I was sorry when he got his placement, to a group home in Pomona. He was the first kid I'd really enjoyed spending time with since my days with Davey, the first one who could remotely understand what I had been through. We were just getting to know each other, and now he was gone. I had to get used to that. Everybody left you eventually. He gave me one of his drawings to remember him by. It was me as a superhero, in a tight white T-shirt and ragged shorts, my body clearly the subject of much observation and thought. I'd just vanquished a biker archvillain, my Doc Marten bootheel planted on his bloody bare chest, a smoking gun in my hand. I shot him through the heart. I don't let anyone touch me was printed over my head.
OUTSIDE the junior boys' cottage a few days after Paul left, I sat at an orange picnic table, waiting for my interview. I ran my hand through my chopped hair, let the winter sun warm my scalp. The families weren't supposed to be shopping, it was supposed to be a 'getting to know you' visit, but it was an audition and everyone knew it. I wasn't worried. I didn't want to get placed. I'd rather stay here until I was eighteen. Paul was right, there was lots worse than Mac. I didn't want to get involved with anybody ever again. But nobody got to stay.
At a table under the big pines, another interview was taking place, a sibling set. They were always the worst. The cute little brother in the woman's lap, the older brother, past cute, pubescent, downy-lipped, standing off to the right, hands in his pockets. They only wanted the little one. Big brother was trying to convince them how responsible he was, how he'd help take care of the little guy, carry the trash, mow the lawn. I could barely watch it.
I had my first interview on Tuesday. Bill and Ann Greenway from Downey. They'd been foster parents for years. They just had one go back to her birth parents. They'd had her three years. Bill wiped his mouth with the back of his hand as he told it, Ann blinking back tears. I studied my shoes, white Keds, blue stripes down the sides, oversized lace holes. One thing in my favor, I wasn't going back to my mother anytime soon.
I didn't say much. I didn't even want to look at them. I could get to like them. I liked them already. Their kindnesses made small sucking noises at me, like water in the bathtub. It would be easy to let them take me home. I could see their house, bright and comfortable, on a street of tract houses but nice, maybe two-story. Pictures of kids on the tables, old swing set in the backyard. The sunny high school, even their church sounded inviting, nobody got fanatic there, or worried too much about sin or damnation. I bet they called their minister by his first name.
I ccuid have gone with them, Ann and Bill Greenway of Downey. But with them, I might forget things. All the butterflies might fly away. Pressed wildflowers and Bach in the morning, dark hair on the pillow, pearls. Aida and Leonard Cohen, Mrs. Kromach and picnics in the living room, pate and caviar. In Downey, it wouldn't matter that I knew about Kandinsky and Ypres and the French names for the turns in ballet. I might forget black thread through skin, a .38 bullet crashing through bone, the smell of new houses and the way my mother looked when they handcuffed her, the odd tenderness with which the burly cop held his hand over her head so she wouldn't hit it getting into the squad car. With Ann and Bill Greenway of Downey, they would dim, fade away. Amsterdam and Eduardo's hotel, tea at the Beverly Wilshire and the way Claire stood trembling when that bum smelled her hair. I would never again look at homeless kids in doorways off Sunset and see my own face staring back.
'You'll like it with us, Astrid,' Ann said, her clean white hand on my arm.
She smelled of Jergens hand lotion, a pallid pink sweetness, not L'Air du Temps or Ma Griffe or my mother's secretive violets, a scent which for chemical reasons could only be smelled for a moment at a time. Which do you like better, tarragon or thyme? All that was a dream, you couldn't hold on, you couldn't depend on frosted glass birds and Debussy.
I looked at Bill and Ann, their well-meaning faces, sturdy shoes, no hard questions. Bill's graying blond crew cut, his silver-rimmed glasses, Ann's snip-and-curl beauty shop hair. This was attainable, solid and homely and indestructible as indoor-outdoor carpeting. I should have been grabbing it. But I found myself pulling away from her hand.
It wasn't that I didn't believe them. I believed everything they said, they were a salvation, a solution to my most basic lack. But I recalled a morning years ago in a boxy church in Tujunga, the fluorescent lights, chipped folding chairs. Starr charmed as a snake while Reverend Thomas explained damnation. The damned could be saved, he said, anytime. But they refused to give up their sins. Though they suffered endlessly, they would not give them up, even for salvation, perfect divine love.
I hadn't understood at the time. If sinners were so unhappy, why would they prefer their suffering? But now I knew why. Without my wounds, who was I? My scars were my face, my past was my life. It wasn't like I didn't know where all this remembering got you, all that hunger for beauty and astonishing cruelty and ever-present loss. But I knew I would never go to Bill with a troubling personal matter, a boy who liked me too much, a teacher who scolded unfairly. I had already seen more of the world, its beauty and misery and sheer surprise, than they could hope or fear to perceive.
But I knew one more thing. That people who denied who they were or where they had been were in the greatest danger. They were blind sleepwalkers on tightropes, fingers scoring thin air. So I let them go, got up and walked away, knowing I'd given up something I could never get back. Not Ann and Bill Greenway, but some illusion I'd had, that I could be saved, start again.
So now I sat at the tables again, waiting for my next interview. I saw her, a skinny brunette in dark glasses, she was taking a shortcut across the wet lawn, sinking into the just-watered turf in high heels, not caring she was ripping up the grass. Her silver earrings flashed in the January sun like fishing lures. Her sweater fell off one shoulder, revealing a black bra strap. She lost a shoe, the earth sucking it right off her foot. She hopped back on one leg, and mashed her bare foot angrily in. I knew already, I'd be going with her.
23
HER NAME was Rena Grushenka. In a week, she took me home in her whitewashed Econoline van with the Grateful Dead sticker in the back window, the red and blue halves of the skull divided down the middle like a bad headache. It was cold, raining, sky a smother of dull gray. I liked how she laid rubber in the parking lot. Watching the wall and wire of Mac dropping away out the window, I tried not to think too much about what lay ahead. We wandered through a maze of suburban neighborhood, looking for the freeway, and I concentrated on memorizing the way I had come — the white house with the dovecote, the green shutters, the mailbox, an Oriental pierced- concrete wall streaked with rain. High-voltage wires stretched between steel towers like giants holding jump ropes into the distance.
Rena lit a black cigarette and offered me one. 'Russian Sobranie. Best in world.'
I took it, lit it with her disposable lighter, and studied my new mother. Her coal-black hair, completely matte, was a hole in the charcoal afternoon. High breasts pushed into a savage cleavage framed in a black crocheted sweater unbuttoned to the fourth button. Her dream-catcher earrings touched her shoulders, and I couldn't imagine what kind of dreams might lodge there. When she'd found the freeway, she shoved a tape into the cassette deck, an old Elton John. 'Like a candle in the wind,' she sang in a deep throaty voice flavored with Russian soft consonants, hands on the big steering wheel grubby and full of rings, the nails chipped red.
