Deena: the Untold Story
Prologue:
“My name is Dinah Wallace. I’m here today to talk to everyone about abuse. Not just physical, but all types of abuse. I’m here to tell you about my experience with abuse, but also I’m here to tell you about my sisters’ and brother’s experiences. This is the story of Deena, my twin sister, Donna, my other twin sister, and Dana, the last of my twin sister’s, and my brother, Caleb. Mostly it’s Deena’s tale, but since she can’t be here I’ll tell the story.
“My older brother, by 14 months, and my sisters, we’re quadruplets, lost our mother when we were very young. I remember my father, always strong as a rock and built as solid, weeping. My mother was an extremely unique woman, I haven’t met anyone quite like he since she died. I was just 6-years-old. I was raised by my father.
“Single handedly he raised us. Through girlfriends, boyfriends, and puberty he was there. He worked double shifts at the bottle factory by our house in Milwaukee so he cold keep us feed and clothed. He worked so hard his heart gave out and at the age of 15, I lost my father. I had my sisters and my brother, that was it. I lost both my mother and my father before I could even drive. I went to live with my mother’s sister, my Aunt Irene, and her husband, my uncle Dylan.
“Uprooted from my friends, everyone I knew and grew up with, I was relocated, along with my siblings, to Oklahoma. I’d met my aunt once in my life that I could remember and never my uncle. I was scared and clung to Deena, like usual. Deena was my best friend, since we were born we’ve been inseparable. Dee was born 2 minutes after me, she’s the youngest, and the one everyone babied. She never met a person she didn’t like and who didn’t like her in return.”
Chapter 1: I Wanna Go Home
“Where’s Dad?” Deena asked, coming home late from a friend’s on June 16, 2000. Her three sisters looked up from the spots on the carpet they’d each picked to stare at, tears in their eyes. Caleb came into the room, placing the phone back on the base as he passed it.
“Deedee, Dad had a heart attack,” Caleb said slowly. He didn’t want to overwhelm her with the news of his death. He wanted to break it to her gently. “He didn’t survive. Ed found him laying by his truck this evening. He died en route to the hospital.” Caleb’s voice broke off, his throat tightening up, refusing to let him talk. He looked away from his youngest, heart-broken sister, he couldn’t bare to see the pain, confusion, and array of other emotions playing across her face and reflecting in the mirroring twin pools of her blue eyes.
“Are you sure?” she asked, a lump forming in her throat, making it hard for her to swallow. “I mean, maybe it was a mistake or a joke. Yeah, a joke. Dad’ll walk in the back door any minute, smiling, his brown eyes twinkling, with his hearty laughter and tell us how silly we are for believing Ed’s tale. Right?”
“Deena,” Dinah said, standing next to her sister. She put her arm around her shoulders, her head leaning against Deena’s matching blonde one. “It’s not a joke.”
“I know,” Deena said, silent tears sliding down her smooth, delicate cheeks. Dinah and Deena sat on the couch, huddled together with Dana and Donna while Caleb answered the phone that ceaselessly rang and answered the door to the lone knock. He opened the door and found a woman he recognized but could not place.
“Hello. You probably don’t remember me. I’m your Aunt Irene, your mother was my older sister,” she introduced herself. “I’m sorry to hear about your father. I came to stay with the five of you until it is decided where you’re going.”
“You don’t have to do that,” Caleb declined politely.
“It’s either me or a social worker. You kids are too young to stay alone,” Irene told them. “So do you want me to stay or do you want a complete stranger to look after you?” Dana, Donna, Deena, and Dinah looked at Caleb with frightened faces. It was plan to even Irene they would rather have Irene taking responsibility of them, for the time being, than have a stranger looking after them.
“Alright,” Caleb relented and shrank into the background. He sat in a recliner and stared straight ahead. In his head he was replaying the fight he had with his father that morning.
