Something Like Hope

by Shawn Goodman

  “You know, you did a good thing just now. Talking to the voice and telling it that you have things under control is a big step—that’s exactly what you should do.”

  “You don’t think I’m crazy?”

  “No.”

  “Do you hear voices?”

  “No, but I talk to myself sometimes. Listen, what does that voice usually tell you to do?”

  “Run away, hit somebody, curse someone out.”

  “How are all those things similar?”

  “Look, I don’t know. Why don’t you just tell me? I don’t mean to be rude, but I just can’t think anymore.” I feel exhausted. Wrung out.

  “They’re all ways that kids protect themselves. When you feel threatened or in danger, does the voice protect you?”

  “Yeah, I guess. So what? You talk about it almost like it’s a good thing. It doesn’t feel like a good thing. It feels crazy.”

  “It’s good up to a point, if it works. But that’s what we’re getting at here. It no longer works. Being angry and scared, trying to squash all the other emotions, it just doesn’t work for you anymore. You agree?”

  I look down at my chewed-up fingernails. I agree. It makes sense. It explains a lot, but still … what am I supposed to do? Stop being Shavonne? How? This is the only way I know how to be. I feel so confused. I tell Mr. D that I’ve got a new emotion: confusion. Anger, fear, and confusion. Is this progress?

  Back in my room, I stay up late waiting for the voice to say bad things about me. It will call me a liar and a stupid bitch. It will say, “You’re so weak, Vonne. You shouldn’t have done that, Vonne. You broke the rule, Vonne. No one can know about me.”

  But the voice doesn’t come.

  31

  Cinda’s gone off the deep end with the geese, naming them John and Julia. John is named after John Travolta because Grease is Cinda’s favorite movie. She sings that one song, “We go together …,” about twenty times a day until China threatens to punch her. She’s so damn white, she messes up the shoobie-doobie part. She can’t get it right even when we coach her. Julia is named after Julia Roberts because Pretty Woman is Cinda’s other favorite movie.

  The names are harmless, I know. What’s crazy is that she’s got stats on the death rate of goslings. Cinda tells me that only a small percentage of the hatchlings will reach adulthood. Starvation, disease, hunters, collisions with planes. These are the risk factors. And then there are the predators: coyotes, foxes, dog packs, birds like hawks, eagles, falcons, and vultures.

  When I return to my room she’s crazy with fear and manic energy. Her face is pressed against the windowpane even though it’s dark out. She can’t see a damn thing, but she scans the pond anyway, or the area where the pond should be.

  “Shavonne, we’ve got to do something! John and Julia are in danger! The woods behind the parking lot are filled with predators. It’s not safe. I won’t let anything happen to them. Do you hear me, Shavonne?”

  I hear her, all right. I hear her telling me she’s going insane. She stays awake all night, looking out the window into the darkness. I tell one of the guards to get the nurses. They know about Cinda and will get permission from the doctor to give her a shot of Haldol in her ass. That usually fixes this shit. It will knock her right out and maybe she’ll forget all about the damn geese and predators.

  But the guard tells me to shut up and mind my own business. “Who died and made you the doctor?” She sneers at me and goes back to her copy of People magazine.

  Most days I’d use the rude comment as an excuse to fight. But this time, I let it go. In a way, I admire Cinda’s half-crazed vigil. For whatever reason, she cares about the geese and has made a commitment to protect them. Even if no one cares about her (which is the truth), she still cares about someone else, if you can call a goose a someone.

  I had someone to care about. Jasmine. And I messed it up. Maybe the truth is that what I really want is someone to care about me. Is that too much to ask for?

  32

  Cinda spotted a red fox this morning. It loped out of the woods at the edge of the parking lot. She said it trotted by the pond and then vanished back into the underbrush. She waited for Cyrus to come on shift and then pumped him for information about foxes. Cyrus told her what he knew, which was considerable. He said the fox was probably either starving or sick. Otherwise, it would never have come so close to humans. Cyrus said there were too many deterrents for a healthy fox to come near: garbage, exhaust fumes, the smell of food from the kitchen. These were all things linked to humans, and foxes fear humans.

