That’s what probably happened to this one. It sat on the hot cement stoop in a corner striving for sound, life, flight, rest, or something—against the siding in solitary and colorful blackness—remote and separated from the triumphant, fiery heights of the many others. It sat apparently struggling, defeated. Before I descended the stoop, I reached my foot over (I felt anxiously compelled in my sad anger) and stomped—crushing, crunching its intricate insect form into mush. I felt power. I wiped my foot, and then proceeded downward toward Molly’s car, into the course that was appointed for me, toward my uncertain destiny which people were plotting for me.
EIGHT
WILD CHERRIES AND YELLOW-JACKETS
Molly drove me twenty miles across Cary Island from the ocean side where the honest horizon remained uninterrupted, where if we just turned our heads and looked to the east, bright Brooklyn seemed like a subdued pleasant place in the distance. She took me to the New Jersey side where there were fewer trees, industry, a narrow channel separating the states, ships, tugs, barges and a smell of chemicals in the air. The air-conditioning in her car was cool, and the music cheery. I felt a little numb from my grief, yet with the windows closed, sealing me from the world that I watched, the bleeding in my heart caused by the ripping from my place at the Sparks’ family seemed to stop. Of course, I didn’t consider it then, but how long healing would take depended on whether infections could be deflected.
Mommy Maureen’s place was in a halfway house called Crossings House—a New York State funded program and facility—a tremendous three-story stone building on Channel Turnpike, a busy roadway paralleling the deep bulk headed channel. We turned in the driveway and drove under a car port into the back where several cars parked on a new asphalt lot. It was like going to the doctor’s or the dentist’s or a restaurant or someplace like these. It wasn’t like going home, for sure.
Nine other women who were also trying to beat drugs lived with their children here too. This was a new and special program—for cases like Mommy’s, an alternative to dispersing kids into foster homes and letting the drug addicted parents continue to ruin themselves, where hopefully moms would cooperate, mend, and learn to be responsible. There were a lot of mixed views among the social professionals about this sort of latest, costly approach. Around the clock counselors and child care workers lived here, while therapists worked there during the day. Taxpayers doled out an awful lot for this.
We parked the car and opened our doors. The thick heat collided against us again. I heard only a few cicadas in a nearby tree as I looked around. Next door I noticed a very enticing swimming pool in the ground with no one in it, and a basketball backboard and hoop on a garage at the head of a driveway. Behind was a large vacant lot. The sound of the turnpike was blustering, noisy. As in a park, a row of picnic tables lay on the lawn beside the parking lot. Adults and kids seemed to be coming and going out the back door. Some sat on the spacious wrap around porch. This place was busy, definitely different, clean and neat. So far, the only negative was that pregnant Mommy Maureen was inside waiting for me.
I stood behind the car by the trunk while Molly got some of her papers and things and locked her door. High-rise, outmoded apartment buildings beyond the lot emerged in the gray haze with visual offensiveness. I hated that urban county on that irritable day.
“We’ll bring your things in in a little while, Silas honey. Let’s go see Mommy and meet some of the people first okay?” She put her arm around my shoulder.
I was sure she had already met “some of the people” already, and that it was just my turn now. I somehow couldn’t bring myself to being phony, putting on a sham, simulated smile right now. I really was very angry, furiously frustrated inside. I couldn’t act that way to Molly, however. She’d always been too genuinely good to me these years.
I felt like I wanted to die. I intended to be cold and aloof to Mommy Maureen. This was all her fault. Why did I have to be her little band-aid while she tried to get herself fixed?
As we walked toward that porch I looked down at the hot asphalt, at my high sneakers, at my brown legs, my blue shorts. I pulled my Yankee cap down over my brows so my petulant, anguishstricken eyes wouldn’t have to look at anyone else’s.
“You okay, Silas?”
“Yeah.”
“Sure?”
“Yeah.”
“You want to talk awhile before we go in, honey?” She tried to get me to look at her. I wouldn’t.
“No.”
“Sure?”
“No. I mean yeah. I don’t care.”
