by Amy Gustine
But the article itself is like reading a blank wall. Simple facts. Only one is useful: Reginald Diglio lives on Mester Road, a two-lane stretching from the western edge of the city into the country, where houses give way to cornfields and scrapyards.
It takes more than an hour to bike there. Sarah’s legs are used to it though, and it’s a warm day for early December in Ohio. Sunny, high forties. She’s feeling strong and optimistic when she enters the last stretch and the signs change over, white with fat black numbers: County Route 24. Half a mile later three giant children’s faces come into view.
Sarah stops across the road. The sign is enormous, wider and taller than either of the rusted trucks sinking into the yard. Superimposed on the kids’ smiles are foot-high letters: “judge cuppernell took my grandchildren.” The rest of the yard is cut into rows by dozens of white paint buckets with metal pipe cemented inside and a piece of plywood lashed to the top displaying a name. Headstones for pets, perhaps. Rudy. Polly. Iris. Tim. Between the rows are other metal, plastic and wooden things intended, she assumes, as sculpture. Behind them stands a dilapidated two-story wooden house. One side disappears into a thicket under which Sarah glimpses what appear to be a mattress and couch slowly rotting.
For five or six minutes she takes in each sculpture, their menacing shapes, like bodies mid-attack, until the front door flies open. Someone shouts, words lost to her as she gets her feet on the pedals, fumbles, turns her tire onto the grass, slides, regains her grip and pedals off, heart like a crack of thunder against her ribs.
“The other kids sense something’s off. It’s because he’s angry all the time. Abused kids are always angry.” Sarah overhears Melanie saying this to someone on the phone.
She has come home mid-conversation, Bluetooth earpiece in place, waved to the kids and Sarah in the sunroom and slid into the kitchen. Sarah strains to hear the rest of the conversation while helping Beatrice finish a Lego princess castle.
“So he walked home today, and I watched out the window. He’s always alone, always, then today these other kids ran up to him and for a second I thought he’d made friends, you know? Then suddenly he slaps one of them across the face. They all stopped, but Ethan never even paused. Just kept walking. There’s something wrong there, don’t you think?”
Melanie’s voice is hard. “I’m sure it’s his mother. I talked to her. She doesn’t care. Too busy with her boyfriend, or her bongs, or something.
“Believe me, I know,” she says, in a tone that makes it sound as though whomever she’s talking to may be questioning how she can be so sure. “She’s skinny, too skinny.”
Melanie considers being too skinny the same thing as being too fat: suspect. “Drugs,” she says. “Maybe alcohol, but I bet drugs.”
A few days before Christmas, Melanie asks about Sarah’s plans. “I take it you aren’t going to Florida? Is your mother coming here?”
Sarah claims her mother is in town staying with an old friend. “I’ll go over there Christmas Day.”
“Okay, then I’m going to give you your present now.”
It’s a gift certificate to Williams-Sonoma.
“You’re such a great cook. I’m sure you can find something you’ll love there.”
Christmas morning Bea shakes Sarah, who pretends to be groggy, though in fact she’s been lying awake for an hour.
“Come on, Santa came! Santa came!” Bea pulls at her arm, but Sarah sends her off.
“I’ll be down. I have to go to the bathroom.”
She listens to the baby’s cry, Bea’s cheerful shouts and Melanie and Aaron’s muttered permissions. The scent of pancakes and bacon, the only two things Aaron can cook, reach her.
At eight Sarah dresses quietly and slips out of the house. First the bus to the Catholic church on Cornish, two warm Masses, then two rides around town, switching every twenty minutes so the driver doesn’t get suspicious, and an early dinner at the Chinese restaurant on Passe Road, the only place open on Christmas Day. From there it’s a two-mile walk back to the Cuppernell’s.
The house is dark, as Sarah expected, Aaron, Melanie and the kids having gone to her parents’ for dinner.