::Fade Into Memory::
“Dad, I’m sixteen! Can’t I please take the car out tonight?” Caleb whined. He had a date and the last thing he wanted to do was show up in a beat up, rusted brown Chevy truck. It ran and took Vincent, his father, to and from work everyday, but it wasn’t going to impress Ingrid. She was classier than flaking paint and dry rot.
“Caleb you know the car is off limits. When you show some more responsibility I’ll let you take it out. Not before,” Vincent said, setting his empty coffee mug in the sink. He folded the paper he’d been reading and called the girls to make sure they were ready to leave. “Bus’ll be here soon!” he called up the stairs. A mini stampede whirled by him as Deena, Dinah, Donna, and Dana ran past him and into the kitchen, grabbing lunches as they rushed out the door and called their ‘I love you’ and ‘Bye’s’ to their dad as they left.
“Caleb, don’t’ be late,” Vincent warned. He felt bad, he knew his son wanted to borrow the car because of his date, but he just didn’t think he was ready for the responsibility. Besides it was Kelly’s car and if anything happened to it he didn’t know what he’d do.
“Can I borrow the car?”
“No!”
“Please?” Caleb said through clenched teeth.
“Caleb, I said no, and I meant no,” Vincent said sternly. It was too big a risk, it would be like loosing his wife again if anything happened to the car. There were so many memories wrapped up in that cherry and white ’69 Chevy that were cherished by Vincent and he wasn’t ready to part with them yet.
“Fine, I can see you don’t care if you make me the laughing stock of the entire school. You want me to suffer, don’t you?” Caleb cried, frustrated.
“Cal you know that’s not true,” Vincent said, sounding defeated.
“You hate me, don’t you?” Caleb asked, picking up his school bag and walking to the door. “That’s it. You hate me and want me to suffer because you’re too cheap to buy a new car you’ll let me drive!” He ran out the door, angry at his father for, in his opinion, ruining his date with Ingrid.
“Cal, you coming?” Deena asked, looking back at her brother. She was standing with her sisters, looking just like them only different. More filled with life maybe. “Cheer up,” she said, walking over to him and putting her arm around his shoulders. “Ingrid likes you, not your car. Besides if you take the truck like Dad says you have to, you can pretend the truck broke down and with the way it looks she’d believe you.”
“Maybe,” Caleb said, cheering up a little. He still wanted to take the car, but maybe Dee was right. It wasn’t the end of the world. “Come on, we’ll miss the bus,” he said, leading the way to the corner where the bus stood waiting.
“Feeling better?” Deena asked as Caleb sat in the seat behind the one she and Dinah were sitting in. Caleb nodded, his thoughts straying to his father and what he’d said to him. He promised himself he’d apologize as soon as his dad returned from work.
::Fade Away From Memory::
“This is all my fault,” Caleb said softly. Irene was in the kitchen, she figured she might as well make herself busy and was washing the breakfast dishes which consisted of Vincent’s coffee cup and a small plate. She figured the kids wouldn’t be hungry but wanted to have food prepared in case they were. “I was fighting with Dad this morning. I brought on the heart attack.”
“Cal,” Deena said, moving over to the recliner Caleb was sitting in. She squeezed into the chair next to him, being that they were all skinny and almost fragilely built they easily had enough room in the chair. “It’s not your fault. We all fight with Dad. Don’t blame yourself,” she pleaded. Donna, Dana, and Dinah sat on the couch consoling each other, tears falling on to the clothes and the couch in equal amounts. None of them noticed Deena’s departure.
“But I fought with him today,” Caleb said, sounding remorseful. “No one but me.”
“What about at work? How do you know someone didn’t bug him there?” Deena asked. “Caleb, Dad loves you. He understands you get mad and doesn’t blame you. So don’t blame yourself.”
“But the last thing I said to him was spoken in anger,” he said, leaning his head back on the recliner. “I’ll never get to take them back.”
“Sorry Cal,” Deena said, unable the change the past. She sat next to Caleb, quiet, and basically not moving. Caleb gently rocked the chair back and forth, his tears sliding down his stubble-free face. One by one they each feel asleep, exhausted from crying and worrying about their futures.
