by Caela Carter
With more thoughts, with more days, we became more solid. Days passed and days passed and we became closer and closer to real.
We were your thoughts. . . . And then we were kids that no one knew what to do with.
That’s where we come from, my brother and me.
We come from you.
Twenty
FAMILIES GET SEPARATED
AN HOUR LATER, WE PULL UP outside a brick house with blue shutters. My blood slows down. My breath comes more smoothly. I feel a headache I didn’t even know was there dissolve out of my skull through my hair.
“Now, we’re heading pretty far back in time at this one,” Person says from the front seat. “You were with Marta over a year. You were with Gloria for eleven months. And you’ve been with me for about two years now. So when you left this home you were seven and eight. I just want you guys to know that if you don’t remember that would be totally normal and not mean anything about . . .”
But I’m already shaking my head.
And Julian says, “This is . . . familiar.”
And we get out of the car without Person even telling us to.
It’s not that there’s anything specific I remember yet. It’s only good feelings and a certainty that I’ve been on the other side of the door.
It bursts open and two women rush out of it, calling our names. “Julian!” “Flora!” “Flora!” “Julian!”
One is white and one is black. They are the same height but the black one is skinny and the white one is not. They have smiles that look like someone drew a smile on a pancake in maple syrup.
They’re rushing at us.
Within seconds we’re in their arms. I don’t remember this woman’s name but I remember her smell. I remember the soft folds of her body making a perfect cushion for my head. I remember in a way that doesn’t have words or facts, just feelings.
I remember riding on her shoulders.
At the same time, they pull back and look at us and then they switch and the other mom is holding me.
They switch again.
Again.
They’re crying and smiling at the same time.
After about four hugs, I wonder what’s happened to Person and when I turn I see she’s standing a few feet away, smiling and crying too. She sort of looks like she’s watching something touching and emotional on television. She looks separate.
I want to pull her into this hug but I don’t know how.
When the women stop hugging us, they rush at Person. Julian and I watch three women smiling and crying over us, their arms tight around each other. “Thank you, thank you,” the women say to Person. “Thank you.”
Finally, one of the women pulls back and takes Person’s face in her hands. “Honey,” she says. “We were afraid we’d never get to see them again.”
I realize that I’m smiling. And when I look hard at these women, side by side, I realize that I do remember them in some sort of real way. I’m not sure what their names are. I called them each “Mommy.”
A little while later they lead us into the brick house.
The smell is instantly familiar. It’s honey and cinnamon and something else that says “home.” A million memories rush back at me in a way that makes me dizzy and confused, but I somehow manage to hold on to some of the happy. It’s not like entirely new memories. More like the other half of half memories. I remembered cooking with someone in a kitchen sometimes. Now I remember the someone and the kitchen. “Weren’t there more . . . colors? Toys?”
Julian and Person gasp quietly and I realize that I said that out loud. My words are back. Of course they are. I’m transported here—far away from fifth grade and Marta and ever being separate from Julian.
The black mom chuckles. “Well,” she says, “I don’t have any kids living here anymore so there aren’t toys and artwork and all of that around.”
“You don’t?” Person says.
“How long did we live here?” I ask.
“Flora!” the white mom says. “Listen to you. Your voice is just beautiful!”
“It still gets stuck sometimes,” I say. And the mom nods at me like she knows what I mean. She looks right at me without bending down or squatting or making me feel like she’s looking down at me even though she’s a lot taller than me. I don’t know how she does that, it seems like magic and it makes me feel good and grown and important.
“You and your brother lived here three years,” she says. “And we loved you every single day and we’ve loved you every day since.” She smiles. “You call me Margie now, OK?”
“And you’ll call me Vanessa,” the other mom says. “Because praise the Lord you’ve got a forever mommy now!” She pats Person on the hand. Person looks nervous even though the rest of us look happy. “Now come in!” Vanessa says. “I’ve got a spread laid out for you.”
We follow her into the dining room. It’s covered in all of our favorite foods. And hanging above it is a homemade construction paper banner that says, “Welcome back, Flora and Julian!”
“Score!” Julian says, and immediately runs toward the pizza. Then he freezes and looks back at the moms. “Sorry, I mean, may I please have some pizza?”
Vanessa laughs big and bold. “You may! It’s for you, isn’t it?”
We all make plates and sit around the table, Vanessa and Margie talking the whole time.
“We took these children to swimming lessons,” Margie is saying. “And Julian was just terrified of the water. But Flora, she jumped right in. We thought it’d be the other way around but no. Flora would have swum right across the pool if she were able. And Julian. He stood on the side saying ‘sister, sister’ the whole time that first lesson.”
Vanessa and Margie laugh.
“But he got in the water eventually,” Vanessa says. “We got this little one swimming.”
“So you’re who taught them to swim,” Person whispers, almost like a prayer.
“Sure did!” Margie says.
“We still know how!” Julian chirps, and I hope hope hope he’s as happy as I am right now and not faking happy. I would have been happier every day of fourth grade if I only remembered that this house existed the whole time.
