Family

by Caroline Leavitt

  “You stay here and watch for Shelter,” Tom told Nick. “You call him every once in a while.” He rubbed at his eyes until Helen pulled his hand free. “You want to get wrinkles?” she said. She buttoned up her coat, bundled a scarf about her hair. “Let’s get this show on the road,” she said.

  Nick watched the car leave. Helen had the window rolled down an inch or two and was blowing on her hands. Nick stayed by the front door until the car was out of sight, then went into the kitchen to get himself something to eat. There was peanut butter, and he took the jar and a butter knife and sat down in front of the television and avidly watched some cowboy movie about a rustler and his partner, who happened to be a woman. It was pretty good. Every few minutes he got up and checked the door. He left it open so he could hear the cat, and, more important, so he could hear his parents’ car, so he could dash back out and pretend he had been watching all the time.

  He fell asleep in the middle of the movie, waking only when he heard someone rapping against the glass of the front door. He jerked up. He had a funny metallic taste in his mouth from the peanut butter; his eyes felt itchy and red. He scrambled to his feet. He had been in the bathroom—he could always say that. He had had a stomachache. Helen was always sympathetic to ailments; Tom’s certain fury would fade. He walked into the living room, rubbing at his belly, his head down, and when he looked up, he saw the two policemen, waiting, watching him steadily through the glass.

  It was just a kid. Sixteen years old, driving his brother’s jeep, speeding. He didn’t know how fast. Not that fast, not murderous. He was blasting the radio, bebopping the tune on the steering wheel. Then he saw a dog, he thought, or maybe a cat, dancing right into the path of his car, and when he swerved to avoid hitting it, he lost control. He was skidding, careening crazily straight for the other side of the road, right where Nick’s parents were standing. They were thrown. They might have made it if they had hit the soft bank of snow, but their own car was so close, the metal so relentlessly impassable.

  It kept playing in Nick’s mind as he moved through a paralyzed haze, as he let the cops lead him right into the back seat of his car. They didn’t rush him; they let him go into the bathroom first, where he locked the door and sat on the tub, thinking, This is my bathroom, that green toothbrush is my father’s, the red one belongs to my mother. There was the heater where the cat used to love to sleep nights. Sometimes he’d step on it by mistake, the cat tensing beneath him. He heard the sudden sharp drone of a bee and he looked around, half expecting to see it buzzing by the sink, and then he realized that it was just the heater kicking on, and he thought how unnatural it all seemed, how everything was suddenly not quite right.

  “Do you have family?” the cops asked. “An aunt, an uncle you can stay with?”

  Nick, speechless, stared at them.

  “Friends?” one cop said. “What about friends?” And then, sighing, he patted Nick on the back. He started to lift Nick’s California suitcase, to get it out of the way, and Nick flinched back, as if he had been struck.

  Later, he’d remember only outlines. There was Miss Harry, the caseworker assigned to him, a rabbity-looking woman who kept asking him about his family, about his friends, who later told him she had found Helen’s address book in the house and had taken it upon herself to call each and every number to see if Nick could be taken in. “They all had such wonderful things to say about you,” she said, while Nick sat there, shamed. “But these times…” She lifted her hands helplessly.

  He remembered two silent days at a youth shelter, where he lay stiffly across his bed, not eating, not washing his face, his hair grown so tangled he couldn’t even get his fingers through it. He wouldn’t unlace his shoes. He refused to sleep under the blanket. When Miss Harry came to take him to the funeral, he refused to go. He heard her talking outside in the corridor, saying, well, he was just a boy, she wasn’t so sure it was smart to force him; it had been…and then both voices softened, pulling away from him.

  He would never go to the cemetery, he would never think about it. He told himself his parents weren’t dead. He hadn’t seen any bodies, and even if he went to the funeral, there was no reason why someone couldn’t have just buried a box. His parents had amnesia, knocked into a kind of sleep by the blow from the car. They were living in a totally different city by now, working, wondering what it was they were missing. Soon, suddenly, he would prickle back into their memory and they would come and get him. Maybe they would go on Walter Cronkite and hold up his picture, not knowing where he was, not remembering the city they had both wanted to forget. “Do you know this boy?” He rolled over onto his back, watching the ceiling, pinching his own flesh, running his hands over his legs, his belly, cupping his hands over his face so he could feel his own breath. His parents would find him.