We were quiet as we slowly strolled, and I imagined she prayed. I’m certain that whatever she thought about, surrounded me. Her thoughts were never wrapped up with other business whenever we spent time together. Whenever Molly was with me, she remained unconditionally wholly with me.
She steered me to a picnic table in the shade of a wild cherry tree, and she sat opposite me, speechless a moment. A trifling breeze blew, stirring some leaves, cooling, lifting the scent of newly cut sparse grass. Fallen wild cherries and black stains of rotted ones blotched smattered on the table and benches, and yellow-jackets maneuvered, hovering above the smatters. A little sparrow landed on the other end of our table very nearby, pecking at crumbs, ignoring the tiny cherries. I wondered if it were fearlessness, carelessness, trust, or just desperate hunger that brought it so close. Its little head jerks made me thing it glanced at me. We could faintly hear its little talons scratching the warping wood until it freely flew away, out of our sight. A long minute passed.
“Silas.”
I didn’t look up.
“Silas, look at me, look at Molly.”
Somebody entered into a car. Doors slammed. An engine started. Tires rolled.
“Silas, honey.”
I still didn’t look up. I kept fearing Mommy Maureen would notice we’d arrived and would come charging down the steps off the big porch with a whole lot of garrulous, confused words out of her grating, cigarette smoked voice box. I looked across the deep, debrisfilled lot in the back. I wanted to run into it. It hung hot and dusty, but I wanted to run into it anyway, and keep on running until I dropped, died, or found my way back to Mommy Sparks. I felt like pulling my hair. I felt like killing myself. Suddenly I felt Molly’s index finger on my chin, gently lifting my head. I grabbed my hair through my hat and squeezed hard. I pressed, mashing my two elbows against the table—hard. I took my top teeth and bit down on my bottom lip—hard. I screamed within myself, within my being, tightening all my sinews. I burst with keen bitter cries and tears once again. It was like the salted, seaweed besieged locks on the nearby channel opening, and a current of tide rushing through. My tears dripped, puddling on the wooden table-top which quickly absorbed, sopping them up into its seasoned dryness as though—like a brief deluge of rain on a wide parched desert—they were insignificant, paltry, nothing. I took my knuckles and struck the wooden seat, letting my head fall flat onto the table, feeling my tooth puncture my lip as I’d still been biting, watching my navy-blue Yankee cap tumble to the ground.
Molly quickly came to my side, rubbing my back. “I know. I know. It’s okay. Cry it out. It’s good to cry Silas. It’s okay.”
She did comfort me. Even though she didn’t cry with me, she really made me feel that what she said was so. She had such a motherly strength. I felt safe crying with her. As I reflect now, I can see that she was perfect for that social work. It was her calling. She fostered me.
I raised my head when I noticed the blood from my lip dripping on my shorts and mingling with my tears as I lingered there. At once I looked into Molly’s kind eyes which immediately noticed my bleeding, swelling lip.
“Oh Silas, you’re bleeding. You bit your lip, honey.”
I said nothing, wiping with my fingers.
“Here,” she said, rummaging through her handbag. She pulled out tissues and wiped my chin and mouth. She took fresh ones and gently placed it on my tooth-wide wound and pressed, holding her hand there.
She looked at me—into my eyes—and shook her head with a small smile. “You’re a silly boy, you know it,” and she laughed a bit, hoping I’d follow. I didn’t. She hugged me and kissed my head while she held my lip. We sat there like that for a long time. Mommy Maureen didn’t come out. After a while Molly said, “Here hold this against your lip.”
“Okay,” I mumbled.
She took out another tissue and wiped my eyes, and then she leaned and lifted my hat from the grass, wiping off clippings. She stuffed it on my head sideways and pinched my cheek, saying, “You’re a silly boy Silas” again, smiling. “Listen to me little fella. Everything’s going to be okay. Everything’s going to be fine. You hear me? You’ll be able to visit Mommy and Daddy Sparks and Justin from time to time. You never know, if this doesn’t work out, you’ll go back there. But we hope this does work out. We all want your Mommy Maureen well. We all want what’s best for you. This is the way your Mommy wants things. She wants you with her, and people in the court—the judge wants you here. They say it is best. So there are just some things in life we can’t control sometimes. We can’t always have things impeccable.”