Sarah gets out the pan she bought at Williams-Sonoma, the important one. Her mother owned its twin, the words “All-Clad” engraved on the handle. She had the small saucepan and a stockpot too, but these were indulgences. “The only pan that really has to be top quality is the large sauté,” her mother explained, “so your meat and fish sear evenly and you can scrape the fond off with a metal spatula. Never use non-stick for this. No good. You can’t get the fond.” Her mother showed her how to polish the pans with a white powder and hang them on a rack above the sink in their mint-green kitchen.
Sarah isn’t hungry, but defrosts a chicken breast anyway and while it sizzles, wonders where the pans ended up. She never thought to ask for them. Then again, she was ten when her mother died and a month passed before her foster parents said anything. By that time, the pans were probably long gone.
The chicken is perfect, browned without burning, juicy in the middle. Sarah wraps it up, then polishes her pan with the powder the saleswoman recommended. She hadn’t recalled its name or what the label looked like. She knows this is the right stuff, though, because the pan shines, brand-new again.
The Saturday after New Year’s Sarah has an appointment to see an apartment and Melanie insists on driving her. She’s long since discovered Sarah has no car.
Stained tan carpeting, white walls. It’s another holding cell, like the bedrooms she slept in as a foster child, but it’s partially furnished with a leather couch, bedframe, table and chairs, and the rent is the same as her old place.
“Furnished?” Melanie sneers, turning to Sarah. “Did you want furnished?”
The landlord, a skinny guy wearing yellow pants, loses interest. No sale here.
On the drive home Melanie pulls into another place with a “Units Available” sign out front. Much newer, the complex is set back from the road behind a rolling lawn. The cars line up, protected from the light snow by a long peaked roof. White numbers reserve each spot.
They look at a one-bedroom. It has floors Sarah thinks are wood, but Melanie informs her it’s “just laminate. Looks nice for an apartment, though.”
The pan could hang here. And she’d keep her laundry quarters in a bag in this drawer. Except it costs three times her old place.
Sarah says she’ll think about it. Feeling the need to justify her delay, she claims to be saving for a car.
On the way home Melanie asks if she knows anything about cars.
“No,” Sarah admits.
Melanie smiles. “I’ve got just the man for you, then.”
Within a week Judge Cuppernell has found a used Civic thirty miles away and he’s coming to get Melanie and Sarah to look at it. They ride south on a blustery Sunday in the Judge’s Suburban. Melanie is laughing because Aaron has never been alone for this long with both kids. “Can you believe it? He’s just going to die.”
Her father seems to find this just as funny. “That poor guy. Fathers really have it tough these days.”
Melanie slaps him playfully on the arm. “Oh right, tough. Really tough. How about grandfathers? Have you ever even changed a diaper?”
The Judge laughs. “Avoiding that is one of my main goals in life.”
The Judge looks under the hood and examines the tires, asks questions of the owner, a Hispanic man with a goatee, then has Sarah start up the car and gun the engine. “No blue smoke,” he says, taking her place in the driver’s seat. “Let’s take it for a spin.” As they drive the Judge explains what he’s testing for—alignment, noisy brakes, stopping distance—then pulls over and tells Sarah to take the wheel. “Let’s get on the expressway. See if you feel comfortable with the acceleration.”
As they pull back into the seller’s driveway, the Judge says, “It seems pretty solid to me, and these have good safety crash ratings, for their age anyway. I want you to take it in,
though, and make sure the airbags check out.” He gives her the name of a mechanic he trusts.
Sarah swallows hard as she writes the check. Five thousand dollars. Nearly her entire life’s savings. She’s close to tears, but that’s not why.
She doesn’t go back to the furnished place Melanie sneered at or the complex with the rolling lawn. She finds a place with carpet not as stained and nothing by way of furnishings except a smelly chair in the bedroom. Sarah moves in early February, taking delivery of a brand-new mattress which she puts on a metal frame scored at Goodwill, where she also bought sheets, a blanket, dishes, and silverware. She’s started from scratch before, knows the priorities.
Melanie gives her the yellow couches from the sunroom.
