Isabel's Daughter

by Judith Ryan Hendricks

  From her I learned that no self-respecting cook would make frijoles without epazote or chile colorado without canela.

  Although Carson was licensed by the state of Colorado, it was run by the Church of God in Jesus Christ, and the administrators all came from the church, including the director, Alice Ridley. Ridley was a tall woman who seemed to be made of large wooden blocks. She had too many yellow teeth and a shock of steel gray hair with eyes to match. She ended every sentence, even the most mundane, with “If God wills.” Or “His will be done.”

  For the longest time I thought of God as some hyperefficient house parent, intensely interested in the smallest details of life at Carson Foundling Home. Had I brushed my teeth? Were all four corners tucked in tight on every metal bunk bed? Was the kitchen door latched?

  The rest of the staff consisted of mostly indistinguishable teachers and counselors, who did their best to make us ready for foster homes, adoption, school, jobs. Productive lives in the real world. Anyone who stayed off drugs and alcohol, didn’t get pregnant or get someone pregnant before they graduated high school, was a success story. They put your picture up in the dining room.

  I was not on the fast track for the dining room wall. Not only did I have weird eyes, I was also small for my age. I had trouble with school because I hated sitting still. I was slow learning to read, and when I was called on in class, I always fumbled it.

  Once when I was sitting in Ridley’s office, copying Bible verses as penance for my latest transgression, I sneaked a look at my file, which was on her desk. A note on the very first page announced that I needed to learn self-control and didn’t “integrate well with my peers.”

  Later when I learned what “understatement” was, I realized that Ridley was a master of it. In plain English, other kids didn’t like me. No skin off my nose, because I didn’t like them either. The difference was that I never felt like I had to do anything about it, whereas some of them couldn’t resist the temptation offered by someone like me.

  Not integrating well with my peers meant finding dog turds in my shoes one morning. It meant my books regularly got dumped into the laundry chute so I’d have to go down to the basement and sift through everybody’s soiled linens to retrieve them. It meant that after I spent hours painstakingly writing a book report, it would disappear from my notebook during dinner and shreds of it would be seen later floating in a toilet.

  I learned to fight. And I learned that fighting isn’t a skill; it’s an attitude. It’s tuning out fear, not feeling pain. It’s forgetting about what anyone can do to you and concentrating on what you can do to them.

  Head butting was my specialty. I was a natural—small and fast. The advantage was that knocking the wind out of somebody meant that by the time they could get up and come after you, there was usually a houseparent there, breaking it up. The disadvantage was that head butting was mostly effective as a surprise tactic. I had to strike first, as soon as I knew there would be trouble. This led inevitably to my being blamed for “starting it.”

  With my reputation, I didn’t get sent to foster homes very often, and when I did, I never lasted long before they returned me to Carson like spoiled milk back to the grocery store.

  I only had one friend there, besides Esperanza.

  Lee-Ann Davisen was, without a doubt, the smartest kid at Carson.

  Now that I think about it, she was probably the smartest person there, period. Some people liked her for that, and some didn’t. She was taller than me, not as skinny, and she had brown hair that was thick and curly, and smelled like cinnamon. The thing I envied her for, though, was her beautiful green eyes.

  Lee-Ann’s story was that her parents—Lee and Ann Davisen—had been killed in a car accident, and her aunt and uncle took her for a while, but they had kids of their own, and I guess they didn’t have much money. I also heard once that her parents were druggies who both ODed. It didn’t matter. Everybody made up their own story of why they were there, and I learned to believe about half of what I could see and zero of what I heard.

  It was just a matter of time before one of the counselors decided that Lee-Ann should tutor me in reading. This meant that on Monday and Friday afternoons from 4:00 until 5:00 P.M., we were closeted in Ridley’s study—a tiny room adjoining the director’s office, the same place where I spent lots of time copying Bible verses.

