America
Page 17
“America is here to see you,” the bald lady says. Mrs. Harper doesn’t even move. “I’ll leave you alone with her,” the bald lady says, and she disappears, and I end up standing next to Mrs. Harper, feeling foolish, just like with Liza and the hammock, only different, because I wasn’t scared with Liza, only aggravated, and now my chest is thumping like a motherfucker right here. Mrs. Harper’s staring over at that fat man in the middle of the rock circles, and I’m staring at her, and I see that ring, that black, round ring, hanging off a gold chain around her neck, and I feel like I could fall down extra easy, so I sit instead. I get my butt on the ground right next to her wheelchair, and I’m so big, my head is just about as high as her shoulders. I look at her awhile, and it’s pretty hard to know if she can see or hear anything.
“Hi, Mrs. Harper,” I go, and then I don’t know what all to say. I scoot around so I’m more in front of her. So if she can see anything, maybe she can see me. “Been a long time,” I say. She’s real still. Sometimes she opens her mouth and then closes it right up again. We sit there a real long while, and I can’t think of one more thing. Then I can. “Remember when we used to play hide-and-seek and shi—and stuff?” I go. She maybe looks at me a little out the sides of her eyes. “Yeah,” I go. “Remember that?” The wind blows, and her blanket slips off her knee. I put it back. “I used to love that,” I go. That word again. Love. You can be big and old and cool with being scared but nowhere near pussy, and that damn word can still get you right in the throat.
* * *
They let me wheel her to her room. An orderly goes with us to show me where it’s at and then to lift her out of the wheelchair right into bed. When we walk in, I don’t even bother to watch how he lifts her, to see how light she is, maybe. I don’t even bother because of the angels. They’re all the ones she did that morning. That first time I left. The ones with the reddish-brown skin and the greenish eyes with the fold down the outsides and the not-straight, not-curly hair. They’re all the angels of me she did that day I remember, and when I quit staring at them long enough to look one last time at her, I know she’s seeing me. I can tell the way her eyes stay steady right on mine, and by something about the way her mouth stays shut, and I look back at those angels, and I look back at her seeing me, and it’s like I was buried under this avalanche all this time, for years and years and years and forever, and then somehow, some way, I just got dug right out.
* * *
The official lady with the bald spot at the top of her head makes me sign that space in the book where it’s what time I’m leaving.
“It’s good you came when you did,” she goes. “Mrs. Harper won’t live much longer.”
America, I sign. 3:43 p.m.
* * *
I ask Dr. B. why Liza keeps changing her mind on me all the time.
“Why do you think?” Dr. B. goes, and I tell him he better learn some new tricks because his shit is getting old.
Me and Liza always end up fooling around after messing with the vegetable garden, and she always lets me get pretty far and then starts with all that bull about how it’s going to mess us up if we keep on.
The peppers poke out first, and then the tomatoes, and me and Liza pick the ripe ones, and then I kick Kevin and Ben and the new dude out of the kitchen.
“Function this,” I tell Kevin, when he starts to bitch about how I’m hyperaggressive, and I toss his ass out.
While Liza and me are washing everything, I get to noticing how tomatoes aren’t truly red, like people say, but they’re more orange with gold flecks.
“These are going to taste good,” Liza goes. “Homegrown stuff is always the best.”
“Can’t believe it’s shit made this garden grow,” I tell her.
“Believe it,” she tells me. “The more shit things get, the better they come out.”
Dear America,
We are saddened to inform you of the passing of your mother, Mrs. Sylvia Harper. We regret that we were unable to contact you prior to the memorial arrangements. Unfortunately, a transition in staff resulted in the temporary misplacement of resident records, and so we were unable to find your information. Mrs. Harper died peacefully in her sleep several days following your visit. If you wish to know the location of her burial, please feel free to contact us.
Enclosed are your mother’s personal effects, which, as indicated in her will, now belong to you.
We hope you will accept our most sincere sympathies.
Jessica Samuels
Riverside View
“What happened?” I sit in my chair and hand him their stupid-ass letter. He reads it, quiet, in his head. “America,” he goes. “I’m so sorry.”
“Whatever,” I go, and then I’m crying like some kind of pussy. He doesn’t say jack for a while, and I’m all trying to stare him down, all ready to curse his ass out for something, only he didn’t do shit. “The hell is your problem?” I go, only it’s real hard to talk when you’re crying. He shakes his head, and he’s got water in his eyes, and I can’t even believe it. “You crying, B.?” I go. He shakes his head again. “You crying?” I go, still at it, my own self.
