I Love You and I'm Leaving You Anyway (8 page)

Of course I remember Yvonne. She wraps birthday gifts with felt ribbon, the kind I used for my ponytails before my curls got too complicated and June chopped them off. Yvonne’s also tall and thin and pretty—no, striking—and wears fantastic clothes. How could I forget her?

I look closely at June. She’s holding me tight, and she looks like she’s crying, which I don’t get at all. If I play my cards right, this could actually be really good news.

“Maybe
they’ll
let me get my ears pierced!”

This has been a point of contention for some time. June thinks I have to be thirteen to pierce my ears, but I’m ready
now
. Daddy’s a total pushover. He’ll definitely consent. I’m stoked. It’s just like me to look on the bright side. That’s what you get with a Sagittarius moon. “That would be so cool!”

June’s kind of surprised by my reaction, but she goes along with it. “Maybe they will, Tracy. Maybe they will.”

I scramble down out of her lap. “Is that what you wanted to talk to me about?”

“That was it,” June says with some tragicomic amusement at my
Well, what’s the big deal?
reaction to this news. Maybe she’s a bit confounded by this unpredictable child the Lord brought to her and is now taking away. But she knows children well enough to index her emotional reaction to mine, not the other way around.

“Whaddaya say we go to Dairy Queen?” She claps her hands together and stands up, smoothing her dress. She’s ready to go get Gene and the kids. They probably had this planned.

“Yayyyy! Dairy Queen!” I am jumping up and down. There’s not much a vanilla ice cream cone dipped in chocolate can’t make you forget.

At least temporarily.

WHAT HAPPENED WAS,
Paul asked me out again. We had a long talk on the phone last night and I don’t know exactly what changed, or when, but I decided I like him. A lot.

Now I have this feeling of intense anticipation, like someone’s gone to get the drugs and they are due back any minute. It’s almost painful, in a hurts-so-good kind of way.

Paul is waiting downstairs when I arrive. He takes me to a sushi spot where the fish rolls by on a conveyor belt and you just grab what you want. Again, there’s not a lot of conversation, but for some reason I’m okay with it. He tells me I’m beautiful, and we make light conversation about current events, and that’s enough for me for right now.

We go to hear my friend’s band. He seems totally smitten. With me. “You’re the most beautiful girl in the room,” he says again. I’ve never had a guy say cheesy stuff like that to me. Especially not over and over. If I had, maybe I would know to watch out. Instead, I’m kind of like that girl in the horror film who’s innocently wandering around the house, looking for the source of the strange noise.

Paul pulls out a tiny digital camera. “Let me take your picture,” he says playfully. I
hate
having my picture taken. I feel like pictures of me always turn out badly. People with expressive faces don’t tend to photograph well, and I’m one of them. But I don’t want to be disagreeable. What to do?

I let him take my picture but cover my face.

“It’s good!” He shows me the picture, and we laugh. “Look”—he flips through the other photos on the camera—“you want to see my mom’s car?”

It’s kind of a non sequitur, but I say sure.

He hands me the camera. There’s a photo of a 1950s Mercedes convertible. Black with caramel interior. It’s beautiful.

“She gave it to me when she died,” he says evenly.

“Oh, I’m sorry.” I’m not sure what to say. The band is about to go on. “That’s sad.”

“It’s okay.”

“When did she die?”

“Nineteen ninety-six.” That’s a long time ago. I know Paul just turned thirty-nine. That means he must have been in his mid-twenties when she died. “She was great. She always said, ‘You’re a lover, not a fighter, Paul.’” He pauses, looking at the picture of the car. “I’m almost done having it restored. I’ve got an Armenian guy in Pacoima who’s been working on it for more than a year. I know she wouldn’t want me to just let it sit there. She would want me to drive it.”

He turns and gives me a vulnerable smile, a boy’s smile.

It’s the most personal thing he’s said in my three days of knowing him, and I’m touched by it. But before the conversation can go any further, someone with an asymmetrical haircut steps onto the stage and begins strumming wildly on a Fender Stratocaster. The moment is gone.