  At first, I only wanted to sit next to her and smell her hair and study the freckles on her pale cheeks, the bristly dark eyelashes that would suddenly fly open revealing those amazing eyes. And I loved to listen to her read. She had a flair for drama, picking up the pace for action, damping it down for suspense, changing her voice to sound like different characters—Jim Hawkins and Long John Silver, Jo and Beth March, Jody Baxter talking to his fawn. She even read me murder mysteries, which I’m sure nobody knew she had in her possession or they would’ve been used to start a bonfire.

  Pretty soon she started making me read some of the characters’ lines, waiting patiently while I puzzled over long words, giving me hints to help me sound them out. I progressed from a few lines to reading whole paragraphs, then pages, then chapters while the late afternoon sun shot gold through the dirty curtains and she sat there, head leaned back against the couch, nibbling thoughtfully on one of the bizcochitos I smuggled out of the kitchen.

  On a windy spring afternoon when she was ten and I was eight, she announced to me that her number one goal in life was to get herself adopted. We were on the playground swings. I didn’t say anything at first, because I was flying like a maniac, bending my body and kicking my feet, trying to get high enough to go over the top and back around.

  “Well, what do you think?” she demanded.

  I stopped pumping, let my weight slow the swing until it was low enough that I dared to jump out. I loved doing that. For one thing it was like flying. For another, it always freaked her out. Physical daring was about the only arena where I ever felt one up on her. My feet and legs stung from the impact of my dirt landing, and momentum pitched me forward, laughing, onto my hands and knees.

  “Did you hear what I told you?” she hollered.

  “No. What?” I hollered back.

  “Just get your flying butt back over here if you want to know, ’cause I’m not going to yell it out.”

  I sauntered back to the swings, dusting the dirt from the knees of my jeans. “What?”

  “My idea is to get adopted.”

  “Why do you want to get adopted?”

  She gave me a condescending smile. “You don’t get it. I guess because you never had a family.”

  “But then you’d have to leave, wouldn’t you?”

  “Of course. That’s the point of getting adopted. Getting out of here.” She was digging her feet into the dirt and pushing herself around and around, twisting the swing chains into a tight spiral.

  I tried to be philosophical about it. “Well, maybe they’d take me, too.”

  “No, that wouldn’t work.” She wasn’t cruel, just practical. “I want a mother and father, but no other children. It’s better to be an only child. You get more attention.”

  She picked up her feet and the chains of the swing began to unwind. She spun faster and faster, like a twirling figure skater, head thrown back, dark curls streaming behind her. When the last twist had popped out of the chains, she sat there, mouth open, gazing up.

  “Ohh, the clouds are spinning.” She giggled.

  Her laugh usually made me laugh, but right then I didn’t feel much like it. I just kept kicking the heels of my tennis shoes in the hard-packed dirt.

  “Want to know how I’m going to find my family?” Her voice was artificially bright, and she didn’t wait for my answer. “I’m going to write letters to the Denver Post. Everybody in Denver reads it.”

  I frowned, pushed my bangs out of my eyes. “You mean you write them a letter and they find you some parents?”

  This time she laughed so hard, she almost fell off the swing. “No, silly. There’s
a page in the paper where they print letters and you can say whatever you want. If I write a letter about living here and how I need to be someplace where I can get a better education, somebody’s bound to see it and adopt me.”

  In spite of my inability to grasp her logic, a part of me was enthralled. Until that moment, it had not occurred to me that you could make up your mind that you wanted something and then set about making it happen.

  Lee-Ann was right about me. I didn’t get it because I’d never known the splendors or the terrors of family life. She took it upon herself to instruct me, in between writing her letters to the Denver Post and reading every book in the Dodd County library.

  She told me about her parents. Her father had been a cabinetmaker. Her mother’s family had owned a farm. “She was working at Pepper’s Steakhouse in Pueblo when they met,” Lee-Ann said. “She served him a beer. It was love at first sight.”

