“You’re telling me your foster father sexually abused you,” Ms. Flores says, though her eyes say I’m full of it. Full of crap. “You ever tell your caseworker about this?”
“No, ma’am.”
“Why not? She checked up on you, did she not? Brought letters from Paul and Lily Zeeger.”
I shrug. “Yes, ma’am.”
“Then why didn’t you tell her?” I look out the one barred window placed too high on the wall for me to see what is outside. There’s just a hint of blue sky, some white fleecy clouds. I fantasize about what’s on the other side: a parking lot, cars, trees.
The caseworker was okay. I didn’t hate her. She drove a beat-up junker car and carried about half a million case files in a mangled Nike bag that, at the age of thirty or maybe forty, made her back sag like those old ladies with osteoporosis. She worked out of her car, with all her files stored in the backseat. She moved from group home to foster home, back to group home, meeting with all the kids on her ever growing caseload. Apparently she had an office—somewhere—but I don’t think she was ever there. She was nice enough, but she was up to her ears in her caseload (if she told me that once, she told me a thousand times) and half the time when she showed up, she thought my name was Clarissa and once or twice, Clarice. She talked fast and moved faster. She wanted things done.
The day I went to live with Joseph and Miriam was just one more checkmark on her to-do list.
“You see, Claire, I’ve seen your files. I know that your caseworker made visits to the home, to Joseph and Miriam’s home, and I know that this so-called sexual abuse was never discussed. What was discussed at these visits—” she reaches down into a briefcase at her feet and pulls out a chunky green file, flipping to a page she’s marked with yellow sticky notes “—were your mood swings, your quick temper, your refusal to follow rules, complete chores, obey orders, your defying authority, your poor grades in school.” She sits, still as a mouse, her eyes bearing down on me across the table, and then adds, “Your flights of fancy.”
I’d been in that house just outside Omaha for all of a month before Joseph came into my bed that first time. At first he just wanted to see parts of me I didn’t think he had any business seeing, and then he wanted to touch me in places I didn’t want to be touched. When I said I didn’t want to do these things, he said to me with a kindliness that waned with every split second it took to undress, “Come on now, Claire. I’m your daddy now. It’s okay to let your daddy see,” and then he’d stare as I pulled a shirt up over my head.
I was scared like I hadn’t been in a long time, not since Ivy Doone, in the first grade, dared me to summons Bloody Mary from my bathroom mirror. In that first month I’d rarely seen Miriam leave her room. Miriam wore her nightclothes all day and all night, the same fusty, crusty ones, without bathing, until her stench filled the home. She rarely said more than two words to the boys or me, only to Joseph, when she was begging his forgiveness for something or other she’d done. She’d drop to her knees before him, sobbing, and kiss his feet, begging Please, Joseph, forgive me and he’d kick her away and move on, saying she was pathetic, worthless, a tramp. He said once, in a fit of rage, that Miriam should be tossed out the window, her corpse left to feed vagrant dogs.
“Have you got anything to say to that?” Louise Flores asks. Any comment about my delinquency.
Joseph said no one would believe me. It was his word against mine. No one would believe me if I told them what he did.
And besides, he was only doing what a good daddy was supposed to do.
“No,” I mutter.
The woman rolls her eyes, closes the file before her and says to me, “This alleged sexual abuse. Tell me about that.”
I learned later, when copying from the Bible, word for word until my hand cramped and the muscles burned and I could barely hold the pencil without shaking, which was Joseph’s punishment for me when I misbehaved, of the Phoenician princess Jezebel, who was thrown through a window for killing the Lord’s prophet, her blood splattered on the walls. She was trampled and left to be eaten by dogs, so that when the people returned, all that was left was her skull, and feet, and the palms of her hands.