“They were my mom’s. I’ve been looking for an excuse to get rid of them so her feelings won’t be hurt. If you take them, she’ll be happy and I can get something I like. I mean, don’t feel you have to keep them. As soon as you find something better, just toss them.”
Sarah spends the last of her savings paying two guys from her old apartment complex to haul the couches up and heave the stranger’s chair in the dumpster. Watching it go over the edge—gone, forget it, she doesn’t need it—is exhilarating.
Now that Sarah has a car, Melanie begins leaving her money to buy groceries. She tries new vegetables and spices every week, makes casseroles from recipes rather than remainders. One day she goes to a store that sells nothing but fish because she’s going to try making seafood paella, a recipe she found in one of Mrs. Cuppernell’s old cookbooks. At the counter she explains to Bea why the fish are on beds of ice and what “deveined shrimp” means.
On the way home they pass Melanie’s school. It’s lunchtime and the students are out playing, so Sarah texts Melanie, who brings them in to see her classroom. While Bea looks around and Grayson dozes in the stroller, Melanie and Sarah stand at the window.
“Is that him?”
Ethan stands alone against the building, his thick, uncombed hair snagged on its bricks, trying to feign preoccupation with a stick, though it’s painfully obvious he’s just standing, excluded from four-square, basketball, the climbing wall, the monkey bars.
“The way he acts, nobody likes him,” Melanie says. “It’s heartbreaking.” She goes over to help Bea feed the fish.
Ethan twirls the stick like a baton, scraping his fingers on its rough bark. He examines his hand, rubs the pain away, then begins rolling the stick against the building, trying to sand it smooth, until one of the playground monitors, a surly woman in a bright yellow jacket, tells him to quit. Sarah can’t hear every word, but it’s clear she’s telling him he’ll damage the building and Ethan is pleading his case: it’s just a stick against brick. The monitor shakes her grumpy face and points to the ground. Ethan throws the stick down and walks several feet away, to stand behind the trunk of a massive oak. The woman yells something else and he sulks back toward her, forced to take up a position in full view of the other kids.
Childhood, Sarah thinks: a prison made up of lack. A lack of words, of knowing better, of being believed. You are at everyone’s mercy.
Back at Melanie’s house she looks through the toys and comes across a Rubik’s Cube, its edges pockmarked by Gray’s teething, its colors hopelessly jumbled. On the way home, she buys a new cube and the next day prints off tips on how to master it. That evening, she gives them to Melanie.
“He’ll have something to do on the playground at least.”
A week later Melanie reports that Ethan takes the cube out every day and that some other boys have started gathering to watch him.
“It’s really improved things for him. It was a brilliant idea. You should be a teacher. Have you ever considered that? Going to college?”
Sarah dodges the question with a vague plan about saving money. The truth is she has no idea how to go about getting into college, let alone paying for it. Melanie suggests federal loans, scholarships. “Didn’t the school counselor help you with any of this?” Sarah has no recollection of such a person at any of her high schools. A few weeks later, while watching a show about Albert Einstein, she wonders if that’s what went wrong. Maybe you couldn’t switch schools, houses or families too often or too quickly. It frayed the net of space and time. You had to stay put, let the moments link themselves like runners passing the baton. If you don’t, your life slips through, like her mother’s pots and pans.
Rubik’s Cube as anodyne has a short half-life. Within a month, Melanie reports that Ethan is being made fun of because he is too attached to the cube.
“He’s amazing at it, actually, very, very smart, and at first the other boys were impressed, but they can’t do it as well, so now they’re mad, and he just won’t put it down. I finally had to take it away. I mean, I give it to him during recess, that’s it. Otherwise he’ll never listen or do anything else.”
Melanie says watching him align the squares, his face no longer a simulacrum of absorption, but truly captivated, makes her cry. “I mean the thought that a colored block of plastic is all he has.”
“He has his mother,” Sarah says.
Another eye roll. “He comes to school in the same clothes all week and when we have food, you know, for holidays or birthdays, he eats like he hasn’t had a meal in days.” Melanie shakes her head. “I wish I could get some evidence on her, something to report to child services.”