  She talked about going to the Cheyenne Drive-In Movie on summer nights when the three of them would have Cokes and share one giant tub of popcorn, with extra butter and salt.

  “Did they have fights?” I asked.

  “Oh, sure. He gave her a black eye once and then he cried for an hour.” She smiled. “And once they were putting groceries away and they started fighting and she threw eggs at him. He started chasing her around the house and she was carrying the eggs and every few minutes she’d stop and throw another one at him.” She wrinkled her nose. “It was a mess. And I had to clean it up.”

  I was indignant. “Why? You didn’t do it.”

  She sighed and looked over the top of my head. “By the time she ran out of eggs, they were all kissy face, and they went in their room and locked the door.”

  “What for?” I demanded.

  “Nothing you’d understand.”

  I didn’t believe she knew either, or she would’ve loved telling me.

  She showed me the big blue dictionary in the parlor, resting on its own wooden table, made available to encourage us to look up words we didn’t understand. She thumbed through the onionskin pages till she came to:

  foundling: Abandoned child of unknown parentage.

  She explained that “abandoned” meant left behind and “parentage” was just a big word for your mother and father. Even then, I was aware that most of the children at Carson knew all too well who their folks were. And where they were—either in jail or riding the rodeo or drinking or whoring around. Most of those kids weren’t abandoned; they were deposited by relatives or taken away by the welfare people.

  “Avery,” she said, “do you realize you’re the only true foundling they’ve got here?”

  I took a certain satisfaction from it.

  When I proudly showed Lee-Ann my greatest treasure—my embroidered baby undershirt—she looked at it for a long time without saying anything. It was the first time I’d seen her at a loss for words. That Friday she brought a new book to our tutoring session. It was from the library, and it had color pictures of flowers, their names, and where they grew. We spent the whole hour hunched over it and the shirt. She pointed out the pink roses, yellow and white daisies with a few petals scattered to the side, purple asters, and in the center, one blue flower, larger than the others. It reminded me of a bird with a long, graceful tail. Finally I flipped over a page and there it was.

  “Aquilegia cae-ru-lea,” she announced. “Rocky Mountain Columbine. The Colorado State Flower.” She gave me a significant look.

  “Does that mean she was from Colorado?”

  She shrugged. “Maybe it just means you were born here.”

  “Big news.” I tried to keep the disappointment out of my voice.

  “Well, what did you think? The book was going to tell you where she went? At least you know she was an artist.”

  “How do I know that?” I looked up at her, suddenly noticing how tall she was. And that she was starting to get boobs. Jesus. She was almost thirteen.

  She snatched the shirt up off the table, shook it under my nose. “Look, dummy. These aren’t just little colored blobs. They’re real flowers. You can see which ones they are. Only an artist could do that.”

  After that, I kept the shirt under my pillow, running my finger along the tiny stitches and knots while I waited for sleep to come, imagining my mother’s hands holding the cloth, drawing the threaded needle through it. I figured someday I’d find her, and I’d show her the shirt as proof of ID, like a dog tag. What if she really was a famous artist? Maybe she lived in New York or L.A. What if there were other clues hidden in the flower design? Maybe it was a test to see if I was smart enough. If I figured it out, I would find her.

  School at Carson only went up to grade eight, so after that you had to go to San Luis High School on the orange bus that stopped every morning at the corner of Selden and San Juan. The first morning that Lee-Ann went, she looked a little nervous, but it was me that was sick to my stomach. I followed her out the front door and stood shivering in the sharp morning air, watching her and Camille Rodriguez plod silently toward the corner. A couple times she turned around and waved at me. When they reached the bus, the yellow and black door opened as if by magic. They climbed inside, and the bus rolled away, belching black smoke out the back, red lights flashing.

  The thing that stays with me is an image of Lee-Ann. Her face.

