One afternoon we’re playing Snakes and Ladders and I notice a small burn on her wrist. She sees me staring and pulls her sleeve down, knocks the board over, bursts into tears and hides her head under a throw pillow. I roll her sleeve up and find three more little round burns on her arm. Cigarette burns.
I pull her sleeve back down and stroke her leg and sing, “You are my sunshine, my only sunshine.” After a while she stops crying and her head pops out from under the pillow and she says, “Can I have some cake?”
Every time I see April after that, I check her out for burns or bruises. On the sly, of course. Most of the time I find them. When I ask her where they come from, she says she fell down or Matthew, her little brother, kicked her or she was helping her mom make toast. When her mom comes to pick her up (she’s always the last parent to arrive), she doesn’t even shut the engine off. She just honks and waits in her car, smoking and listening to Aerosmith. She lets April ride in the front seat without a seat belt. I was, like, ten before Sandra let me ride in front, and she still won’t start the car until my seat belt is done up.
After a while, I can’t take any more. I have nightmares that one day April won’t be at the after-school program, that she will end up in the hospital or, worse, in the morgue. I have seen enough bruises on her pale skin to believe that she is in danger from the very people who are supposed to protect her. It’s all kinds of wrong, and I have to tell somebody or I’m going to get violent myself. I’ve watched enough TV to know I need proof. All I have are suspicions, but I don’t know where to take them. I start with Dr. Handel.
“Cigarette burns,” he says. “You’re sure?” He puts his notepad down and leans toward me. I’m sitting on the edge of the couch instead of lying down like I usually do. April’s problems seem so much bigger than mine right now.
“Yup,” I say. I pull my own sleeve up to show him a burn on my forearm. “I bummed a cigarette off Jared and burned myself, just to be sure. It hurt like you wouldn’t believe.” My eyes fill with tears, and I feel a surge of anger so strong it threatens to choke me. “How can anyone do that to a kid? She’s only seven. She sings dumb songs while we bake. She cheats at Snakes and Ladders. She makes me laugh. They don’t deserve her. She’d be better off with me.”
Dr. Handel nods. “That’s probably true, Emily,” he says. “But you’re only seventeen.” He pauses. “Have you told anyone? Your mom, maybe, or someone at the school?”
I start to say what I usually say—that she’s not my mom—but this time I stop and simply answer, “No.”
Chapter Thirteen
I stand in the doorway of Sandra’s office. “I need your help,” I say.
Sandra looks up from her work. She lowers her glasses and gestures to the client chair.
“Okay,” she says. “Shoot.”
I take a deep breath. “It’s about April,” I begin. “I think...I mean...she needs...”
Sandra leans forward. “Go on,” she says gently. I continue.
“Someone’s hurting her, someone at her house. Dr. Handel says I need to report it, but I...” My eyes fill with tears. Sandra gets up and crouches by the chair and holds me as I cry.
“Dr. Handel says I can call the cops or the ministry or the Kids’ Help Line. He says social workers will talk to me and to April, and doctors will examine her, and she’ll probably get taken away from her parents. I’m scared. I mean, what if she gets sent to a bad foster home, like Tina did? What if her dad comes after her or something? What if he comes after me?”
Sandra stiffens and stands up. She looks like she did when she caught Billy Conklin burning a cat’s tail with a cigarette lighter. Like a mother bear having a very bad day. “What do you need me to do?” she asks.
I had my speech all planned out, but now my tongue feels thick and my lips are glued together. I can’t get the words out.
“Emily? Honey? Would it help if April could come here for a while?”
I am still speechless, but for different reasons. How did she know what I was going to say? And why is she being so generous after all I’ve put her through?
I nod. “Dr. Handel says that if you talk to the social workers and they see what kind of a...” I pause. “...What kind of a mother you are, and what kind of a home we have, then maybe she can stay with us instead of going to strangers.”
“Okay, then,” she says. “Let’s get that first phone call over with. We’ll take it from there.”
She sits with me while I call the Kids’ Help Line. The woman I talk to is calm and kind, and she makes me feel better about what I’m doing. She tells me what will happen next, to April and to me. Then she talks to Sandra, who takes lots of notes. When Sandra gets off the phone, she leads me up to the kitchen. She sits me down at the table while she makes macaroni and cheese from the box. We sit down to our bowls of bright orange goop, and she takes a bite and says, “Heaven.”
