Free Almost Home by Damien Echols Page A

around, as there Damien Echols
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    was nothing I wanted to say goodbye to. We didn’t own a great deal that was worth taking other than our clothes and a few appliances. The furniture was all ready for the trash.
    Ah, but I did find a treasure in that place before I left. It was a parting gift from the ghosts. There was only one closet in the house, and it hadn’t been opened in years. It was packed full of clothes that no one wore and other assorted trash that should have been thrown out years ago. My mother and Jack decided to go through it to make certain they weren’t leaving behind anything useful (yeah right, like a pirate might have crept in and buried a treasure). Jack was pulling things out and tossing them on the floor while my mother looked on. At one point he climbed into the closet so that he could reach an area that extended up to the ceiling. This was the area where the fire had once started. He handed everything he found down to my mother, and she tossed them out onto the floor with her nose wrinkled in disgust.
    Suddenly something dusty and black was thrown out. Up until this point, I had no interest in anything they were doing. I was just eager to leave. Something about that dusty black bundle drew my attention, so I picked it up. It was a filthy, tattered, dry-rotted, and moth-eaten trench coat. My heart skipped a beat because of its perfection. I had to have it.
    “Whose is this?” I asked.
    My mom said, “No one’s, it’s just trash.” I was slipping it on before she even finished speaking. “That’s filthy, you need to wash it,” she told me.
    Jack, who had just climbed down, took one look and said, “It’ll probably come apart if you try to wash it.”
    And that was how I came to own my very first trench coat. From then on, I was never without one. That seemed to be the one thing that people remembered about me more than anything else. Everyone who described me always began with “He wears a long, black coat.” It became the symbol of all that people associated with being of me. That particular one eventually disintegrated, but I went on to find others. I felt safe when wrapped up in them, covered up and shielded.
    It was the greatest security blanket of all. I felt hidden when wearing it, as if bad things couldn’t find me. Without it, I felt exposed and vulnerably open to the world. I was never self-conscious or a victim of self-doubt when draped in all that black cloth. There’s no reason to fear anything when you float through the world like a dusty black ghost.
    XIV
    Once in my grandmother’s “Lakeshore Estate,” we had to build two ramps—one to get her into and out of the trailer, and one to bridge the slight drop between the kitchen and living room. It was next to impossible for her to navigate her wheel chair through the narrow hallway, so we put her bed in a corner of the living room. My mother and Jack took her old room, and at long last I had a room of my own. I rarely ventured outside that room while at home. It was small and dark, the light was encased within a smoky glass globe. I had a black vinyl couch to sleep on, and a small metal shelf to store my things. One entire wall was covered by a three-panel mirror. The closet had an odd folding door on it, and the floor was covered with short, brown carpet. I immediately covered the walls with pictures and posters of pro-skaters, and set up the cheap, second hand stereo that had been my Christmas present—I made it my place.
    I’ve heard many jokes about poor people living in trailer parks, but I no longer considered myself poor. I was now in the lap of luxury—I could take a shower whenever I wanted, there was central heat for the winter, and a window unit air conditioner for the summer. The toilet flushed, there were no crop dusters, and we had neighbors. It was heaven.
    This narrative would not be complete without a word about Lakeshore itself.
    People who have seen it in the many years I’ve been locked up have