“What’s peckable?”
“Impeccable. It means perfect, faultless. We can’t always have things impeccable. We try our best, and we pray. You hear me? You can call me up whenever you want. I’ll be around. I’ll be stopping in on you and Maureen a lot.” She paused. “You hear me buddy?”
I nodded.
We walked to the house, up the steps and into the small foyer. She told the receptionist that I was Maureen’s boy, and she asked two of the workers there to take my stuff from the car up to my room, handing them her keys.
The receptionist dialed an extension upstairs and Mommy was on her way down. She scurried down sunny and grinning, wearing shorts, happy to see me. I don’t think I’d ever seen her move so fast before. She’d gained weight, and her face revealed it. I could only recall her being depressed, strung-out, high, perturbed, or deranged. She lowered to her knees, placing her white hands on her thighs, and she looked at me. Years had been passing. I was growing. I was too tall for her to kneel like she did.
After the last litigation in court, when the very real possibility that my adoption by the Sparks’ had been pending, and Mommy had been granted some more time to get rehabilitated, some parents’ rights advocate somehow got through to her the truth that she ought to take very seriously the courts’ very patient yet persistent stipulations that she cooperate. She needed to regularly take her long ago prescribed medication, which sedated her as far as her melancholy went, so that when the court ordered mental health study progressed, she’d be deemed rational and fit. She needed to regularly take her newly prescribed HIV medicine—AZT—to forestall the onset of AIDS. She needed to choose to get into a program to free herself from the heroin grip. She needed to make evident some conscientious efforts of planning, of getting employed, of focusing on parenting skills—for me and my unborn brother. Meanwhile, eight years—my life—had slipped by. I was a toy, a pink stickball to be bounced around, a plaything—to her, something to be fancied for her own gratification and selfish serenity. This whole concept, this theory, this thought came to me in a more elementary, puerile way—then, at eight years of age, while she kneeled before me saying, “Silas, my love, I missed you so much. Give me a big hug and kiss.”
My expression remained constant, with my hat low over my eyes, with my eyes diverted. I noticed the bulging beneath the white cotton maternity blouse from her abdomen, the sign that a new human would be crossing the threshold of this world. It was five months away—around my ninth birthday. I wished I were dexterous enough to appeal to her and communicate to her in a sophisticated, adult manner that she ought to let the Sparks adopt me. I was impetuous; it just came out: “I don’t wanna live here. I wanna go back home.”
“Silas!”
“No. I hate you.” I turned away, around, facing Molly, looking down.
Mommy looked up at Molly. Molly said nothing. I imagine now that Molly had surely appealed to Mommy to do just that even before all the courtroom business. Molly had probably aimed to convince her that that would be best for me, and that that would be the most loving and selfless thing to do for me, for my emotional health, for my future. There was this open adoption possibility as well, where the birth mother could legally keep contact and have visitation privileges after the finalized adoption, so that cord—however strong or weak—could remain connected. Mommy had always refused. She clung, unyielding. She wanted me to herself, for herself.
Molly’s expression—her peacemaking knack—somehow told Mommy that I’d come around. She lifted my head again with her finger under my chin. “Silas, Mommy’s going to take you to your new school today if she can. If not, on Monday. You’re going to like it. It has a whole new wing, and a brand-new gym, and a baseball field. And Mr. McMaster the principal is a very nice man; and Miss Karessi your teacher, and Mr. Kemp your gym teacher is looking forward to having you in his gym class because he’s heard you’re a good athlete. He loves the Yankees like you too!”
“How’s he know? Who said I’m good?”
“Well, me, and Daddy Sparks.”
“Oh.” I said. Molly’s words somehow magically lifted me. I thought about my baseball glove. I straightened my hat. The expression on my face—my countenance, my eye contact, my look of wonderment—announced to Molly that there was a flicker of hope here, for now.
“And now that you’re eight, you can join the soccer league in the community!”
