A little while later I heard footsteps in the hall. Then a girl was standing in the doorway. She was slender with long, dark hair. She was wearing a green sweater, the sleeves covering her hands as she crossed her arms and leaned against the door. I thought of her as someone out of a magazine, posing in the doorway, maybe a movie star. She was really pretty. I found myself taken by the way she’d presented herself in that moment. She looked at George as if purposefully avoiding eye contact with me, but I stared at her.
The moment she looked at me, I felt the connection.
“Who are you?” she asked me.
“Sequoyah.”
She looked back at George, who didn’t seem to notice her. He sat cross-legged on his bed with his eyes closed. I waited for her to say something else, to ask me where I was from, where I had been living, those sorts of questions, but she didn’t say anything. Maybe I found that intriguing about her, the lack of interest. The way she dismissed me the moment I said my name. The way she never smiled, not even at George’s eccentricities. She glanced at me and said she was going to her room. Then she left and walked down the hall. I heard her door shut.
“That was Rosemary?” I asked George.
He spoke without opening his eyes. “Yeah, that’s Rosemary.”
“How old is she?”
“Seventeen,” he said. “Born April twenty-third. She’s a Taurus, so Harold always says she’s like a stubborn bull. They make fun of astrology.”
I tried to laugh, partly to get some sort of reaction from George, but he remained serious. Everyone was too serious, I thought. It was a gloomy day outside and I already wanted to leave. I looked at George, who kept his eyes closed as the room fell quiet. There was nothing left for either of us to say.
That first night, George and I sat with Harold and Agnes at the dining room table, waiting for Rosemary to come downstairs for dinner. Agnes had made spaghetti and meatballs with a salad and chocolate pudding for dessert. She filled my plate for me and asked what kind of salad dressing I liked.
“It doesn’t matter,” I told her.
“Do you like salad?” she asked. “It’s okay if you don’t like it. You don’t have to eat it.”
“I like it. I’m not picky.”
“Liz said spaghetti is one of your favorite dishes, so I thought this would be a nice first dinner. We have ranch and Italian dressing for your salad.”
“It doesn’t matter. I’ll eat whatever.”
“How about ranch? Do you want me to pour it for you? Or you probably want to do it yourself?”
Agnes smiled at me and handed me the bottle of ranch dressing. I opened it and poured it on my salad. The spaghetti was hot and I took a bite before I realized no one else was eating.
“I don’t think Rosemary is coming down,” Agnes said.
Harold nodded.
“George, was she on the phone?”
George was running a finger around the rim of his glass of milk. “I don’t know,” he said.
“Well, I guess we’ll go ahead and say grace,” Agnes said. “I’ll take a plate up to her.”
Then Agnes started to pray aloud, during which I looked around and noticed she was the only one with her eyes closed. Harold was already putting sauce on his spaghetti, and George was pinching the fleshy part of his hand.
“Father, thank you for this food,” Agnes prayed, her voice soft, “and thank you for bringing Sequoyah to our family. Help us to be a reflection of your goodness through Christ and thank you for all your blessings. Amen.”
I ate head down, not saying anything.
“What do you want to do?” Agnes asked me. “I mean, when you get older? Do you know what you want to be after you finish school? George wants to be an engineer.”
She smiled at me, waiting for an answer.
“I guess I don’t know,” I said.
“That’s understandable,” she said. “You have plenty of time to figure all that out.”
George twisted the spaghetti on his fork.
I kept eating with my head down, but I could feel Agnes watching me. I could tell she was trying to make me feel welcome. She resembled a woman I’d met when I left my last foster home. Maybe it was the way she looked at me, a look of worry or sympathy. Or maybe it was that they were both older, attractive women in their fifties or thereabouts, with similar features. I had left my last foster home after the family caught me smoking in my bedroom. I did this from time to time, usually late at night when everyone was in bed. I’d get cigarettes from friends at school and save them. I kept them with packages of chips and cookies hidden in the closet. Sometimes I stayed out past curfew and they would call Liz, saying they weren’t sure whether I was going to work out for them or not. They treated me like that, as if I were a chore barely worth the money the state paid them for taking me in. They had another foster kid, a little girl named Lacey, but she followed their rules and got along with them. She was only nine. They hated me.
