Don't Fail Me Now

by Una LaMarche

  Cass wasn’t an accident like me, but she didn’t help to save a marriage that was already falling apart. My earliest memories are a collage of conflicting arguments: driving around with my parents singing along to the radio and dancing in their seats at red lights; watching TV with Buck while Mom cries loudly in an adjacent room; licking an ice cream cone at a petting zoo while Mom and Buck giggle and kiss above me; getting tugged in and out of my car seat while they scream at each other. They must have been on one of their highs when they decided to have my sister, not knowing she would come six weeks early on the day after Christmas, stretching their bare-bones insurance to its limit with a stay in the NICU, and sick again by the time she was five months old, underweight and shaking all the time, requiring daily insulin injections that would eventually put them in a debt they would never recover from.

  Oh, shit, her insulin. I reach across Denny and pinch Cass’s skinny calf through her jeans. “Cass,” I say. “Cass, wake up. You need your shot.”

  She starts and squints at me, sleepy and confused, then looks around and slowly drags herself to a sitting position. Without a word, she unzips the front pocket of her backpack and takes out a Ziploc baggie full of needles and little glass bottles as well as a small foil pack of Wheat Thins. She rips open the crackers with her teeth and pops one into her mouth, then starts to roll up her shirt; Cass is so wiry that her stomach is the only place with enough padding so the shots don’t hurt.

  “Hey,” cries Tight Hair, leaping to her feet. “Stop right there.” She turns and yells, “Backup!” and the two arresting officers, one young and barrel-chested, one graying with a potbelly that thunders ahead of him by a good twelve inches, come running down the hall with their hands on their guns. Denny’s hand on my waist turns into a viselike claw.

  “She’s got needles,” Tight Hair says. Cass’s mahogany eyes grow wide and scared.

  “It’s insulin,” I snap, knowing I should watch my tone but unable to mask my anger. Protecting Cass has been my job since she was born. “She’s diabetic.”

  “Lemme see,” the young cop says, softening his stance. Cass hands him the baggie, and he examines the contents for a long moment. “You got a prescription?” he asks.

  With trembling hands, Cass reaches into her backpack again and produces a silver MedicAlert bracelet engraved with her name and condition. She hasn’t worn it since she was eight, but at Mom’s insistence she always keeps it in her bag. This realization sends even sharper stabs of anger shooting through my veins. Mom was doing so much better. This wasn’t supposed to happen again. She swore it wouldn’t.

  “Okay,” the cop says to Cass, attempting a goofy “oops, my bad!” smile. “But you can’t do that out here. Come with me, and I’ll take you to the ladies’ room.”

  Cass looks at me as if for permission, and I nod. Reluctantly, she follows the officers back down the hall, slouching into her big sweatshirt like it’s an invisibility cloak.

  “See, she’s okay,” I whisper into the top of Denny’s head. “Everything’s okay.” I squeeze again, three times. Lie, lie, lie.

  “Where’s Mom?” he whimpers. “I wanna see Mom.”

  “Mom . . . has to stay here for the night,” I say. “But Aunt Sam is going to pick us up, and we’ll have a sleepover at her house.” I say “sleepover” like we’ll be sleeping on lumpy blankets on the living room floor by choice, as some kind of fun adventure that’ll end in ghost stories and s’mores.

  “I hate Aunt Sam’s,” Denny says quietly.

  “I know, meatball. It won’t be for long this time.”

  “Max says it will.”

  Of course he does. Max’s contribution to any conversation is usually pessimistic. “Well,” I sigh, “tell Max he doesn’t know what I know.” Turning over the paper where I’ve been listing the names, I write Dennis Devereux inside the heart at the center of the tree. “See?” I say. “You’re safe in there.” But Denny looks unsure; even little kids know bullshit when they smell it.

  “What if Aunt Sam doesn’t come?” he asks.

  “She’s coming,” I say.

  “When?”

  “Soon,” I whisper, raising my eyes to the ceiling, repeating it like a prayer even though it’s been years and way too many sins since I’ve seen the inside of a church. “She’s coming soon.”

