You Should Pity Us Instead

by Amy Gustine

Slowly, his crying diminishes and Sarah turns to Beatrice. “Do you want to make some real cupcakes?”

  “It took no time at all to spot him,” Melanie tells Sarah.

  They’re in the kitchen, Sarah washing frosting fingerprints from the cupboards while Melanie pretends to make headway on the counters. Long smears mixed with sprinkles and Red Hots—which Beatrice inexplicably adores—Pollock the white marble, but Melanie is only pinching individual candies, making no real progress, in an attempt to protect her silk blouse.

  Bea greeted her mother nearly quivering with excitement—“Grayson almost died!”—and Sarah quickly intervened.

  “A bee stung him. You have a big nest in the backyard. I iced the spot and watched him carefully. He had no trouble breathing, and the swelling was very slight. I gave him a dose of Tylenol for the pain.”

  Melanie is pleased at her handling of the crisis. “I knew you were the one for us.”

  Now Grayson is playing with some pots and plastic spatulas, Bea has taken herself off and Sarah knows she’s gotten away with it. There will be no mention of her disappearance. She applies another squirt of soap to the sponge and waves Melanie off.

  From the safety of a counter stool, Melanie continues her story about a student. “He’s one of my Ethans.” There are three in her class, the name’s popularity having surged at the turn of the millennium. Melanie considered it herself, she tells Sarah, but aware of name contamination—every teacher develops strong associations with previous students that ruin otherwise good names—she chose Grayson instead. “Because it’s my dad’s name, I knew I’d always love it.”

  Ethan K. is new at school and Melanie declares, “He’s going to be my problem kid.”

  She ticks off the “flags” she found in his file. #1: He lives in an apartment on Moss Road. #2: No father listed. #3: Only one emergency contact listed, a man’s name, and under “Relationship” it says “friend.”

  “Today I kept him in because he’s behind in language, so I have him there trying to squeeze out a paragraph about his summer, and I find out he’s alone all the time. His mother ‘works.’” Melanie does air quotes. “Okay, so has she ever heard of a babysitter? Or summer camp? I asked what he did all day and he says he plays his Nintendo DS. Lovely, right? No wonder he can barely eke out an English sentence. And he eats peanut butter sandwiches every day for lunch.”

  “They’re filling, and cheap.”

  “Right.” Melanie rolls her eyes.

  As she details the many angry outbursts Ethan K. has had in the weeks since school started, Sarah realizes it could have been her fourth-grade teacher, Mrs. Schuppe, who reported her mother. She’d always assumed it was the neighbor, Mrs. Zabik, because she left the door to her apartment open, would have seen Sarah’s mother coming and going, and her mother had often warned Sarah not to give Mrs. Zabik any information. “Anything you say can and will be held against you.”

  But what about Mrs. Schuppe and the teachers before her? They knew of all those days missed, heard her mother’s excuses. A rash. A doctor’s appointment. A family reunion. Or maybe Sarah herself told Mrs. Schuppe something incriminating. Listening to Melanie, she learns again what she already knew: everywhere, by everyone, things can and will be held against you. Things you never even thought to hide, like the street you live on or the emergency contact on your school form. It could have been something as simple as that which brought Sarah to the attention of Judge Grayson Cuppernell.

  Four bedrooms. Eight closets. Three bathrooms. A basement storage room full of boxes.

  Sarah makes her way through it all during TV time, when the kids are too captivated by Disney to notice her whereabouts. In the hollowed-out pages of a book about the Lewis and Clark expedition she finds a pair of diamond earrings and a couple of old-looking pieces of jewelry—a pin and an engagement ring—all of which she leaves untouched. In the master closet in a shoebox under other shoeboxes she finds a blue rubber dildo. She knows instinctively what it’s for, but not what it means. Does Aaron know it’s here? Is it normal to have such a thing? Sarah washes her hands.

  Their medicine cabinet conceals the usual supplies—tampons, toothpaste, fungus cream, Benadryl, Advil—plus something called Zovirax, which Sarah looks up on Wikipedia using Melanie’s computer. Usually Wikipedia sends her mind dodging and weaving in too many directions, one article pushing her forward to a web of a hundred more, until she quits not because she understands, but because she never will.