  He remembered his court appearance, in a jacket, his hair slicked back with oil because Miss Harry had insisted. The judge, a man no older than his father, kept watching him, frowning, kept asking him why he didn’t want a foster home, why he kept insisting he had a home, had parents. And when the judge told him he was a ward of the state, and as such would be put into the care of the Pittsburgh Home for Boys, Nick suddenly couldn’t breathe, couldn’t move his hand to tell anyone he was dying. Everything shimmered, floating by him. Miss Harry touched him then, and he folded right over, almost falling, until his head was against the cool wood of the table, and then fiercely, for the first time, he cried.

  His last memory was of driving with Miss Harry, on the way to the home. She kept the radio on low—“Easy Listening”—and when she drove past his neighborhood, he asked her to stop. She didn’t say anything, but stopped where he had asked and didn’t try to keep him from going up the chipped flagstone walk to his house. He tried the door, but it was locked. He wrenched at it, he kicked. It was his house. There was his room inside. He knew where the burns were in the rug from Tom’s cigars, he knew where Helen kept her pictures of beaches, stashed under the cards in the den, hidden under a kitchen towel, little fixes that warmed the chill of the long winter months. He tugged at the door and then started pounding at the glass, over and over, and then Miss Harry was racing up the flagstone, her heels clicking, grabbing hold of him and forcing him toward her. He had let her touch him then. He had felt her hands moving over his hair, along his spine, but then, when he had felt her heart, he had panicked, pulling himself free. She had said something to him, her face earnest, pleading, but he hadn’t heard any of the words; he had felt only her voice washing over him like a wave, when he was already drowning.

  It was funny. All his life he had lived in Pittsburgh, but he had never been this far east, this near the edge of town. He couldn’t remember seeing this big red brick building, the gated scrubby yard.

  The director of the home was a tall, bony man named Mr. Rice. He spoke privately with Miss Harry for a while, and then Miss Harry spoke with Nick. She told him she would come to see him, she’d make sure he was all right. There were bills, she explained, but the sale of the house should cover them, and if there was money left over, she’d put it in trust for him; he could get it when he turned eighteen.

  “Come on, I’ll show you the dorm,” Mr. Rice said. He took Nick up two flights to a large white room. Twelve beds in a row, the same brown wood dresser beside each one. There were a few posters hanging up over each bed. Rock stars. Movie stars. A few calendars with days X’d off. “Ah, here we go,” said Mr. Rice. “Yours.”

  Nick settled tentatively on the bed.

  “Oh, don’t look like that,” Mr. Rice said. “This isn’t a prison. We think of ourselves as a kind of extended family, I suppose, with rewards and punishments like everywhere else. Demerits, you know—no radio at night, no going out nights, things like that. I have a little booklet I can give you. Come on, cheer up. You’ll see how it is. You’re going to be just fine.”

  Just fine. Nick pinched himself, bright spotty bruises, trying to jolt things right. He wasn’t sleeping. When he did, he
dreamed of his parents. Tom pulling the stars out of the sky and juggling them; Helen dancing, a white transistor clapped against one ear. The alarm would wake him, and he’d burrow into the sheets, waiting for the familiar smell of Helen’s perfume as she bent to shake him awake, waiting for the heavy dark odor of Tom’s coffee. And then, after a while, other smells would filter in. Ammonia. Urine. Dirty socks. And then he’d hear strange voices, and he’d open his eyes. He’d see the room, the other boys watching him, waiting. What was happening to his life? He’d feel himself falling, falling, and then he’d jerk up and race to the bathroom, turning on the shower as hot as it would go, standing under it so the sting of the water would burn away his terror.

