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Dec 2009  |  By Tricia Parker  |  Comments

A Way Out - A Book Excerpt

Riverwoods, 1986. By the time I’m 4, things are completely out of control. It’s like a Chinese toy factory exploded in my house. There are thousands of trinkets and toys: My Little Ponies, yo-yos, Styrofoam balls, stickers, cassette tapes.

Some, like my puzzles, are out in the open, but many are still in bags. My mother places her shopping bags indiscriminately, whenever she comes home. Or maybe she has a system: She seems to know where everything is.

Bags of trinkets pile up on old newspapers, which pile up on moldy clothes, which pile up on yet another layer of National Enquirers. It’s amazing how fast things deteriorate. The upstairs is the first to go: Within months, the “playroom”
next to my room is completely filled with debris. Next is my father’s old office, down the hall. I used to be able to stand
by the window, to see who was coming. Now, I have to teeter on top of a mound to see the cul-de-sac. Teetering like that feels scary to me; it feels wrong.

My bedroom also starts to feel unsafe: I have to crawl across heaping piles of clothes just to get to my bed. My mother
never knocks before she puts them there. She just walks in. Unsafe. That’s the word I’m looking for. I start to feel really unsafe, and a lot of other grown-up things. I’m scared. I’m panicky. I’m angry. There are warning bells going off inside me, tinkling along the axis of my soul. They’re like ancient sirens, telling of an impending storm.

(The situation continues to worsen. In 1993, just after turning 11, Tricia begins a 2-year battle with anorexia. It would be
two more years before she receives professional psychological help.)

PART II

April, 1993. I’m 11. The refrigerator has been unplugged for years now. Food is becoming scarce. Whatever methods I’d used before to scavenge food are getting harder: Friends’ parents seem less tolerant of my gluttony; restaurants are becoming more unappetizing. The garbage in the kitchen is so high, it towers over my head. And the moths in the family room are freaking me out—I don’t want them flying near my frozen dinners anymore.

What really frightens me, though, are the fights between my parents. My mother’s violence is escalating. The screaming, the hitting, the door slamming, the throwing. They happen every night now. I seriously begin to worry that my mother will kill my father. Some nights, I sleep with a knife under my pillow. just in case. I never know when I’ll have to defend my father. If my mother kills my father, I think, then I’ll really be in trouble: My father is the only one who supplies me with actual food.

Still, I have my secret hopes. My biggest dream is that I’ll eat off a plate—not a plastic plate, like my mother gives me—but a real plate, with glassy edges. A real glass plate. Sometimes, after school, I’ll even crawl across the garbage in the kitchen so I can go to the living room, and hold one. The plates are hard to get to because I have to push through a huge mound of garbage between the kitchen and living room door, and they’re high on a shelf. But they’re worth it. Holding a plate gives me hope; it makes me smile.

(In 1995, at the urging of a family friend, Tricia enters into therapy, with the support of her father. She attends Deerfield High School from 1996-2000. In August 2000, she and her father prepare to leave Riverwoods, for Washington, D.C.,
where Tricia plans on attending college.)

PART III

August, 2000. Night has fallen. It’s time to go. The cover of darkness will protect us, I know, but not for very long. My mother could come home at any moment. The possibility is real. For the last time, I study my childhood bedroom. I listen to the crickets outside near my window. I hear their slow, sad crescendos and equally exuberant falls. The crickets are the only things I’ll miss. The so-called sentimental things—my diaries, my violin, my seashell collection—are buried somewhere and must now be left behind. Not everything could fit in my father’s car. Once I leave, I know I will never come back. This is the final goodbye.

I shut the door, and walk down the stairs. I feel nothing as I approach the front door. I vaguely remember the feeling of horror, years ago, when I thought I wouldn’t make it to this day. I remember that feeling, and as quickly as I remember, I forget.

I walk out the door and toward my car. I take one last look: at the woods, at the yard, at the cul-de-sac. Finally, I’m free to go.

“Goodbye,” I whisper, from the safety of my car.

In 2003 Tricia graduated magna cum laude from the George Washington University, in Washington D.C. She went on to earn a master’s degree, in 2004, from the Medill School of Journalism at Northwestern University. She never went home again.