  • • •

  An hour later our aunt is still AWOL, but we do have some surprise visitors: a dozen crazy drunk bachelor partiers who tried to sneak out on their tab at Scores. They’re so loud and sloppy while the officers try to deal with them that Tight Hair sourly ushers the three of us into a nearby break room so that we don’t get trampled or scarred for life hearing all the shouting about some stripper named Nico and the unusual locations of her body piercings. Cass and Denny both brighten when they see the vending machines, so I give them each $3 to buy whatever they want, and as we cluster around a small table eating our snacks and sharing a can of Sprite with a straw pushed through the tab, for a minute things start to feel okay. Normal, even.

  “When’s your tree thing due, Denny?” I ask between handfuls of carefully curated Skittles combinations.

  “I dunno,” he shrugs, licking Doritos dust off his thumb.

  “Just tell them our family tree burned down,” Cass says with a wry smile. “Deforestation.”

  “Huh?”

  “She’s kidding,” I say, but Denny’s already forgotten.

  “If we stay here all night, can we stay home from school tomorrow?” he asks hopefully.

  “We’re not staying all night,” I say.

  “Maybe we are,” Cass mumbles.

  “Well, even if we do . . .” I don’t know how to explain to them that no one’s just going to drop us off at our doorstep like we’ve been on some kind of extra-credit field trip, that we might not get to live in our house or sleep in our beds again for weeks or even months. We might end up with Aunt Sam, or we might get sent to foster care (Don’t let them split you up!: the last thing Mom yelled as the potbellied cop pushed her head down into the back of the cruiser), but no matter what happens, the one thing we can depend on is that someone will make us keep going to school. I realize Cass and Denny are staring at me, waiting for me to finish, so I just shake my head. “We can’t get out of school,” I say. “I mean, who’s going to write our absence notes?”

  “Mom can! She was there!” Denny says brightly, starting in on a Three Musketeers bar, and without warning tears spring to my eyes. His trust breaks my heart.

  The thing is, Denny doesn’t really have a reason not to trust Mom. He forced her to get her shit together—at least as much as shit like hers can be contained (I see it like, most people trip and fall every once in a while, but Mom walked off a cliff when she met Buck and has been falling ever since without realizing it, like one of those Roadrunner cartoons where for a second the dumbass coyote thinks he’s just walking on air). The years right before Denny were some of her lowest. She had a string of failed part-time jobs that introduced Cass and me to a rotating roster of strange and wet-eyed babysitters—mostly friends Mom made at the bar—who would use up all our Hi-C making mixed drinks and then either fall asleep on the couch or yell at someone on the phone. She got on unemployment for a while and seemed more stable, but then came her back-to-back arrests for shoplifting and drunk driving, and Aunt Sam moved in with us for a few months. I wish I could say those months were better, but Sam’s basically just a mean drunk without the drunk part. As Mom likes to say, she’s got a big ol’ bug up her ass about us living in “her” house. It’s to Mom’s credit that even when she was using, she never took my aunt up on her offers to buy the house back, because I don’t even want to think about what she could have done to herself with that kind of cash.

  “Michelle, you can do Mom’s writing, right?” Cass asks. Apparently the conversation’s been going on without me, and now the two of them are
plotting.

  “I’m not doing that,” I say flatly. The last thing I need is to be worrying about what those two are doing all day by themselves; school hours—when I can forget about my family for a while, replacing them with Spanish verb conjugations and pointless, empty conversations with the friends I never invite home—are the only times the anxious static subsides.

  Cass glowers at me. “You don’t even care because you’re almost done,” she says. “In two months you’ll never have to go to school again.” She crumples up her Fritos bag and crushes it into the tabletop with her palm. “Lucky bitch.”

  “Hey!” I cry. “Watch it.”

  Cass rolls her eyes dramatically. “Like Denny’s never heard a curse. Doesn’t he have Tourette’s or something?”