  He saw bow it was. Everything was firmly scheduled. You had to get to breakfast by eight if you wanted the gluey oatmeal, the plate of soggy toast. You had to sit at the row table and eat whatever they had that morning or go hungry until lunch. You had to be at the home’s school until four, and you had to sign up for at least one activity—a sport, a club. There was even a therapist on staff who called you in once a month to talk, who always wanted to discuss some comment a teacher made about you. Weekends were your own; so was the time between classes and after dinner until eleven, when you had to be in bed with the lights clicked dark. They didn’t care what you did as long as you signed in and out, and if you did chores if you swept the front stoop or washed a floor, you could earn more time.

  He kept to himself. A few boys approached him, impressed that he had actually had parents, wanting to know what it was like. “It’s like nothing,” Nick said. He wouldn’t socialize with any of them; he wouldn’t for one moment let himself think this life was real. And when, rebuffed enough times, the other boys kept their distance, when he overheard one tell another that he was weird, he felt a hard, raw flush of satisfaction, and then a yearning despair.

  He told himself he would run away; he plotted where he would go, places Tom had told him about. When he was outside on free time, he’d start walking and walking, and then he would panic a little. Where could he go with two dollars in his back pocket? What kind of work could he get? How would he live? He’d come back to the home furious with himself. He’d try to go to sleep, half-certain that if he slept deeply enough, he’d wake up from the dream, back in his parents’ home.

  The other kids thought about escape, too, but it was always adoption. The babies always left almost as quickly as they arrived, and the smaller boys could usually find homes. But the older you got, the more difficult it became, and everyone knew it. As soon as a couple walked in, boys would be spitting into their palms, slicking back their hair, straightening up and smiling, but the couple almost always left promised a newborn.

  The home tried to help. Every month they put someone’s picture into the Sunday Press, with a small blurb detailing how smart that particular boy was, how well behaved, and why you should think seriously about adopting him. The paper never said how a boy burned tattoos into his arm, how a boy wet his bed so many times a night he had to keep clean linen on a chair next to the bed. It was all vaguely humiliating, and only one boy in three years had ever been adopted because of the picture. But always, always, when it came time for volunteers, there were all these restless hands shooting up, uncontrollable as weeds.

  A few boys got foster homes, sending postcards back to the home that were tacked up on the bulletin board in the dining room. “Have my own room,” the cards said. “Have my own dog.” One or two of the boys always came back, stiff and silent, curled about their time outside as if it were a wound.

  Nick wrote postcards, too, and letters. Every trip outside the home, he stopped at a pay phone and tried to find the address of someone who had known his family, someone who had known and liked him. There weren’t many names. His parents hadn’t really made room for anyone in their lives except each other and him. Still, he kept thinking, maybe people didn’t realize what had happened to him; maybe they had just assumed he had aunts and uncles like everyone else. He’d do it right, he thought. He wouldn’t just show up on someone’s doorstep, embarrassing them. He’d write a letter that showed how intelligent he was, how well bred.

  He wrote to Tom’s boss, promising to work in the mills for free if he was taken in. He wrote to Helen’s one friend, telling her that he knew how to cook macaroni and cheese, that he could scrub a kitchen floor so shiny you could see yourself reflected in the gloss. He wrote to his last teacher because she had taken him aside one day and told him what promise she thought he had. And then he wrote to Chuck, a simple plea.

  He mailed his letters and then he waited. No one at the home ever got any mail. All letters went right to Mr. Rice, and so every time Nick passed him, he looked at the director anxiously. When he passed a phone, he thought about nonchalantly calling some of the people, asking casually. “Oh, did you get my letter?” His fear, small and dark within him, took hold.

  It took another week, and then a few responses trickled in. Mr. Rice gave him five envelopes, smiling, not asking him one question, and Nick raced with them into the bathroom, leaning along the tiled wall, his hands shaking as he ripped open the letters.

  There was a note from Helen’s friend, polite and sad, telling him how much she missed Helen, how she knew Nick would grow up to be a credit, and then her signature. There were listless responses from neighbors who said that if Nick was in the neighborhood he should call—he was welcome to potluck dinner anytime. And there was a letter from Chuck. Chuck said his father had left as soon as the driveway had been repaved, without a word of explanation. They thought he had gone someplace south, because he had taken only his summer shirts. His mother was waiting tables over at Tiffany’s, and he himself was thinking of going over to Giant Eagle supermarket and trying to get work as a boxboy, to earn at least some of his keep. “If anyone needs rescue, it’s me,” Chuck wrote.

