Sarah Surviving – Part 2 of the series

By ERIC ADLER – The Kansas City Star

October 17, 1996.

No way. It’s too unbelievable. It can’t be right.

Sarah Clark, 14, holds the check in her hand.

Look again, her mother says. It’s got to be a mistake.

Check the name.

But there it is, printed in black ink.

Pay to the order of Sarah Clark $22,788.

And Brian has one, too. For $24,516.

The Social Security Administration has just mailed Sarah and her 12-year-old brother nearly $50,000. Back money owed the kids from the time their biological dad died.

“But he’s not dead as far as I know,” Andrea Wright, 38, tells the lady when she calls Social Security. “He’s locked up in jail in California.” Which he is.

But the lady says, according to their records, Patrick Clark died way back in 1991. The money is theirs.

What a weird turn of events. So weird, it’s hard for Sarah to grasp.

A month ago she thought she might die. One minute she’s a freshman flirting with some cute guys after a Schlagle football game. The next Randy, her drunken stepfather, is holding her captive on a terrifying car ride through Kansas City, Kan. He says he has a gun. He says he will kill her.

Now Randy’s in jail. He’ll be locked up for 26 months.

And Sarah, for the first time, has real money to help fulfill her dreams. Of going to college. Of leaving this life behind. Of maybe, even, becoming a lawyer.  Sometimes Sarah can even see it: “Everything I always wanted but didn’t know I wanted.”

“I see myself having my own law firm,” she says, “and a great house and a perfect family. And I want two kids, maybe three. But I want twins, identical twin girls. I see little redheads playing in the park and having fun. The house, my house, is in the country, with horses and stables and lots of land, lots of trees, lots of space.”

And Sarah sees something else, too. But it’s a dream she’s only begun to envision.

At the end of it, she’s wearing a cap and gown. All around her, as she walks on stage, her high school classmates and family are cheering. At a microphone, a teacher announces Sarah’s name. She’s first in her class.

Sarah Clark. Cheerleader. Valedictorian.

And why not? With Randy in jail, with A’s on her tests and with all that money in the bank, what could possibly stop her now?

“Hey,” Sarah’s mom suggests. “What do you say we go shopping?”

Sarah’s all for it.

She likes nice things, pretty things, even though she doesn’t have many, or maybe because of it. She takes care to look pretty.

On school mornings she rises early enough so she doesn’t have to rush when putting on her foundation, lipstick, mascara and eyeliner. Sarah likes her makeup to appear light and natural, heavier around the eyes, but not too heavy.

She wants to feel attractive in a way her mother never did. For although she may hate her mother’s life, she doesn’t hate her mother. She knows her mother loves her. Much of the time Sarah even pities Andrea, abandoned with her 3-year-old sister, Denise, at a Kansas City orphanage when she was 18 months old.

Sarah knows the story well. How Andrea was just a baby, a dark-haired Mexican girl, whose birth mother didn’t want her. How, even after she was adopted by Charles Lombrano, a Mexican-American grain inspector, and his GermanAmerican wife, Doris, she never felt accepted or loved or good enough. Not next to her sister. Not next to Denise.

While Denise was thin, Andrea was fat.

While Denise was studious, logical and independent, Andrea was none of those things. She was a sensitive romantic who laughed until her crescent eyes shut and who desperately wanted to be liked.

Instead, she got criticized, constantly.

Andy, you’d be so pretty if ….

Andy, you’ll never get a man until …

“Mom was hard on her weight. Everybody was, and it hurt her,” Denise Nasternak, Andrea’s sister, said.    But by 16, Andrea began proving her mother wrong, at least on one account.

She began getting men, plenty. She also began getting high, plenty.

She ran away from home twice. Then she dropped out of high school. At 21, she met Sarah’s dad who, in the course of their five-year marriage, repeatedly beat her. He broke her nose. He broke her jaw. Finally she ran away with Sarah when she was 3 and Brian, 1, was still in diapers.     Now not only is Andrea’s second husband, Randy, in jail, but also two weeks ago Andrea’s mother died of cancer. So as far as a little shopping spree goes, Sarah figures her mom deserves it. They all do.

Quickly they fill their Dutch Colonial house in Westheight with more than $6,000 in clothes and furniture. New couch. Love seat. End tables. Computer. VCR. Thirtysix-inch TV. Sega system. CD stereo. Bunk beds for the boys.

Then, as an extra treat to herself, Sarah’s mom heads to the Missouri River casinos.

And then she goes again … and again … and again.

Soon Sarah and the boys barely see their mother anymore.

During the day they’re in school. Overnight Andrea’s working the red-eye shift at Hen House. The rest of the time she’s with Mike Scrivo, a new boyfriend she met at the casinos.

Half-Italian, half-Korean, Mike, 48, has the lean musculature of a middleweight and the carved face of a Mongolian warrior. He makes van deliveries for an airport courier service. Andrea thinks he dropped from heaven.

