...And Never Let HerGo

of the rage that swept over him, although both she and Kathleen had come to loathe and fear the man their father became when he was drinking. There was no explaining why he chose Annie to be his verbal punching bag. She was, perhaps, a reminder that he still had responsibilities and he could not simply abandon his life. She was the most vulnerable of his children, and yet she was feisty, too. Although she told herself that the man who shouted insults and obscenities at her wasn’t her
real
father, his words did more damage than a physical blow could. He told her she was fat, that her legs were fat, that she was ugly, that no one would ever want such a fat, ugly girl for a wife. Sometimes he called her a slut. Terrible words that evoked terrible feelings.
    Sometimes, caught unaware when she heard the front door open and the heavy steps that meant her father was drunk, Anne Marie escaped his vitriol by scrambling under the dining room table to hide. She made herself as small as possible, repeating Hail Marys in her head, praying he wouldn’t find her. But he usually did, leaning over and shouting cruel words at her. Her fear as she hid under the furniture may have been the cause of her lifelong claustrophobia. For whatever reason, Ann Marie would grow up with an almost pathological fear of the dark and of closed-in places.
    As she grew older and more able to fight back, Anne Marie fended her father off with her hockey stick. She poked it at him, keeping him at bay, threatening to strike him if he didn’t go away. Occasionally she got so frustrated and angry with her father that she erupted, totally beyond fear. “If I remember correctly,” Kathleen said later, “my father used to take Anne Marie’s change, and she got tired of it and chased him around the house with a field hockey stick.”
    Why Robert Fahey told Annie she was fat and ugly is part of the mystery of the human brain on alcohol. She was neither fat nor ugly. She was growing into a tall, willowy, and transcendentally beautiful young woman. Despite living in an almost Oliver Twistian situation, she was a talented and bright girl, lovely as a flower, with friends, good grades, and hopes for the future. She wore that happy mask when she was at school. All the hurts and pain were hidden behind her laughing facade. She never spoke of the mother she had lost or of how she still grieved for her. She certainly never talked about the father who was as lost to her as her mother was. But attimes she saw glimpses of the man her father had been, and in a way, that was even more painful.
    A T Brandywine High School, Anne Marie turned in her homework promptly, excelled at sports, and went home to a house that continued to disintegrate. Her sister and all of her brothers except Brian had moved out. Separated physically, they grew closer emotionally, while Annie, still living with her father on Nichols Avenue, used up a great deal of energy being afraid and looking for safe niches where she could hide. But even so, at the very center of her, there was a little kernel of self-esteem that would not die. Blighted as it was, the essence of Anne Marie Fahey would not give up. When Brian was home or whenever her other siblings came over, they stood between their Annie and her father’s fury. When they weren’t there, she managed to survive on her own.
    Brian was a freshman in college when the inevitable happened and there
was
no house for them to live in. It had been in the process of foreclosure for a long time and went up for a sheriff’s sale in 1980. Their father had long since stopped paying the mortgage, and their home sold for far less than its actual value. Over the years and now in this final eviction, they had lost almost everything of sentimental value. “There are some pictures,” Robert Fahey recalled, “but our house was so torn up, there was such chaos, that things that mattered were lost—even my birth certificate.”
    A NNE M ARIE was almost fifteen and a sophomore at Brandywine when she literally had no home at all. She had done a lot of baby-sitting for the cousin of one of her girlfriends, and when the woman, whose name was Carol Creighton, found out that the Faheys had lost their house, she told Anne Marie that she could come and live with her. Their father and Brian were moving into a small rental in a city west of Wilmington—Newark, Delaware. She had lost everything else, and Anne Marie wanted desperately to stay in her high school. She