Losing Tia

It started out the way that normal days start.  The alarm clock screams from it's place on the bedside table, demanding my attention and my day.  Contacts that shouldn't be slept in are dry and itchy as I drag myself from the womb-like cave of blankets that have been my resting place for the last six hours or so.  Quick bathroom stop, and I am down the hall, cold feet on a bare hardwood floor to wake the little one sleeping two doors down on the right.  Gentle shakes and quiet pleading as my little one begs to stay in her warm bed for just a few more minutes.  The mad dash now that everyone is awake and out of bed of school clothes and lost shoes and toothbrushing. 

I start the car, it as reluctant as we this morning about facing the day.  The cloud of my breath hangs in front of me like a storm front as I walk back into the house.  Zipping up coats, grabbing backpacks and racing the clock to get to school on time.  We pull up and go through our regular routine. 

"You know to ride the bus home this afternoon, Bridgett is going to be there with you until I get home from work."

"Mommy loves you and will see you this afternoon."

"I hope you have a FABULOUS day!"

"You have a FABULOUS day too, Mommy"

  This day upon returning home is like every other normal day.  I dress for work, khaki pants, blue button up, casual shoes.  Drink coffee, make my face presentable for the world, hair in a messy knot on the back of my neck.  I am separated from my husband, and what is normal now was not normal six months or even a month ago.  The house is too quiet after two years of alcoholic rage and abuse.  Protective orders and court dates have taken up the last week, as I tried to assure that my daughter and I would never have to service the silence that came with his anger again.  I turn up the radio, blaring my music through an empty house, and relish the idea of silence by choice instead of silence from fear. 

  Work like it is any other day is normal.  Lunch is coffee from the service station next door, followed by a cigarette that repulses me, yet I am unable to ignore the call of the nicotine.  The DARE officer has recently visited my daughter's school, and she is now convinced that I am on drugs because she is in kindergarten and she doesn't quite know the difference between a Marlboro and crack-cocaine.  As I stand outside freezing because of my habit I ponder that idea, and decide that it is better if she never fully grasps the concept.

  It is almost four o'clock, the magic hour that will allow me to log on to my computer in order to log back out and go home.  My cellular phone, sitting silently on my side all day wakes with a vengence, the silent vibration shaking me to the core.  On the phone is Bridgett.

"Your mom is here to get Tia."

A moment of silence, confusion, hesitation.

"She can't pick up Tia today, Tia has school tomorrow."

  The voice of my mother, shrill angry full of contempt.  The conflict between the two of us has been raging since birth.

"Tia is going home with me.  I have papers.  There is nothing you can do."

  The phone line goes dead in my ear.  I become frantic.  I am forty-five minutes from home, no way that I can be home before she leaves.  What do I do?  I leave work in a frenzy, certain that I misunderstood what she said.  Why is she taking my daughter?  Is she taking my daughter?  I promised her that I would be home soon after she got off the bus JUST LIKE ANY NORMAL DAY!!  I am scraping my very core for explanations.  Can she do this?  Can she just walk into my house and take my child with no regard for me?  I am desperate.  I drive too fast.  I pull into the driveway barely stopping my car before I am out of the door and into the house. 

  Bridgett is crying. 

"I'm so sorry, I'm so sorry"

  Her words are lost to me.  They are barely audible background noise to a truly awful horrible sound.  There are toys, a virtual sea of toys spread throughout the dining room.
Tia's room is empty save for the bed and her desk.  All the toys from her room are spread across the once empty desert of a room that had never been put to proper use.  I plow a path across the expanse, trying to make it to the stairs that lead to the loft, so I can sit.  Bridgett's background noise is there, but I can't make it out, her words flowing like a river, but I can only hear the distant hum under the sound of my own anguish.