It was the third of February on that night when the police officer came to our house. My tenth birthday had been three days earlier. Even now, decades later, the memories are still vivid in my mind. Some nights I still have nightmares about it.
My parents, George and Diane, had gone out that night to celebrate his parents' thirty-fifth wedding anniversary. My father loved his parents very much, and was excited about marking this milestone with them. He had even named me after his father, Douglas, although everyone called me Doug, or sometimes Dougie. They had driven to my grandparents' house in Ingleton, about an hour's drive from Welton, the town where we lived. It had been raining all day, but it got cold that night. I remember hearing the sleet and hail batter the windows. It sounded like the claws of a hungry monster trying to get in to devour me.
I was in the living room, sitting on the couch with my babysitter, Penny, watching "The Six Million Dollar Man". It was my favourite TV show when I was a kid. When we heard a knock at the door Penny got up to answer it. I kept watching the television, oblivious to the muffled voices in the kitchen. When Penny came back in the room a while later she looked ashen. She was shaking a little and she seemed like she was going to cry, or maybe throw up. She turned the TV off and sat down beside me on the couch. She just looked at me for a minute, hands trembling, before she said anything.
Penny reached out to hold my hand. "Dougie, I have some really bad news to tell you," she began in a halting voice. That's when I saw the tears start to run down her cheeks.
Neither Penny nor the rest of my family told me everything they knew about what had happened that night, not for years anyway. They thought I was too young and fragile to deal with hearing it all. They were probably right. It was only when I was a teenager that I was given the rest of the details. But essentially what I was told that night was that my parents had been in a horrific car accident while driving home. The roads had become very icy, and their car had skidded on a bend in the road and was rammed by an eighteen-wheeler in the on-coming lane. Dad was killed instantly. I also later found out that they tried to save my mother at the hospital -- that she was still conscious and asking for me -- but there was nothing they could do. By the time the sun rose the next morning, I was an orphan.
That night my mother's parents came and took me to their house, a few miles from where we lived. I stayed with them for almost a month, until other arrangements were made. My grandparents loved me dearly, but they had already raised three children of their own, and at their ages they were not prepared to care for another. What was eventually decided was that I would go live with my Uncle Wayne and Aunt Lisa in Walker Valley. They would be my new parents, my grandmother explained.
I cannot overstate just how tumultuous this period of my life was. Almost literally in the middle of the night I was taken from the only home I knew, then later uprooted from the town I grew up in, had gone to school at, and where all of my friends lived. This, on top of coping with losing both of my parents.
Aunt Lisa was Mom's younger sister. They also had a brother, Uncle Kenny, who was the youngest of the three siblings. He was single and considered too irresponsible to be a parent at his age, so my Aunt Lisa and Uncle Wayne were the logical choice. They lived in Walker Valley, almost two hundred miles from Welton. Like most everyone there, they had gotten married the day after they graduated from high school, or so it seemed.
Wayne was a carpenter, and a good one apparently, because he got a lot of work. He was almost six feet tall, with short brown hair, broad shoulders, and arms that seemed to me at that young age like small trees. Lots of guys spend hours in a gym or take drugs to build muscles like that, but my uncle had earned his by swinging a hammer and carrying lumber most of his life. If you didn't know him he might seem imposing at first. But when you heard his laugh and saw his green eyes light up you could tell he was as gentle as a kitten.
Uncle Wayne and Aunt Lisa didn't have any kids of their own, but they wanted some very much. They had tried, but sadly both attempts had resulted in my aunt having miscarriages. The second one happened a few months after I had come to live with them. After that, my aunt's doctor cautioned her against getting pregnant again. He offered to tie her tubes, and seeing no other alternative, she reluctantly agreed.
Walker Valley was a small farming community in the middle of Chilton County. It was mostly flat land and had a wide, lazy river meandering through it. Visitors would probably call it quaint or picturesque, and I suppose it was, but compared to Welton it may as well been another planet. You could drive for almost a mile in some places between houses, and it was so quiet that it was almost eerie. Welton was a larger town with more stores and a lot more people. I was used to hearing traffic at night, people laughing and talking as they stumbled home from bars, and the occasional wail of the siren of a police car or ambulance in the distance. Lying in bed at night at my new home I didn't hear a sound. I felt like the only person on Earth.
My aunt and uncle owned a spacious four bedroom house that his grandfather had built, located on six acres of land. It had a verandah facing west where the road ran by, and a patio in back where my uncle would barbeque steaks and chicken on weekends and some evenings as the sun set when the weather was nice.
One thing that pleased me as soon as I moved there was discovering that I would have a bedroom that was much larger than my old one in Welton. It was next to the bathroom and down the hall from my uncle's and aunt's room. When he showed it to me for the first time my uncle told me that it was all mine, and I could put posters on the walls and store my toys and comic books wherever I wanted. If I wanted another book shelf or stand for my model airplanes, he would build me one, he told me. He even offered to paint the walls a different colour if I wanted. None of that was necessary though. My new room was perfect as it was.
Although I was their nephew and not their biological son, Uncle Wayne and Aunt Lisa never once made me feel like a surrogate, or acted like they were doing me a favour or that they resented having parenthood thrust upon them. They doted on me, and showered me with as much love as I imagined they would have any child that they had brought into this world. In fact, it sometimes seemed as though all the love they would have bestowed on the children they would never have was lavished on me.
About six months after I arrived, and had begun to grow accustomed to my new life and surroundings, my uncle got me a puppy -- a black Lab that I named Steve, after Steve Austin. Having a companion helped me to feel less lonely, and I suppose that was how my aunt and uncle had hoped I would feel.
Something I learned when I was a few years older was that a judge had ordered that my parents' house be sold, and all their assets be placed in a trust for me, which was to be handled by my grandmother. Once I turned twenty-one the money would be mine to do as I pleased, presumably for college. Until then, my grandmother could mete it out as she saw fit. This she did, giving some to my aunt and uncle occasionally to help with necessities like clothes, school supplies and gifts for me at Christmas and birthdays. One of the first things they bought me was a brand new red bike with a bell on the handlebars. This proved to be quite useful, since houses were so far apart and the nearest corner store that sold candy and pop was two miles down the road.
I guess I was more resilient than I realized because it wasn't long before I adjusted to my new surroundings. Walker Valley became my home, and Uncle Wayne and Aunt Lisa, my parents. The ache I felt over the loss of my parents never fully went away though -- even to this day. When I look at my children now sometimes I can see their grandparents' faces in theirs and I find it bittersweet.
Exploring our house, especially the attic and basement, always fascinated me for some reason. I suppose I was naturally curious, and my uncle's and aunt's house seemed expansive to me compared to the small two-bedroom home I had spent my first ten years in. One day, years later, while searching through the basement, I chanced upon a Playboy magazine that my uncle must have hidden. It was tucked in a pile of old newspapers on a shelf beside the chest freezer. As I flipped through those glossy pages of naked women my whole world seemed to tilt a little and expand. I felt a little dizzy and my cock was as hard as an oak tree.
