Picture This (9 page)

Natalie was in line with the sun, and Rocky had to shade her eyes to keep looking at the girl. “Until we figure this out, you're welcome to stay there. It's summer. There might be a little work in Portland or Peaks.”

“I didn't come here asking for a place to live. I don't need someone taking care of me,” said Natalie.

“I can hardly take care of myself,” Rocky responded. “But this is important. Bob's name is on that birth certificate, and I want to know why. Or some Robert Tilbe is on it. I guess you're desperate to find out or you wouldn't be here. It's like a business offer,” said Rocky, trying to sound official so she wouldn't scare the girl off. She leaned back on the bench, feeling exhausted but suddenly less alone.

“Maybe,” said Natalie, “Maybe for a few days. But I can leave anytime that I want to. And I'm not a kid. I'm eighteen.”

“Deal. You can leave anytime you want to. Me too.”

Chapter 15

N
atalie had been at Rocky's for three days, taking the ferry to Portland each day to look for a job, returning each day on the six o'clock to say that she had put in job applications, looking discouraged. What would have been different for Natalie if Bob had been able to read her stories at night, slather peanut butter on crackers for her, and watch proudly as she kicked a soccer ball with the other kids? Rocky played the scenario a hundred times in her head. Would Natalie be a first-year college student by now? Would her biggest worry in life be who to sit with at the dining commons? And would Rocky have been the complicated stepmother—never enough, never right?

Rocky wanted to refuel Natalie, go back to the beginning and drain off the foster care of fourteen years. If Bob were here, his big mountain-sized steadiness might brace her up, even at this late date.

What did Rocky have to offer a kid who wasn't a client at the local college? Was she anything at all like a parent? Should she inquire about the job search as she might with a friend or a roommate? Should she bolster the girl up with the bottomless well of support that a parent can provide? Or should she just help Natalie figure out the truth of her background?

Natalie walked into the house and held out her hand to Cooper. The dog dropped his tail and smelled her pant legs and her feet, as if he were vacuuming her.

Natalie backed up with the core of her body, arching away from the dog.

“You're bringing Cooper all the good smells of Portland. He's just curious,” said Rocky. The girl looked unaccustomed to dogs.

“Good dog,” said Natalie, sliding her hand into her pants pocket, moving away from him.

Rocky knelt by Cooper, ruffling the fur around his neck to demonstrate his koala bear nature. “He's a big hunk of burning love. Everybody loves this guy, but take your time with him if you're not used to dogs.”

The next day Rocky had been up since sunrise, and she and Cooper had already walked the beaches and trails for an hour. She'd had coffee, fed the dog, and looked over her sketches for the house remodel yet again. Natalie began to rustle in the bedroom.

The corroded hinges of the bedroom door announced the girl. Natalie wore a tank top covered by a faux Western shirt. Rocky admired the aim at personal distinction: the shirt came complete with snaps at the cuffs and two pointed triangle tips over each breast.

“Help yourself to cereal. I've got the boring kind, but I see you bought cereal also. Let me know if you need anything,” said Rocky, looking up from her drawings on newsprint.

“So it's okay if I open the fridge?” said Natalie, looking every bit like a dog that has been kicked on a regular schedule.

Natalie had asked the same question each day, and each time it left a dark bruise on Rocky as she wondered about places where the fridge was off limits. “It's okay to open the fridge, and before you ask about the one inch of milk left in the bottle, yes, it's okay to finish the last of the milk. In fact, I beg you to finish the last of the milk.” Was Natalie too brittle for the slightest bit of joking?

The first time Rocky met a college student who had lived nearly her entire life in foster homes, the landscape in her counseling office had curdled. The student had come from a state that declared eighteen-year-olds adults and no longer in need of support. Her foster family said good-bye and good luck. The student showed up at the counseling center dazed and terrified before Thanksgiving vacation, wondering where she was supposed to go when the dorms closed. Rocky had hooked her up with a group of foreign exchange students who were in the same boat, but for a different reason.

Ray, her now former boss at the counseling center, had told her, “A lot of college kids go through struggles with their parents, and maybe they've got a parent who's a little crazy or demanding or even a son of a bitch. But when the kids call home, someone answers the phone. That's the true dividing line with students who were foster kids: there's no one at the other end of the line.”