“What if I’m sad for you?” he goes, his voice all cracking.
“You try to hug me, or something, and I’ll mess you up good,” I go.
He shakes his head one last time, and then grabs a tissue from the box next to his phone and blows his nose. It honks like a motherfucker. “I’m not trying anything,” he goes.
Grown
IT’S REAL LATE, and I know from the sounds of things that everybody’s asleep, even Kevin is done sneaking porn and back, unbusted, in his room. I don’t think about it too hard, but I haul my bag I got that day at the mall from under my bed, and I stay real quiet and take myself out by the hammock, next to the garden. After I look at the stars and the moon for a minute, I pull out the red plastic lighter and those fifty-seven pairs of shoelaces. I get the shoelaces together, and I tie them in one big-ass knot, and then I light them on fire, and I hold them by their own tail until the flame gets close to my fingers, and then I drop them right into the dirt. The soil. I watch until the flame gets almost used up, and then I stomp on it a couple of times, and then I throw my lighter so hard, I never even hear it land. Then I lie some more out here. And I wrap my big old fingers over the black, round ring hanging off the gold chain around my neck. And I think some things.
Like how when you’re a kid, you don’t know squat, and by the time you get older and figure out what you could have done and should have done and what everybody else could have done and should have done, it’s too damn late. So you can have a lot of regrets if you’re not careful. And how all that messed up my head so deep, it convinced me for a little bit of a while that maybe I should die before I hit eighteen, just to show for real how bad I was feeling. And now. Now I don’t even know what all happened, but I’m thinking, Damn. I’m here, I’m alive. What next?
* * *
Now, my big old feet stick way out over the end of the bed, and I can feel little bits of the garden stuck to my soles, and my skin’s real dusty the way you get at the end of a day, and I’m thinking I ought to get my ass in the shower, but my eyes and my whole self is all heavy, so forget it. I’ll wait until morning.
* * *
We’re angels. Me and Brooklyn and Ty and Liza and Lyle and Clark Poignant and Dr. B. and Fish and Wick and Marshall and Ernie and Tom, and we’re all different. Some of us are the color of leaves, and some of us have blue edges around our wings, and some of us are silver, and we can fly. We can fly way high to get away if we want to, but we don’t want to. We’re all over some big yard, and we’re flying behind the weeds that grow up at the bottom of the fence, and underneath the kitchen window boxes full of tulips and in the grass, and I hear, Ready or not here I come, and I hear, Peekaboo, and I hear, Where’s America? and I hear, There he is, I see you, and then this big huge old hand from right out of the sky is lifting me up, gentle as all, and it’s warm and softer than a
nything you ever knew in your whole damn life, and I am found. I am found.
A Word from E. R. Frank
As a clinical social worker who has practiced in Manhattan, Brooklyn, and New Jersey, I’ve known many Americas. They have been as young as nine and as old as fifty-six. Male and female. Unlike the boy America of my novel, most did not free-fall through the cracks of the system but became stuck instead: in prison, hospitals, addiction, homelessness, violence.
I’ve often wondered how useful a therapist’s presence in the lives of these Americas could be. Usually their treatment is court- or school-mandated and seems limited, inconsistent. But what would happen if an America actually had the opportunity to be in one place at one time with one competent and caring therapist? Would it really make a difference? How could such a long-term treatment come about for someone not wealthy or grounded in a supportive family or community? Can a young person who has been traumatized several times over put himself back together again, and if so, how?
For me the answer lies in a healing relationship. It could be a teacher, a cousin, a neighbor. It doesn’t have to be a therapist, but a therapist is whom I picked. Dr. B. was inspired by several supervisors and colleagues I’ve met and worked with over the years. He is effective, in part, not because he behaves perfectly, but because sometimes he makes mistakes and then handles his mistakes honestly.
But Dr. B. has a difficult task: America has experienced abandonment, sexual abuse, emotional violence, and all manner of loss. Not surprisingly then, America has been driven to the deepest caverns of his being. My belief is that a healthy, loving relationship very early in life, which is not tainted by betrayal, can be the mitigating factor, the one experience that can pull a person back from the edge of darkness. Which is why, in order for America to catch hold of Dr. B.’s lifeline, he had to have Mrs. Harper’s first.