Matthew and Isaac were sent to school while Miriam and I were left at home alone. If anyone ever came to the door, we weren’t to answer it. We were to stay real quiet so no one knew we were inside. Joseph told me if ever I did dare answer that door it might be bad people on the other side, bad people who wanted to hurt me. So I didn’t dare open that door. The house was dark, the curtains always closed. Except in my bedroom, where I’d peek out my window as Matthew and Isaac walked through the neighborhood where we lived, past the kids on the bikes with their baseballs and footballs, past little girls with pigtails who drew murals on the sidewalks with chalk. They’d wait, at the end of the block, for the big yellow school bus to come and sweep them up and drive them to school. I watched as some of the kids called Matthew and Isaac mean names because, in that neighborhood, Matthew and Isaac were deemed weird ’cause they didn’t ride their bikes and they couldn’t catch a ball if their life depended on it. They didn’t have friends, and if ever some of the neighborhood boys came to the door to see if they could play, Matthew and Isaac, like me, had to be real quiet, pretend no one was home, and in time, none of those kids came to call anymore. Instead they called them names at the bus stop, they pushed and shoved them, they threw snowballs smack dab at Matthew and Isaac’s heads.
I believed Joseph when he said, coming into my bedroom night after night, hearing me sob for Momma and Daddy, and feeling so lonely and alone and scared, that he would take care of me like a good daddy should. He told me that this, what he was doing when he lay his sweaty body beside me under the patchwork quilt, was what a real daddy was supposed to do.
He told me that my living with him and Miriam was my momma and daddy’s last request. That this was what they wanted.
And he told me that if I didn’t do what he said, he’d take it out on my Lily. Oh, yes, he’d say if ever I hesitated to undress. You don’t want anything to happen to Lily now, do you?
I thought about Lily all the time. I thought about Lily, out there, somewhere. I wondered if that was Momma and Daddy’s wish, too: that Lily live with the Zeegers when they died.
But I didn’t think that was true.
By then, Lily was three years old. She only knew Paul and Big Lily as Mommy and Daddy; she didn’t have any memory of those folks buried at the cemetery back in Ogallala off Fifth Street, under a maple tree that was half as dead as they were, their corpses rotting in matching pine boxes in the ground. I dreamed of Momma and Daddy there, in those boxes, the ones I watched with Ms. Amber Adler being lowered into the ground, before she drove Lily and me in her junker car to the group home.
I dreamed of Momma and Daddy’s skeleton arms trying hard to reach through the pine boxes and touch hands.
CHRIS
I watch Heidi sauté the chicken, carrots, peas and celery in a skillet in the kitchen. In a saucepan, she adds butter and onion, cans of chicken broth. I bless my lucky stars for real chicken and not chicken crumbles. She pours it all into a pie crust and pops it in the oven. She tries not to look at me. When our eyes do intersect, she says, “She needs our help,” just like that: her new catchphrase, her mantra.
I haul my laptop and printer to the floor so we can eat at the kitchen table. I try hard to be theatrical about it so Heidi can see what an inconvenience this has become. She ignores the moan, the heavy thwack of the printer on the hardwood floor, the “oh, shit” when my legs get tangled up in the cord and I all but trip. Heidi is still unshowered for the day, still sporting the lilac robe, her hair now thrust into an unruly bun. She’s wearing her glasses.
Her hands tremble as she yanks dinner plates from the kitchen cabinets. Zoe is in her bedroom, still listening to boy band music and, no doubt, inventing all sorts of scenarios in her mind in which her parents disappear. Little does she know her best chance of ridding herself of
Heidi and me lies on the other side of the bedroom wall, resting at Heidi’s suggestion. From time to time I detect the babble of that baby, doped up on Tylenol to keep a fever in check.
“You’re shaking,” I say.
She frowns at me and says, “I haven’t had anything to eat all day.”
But I imagine there’s more to it than that.
On the edge of the counter, her cell phone, placed nose to nose with Zoe’s confiscated one, rings, and she picks it up, her eyes roving over the display screen before she sets it back down, the call ignored.
“Who was that?” I ask, arching my back after the weight of the printer.
“No one,” she says, “telemarketer,” but when she goes to retrieve Zoe and that girl for dinner, I sneak a peek and see that Jennifer called for the second time today. Two missed calls, the phone reminds her, from Jennifer Marcue. Two waiting voice mails.
