I owned one bra, slipped to me by Joseph with the last parcel of clothing: one that contained brown jumpers and cardigans that bored me to tears, when what I wanted were heels and bangle bracelets. I wanted to slip some see-through shirt over my one bra and let Matthew see.
When Matthew and I lay down, side by side on my bed to read from the pages of whatever book he’d brought me, we lay close, our bodies fused together, our heads sharing the same lumpy pillow. Matthew would slant himself into the bed’s headboard, his legs and torso curving their way around my own, his head angled toward mine so we could both see the same microscopic words in the books. One of my favorites was Anne of Green Gables, a book I must’ve asked Matthew a million times to check out, and though I knew he must be getting sick of it, he didn’t ever complain. He even said he liked it, too.
But no matter how much I liked that book, still, I’d find it hard to do anything but think about Matthew’s hand grazing mine while turning the pages, his jeans brushing against my bare leg beneath the blanket, an elbow accidentally swiping my breast as he redistributed himself on the bed. While Matthew was reading aloud about Anne Shirley and the Cuthberts, I lost myself on the tone of his voice, the smell of him—a hodgepodge of moss and cigarette smoke—the shape of his fingernails, what it would feel like if he slipped those toasty hands up under my sweatshirt and touched my breast.
It would be different from Joseph, that I knew for sure, different from Joseph whose teeth marks were singed into my sallow skin like the branding of cattle.
Matthew and I would lie that way for a real long time, together on the bed, and then sometimes Matthew would sit up quickly, rearrange himself on the other end of the bed.
As if we were doing something wrong.
Ms. Amber Adler continued to come every six months or so. In the days leading up to her arrival, Joseph, with my help, would give Miriam those pills. Like clockwork, Miriam would start to feel better and get out of bed, and we’d air the Miriam stench right out of the house. I’d get to cleaning, and Joseph would appear with a brand-new dress, and he’d sit me down at the kitchen table and give my hair a trim, and by the time the caseworker appeared in her junker car with her too-big Nike bag, the house would smell lemon fresh, Miriam would be acting more or less normal and hanging on the refrigerator door would be some fabricated book report Joseph typed up, my name printed at the top.
“Did you write this?” Ms. Amber Adler asked, clutching the paper in her pretty little hand, and I lied, “Yes, ma’am.”
Of course I never wrote any book report. I never went to school. But Joseph looked at her as if it were the God’s honest truth and said how my reading and writing were coming along okay, but there was still the issue of my disorderly behavior, and Amber Adler would pull me aside and remind me how I was oh so fortunate to have a family like Joseph and Miriam, and that I needed to put more effort into my conduct and show a little respect.
The caseworker continued to bring letters from Paul and Lily Zeeger, and from my Little Lily. Big Lily told me how Rose (Lily) was growing up so big. How she wanted to grow her dark hair longer and longer, how she’d recently cut bangs. How she had so many friends: Peyton and Morgan and Faith. How she loved school, and what a brilliant child she was, and how her favorite subject was music. She asked: did I play any musical instruments? Did I like to sing? She’d tell me that Rose (Lily) was a natural musician. She wondered: is it a family trait? As Lily got to reading and writing herself, she would send me notes, too, scribbled on stationery with a simple tree branch and a red bird on front. The stationery had her very own name printed across the front: Rose Zeeger, and every fall, tucked inside, was a brand-new school photo. My Lily was always happy, always smiling, and in those photos I saw how she was growing older, looking more and more like our Momma every day. When I looked in the mirror myself, I didn’t see any traces of Momma, but I saw them on Little Lily, in those photos that Joseph forced me to tear to shreds once the caseworker had driven away.
“I started to feel relieved for Lily,” I tell Ms. Flores.
“Why is that?” she asks.
“Because Lily was happy with the Zeegers. She was happy in a way that she never would’ve been if she’d have stayed with me.”
I thought of Joseph doing with Lily what he did with me, and just the idea of it made me want to bash his head in with the frying pan, the kind of thoughts that more or less started filling my mind as I grew from an eight-year-old child to a fifteen-year-old girl, one who knew with absolute certainty that Joseph had no business coming into my room.
“Why didn’t you tell the caseworker about Joseph?” asks Ms. Flores, adding, “If what you say is true,” implying that it was not.
I look away, refuse to answer. I’ve answered this question before.
“Claire,” Ms. Flores snaps, her tone dry. And then, when I don’t answer, she goes on, looking at her notes instead of me, “As far as I can tell, Claire, you didn’t do a thing to remedy your situation. You could have told Ms. Adler what you claim Joseph was doing to you. You could have informed—” she peeks back at her notes to make sure she’s got it right “—Matthew. But you didn’t. You chose to take matters into your own hands.”
I refuse to answer. I lay my head on the table and close my eyes.
She slaps a blunt hand against the table and I jump; the guard jumps. “Claire,” she barks. I will not raise my head. Will not open my eyes. I imagine Momma holding my hand. Hold still and it won’t hurt so much. “Young lady,” she says, “you had better cooperate. Ignoring me will not help a thing. You’re in a lot of trouble here. More trouble than you can possibly imagine. You’re facing two murder charges, in addition to—”
It’s then that I lift my head up from that table and stare at her, into Ms. Louise Flores’s gray eyes and at her long silver hair, the scratchy cardigan, the wrinkles of her skin, the big teeth like a horse’s. The gray brick walls of the small room come closing in around me, the sunlight through the one window suddenly in my eyes. A headache arrives, without warning. I imagine a body, blood, bowels unintentionally let loose on the floor. The front door, open. My legs wobbly, like Jell-O. A voice telling me to go. Go!
And I think: two?
CHRIS
That baby is whimpering in the background when I finally get a chance to talk to Heidi. I ask Heidi what’s wrong, but all she says is, “Waiting for the Tylenol to kick in,” and there’s a vibration in her voice, a jostling effect as if she’s bouncing that baby up and down, up and down, to try to amend the situation. To get that baby to shut up.
“Fever?” I ask, typing away on my laptop. The securities offered hereby are highly speculative... I’m barely listening as Heidi tells me that the fever isn’t so bad—she rattles off some number I couldn’t recount if my life depended on it—and then goes on to tell me about their doctor appointment at the clinic in Lakeview.
“DCFS,” I remind her.
One quick, easy phone call that could make this all go away.
But all she says is, “Not now, Chris,” and then she’s quiet. She doesn’t want to hear my nagging about the girl and how I think it’s utterly insane that she’s still cohabitating with us, in a space too small for three, much less five. Or that this whole fiasco might land us both in jail.
The shares are being offered without...
She tells me about bringing the baby to the family practitioner at the clinic in Lakeview. How they said the baby belonged to Heidi, in an effort to avoid any suspicious inquiry, and I thought of that, imagining Heidi, at her age, with an infant child. It wasn’t so much that Heidi was too old to have a baby, but that we’d moved so far past that, past diapers and baby bottles and all that crap.