Irene came into the living room to find Dana leaning on Dinah and Donna leaning on the couch, all with tear stained faces and troubled looks on their cherubic features. She saw Caleb and Deena, each leaning on the other, supporting themselves while they slept, their blond heads pressed together, their hair mingling so it was indiscernible where one’s stopped and the other’s started. She went back into the kitchen, leaving the kids to the sleep they needed and put the food she’d prepared in the refrigerator. Once the kitchen was cleaned and put in order she went into the empty family room and picked a book off the bookshelf to read. As she headed to the couch she saw a picture of Kelly and Vincent in a family portrait, shortly after the quadruplets turned 2.
“They all
look so much like Kelly,” Irene reflected to herself. “Same hair, eyes, mouth, bone structure, so much like her.” She looked at the picture, Vincent tall and
muscular with dark curly brown hair, so dark it looked black, and brown eyes,
Kelly fragile in build with blonde hair and the same blue eyes as each of the
kids. They looked so very happy in the
picture. She looked away from the
picture and curled up on the couch to read Pet Cemetery.
In two weeks time it was made official the fate of the five Urgwye children. Irene was made their official guardian, they were moving. Much to the disappointment of all of them they were leaving their friends, all the people they’d grown up with, and most important they lost the house they’d grown up in. Irene was sympathetic to their loss and hoped desperately they would adjust well to the change. She helped them pack the house, everything they weren’t taking with them was being shipped to a storage shed near Irene and Dylan’s home in Oklahoma.
Irene and Dylan tried to make the adjustment easier for the kids. They introduced them to their friends and their children and treated them like one of their own children. Slowly the Urgwye kids blended into the Royal family and the Oklahoma setting. Caleb shared a room with his 17-year-old cousin, William. They stayed on the third floor in one room while Donna, Dana, and their 14-year-old cousin, Ashley, stayed in the other room. On the second floor Dinah stayed in one bedroom while Deena stayed in another, they couldn’t share a room because they were too talkative, they would stay up all night discussing what had happened during the day and never get any sleep. Irene and Dylan also had a room on the second floor at the end of the hall, the room at the very top of the stairs.
After a couple of months they began thinking of Irene’s as home and as Oklahoma their state rather than Michigan. They made friends and learned how to cope with the day-to-day aspect of life without their father. Of course Caleb, Dana, Donna, Deena, and Dinah leaned on each other more and more. They were close for siblings, closer than most. They weren’t just family, they were friends.
Chapter 2: Nathan!
“Deedee, where are you going?” Caleb asked, seeing his sister running up the stairs to the third floor. She ran past him and into the room Ashley, Dana, and Donna shared.
“Ashley,” Deena said, waking her cousin. Dana and Donna were both already downstairs, it was 10:30 on a Saturday morning and they were discussing the actuality of going to the mall with Irene driving them. “He called! I told him you’d love to go out with him tonight.”
“Did he really call?” Ashley asked, sitting up straight.
“No, he wanted your number. He said he’d call around 11. Wake up and get downstairs,” Deena directed. Ashley mock saluted her and jumped out of bed. Deena smiled and left Ashley alone and headed back to the stairs.
“Deena, what’s wrong?” Caleb asked, coming out of his and William’s room with William and two others. He came over and put his arm around her shoulder while they waked down the stairs.
“Nothing,” Deena said with a shrug. “I had to talk to Ash.”
“Oh,” Caleb said, sounding bored. “What’s going on today?”
“Dana and Donna are trying to talk Aunt Irene into driving them to the mall. Di’s eating, Uncle Dylan is mowing the lawn, so he says. Ash might be going out, and that’s all. Why? Are you bored?” Deena asked as they reached the kitchen.
“Yes,” Caleb said with a sigh. “Anyway, Dee meet Zac and Tay, they live next door,” he said, introducing her, the only one who hadn’t met the neighbors. “Guys, Deena.”