One Saturday they threatened to return me to the shelter if I didn’t start following their rules. They made me pick up my room and rake the leaves outside. They made me clean out the garage and sweep the porch. After all that, they told me to take out the trash and go straight to my room without coming out. I ended up in a shouting match with them, so they told me to leave. I put everything into a duffel bag, including a lighter and a book I’d stolen from the foster dad. Lacey was crying but I couldn’t bring myself to tell her goodbye. I knew they wanted me gone. They called Liz and made me wait outside in the yard. It was getting dark out and I could see road dust settling from a truck that drove by. But I didn’t want to go back to the shelter, so I left on my own. I jumped the fence and walked all the way to Highway 51, past the Econo Lodge and to the gas station across from it.
The woman I met there offered to take me to her home and feed me. She was old with gray hair that hung down in her face. She told me she’d been raised in an orphanage many years ago. She wore rings on every finger. When we got to her house she brought me soup on a tray and sat next to me while I ate. She wanted to put the spoon in my mouth but I wouldn’t let her.
We stayed up late, drinking cheap wine and watching TV. She showed me photos of a boy with crutches. They were old black-and-white photos taken on a farm somewhere.
“His name was Arthur,” she said. “He was crippled and walked with crutches until he died. He was born that way. He was only ten when he died.”
I wasn’t interested. She had this way of trying to laugh. She touched one of the burn marks on my face and told me my eyes were gray. Did I know they were gray? Did I want her to look into my palm and tell me my future? She reached for my hand but I pulled away. She told me a story from the Bible about a woman at a well who gave water to Jesus. The next thing I knew it was almost midnight and rain was hitting the window.
I asked her where the bathroom was and she pointed to the hall. When I got in there I didn’t close the door all the way. I left it barely open. Then I lifted the toilet seat and unbuttoned my pants. I pulled out my cock and masturbated, looking at the open door the whole time until I shot into the toilet. Some of it missed the water. Some of it ran down the side of the toilet, very slowly, and I didn’t bother to clean it up.
When I returned to her living room she tried asking me about my mom and family but I didn’t want to talk. I told her I needed to leave.
“I understand how you must feel,” she said.
“You don’t understand anything,” I told her.
“If you stay I’ll let you sleep in the bed.”
I said, “Don’t you get it? I don’t have to stay anywhere. I can leave if I want.”
She was sitting on the edge of the divan, staring at something on the floor.
“At least wait until it stops raining,” she said.
I grabbed my duffel bag. She didn’t get up or try to stop me. I
waited for her to say something. I waited for her to do something, anything.
Maybe all she was trying to do was help me, but I left anyway.
After dinner I unpacked upstairs, alone in the bedroom. I saw Rosemary briefly in the hall as I was coming out of the bedroom. She didn’t seem to register my presence. She was wearing earphones, staring at her Walkman as she headed to her room. She’d been downstairs with the rest of the family. I feared they’d been talking about me in my absence. It was a common worry, Liz always told me this. No need to be paranoid. No need to worry they won’t like you. But it was hard.
Rosemary went into her bedroom and closed the door. I went downstairs to the kitchen, where Agnes was putting dishes away. The kitchen had a white enamel sink and wooden cabinets painted light blue. The wallpaper was light blue with pictures of small baskets of vegetables and fruit. The room gave off a country kitchen feel. It was a reminder I was in a rural area, a few miles outside of town. I’d never lived in the country before, so looking out the kitchen window at night was like looking in a mirror—there was vast darkness as far as you could see without any porch lights on.
