My brothers would arrive within the next day or two, but I would never see them. After a couple of weeks, Isabella too would disappear. A family had selected her.
I slept alone after she was taken away.
“STEPH? THESE AMEX bills are out of control,” Jim said. “Can you explain these charges to me? $2,700 to Kravet?”
“That was to reupholster the sofa.”
“What sofa?”
“The living room sofa. Did you actually not notice that it used to be blue and gold brocade and now it’s Belgian linen?”
“I did not notice that, no.”
I pretended incredulity but I wasn’t really surprised. Jim was never home. He hadn’t looked at me in months, so why would he notice the sofa?
“Was there some reason to reupholster it?” he asked. “I wasn’t aware there was anything wrong with it.”
“Well, the room is a much warmer taupe now that I had it repainted, and the sofa clashed with the new shade,” I told him. “You know I had the walls repainted last month.”
“Yes, that I do know. To the tune of several thousand dollars as well. And I don’t know why you needed to do that either.”
“They were too yellowish!” I protested. “I started to feel like there was something sickly about them.”
“You are killing me, Steph. Do you know how many unnecessary things you’ve had done to the house in the last six months?”
I knew very well, but I stood listening as Jim ticked them off. In addition to repainting the living room, dining room and entry—and reupholstering the sofa—I had changed all the drapes and accent pillows in those rooms. I had pulled out the bathroom vanity and installed a copper sink along with imported travertine tile. I had all the oak cupboards in the kitchen painted white and then inlaid with leaded glass. I’d ripped out the Formica countertops and replaced them with quartz. I put in recessed lighting. I made the surface of the kitchen island one vast wooden butcher block.
“Well, you’re right, that is a lot,” I conceded. “but I really needed a change, and I’m almost done.”
“What do you mean, almost?”
“I’ve had my eye on a chandelier at Porteco and a couple of rugs in the Pearl District. And there’s a vintage tapestry from—”
“Stop,” Jim said. “Just—time out for a minute. Listen to me: You need to put a freeze on the spending, at least for a little while.”
“Why?”
“What do you mean why? Because I can’t keep up with you! Honestly, it’s out of control. It’s starting to seem like a compulsion on your part, this need to keep redesigning and overhauling every aspect of the house.”
“I’m a designer, Jim,” I said haughtily. “It’s my art form. It’s what I do.”
“I thought the point was to do it to other people’s houses.”
“The best showcase for my work is my own house! Do you know how many jobs I’ve gotten because people want me to do their houses the way I’ve done ours? Why don’t you worry about your own work and let me worry about mine?”
“I am worried about my own work,” Jim said. “That’s what you don’t seem to get. You seem to think NexPractice is a done deal, that it’s already a success story, but that’s not the case.”
NexPractice was the start-up that currently consumed all of Jim’s waking hours. To say I resented it would be an understatement—by now I hated even the sound of its name. I was tired of competing with it for my husband’s presence and attention, and I was tired of losing every time.
My husband had always been what I considered excessively driven. The very long hours he put in at work had been our deepest source of tension for well over a decade. He was a serial entrepreneur, but NexPractice demanded a level of commitment that made all his other ventures seem family-friendly in comparison.
By now it seemed that Jim was married to the company rather than to me. It was as if NexPractice were the wife and I the mistress, settling for scant and stolen hours. With something of a shock, I realized that my spending had been spurred by this resentment. If I was going to be the kept woman in Jim’s life, then by God, I was going to be kept in style.
“Well, you’ve always talked like it’s a done deal,” I said. “The big payoff is just around the corner. Isn’t that what you’ve been saying forever?”
“I wouldn’t have put in this kind of time if I didn’t believe that. I’ve killed myself trying to make this company work, but I no longer know when or even if that will happen.”
“What are you talking about?”
“Which part don’t you understand?”
“You’re suddenly saying you don’t know if you can make NexPractice work?” I heard panic edge into my voice. “I have essentially been a single mother for all the years you’ve put into that venture. Now you’re telling me it might all be for nothing?”
Jim was silent. I saw his jaw twitch.
“Well?” I demanded.
“Stephanie, I have done everything in my power to build this company. I have given it my whole life. Do you think I want to tell you it might not work?”
“Jim!” I heard myself becoming shrill with anxiety. “Failure is not an option after all this. It has to work.”
My husband jammed his fists into the front pockets of his jeans and turned away. I followed him into the next room.
“Jim? Do you hear me? You have to make it work. Our family has sacrificed too much.”
“Sacrificed? Isn’t that a little over the top? Has this family wanted for a single thing?”
“Oh, just a husband and a father.”
“Don’t give me that,” Jim said. “Don’t I detail your car, don’t I de-ice your windshield in the morning, don’t I make you coffee before I leave and do a hundred other loving things despite the very long hours I work? Frankly, comparing yourself to a single mother is obscene.”
“Those things are nice, Jim. But they aren’t enough. I’m sorry, but you are gone. You just aren’t in our lives anymore.”
We stood there for a moment with this accusation hanging in the air between us. When I spoke again, I was fighting tears.
“You said you would never leave me,” I said. “But you have. You’ve abandoned me in all the ways that matter. I feel completely alone.”
