Not my throat. My heart.
My words hurt my heart.
“Her brain exploded. Last night. No, the night before. I can’t remember now.”
I can’t remember now. I can’t remember if my mom died last night or the night before. What is happening to me?
“She never kept me in a cage or anything like that.”
I start to cry, but I wrap my arms around myself to keep from sobbing too loud and I roll my face into the pillow.
One of them, I don’t know which, says softly, “Poor baby. That’s horrible.”
The lamps snap off, plunging the room into darkness. I hear the sounds of sheets and blankets being arranged, and then heavy, resigned sighs. Down the hall, Georgia shuffles around, murmuring. I realize she’s praying.
Thy Kingdom come. Thy will be done.
Where. Is my mother. Is she…here, like on Earth, somewhere? Or somewhere else?
On Earth as it is in Heaven.
There are a lot of things we never really talked about. Like Heaven. Or death. Like, what happens after. What if she’s somewhere…and she’s scared? Alone? I saw a movie once and the ghosts were everywhere among the living, watching them from trees, looking into their grocery carts in the market. But the living never felt them.
My heart flops. Is it possible to have a heart attack at sixteen?
I roll over, tears sliding down my cheeks into the pillow beneath me. Kendra is on her bed, beneath the window, her knees drawn up under the blanket, trailing a hand over the windowsill, looking out at the stars in the velvety Arizona sky.
With no streetlights, you can see them, those pretty, promising stars, and the fat white moon, perfectly, through the solid black bars on the window.
YOU WANT TO LAUGH at them. Maybe even chortle, another word from Lit class.
Because none of them, not the skinny brown-haired one, or the plump white blond one with the crooked teeth, or even that sallow, horrible, tall woman named Georgia, believed you.
They thought you were going to be here forever, like them. Or some of forever, however it works in this foster system, where maybe forever doesn’t even exist anymore, because life is just one house after the next. One plastic cup of warm milk after another.
But there is Karen, stepping out of the State of Arizona car in the bright sunshine and walking purposefully to the heavily gated front door.
She’s like your best damn friend now.
Knocking. You can see her from Kendra’s window, through the bars, and you drag yourself, sick as you feel, but elated, from the narrow bed and throw all your clothes back in the pink suitcase without folding them. You toss a Poison T-shirt over to Kendra, who sleepily rubs her eyes.
The other one, Lisa, Blondie, is already dressed and making her bed. So neat and clean, that one. Hair smoothed flat over her ears, hands tucking the pale blanket under the slim mattress.
She looks up. “You were right,” she says.
She tries to smile, but she’s not happy about it, you can tell. She runs a hand over her bedspread.
And why should she be happy? She has more days, more nights, of bland, boiled food in the middle of nowhere. Black bars on the windows. Lists on walls.
And she thinks all that is good, which makes you shudder, thinking of where she must have been.
Georgia meets you in the hallway. “Well,” she says, gravely, towering over you. “Sometimes I get kids two or three times, you never know. We might meet again.”
She puts a large hand on your shoulder.
“I am very sorry about your mother, Grace.”
Your real name stings a little, mostly because it was reserved for your mother, for those moments when she was pissed, or when she was very, very dreamy and sweet.
You look down, because the ocean is swelling in you again, and you don’t want to believe Georgia means it, but you know she does, because you heard her long into the night last night, praying, and you know she believes some things very deeply.
You feel a little sorry for thinking bad things about her.
But then you remember she made you drink disgusting, overly warm milk, and the sorry feeling goes away.
You push past her, and don’t care that the wheels of your pink suitcase tumble over her white sneakers.
In the back of Karen’s car, as she says, “Ready?” you buckle yourself in and a little part of you wonders if your mother is watching all this, right now, like a movie ghost, but the thought hurts, and the girl-bug behind glass swats it away. You are carrying so many heavy feelings.
There just isn’t enough room for them all.