“What else?” I say. “What else did you teach us?”
I pick up a piece of fried broccoli and take the tiniest bite. I forgot all about fried broccoli and how I love it. I’m eating it as slowly as possible. I want this meal to last all day and into tomorrow.
“Well, let’s see,” Vanessa says. “We got you set up with speech lessons, Flora. When you first came to us you were four years old and barely talking. By the time you left you were a regular old chatterbox!”
“Speech?” I say. A vague memory comes over me of a person helping me learn how to shape my mouth for certain words and letters.
“Thank you,” Person says. “Wow. Thank you for that.”
“I’m not a chatterbox, though,” I say. I think about everything that happened between these two moms and Person. I wonder if all of those in-between people stole my lung filters.
“We can get you speech therapy if it’ll help, Flora,” Person says. She’s talking too fast. “That’s a good idea. We can get you back to chatterbox. Or you don’t have to be a chatterbox. Whatever you want.”
“What else?” Julian says.
“Well, you guys were preschoolers,” Margie says. “So of course we worked on the basics. You learned your colors and your animals and the alphabet and how to count.”
I look around the room. I can see the living room through one of the dining room doors and I can see the little kitchen through the other one. I learned the beginning of math here. Right here.
“And we played a lot. Julian, we potty trained you,” Vanessa says.
“Thank you,” Person says. She keeps saying thank you. Like Vanessa and Margie were a training ground for Person the way Ms. K was a training ground for fifth grade.
I don’t think I like the thank yous.
“We dressed y
ou up for Halloween. Julian, when you were five you were just dying to be a tortoise. You kept saying ‘I don’t want to be a turtle, Mommy, I want to be a tortoise.’”
Margie stops talking and looks at Person. “Sorry . . . I mean, they . . . they were with us a while. They called us Mom then.”
Person’s eyes get big. They look wet. “I know,” she says. She isn’t smiling.
But I can’t think about it too much because I’m so hungry. Not for food. I finished my pizza and fried broccoli. I’m hungry for these stories.
Margie pats Person on the hand.
“Anyway,” Vanessa says. “We kept asking you what the difference was between a tortoise and a turtle so we could figure out the right costume for you. And you kept answering ‘no ribbons.’ We had no idea what you meant. Do you?”
Julian shakes his head. I shake mine too even though she’s talking to Julian. I want to know what little Julian thought ribbons had to do with turtles. I want to remember little Julian more than I do. More than just that he was there.
“You were talking about Ninja Turtles!”
“Oh!” Julian says.
“Oh!” I say.
We all laugh.
“I wanted to be the animal. I thought all turtles were cartoons!” Julian says, and I wonder if he’s remembering or just filling in the blanks.
“That’s right,” Margie says. She drums her fingers on the table. “Let’s see. What else can we tell you?”
“Normal,” I say. And everyone looks at me.
“What, Flora?” Vanessa says.
“I want to hear the normal.”
Person says, “Explain, sweetie.”
So I take a second. I put my words together. I say, “Can you tell me about a normal day?”
“Oh,” Vanessa says. She closes her eyes and takes a deep breath, almost like she’s resetting.
“We can do that,” Margie says.
And they talk. What they’re saying is the most important stuff ever, but I only half listen. I don’t pay attention to particular words or to which mom is talking at any given moment. Instead, I let the meaning of it wash over me.
As they speak, I’m able to remember it, the living here, the normal-ness.
Vanessa waking me up every morning and helping me get into the clothes we’d laid out the day before. Vanessa cooking us breakfast and taking us to school. Margie picking us up at the end of the day and asking us about the day’s highlights on the car ride home. She always used that word: highlights. Afternoons with Margie always looked different—the park, or baking cookies, or playing with toys in the living room, or making a craft—but somehow they were always a little the same. Dinner around this table when Vanessa came home from work and how it was always warm food in the winter. Learning to use a knife and fork and stay at the table until everyone was finished. Bedtime routine with either mom that involved stories and being tucked into the top bunk while Julian was tucked into the bottom.
The feelings of it all come back.
Security. Love. Family.
Having two parents who work together.
Having two parents who love my brother like they love me.
Having two parents who love each other like they love us.
“We’re making it sound pretty idyllic, I’m afraid,” Vanessa says. “We had our rough moments.”
“Of course,” Margie says. “We had regression and behaviors and tantrums and all of that. It wasn’t all easy. But . . . we’ve been missing them so much for so long.”
“So the good parts are what we remember,” Vanessa says.
And then I feel lucky. For the first time in my life, I feel lucky. Lucky to have found people who choose to remember only the good parts of me and not how angry I am and how hard it is for me to talk and how I’m someone from nowhere.
Margie goes into the kitchen and comes back with a yellow cake. “I brought dessert,” she says.
She places it right in front of me and the smell of lemon crawls up my nostrils and wiggles into my brain and somehow gets to my memory.
