The Dreamer and His Daughter
My name wasn’t always Sarah Baker. It changed 6 years into my life. My hair was cut short. Almost the length of my brother’s. And went from brown to a light red. Strawberry blonde they called it. I called it ugly. I hated my new name. It was so plain. Of course “plain” was my new description. At six I became simply boring.
My brother, and parents, and I didn’t always live in Nebraska either. We used to live in Salt Lake City, Utah. We had a beautiful house and a dog. And my dad was building me my very own playhouse in the backyard; on account that my older brother would no longer allow me into the tree-fort since I was a girl and apparently had cooties.
None of us wanted to move. But my dad said he couldn’t live with himself if he didn’t testify. And the government said if he testified and didn’t move, he wouldn’t live. So he testified, and they put us in the Witness Protection Program and off we went to Nebraska.
It was hard leaving my friends. And we weren’t allowed to take anything with us. No pictures or stuffed animals; not even our dog Jelly Bean (I got to name him). We could take nothing. Every possession was now a danger that could reveal our true selves. It was hardest on my mom. Her parents were still alive and she had grown up in Salt Lake. My brother thought it was exciting, an adventure; like the explorers he was always pretending to be while in the tree house. For my dad it was a matter of both patriotic and moral duty. And for me, well I was only six so I was just along for the ride.
Aurora, Nebraska. Hamilton County, located in the state’s Pioneer Region. My dad tried to cheer us up by saying it was symbolic. “We’ll be happy here”, he’d say.
“How do you know”, I’d ask.
“Well, Bebe. Aurora was the Roman goddess of the Dawn. You see. And the city of Aurora is where the Nebraskan Pioneers first settled. And now we too are pioneers. Pioneers settling in the dawn. Dawn is the most magical time of the day, Bebe, because everything is new and fresh. A clean slate, a new beginning. It’s the dawn of a new life for us, Bebe”.
That was my dad, a romantic literary scholar. He loved Thoreau and Whitman. Loved the classics, prose, and poetry. And I was daddy’s girl. And in case you were wondering where Bebe came from, my real name was Beth, Elizabeth; and Bebe was what my dad had always called me. Thankfully he never stopped. And it was the one thing that carried over from my first life into my second. “Bebe”.
Unfortunately for my parent’s marriage, my mom was less poetic than my father. Whereas I would get lost in his tales of wonder, my mother would become impatient. She would always rein him in, like a kite-flyer tired of flying. She’d pull and tug on the string until the kite, that was my father, came crashing back down to earth. I didn’t understand her then, but now I do. She feared his romanticism would encourage us to be impractical. That as a result we would grow up unable to face the realities of everyday life. Whenever my mom began to pull my dad from the sky and back to earth, my dad would surrender without a fight. But not without a wink in my direction. That wink was an unspoken promise between us that any unfinished story would be continued as soon as time allowed. After awhile though, those promises became empty, unfulfilled. And pretty soon my dad’s imagination dried up. The kite no longer flew.
My brother was like my mom. Oh he liked my dad’s stories, but never got lost in them the way I did. He quickly grew out of his explorer days and fell into the security and comfort of his new daily routine. He embraced his new identity as a matter of fact. Never looked back. My brother is now an accountant. I think he found security in the dependability of math. In the knowledge that there is an answer to every problem.
In Utah, my dad had been an architect. He had always wanted to be a writer or an artist. He loved creating. But once he had the responsibilities of a husband and then a father, he had to let go of such childish delusions. Architecture had been a happy compromise for him; a bridge between a paycheck and a steady job and his imagination and need for creation.
Once we moved to Aurora, though, he wasn’t allowed to have the same job. He became a teacher. He had liked the idea of farming, but my mom refused, and not so kindly pointed out that he had no knowledge of or skill for “tilling the land”. So he taught English at the local high school.
My mom had been a nurse at a doctor’ office. She preferred working in offices because she had a “set schedule with daytime hours”. As opposed to a hospital where “you never know what hours those people will stick you with”. Once we moved she worked as a secretary for a small law firm.