47 hours, 15 minutes
THE FOSTER MOTHER NAMED LaLa doesn’t look mean, and she isn’t holding a wooden spoon, ready to strike me down if I don’t cook drugs for her.
In fact, she’s wearing a flannel robe, has thick black braids with strands of gray, and black horn-rimmed glasses with silver sparkles. She’s fixed a plate, a real plate, ceramic, it looks like, of food for me and left it on the kitchen table. A glass of water. A fork with a cloth napkin. It is, to use another word I learned from a book, a lovely tableau, but I don’t eat it. After Georgia and the sour milk, I don’t think I’ll ever eat or drink again, maybe.
I sit at the kitchen table while LaLa and Karen talk in the living room. LaLa lives on the outskirts of Tucson, where the land stretches out far and wide. Her house is very quiet.
I have my phone back. Karen took me back to the Children and Protective Services building after Georgia’s to pick up paperwork, answer phone calls, and give me my backpack, which Cake had dropped off, and which had my phone. I’d left the backpack in Kai’s car.
We were at the CPS building for hours, Karen doing her work, me sitting in a chair, watching her. “Things like this take a long time,” she said with a shrug. By the time we left, it was already getting dark, and by the time we got to this new house, I was exhausted again.
In the kitchen, I start to text Cake.
But I don’t—I don’t even know what to say. What words am I supposed to use for…this?
Like, Hi. I’m at a stranger’s house. There is a yellow kitchen table.
Like, Hey.
Like, Hi. My mother is still dead.
The front door shuts. Quickly, I type, I’m alive.
LaLa comes into the kitchen. I turn my phone over in my lap just as it vibrates.
LaLa sits down. “I like your dress.”
“Thank you.” My voice seems small. I rub a patch of lace between my fingers.
“I’m really sorry about your mom.”
“Her brain exploded,” I answer. Look at the lace of my dress, entwined in my fingers. The intricate pattern. If only I could disappear inside it. The phone buzzes again. I look down. Cake. Talk to me.
LaLa notices and says, “You can text if you want. Friends are important right now.”
I turn the phone back over. Swallow hard.
There’s a lot moving around inside me.
“I don’t really understand it, you know? What happened.”
The youngish doctor had talked about blood vessels and blood flow, but it was hard to concentrate on his words because my body was fracturing into millions of pieces.
LaLa looks sad. “I’m so sorry, Gra—”
“Nobody calls me that, except for my mom sometimes. My name is Tiger.”
We had such a terrible, terrible fight. I wince, remembering. Hold my breath until the sharp pain passes.
“Got it. Cool name. Please eat, and if you can’t that’s okay, but I do want you to drink some water. You look dehydrated. I have some pajamas for you, too, if you need them. I’ll bet you’re exhausted.”
My mouth feels grimy and dry, so I sip some water. “Am I the only one here?” I ask. I wonder if I will miss Brownie and Blondie, or if all the kid
s I’ll know from now on will just bleed into one another.
She shakes her head. “Nope. I’ve got three, at the moment, plus you. Two littles and a boy a bit older than you. He’s in Phoenix right now, but he’ll be back soon.”
“How long am I going to be here?”
“I’m not sure, exactly.”
I bite my lip. How many times will I have to move now? Harry Potter went to his aunt and uncle’s but he had to live under the stairs. He got Hogwarts, but he still had to go home in the summers. My mother always thought that was bullshit, Dumbledore sending Harry back to a horrible house. “He could have kept him at Hogwarts,” she insisted. “Or even with Hagrid. He thought he needed to deprive him of love if he was going to do what he needed him to do. But I don’t believe that. Not at all.”
“I have essences that might relax you.” LaLa ticks her fingers. “Sweet chestnut, lemon balm, star-of-Bethlehem. I could get you some drops. I’d have to get permission from Karen, though.”
“Permission?”
“Yes. I can’t give you any painkillers or even get your hair cut without asking permission first. Your parents still have rights.”
“I don’t think my mom is going to have much to say about giving me an aspirin, at the moment, do you?” I rub the lace harder between my fingertips.
