The Snowball Effect (6 page)

“Yeah, right.”

I shrugged.

“Why didn't she send him back after she realized how much he screamed? I mean, it's one thing to pop out a kid like that and be stuck with him. What was wrong with her?”

“You don't just send a kid back. And you know, you're basically doing the same thing.”

“No, this is different.”

“How?”

Vallery looked off toward the living room. We listened to Collin scream. I wondered what I would have done if I was Vallery. I wasn't sure if I'd give up my whole life to come back to Baltimore and take care of a kid I'd never even met. Didn't even know existed. Actually, I was pretty sure I wouldn't have done it.

“This is family,” Vallery finally said. “You don't turn your back on your family.”

“Right.” How could she have felt any kind of loyalty to Mom? She hardly knew her.

“So. This is what he does? He screams?”

“Sometimes. He is five, you know.”

“This isn't normal.”

“I never said he was normal.”

“I brought him home from that lawyer's office two hours ago and he hasn't stopped screaming, not for a goddamned second. I thought maybe he was hungry, and I asked what he wanted for lunch, but he just screamed in my face.”

“I'll try to talk to him.”

I went to Collin's room. He was lying on his back on the bed, kicking the wall and screaming as loud as he possibly could. I stepped around the toy cars and trains and LEGO blocks and action figures and made my way to the bed.

“Hey, Collin,” I said.

(High-pitched screaming.)

I lay down on the bed beside him and put my feet up on the wall. “Want some lunch?”

(More screaming.)

“So you met our big sister Vallery? She's pretty cool, huh?”

(Screams. Kick, kick, kick against the wall.)

“Did you have fun at Grandma's house?”

(Screaming suddenly stopped. He shook his head.)

“Grandma's kind of mean, huh?”

(Kick, kick, kick.)

“Are you hungry? I already ate lunch. I had pizza and french fries with Riley. But I'll make you a sandwich if you want.”

“I don't WANT a sandwich.”

“Well, tell me what you want.”

“I want you to GO AWAY.”

“Not gonna happen.”

(Kick, kick, kick.)

“Want to hear about my day?”

(Collin shook his head.)

I told him anyway. I started with breakfast and told him about work, and my customers, and every little thing that happened to me. By the time I was done, he'd stopped screaming and kicking altogether. That was a trick I'd learned from Riley a while ago—just start talking about your day or some other random thing. For some
reason it shut him up. I don't know why.

I rolled off the bed and walked toward the door. Behind me, I heard Collin roll off the bed too. “Lainey,” he called after me.

I stopped at the doorway and turned. “Yeah?”

“I'm HUNGRY.”

“Okay,” I said.

We went to the kitchen, where Vallery was still sitting at the table. She and Collin looked at each other but neither of them said anything. I opened the cabinet and took out the peanut butter. I looked back at Collin.

“Collin, tell Vallery you're sorry for being bad and busting her eardrums.”

“No.”

I slammed the peanut butter down on the counter and turned to give him The Look of Doom. I'd picked that up from Carl, unfortunately.

Collin glanced over at Vallery, then back at me. “I don't remember what to say.”

“Say, ‘Vallery, I'm sorry for being bad and busting your eardrums.'”

“Vallery, I'm sorry for being bad and busting your eardrums.”

Vallery nodded. “Apology accepted.”

“No more screaming,” I said as I opened the bread. “Promise?”

“No more screaming,” Collin repeated. “Promise.”

Collin was good at repeating things. He wasn't,
however, good at having any idea what he was agreeing to, so I knew he'd break that promise in less than an hour.

I finished making his sandwich. “TV?” I asked. He nodded. I carried his sandwich into the living room and put it down on the coffee table in front of the television.

I walked back into the kitchen. “He'll probably be good for about twenty minutes,” I said to Vallery. “Maybe you should take advantage of it and go take a nap or something.”

She stared at me like I was crazy. “I'm pretty sure I'm not going to be able to do this every day.”

“Every day won't be this bad. I don't even remember the last time he screamed like that.” That was only because I hadn't been around him in a week, but Vallery didn't need to know that.

“So what kind of problem does he have? Like ADD?”

“Maybe,” I said. “He's been diagnosed so many freakin' times, I can't keep it straight. There's the ADHD. And they think he has attachment disorder. And sometimes they put him on the autism spectrum. Autism is a spectrum, apparently. It's not just one thing.”

I opened one of the cabinets and pulled out Collin's file. Even though he had just finished kindergarten, Collin already had more paperwork on him than I'd amassed in my entire public school education. I dropped the papers in front of Vallery.

“IEPs, doctors' reports, psychiatric evaluations.”