Chapter 10
JIM AND I had breakfast in near-silence the next morning. We were at an impasse: I could not abide his working hours any longer, and he was in too deep to ease back. There was nothing left to say. While he sat at the kitchen table, I busied myself at the counter, pouring coffee, hovering over the toaster, not wanting to take the seat across from him.
The sky outside was still dark. It matched the color of my mood. I’d just locked the house behind me and was walking out to my car when I felt the buzz of my cell phone from within my purse. It was my mother.
“When are you coming to see me, Stephanie?” she asked fretfully. “My pain meds aren’t working. I can barely get around the apartment, and I need Starbucks and cigarettes and herbs.” By herbs I knew she meant marijuana. Nothing else ever seemed to bring her pain relief.
“I don’t know when I can come, Mom,” I said. “I’m not feeling well myself today.”
“Stephanie,” she said, in a tone of pure command. “Don’t let me suffer like this! It’s cruel. I need you.”
“I’ll get there when I can,” I told her. “I just don’t know if it’ll be today.”
But we both knew it would. She had said the magic words. She needed me.
* * *
IN MY CAR, going up and down the dial of its satellite radio stations, I stumbled across a channel titled Broadway, caught by the opening of a song I knew. I froze, remembering the last time I had heard the tune.
Years ago, I was sitting with my young sons in a children’s theater in Portland, watching a local production of Annie. Listening to the opening lyrics of “Maybe,” I was suddenly so awash in tears that I had to step out into the lobby.
To my boys, and probably
to everyone else in the theater, the dream of being adopted by a loving family described in that song was pure entertainment, and hit no closer to home than Cinderella’s desire to attend the ball. But to me, the orphans’ longing for parents to love them and bring them home was achingly familiar and real.
My time in the Bertolini house had planted that seed—the seed of How Things Could Be, How Things Should Be. The dream of a small, cheerful, well-kept house. A sun-splashed kitchen and garden, bookshelves and rocking chairs and rag rugs, kindness and coziness and bedtime prayers. A mother and a father. Home.
IN THE DEPENDENT unit of Santa Rosa, the dream of a real home was impossibly distant, and yet occasionally it glimmered into view, like the North Star. Children disappeared from the place every week. They simply vanished, as Isabella had. There one day and gone the next.
Taken. Chosen. Plucked from the rabble, the rubble. When I tried to imagine where they had gone, I pictured a house like Mama and Papa Bee’s, and I wished with all my might to be selected next.
Then one day it happened, just like that. I was in the yard, which wasn’t a yard at all but a cement enclosure between two buildings, bordered on the other two sides by wire fencing. A wild game of dodgeball was underway, and I was cringing on the fringes of it, trying mostly to stay apart from the action, when there was a tap on my shoulder.
“Come with me,” said one of the matrons who staffed the unit.
Mutely, I trailed her into the nearest building and down the hall to an office. My file was on the desk, along with the black trash bag I’d had to surrender upon my arrival. As promised that day, my doll was still inside. The matron sat down and stamped a release form.
“Stephanie Madera,” she said, squinting at the top page. It was startling to hear my name from an employee after so many months. To remember I had a name at all. Then she pushed the black trash bag across the desk to me.
“You’re out of here,” she told me. “Somebody picked you.”
Those shimmering words—somebody picked you—seemed to tamper with the air and sunlight as I followed the matron across the parking lot to where a social worker was waiting. My social worker, Adele, the soft-spoken and gentle one who had been in the police car with Isabella and me. She knelt down and put her arms around me, and I clung to her with all my strength.
“I’m so happy to see you again, Stephanie,” she said into my hair. “I was so happy to hear the good news. A family wants you to come and live with them! A very nice family with other children for you to play with. Would you like that?”
I nodded, my face pressed against her neck, too pleased to speak, and too shy.
She opened the back door of her car, ushered me in, and fastened a seatbelt around me. Then we drove down the winding road, away from the dependent unit and onto the avenues of Santa Rosa, the matron’s words still echoing in my ears. Somebody picked you. Oh, the joy of it!
I’d been chosen. I was wanted. I was going to a real home.
MY NEW FAMILY lived on Creekside Drive. I was enchanted by the sound of it. To me it sounded like something from a fairy tale. I pictured a mighty creek winding through a village, with charming houses along either side of it. I had never seen the residential canals of Venice or Amsterdam, or even pictures of them, but a similar image took hold in my imagination.
My hopes were high and yet, when the car pulled into their circular drive, the splendor of their house and yard left me breathless. There was an above-ground swimming pool—a swimming pool—and a lush garden filled with all kinds of vegetables: tidy rows of cherry tomato plants and purplish asparagus and mustard greens and rainbow chard. There were snap peas and kirby cucumbers. There were lavender cabbages that looked like roses. The herbs were clustered at the far end: cilantro and basil and dill and mint. Looking at it, I remembered helping Mama Bee in her garden and felt a surge of hope.
