reporter, instead of holing up in isolation, was in touch with the rest of
the world. What the reporter wrote influenced what people thought about
and talked about the next day; he knew what was really going on. I
decided I wanted to be one of the people who knew what was really
going on.
When my work was done, I read the stories on the wire services. Because
we never subscribed to newspapers or magazines, I'd never known what
was going on in the world, except for the skewed version of events we
got from Mom and Dad—one in which every politician was a crook,
every cop was a thug, and every criminal had been framed. I began to
feel like I was getting the whole story for the first time, that I was being
handed the missing pieces to the puzzle, and the world was making a
little more sense.
AT TIMES I FELT LIKE I was failing Maureen, like I wasn't keeping
my promise that I'd protect her—the promise I'd made to her when I held
her on the way home from the hospital after she'd been born. I couldn't
get her what she needed most—hot baths, a warm bed, steaming bowls of
Cream of Wheat before school in the morning—but I tried to do little
things. When she turned seven that year, I told Brian and Lori that she
needed a special birthday celebration. We knew Mom and Dad wouldn't
get her presents, so we saved for months, went to the Dollar General
Store, and bought her a toy set of kitchen appliances that were pretty
realistic: The agitator in the washing machine twisted around, and the
refrigerator had metal shelves inside. We figured when she was playing,
she could at least pretend to have clean clothes and regular meals.
"Tell me again about California," Maureen said after she opened the
presents. Although she had been born there, she couldn't remember it.
She always loved hearing our stories about life in the California desert,
so we told them to her again, about how the sun shone all the time and it