You’d think that when I look back on the transition between my family’s first life and our second, I would see a whirlwind of change. An uncontrollable wave of the unknown. But that is not the case. I see more clearly the truth of who my parents, brother, and I were. You see, if there is one thing I learned from this uncommon and strange experience it’s that you can change someone’s name, move them to a new city, turn their lives upside down; but they will always be the same person inside. They will always act and react the same to the forces coming at them. They will charge forward or pull back the way they always have. Their character, their personality, the true things that make up a person’s identity can never be altered. Maybe it is that continuity that got my dad into trouble. The romantic, who followed his heart. Followed it to his grave.
My mom left him. After 2 years in Nebraska she left. She wanted desperately to return to Salt Lake. To her parents who still lived in her childhood home. To her old job, her old friends. She hated being Mrs. Warren Baker. She wanted to be Danielle Harris again. Halfway through our second year in Nebraska my mom began the process of leaving my father and leaving the program. She was allowed to divorce my father. Allowed to leave his house, and our new town. But she was not allowed to return to Salt Lake. The process took about eight months, but as soon as everything was finalized she moved as close to Salt Lake as she could. She also got back in touch with her parents. This was how they found him.
Once she had gotten settled, my mom had called, letting us know where she was. She wasn’t supposed to, but she said she was leaving him and not her children. She thought it would be safe to call. After all, she was using her maiden name. And so far, she had only been in touch with her parents about the divorce and the move. But somehow they found out. They watched her. Unknown to her, they traced and tapped her calls. They followed her wherever she went. Monitored her mail. All that work they put into tracking down my dad. They never imagined that he’d come to them.
Six months into their divorce, my dad couldn’t take it anymore. He missed my mom terribly, desperately. The way a person misses breathing. Despite all common sense, he left us one weekend with the neighbors and drove to my mom’s new home. I can only imagine the surprised looks on the men’s faces when my dad got out of a Nebraskan pick-up tuck and walked up the front walk.
I don’t know how long he and mom talked. What they talked about or what decisions, if any, they had come to. All I know is that my dad’s pick-up was found stuck in a ditch on the north bound side of the interstate. His body was found nearby. I wasn’t allowed to see it. And that is the one place I will never allow my imagination to venture.
My mom is dead now. Dead to me at least. I am sure that she was told of my father’s murder. I am sure that she was scared, saddened, shocked. That she was concerned for our safety and her own. I can only hope she felt somewhat responsible. But I will never know these things for sure. She never tried to reach us.
The Program agent in charge of our case knocked on the door of the neighbor’s house where we were staying. It was 3 am. In front of the kind, elderly couple he said what he could. And told us the remaining appropriate-for-children details later when were alone. The nice elderly couple offered to watch over us while we attempted to contact our mom. But, eventually we deemed ourselves orphans. My brother was twelve, I was nine. And we were alone in the world. We became wards of the state of Nebraska. We bounced from one foster home to the next. Until finally we landed in the home of a kind, middle-aged, infertile couple. They had always wanted kids. And lucky for us, felt they were too old to start from scratch with babies like most people requested. From the moment we entered their home, their lives, they loved as though we were their own. And slowly we grew to love them as much in return. My third family. My second parents. My third life
At first I thought I would change my name. This time choosing for myself who I wanted to be. Something that captured the dreamer inside, the free spirit that my father instilled in me. But it was out of loyalty to him that I remain to this day Sarah Baker. To change my second given surname, felt at the time, and still feels to this day, to be closing the door on the one remaining piece of my father that I have carried with me. I have no photos. No tangible reminders or memorabilia to gaze upon when I miss him. I have only his name. This plain name given to a dreamer and his child. And while I owe my success in this life to my second parents; my education, my eventual career, and all those things that parents teach you to do and say; I owe my soul and my character to the man who, in my eyes, was the greatest man I ever met.
It may seem a contradiction, this attachment to my name and my belief that a person’s name doesn’t define or change a their being. But the truth is that a name doesn’t change who you are. But rather reminds you of where you come from. And I come from a place I never want to forget. I come from the dawn.