As we listen to the band, Paul takes my hand and my heart jumps a little. I hold my breath—it scares me sometimes, to make actual contact with another human being. Not in the way that a monster running after me would scare me. More like,
What if I like him? What if I don’t? What if I don’t feel anything at all? What if I do?

It’s immediately clear that he’s an excellent hand-holder. Expert, really. During the band’s set he takes me through his whole oeuvre: from mindless caressing to some quite sensuous finger-play. If this is a preview of coming attractions, I definitely want to see the movie.

And it looks like I’m going to get the chance. As we pull up to his curb, he invites me upstairs.

THE ERICSONS WERE GOING
to put up a fight. They wanted to keep me, like my dad promised they could. But fate, or whatever, intervened. Years later, June told me what happened.

“We went to the Hennepin County Welfare Department people and asked them what we could do,” she explained. “They said to gather all the information I could on the promises your daddy made to me that we could raise you until you were eighteen.”

The promise had been part of the deal. When the Ericsons adopted Connie from a Korean orphanage (just four years before I came to live with them), they made a decision to stop doing foster care, to protect Connie’s sense of security in her new home. So when my social worker called June one night and told her there was this child—me—whose mother couldn’t care for her and whose father was in prison, June agreed to take me in. But only if the placement was permanent.

“I stayed up late one night, going through all your daddy’s letters”—a long process, since June was a major letter writer—“looking for the places where he said he’d never try to take you out of our home. But before I even finished, Children’s Services called and told us we just weren’t going to win this. We had two big strikes against us: we weren’t your relatives, and we weren’t black.”

With two strikes, there’s still hope, right?

THEN COMES THE THIRD STRIKE.

I literally stumble into the news. We are in Los Angeles, visiting June’s sister Auntie Anne. I have just come through the sliding back patio door, a contraption that, on the scale of Exotic California Things, falls somewhere between avocados and Jack in the Box. In
Minnesota the indoor and the outdoor are kept as far apart as girls and boys in Saudi Arabia. And like girls and boys in Saudi Arabia, where they do come together, there is always some type of intermediary—a screen door, a foyer, a little porch—to run interference. That you can simply step across a threshold and be indoors seems…outrageous. And cool.

It also makes it possible to hear something you’re not really old enough to process. As I enter the room at the far end, I see June hang up the phone and do one of her characteristic deep sighs, except deeper. Gene hovers protectively. He always looks different, less powerful, on vacations, probably because it’s the only time he’s not wearing his black pants, black shirt, and white minister’s collar. There’s a feeling in the room—it’s both electric and morbid.

“He says it’s lupus,” June says simply.

I’d been picking up a lot of chatter about this lupus lately, along with talk about prednisone, the room-a-tologist, staying out of the sun, and tests, tests, and more tests. I don’t know anything yet about lupus—that it’s an autoimmune disorder, that it could put you in the hospital ten times in one year, that it would cripple your hands, that you might have half your lung removed, that you could never cure it, that the drugs you have to take for it are nothing short of hideous. But I know it can’t be good.

I linger just inside the door, near the sofa, trying to absorb as much information as I can. I must know it’s going to change my life.

Gene just stands there, silently, one hand on June’s shoulder.

Not that Gene says much even under normal circumstances. He doesn’t come home from church and gossip about what the secretaries in the office have going on in their marriages or what the deacons are doing to screw up the church. He’s a container. Strong and airtight.

The most I ever hear Gene say outside the pulpit comes during Monday night devotions—the one we have at home, not the one at church (that’s on Wednesdays and it’s called Bible study, not devotions). After dinner he sits in his olive green upholstered rocker and
we gather around. He says some stuff about the Lord, or maybe reads some of the Bible, or tells a story about Jonah, or Noah, or Moses, or some other guy who’ll have a ton of children named after him come the late 1990s. Then he prays. We know it’s praying time because he always bows his head and says, “Let us pray.”

Also, Gene’s a busy guy—he’s got a whole congregation to deal with. Hundreds of people! All of them getting baptized, getting confirmed, getting married, having babies, getting sick, and dying. In that order. Because of his huge responsibilities at church, Gene and I don’t come into all that much direct contact unless I’m in big trouble. And then he’s a kind, gentle, patient teacher who usually offers me some version of what Jesus would have done, which is never ever what I just did. That’s because Jesus doesn’t steal candy, play with matches, or forget to take his Ritalin.