So America, Dr. B., Mrs. Harper, Browning, and all the rest in this novel are made up. They’re complete fiction, except in spirit. That is to say, these characters are the result of my cumulative experiences and imaginings. They could easily have walked through my office door, but instead, they settled in my heart.
Turn the page for a preview of E. R. Frank’s gritty new novel, Dime.
WHEN I FIRST understood what I was going to do, I expected to write the note as Lollipop. But in the six weeks since then, I’ve had to face facts. Lollipop has lived in front of one screen or another her whole life, possesses the vocabulary of a four-year-old, can’t read, and thinks a cheeseburger and a new pair of glitter panties are things to get excited about. Using her is just a poor idea.
Back in August, Daddy assigned Lollipop to me, saying, You school her. I must have been doing a good job hiding my insides from him, or he wouldn’t have. L.A. was still the only one of us who was allowed to touch the money. If she found out, it would be the second time she’d learn about Daddy asking me to hold coins. Which would only make things worse than they already were.
Lollipop didn’t know the difference between a twenty and a one. “What’s that?” She held out her hands, nails trimmed neatly and painted little-girl pink. She was polite, even if she was stupid. “May I touch it, please?”
“Nobody touches the money but Daddy.”
“Listen to you,” Brandy said from the couch where she was dabbing Polysporin on the cut over her eye that was taking so long to heal. “Cat gave back your tongue?”
“You’re touching the money now,” Lollipop said. She leaned her head in close to get the best look she could. Then she sniffed. At the one first. Then the twenty. “It stinks.”
“Stop,” I told her. “Money is dirty. You don’t know where it’s been. Don’t put your nose on it.”
Brandy grunted. “That there the funniest thing I heard all week.” She didn’t sound amused.
I pointed. “That’s a two.” I pointed again. “That’s a zero. That’s twenty.”
“I know that says twenty.” Lollipop pretended to be offended. She was obviously lying. “What’s that one?”
“A one next to a zero is ten. You didn’t even learn any of this from TV?”
“They have numbers on Sesame Street all the time,” Lollipop said. “And Little Einsteins. Mickey Mouse Clubhouse. They have it on a bunch of stuff. So I know them, but I never paid attention to what’s more. Only I know a hundred is a lot and a thousand is even more than that. A thousand keeps me pretty in pink.”
“Do you know letters?” I asked.
Lollipop nodded. “Yeah,” she said. “TV and Uncle Ray taught me those.”
Brandy grunted again. “I bet he did.”
“Do you know how to read?”
“Some signs.” Lollipop scrunched up her face, thinking. “Exit.”
I waited.
“Ladies. Um. Ice.”
I waited some more.
“Maybe that’s all the signs I know. But I can read two books.”
That didn’t seem likely. “Which ones?”
“ ‘In the great green room, there was a telephone and a red balloon . . .’ ”
Some kind of a hiss or a gasp or the sound of a punctured lung came out of Brandy.
“ ‘. . . and a picture of the cow jumping over the moon.’ ”
Brandy flew off the couch as much as anybody still limping can and smacked Lollipop so hard that Lollipop fell, a perfect handprint seeping onto her cheek. She didn’t cry out a sound. Not a whimper, not a squeak. She just got still, like a statue knocked over. You have to respect an eleven-year-old who gets smacked like that for no good reason and keeps quiet. That Uncle Ray trained her well.
“Brandy!” I stepped between the two of them. Brandy wasn’t weak, but this. This was a whole side of her I never knew existed.
Her face was twisted up again the way it had been the other day with Daddy, only now it was beat up from him, fat lip and bruised eyes.
“What was that?” Brandy asked Lollipop. Her cut seeped blood right through the shiny Polysporin. “What was that?”
Lollipop answered as plain as she could manage. She didn’t move any part of herself but her mouth. “Goodnight Moon.”
“Get off the floor.”
“Brandy.” Those flames that were lit in my belly the day we took Lollipop rose up, flaring. Was Brandy going to turn vicious now, on top of everything with Daddy? But Lollipop was standing, calm as anything.
“Don’t you ever say those words again.” Brandy smacked Lollipop’s other cheek. Lollipop went down. This time tears oozed like rain dribbling down a wall.