“Hey,” Deena said with a smile. She sat at the table next to Dinah who was eating a bagel with cream cheese while reading the local paper. She reached out and stole a piece of her sister’s bagel.
“Why don’t you get your own food?” Dinah asked.
“Because I’m not hungry,” Deena said, putting the piece of bagel in her mouth and chewing it. “Besides why make food when you already have some?” Dinah rolled her eyes and folded her newspaper. Donna and Dana came into the kitchen smiling happily, obviously they’d persuaded Irene to drive them to the mall.
“Dee, Di wanna go to the mall?” Dana asked. She waved a quick hello to Taylor and Zac before dropping into the chair next to Deena, Donna taking the seat next to Dinah.
“Sure,” Dinah said with a shrug, she was in the same mood as Caleb, bored. “When?”
“Soon,” Irene said, coming into the kitchen. Ashley came down the stairs, nearly skipping as she bounced joyously down the phone rang and she picked it up, expecting Nathan.
“Hello?” she asked.
“Is Deena there?” Nathan asked.
“Sure, hold on,” Ashley said, recognizing the voice. She handed the phone to Deena with a questioning look. “Why’s he want to talk to you? I thought he was calling for me.” Deena shrugged, as confused as Ashley.
“Hello?”
“Hey. How are you?”
“Fine,” Deena said slowly. “Why are you calling me?”
“You said to,” Nathan said confused. “You said your cousin liked me, I assumed that you were too shy to say you liked me.”
“Yeah, I do, as a friend. Oh God, you thought…” Deena said, realization dawning on her. Ashley looked at her, her eyes growing large as she realized there was something wrong, Nathan didn’t like her, he liked Deena. Tears came to her eyes and she ran up the stairs to her room, not wanting anyone to see her crying.
‘It’s not fair,’ she thought, laying on her bed, her tears soaked up by her pillow. ‘I’ve known Nathan for years and he’s never noticed me, now suddenly Dee appears and he’s calling her. It’s just not fair!’
“Ashley!” Deena called after her cousin. She dropped the phone, not caring that she was being rude to Nathan, and ran after her cousin. “Ash?” she called, knocking on the door softly. “Can I come in?” she asked, receiving no answer she turned the knob and went in. “Can I talk to you?” she asked, Ashley turned her face so she wasn’t looking at Deena. “Ash I’m sorry. He got the wrong idea, that’s all. He thought that I was talking about myself when I was talking about you. He thought I liked him and was too shy to say so out right. I’m sure if you go down there and talk to him he’ll see what everyone who knows you sees; that you’re smart, pretty, funny, a great conversationalist, and a million other things.”
“Forget it,” Ashley said, turning to glare at her cousin. “I don’t like him, you can keep him.”
“Ash I don’t want him, I never did. I was trying to help you, that’s all.”
“Great help you were,” Ashley mumbled, turning away from Deena.
“I’m sorry Ash, I truly am. I only wanted to help. Next time if you want to know if someone likes you talk to them yourself so there is no confusion. Okay?” Deena asked, standing up and turning to leave the room.
“Dee, wait,” Ashley said as Deena reached the door. “I’m sorry. It’s not your fault. I should have had the courage to talk to Nathan since I’m the one that likes him. Thanks for trying, next time just stay out of it, okay?”
“Deal,” Deena agreed. “Want to go to the mall?”
“Not really,” Ashley said. “I kind of feel like just staying here. Moping in my room for the day,” she said.
“Do you want some company?” Deena asked.
“No, I’ll be fine. You go,” Ashley said.
“Are you sure?”
“Yeah. Go. Have fun,” Ashley said. Deena looked at her cousin, trying to figure out if she should stay or go. Finally she decided to listen to Ashley’s wishes and went back downstairs.
“Hey Dee are you coming with to the mall?” Dana asked, waiting for her sister to come down the stairs before heading out the door.