“Don’t do that.” Sarah hears the sharpness of her tone too late, but Melanie is oblivious.
Unloading a stack of papers covered in large, loopy handwriting, the lines of text sloping up and down, she says, “I’m keeping my eye on things. I don’t like that woman.”
Sarah finds Ethan’s last name in Melanie’s grade book, looks up his address and drives by several times thinking vaguely of warning them: be careful, they’re watching you. Their building is a yellow brick fourplex on a street that backs up to a grocery store and gas station. The windows are the same type of silver ones she has in the new apartment and she wonders if they ice up the same way.
One Sunday Ethan is sitting on the front stoop in a jacket and no hat, hands clasped between his knees. Sarah circles the block, then pulls over and gets out. “You okay? Are you locked out?”
Ethan looks at her a long moment as if he doesn’t speak English. “No.”
“Well, what’re you doing sitting out here? It’s awfully cold, and you don’t have a hat or gloves.”
“I’m okay.”
“That’s a light jacket. Do you have a coat? A winter coat?”
Ethan stares at her sullenly. “Who are you?”
“I’m a friend of your mom’s.”
“She’s inside.” Ethan scoots over for her to pass.
“Aren’t you coming in?”
“I have to stay out here.”
“Have to? Why?”
Again he gives her that look that lets her know she has no business here.
“Is your mom making you stay out here?”
The door opens. Sarah looks up, startled.
Ethan’s mother is very skinny. She has a pale face pockmarked lightly around the mouth and thin hair dyed the color of a brand-new penny. A dark line cleaves its two halves.
“Your friend is here,” Ethan says. His voice is high, almost broken.
“I don’t want anything. And I don’t appreciate you talking to my kid.”
“I’m not selling anything,” Sarah mumbles.
Ethan looks between his mother and Sarah.
His mother steps outside. “Are you looking for somebody?” Her voice is hard and annoyed.
“Sorry, I just stopped because I thought maybe he was locked out.”
“You just drive around talking to strange kids?”
“Well, it’s pretty cold.”
“What?”
“It’s cold, so I was worried.” Sarah has to use the bathroom. She contracts her muscles and the urge recedes.
Ethan speaks up. “She said you were friends.”
The mother looks at Ethan, registering his claim, then back at Sarah, alerted that something is wrong. “Is that your car?”
Sarah looks behind her. The license plate is fully visible. “I’m from Children’s Services,” she blurts.
Immediately, the woman’s attitude changes. She becomes both stiffer and more friendly, a smile stretched across her face as if it’s being pulled by a string.
Sarah introduces herself as “Ms. Adams.” “May I come in?”
The woman stands back, swinging open the cracked storm door. “Of course, of course, we got nothing to hide.”
An unfamiliar feeling of power washes through Sarah, loosening her stomach and slowing her heart. “Ethan is coming in too, yes?” she asks, glancing behind her as she steps into the building’s common hall, a wide space dimly lit by a single bulb recessed behind a soiled plastic cover.
Inside the apartment the living and dining space is one long room. The table is covered in stacks of mail and various other misplaced things. She spies a screwdriver and several bottles of nail polish. Unopened boxes stand in the corner, and the drapes, little blue and yellow flowers, must be left over from previous occupants. They were not chosen by the same person who owns the overstuffed brown couch and red chairs.
“Would you like a drink? A pop or coffee?” Ethan’s mother asks.
“No, thank you.”
“Please sit down. What’s this about? Did someone call you or something?”
“Maybe we should talk privately.” Sarah mimics the cadence of Nancy’s voice and the kinds of things she used to say.
Ethan’s mother tells him to go to his room, then motions for Sarah to sit and both women perch on the edge, Sarah on the couch, Ethan’s mother on the nearer of the two chairs.
“I’m just here to find out a little information. So I see Ethan was outside. He said he had to stay out there. Why was that?”
“I just wanted him to go play a little while. He doesn’t do anything but those video games. I thought he needed the exercise.”