“Daddy’s going to kill you,” I told Brandy. Even saying Daddy made me want to slide through the floor and die, but there was nowhere to slide to and no way to die, so somehow I just kept on.
Brandy slipped around the corner to the alcove where my sleeping bag was. I heard her zipping into it. L.A.’s going to kill you! I wanted to shout, but the cat took back my tongue again. Anyway, probably Daddy was getting home before L.A., who was doing an outcall. So Daddy would get to Brandy first.
I hauled Lollipop up and propped her on the couch. I made sure the bills we had been studying were in my back pocket. Then I wrapped ice in a paper towel and held it to both sides of her face. She had white features and good, light-brown hair. Her skin was the color of wet sand. Mostly she seemed white, but with that color, it was confusing. She was prettier than the rest of us. Baby-faced.
“What’s the other book you know?” I asked her. “Whisper.” I didn’t want Brandy hearing anything else that might make her charge back out here. But it had been a long time since anybody could talk to me about any kind of book.
“ ‘Be still,’ ” Lollipop whispered. “It’s monsters. There’s more, but I can’t remember it right now.”
Somebody who smelled like barbecue potato chips used to cuddle me on her lap and read to me. I didn’t remember the reader; just that salty, smoky scent and something scratchy on my left shoulder every time a page was turned. I remembered the books, though: Goodnight Moon and T
he Snowy Day.
“ ‘A wild ruckus,’ ” Lollipop tried.
“Rumpus.” I used to love Where the Wild Things Are.
E. R. FRANK is the author of four novels. Her second book, America, was made into a made-for-television movie. In addition to being a writer, she is also a psychotherapist with a specialty in trauma. She has earned a postgraduate certificate from New York’s Institute for Contemporary Psychotherapy and is a consultant in Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing (EMDR) therapy. E. R. Frank is a member of the Child Welfare League of America’s national advisory board and is also an advisory board member of New York City’s Behind the Book. After many years of living in Brooklyn and Manhattan, she has settled in New Jersey with her husband and two children. You can visit her at erfrank.com.
A RICHARD JACKSON BOOK
Atheneum Books for Young Readers
SIMON & SCHUSTER | NEW YORK
Watch videos, get extras, and read exclusives at
TEEN.SimonandSchuster.com
authors.simonandschuster.com/E-R-Frank
Also by E. R. Frank
Dime
Friction
Life Is Funny
Wrecked
ATHENEUM BOOKS FOR YOUNG READERS • An imprint of Simon & Schuster Children’s Publishing Division • 1230 Avenue of the Americas, New York, New York 10020 • www.SimonandSchuster.com • This book is a work of fiction. Any references to historical events, real people, or real places are used fictitiously. Other names, characters, places, and events are products of the author’s imagination, and any resemblance to actual events or places or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental. • Text copyright © 2002 by E. R. Frank • Cover illustration copyright © 2015 by Neil Swaab • Cover design and hand-lettering by Russell Gordon • Cover illustration copyright © 2015 by Neil Swaab • All rights reserved, including the right of reproduction in whole or in part in any form. • ATHENEUM BOOKS FOR YOUNG READERS is a registered trademark of Simon & Schuster, Inc. • Atheneum logo is a trademark of Simon & Schuster, Inc. • For information about special discounts for bulk purchases, please contact Simon & Schuster Special Sales at 1-866-506-1949 or business@simonandschuster.com. • The Simon & Schuster Speakers Bureau can bring authors to your live event. For more information or to book an event, contact the Simon & Schuster Speakers Bureau at 1-866-248-3049 or visit our website at www.simonspeakers.com. • Interior design by Mike Rosamilia; cover design and hand-lettering by Russell Gordon • The text for this book is set in Bembo. • This Atheneum Books for Young Readers paperback edition May 2015 • The Library of Congress has cataloged the hardcover edition as follows: • Frank. E. R. • America / E. R. Frank. • p. cm. • “A Richard Jackson book.” • Summary: Teenage America, a part-black, part-white, part-anything boy who has spent many years in institutions for disturbed, antisocial behavior, tries to piece his life together. • ISBN 978-0-689-84729-5 (hc) • [1. Emotional problems—Fiction. 2. Racially mixed people—Fiction.] I. Title. • PZ7.F84913 Am 2002 • [Fic]—dc21 2001022984 • ISBN 978-1-4814-5138-3 (pbk) • ISBN 978-1-4391-3223-4 (eBook)