Counting by 7s

  But I cannot find my voice to do anything about these future calamities, because it is someone’s idea of inspirational to release the bobbing weapons.

  Out of the corner of my eye I see a toddler refusing to let go of his helium prize.

  His parents finally manage to pry the ribbon from his clenched fist.

  As the four-year-old sobs in agony, I know that he is the only one here who understands.

  A small article with a postage-stamp-size photo of me is in the local paper, and a fund is started for my future education.

  My father’s employer makes a generous contribution.

  There are other people on the list of donors, but they are only names I’ve heard in passing, not associated with faces that I would easily recognize.

  The only person I know is Jairo Hernandez from Mexicano Taxi Company.

  I write Jairo a thank-you note and he calls Happy Polish Nails. It’s two and half weeks after the accident. I used the stationery from here, so he took a guess that they might know where I am.

  Pattie is surprised that a man wants to speak to me.

  I explain he is an old friend. He is a friend. And a lot older than me. So I’m not lying.

  Jairo asks how I’m doing, and then he says:

  “I want you to call me if you need a ride somewhere.”

  I say:

  “Thank you. I will.”

  It is quiet for a long time but I know he is still on the phone line. Pattie is watching me so I nod and try to look like I’m listening to more than silence. I finally say:

  “Did you enroll in school?”

  He says:

  “I haven’t done that yet.”

  He then asks:

  “How is school going for you?”

  I could just say fine, but it feels wrong, so I say:

  “I’m taking a break from that.”

  He says:

  “Me too.”

  I add:

  “But I’m going to the library today. Maybe that’s some kind of start.”

  I hang up the phone, and later in the afternoon I ask Pattie if I can go to Beale. She says yes.

  Once inside the building, I go upstairs and find the spot behind the doughnut chair. I crawl back there, but I don’t sleep at first. Instead, I watch the world from this protected place.

  The library has regulars.

  A lot of them talk to themselves.

  But they do it quietly because quiet is enforced here.

  After a long nap, I go back down to the first floor.

  The computer room is the most popular space in the building.

  I’m surprised, but a lot of the people who I think might be homeless (from the amount of things they are forced to leave downstairs at the front desk) go online.

  I can see that they check their Facebook pages.

  I watch these people click through pictures and view the same kind of videos as the bored-looking teenagers who show up once school is out.

  I’m not sure why this is reassuring, but it is.

  I go outside and sit on the steps.

  I’m not waiting.

  I’m just being.

  Time exists only in my mind.

  For someone grieving, moving forward is the challenge.

  Because after extreme loss, you want to go back.

  Maybe that’s why I don’t calculate anything now. I can only count in the negative space.

  I’m on a different planet now.

  I only speak when I absolutely have to.

  Otherwise, I do my best to be invisible and stay out of the way.

  No matter how hard they try, other people do not understand because I’m incapable of communication.

  And that is why the deepest form of pain comes out as silence.

  Mai, when she’s not at school, or with her friends, talks to me about her life.

  I listen. But I don’t answer.

  I spend most of my day with Pattie.

  She’s there for me.

  And just being there is ninety-nine percent of what matters when your world falls apart.

  I know for a fact that Quang-ha hates me.

  But I’m okay with that.

  I have brought nothing positive into his life. Now he has to wait longer to use the bathroom, and the hot water in the shower runs out more quickly.

  I try to do everything last, but sometimes it doesn’t work out that way.

  I don’t want to cause trouble, so I haven’t said anything about being a vegetarian. I just push the chicken or the pork pieces off to the side and then later transfer them to a napkin, and then at the end of the meal I sneak them into the trash.

  I know that I’m eating meat bits that escape this tragically simple procedure, but the principle of my decision is intact, even if the reality is compromised.

  All reality, I decide, is a blender where hopes and dreams are mixed with fear and despair.

  Only in cartoons and fairy tales and greeting cards do endings have glitter.

  I somehow make it through the first month.

  I dress and brush my teeth when they tell me to.

  And I experience the hollow feeling of complete loss, which is emptiness.

  Meaning has been drained from my life.

  I force myself to think of anything but the one thing that I’m actually always thinking about.

  And that is so exhausting that I sleep more than I ever have.

  I am a shadow.

  I no longer dream in color.

  I don’t count by 7s.

  Because in this new world I don’t count.

  Chapter 30

  It was dark nowadays when Dell got home to the Gardens of Glenwood.

  The only greenery in the apartment complex was in the courtyard.

  And that was in a circular patch of red volcanic chips that hurt Dell’s feet, even when he wore thick-soled shoes and was just trying to take a shortcut to the always-strange-smelling stairwell.