When I entered the kitchen, Agnes smiled and said, “I’m glad you’re here. I was about to head upstairs to talk to you. Can I get you anything?”
“No, I’m fine.”
“Are you sure? Anything you need?”
“I’m fine.”
“Good,” she said. She wiped her hands with a dish towel. “I don’t want you to think we’re inconvenienced by having you here with us. We want to get to know you better. Liz said very pleasant things about you, and I want you to know you can talk to me or Harold about anything you want.”
“I know,” I said.
“Harold tends to spend a lot of time downstairs in the basement. Don’t worry about bothering him. He does it to keep himself occupied. He keeps to himself, but I think you’ll find him quite likable. Did you get a chance to talk to Rosemary?”
“Not really.”
“She’s an artist. She loves to draw and paint. Tomorrow she’ll drive you and George to school. George will show you where to go. Liz said you’re enrolled. Do you have your schedule? Do you know what teachers you have?”
“I don’t know,” I said. “It’s fine. I’ve done it before.”
“All right,” she said. “I’m here for you, okay? Will you remember that?” She kept looking at me, waiting for me to say something, but all I could wonder was whether she was lying or not.
Looking back, I realize I wanted more than anything else to be liked, accepted. Moving from place to place, from shelter to foster home, almost always took its toll, and at fifteen I’d never gotten over the crippling anxiety of sleeping in a new room, a new bed, living in a whole new environment. While the shelter was confining and supposed to be a short-term placement, I’d grown to appreciate having my own room and how easy it was to manipulate the staff and sneak away at night. Foster homes were different. Foster homes were real families in real houses with burglar alarms and neighborhood watch groups. A teenager couldn’t walk around in such a neighborhood late at night and get away with it.
Agnes and Harold told me how proud they were of George’s donations and participation in the annual Walk-a-Thon for Leukemia, as well as his time spent volunteering at the local animal shelter and public library, and that they thought other students should be as passionate and proactive about such issues as he was. Over the past summer he’d done even more. His picture was in the newspaper for collecting used athletic shoes for the Perpetual Prosperity Pumps Foundation that raised awareness of poverty in Ghana or somewhere. Agnes was quoted in the paper as saying, “George has such a big heart.”
“We’re proud of Rosemary’s accomplishments, too,” she added, but didn’t mention any of them.
The first night was strange. It came upon me like burning memory, how shadows spread across the wall in this new room, and in trying to sleep I revisited all the other rooms where I had slept in my past:
My room at the shelter, with its dull, concrete walls, absent of life and color, with one small window facing the brick building next door.
My room in our first house, a small house built of rock that sat near a hill in the woods in Steely Hollow, with the bedroom full of wallpaper of ships at sea, and the small closet I feared held the monsters that lived there—creatures that crawled up from the dirt below the house, who howled in the night, whose shadows cast jagged shards of light across the ceiling when I tried to sleep.
My room in the small apartment above the dirty bookstore, where I slept with a blanket the spirits had blessed with protection. I was more afraid there than anywhere. I heard sirens and traffic sounds at night. There were voices from the street outside. The room was the smallest room I’ve ever seen, as I now recall, and my mother’s footsteps on the hardwood floors kept me awake until late in the night.
My room in the foster home after my mother was locked up the first time, a room I shared with two other boys who slept in bunk beds. I slept on a trundle bed against the wall across from the window. The room was never frightening like some of the other rooms, though the boy on the top bunk thought it was, and spent many nights crying himself to sleep.
And into this new room I was now thrown, or so it seemed, trying to sleep again, this room with its clock ticking on the wall by the door, with its shadows and lights stretching across the wall and ceiling. And I remember how, that first night in bed, I could hear George making sounds of explosions and gunfire with his mouth. It was something a younger boy might do while playing army. In the darkness I stared at the ceiling and waited for him to stop. After it went on a while I finally sat up in bed and looked over at him.
“I’m trying to sleep,” I said.
“I forgot you were here,” he said.