LaLa sighs. “Sorry. I messed up there for a minute. I forgot.”
There are tons of LaLas around Mesa Luna. Easygoing hippies with braided hair and worn clothes, with a tincture or a balm for everything.
But not for this. There will never be anything, ever, that can heal what I have.
LaLa snaps her fingers. “I always forget to say how this is going to work. Here goes.” She takes a breath. “You live here and follow my rules. No fighting, no drugs, no drinking. In the background, Karen’s working on finding you another place. I’m not long-term.”
Fighting, drinking, drugs. I don’t do any of those things anyway. But maybe I’ll start, now that there’s no one to care.
LaLa’s house smells like ginger and incense, miles better than the boiled-meat smell of Georgia’s house.
I’ll have to get used to all-new smells. People. Rules.
I feel dizzy just thinking about it. My eyes fill up. I dig the heels of my palms into them until I see bright explosions of color.
LaLa says gently, “Let’s do a tour, okay? It’s getting late and I want you to rest. We’ve gotta keep it down a bit, though, because Sarah and Leonard are sleeping.”
She leads me down a hallway, not to a room underneath the stairs, after all, but to a regular room with bunk beds, two wooden dressers, and a poster of Olaf the Snowman.
He’s my favorite part of that movie, when he puts on the hat and sings about summertime.
I feel myself relax, just the smallest bit. This is going to be okay, I think. At least better than Georgia’s.
LaLa whispers, “Sarah likes the bottom bunk. She gets a little anxious at bedtime because of where she was living in the past, so we have night-lights—” She points to the walls. There are three night-lights: a fish in a bowl, a duck, and the moon. In the bottom bunk, a Black girl with cornrows sleeps peacefully, two fingers jammed in her mouth.
“Sarah is ten,” LaLa whispers. “That’s your dresser, over there. You girls share my bathroom; it’s the one down the hall with clouds painted on the outside. The door with the tree is the other bathroom.”
She takes me down the hall to the cloud bathroom. “If you need tampons or pads or anything like that, look under the sink. Whatever you need, just ask, okay, Tiger?”
My voice is flat. “My mom died. Can you help me with that?”
LaLa says softly, “Grief is a process your body and mind have to go through, Tiger. There isn’t a cure. But I can keep you comfortable and safe.”
I fix my eyes on the floor. Faded rag rug. Scuffed wood.
LaLa sighs. “I’ve put some pajamas on the sink, right here. A shower and some sleep is going to help a lot, okay?”
She closes the bathroom door.
In the round mirror above the sink, the girl who stares back looks haunted, like she’s been scooped out from the inside, like she’s lost twenty pounds in a day.
I touch her face. I don’t recognize her.
I think: This girl is motherless. This girl has nothing.
Tears stream down her haunted, carved-out face.
If my mother was here, she’d wrap her arms around me and pat my face dry and murmur, You look tired, Tiger. Wash your face and get your book and go to bed. You’ll feel better in the morning.
Sometimes she sleeps in my bed with me, her back pressed against mine.
I don’t understand how things are keeping going when she has just stopped.
If I close my eyes and wish hard enough, will she come back? Is this some cruel, weird trick by the universe? Like I’ve stepped into the wrong portal by mistake? That’s always happening in books, after all. Maybe by yelling at my mother and telling her those horrible things, I set off some domino effect, tripped a wire in the cosmos, and changed my path and now I’m being taught a terrible lesson.
Maybe I’ve imagined the whole thing. Maybe all of this is not real, either. This strange and quiet house, after the eerie stillness of Georgia’s, this kind woman with the black braids and sparkly glasses, trying to pawn her elixirs off on me.
The one thing my mom’s told me over and over and over for years is I will never leave you. I will always be right here.
My mother might be a lot of things, but she isn’t a liar.
This has to be a horrible mistake, a time warp of some sort, and it’ll be over soon. It just can’t be real: a life of locked cabinets and refrigerators, bars on the window. Sweatshirts and creamed corn on plastic plates.