I mix ketchup in with mine and I say what I always say. “Sunset in a bowl.”
She laughs, as she always does.
The next few days are a blur of interviews and meetings and more interviews and more meetings. Sandra drives me to every appointment and waits for me, sometimes for as long as two hours. She brings her laptop and sits in hallways and drinks a lot of tea. She is also interviewed to see if she’s a suitable foster mother for April
It makes me want to scream—how long it takes and how many different people we have to talk to—but one morning, about a week after I made the call, a social worker brings April to our house. Her father has been charged with assault, and her mother has gone into rehab for her drinking. April will stay with us indefinitely. Mom won’t get paid right away, but she says that’s okay—April’s happiness is more important.
I don’t expect April to be happy, exactly, but for the first few days she hardly talks to me. She cries all the time and wants her mother. I try to coax a smile out of her by making up songs about macaroons and date squares, but she’s not buying it. The social workers have warned me that the transition will be difficult for her, so I try to use what Sandra says is the number one parenting skill of all time: patience
Little by little, April starts to talk about what happened to her after I made the call. She tells me how the doctors poked and prodded her, how the social workers asked endless questions and the police came and took away her dad. She never talks about what her parents did to her. I don’t push her to give me details—she’s in a state of shock and she misses her home and her little brother and her parents. Her loyalty to the people who abuse her blows me away. I try to go with her to all her appointments, and if I can’t go, Sandra goes. There are therapists and more social workers, lots of different ones. Later on there will be court dates and supervised visits with her mom when she gets out of rehab.
But right now we do lots of regular everyday stuff. I take her to school and pick her up. We do our homework together and help Sandra with dinner. We play games and watch TV and paint our toenails crazy colors. I read all my old favorites to her at bedtime—Goodnight Moon, Babar, Madeleine. Once a week I take her to visit her little brother, Matthew, at his foster home. She’s a great big sister, loving and careful—the way I am trying to be with her. How an abused seven-year-old knows how to do this is beyond me, and I wonder if Matthew realizes how lucky he is. She is always sad when we have to leave.
After April goes to bed, I usually sit and drink tea with Sandra for a little while before I study or go out with friends. Mostly we talk about ordinary stuff—how April is doing or which exams I’m stressing about or whether we should get a cat. Sometimes we talk about what happened between us. Mostly I’m doing what Dr. Handel suggested—I’m sitting with it, processing the fact that both my biological parents are dead, and while Sandra is biologically my aunt, she really is my mother. I’m not angry about it anymore, and I’ve gone back to thinking of Donna as my aunt. And Michael Keene Senior? Well, he really was just a sperm-donor after all.
Tina is coming for Christmas. The
n we’re going to drive her back to Vancouver and we’re all going to stay at the Sylvia for a few days. We’ll take April to Stanley Park and the Planetarium and go shopping on Robson and eat cupcakes and gelato on Denman. Tina and I will go back to the café on Robson so I can flirt with the cute barista. I’m pretty sure that I’m going to visit Mike Junior and tell him who I am. It scares me, mostly because I don’t want to mess up his life, but I think he deserves to know that he has a sister, even a slightly crazy one. I’m going to tell him about the bull’s-eyes. I want him to meet Tina and April and Sandra too, but that may have to wait. In the meantime, I’ve got lots to keep me busy. And happy. That’s the most surprising thing. The happiness.
One night after April’s bedtime ritual (three stories, a cuddle and a kiss, the bedbug rhyme, lights out), her whisper follows me to the door.
“Are you my sister now, Emily?”
I don’t have to give it even a moment’s thought. “Sure looks that way, doesn’t it?” I reply, smiling in the dark.
“Even if I go back to live with Mommy?” Her little voice is quavering. I flip the light on again and sit on the side of her bed. I look down at her worried little face.
“Here’s the way it works,” I say, stroking her hair away from her face. “No matter where you go and what you do, we’ll always be sisters. Deal?”
“Deal,” she says as her thumb rises to her mouth and her eyes close.
“Deal,” I say again as I turn out the light and leave the room.
Sarah N. Harvey is an editor and the author of Puppies on Board, a picturebook. Bull’s Eye, her first Soundings novel, was written between Ping-Pong games. Sarah lives in Victoria, British Columbia.
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