  Cyrus said that the fox would have a difficult time getting past the male goose. The goose would hover off the ground, flap his wings madly, hiss, and jab at the fox with his beak. The goose would then position himself directly between the attacker and the nesting female. A smart fox would turn away, Cyrus said.

  The real danger, however, lies in the weeks immediately after hatching. The tiny goslings will trail behind their parents in a line. On land, or close enough to shore, a fox could make a mad dash and snatch one. If it’s successful, it could keep snatching them until they’re all gone.

  I can see the wheels turning in Cinda’s head. The babies haven’t even hatched yet and the predators are lining up. It’s too similar to Cinda’s life, or mine, for that matter. The foxes are the pimps. “Hey, shorty, you too fine to be all by yourself, without no man to buy you the nice things you deserve.” “Damn, baby, what’s it gonna take for me to get a piece of that ass?” “You got to come work for me. I’ll treat you so nice.” The dog packs are the johns or tricks. “I’m so hungry.” “Give it to me.” “I want …” And the hawks and vultures are the rapists and child molesters. “I will take what I want. I want you. So I will take you.”

  I can see that Cinda is setting herself up for disaster. She knows the odds, can see how it will end. And still she’s counting on a different ending. Counting on her ability to force a different outcome. She says, “I won’t let anything get to them, Shavonne. I won’t allow it.”

  I say, “How the hell are you gonna protect those geese, Cinda?”

  “I don’t know yet. But I’ll figure it out. They need me.”

  And there you have it. The geese need her. Shit. That’s exactly why I don’t let myself have fantasies about my daughter needing me. It’s Cinda’s need. It’s my own need. I’m not fooling anybody.

  33

  I can’t watch my back all the time. I try, but then danger comes from so many different directions and takes different shapes. Today it comes in the form of Ms. Choi.

  She has real power for a guard. You can see this in the way other guards kiss her fat ass: buy her sodas, ask her permission to go on break, shit like that. Even the administrators leave her alone—not because they can’t squash her with absolute power or rank. They can. But they don’t because she’s a life-sucker. Going head to head with Ms. Choi is like tangling with a big cactus. Whatever you might do to her, she’ll get you back ten times worse because she’s that much meaner.

  Physically, Ms. Choi is fat and disgusting. She wears her black hair in cornrows so tight they pull her eyebrows up. She drives a Lincoln Town Car with custom plates that say CHOI-GRL. No one knows how she got the Chinese name, because she’s Caucasian, even though she talks like she’s black.

  On her face is a constant glare, and she seethes hatred from strange green eyes. The color itself is beautiful, but that’s only if you can think of them apart from the rest of the package. The hate that comes out of those eyes almost makes my own seem trivial. It’s a hate that takes delight in others’ pain.

  “You think you’re so damn smart, don’t you?”

  “Excuse me, Ms. Choi?”

  It’s shift change, and the three-to-eleven staff are coming in. Choi heads straight for me, finger pointing, green eyes blazing. I have no idea what I’ve done to make her mad.

  “Don’t give me that shit, Shavonne. You know exactly what I’m talking about, right?”


  “No, Ms. Choi. I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

  “See? That’s just the kind of answer a smart pretty girl like you would give, isn’t it? Covering all the bases, Shavonne. That’s what you do best, right? Plot, scheme, set people up? Well, I can set people up too. You just wait and see, little girl.”

  She sneers this last part and makes it sound ugly. Kiki leans over and says, “Don’t sweat it, girl, she just be trippin’.” Kiki is plump, voluptuous. She works furiously at her long thin braids, holding pieces of weave in her mouth. Very quietly, so only I can hear she says, “That bitch is so fat and ugly and mean, she can’t keep no man around. She just broke up with Kowalski because she found out he’s been fuckin’ one of the girls on the overnight shift. You wasn’t doin’ him, was you? Maybe that’s why she be raggin’ on you.”

  I whisper back, “No, never. All I know about that man is that he restrained Samantha.”

  “Well, it don’t matter. He just some big dummy. Double dummy. First, he stupid and blind enough to go with that pig. Second, he stupid enough to start givin’ it to one of them new girls up on the beginner unit. Fool, thinkin’ that nobody’ll find out. Girl, you should know this! You always know what’s goin’ on. What’s up with you?”