But within the family, Gene communicates primarily through his presence, which is like a color or a tone—impossible to describe but completely tangible. When he’s in the room, you can feel it. And it’s comforting.

So when he says to June, “The Lord is going to get us through this,” I know he’s just taken all that energy, his presence, the color and the tone, and distilled it into nine words.

The Lord is going to get us through this.

I’M DEFINITELY GONNA NEED A LORD.
Because me and my new caseworker Ralph Timmons just parked in front of an uninspired two-story tract home in a place tragironically named New Hope. It’s a split-level ranch, a type of construction (architecture is too fancy a word) I have never seen before. I will come to dislike split-levels for the rest of my life, and this house is why.

The Werners are professional foster parents, which means they do it for the money. They’ve got a gang of foster kids up in here: a twelve-or thirteen-year-old boy with a slight menace to him; a kid
with cystic fibrosis who sleeps in a plastic tent; another girl a bit older than me who tells me she’s “an Israelite.” Her name is Laurie and she’s obviously the favorite here, probably because she’s part of the permanent collection; the rest of us are on loan. There’s also an older teenage girl whose name I never get but who listens obsessively to Cat Stevens’s
Tea for the Tillerman
.

This is a halfway house for me. A transition between the Ericsons’ house and my dad’s, where I will be going on June 7. That is sixty-four days from today. (I have already counted.) I guess social workers think it’s a bad idea to have you just go straight from wherever you’ve been for the past four and a half years to wherever it is you’re going next. Probably because all the tears and shock and grief might bum the new people out. Better to get all that out of the way with some family who is never going to see you again.

Things at the Werners’ are different than things at the Ericsons’. For starters, they only give you half a Popsicle. I react to this with surprise and, I’ll admit, maybe a hint of indignation, which does not strike Mrs. Werner as particularly gracious or appreciative. I don’t know exactly what I just said to make her mad, but her jaw is set hard. Apparently she prefers her foster kids gracious and appreciative. And who wouldn’t?

There’s another problem. They use this soap called Irish Spring, and it smells really strong, like kelly green. Neon kelly green. At the Ericsons’, we used Ivory. It smells like white. And it floats. If you also take into account that there are no trees and no sidewalks in this awful suburb, and I am the only brown person at school, things are not really off to a great start.

My social worker, Ralph, checks in on me every week or so. He is low-key to the point of dolefulness, with a sad, stuffed-animal quality about him. At least he’s nice, but I prefer my old social worker, Constance Ryan, who smiled a lot and took me shopping.

“How’s it going there, Tracy?” Ralph drones. His cadence is steady and even, and he overenunciates, like perfectly formed letters
on a piece of lined elementary school practice paper. If he hadn’t gone into social work, Ralph probably would have made a halfway decent third-grade teacher. Or activities coordinator at a nursing home.

I don’t have a lot of patience with Ralph’s questions. He means well, but there’s not a whole lot he can do about my situation and we both know it. “I’m fine,” I answer perfunctorily.

“Good.” Pause. Beat. “Good.”

Ralph is observing me very closely, which makes me nervous. I’d rather that he not see how they’re giving me only half a Popsicle or how I am crying my eyes out every night to “Diamond Girl” by Seals and Crofts.

No one talks about the Ericsons. The Werners have given me stern warnings not to try to contact June or Gene. I think they are hoping that I will just forget about them.

Ralph turns to Mrs. Werner and does some social working. “How’s she doing with her medication?” He means me. And my Ritalin.

“Okay, I guess,” Mrs. Werner says in her scratchy Virginia Slims voice. “It doesn’t really seem to help all that much. Her teacher says she can’t sit still.” Mrs. Werner says this so matter-of-factly, I’m starting to think she’s a bitch. Doesn’t she know that eight days ago I had a mom and a dad and brothers and sisters and a best friend named Carrie and a Girl Scout troop? That I’d just sung the solo in the children’s choir at church? And that seven days ago it was all gone? But I don’t say anything. “Maybe she needs a higher dose,” Mrs. Werner offers.