“That’s right,” said Miss Bateman. “Up and down the bunnies go, up and down, up and down . . .”
Miss Bateman had a cat, but it didn’t like to be petted and just watched everything from under a table, licking one paw at a time, and hissing if Harvey got too close.
After a few days, the woman who had been in the office with Principal Russo came to take Harvey to a foster home.
XIV
WHEN WANDA WANTED to come over a third time, Jason figured she was up to no good and told her he was sick and couldn’t get out of bed. But she called again the next day and said she really had to see him.
When Jason heard her car outside, he looked out the window. There was someone with her this time, some little kid with a doll.
After they came inside, Jason said he had only water to drink, but Wanda said they were fine. Then they sat on the couch and no one said anything. The little girl kept looking at her doll, kept touching the doll’s face.
“This is my helper for the day,” Wanda said.
The child pretended not to hear.
“Who is your helper, Harvey?” Wanda said, but still she did not look up.
Jason watched the little kid play with her doll, wondering why she was sitting on his couch with the woman from Social Services who wouldn’t leave him alone.
“Honey?” Wanda said to the little girl. “Can you go get me nine pieces of toilet tissue from the bathroom?”
“Okay,” the girl said, and stood mechanically. “Where’s the bathroom?” she whispered to Wanda.
“Ask the man who lives here,” Wanda whispered.
Slowly, the girl turned her body but kept her eyes on the floor. “Excuse me, Jason, but where’s—”
“End of the hall. Light switch is outside if you can reach it, which you probably can’t.”
“Remember to count out nine pieces carefully . . .” Wanda reminded her.
When Harvey was out of sight, Wanda picked up the girl’s doll and began arranging its limbs.
“How does the kid know my name?” Jason said.
“She knows more than that,” Wanda said.
“Yeah, really? Why’s that?”
“I was kinda hoping you’d figure that out by yourself.”
“Figure what out?”
Wanda put the doll back where she had found it. “Harvey is your late brother’s daughter.”
Jason’s mouth opened and closed.
“And the only family you have left to my knowledge, Jason.”
She explained that Harvey’s grandparents, the Morganos, were applying to adopt Harvey, and were on Long Island that very day doing the paperwork. They had flown up for the funeral from their gated community in Tampa, where they had lived since retiring. It was strictly sixty-five and older, but the board had agreed to make an exception in light of the tragic circumstances with their daughter and son-in-law. Wanda said they were still in shock.
Then Harvey returned with the pieces of toilet paper.
“I got them like you asked, Wanda.”
“Count them out, sweetie.”
Jason listened to the sound of the numbers, and remembered, years ago, sitting at home with his little brother watching Sesame Street.
The child’s hair was pulled back in a braid. Her clothes were new and the dress still had a sticker on the hem that read 5X. She was wearing a green T-shirt stamped with peace signs, and her doll had fake plastic hair and a hole in its mouth for a fake bottle. It also had black eyelashes, and blinked when she moved it. On the girl’s wrist were friendship bracelets. On her finger a plastic ring that once had gum inside.
When Jason went outside to smoke, he looked in through the sliding door at the woman from Social Services and at his brother’s child. He wondered why all this was happening. For years he had lived alone, slept alone, eaten alone, felt alone. Most of his mail went in the trash unopened. He ignored his neighbors, and they ignored him. But despite this effort to shut himself away, despite his determination to live at a distance from the world he had come to hate, Jason found himself once again in the midst of it—tangled up in lives that had simply been going on without him.
XV
WHEN WANDA HAD come to pick Harvey up from Miss Bateman’s apartment, she didn’t want to leave.
Miss Bateman suggested they take a trip around the block. Walk off the tears.
When all her clothes were folded into a plastic TJ Maxx shopping bag and they were almost ready, Harvey asked if Miss Bateman would brush her hair one last time.
Wanda drove slowly because of the bad weather.
“Look at this, look at this,” Wanda said as it just poured down. The windshield wipers rowed Harvey further and further toward sleep.
“The Goldenbergs are nice,” Wanda said. “I think you’re gonna like them.”
“I like Miss Bateman.”
Miss Bateman had told Harvey she would eventually get adopted by a great family who really wanted a daughter. “You are going to be so spoiled,” she had said.
Harvey wanted to get excited, but it felt wrong, a betrayal of sorts.
Wanda looked in her rearview mirror at the girl in her backseat. Over the years, she had met many children whose lives had broken into pieces that would not fit back together. Many of them had sat in that same booster seat, harnessed by the same seat belt, drawing small scenes from their lives on the window when it fogged.
Wanda watched in the mirror as Harvey’s finger traced images in the glass. She thought about the show she’d seen on PBS of our early ancestors drawing stick figures on cave walls or printing their hands on the rock in colored paint.
Some of the children who rode with her to foster care—Wanda knew from experience—would never recover. Some would end up in jail, or on drugs, or on the street, unable to live on their own or hold down a job. To think that only a few years before, they had been normal children, in normal houses, with school bags and bedtimes, fear of the dark, new shoes, presents under the tree at Christmas.