Natalie took out the carton of milk and poured the last of it over a cereal that she had picked out at the grocery store yesterday. The little bits of cereal were multicolored in vivid Crayola style.

“Wow. It's hard to know if you should eat that or use it to paint the house,” said Rocky.

Natalie pulled the bowl toward her on the counter, hemming it in protectively with her hands. Rocky cringed, hearing how her words could have sounded like criticism instead of friendliness in Natalie's world. “This is my favorite cereal,” the girl said. “It's been my favorite since I was in first grade, except I couldn't ever have it with one of my first foster families. I was with them until I was five. They kept me in the basement when I wasn't in school, and it wasn't like a really great finished basement with rugs and stuff. This was a bed-next-to-an-oil-burner kind of basement. And they wouldn't let me eat with them. I only remember eating meals at school.”

Rocky's jaw tightened. She wanted to reach back in time and pull the child to safety.

“I've just always wondered why they wouldn't want a five-year-old girl to eat. I'd kind of like to go back and ask them, you know what I'm saying?”

Rocky crumpled when the girl spoke. It was the crystalline purity of the question, without revenge or malice, the open honesty that unhinged her.

“There's no good answer to your question. They were either ignorant beyond belief, damaged at the core, or malicious as all get out. They were wrong to mistreat a small child,” said Rocky. She wanted to leave the land of hungry kids in basements behind them. “Do you want to go look at a house with me? I bought it, and almost everyone but me thinks it's a disaster.”

Natalie pulled a chair out from the maple table and sat down. Rocky scooted the drawings closer to her side of the table, eager to make room for the girl.

“But you told me that you already have a house back in Massachusetts. Why would you need two? Who needs two houses? It wasn't like you and my father had kids or anything.”

You and my father.
Hearing the words felt like a pin inserted under Rocky's eyelid. Natalie said it so definitively. Why did she get the sense that she had done something wrong, that she had stolen Bob from the girl?

“What matters now is that you're here,” said Rocky. “We'll figure out the rest later. Finish your paint-chip cereal and we'll take a walk to the other house.”

She wanted to see Natalie's reaction to the house, not that she expected any expertise from the girl. Did she want to use the house as a Rorschach test, a place onto which this tormented kid could project her dreams and fears?

Rocky had forgotten how long it takes girls to get ready. What could Natalie be doing in the bathroom? Restructuring each hair follicle?

After half an hour, Rocky began to remember exactly how long it takes girls to primp for public appearances.

“Natalie, I'm leaving. You said you wanted to see the house.”

Cooper sensed a departure and was already at the door, looking back at Rocky. The bathroom door opened, blowing out a heavily scented cloud of skin lotions, hair products, even a deodorant layered with chemicals meant to mimic flowers, musk, something lemony, all brewed in a mixture that made Rocky's eyes water.

“I'm ready,” said Natalie, adjusting her hair with the slightest touch, moving it a fraction of an inch closer to her face, not away.

N
atalie and Rocky walked through the empty rooms of the old place, opening windows, letting accumulated moisture escape. The living room had a fireplace, the face of which was brick painted white but darkened by smoke to an uneven gray. The remnants of nuts, left by opportunistic rodents, lay scattered around the grate. The fireplace pulled at Rocky, wanting more, wanting the gurgle of voices gathered around a warm fire, not the damp ash of neglect.

Rocky ran a hand along the brick mantel. “I hope this thing works. I love a fireplace. I mean, they're not the most energy-efficient, but they make up for it in atmosphere.”

Natalie put a hesitant foot on the hearth. “We had one of these in one foster family. The dad said it smoked up the house.” She withdrew from the hearth as if it were too hot for her feet.

Natalie walked lightly, making only a faint connection with the floor, as if she were weightless. The girl was the very image of ripeness common among girls in the hard years of late teens to early twenties. Ray had called them “the simian years.” But she lacked something that kept her attached. What elemental substance had been omitted from Natalie's development as she advanced from foster home to foster home?

“So you could just buy this place?” asked the girl.

Rocky heard the subtext about money, about having enough money to see something that she wanted and the power to buy it.

“I'm making a giant, scary shift in my life,” said Rocky. “I don't know what the full picture is yet, but yes, I was able to buy this house. There's something about it that I can imagine. I want it to be a warm and happy place again.”