“Are you going to pull out the stuff on Collin or do I have to find it myself?”

“It's
all
about Collin.”

Vallery laid her head down on top of the file. “I can't do this.”

“You can leave,” I said. “It's not like there's a law saying you have to keep him.”

Vallery sat up and crossed her arms. “And leave you two alone? I don't think so.”

“I'm just saying. If you're going to bitch and complain about him the whole time, maybe you shouldn't be here.”

“Oh, Lainey. Jesus Christ. I was just being dramatic. If our crazy mother could take care of this kid, I can too.”

I shrugged. “Okay.”

“It's just going to be more challenging than I thought. No big deal.”

Vallery opened the file and started reading through the papers. I went into the living room to clean up after Collin's lunch.

I was pretty sure that if I'd been in Vallery's position, I'd already be on my way back to Dallas.

 

That night around ten, I lay in my room and listened to Vallery try to put Collin to bed. I'd already told her that Collin didn't sleep by himself, but she seemed to think I was lying.

“Collin, you stay in this bed. It's bedtime, all right?
We'll have playtime again tomorrow.”

As soon as Vallery shut his door, I heard Collin jumping on the bed and laughing.

Then Vallery opened the door again. “Collin! Lie down!”

This happened about ten times before I finally went out into the hallway.

“Val, he's not going to sleep in his bed alone. You have to let him sleep with you.”

“Seriously?” she asked. She glared at me. Behind her, through the open door, I could see Collin jumping on his bed.

“I already told you that. Right, Collin? Where do you sleep?”

“Mommy's bed.”

“Mommy's bed,” I repeated to Vallery.

“Where's Mommy?” he asked.

“Heaven,” I said. “Remember? She had to go be with Daddy.”

Fortunately, I didn't have to give him that first Mommy-went-to-Heaven talk. Mabel and Carl's mom covered that before Vallery brought him home.

“Do you want to go sleep in Mommy's bed with Vallery?” I asked Collin.

“No,” he said.

“Okay,” I said to Vallery. “I'm going back to my room. You just have to pick him up and take him to bed with you.”

I shut my door. Vallery called Collin's name. Collin screamed.

It wasn't funny, but I shoved my face in my pillow and started laughing.

T
he thing about Mom was that she really loved all of her boyfriends even when they were absolute scum. Well, she loved them for a while. And then they cheated on her or forgot to put the toilet seat down for the hundredth time, or did something else to make her mad, and she kicked them out. Sometimes they got annoyed with her first and left on their own, but not often.

So at the beginning I couldn't tell that Carl was any different from the others. But after a while I realized she didn't get annoyed with him, didn't nag him, and you could look at her when she was around him and tell she thought he was something special. I spent a whole lot of time trying to figure out why. This was my best guess: It was because of the way they met, in therapy. He was all vulnerable and broken like she was, and when she looked at him, she saw someone who would understand her and
sympathize with her. What I saw was a lazy guy who sat on the recliner all day while Mom busted her ass at the buffet to pay for our house and food and everything. And when she got home every night, she kissed Carl and looked at him like he was a god or something. Then she started dinner and straightened up and I knew that, for some reason, she was happier than she'd ever been. Honestly, it drove me kind of crazy. I hadn't understood why she'd been miserable before, but it was even harder to understand what had changed.

One day after they'd been together awhile, Mom finished making dinner and then told me to come to the table. I usually ate in my room, so it was weird that Mom suddenly wanted to “eat like a family.” Half the time I didn't even eat the same thing they were having. If Carl didn't like something, she wouldn't make it, but if I didn't like it, I was just being stubborn. After the plates were on the table, before Mom had even picked up her fork, she looked at Carl and said, “I want to have a baby.”

There was a big long silence after that when neither of us had any kind of reaction at all and Mom and I just stared at Carl.

I tried to picture Carl as a father. He wasn't bad to me at all, but he'd never been especially fatherly. There was that time I'd gotten a splinter in my hand and he'd used Mom's tweezers to pull it out. I was crying and he'd told me, “It'll only hurt for a minute. Hush. It's okay.” He could have said something a lot worse, or he could have
not helped me at all. That was nice enough. But he never asked me how my day was and we didn't do anything together except watch TV, and that didn't count because we didn't talk.

I waited for him to refuse or to laugh in her face, and I figured that this, finally, would be the night she fell out of love and dumped him. Instead, Carl pushed his chair back and walked over to Mom's side of the table. He hiked up his jeans and then bent down on one knee and took Mom's hand.

“Lisa,” he said, “will you marry me?”

Of course he didn't have a ring or anything. But Mom started bawling and kept saying, “Yes, yes, oh yes! Oh God, yes!”