  Denny grins, his teeth smeared with chocolate. “Poopy pants!” he cries. It’s true that Denny’s teachers have complained about him disrupting class, but his outbursts tend to be pretty G-rated. Pee-pee, butt, stupid head, poop: your average first grader’s nuggets of comedy gold. I’m not saying it’s great or anything, but he’s not exactly calling someone a stank-ass ho.

  “No,” I say sharply. “He’s fine. And I’m not—” Lucky, I want to say. I’m not lucky. But instead I say, “I’m not letting you guys cut school.”

  Cass shrugs and sits back in her chair, but she’s chewing furiously on her lower lip—her giveaway since age two that she’s trying not to cry.

  “Sorry,” I mutter.

  “Poop, poop, poop,” Denny laughs, which are my thoughts exactly. And then there’s a knock on the glass behind us.

  I turn around to see a short, middle-aged woman with a gray pixie cut and a navy pantsuit standing in the doorway. She’s clutching a slim, leather-covered notebook, a pen, and a digital recorder, and she’s smiling in that overcompensating way that doctors smile at little kids before giving them a shot. I don’t have to look at the ID clipped to her blouse to know she’s from Child Protective Services. I stand up, instinctively trying to block Cass and Denny from seeing her, from understanding what she’s here for.

  “Hi,” she says in a condescending, honeyed voice. “Are you Michelle?”

  “Our aunt is coming,” I blurt in a panic. “She’s probably almost here.”

  They’ll try to split you up.

  The lady nods even more condescendingly and says, “My name is Janet. I just need to talk to you for a few minutes. May I sit down?”

  I want to say no, to take her fancy notebook, hurl it down the hallway, throw both siblings over one shoulder like I’m Schwarzenegger in Commando (Buck’s favorite movie, left behind on DVD, and the only thing we have in common besides our eye color), and run until my legs give out. But I know I have no recourse; we’re a bunch of unaccompanied minors in a police station in the middle of the night. I step back and lower myself into my plastic bucket chair, folding my hands primly on the table as if somehow weaving my fingers together can contain this phenomenal mess we’re in. Cass looks Janet up and down without a word or even so much as a facial twitch. Denny, meanwhile, bounces rhythmically in his seat. I shouldn’t have let him have so much sugar all at once.

  Janet pulls up a chair between Cass and me and sits with her legs crossed, placing her supplies in a neat row in front of her. She pushes a button on the recorder and then opens the notebook, licking her thumb to turn the pages. I hate that. Seriously, how hard is it to separate two flimsy pieces of paper without smearing your germy saliva all over the place?

  “You guys must be tired,” she says with a sympathetic frown.

  Cass and I say nothing, but Denny, who doesn’t know better, chirps, “I took a nap before, and then I had a candy bar.” He eyes her notebook. “Can I draw?” This kid will talk to anyone. It must be in his dad’s genes, because Cass and I are like Mom, immediately suspicious of strangers until proven otherwise—and maybe even then.

  “Sure,” Janet says, neatly tearing out a sheet. “I even have an extra pen.” She hands Denny one of those thick ones with the four different ink colors that you can change by pushing down the buttons, and Denny beams. I bet she uses that pen exclusively to charm small children.

  “So,” Janet continues, looking back and forth between the three of us, probably searching for physical signs of abuse she can put in her bullshit report, “I just have a few questions to ask so we can get you out of here as soon as possible.” She smiles at Denny. “I’ll start with an easy one: How old are you?”

  “I’m six,” Denny says proudly.

  “Thirteen,” Cass mutters, barely audible.

  “Seventeen,” I say, then quickly add, “But I’ll be eighteen in July.”

  Janet raises her eyebrows and writes something down. “Okay,” she says. “And you live with your mother, correct?”

  “Yes,” I say quickly. I don’t want my sister and brother to say another word to this woman. I feel familiar tingles climbing up my neck. Ever since I was little I’ve had episodes—not attacks, exactly, more like tidal waves that I drown in for just a few seconds at a time. It’s like I get paralyzed, only it’s my brain that shuts down, not my body; my anxiety reaches some max-fill line and overrides the system. I close my eyes and focus on my heart beating, reminding myself that I’m still alive. When I open them again, Cass is being her usual stone-cold self, staring off at a wall poster outlining the steps of the Heimlich maneuver, and Denny is immersed in coloring in the legs on a dinosaur.