  “I don’t know, Kiki. I haven’t been paying attention.”

  “Shoot. I know that’s true because you involved in this shit! They only found out because of that story you told about gettin’ pregnant! Mr. Slater went and interviewed all the male guards who could have been with you. Tyreena was waitin’ outside Slater’s office to clean. You know that girl can clean! You know she like to clean so much that—”

  “Kiki, get to the point. Did Tyreena hear something?”

  “Oh yeah, I almost forgot. She heard the big dummy break down crying. He spilled the whole story ’bout cheatin’ on Choi with a resident. Said it wasn’t his fault. Said the girl came on to him! I can’t believe you didn’t know, Shavonne. You usually down with everything.”

  I thank Kiki for the info. It all makes sense. No wonder Choi is out to get me: my lies fucked up her situation. In her mind, I’m to blame for losing her man. Jesus, what a mess. I need time to figure out how to deal with this woman before she gets to me first.

  34

  The retarded girl, Mary, is ready to burst. It turns out that she’s almost eight months pregnant. She’s got that dark line down her belly and her navel is pushed out. The baby kicks all the time and she lets us feel it.

  She won’t talk about the baby’s father. That means one of two things: either she was raped, or she went along with it but the guy’s old as hell. I know the female guards here would say, “Honey, they both the same thing.” But they’re not. Ask any fifteen-year-old girl at the Center how old her last boyfriend was. She’ll say twenty or twenty-five or even thirty years old. It’s not right or wrong. It’s just how it is.

  My mom was sixteen when she had me. Guess how old my father was? Thirty. Almost twice her age. That’s why Mary’s not talking about it. Whenever someone asks her, she just flashes that dumb smile and looks down at her feet, or her belly, or someplace far away. Who knows where.

  Those of us with children of our own avoid Mary. We don’t want to think about it, our babies at home being raised by our mothers and grandmothers or even by strangers. But really we avoid Mary because we know what’s going to happen to her. We can practically feel the Social Services people closing in, old women in panty hose and those starchy skirts, all the cheap perfume to cover up the cigarette smoke from their hurried breaks outside in the cold.

  Maybe this girl, Mary, can’t take care of her kid. But it sucks. How’d she get pregnant in the first place? Who was watching out for her? Who was protecting her? Everyone’s willing to step up and take care of her innocent little baby, but what about an innocent fourteen-year-old retarded girl who doesn’t know who to trust?

  This is why I stay away from Mary and others like her. The sad sacks. The helpless. The misfits and fuck-ups. Mary, Cinda, and all the others. They’re not like Tyreena and Kiki, who know how to protect themselves. They’re tough, so nobody’s going to hurt them. I wish I could be like that.

  35

  Today I get to leave the facility for a med trip. Cinda and three other girls have cavities; I need to have my front teeth capped. No dentist will come to the facility, so we have to drive twenty miles to the nearest city.

  As much as I hate dentists, I am eager to get out. Don’t get me wrong; riding in a state van with shackles on your hands and feet is not my idea of fun, but it’s a break from the facility.

  And there is cool stuff to see. Cyrus, who is driving the van, points out red-tailed hawks and a bunch of deer. And for the first time I get to see Amish people. There’s this buggy pulled by a horse. It’s moving real slowly on the side of the road: a black horse pulling a plain black carriage with that bright orange triangle nailed to it. Cinda and I stare into the carriage to see the family inside. There’s a father, with one of those Abe Lincoln beards. He’s wearing a black hat. Next to him sits his wife. She’s wearing a white bonnet and is very plain-looking. Behind them you can see the heads of two or three small children. They look so comfortable, bundled up together under warm blankets.

  Then we drive by this farm. It has a battered old house surrounded by fields. Cyrus slows the van and points to an Amish guy. He is plowing the field with a big brown horse. He wears suspenders and a straw hat and rides a kind of old-fashioned plow I’ve never seen before. They move slow and steady, the point of the plow digging into the dirt.