We sit at the table, like one big happy family. Heidi holds the baby. The girl, Willow, Heidi reminds me with a firm kick to the shin when I mistakenly call her Wilma, scarfs down the meal as if she hasn’t eaten in a week. She won’t make eye contact with me, though every now and then her eyes stray to Heidi’s, but for me, there’s no such luck. She stays away from me, three feet or more, as if I might just carry the plague. I tell myself it has something to do with men, but maybe it’s just me. She jumps when I move too quickly, skidding my chair out from the table and standing to fetch a glass of milk.
Heidi is watching the baby, the way her eyes oscillate under translucent eyelids in her sleep. A smile toys with her lips, and I wonder what life would have been like if Heidi had been given the big family she always talked about. Heidi hungered for a huge family, a half dozen kids, maybe more. I was never really sure how I felt about it. Kids, sure. I wanted kids. But five or six, like Heidi talked about, I didn’t know. Of course it didn’t matter how I felt because it never came down to that. Before I could be too concerned with a houseful of kids, we got the diagnosis from the doctor that would forever change our lives.
Suddenly kids weren’t the issue; it was whether or not my wife would live or die.
But still, I wonder what it would have been like had Zoe not been an only child. Would family meals have been like this—strained and unnatural, the only sound the gnashing and grinding of food—or would dinnertime have been rambunctious: hair pulling and knock-knock jokes, name calling and kids taunting each other, rather than withdrawing themselves into silent seclusion as our sole child chooses to do? Those stereotypical only-child myths—that they are lonely, selfish and maladjusted—all seem to apply to Zoe, and I watch as, out of the corner of her eye, Zoe peeks sideways at the girl beside her, and I wonder: what is that expression that crosses her face? Hate? Envy? Or something more? Something different?
Zoe, sitting at the table, wrapped up in a gray blanket because she is perpetually cold, scoops the innards of her chicken potpie out with a fork, and then asks, “What even is this?” while staring at the broth that oozes across her plate like water from a dam.
“Chicken potpie,” Heidi says, setting a forkful in her mouth. “Try it. You’ll like it,” she says. I watch her manage the baby and eat her meal, a woman skilled in the art of motherhood. It wasn’t that long ago that she juggled baby Zoe at the kitchen table.
Zoe says that she hates peas, and we all watch as she draws her fork through the goo, separating piles of carrots and peas, chicken and celery. She picks at the crust, and lays a nibble of pastry on her tongue, letting it dissolve.
“What kind of name is Willow anyway?” I ask as the room drifts into silence. The TV is on: a roundup of the day’s basketball games, but as is always the case during dinnertime, it’s on mute. I see scores flash by, replays of bank shots and alley-oops.
“Chris,” Heidi barks, as if I’d asked some kind of inappropriate question: her bra size or political affiliation. No one ever accused me of being shy. The irony, of course, is Heidi’s practice of interrogating me on my day, and yet allowing this stranger to sit at our kitchen table without knowing her vital statistics, a surname, whether or not she’s an escaped con.
“It’s just a question. I’m curious, that’s all. I’ve never heard the name. Not for a girl anyway.”
Maybe a tree.
“It’s a beautiful name. Like a Willow tree,” Heidi says, “graceful and lithe.”
“There’s a Willow in my earth science class,” Zoe states, her arrival in the conversation astounding us all. Almost as unexpected as if Willow herself opened her mouth and said something. “Willow Toler.” And then Zoe adds, “The boys call her Pussy,” and an awkward silence takes over the room. Again. All but for the damn black cat who attacks the exposed brick wall as if there are roaches living inside it.
“You have a last name, Willow?” I ask, and again with Heidi’s, “Chris!”
“Yes, sir,” she says quietly. There’s a kind of Arcadian simplicity to her, hidden there under the tough disguise. I can’t quite put my finger on it. A twang in her voice, or maybe it’s the fact that she said sir. I stare at her, plunging forkfuls of chicken potpie into her mouth, too much food in each bite. She nearly licks the plate clean and, without asking, Heidi dishes up another slice. She eats the insides of the pie first, saving the crust for the very end. Her favorite part. The part Heidi pulled from a box. Store bought.