  In this case, though, it’s only two links to the answer: a picture of the familiar cluster of blisters on the edge of a lip. They bloom on Sarah’s every three or four months.

  That evening Sarah rides her bike to the drugstore, looks on the shelves, then goes up to the pharmacy counter.

  “You need a script,” the pharmacist says.

  Sarah assumes she can get one at the free clinic. “How much is it? I don’t have insurance.”

  The pharmacist taps at the computer. “A hundred and fifty.”

  “Dollars?”

  “I know. It’s expensive. Have you tried the new exchanges?” The pharmacist explains Obamacare.

  It sounds like an innocent enough trade: information for medicine. But the government took her mother and gave her nothing. She is reluctant to exchange with them again.

  The next day Sarah puts the Zovirax from Melanie’s medicine cabinet in her pocket. It is a very small piece, she figures, of what this family owes her.

  Wednesday, two p.m., she announces she’s going to the neighbor’s for an egg.

  “You can’t,” Bea says. “Grayson is sleeping.”

  “You’ll stay here and watch him.”

  “I can’t do that.” Bea flashes a big grin. She thinks Sarah is kidding.

  “Sure you can. Just sit here and wait. If he cries, go upstairs and talk to him. He won’t, though. I’ll be back in a bit.”

  “What’s a bit?”

  “Ten minutes,” Sarah says.

  Bea looks at the big grandfather clock she can’t read. “I want to go with you.”

  “You’ll be fine here. You have to stop panicking about being alone. It’s no big deal. I was alone all the time at your age.”

  “You were?”

  “Yeah, sometimes overnight.” Sarah stops herself from saying more, in case Bea repeats this to Melanie.

  “Okay.” Bea sits down on the couch and crosses her legs, her tiny hands cupping her tiny knee.

  Outside Sarah stands in the bushes next to a window sneaking looks into the living room, where Bea sits rigidly, glancing repeatedly at the clock. After two minutes, she looks at the TV remote lying on the end table. House rules: no more than two hours a day, and that’s reserved for an hour after nap time and an hour after dinner, for Melanie and Aaron to grab some quiet time.

  At Bea’s age, Sarah watched a lot of TV because TV hours are different. Faster. Fuller. They make it easy to pretend your mother is in her room napping and they count the day for you. When the shows about evil twins and men saving women from kidnappers come on, it’s lunchtime. The news: dinnertime. Shows with men on a stage telling jokes: bedtime.

  Very slowly, as if Bea is afraid the remote will bite her, she picks it up and turns on the set. It springs to life with a happy brown-haired woman talking about how to grow a vegetable garden. Bea taps at the remote until Tom and Jerry appears, then scoots back on the couch and relaxes.

  Good girl, Sarah thinks. These are the things you have to learn.

  She thought she would know him. Only now does she realize she’s been picturing his robes, his desk, the great seal of the state of Ohio behind him, but not the man himself.

  He’s short, 5’7” or 8”, her eye level. His right cheek is mottled light and dark in large, irregularly shaped patches and she knows instinctively this is a disease or defect of some kind. It will get worse. Do they hurt? No, she decides. Maybe unsightly, even embarrassing, but they do not cause physical pain.

  “Hi, I’m Melanie’s dad. Did
she tell you I was coming by?”

  Sarah eyes the Judge, then looks behind her toward the kitchen, where Beatrice and Gray are eating lunch, to reinforce her role: she is the one in charge.

  They hear his voice and Beatrice comes running down the hall. “Grandpa!”

  He hauls in a dirty canvas bag filled with tools. “Mel say’s you’ve got no water pressure in the kitchen. I’m going to take a look.”

  He removes a small screen from the spout’s end and cleans out a buildup that looks like hardened baking soda. “Mineral deposits,” he explains. “Mostly calcium.” Getting rid of it doesn’t help the pressure, though, so he heads down to the basement to shut off the water. “I’ll have to replace the valves.”

  Sarah empties the sink cabinet, stacking the cleaners and plant food out of Grayson’s reach. The Judge lies on his back, reaching into the cabinet over his head. The knees of his jeans are white with wear and a triangle of hairy flesh shows where his old button-down pulls free of his belt.