  Nick stopped writing letters, stopped thinking about taking the bus to his side of town to look for familiar faces. When he walked, he hunched over, keeping his face in shadows. Once, when he was outside reading, he looked up and saw an old gambling buddy of Tom’s. He was walking, a paper trapped under one arm, and he whistled. He wasn’t even one of the people Nick had written to. Nick felt his breath chip. He got his hand up in a kind of frantic half-salute, and then he remembered all those letters, how they had come back to him, and he jerked his hand down, furious, burning with need.

  Nick would turn fifteen in the home. He kept trying to keep himself as apart from the home as he could. He wouldn’t wear the clothing the home provided—the hand-me-downs from churches and Goodwill, the donations from the Girl Scout groups and ladies’ clubs that came to the home on holidays, grinning, carrying themselves like saints. He wouldn’t go when Mr. Rice herded ten boys over to the cut-rate stores to shop. He knew how it must look, one man with all those boys politely calling him mister, fingering the chinos everyone wanted, but Mr. Rice said were too faddy. The kids all got the same kinds of stuff, cheaply made, with colors that bled in the wash, pinking your underwear and your socks.

  Nick began doing chores, taking what money he could earn and saving it for clothing. He also got permission to work two afternoons a week at the Cluck-a-Buck, a chicken place in Shadyside, where he served family after family, mopping up the messes they made, getting them extra fries, extra water, extra everything for the meager tips they doled out. He had to wear a yellow hat shaped like a big chicken comb, a yellow shirt that said “Cluck” across it, but he didn’t care. It all had a purpose. After a month, he walked right onto the main floor of Kaufmann’s and bought himself chinos and loafers and a pale blue shirt. Every night he carefully swabbed out the bathroom sink and handwashed his shirt, hanging it in the shower to dry.

  He paid for his own haircuts. He hated the crew cuts the home provided, and although the barber promised to do whatever Nick wanted, Nick didn’t think he could give a cut that didn’t have an institutional look to it. He began taking two buses over to the Wilfred Beauty Sc
hool, where for only two dollars one of the students would cut your hair. The only catch was that you had to give them carte blanche—you had to trust them. Nick didn’t mind. The students were friendly girls, in white uniforms and nurses’ shoes, their names on blue name tags. Dot. Amy. And they talked to him while they fussed with his hair; they treated him as if he were just an ordinary kid coming to get his hair cut.

  He had startling cuts. Ducktails, bangs, once something called a Whiffle Ball, a cut that bristled up about his head. He couldn’t recognize himself in the mirror.

  “You hate it,” the girl working on him said. She kept rubbing her hands along her uniform, as if they were wet. She glanced toward the supervisor, who was shouting at another student for having left some peroxide on far too long.

  “No, no, it’s great,” Nick said, and then, as soon as he left, he went to the five-and-dime and bought himself a golf hat to tug over it. The other kids in the home made fun of him, but he didn’t care. He studied his reflection in the mirror, and he thought no one would ever mistake him for an orphan.

  When he was sixteen, Miss Harry suddenly stopped coming. He had a new social worker, a thin young woman, fresh out of school, who took him out for burgers and fries, who said she wanted to be his friend and kept glancing at her watch. She told him Miss Harry had gotten fed up with the pressure and had moved to Florida.

  Florida. It made Nick think about travel. It rekindled memories of Tom and his brochures, his road maps. Nick began to hang around the travel agencies in town. Like father, like son, he thought, and it was a kind of comfort. He crammed brochures into his jacket when no one was looking. He stared so long at the posters that once an agent gave him one, telling him to come back again when he was with his parents, and she would give them a deal. At night he lay across his bed, the brochures spread about him, waiting for it to be nine, the time he had overheard that the Pan Am flight took off for Spain.