I strip off the lace dress, relieved. Twist on the water in the shower. This is a tremendous, universe-gone-mad mistake. Because my mom promised.
When I get in the shower, I scrub myself until I’m just patches of red and raw skin. I shampoo my hair five times to get the horribleness out. I want to be clean when I wake up in the morning, when my mother comes for me, cup of coffee in her hand, her hair mussed, her eyes sleepy.
When I get out, I dry myself and hang my wet towels over the curtain rod because my mother didn’t raise a total slob. I put the ivory lace dress back on because in the morning, when my mother comes for me, when the universe has been righted, she’ll love that I’m wearing it. Her face will glow. She’ll laugh.
She’ll say, How beautiful you look, Tiger.
We won’t remember a stupid fight about a dress, or any of this, whatever this is, because it isn’t real, it can’t be.
This cannot be fucking happening.
I find a new toothbrush in plastic beneath the sink, brush my teeth, glad to clean my mouth out after so long, and pad my way back down the hallway to the bedroom, where I climb the ladder to the top bunk, cover myself with the itchy wool blanket, and stare at the ceiling. My phone says it’s 9:15 p.m.
I will myself to sleep, because when I wake up, it’s all going to be a goddamn bad dream.
And we will be we again, the well-oiled, good-looking, and good-smelling machine.
2 days, 6 hours, 9 minutes
WHEN I OPEN MY eyes, I’m in a strange room, and my heart jumps. Not my bed, not my blanket, not my clothes, not my walls, not my—
And then it floods back over me. It wasn’t a bad dream after all.
She’s still gone.
The wet cement feeling settles on me again. It’s hard to breathe.
I’m in a strange house.
My mother is dead.
I have no home.
Everything I knew is gone.
I start to cry.
“You want us to get LaLa?”
I look down from the top bunk
.
Two Black kids, one super tiny and scrawny, and one stick-thin and tall, stare up at me with suspicious eyes, next to my open suitcase. My underwear and bras, everything Cake packed for me, spread all over the floor. The little girl, she’s the one who spoke. I can tell. Her eyes are worried, even as she stands there, my underwear in her hands.
Jesus, first Brownie and now them. Is that what foster kids do? Rifle through each other’s suitcases all the time?
The tiny one, the boy, says, “We didn’t find any candy.” He has a blue basketball jersey on and matching shorts. His knees are as round as baseballs. “The hell you come here without candy for?”
“The hell,” says the skinny one, the girl, only her “hell” is whispered, like she’s trying it on. It’s Sarah. I can see how expertly cornrowed her hair is in the light. I’ve never been able to do anything with my hair. I’m all thumbs.
“Don’t you mess with me,” huffs the boy. “I’ll kick your ass.” A bubble of green snot balloons from his nostril, but he doesn’t notice. He punches his fist into his other hand.
Sarah repeats, “Don’t mess.” She tries to punch her hand, too, but misses.
They’re just kids who’ve been abandoned, but I’m still a little mad they’re going through my stuff. I should be nice, but what does it matter now? These kids are me now and I am them.
I wipe my wet face with the back of my hand and lean over the bunk and snarl, “I’m a ninja. My mom died. Her brain exploded. You put my stuff back in my suitcase or I’ll take the both of you out with one kick.”
The boy and the girl squeal and start tossing my things in the general direction of the suitcase before they run down the hall.
The ceiling over my bunk has old water stains. If I had a pencil, I would write Kill me. Kill me now inside them, like words inside cartoon text bubbles. Draw a girl with crosses for eyes and a limp body in an old lace dress. Or a girl-bug in glass, fluttering her crisp wings, waiting.
This isn’t a bad dream. I am really, really, really here, and she is really, really, really gone.
It’s like lightning, what tears through me then. I bury my face in a pillow that isn’t mine, that doesn’t smell like anything I know, and cry myself back to sleep.
How to Make Friends with the Dark Page 8