“Lemon cake!” I say. “I wanted a lemon cake!”
Vanessa laughs. “That’s right. When you were—”
“No!” I shout, making Person and Julian and both the moms jump.
“Sorry,” I say. “I want to tell it. I think I can remember.”
“OK,” Margie says. She sits without slicing the cake and I think-think-think-think-think harder than I ever have.
“It was my birthday, right?” I say.
Both the moms nod.
“How old?” I ask.
“Seven,” Vanessa says quietly. “It was only a few weeks before you left.”
I nod and think and think.
“I saw a lemon cake on television. With lemons on it.”
“Yup,” Margie says.
“I said ‘I want that kind’ or something, and then someone said she didn’t know how to make a lemon cake.”
“That would be me!” Margie says.
“We watched a video about it?”
“That’s right,” Margie says. “We looked up how to do it on the internet.”
“We went to the store and bought the lemons,” I say.
“And everything else,” Margie says.
“And then we made the cake together,” I say.
“Wow,” Person says. “Wow. Flora. That was amazing.” She looks impressed and sad at the same time.
I feel like I won a trophy. I feel like I won the whole world. I feel so exhausted from all the remembering and all the words that I could fall asleep in the lemon cake in front of me. The lemons are shiny on the top of it. I remember that’s from letting them sit in sugar syrup.
Margie slices the cake and we eat.
Person sighs.
Vanessa pats her hand. “Are you OK, Mommy?” she asks.
“It’s just they had this whole life,” Person says. “You guys were amazing and . . .”
“And what happened?” Margie says.
“Yeah,” Julian says. “What happened?”
Person nods but it looks like she wanted to say something else. “I hate to have to ask the tough questions,” she says.
“I know,” Vanessa says. “If we all loved each other so much, why did they leave? Right?”
“Right,” Person says.
I stop eating. My fork crashes into the plate. I suddenly think this lemon cake is the grossest thing in the world.
I don’t want to hear about the awful thing I did to make these two sugary wonderful women give us up.
“You guys are nine and eleven now,” Margie says. “So it’s truth time.” She turns to Person. “That’s what this is about, huh?”
“Yes,” Person says. “Their therapist says by the time they’re twelve, they should know everything I know. But I don’t know too much. No one knows that much about these kids, my kids. And they’re asking now so . . .”
“Good for you. Doing that hard work,” Margie says. “Well . . . the official story from the state is that they left to find more permanent placements.”
“Permanent?” Julian cries.
“I know,” Vanessa says. “I gather it didn’t turn out that way.”
“Why couldn’t you permanent?” The words fall out of me like usual. I don’t want the answer.
But of course I need it. I need the whole truth. I need to know about all the awful things that meant we had to move and move and move.
Margie reaches out and pats my cheek. “You know we wanted to, Flora. More than anything we wanted to be your moms.”
Vanessa pats Julian’s cheeks. “And yours.”
And once again I’m reminded how great it was: two moms for two kids.
“So what happened?” Person asks.
Even though it doesn’t matter anymore. I didn’t mess it up. She wanted me. They wanted us. That’s the part that counts.
“Flora and Julian came to us when they were three and four years old. At the time, their goal was still Retu
rn to Parent,” Vanessa says.
“What does that mean?” I ask.
Vanessa looks at me. “It means your caseworkers and the judge and everyone was still hoping you could go back to your first family.”
My eyebrows go up. All of these people thought we had a first family. A bio family. All of them were wrong.
Because they have to be wrong. Because we couldn’t have had a first mother. Because if we did . . . where did she go?
“You were coming from an emergency placement, meaning you were supposed to be there just a short while. They decided they needed to get you settled somewhere because it was taking a long time to find a relative.”
“Did they ever find anyone?” Julian asks.
Margie sighs. “We don’t think so, but to be honest, we don’t know. Since we were never the legal parents and we never got a chance to adopt you, we weren’t ever allowed to read your whole file.”
“But . . . ,” Person says. “Why didn’t you adopt them?”
“The official story from the state is that our house was deemed inappropriate,” Vanessa says.
Julian and I look around. “Why?” he asks.
“Well, we only had two bedrooms. We had you guys sharing a room. And once children are seven, it’s considered inappropriate to have them share a room unless they’re the same sex.”
“So we had to leave because Julian’s not a girl?” I ask.
That’s the stupidest thing I’ve ever heard. And I know I worded it weirdly. I’m afraid for a second that they’re going to giggle like I’m being cute even though this is way too important for giggling.
They don’t.
“No,” Margie says. “We’d never blame Julian!” She pats his hand and I nod and I want to tell him that’s not what I meant but I think he knows already. “And anyway, we told them we’d move before he turned seven. We said we’d give one of the kids our room and we’d sleep in the living room if necessary. But they took the kids anyway.”
“What?” Julian says. “Why?”
I can see Person’s sad heart right through her eyes. “No,” she says. “It wasn’t . . .”
Margie nods. “We’ll never know. We can’t prove it. But it felt . . .”