  “Can you hand me the wrench with the red handle?”

  She looks in the bag for anything with a red handle.

  “These are pliers.” He hands them back. “The wrench is the one with the round head.”

  They work like that for an hour, the Judge asking for various tools and a cookie sheet to protect the back of the cupboard. “I’m going to use the blowtorch to solder this in, so keep the kids away.”

  Bea asks what a blowtorch is and when her grandfather explains, she says, “I already got burned today.”

  Sarah stiffens.

  The Judge slides out of the cabinet and sits up. “You were? What happened?”

  Bea presents her leg. “I was cooking.”

  That morning Bea and Sarah made cookies, another food of uncountable raw ingredients and indeterminate portions which makes it easy to squirrel a few away in her tote. Sarah had explained the oven’s heat, showed Bea how to use a potholder, but Bea leaned on the door while taking the cookies out. To her credit, she didn’t even cry. Good girl, Sarah told her. Brave girl. You’ll know better next time. You’ll be more careful. Pain is an efficient teacher. Fortunately Bea doesn’t repeat these words to her grandfather.

  The Judge kisses the red line on her knee. “Ovens are hot. Nothing for little girls to mess with.” Then he winks at Sarah, assuming Bea being near the oven was an accident.

  •

  “So what was it like,” Sarah asks Melanie, “having your father be a judge?”

  Melanie shrugs. “There were a few interesting moments.”

  “Like what?”

  “This one time, I was maybe seven or eight, and these people were upset about a ruling Dad made on an abortion clinic. They were protesting in front of our house, this house, actually.”

  This is Melanie’s family house. Her parents gave it to Melanie and Aaron two years ago.

  “My mom had the twins in the bath, so my brother Tim and I were watching this out front and trying to figure out what was going on. The people had signs with fetuses on them and stuff like ‘Cuppernell kills babies.’ Finally Tim, who was just starting to read, goes into the bathroom and asks my mother, ‘Does Daddy murder babies?’

  “My mom loves to retell that story,” Melanie says. “She always says Tim was waiting until he’d been told what to think of this act Daddy supposedly performed, ready to side with him in case it turns out killing babies is something Daddy is supposed to do.”

  “So what happened?”

  “Mom locked us in the house and marched outside and told the people she had four children in there and they were scared and could read those signs and could those people please go.”

  “Did they?”

  “Yeah. They actually apologized. My mom always said it was because they never thought of Dad as someone with four little kids of his own. I guess they thought that meant he was a good guy.” Melanie shrugs again. “I never did figure it out. I mean, if it was so easy to give up, why had they come?”

  The next day Sarah Googles Aaron, Melanie, the Judge and his wife. Wife: zero hits. Melanie and Aaron: two each. Judge Grayson Cuppernell: five thousand eight hundred and twenty-four.

  As the leaves redden and fall, Sarah works her way through. Most are official documents and news articles of little significance, but she feels increasingly powerful with the gathering of his facts. Where he went to law school and college. What year he graduated. Newsworthy cases. One day she finds an article about a gavel he gives to kids finalizing adoptions. The other judges who do adoptions—it’s called “Probate Court” Sarah learns—give them too. The article shows Judge Cuppernell handing the gavel to a pretty white girl being adopted by her uncle. Sarah stews on this. Gavels are a symbol of power. Instead of pretty white girls with nice uncles they need to give them to children being put in foster care, something to slam and say, “No! Order, order in this house!” Or they could give them to kids aging out. You are your own parent now. Call your life to order.

  The lessons continue. Sarah teaches Bea how to slice the neck of a banana laterally so the top won’t bruise. She teaches her how to mix Grayson’s formula and change his diaper, how to crack an egg and how to set the heat level on the stove. “Five is usually good. If you aren’t sure, choose five.” It’s too soon for spaghetti, pouring out the boiling water too dangerous, but she teaches her how to make rice, which Sarah used to put in her mother’s shopping cart by the five-pound bag.

  “Really?” her mother would ask, lightly knuckling the top of her head. “Five pounds? That’s a lot of rice.”