Natalie ran a hand over the kitchen counter. “And so, you're the dog warden on the island? You've gone from psychologist to dog warden. Isn't that like a weird career move? You're not going back to your house in Massachusetts?”

Rocky pushed up the sleeves of her shirt. “I've been on a strange career trajectory for some time.”

Natalie turned her back to the counter and hoisted her butt onto the ledge of Formica.

“Is this okay? Can I sit here? I had one foster mother who would have had a fit if I even came into the kitchen, never mind sat on the counter. Except it was okay for her kids. She had two boys.”

Rocky looked around at the wreck of the empty house. “This is essentially a work zone. The counter is earmarked for the Dumpster within days. You don't need to be careful.” Had Natalie felt at home anywhere? “How long did you live with your birth mother? What happened?”

Rocky hadn't meant to ask so abruptly. She sounded as subtle as a meteorite falling from the sky, but it was what she had been thinking about since the moment she woke up.

Natalie looked at a place where the wall met the ceiling. “I sort of remember her, I think I do. But my old caseworker said it's not possible. I was two years old when I was first taken away because she was arrested for drugs. She took some big dive into crack that middle-class white girls aren't supposed to do, especially not the ones from Iowa. She was ahead of the curve. When she got arrested, she was so high that she forgot to tell them that she had a kid and that the kid was alone in the apartment. When someone finally found me, I'd been there for three days. There wasn't any food in the apartment. It's good not to remember things from when you're little. My old caseworker said some part of me might remember, but I don't know what part.”

Cooper settled in near Rocky's feet, sliding to the floor with his rump against her shoes.

“My mother spent eighteen months in Ludlow prison, and when she came out she didn't pause to let any dust settle on her. She went back to crack and disappeared. Gone. I guess there are a lot of places where someone can disappear.”

“Ludlow? That's in Massachusetts. I thought you were born in Iowa.”

“I was. But my mother didn't stay there. Something happened, I don't know what, and she moved to Massachusetts, so that's where I entered the system. That's what they call it, ‘entering the system.' ”

Rocky reached down and stroked Cooper's head. “Did you ever see her again?”

Natalie rubbed the back of her neck and rolled her head from side to side as if she was adjusting her muscles.

“I was four the last time I saw her. It was a supervised visit at the caseworker's office. I remember sitting on a woman's lap. We were both kind of skinny, our bones rubbed together. She told me that I was her little girl and that was the last time that anyone ever said that to me. She died right after that, out west somewhere. Do you know how many times I've recited this to shrinks? I don't want to talk about it anymore,” she said.

“Me either,” said Rocky. And she really meant it. If she heard one more word about four-year-old Natalie, she wasn't sure that she could stand it.

“Let me show you the upstairs and maybe you can give me some ideas,” said Rocky, running her fingers through her dark curly hair. “The thing with a remodel is that you can get a fresh start and make a house however you want it to be. Tell me how you'd like a house if you could start over.” Was she telling Natalie that she could start over, or was she telling herself? They gingerly walked up the narrow staircase, each step creaking in response. The banister was burnished from over eighty years of hands.

Cooper, who didn't like stairways, waited at the bottom of the steps, ears up.

Four bedrooms upstairs held a powdered scent, mixed with damp sea air. Rocky had discovered oak floors under the wall-to-wall carpet; she could already picture the sanded gleam of the wood with sunlight streaming across them. They walked into the smallest bedroom.

“Most old houses have very little closet space. These two bedrooms actually share one closet,” said Rocky, opening a door. “Look, if you go through this closet, you come through into the other bedroom. Kids must have loved this. Take a look.”

As Natalie poked her head into the closet, Cooper barked. The dog rarely barked, so Rocky immediately left the room and trotted downstairs to see if anyone had come to the house. No sooner had she gotten to the bottom of the stairs than she heard a pounding sound from upstairs.

“Hey, this is not funny. Let me out of here!” It was Natalie, but it sounded like she was in a box.

Rocky flew back up the stairs, taking the steps two at a time. The closet door was shut, and Natalie was pounding so hard on the door that it vibrated. With a tug, Rocky pulled it open, and Natalie exploded from the closet as if it was devoid of oxygen.