  It is really quite a scene. The sun hangs just above the distant trees, making the whole field glow. And in the center of this soft orange light is an old-fashioned man and his horse. It’s like the world or the earth or whatever is so pleased with this scene that it can’t help but draw attention and point it out to us. “Look,” it says, “because there’s still wonder.”

  Cinda starts giggling in delight. The other girls laugh outright and say that it’s mad corny. I don’t know how to explain my own feelings. A warmth surges up inside me, like I’m seeing something really important and powerful, and it doesn’t even matter if I understand it; it’s enough just to be here and look. It’s so strange, but I don’t want the moment to be broken by words.

  It’s like sneaking up on something very special that isn’t meant for you, like getting lost in the woods and finding a fawn taking its first steps. Does that sound corny? I don’t care if it does. I’ve never seen anything like that before, but I always wanted to. That Amish farmer isn’t doing anything to impress anyone. He isn’t fronting or putting on a show; he’s just doing his regular work like he’s done every day since he was a boy. But he fits in perfectly, with the horse and the field and the glowing sun around him. It is so beautiful, though I can’t really explain why.

  Then Cinda breaks the spell and starts asking questions. “Cyrus, what kind of horse is that? How does the plow stay straight? Why not use a tractor—is the man too poor to afford one?” Most of the questions are legitimate, but some are ridiculous. “Cyrus, that horse is pretty big. How long do you think its penis is?”

  She laughs, that crazy energy building up inside her. She turns freakish, obsessing about the horse’s genitals, making up songs where she rhymes “Niagara Falls” with “horse’s balls.” I tell her to shut up, because she’s getting on everyone’s nerves and Cyrus is having a hard time driving. The other guard in the front seat keeps whispering to him about what to do. But there isn’t anything to do. Either she shuts up or she doesn’t. She isn’t reasonable or logical, and I don’t think the guards ever really get it. Crazy is just plain crazy. You can’t make sense of it.

  Cinda listens to me and, for the most part, quiets down. If you don’t know her, you’d think she’s a cute kid. Even though she’s seventeen, she looks only about twelve or thirteen. She has this short sandy-colored hair and the palest blue eyes. Almost gray. Her skin is very pink and she blushes easily. She�
��s bone thin and has no breasts. It’s like she skipped puberty and decided to stay a little girl. But not really, because she is always making bizarre sexual comments to people.

  I think that’s what freaks everyone out so much about Cinda, this split between what she looks like on the outside and how she really is. Sometimes, at least. That’s why the guards are afraid of her. This wispy seventeen-year-old with the chopped-up hair and pale blue eyes actually scares people.

  I have to admit that sometimes she scares me. Like this one time when I caught her watching me sleep. But most of the time I think she’s just sad and pathetic. She was abused like the rest of us, but in her case it broke her mind. One minute she’s okay, then the next she’s screaming, crying, saying bizarre things. Sometimes she needs to go to the hospital, but they rarely keep her for long. She masturbates constantly, and wets the bed unless she takes special pills. Sometimes she refuses her meds and gets really out of control.

  In the van, Cinda is quiet, staring out the window. I forget about her and talk to Cyrus. He tells me more about the Amish, how they live the way people did hundreds of years ago. He says they make their own clothes, grow their own food, teach their children in their own schools. They don’t trust outsiders and take care of each other in ways we couldn’t understand.

  I get so wrapped up in Cyrus’s talk and my own thoughts that I don’t notice Cinda. Her shackles have been rattling for several minutes, ever since we passed a burned-up old house with melted garbage in the front yard. Her cuffs rattle insanely, but I just figure she’s playing with herself again. And who could blame me for not wanting to deal with that? I slide away from her on the vinyl bench seat, at least as far as the shackles will allow.

  But something is wrong, I think, because it’s too quiet. Cinda is staring out the window with a blank look. Her eyes are dead, vacant. Her hands rest palms-up on her lap. The left wrist is sliced open along the veins. It’s an ugly jagged cut, made from the edge of an ashtray lid. It looks like she pried the lid off the armrest and cut the hell out of herself with it. The blood is bright red, spurting out of the wound. It makes dripping noises on the plastic floor mats.