  The pumice rock minefield was dotted with stubborn weeds armed with sharp thistles, which poked up through the cheap layer of thin black plastic under the brick-colored lava bits. The thorns caught Dell’s exposed, fleshy ankles and drew dots of blood.

  There were no natural glens in all of Bakersfield. It was a flat, dry place made green only by sprinkler systems.

  Maybe that was why so many apartment complexes around town were named for ferns and wet, wooded sanctuaries.

  It was “an expression of the yearning of a moisture-challenged climate”—at least that’s what Willow had told him when she had first asked where he lived and he responded, he had to admit, with puffy pride:

  “The Gardens of Glenwood.”

  Now he took the stairs to his second-floor unit, because the elevator, which was required by law, never worked.

  Dell tried, in desperation, to add up the events of the long and challenging month.

  A week after the accident (as he had predicted) his supervisor asked to see his file on Willow Chance.

  Dell may have found the missing kid on the day she left Mercy Hospital, but he wasn’t a hero for very long.

  Now, weeks later, he was afraid. He could admit that, at least to himself.

  He had given Willow practice exams in everything from the required three-hour test for application to medical school to fourteen of the SAT Subject II’s.

  And she had aced them all.

  But he made the decision not to hand those materials over.

  What he sent to his boss was a simple electronic form that revealed next to nothing about the girl.

  Somehow, he’d been caught up in so many layers of deception:

  Willow Chance wasn’t a cheater.

  Pattie Nguyen wasn’t an old family friend.

&
nbsp; The Nguyens didn’t live in the Gardens of Glenwood. (Why couldn’t they use their own address?)

  He didn’t homeschool her (like he was supposed to do).

  And he had never been committed to being any kind of a counselor.

  Willow walked from the nail salon to the district offices on Tuesdays.

  She was always on time.

  Instead of taking tests or analyzing the stock market, the two now sat in silence.

  Dell tried to think of things to motivate her, or at the very least ease her distress, but so far, he had been a failure.

  Yesterday Willow had come in and for fifty-five minutes (which seemed like fifty-five hours) Dell worked on a one-thousand-piece jigsaw puzzle of bowls of jelly beans.

  Willow didn’t place a single piece.

  But he knew she wasn’t trying.

  And he was really bad at puzzles, so it was a struggle in all ways.

  After she had gone, Dell opened his computer and wrote up a report.

  He knew now that he was being observed. And if there was one thing Dell Duke understood, it was that he didn’t do well under scrutiny.

  He had made a mistake by ever getting involved with the genius kid.

  Because it was a lot easier to do his job and not care about anything.

  And now he cared about everything.

  Pattie Nguyen hadn’t enrolled in any of the necessary classes for foster parenting, and she didn’t go to the one group session that had been offered.

  She intended to.

  But somehow, more than four weeks had passed and she had yet to do more than check in with Lenore Cole, who was Willow’s social worker.

  As the darkness of an autumn sky pressed in through the glass of the salon, Pattie looked down at her calendar.

  A hearing had been set in family court and a judge would make a determination about Willow in the next two months.

  But Pattie decided that today wasn’t the time to think about the future.

  Today was the day to order more shades of red nail polish.

  She found the new catalog from her most reliable supplier and circled a shade that she thought Willow would approve of.

  It was called “well red.”

  Just doing that made Pattie feel marginally better.

  Chapter 31

  Vietnamese is spoken here.

  I can understand the manicurists, even the ones who talk fast.

  They never whisper back and forth about their customers’ nails.

  They talk about their lives.

  While they file and buff and paint, I hear their stories, which are nearly all about husbands and children and other family members.

  Many of them are related to one another. Cousins and sisters. Mothers- and daughters-in-law.

  They are a tribe.

  They don’t know that what I hear is hurtful. Because even as they complain about bad men or lazy kids, the pain for me is seeing how they are so connected.

  To one another.

  And to their families.

  And to the world.

  These women wrap themselves in their stories from the minute they walk through the glass door until the second they leave at the end of the day.

  They use words to build something that is as real as cloth.

  And while they complain in lower voices, about one another, they are joined by blood and circumstance and shared experience.

  They are part of something bigger than themselves.

  Even if they don’t realize it.

  I do.

  I have seen trees that survive fire.

  Their bark is burned and their limbs are dead branches.

  But hidden under that skeleton is a force that sends a single shoot of green out into the world.

  Maybe if I’m lucky, that will one day happen to me.

  But right now, I can’t see it.

  Pattie is at the front desk.