  On the days her mother slipped away Sarah would eat it for lunch and dinner with big pads of butter and lots of salt. When they ran out of butter she’d put on ketchup or mayonnaise, and when her mother returned after a night or two, sometimes three, fuzzy-eyed and penitent, Sarah would make twice as much, then her mother would take a bath and Sarah would sit on the toilet and tell funny stories, or ask lots of questions, vainly trying to keep her awake. When she drifted off, Sarah drained the water and covered her with towels.

  •

  Sarah teaches Bea how to work the cordless phone and about 911. “It’s only for emergencies, if there’s a fire or Grayson chokes.”

  The notion of confronting the world alone unsettles Bea. “You can call.”

  “What if I’m not here?”

  “Then Mommy or Daddy will call.”

  “What if Mommy and Daddy aren’t home?”

  “Then I’ll be with Grandma, or Aunt Lydi.”

  “Someday you’ll be alone.”

  “I will?”

  “Everybody is. You have to keep your wits about you.”

  “What are wits?”

  Sarah puts the girl on her lap. “Your smarts, your thinking. You can take care of yourself, Bea. You just have to learn some stuff.”

  “I don’t want to learn stuff. I want you to do it.”

  “And what if something happens to me?”

  “What is going to happen?” Bea starts to cry, little hiccuping bursts that tighten Sarah’s throat.

  “You need to toughen up.” She lifts Bea off her lap and gives her a light swat on the butt. “There’s nothing even wrong right now. What are you crying about?”

  Sarah lives in an efficiency apartment in a complex off Bancroft Street. The Saturday after Thanksgiving she is watching reruns on TBS while the microwave blasts away at leftover spaghetti when a thunderstorm comes up, rain beating the single-paned windows. Sarah has always liked storms, so she takes her dinner and stands watching the lightning, feeling the thunder through her slippered feet. Then, a cracking noise reaches through and before she knows what is happening out there in the dark, Sarah drops her plate, covers her head, and her knees skid across the carpet, the cold air and rain on her. When the cracking noises have stopped, she looks up to see an oak tree suspended above her bed.

  “My God, that’s terrible,” Melanie says. “Where did you go?”

  “I checked into a motel.”

 
; “A motel? Really? Don’t you have a friend or somebody to stay with?”

  Sarah shrugs, embarrassed. She attended seven schools after she was taken from her mother. Kids’ names surface. Amber. Tanya. Ricky. Pat. Julie. She doesn’t know where any of them are now. That was Sarah’s life. One day she was sharing a toothbrush holder with you, the next she never saw you again.

  “Do you have renter’s insurance?” Melanie persists. “Maybe it covers motel.”

  “No, actually my mom said I shouldn’t bother. My stuff, it was so cheap. Not worth the premium.” It was actually Nancy who said this. In her delicate way, with a tilt of her head and a sad smile, the way Nancy said everything.

  “What about your lease? Do you have to honor it?”

  “I don’t know.”

  Before she can stop her, Melanie gets the Judge on the phone. “Dad, yeah, I have a legal question.”

  Sarah has nothing to worry about. The Judge says she will definitely be able to break her lease.

  Melanie insists she stay with them until she finds a new place to rent, but the fourth bedroom is crowded with a huge desk and two bookcases, so she’ll have to sleep with Bea.

  “Do you want the top or the bottom?” Bea asks.

  Bunk beds make Sarah feel as if she’s in a coffin, so she takes the mattress off and sleeps on the floor, tells Bea it’s like a magic carpet. Of course Bea wants her mattress on the floor too, and they sleep like that, side by side, flying all night.

  •

  Evil. That is the word Sarah finds in the blog about Judge Cuppernell taking away Reginald Diglio’s grandchildren. It appears entry after entry. One hundred thirty-eight times. Sarah counts. She finds a news article from five years ago profiling Diglio, who at the time was circling the courthouse in his pickup truck from eight a.m. to five p.m., Monday through Friday, protesting the placement of his grandchildren in foster care. He had a sign mounted in the truck’s bed. “Cuppernell took my kids.” The picture of the sign shows a poster board with slanting, furry-edged letters that had bled, from some sort of homemade stencil she guesses, and Sarah feels an upwelling in her throat. The tears surprise her. Yes, yes, she thinks. He took away your kids.