“I’m right here.”
I lay in the bed with my arm over my eyes, trying to go to sleep. I felt a sadness but also a kind of confusion. There was nothing I was afraid of, and nothing to look forward to, which made me want to leave. I was like a cat in the night—that’s what Liz always said. I needed a place to feel comfortable.
George turned on the lamp beside his bed and wrote something down in a notebook. He brought it to me. It read:
Sometimes I sleepwalk.
“Whatever,” I said. “Just don’t wake me up if you do.”
He took the notebook from me and wrote something else:
If I sleepwalk I might get in bed with you, okay?
That night I didn’t sleep well. I kept waking up disoriented, confused in the darkness. At one point I got up to go to the bathroom. I didn’t know what time it was, but the house was silent. As I stepped into the hall I noticed Rosemary’s door was open. I walked past her room and saw her sitting cross-legged on her bed, a pillow in her lap. It took a moment in the darkness for me to notice she was looking at me. Neither of us said anything. I saw only her, sitting alone in the dark, looking at me. I walked down the hall to the bathroom. When I came out, her bedroom door was closed.
The next morning I dressed and ate breakfast with George downstairs while Rosemary got ready in the upstairs bathroom. With the dizzy smell of coffee brewing and hot oatmeal, George showed me the cassette tapes in his backpack. The tapes were Rosemary’s, Agnes explained, but instead of listening to them George liked reading the liner notes, memorizing the names of band members. He could name the band’s members and history without ever having listened to their music.
“The Sugarcubes,” he said. “From Iceland. Do you know them?”
“No.”
“Wall of Voodoo? The Smiths?”
“No.”
“Morbid Opera? What about Throbbing Gristle or The Plasmatics? Teenage Jesus and the Jerks? Who else. Boomtown Rats, Bow Wow Wow? Castration Squad? The Raincoats?”
“No.”
“I like to memorize band names
,” he said. “But not the music. Never the music. Rosemary gives me the inserts of her tapes and I read the liner notes. She listens to them.”
Agnes asked if we wanted more orange juice. “You better hurry and leave,” she said, and looked at George. “Where’s Rosemary?”
He shrugged.
Agnes stepped out of the room. We heard her call for Rosemary from the bottom of the stairs. When Rosemary finally came downstairs she walked into the kitchen and grabbed a Diet Coke from the fridge. “I can’t eat anything this early,” she told us, as if we’d asked her about breakfast. She opened the can and looked at us. “You guys ready?”
We took the Pontiac Grand Am out of the country and onto the highway. George wanted to ride in back. I sat up front next to Rosemary. She was wearing a black coat and light blue gloves. Her hair was long and I could smell her perfume. She played a cassette and turned it up. The music was full of keyboards and drums. She sang along as we sped down the highway. When we reached the junior high school, she stopped at the corner to let George out.
He took forever checking his backpack before opening the door.
“See you later,” Rosemary said to him.
As we pulled away, she turned down the music and drove toward the high school a few blocks away.
“I have to go to the office to get my schedule,” I said.
“You’re a freshman, right?”
“Yeah. You’re a senior?”
“I’m basically done. I have like one class I’m finishing.”
She pulled in front of the high school, next to the curb. “The office is on the first floor,” she said. “You’ll do fine.”
I got out and watched her drive away. It seemed she wasn’t going to park anywhere nearby.
Students crowded outside and everyone was in groups. In the school office, a woman stared at the scars on my face and asked what my name was. I’d seen the look before. She felt sorry for me, whatever. I didn’t want to be there. I thought about ditching school altogether that day. I remember thinking: fuck this woman, I hate her. So many teachers and staff at schools tried to feel sorry for me when they first saw me, like something was wrong with me. Fuck her, I thought. She typed my name in on a computer and we waited for my schedule to print. She handed it to me and told me to have a good day and to let her know if I needed anything.
Where the Dead Sit Talking Page 3