Counting by 7s

  It had taken his wife all of ten minutes to decide that they would adopt, and her enthusiasm for life then immediately returned.

  That took four years to happen, but the adoption had worked out. So this would work out. There would be an answer. There had to be. For him. For Willow. For her.

  Yes. For her.

  Because he would do anything . . .

  For her.

  Roberta and Jimmy sat outside the medical center on a wooden bench that was dirty.

  She put her shoulder blades back and realized that she was leaning against crusty bird droppings.

  Did birds get cancer?

  Jimmy was holding her hand but they were both silent.

  She was glad for that.

  There was so much to say but really so little. They had long ago said what mattered to each other.

  Roberta put her head on his shoulder and sitting there, in silence, she didn’t think about herself. Or about her husband. She thought about Willow.

  Her love for her daughter now literally made it hard to breathe.

  Roberta shut her eyes to keep the tears trapped under her eyelids. She made her decision.

  They wouldn’t tell her. Willow was far too interested in medicine to deal with this right now.

  They would let her in on the situation when it was over.

  After what seemed like five minutes, but was actually over an hour, they got up to go.

  They decided to leave Roberta’s car in the parking lot down the street and take Jimmy’s pickup truck so that they could be together as they drove across town to the next appointment.

  They would not be alone now until this thing was figured out.

  Ever.

  It was mid-afternoon and the sun beat down in a brutal way. Drivers were cranky as they navigated through congested streets, not giving an inch. It was every car for himself. Or herself.

  But Jimmy and Roberta were in their own world in the front seat of the pickup. They were traveling down Eye Street and up ahead the traffic light was red.

  Jimmy slowed, but before he came to a full stop the light changed to green.

  Ordinarily he would have looked to see if anyone was entering the intersection.

  But not today.

  Not now.

  Jimmy’s hand reached over and touched his wife’s arm and at the exact moment that he made this connection, the world literally came apart.

  They were T-boned in the middle of the intersection by a driver for Med-Service Hospital Supplies. His box truck was loaded down with oxygen tanks and he was already forty minutes behind schedule.

  The driver watched the traffic light turn to yellow and then he stepped on the accelerator believing he could just glide right through the red signal.

  Instead, he sailed straight into a pickup truck.

  Jimmy died on the scene but was still put into an ambulance and taken to the hospital with his wife.

  Roberta stopped breathing three hours later during emergency surgery.

  The driver was left in a coma.

  The only piece of metal not mangled or burned by the collision was a yellow triangle with black lettering on the back bumper, which read:

  SAFETY FIRST! Tell Me How I’m Doing:

  Call 800 Med-Supp. I’m truck #807.

  Chapter 16

  Mai and I sat outside today on the steps of the trailer office.

  When the door swung open, and Dell and Quang-ha emerged, I got to my feet and followed Mai down the stairs.

  Dell’s forehead crunched up.

  “What are you doing?”

  Mai gave Dell a sly smile.

  “Willow doesn’t want to have a session today. But we were thinking maybe we would all go for ice cream. Chocolate-dipped cones would be nice.”

  Dell looked like he had just lost bowel control. He stammered:

  “Willow h-has an appointment. That’s not something th-that’s optional.”

  I glanced off into the distance. Quang-ha couldn’t hold back a snicker.

  Dell turned from Mai to me.

  “Willow, you’ve been ordered to come here for behavioral reasons. It’s not optional.”

  I looked right at him.

  “I was sent here under false pretense.”

  For the first time Quang-ha actually seemed interested in what was going on. He said:

  “Why does she have to be counseled? She hangs out with my kid sister, so she can’t be any kind of troublemaker.”

  Dell appeared panicked. He started to babble:

  “You—I . . . We must . . . this to-day—”

  Mai came to the rescue. She stared at the counselor (whose arms were now giving a strange flap as if he were trying to fly) and said:

  “We wanna go to Fosters Freeze. You could drive us. You and Willow can talk about her counseling in the car.”

  I could see on Dell’s face that he was shocked at how cheeky the teenager was.

  Then Mai spoke to me in Vietnamese and I answered her. She said that she thought our plan was working. I told her that I agreed.

  Dell and Quang-ha both looked surprised. I guess they were unprepared for us to share the language.

  The next thing we knew, we were all in Dell Duke’s dusty car, heading out of the parking lot to Fosters Freeze.

  And that’s where it all began, really.

  Because as I watched the school district offices recede into the distance, I was certain that the old dynamic between Dell and Mai and me was over.

  And endings are always the beginnings of something else.

  Chapter 17

  back in the now

  Next of kin.

  That’s what they want to know. Kinfolk. Who talks like that?

  But that’s what they are asking me.