  Everything in here is white. The reception area. The manicure chairs. The floor.

  White = clean.

  I’m pretty sure that with the exception of the color red, Pattie would be pleased if every other shade in the world disappeared.

  That’s how she sees things.

  She has schedules and rules and methods and every day she does her best to impose these on the world, one chipped fingernail repair at a time.

  My mother used the old expression “There is a place for everything and everything should be in its place.” But she didn’t practice it.

  Pattie does.

  I would say that, with the exception of me sitting in the back of this salon, she’s winning the battle.

  Pattie is adding up something on a calculator when the phone rings. After she says hello, I hear:

  “Today?”

  I look over because I’m now an expert in her voice, and while it was even and unemotional, I still heard something different in it.

  The person on the other end of the phone line is doing all the talking.

  Pattie shoots a look to the back of the salon and our eyes connect.

  This must be the call where she officially gets rid of me.

  I hear her say:

  “I work until six thirty.”

  Pattie looks out the window. She’s struggling now.

  I want to make this easy for her. I get up from my spot in the back and I fold up the furniture pad. I close my computer and I take off my glasses.

  I breathe deep.

  I know that I’ve been nothing but a problem. I’ve tried to be invisible, but just my presence here has changed the dynamic of the situation.

  Quang-ha was mad before, but now he’s a volcano when we cross the alley at night to the garage.

  Mai puts on a good front, but even she seems tired of the whole arrangement.

  I need this to be easy for Pattie.

  She has been good to me.

  So I turn to face her and I do my best to smile.

  I want this smile to say that I am grateful for what she’s done for me.

  I want it to say that I’m sorry for being broken.

  I want it to say that I understand her situation.

  So I’m trying. I really, truly am.

  But my teeth stick to my lip and my whole mouth quivers.

  Pattie sees my creepy grin and turns away.

  I hear her voice, shaky now, say:

  “We won’t be there until six forty-five. Is that too late?”

  Pattie hangs up, and right away dials a number.

  Her even disposition is one of her best qualities. And she’s maintaining it. Sort of.

  Maybe that happens when you’ve been through a lot. All of your edges are worn off, like sea glass.

  Either that, or you shatter.

  Bakersfield is 130 miles from the Pacific Ocean, but twice I drove to the beach, just outside of Santa Maria, with my parents.

  There was a short period of time when I was obsessed with the study of the ocean, since it takes up more than 70 percent of the planet.

  But on the two times that we went to visit, I was afraid.

  The unpredictable current and the vast, complex system of wildlife that resides beneath the churning water gave me hives.

  Literally.

  I was a body of bumps.

  So I admire Pattie’s composure.

  I knew that my time here wouldn’t last long.

  And today is the proof.

  I find myself always waiting for bad news now.

  So it’s almost a relief to get some.

  I walk to the front counter. I hear Pattie saying:

  “A woman called from child services. They are doing a home visitation. Today.”

  Once I’m close, she shoots me a look and then hits a but
ton and suddenly Dell Duke’s voice is on speakerphone.

  “Well, it’s pretty obvious you don’t live at my place!”

  Pattie only shrugs and says:

  “It’s temporary.”

  He says:

  “Why did we use my address? What’s wrong with where you live?”

  Pattie ignores the question. She says:

  “Let’s start by taking a look at your apartment.”

  I hear Dell slamming something. His fist into a file cabinet? His head onto his desk?

  “I can’t just leave. I mean, I’d have to take a sick day or—”

  Pattie hits the speakerphone release button and Dell’s voice is cut off. She then says:

  “Come get us. We’ll be here waiting.”

  She puts the receiver back into the cradle and returns to her work. She says again, to no one in particular:

  “Temporary.”

  Chapter 32

  It isn’t long before Dell’s Ford swerves into the parking lot. He gets out of his car as if his hair is on fire.

  I should be freaking out like Dell, but I find myself mimicking Pattie’s attitude.

  My edges are gone.

  I’m sea glass.

  If you look hard, you can see right through me.

  There isn’t much discussion.

  Pattie and I get in Dell’s car and we drive across town.

  Ten minutes later we arrive at 257 Heptad Lane.

  I look up at the apartment house. It appears to be a building constructed by a blind contractor who didn’t use an architect.

  The proportions of the place are all off, and not in a provocative way.

  It looks like someone took an enormous box, painted it the color of serratia marcescens (which is a rod-shaped, pink bacterium that grows in showers) and cut holes in the sides.

  I’m somehow not surprised that Dell Duke lives here.

  We follow the counselor up a dark stairwell to the second floor, where he opens a door. He’s mumbling now: