I’m not technically an orphan, but it’s the easiest explanation. Because for most of my life, family functionally didn’t exist.
I was the youngest of five, born in the mountain town of Ogden, Utah. When I turned seven, my parents divorced after years of my father’s abuse of my mother. My mom ended up falling in love with a con man who convinced her to take out thousands of dollars in payday loans before he disappeared into the night. After that came the spiral: rampant drug use, job loss, and my mom and me living in a motel room. I moved in with one of my older sisters, beginning a dark two-year chapter that I try not to revisit. This chapter ended with me, age 13, alone in my sister’s former house with no power, heat, or key.
This article appears in Issue 36 of Alta Journal.
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One evening in eighth grade, a friend’s mom dropped me off at the dark house and watched me climb through a window to get inside. Soon after, the family invited me to move in with them. They were Mormon, and I lived with them for six years; the parents became my legal guardians. At first, it felt miraculous to participate in a “normal” family. There was structure (curfews, bedtimes, Saturday-morning chores) and predictability (dinner at the same time every night). But if I’m honest…I’m not sure why they took me in. Belonging is different from shelter. Sharing a house does not make a home. Gratitude was expected, silence was safer, and anything less than excellence was criticized. They always made me feel that my place there was conditional—because it was.
When I was 17, my mother died of a brain tumor. It was one of the loneliest times of my life. I had known she was sick, but I hadn’t understood what that meant and how little time was left. I couldn’t drive, so visiting her meant asking for a ride to her end-of-life facility. My requests to the Mormons were treated like an inconvenience, so after a while, I just stopped asking. Even though she hadn’t been a good mother and our relationship was complicated, I still carry guilt for not being there with her at the end. I wish I had pushed harder. I wish someone had pushed for me.
In 2012, a year after my mother died, I had her birth year, 1956, tattooed on my left arm in small Roman numerals. When I showed the Mormon mom, she didn’t speak to me for two weeks. She told me I had ruined my life. The relationship with her and most of that family didn’t last much longer.
It was around that time, the summer before my first semester of college, that I met Rachel. I remember sitting in her backyard near the firepit, telling her about my childhood and the family I had just left. I remember holding back tears that surprised me, a lump lodged in my throat before I understood why they were there. It’s still hard to write about my life without feeling that same tightness.
Sometimes, I think that was the night Rachel decided something about me.
MEETING A SISTER
I was introduced to Rachel through our respective partners. We were dating brothers—she, about to marry one; I, newly seeing the other. Neither of us was a member of the Mormon church, but in Utah, everyone lives within its orbit. And somehow, despite being nonbelievers, we had found ourselves loving men from a big, devoted Mormon family.
We quickly became close. Every Sunday, our boyfriends’ family gathered for dinner. Rachel and I would claim a table set just slightly apart from everyone else, our own little outsider zone. Those meals together turned into weekend trips to Vegas. We’d meet in Salt Lake City for dinner or, after workouts, make green smoothies that tasted like dirt. When I try to summon that period in my life, I see Rachel in a soft gray V-neck, a Coors sweating in her hand, her red-haired head tipped back in laughter. Rachel sparkles, though not in a way that clamors for attention. She is the intriguing girl next door: She’s All That’s Laney Boggs after the makeover—except Rachel never needed one. In the 15 years I’ve known her, she has remained exactly herself. And that has always made her the most reliable person I know.
Rachel made me love that family. At the time, I thought I would marry that guy, and it felt inevitable that she would become my sister, though I really didn’t need more sisters. I already had five. My mother had had three other girls and a boy. The Mormon family I had lived with was blended, with two girls and three boys. I had grown up surrounded by siblings. But by the time I met Rachel, most of those relationships were tenuous, fading, or already gone.
About three years after I joined the family, Rachel and her husband separated. When my boyfriend and I heard, we got in the car and drove straight to her house. I remember sitting on her couch, the air heavy with emotion. “How am I supposed to stay in this family without her?” I thought. The divorce made things official. She was no longer part of it. That was the last time I saw her for a while.
Nine months later, during the summer between my junior and senior years of college, when my own relationship ended, Rachel was one of the first people I texted. I asked if she’d be open to meeting. She immediately said yes.
Our relationship bloomed during our year together as single women. We still took trips to Vegas, this time with a man she was seeing named Christopher, whom she would later marry. When Taylor Swift released 1989, we drove around with the windows down, singing our favorite track, “Clean,” a song about finding yourself after a devastating breakup. It felt on the nose. It was. After a day of classes, I’d drive to her one-bedroom apartment in South Ogden. We’d order salads and cinnamon sticks from the local pizza place and discuss the men on The Bachelorette or the love affair between Fitz and Olivia on Scandal. We now have matching Olivia Pope long-stemmed wineglasses tattooed on our arms, a small toast to the year we rebuilt our lives together.
AUNTIE SHAQY
Rachel is one of those lucky people who come from an intact, loving family. She folded me into her life: dinners with her parents, Pam and Dave, and drinks with her brother, Nick. Before I moved to San Francisco in 2015, Rachel and her family organized a small send-off dinner. We stood outside the restaurant together, her soft voice repeating “You got this” as she read the fear in my eyes. (In hindsight, Rachel made it possible for me to go.) Even then, she knew I was never meant to stay. But more than that, she made leaving feel less final. If everything went to hell, there was somewhere to return.
A few months after I moved to San Francisco, Rachel became pregnant with her first daughter, Ari. Five years later, she had her second, Lola. Somewhere along the way, I became Auntie Shaqy—a title I consider a duty and honor.
When Ari was still a baby, I’d return to Utah maybe twice a year, staying a few days at a time. Going home was painful. My relationships with both my adopted and my biological siblings had grown increasingly strained. Utah itself felt like a map of old wounds: the run-down motel where my mother and I lived when I was in sixth grade, the track where I was forced to run laps in 90-degree heat as punishment, the housing complex where my mom left me so she could get high. Memory ignites easily. Sometimes all it takes is a smell.
And yet, becoming the girls’ auntie has rewired so much of that. Washington Boulevard, where my parents once fought, is now where I burst into tears watching Ari play the lead role of Anna in Frozen in a summer play. My high school auditorium now conjures the sweet feeling of holding Lola’s hand during her preschool graduation. The street I ran down at 1 a.m. while searching for my mother after she didn’t come home for three days? It’s now where Rachel, Christopher, and my babies live.
There is, in a quiet way, a freedom in not having a family. I’m not tethered; I can take any opportunities that the world presents without weighing them against an aging parent or sick siblings. But Rachel is the one tie I keep. Every time I write something I’m proud of, I first send it to Rachel. Holidays when I would otherwise be alone are now spent with her family, making wontons and drinking Painkillers. When I quit my job and left San Francisco to travel across Europe, she let me crash in her basement after I returned, helping me figure out how to move to Los Angeles. When my long-term relationship and engagement ended two years ago, she let me cry on her couch and made sure that every day, I was still eating. Still breathing. If the world ended tomorrow, I’d get back to Utah. However I could. To find Rachel.•
Shaquille Heath is a writer and essayist who explores the intricacies of Blackness and identity, specifically in the visual arts. Her work has appeared in Juxtapoz, the New York Times, the Cut, the San Francisco Chronicle, Elephant, and elsewhere.
