Like Family (13 page)

I didn’t tell my sisters or Mrs. O’Rourke about the chair, or about the times Mr. Clapp trapped me in the hallway or by the
fireplace and said, “I’ve shown you mine, now show me yours.” I didn’t tell them about how I woke many nights to what seemed
to be his shadow in my doorway, a smudge or a stain, a haunting. Was it him? Had he come for me? I blinked and blinked, trying
either to make him more clear or less so. Everything had grown so gauzy; I felt like a passenger on a dream train, or like
one of those guys on the submarine in
Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea,
the depth sounder pinging with distance. “You’re pretty,” said Mr. Clapp. “You smell like oranges.”

I didn’t tell anyone anything until I finally told Mrs. Clapp. She stood at the sink washing vegetables when I came into the
kitchen, the sleeves of her burgundy sweater not pushed up, but cuffed neatly past her elbows. She didn’t turn around when
I started talking, but I kept going anyway, saying what I could to her back. It was hard to get enough breath to speak the
words: I was a balloon losing air, hissing myself smaller. I’m surprised she could hear me at all.

I also couldn’t stop thinking about what Mrs. Clapp would do when I was finished telling my story. Would she turn around and
hit me? Drag me off to my bedroom and make me stay there without food or water? Lock me outside for the duration? I watched
her thick shoulders and hips, watched her small, fat feet in their purple pumps. Nothing. She didn’t shift her weight, or
tap a toe, or clear her throat, even. Her attention stayed on the potatoes, the average, everyday-size potatoes that no one
would ever push in a wheelbarrow. Her hands moved under the running water, scrubbing roughly, rinsing spidery roots and dirt
nuggets down the drain and away.

The next day, she called Mrs. O’Rourke to say we’d have to be placed elsewhere immediately. She had back problems, chronic,
incurable, and needed quiet now, a good long rest. This didn’t surprise me at all. I had seen it myself, hadn’t I? Her back
so painful, so persistently stiff that she couldn’t turn to face me: spent balloon, bubble girl, the eight-year-old in her
kitchen.

E
VERY MORNING OF THE
first month we spent at the Fredricksons’ was a test. I opened one eye at a time to the wallpaper flowers, hot-pink and purple
and raspberry daisies as big and round as dinner plates. Miraculously, they didn’t go away. Nothing did — not the room, not
my new parents or my Barbie beach house or the banana-seat bicycle with silver-blue streamers on the handlebars. It was as
if I’d been born for real, this time as a girl no one would think about leaving or passing along to the next address like
a fruitcake. I had a ballerina jewelry box that tinkled softly when I lifted the lid. I had a toy box and a closet full of
clothes that Samantha Fredrickson said I could keep, no matter what happened. Sometimes I’d go into the closet and press into
the bright row of my new dresses the way my sisters and I liked to do with the racks of clothes at department stores.
But these are mine,
I told myself, fingering the hems and sleeves and buttonholes, nodding so that my face rubbed clean cotton.

The Fredricksons were nice people, maybe the nicest we’d ever known. On our first night in their home, they told us we could
call them Mom and Dad if we wanted, only if we were comfortable. Then they took us to Montgomery Ward so we could each pick
out a bicycle, brand-new, any one we wanted. Rows and rows of them stood on their kickstands like shiny dominoes. I thought:
If this is the only good thing that happens, it will be enough.

Samantha Fredrickson was twenty-six and used to be a physical therapist. “Now I’m a mom,” she said. “Anyone can be a physical
therapist, but I’ve always wanted to be a mom.” She was tall and thin with crimped reddish movie-star hair. Tom was a good
inch shorter than his wife and stocky, with a receding hairline and bushy mustache that looked, well,
friendly.
He worked for a company that made desserts in bulk. I don’t know what he did exactly, only that he got to bring home whole
cartons of cherry and apple turnovers that came out of the oven bubbling, the sugar-dusted crust crisped up perfectly.

Our new mom and dad liked to sit us down in the living room for family talks. “We wanted a baby,” Tom Fredrickson said at
the very first family meeting. “Sam and I have tried for a baby since we got married, but the doctors say we’ll never have
one of our own.

Samantha started crying a little then, and I thought about how unfair it was that Samantha, who wanted children so badly,
wasn’t able to have them, but others who obviously didn’t want them and couldn’t take care of them popped them out like kittens
— people like Louise Spinoza and Aunt Deedee. Like my mother. I went over to where Samantha was sitting on the couch, crouched
down and put my head in her lap. I wasn’t a baby, but I fit pretty snugly there, I thought, my left ear resting in the space
between her knees that was as smooth and pink as the opening to a conch shell. If neither of us moved, would I hear the sea?
her heartbeat? mine?

F
OR
SEVEN MONTHS WE
lived with the Fredricksons on Santa Rita in a subdivision that was still going up all around us. Most of the houses didn’t
even have yards yet, just plots of lumpy dirt marked with sticks where the patios and front walks would go. Our house wasn’t
big or small; it looked like all the other houses, and that made me happy. We were like everyone else. The bus dropped us
off, and we walked home to find snacks on paper plates, cinnamon graham crackers, cherry turnovers with a lace of singed filling,
cheese cut into little triangles. After, we could take our bikes out and go anywhere in the neighborhood. Samantha (and we
did call her Mom, shyly at first, testing the word like something hot in a cup) would stand at the door and call Out, “Just
be back before dinner.”