  “There’s no other adult in the home?” Janet asks, not looking up from her notebook.

  “No.” I splay my fingers out on the tabletop, feeling my weight pressing into the scratched black vinyl, trying to root myself like a tree without soil.

  “Is the other biological parent deceased?”

  I wish. “No.”

  “And does your mother have a boyfriend or significant other?”

  “No.”

  “Any living grandparents?”

  “Not that I know of.”

  “But you do have an aunt.”

  “Yeah, my mom’s sister.”

  Janet licks her thumb again and flips back a few pages, looking for something. “That would be . . . Samara Means?”

  “Right.”

  “And she lives locally?”

  “Yes.”

  Scribble, scribble, scribble.

  “Any other aunts or uncles?”

  “No.”

  “And you’re all in school full-time?”

  “Yes.”

  “Do you depend on your mother to take you to school?”

  “No, she takes the bus and I drive us.”

  Janet frowns, sending a web of lines running down the sides of her mouth and off of her cheeks like tributaries from a river. “You know,” she says, “it’s in violation of your provisional license to have other minors in the car without supervision.”

  Shit. “I . . . um . . .” The truth is, I am familiar with that particular passage in Maryland’s DMV manual, but what else am I supposed to do? Mom works—well, worked, anyway—from seven thirty to six, and we all have to be at three different schools spanning six miles between seven forty-five and eight fifteen, and Denny gets out at two forty-five and then Cass at three ten, and I have to bring both of them to Taco Bell by four for my shift so they can do homework and eat the edible-but-messed-up-looking kitchen errors for free, so we’re all screwed unless I take a little creative license with the driving laws.

  “Well, I’m sure you can find a suitable alternative for the next month,” Janet says with a thin smile.

  “I’m sure,” I parrot hollowly.

  “Would you say your family is . . . isolated?” she asks. I wonder how long this checklist is and whether she has some key at the end that’ll tell her where we fall on the spectrum between the Cosbys and the Mansons.

  “No, we’re right here in the city, over in Berea.
” Our house is one slightly busted-looking brick row house on a block of dozens. Like most of low-income Baltimore, our street has a few abandoned, boarded-up lots, places you have to stomp by after dark so the rats won’t dart out from under the rotting stairs and scare the bejesus out of you. But it’s not the boonies by any means.

  “Of course,” Janet says, a little impatiently. “I mean, do you see friends, have people over?”

  “Yes,” I say. But the truth is I haven’t brought a friend home in years, not since I was a kid. There was this one girl in particular I remember, named Excelyn, who was Mexican and had black braids down to her hips. She would come over after school, and we’d watch cartoons or play with Cass while she bounced in this little chair that hung in the kitchen doorway, and Mom would cut grilled cheese into long strips that she called monkey fingers. There was also a girl named Rosemarie who didn’t go to my school but was the daughter of one of my grandpa’s parishioners who tried to help Mom for a while after her parents passed. For some reason I don’t remember any identifying details about Rosemarie except that in the bathroom at her house, there was a clear, round liquid soap dispenser that matched the seasons. In December it would have a little Santa hat floating in it; in April, a nest of colored eggs; in July, an American flag. At the time, it seemed like an unfathomable luxury item, and later, when things got bad, I sometimes thought of that soap dispenser, convinced that if we were the kind of family who had one, it would have protected us somehow. Made everything perfect.

  “So you have a social life outside the home?” Janet presses.

  “Yeah,” I lie, trying to sound casual, like I don’t eat the same fast-food bean burrito for dinner every night in the cramped booth right by the men’s room exit, which is the least popular booth due to the pervasive urinal-cake stench, and therefore the only one my manager will let my latchkey siblings park themselves for hours on end.

  Janet scribbles in her notebook and then looks up at me, fixing me once again with Meaningful Eye Contact. We’re so close I can see the contact lenses glistening on her slate-colored irises.