  One of the kinfolk is in the Valiant Village, which is a care facility for patients suffering from dementia.

  This “kin” is my father’s mom.

  My grandma Grace sits in a chair in the lobby in front of a non-working fireplace. She even takes her meals on a tray there.

  An aid feeds her.

  G.G.’s husband died of a heart attack on his sixty-sixth birthday and she started to lose track of things after that.

  Should I tell them?

  My dad had one brother, but he was older and drifted away from the family when he found work overseas doing private contracting for the military.

  No one had heard from him in years; my dad didn’t even know if his own brother was still alive.

  I tried to find him when I was ten years old, and from what I pieced together, I’m pretty certain that he died in some kind of accident involving a cargo plane.

  But I didn’t tell my parents.

  And my mom was an only child. Both of her parents passed away when she was in her late twenties. I never even got to meet them.

  I don’t have aunts and uncles and cousins. We aren’t that kind of family. We’ve had misfortune and a lot of bad health. And now this.

  Thinking about the kinfolk health histories was the only time I found comfort in being adopted.

  Now I cannot think.

  I cannot concentrate.

  I cannot breathe.

  No.

  No.

  No.

  No.

  No.

  No.

  No.

  After a lot of questions, all that I say to the officers is:

  “I have one grandma who thinks every day is Tuesday.”

  The shadows get longer.

  I sit on the front steps.

  The tears will not stop.

  And I almost never cry.

  But I’m not myself.

  I will forever be someone else now.

  The two people I need to ge
t in touch with, the two people who most need to hear this most horrible news, are not here.

  My teeth start to chatter.

  I want to shut my eyes and make everything stop.

  I no longer care if my heart pounds in my chest or if my lungs move.

  Who are they even moving for?

  Mai sits next to me, and her hand grips my shoulder.

  She makes a low cooing noise. It is a drawn-out call like a dove makes. And it comes from somewhere deep inside.

  I try to focus everything on this sound.

  It makes me think, for just an instant, of the tiny squeak that the little green-rumped parrot baby made when he fell from the nest in our backyard years ago.

  I look over at her and see that Mai is crying too.

  The police officers, with Dell Duke at their jutting elbows, make phone calls. To the police station. To Social Services. To a dozen different workers and agencies as they look for someone who will tell them what to do.

  I don’t listen.

  But I hear them.

  I cannot count anymore by 7s.

  I hear a voice in my head and it says “Make this stop.”

  That’s all I know.

  Should they take me into something called “protective custody”?

  If they can’t locate next of kin, can they turn me over to a family friend?

  I have to go to the bathroom, and finally, that feeling is overwhelming.

  I take out my house key and give it to Mai, who opens the door.

  When I step inside, I feel certain that my mother will be in the kitchen.

  My father will be coming around the corner from the garage and he will be wearing my mom’s Peeper glasses.

  This has all been a big mistake.

  But the house is dark and no one is there.

  It is a house now of only ghosts.

  It is only a museum of the past.

  We

  are

  d o n e.

  Chapter 18

  Willow was finally willing to go inside, to use the bathroom.

  Mai gave her a cold, wet towel to hold to her face.

  The teenage girl then found a paper grocery bag in a drawer in the kitchen. She went down the hall to Willow’s room, where she stood for a moment in the door frame and stared.

  It didn’t look like where a twelve-year-old kid would live.

  All the walls had floor-to-ceiling bookshelves and they were full. There were more things to read in this room than in some bookstores.

  Just above the desk (which had a microscope and an elaborate computer setup) was a bulletin board covered with photographs of plants.

  Mai moved to the bed, where red pajamas were folded neatly on an espresso-colored comforter. She stuffed them into the paper bag. Mai turned to leave and that’s when she noticed the top book on the tall stack of reading material sitting on Willow’s night table.

  It was open and face-down.

  From the position of the spine, Mai could tell that it was almost finished.

  She moved closer and she saw that the book was from the Bakersfield public library and it was called Understanding Vietnamese Customs and Traditions.

  And that was when Mai knew that Willow was coming with her.

  She lied.

  She told the police that she’d known Willow for many years, not for only weeks.

  She said that her mother would sign any paperwork because the families were very, very close.

  Dell Duke didn’t contradict her because Mai was so convincing that he now half believed her story.

  Quang-ha, unnerved by the police, had stayed the whole time in Dell’s car. He hadn’t moved a muscle.

  So Mai was taken as the authority on the situation.

  As Dell pulled his car away, he could see neighbors coming out onto the sidewalk. But Willow, with her eyes closed in the backseat, saw nothing.

  Dell drove as slowly as he’d ever maneuvered a vehicle, heading across town to the nail salon with the patrol car behind him.