Carl stood up and Mom stood up and they hugged and Mom jumped up and down. “We'll have a baby,” he told her. “We'll have as many babies as you want.”

Mom cried and Carl held her. And I was invisible anyway, so I took my plate and finished my fish and macaroni and cheese in my room.

 

Vallery and I had both been accidents. Mom had married Vallery's dad right out of high school when she was seventeen but they hadn't been planning on having kids for a few years. Then she found out she was pregnant. Their relationship didn't last very long after Vallery was born. She'd only been dating my dad for a few months when the same “oops!” happened again. So it was kind of
ironic that when Mom actually tried to get pregnant, she couldn't do it.

For months all they talked about in the house was her stupid uterus. Her groups had a special prayer time for her at the end of every session to support her in her procreation goals. After a year it still hadn't happened, and someone in her group suggested that maybe she should look into foster care because there were so many poor children in the world who needed a good home.

Not long after that, Mom saw an ad in the
PennySaver
for therapeutic foster parents. I think the word
therapeutic
is what got her. Unfortunately for Mom,
therapeutic
was the polite way of saying that the kids had serious problems, and the kids who came to stay with us were way beyond anything Mom and Carl had been prepared to deal with. For someone who loved helping people, Mom didn't have too much patience for the kids.

The first boy was about thirteen and got sent home from school the first day for threatening another kid with a knife. Mom said no thank you and sent him back to the agency. The next boy was polite and did well in school, but one night I woke up to find him standing beside my bed and staring at me. I cried and begged Mom to send him back, but she didn't want the agency to think she was a flake. It wasn't until Carl backed me up that she agreed to get rid of him. Then she decided maybe she'd have better luck with girls. They sent us a girl, but she was psychotic. She never actually did anything, but the way she
talked about wanting to hurt the other kids at school was so disturbing that we couldn't take it. Mom tried to talk to the girl about her feelings and even had her join one of the groups. But then the other women in her group said she made them kind of uncomfortable. Eventually Mom gave up and sent her back.

After that, the agency thought Mom and Carl might do better with a younger kid. That's when they sent us Collin.

It was a disaster from the second he stepped into our house. He hadn't been there for more than ten minutes before he pulled off all his clothes and peed on the television. Carl smacked him, even though you're not really allowed to hit foster kids, and then Collin screamed for two hours. Mom put his clothes back on and tried to hold him and rock him, but he struggled out of her arms and ran and hid in his new room.

“You can't treat the poor boy like that, Carl,” Mom said to him. “He's been neglected. He needs love.”

That's what Mom told us over and over.
He just needs love.

I guess Mom was drawn to Collin for the same reason she was drawn to Carl. He was messed up and really needed help. But just like Carl, Collin didn't seem to get any better either.

Mom took him to all sorts of specialists to have him diagnosed and evaluated. She was never happy with anything they told her. I'm not sure what sort of answer she
wanted, but she never seemed to get it.

Collin spent every second of the day with Mom when he wasn't at school. She thought if she just spent enough time with him, he'd eventually feel bonded to her and all his problems would be solved and he'd start behaving and be normal.

“What if they take him away from me?” Mom asked me sometimes.

“I don't think they will, Mom,” I said to her.

“What if they think he's not making enough progress?”

I thought that the agency was probably just happy that Mom had finally found a kid she wanted to keep. And I didn't think they'd be able to find another family who wanted to deal with Collin, anyway. But I couldn't tell Mom that. She was too paranoid. Collin had already been taken away from one mother who couldn't help him, so what was stopping the agency from taking him away from her, too?

Just after his fourth birthday they decided to adopt him. Well, Mom did, and Carl went along for the ride. That was another way Carl was different from Mom's other boyfriends: He didn't tell her what to do, and he didn't get in her way. The process was a long one and involved lots of paperwork and lots of interviews—we even had to get fingerprinted and have background checks—but they went through all of it. They gave up the support of the agency, financial and otherwise, just so Mom could be
sure that no one could ever take Collin away from her.

And then she left him. It just didn't make any sense to me.

For the last two years or so, Mom had cried a lot less often. I stopped finding her slumped in the kitchen or hiding under the covers when I got home from school. She smiled all the time, and I knew she was finally happy. I thought it was because of her groups, because she'd found something she was good at, and because she had Collin. I thought Carl the freeloading bum was a weird addition to her new life. I didn't realize he was the foundation for it.

But it was Carl all along. He was the reason she stayed optimistic and didn't cry. He was the reason she started those groups to help other people. He was the reason she got Collin and tried to be a good mother.

And then he was gone.

And then there was nothing.