Sometimes we rode over to the model home, which sat open from one to four every day. Kids weren’t supposed to go in, but we
risked it anyway, looking over our shoulders for the real estate agent as we crept through the sliding glass door in back.
Once in, we’d drop down on the living-room carpet, which was plush and springy, pink as an after-dinner mint, and roll back
and forth, back and forth until our hair snapped with static. At the breakfast bar, there were padded chrome stools that spun
only partway around before jerking back, perfectly pressed hand towels in the bathroom, a glazed bowl of real oranges on the
coffee table. In the master bedroom, a round bed was raised up on a round platform, the whole thing covered with blue satin
sheets that were so shiny they looked wet. We’d lie on the bed, our heads touching in the center, shoes carefully off the
edge, and agree that nothing in the world could be as soft.

One day, the real estate agent came to show the model when we were there, and we had to hide. Teresa rushed into a broom closet,
and Penny and I stood as still as possible behind the blinds in the living room. The wife disliked the layout right away —
wasn’t there a conversation pit advertised? — and the showing was quick. False alarm, no one even came near us.

Afterward, Penny asked if I remembered the time when we had to hide behind some bushes at Granny’s. It was because of Dad.
Someone — was it Mom? — took us there and told us that we couldn’t make any noise or Dad would hurt us. Did I remember that?

“No,” I said.

“I do,” said Teresa, out of her closet now. “Dad was really mad or drunk or something.” One nut-brown curl had fallen into
her eyes, and she swatted at it as if it were a bug.

“Was I there too?” I asked.

“Of course you were, spazola. Where else would you be?” She shrugged.

“Oh, yeah. I remember now. There were bushes, right?” “Uh-huh,” Teresa said, dropping it.

In truth I didn’t remember it at all, not a thing, and although I didn’t want my sisters to think I knew less than they did
about anything, I wasn’t at all surprised. There was a lot of stuff I didn’t remember, so much, in fact, that I had begun
to regard my brain as its own complicated thing — sometimes a doctor, sometimes a drawer, sometimes a deliverer of memories
like mail. When something big got lost, I just thought of it as a tonsil and heard the brain-doctor saying, “It has to come
out. You won’t feel a thing, and later there’ll be ice cream.”

O
UR
SECOND FAMILY MEETING
was about fire safety. Tom Fredrickson had drawn a map of the house with red circles around all the windows and doors. He
showed us where the smoke alarms and fire extinguishers were; he stopped, dropped and rolled.

“If anything happens,” Samantha added gravely, “you need to get out of the house as fast as you can. Once you’re on the front
lawn and safe, run to a neighbor’s to call the fire department.”

Neither of them said anything about us waking each other up or checking to see if everyone was all right. With fire safety,
it was every man for himself, I guessed. I began to cry, just a little at first, but soon I was nearly gagging.

“It’s okay, Paula,” said Samantha. “You don’t need to be afraid. We’re just telling you what to do in case something happens.
You’re going to be okay.”

I tried to stop crying long enough to tell her that that wasn’t it, that I wasn’t afraid for myself. She came to sit beside
me and stroked my hair, but I couldn’t calm down. I got louder and louder, and she was angry with me suddenly, her patience
gone.

“Stop it, now,” she said. “You have nothing to be afraid of.”

I took one of those deep snotty breaths and stopped. My face was fat and wet. Finally I was able to say, “What about
you?
How will we know you’ll be all right? What happens to
you?”

Although we’d only been at our new placement a few weeks at that point, I was happy to let every good thing about the Fredricksons
eclipse every bad thing about the Clapps. We wouldn’t go back there, not with Mrs. Clapp’s back problems, not with everything
that had happened, and they wouldn’t come to the house on Santa Rita, which was beginning to feel protected in a magical way,
as if it were broad daylight and the Clapps were vampires, as if it were real and the Clapps were make-believe.

Real and Make-Believe
was the name of a textbook we were reading in my third-grade class at Palo Verde Elementary. The cover was half purple, half
white, with purple lettering in the white space and white lettering in the purple. This reminded me of Gee Gee and Gia, Mrs.
Clapp’s awful dogs, but even their sniff-sniffing and toenail racket was hushed, dimmed, as if I had already stepped over
the purple border into a
realer
real where they couldn’t ever follow.

Unfortunately, nothing I had learned in second grade at American Union seemed to follow me either. I was supposed to know
how to write in cursive and how to do my times tables, but I didn’t. My teacher, Mrs. Just, had long, hard fingernails that
she rapped on her desk when she was waiting for a kid to answer a question.
Click click click,
like poodle claws, and I’d lose my concentration, answering that six times six was twelve. Mrs. Just gave me extra math homework
and said I should be embarrassed of my education. Still, I was glad I wasn’t a boy; she was meaner to boys. She’d come right
up behind Chris Curtis while he was scratching Spiderman or the Bat-Signal into his desktop and lift him clear out of his
seat, shaking him like a doll.