  No one knew it, but they passed through the very intersection where Jimmy and Roberta Chance had been hit.

  There was still an official vehicle on the scene, but what was left of the pickup and the box truck had been taken away.

  There were four gray coils on the pavement where flares had burned out.

  Dell’s car drove straight over the ash.

  They swung into the parking lot in front of Happy Polish Nails, and Mai opened the car door immediately. She and Quang-ha seemed to be in a race to get inside the shop.

  But Willow didn’t move.

  Dell decided to wait with her, but it was killing him.

  The real action was obviously going on behind the plate-glass window that had purple sausage-shaped writing, which said:

  MAN + PED EURO-STYLE SPECIAL!

  WALK-INS VERY WELCOME!

  Dell read the message at least a dozen times and could make no sense of it.

  He had to concentrate.

  Not only were two people dead, but there would now be all kinds of official reports filed, and it was going to become pretty darn obvious that Mr. Dell Duke had taken three kids from the school district off school property to have ice cream and French fries and look at geese.

  Talk about terrible timing.

  There were police involved and social workers already on high alert.

  This was a nightmare.

  In so many ways.

  It was crucial that Dell look professional, which was one of the hardest things for him to do.

  He glanced up into the rearview mirror at Willow.

  She had her eyes closed, yet tears still oozed out of the corners and ran at intervals down her dark cheeks.

  He wished that he could think of something to say that would be comforting to her. He was, after all, a trained counselor.

  And so he turned to the backseat and sputtered:

  “This is such a big loss.”

  He then exhaled and more words dribbled out like applesauce from a baby’s mouth. Just audible lumps:

  “It’s not much consolation, but you’ll probably never have any loss this big again.”

  Dell continued, unable to stop himself.

  “So that’s kind of comforting—knowing that the worst thing in life is already behind you. I mean, once it actually is behind you. Which it won’t be for a while, obviously.”

  To Dell’s horror, her level of distress seemed to increase with his every word.

  What was he talking about?

  Dell cleared his throat and tried to steady his voice as he finished with:

  “Because this is life. And these things just happen . . .”

  Wow. Did he really just say that?

  How many kids go to school and come home to find that both of their parents are dead? Maybe in war-torn Somalia or someplace like that. Then maybe he could legitimately say: “These things happen.”

  But here?

  In Bakersfield?

  A total meatball move.

  Dell bit down on the inside of his left cheek and held his mouth closed until he could detect the taste of blood.

  That’s what it took to shut himself up.

  Chapter 19

  pattie nguyen

  A leader organizes people whether they know it or not.

  It was a slow afternoon at the salon and Pattie was doing inventory, which was never her favorite thing.

  But it had to be done. Bottles of nail polish vanished almost every day. She was certain that it was the result of theft from both her workers and her clients, so it was essential to stay on top of the situation.

  As a small-business owner, you had to show that you cared about these things, even if the nail polish, bought in bulk, only ended up costing he
r sixty-nine cents a pop.

  That was one of the secrets to success: caring about the big things and the small things.

  Or in Pattie’s case, you cared about everything.

  She wished all of her customers just wanted red nails. Red was lucky.

  But Pattie carried over one hundred shades in their squat little glass containers.

  She put down a bottle of fire-engine red and picked up peacock blue, a new shade that was very popular but carried no good fortune.

  With the annoying blue in her right hand, she looked through the front window and suddenly saw a dusty sedan pull into the parking lot.

  A police car was right behind it.

  Not good.

  Maybe if she had kept the red bottle in her hand, this wouldn’t have happened. She knew that wasn’t logical, but still.

  And then she watched, her heart rate increasing, as her two kids got out of the dirty Ford and rushed toward the salon.

  Really not good.

  Pattie dropped the little glass bottle straight into the trash. She was going to discontinue carrying the unlucky peacock-blue nail polish.

  In the very first week of school, Quang-ha had cut classes and gotten into arguments with teachers. He was in danger of being expelled.

  Pattie had asked the principal for counseling. She firmly believed that her son needed a voice of authority to scare him back onto the right path.

  But not real authority!

  Certainly not the police.

  And then before she could make a guess at what he’d done, her kids were inside the salon and they were both talking at once.

  Quang-ha wanted his mother to know that Mai had lied.

  This was suddenly an important moment for him because the playing field was being leveled.

  Now he wasn’t the only one who twisted words to the people in charge.

  But Mai, speaking rapid-fire in Vietnamese, raised her voice above his.

  This wasn’t about lying.

  This was about a car accident and a girl who had lost her parents. Mai only cared about that.

  Quang-ha argued that they didn’t even know the little kid. Getting involved on any level was trouble.