Some children were quickly adopted by relatives or friends. Others by people they had never met. It was especially hard for these children, who were expected to begin new lives while still anchored to old ones that no one wanted to talk about.
Wanda cared not only for children like Harvey, who’d been orphaned by circumstance, but also for those whose parents went to jail, or were addicted to drugs, or were abusive or negligent or a combination of those things. Over thirty years on the job had given her an instinct for who would make a good parent and who wouldn’t. It wasn’t always what you’d think, she told her husband. You get surprises where you least expect—for all that glitters is not gold.
After her first twenty years with Social Services, Wanda thought she had seen it all, but with each passing year came something new—and always the pinch of bureaucracy, which sometimes prevented her from placing children in the homes that best served their needs.
As retirement neared, she found herself taking more risks, “losing” data that wasn’t helpful, or lying to put her own spin on things—the way she’d lied to Jason about Harvey’s grandparents filling out adoption paperwork.
She told her husband everything, and he stood behind her. His name was Keith. He was from Baltimore. They had no children of their own.
“You gotta do what you gotta do,” he always said. “Trust yourself.”
When Harvey’s case was assigned to Wanda’s office and all the facts came out, no one could agree what to do. The obvious choice would have been the girl’s maternal grandparents, but it turned out they had recently passed, down in Tampa, Florida—within a few months of each other.
There was a much older great-aunt who also lived in Florida, but Wanda would need to know more about her; when family members fell out of touch, it was sometimes for good reason.
Wanda had known early on about the deceased’s older brother, but felt he was probably a lost cause—the obvious family link broken by a list of violent criminal charges against his name and
recent investigations by the IRS into thousands of dollars of undisclosed income—possibly the result of drug deals or resale of stolen goods. Charges for burglary or criminal damage were one thing, violent assault was another.
Wanda had all but crossed Jason off the list when Harvey suddenly mentioned him on the way from Miss Bateman’s apartment to the foster home. “Jason? Who’s that Harvey?”
“My dad’s brother.”
“You ever meet him? Your uncle Jason?”
“No.”
“How come you never met him?”
“Mom says he’s a bad man.”
“That so?”
“Tried to kill people, Mom said.”
Wanda paused a moment. “Sure you want to meet someone like that?”
“Dad said he never killed people—he just made them blind.”
“I see.”
“Now he goes to diners and has a fake leg.”
“Diners?”
“Yeah—so we know that he eats.”
“Was your father in touch with him, Harvey?”
“No, but they had a dog called Birdie, and my dad said that when Birdie left, Jason cried and cried, and he’d never seen his brother cry before the dog just ran away.”
“Birdie is a nice name for a dog.”
“I’d cry too, if my dog ran away.”
“So would I,” Wanda said. “And so would my husband, Keith. He’s a real animal lover.”
They were getting close to the Goldenbergs’, but Wanda didn’t want the conversation to end, so she pulled to the side of the road and asked Harvey if she had any stories about Jason.
“Mom would be mad if she knew,” Harvey said. “But Mom’s in heaven, right? I don’t think you can get mad in heaven, right, Wanda?”
“You don’t have to tell me anything you don’t want to,” Wanda assured her. “Just tell me what feels right.”
Harvey looked out the window, pulling together all the words she would need. “Dad said that Jason protected him at school from the bad children who stole his lunch.”
“Uh-huh.”
“And when Dad was sick, Jason had to get him better all by himself, but he was just a kid like me.”
“How’d he get him better?”
“My dad said he pretended to read the back of cereal boxes, but he couldn’t read—he was pretending, making up stories from his ’magination about why my dad was sick. They laughed about that.”
“Oh,” Wanda said, searching for a thread that might lead somewhere.
“Jason gave my dad his medicine from a special cup with rabbits on it. That was one cup that didn’t get broken, because Jason hid it and wouldn’t tell his father where it was. He liked to break stuff and put things on fire—their dad did—so it got saved. Jason used to get Dad better by letting him sip special juice made by rabbits in their home, in the dirt where they lived, in a hole. In a rabbit hole. That’s where it came from.”
“Hmm, I see. How special.”
“Rabbits made it and gave it to him in that cup to get my dad better.”
“That was nice of those rabbits,” Wanda said. “Were they the same ones Miss Bateman used to braid your hair?”
“No,” Harvey said. “Those ones are made up.”
“And your father told you all this, Harvey?”
“And Jason used to put notes in my dad’s lunch box saying he was a special boy.”
“That was very kind,” Wanda said. “I’m starting to like the sound of this guy.”
“He looked after my dad, so he could grow up and look after me, right?”
Wanda started the car and waited for an opening in the traffic.
“Can we go to his house, Wanda?”
“I can’t promise that.”
“Dad said he only hurt bad people, like heroes on TV do. They only hurt bad people, right, Wanda?”
“That’s right,” Wanda said. “You got nothing to worry about if you have a good heart, nothing at all.”
She would have to get an exception from the courts, convince her coworkers to play along, and of course find a way for the paperwork to slip through the system—legally, but undetected.