  Framed in a window, because that’s what it was like after she started going to high school. She was present, but there was some invisible obstruction between us. So real I sometimes thought I could see my breath on the glass. We could still walk downtown to mail her Denver Post letters, have an ice cream, or go to the movies. We still read books together, ate meals together. But at night when she climbed under the covers with me, all she could talk about was leaving Alamitos. She was discouraged because her letters had failed to turn up a suitable family. And then a name began to creep into our conversations. Pat Neeley. It took awhile, but I finally figured out that Pat Neeley was a boy. It made me laugh.

  “Why’d his parents give him a girl’s name?”

  Her face reddened. “His name is Patrick,” she snapped. “It happens to be Irish. And you don’t know a damn thing about it, so don’t act like such a stupid twit, or I’ll never tell you anything again.”

  Stung by her anger, I asked, “Is he your boyfriend?”

  She looked over my head, something she’d been doing a lot more often. “Not exactly. We like each other, though.”

  Then came the night I climbed in bed with her and snuggled up next to a pile of clothes wrapped in her bathrobe.

  I had to clap a hand over my mouth to muffle my gasp.

  Everyone was used to people climbing into bunks that didn’t belong to them, but it would’ve looked strange for me to hop right back out. In the dark I could hear the rustle of other blankets, moans from other dreams, someone trying to breathe through a plugged-up nose. I was shaking with the cold and my own fear and anger.

  She was out meeting Patrick Neeley. They were someplace together. Standing in some cold, blue shadow. Whispering, laughing, kissing. Would he put his tongue in her mouth? My stomach turned over, and I buried my face in her pillow to smell her cinnamon hair.

  I thought of staying in her bed till she came back but I couldn’t bear for her to know how much it bothered me. I lay as still as I could until the sighs and grinding teeth and little tight coughs of the others had subsided, and then I slipped out of her bed and back into my own.

  It was easy to avoid her until dinnertime the next day, and I decided to go late to the dining room. All the seats would be taken and I wouldn’t be able to sit by her. When the bell rang at six, I hid in one of the toilet stalls, listening to the stampede of feet down the stairs. When it was quiet, I let myself out and washed my hands. At the top of the landing I paused to hear the tail end of grace, the muted chorus of “Amens.” Then I took a deep breath and ran down the stairs, like I was rushing to get there on time. Everyone was already slurping their soup.

  Only two faces loo
ked to the door when I clattered across the threshold: Edward Blakey, one of the houseparents, looking mildly annoyed. And Lee-Ann. Hair tied back with one of the pale, sheer scarves she’d taken to wearing. Eyes wide open, searching for mine, and finding them, like a heat-seeking missile. She patted the empty seat next to her.

  “I saved your place.” She smiled sweetly and I came to her side, like a dog hearing its name.

  three

  I never confronted her, but she knew. Just like she knew I’d never tell. She made up to me by giving me books she decided she didn’t want, buying me little treats with part of her lunch money. Malted milk balls and chocolate-covered raisins, pixie straws, red licorice. All the things we used to get at Raymond’s. So she was now one of those kids we used to stare at while they groped each other in the parking lot. Her and Patrick. I hated him. Just thinking his name enraged me to the point where anything I was looking at had white around the edges, like the glare of the sun. Sometimes I wanted to scream at her and hit her. Tell her I never wanted to talk to her again. But I did want to talk to her again, and I was terrified that she would shrug me off if I was too much trouble.

  On the day before her fifteenth birthday, she was gone. I didn’t see her at dinner, so I looked for her in the dorm, and her bed was stripped down to the mattress. All her books, her hair clips, the sheer scarves, her black plastic watch—all gone from her shelf. Her locker in the bathroom hung open, empty.

  How could she just go? Without saying anything to me? Sure I was pissed off about Patrick, but she knew I always caved in and forgave her. All I could think of was that she did it on purpose, to spite me. She got her family and she wanted to rub my nose in it by making me ask Ridley or somebody where she went.