Sarah detests him.

She blames him for coming between them and their mother.

Months pass — November, December, March, April — and Andrea is getting skinnier.

She’s becoming more scattered. Sarah says it’s because her mom’s doing more drugs than ever. Pot. Crank. Speed. But Andrea says that’s not the case. She denies doing crank and speed and blames her weight loss on depression over Randy being in jail and her mother’s death.

All around the house, Sarah finds the casino receipts:

Harrah’s: $300.

Harrah’s: $500.

Argosy: $300.

Mike took Andrea to Las Vegas for her 39th birthday. He said he’d pay. And he did, for the airfare and hotels. But how much did her mother lose? And what about Sarah’s plans for college? Everything had been going so well.  In May 1997, with seven A’s and two B’s, Sarah ends her freshman year ranked near the top of her class. Again, she’s made cheerleader.

On June 12, one month later, the electricity goes off. Andrea hasn’t paid the bills in six months.

A winter night. February 1998.

Sarah, 15, and her younger brothers huddle like campers around a kerosene heater in the center of their living room. To keep out the cold, Sarah has nailed a sheet over the room’s only entryway. The room feels warm, but it’s heavy with darkness.

A wavering light shines from the heater’s red flame. A few flickering candles cast large shadows against the walls.

Lying on the couch, Sarah reads by flashlight. It’s been eight months since the utility company got tired of waiting to be paid and turned off the lights, the stove, the heat, all the power to the house. Not long after that, the water went, too.

In the mornings Sarah and her brothers heat pots of bottled water on the kerosene stove and pour them into the bath. They pour more in the tank to flush the toilet.

Too humiliated, too embarrassed, she has managed to keep her circumstances a secret, telling virtually no one. One friend came to pick her up the other day. Sarah met her outside. Another, Rachel Vernon, wanted to stop by to hang out.

“My mom is in a bad mood,” Sarah said. “She doesn’t want anyone over.”

Truth is, Sarah’s mom is rarely around anymore. When Andrea does show up, it’s often near midnight to bring the kids a dinner of sandwiches or fast food. Sarah and her brothers have been living off McDonald’s, Burger King and Taco Bell for months.

Andrea has been gone so much, Sarah’s youngest brother,

Jordan, 8, sometimes slips and calls Sarah “Mom.”

“Mom, I’m cold.”

“Mom, can you check my homework?”

Sarah does it, occasionally by flashlight. At night she puts Jordan to bed on the couch. In the mornings she and Brian make sure he’s warm and dressed in clean clothes before he heads to school.

Then, in the afternoons and evenings, she puts on her Schlagle Stallions uniform and cheers for her classmates.

This is Sarah’s sophomore year. Whatever homework

Sarah has, she does at school. Her grades are nearly perfect.

Of course, she knows by now that the Social Security windfall is gone. Every cent. Fifty thousand dollars. Blown on gambling or drugs or who knows what else. Andrea says she used most of it to pay back bills. Sarah doesn’t believe it.

Almost all their new toys are gone, too. Big-screen TV.

CD stereo. Computer.

A burglar stole everything in January. Besides being cold and dark, the house is now empty.

Sarah and the boys do have one portable TV left, though. It has a 5-inch screen and plugs into a car cigarette lighter. Sometimes Sarah and the boys go outside to the van to watch it.

And sometimes Sarah wonders what it must look like to those who see them. Three kids sitting in a van, in the night, their faces illuminated by the tiniest of lights.

Late May 1998. Four months later.

Outside their house, Sarah, Brian and Jordan sit in police squad cars. The officer is blunt.

You’re not sleeping here again, he tells the kids. If a responsible adult isn’t here to get you in 30 minutes, we’re calling child protective services.

At last. Someone called the authorities.  Sarah is relieved. They’ve been living with no heat or lights for close to a year. For a long time Sarah hoped her mother would come to her senses and start paying the bills.

Sarah knows her mom must have some money. Andrea still works at Hen House. Plus, long before Social Security sent Sarah and Brian the $50,000, the agency had been sending them benefit checks totaling nearly $1,000 a month.

The money should come until they turn 18.

But every time Sarah confronts her mother, Andrea says she’s paying the bills. She has some left, she says. But she’s saving it for Sarah’s college.

“College? Forget college,” Sarah screamed during an argument. “

The day Sarah found out her mother was having the money mailed to her own post office box is the day her burden felt the heaviest. And she knew: Her mother would never change.

Like always, it was up to Sarah.  For the third year in a row, she had made the cheerleading squad. The taunting had subsided. She had made friends and, with her grades at the end of her sophomore year, the National Honor Society.

Honors English A

TV Production A-

Honors Algebra A

Biology A

World History A

Spanish A

Intro Computer A

Consumer Resource Management B-

She’s among the top three in her class. But now she’s homeless.