“Wow, that’s great!” Mommy responded from her knees, moving a little as two little ones passed with their mother out the door onto the porch.
I don’t think Mommy knew she was going to bring me on a school tour at all, and I found it typical that Molly had taken time to make these important contacts for me, that she was interested enough to know all this; and that Mommy didn’t know this. Looking back now, I know that it was more than part of Molly’s accountable duty for her salary, it was concern. I also know that my disgust for Mommy’s inadequacy was merciless, rooted from bitterness, lacked any understanding, yet was normal for an eight-year-old.
“What happened to your lip, Silas?”
“He bit it.”
“I bit it.”
“You got blood on your shorts. You okay?”
“Yes.”
“Come on,” she said, rising, reaching her hand for mine. “Let’s go wash up.”
I began to follow. One of the workers handed Molly her keys. “Silas, I’m going to leave now. I’ll stop by Monday morning, and maybe I’ll go with you and Mommy to the school, okay? School starts Wednesday, so we want you to know your way around.”
I walked toward her and hugged her goodbye.
She rubbed her fingers through my crimped, twisty hair. “You have my number. Remember. I’m here.”
I nodded. She left, and I went into the big bathroom downstairs to wash up with Mommy Maureen. One of the young childcare workers—a heavy black girl who was very talkative—pulled out some peroxide from a cabinet and poured it on a washcloth and pressed it on my lip. It burned, stung, fizzled; but I submitted, knowing it was good medicine.
NINE
THE CHANNEL
Hundreds of years ago, Welsh settlers founded this island, naming it Cary, which means “rocky island.” Underneath a blanket of stony soil, thick bedrock kept this plot firm through eons of storms. The surface soil’s pebbly temper had always made this place agriculturally impotent, yet the island had always been more of a trade center, and at one time—during the great Atlantic slave trade—it had been a northeast center for trading, buying, selling, trafficking, investing in, and auctioning human beings—Africans, slaves.
My life was like this island—a hard, craggy place. And I often felt like one of those who had been auctioned off, put on the block, sold to any bidder, torn from my ties.
Now I was trying to bond—sort of—with Mommy Maureen, and it wasn’t easy or worki
ng. She was volatile, unpredictable. She was flighty, moody. One hour she’d be happy, talkative, energetic; the next hour she’d be biting her nails, pacing, staring, weeping. One day she’d be friendly and loving to everyone in this domicile—to the other moms, the workers, all the kids. The next day she’d be unsociable, solitary, locking herself away in her room, even from me. One week she’d spend petulantly cross, breaking into fits of rage over nothing—cursing, frustrated, throwing things at walls. Another week she’d be considerate, warm and tender, doting, asking if I was tired or hungry or felt okay, holding doors for people, smiling, greeting. One night she’d sleep soundly, the next she’d be up, scratching her head, sitting, getting up, straightening her room, secretly smoking cigarettes by the window.
My asthma was as unpredictable as my mom’s moods. I always had my safeguard inhaler with me, since I’d outgrown the nebulizer. Besides that I’d developed eczema which seemed to blossom redder, itchier, and rawer as months passed. I was often applying prescription creams for that too.
I liked to be in school. I felt safe there. I didn’t like learning and books though; so I didn’t work too hard, unless I liked the subject. Sometimes I liked social studies—not history, but the global studies—geography and the differences between the world’s races. English was tolerable—some of the storybooks we read, a few of the poems. I never put effort in math or science. It was during math and science I’d stare pensively out the window, or get fidgety and distract other kids and get Miss Karessi mad at me. Math demanded concentration and paying attention. Science was uninteresting. I invariably failed math and science.
Two-thirty meant the last bell would ring and I’d get on a big bus with those elementary school kids who had normal homes, except for Kyle and Tyrone who lived at the halfway house with me too. Not knowing what was up with Mommy made me hate the anticipation on the ride home. Sitting on the bus for a long time was not a bother to me. I liked red lights and parents at stops who’d detain the driver for asinine reasons. A lot of rain meant a slower ride home too.
Silas Dillon of Cary County Page 8