A Girl with Many Names
An unlikely hero for hire
A single name could never contain all that she was. Tracy was her fierce name, modeled after a bully she feared in middle school. Sammy, a playful name extended to lechers more responsive to coquetry. These were not her only names. She drifted from town to city, a spirit unmade, embodying whichever persona fit the moment. She was a survivor, a chameleon, always shifting yet always the same.
Buried deep and almost fully cauterized lurked her given name. Never spoken, but forever connected to a fuzzy recollection of her mother’s face, cancer devouring the last of her spirit. Her namesake, and with her passing being Lisa, just didn’t feel the same. She didn’t feel the same. A limb hacked from the body and left to bleed.
As a child before her mother’s death, she was a melody. Playful chords with few strident notes. Her father was a man she would be hard-pressed to choose from a line-up. He collected titles like grifter and deadbeat, as other men collected tools. She knew this from her mother’s breast and never doubted the virulence laced within warm milk.
She had been a runner with unruly cinnamon hair, forever tangled in dollar-store elastics. Legs corded with young muscle propelling her ever forward, even when she should have stood still. She was the lithe form racing alone down the sidewalk, head of the pack on the track team, only the wind keeping pace.
In the early days, she overlooked signs of her mother’s illness. A shadowing under the eyes, bones where they hadn’t been before. Perhaps her mother was absent more than normal, a touch more irritable than yesterday, but a girl of sixteen was ill-equipped to see death. She felt betrayed when finally told. Her song became a dirge.
Death came quickly, leaving behind the shell of a shattered girl with a father she barely knew. He would play the hero, ushering her into his dank one-bedroom apartment to live, telling no one the surge of relief when she ran away just two days later. He barely grazed the note pinned to the door. Sixteen was old enough in his eyes.
With a knapsack of clothes and her mother’s gold chain, she walked until her feet raged red in her sneakers. Until she felt small and hidden in the embrace of towering skyscrapers. Never had she dallied to witness the proceedings of the city core, business suits and panhandlers mixing like oil and water. For hours, life unknown unfolded all around her. Riveted, she peeked at a disheveled man, begging for change and singing off-key in turns. Her heart skipped, watching a waif of a boy hurl paint onto a vast mural, flecks of blue and gold decorating his burnished skin. She absorbed each minute detail, starving for something beyond her own reality.
As the sun set, awe changed to fear. Hunger nagged at her belly, and the few bills stolen from her dad looked smaller in the diminishing light. Determination pounded her ears. Her eyes seeking help in a sea of strangers. With no one to turn to, she sidled close to a group of young panhandlers.
“Hey, my name is Allison.” Her first rebirth.
There is no funeral for the passing of a name. Ceasing to exist in that moment, she became a thousand amalgamations. Forever searching for a home gone cold in her mother’s grave, always building defenses to keep people out. She learned to navigate homeless shelters, traveling by thumb and wit. One day a dishwasher, the next a vagrant. Six months spent bunking with a toothless woman and her six cats. A string of boyfriends and a tent deep in the woods. She dyed her hair black in a truck stop washroom, then buzzed it close to keep it clean. She became a radio, switching between stations.
After a decade, the lost girl was gone, but sometimes, the smell of old sneakers catches her unaware. She will twirl the gold chain through weather-beaten fingers. The hardness of her face will melt just a touch. Sometimes she remembers the girl that loved to race and forgets the woman that only runs.