Then again, if the judge said a flat no, that was it. Nothing could be done.
The uncle might say no too. Or the uncle might say yes and not be suitable—or just be doing it for the monthly allowance.
“Could we go there now?” Harvey said. “To my uncle’s house?”
“It’s not our decision, little lady, so I don’t want you to worry about it. But Wanda is going to do her best. For right now,” she told Harvey, “the only sure thing is that you’re going to get more love and spoiling than you can imagine.”
One thing Wanda had learned in her thirty years on the job: Disappointment later on is better than no hope to begin with.
XVI
WANDA CALLED THE next day and asked what Jason thought of his niece.
“I can’t take her,” he said, lighting a cigarette.
“I’m not asking you to. I just wanted to know what you thought of her.”
“Do I strike you as the fatherly type?”
“It doesn’t matter what I think. Harvey’s grandparents are doing the adoption paperwork with their lawyer right now, so it’s not something you have to worry about.”
Jason exhaled and pictured the Morgano grandparents bent over a table, filling in forms at some Social Security office on Hempstead Turnpike. “What are they like?”
“The Morganos?” Wanda said. “I don’t personally think they can handle a six-year-old, but that’s for the courts to figure out.”
“But they’re family, at least.”
“That’s right,” Wanda said. “Family gotta stick together at a time like this.”
Jason watched the smoke escape from his mouth through a crack in the window. “You trying to make me feel guilty or something?”
“It’s the truth,” Wanda said. “Whether you feel guilty about it or not.”
“None of this is my fault.”
“That’s right, so you best stay clear of it.”
“I’ve been trying to,” Jason snapped. “But you keep fucking calling my house.”
Wanda’s sudden laughter surprised him.
“Behind the attitude,” she said, “and the tattoos, and the record, and the foul language, and that god-awful messy house you live in—there’s something about you, Jason.”
Jason lit another cigarette and noticed his hands were shaking. “Yeah, what’s that?”
“Like how you went outside for a smoke instead of just lighting up in front of the kid.”
Jason laughed. “That don’t mean nothing.”
Wanda laughed too. “We’ll see,” she said. “Remember, I’ve been doing this job since you were in diapers.”
XVII
WHEN WANDA CALLED three days later, she put Harvey on the phone.
“Hey,” Harvey said.
“Hey, kid. Is Wanda right there?”
“Uh-huh.”
“Did Wanda tell you to talk to me, or was it your idea?”
“Wanda.”
“Well, I hear you’re getting adopted, so it looks like you’ll be okay.”
There was silence on the other end of the line, then Wanda’s voice came on. “You have time to talk? Harvey’s just about to leave the office with her foster family, and I wondered if we could chat for ten minutes.”
“A foster family?”
“Just until we get her paperwork sorted out.”
“Why can’t she stay permanently with the foster family here, on Long Island?”
“That’s just not how it works, Jason—you of all people know that.”
WHEN WANDA WAS alone in the office, she called Jason back and asked him some more about his father.
Jason told her the old man had died when he and his brother were in high school. “He’d been sick for a while,” Jason said. “Some kind of cancer. Hadn’t left his bedroom in months. The television was turned up when
it happened, so I didn’t hear him calling or nothing. I sat with the body until Mom and Steve came home from Shop Rite.”
“So you were there,” Wanda said. “That must have been a tough thing to see, Jason. You said you hated your father.”
“Our whole lives, he pretty much tortured us one way or another—but it was bad when we were kids, until one Christmas the tables turned, and then he wasn’t around much after that.”
STUMBLING BACK IN the early hours from the Lucky Clover, Jason’s father was unable to find his front door among the hundred or so in the neighborhood.
He fell asleep in someone’s driveway, then woke up freezing and walked the few blocks to his own house. His wife was up making coffee because it was Christmas Day. When she asked what happened, he dragged her into the living room and threw her into the Christmas tree. Then he opened a beer and put the TV on.
Jason and his brother ran out and saw their mother with pine needles in her hair, trying to stand the tree up. Jason’s father wanted them to laugh about it, but little Steve went up and snatched the bottle of beer from his hand.
“Give that back, you little asshole, it’s Christmas Day!”
But Steve just poured it out on the carpet. The beer frothed and splashed on his bare feet.
Their father stood quickly, his face tightening, so Jason grabbed the empty bottle from Steve’s hand and swung it at their father’s head. He stumbled backwards for a few moments, touching his ear, then rushed Jason and pulled him to the carpet in a chokehold. Christmas ornaments went pop as Jason and his father rolled around on them. Then Jason got on top and there was blood on his father’s cheek from one of the angel’s wings. Mom was screaming and trying to pull Jason off. Eventually, the fight ended and their father got up and ran out of the house.
Jason vacuumed up the glass from the broken ornaments, then watched as Steve rubbed the carpet with paper towels to soak up the beer. Before opening presents, they made toast and poured two glasses of eggnog. It was sweet and so much thicker than normal milk.
Jason got blank TDK cassettes to make his own mix tapes, an Iron Maiden T-shirt, and the expensive hair wax he needed to style his hair like James Dean.
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