She’s not eighteen. I know that much. But I don’t know how old she is. I tell myself she’s eighteen because that way, when the authorities show up at our front door, I can claim ignorance. But, sir, she told me she was eighteen. She smells better than she did hours ago, cleaned up and wearing Zoe’s castoff clothing. But she still looks like a vagabond, the messy eyeliner she painted on following her shower, the ersatz color of her hair. An earring hole, or two, that look infected, fingernails bitten to the quick. Eyes that are erratic, trying hard to escape my probe. The bruise that looms from behind the mantle of dyed hair.
“Care to share?”
“Chris. Please.”
The girl mutters something cryptic beneath her breath. I imagine words of a religious nature, trust and God. But when I ask her to repeat herself, she breathes out, “Greer.”
“What’s that?” I ask. A car alarm starts squawking out the still open window.
She repeats, louder this time, “My name is Willow Greer.”
Later, after we’re through with dinner and the dishes have been cleared, I write it down on the back of a receipt I pull from my wallet. So I won’t forget.
* * *
When I awake in the morning, there is sun. After days and days of clouds and rain, there’s something perplexing about the sun. It’s bright. Too bright.
My entire body is stiff. Like an old man’s. I can barely feel my hip. I roll over, onto my back, my right hand smacking the metal edge of the bed frame. All sorts of expletives run through my mind as I try to remember why I’m on the floor to begin with, why my now-aching hand is even close enough to accost the bed frame. I find myself on the not-so-soft boucle rug that lines Heidi’s and my bedroom floor, wrapped up in Zoe’s magenta sleeping bag.
And then I remember: sleeping on the floor at my own insistence that Zoe not be left alone in her bedroom for the night. Not when we had an outsider in the home. Heidi told me I was being ridiculous and offered to swap places with Zoe. But I said no. I wanted my flock where I could see them. All of them. Even the cats were allowed to stay, sealed in a locked bedroom across the hall from that girl, an extra chair buttressed beneath the door’s handle in case she tried to force her way in.
I roll over, onto my side, and get an angle of the bed I’ve never seen before: the underside. There are all the expected things one finds underneath a bed: a dusty sock divorced from its partner some time ago, a stuffed bunny of Zoe’s that went AWOL when she was eleven, the back of a woman’s earring.
“What’s wrong?” Heidi asks as I slip out of the bedroom and into the kitchen. The house is filled with the aroma of pancakes and eggs, fr
eshly brewed coffee. Heidi’s hovering before the stove, baby placed on one hip, flipping pancakes with the opposing hand. It looks shockingly natural, Heidi and that baby. As though we’ve stepped in a time machine or something, and there she is, holding baby Zoe in her arms. The baby’s got her gold chain, the one Heidi won’t leave home without, wrapped up in the palm of its fat hand, tugging hard. I see Heidi’s father’s wedding band dangling from the end, the one and only thing in the world Heidi wanted when he died. She made a bargain with her mother: her mother could have everything else of sentimental value, but the ring went to Heidi. She searched high and low for a chain of the very same yellow gold as the ring, a twenty-four-karat gold chain that cost nearly a thousand dollars. And now, I watch as the baby yanks on it, the loop of the chain dangling from her grip like a uvula at the back of someone’s throat.
“Nothing,” I lie as I yank a mug from the cabinet and fill it with coffee. “Morning, Willow,” I say to the girl who sits alone at the table, dragging pancakes and eggs into her mouth with a trail of syrup that runs its course across the mahogany table and up Zoe’s striped shirt.
I make a quick trip out to purchase the Trib from the stand on the corner, and then I take my pancakes and eat outside, on the insignificant wooden balcony that sits at a tilt. I can’t stand to stay in the same room with Heidi and that girl, the discomfort filling the room like pea-soup fog. Outside it can’t be more than fifty degrees. I stare at my bare feet resting on the balcony’s rails and think that I’ve been duped by the sun. Flipping through the paper I find the high for the day: 56 degrees. I can’t help but scan for images of missing girls, as well—teenage runaways, articles on kids wanted for questioning in the killing of their parents. I scour for the words: homicide, butchery, torture, and find myself wondering what, exactly, Lizzie Borden’s folks did to piss her off.