The whole family, it seemed, was standing in the yard, awaiting our arrival as if it were a special event. The woman was dark-haired and slender with a wholesome beauty. She wore a fitted white shirt and held a toddler in her arms. Next to her was a blond, blue-eyed boy who looked a little younger than me, as well as a dark-eyed girl about my age. The girl had blunt black bangs and wore a red dress.
“Hello, Stephanie,” the woman said, her smile wide and warm. “We’re so glad to have you with us. My name is Lorraine.”
Adele squeezed my hand and gave me a little nudge toward her. I was too shy to speak but I smiled back at her, filled with an eager pleasure. Chosen.
“And this is Ted, your foster father,” she said next, touching the arm of the tall man beside her.
Ted was sunburned and muscular, with curly blond hair, a chevron mustache, and deep crow’s feet radiating from the corner of his eyes. “Hi there, honey,” he said. He leaned down to me in a half-crouch, like a football player about to hike the ball. “Aren’t you just the sweetest little thing.”
I smiled at him in turn, unable to think of anything to say.
“Michael and Steven here are our own children,” Lorraine continued. “And this,” she touched the shoulder of the girl, “is Paige. Can you say hello to Stephanie, Paige?”
The girl tilted her head and regarded me without speaking.
“Paige came to us from the dependent unit, just like you,” Lorraine told me.
Paige and I looked at each other. There was something unsettling about her eyes, huge and sunken and dark in her very pale face, that I didn’t like. They didn’t really focus but slid past me while these introductions were made. Her knees were scabbed and dirty, and her lips were fixed in a strange half-smile.
Adele suggested we go inside. “So Stephanie can see the house,” she told Lorraine, “and we can take care of the paperwork.”
Their living room was high-ceilinged and warm. The couch was upholstered in a floral-patterned fabric of orange and yellow and tan. An intricately carved wooden clock, shaped like a house, hung on one wall, and as we entered, a little wooden door swung open beneath its pitched roof. A tiny yellow bird emerged before my startled eyes, cooed twice, and went back into its hole before the door swung shut again.
Adele glanced down at me and smiled. “Have you ever seen a cuckoo clock before, Stephanie?”
I never had.
“Michael and Steven share a bedroom,” Lorraine told me. “Stephanie, you and Paige will be sharing a bedroom too. Paige, do you want to show Stephanie your room?”
Paige grabbed my arm and tugged me toward the stairs.
The bedroom I would share with Paige was as plain as could be. There were two twin beds and a lamp and a dresser. That was it. No curtains or rug or art on the walls. No other furnishing or decoration of any kind.
The family cat wandered in. It was a beautiful animal, silvery gray with blue eyes like two cloudy marbles. With no warning, Paige yanked up her dress, ripped off her panties, and sat on the floor with her legs spread. “Here, kitty,” she called.
The cat approached cautiously and spent several moments sniffing at the place between her legs while Paige squirmed and giggled.
“It tickles,” she said. “The whiskers tickle.”
I watched, cringing and transfixed, alarmed and faintly queasy at the sight.
“Want him to do it to you?” Paige asked.
I shook my head and backed away. She tilted her head up at me from the floor but again, her eyes slid past mine, darting back and forth without coming to rest on anything.
“It feels good,” she urged. “Try it and you’ll see.”
I found my voice. “I don’t want to.”
She flipped her dress back down and straightened up, her panties still wadded in one white-knuckled fist.
The cat came over to me and I reached down to stroke its back. I wanted to pick it up and run with it, far away from Paige.
“Stephanie!” I heard Adele call. “Come give me a hug before I go.”
With relief, I fled the room. Adele was standing at the bottom of the stairs. I wen
t to her and she lifted me into her arms, holding me close for a precious fleeting instant.
Then she was gone, and the moment the door closed behind her, it was as if a chill blew through the house.
“All right, you two, clear out of here,” Lorraine said to Paige and me. Her voice was flat and cold, her tone so different than it had been just a moment before. “I don’t need you underfoot while I’m getting dinner. Go play outside.”
SO BEGAN MY time in the house on Creekside Drive.
Lorraine was gentle and loving with her real children, Michael and Steven. She was harsh and impatient with Paige and me. Sometimes the two of us were allowed to eat with the family, but often we ate by ourselves in the kitchen while the family sat together in the dining room. The boys’ room was decorated with a sports motif and filled with toys and games and bean bag chairs. Lorraine drenched them with affection. Very soon it was clear she had no use for us.
We were there for Ted.
On my second day in their house, he led me into the room he shared with Lorraine, stripped off his pants and boxer shorts, and lay back on the bed. The sight of his privates was dreadful and grotesque, like the fleshy red wattle dangling from a turkey’s throat. There was an odor emanating from his crotch. He smelled unwashed and musty and pungent.
He put my hand on it—a live tensile thing, like an eel—and I jerked it away. With something like a growl, his fist closed hard around mine and he brought it back.
“Be a good girl,” he said, his tone like a warning. “It’s time you learned how to please a man.”
He pried my fingers open, clamped my hand around the shaft of his penis, and forced it up and down. I gave up on resistance and did as he told me. “That’s it,” he said, letting his head fall back and closing his eyes. “Don’t stop.”
I moved my hand the way he wanted for what seemed like forever. After a while he pried my palm away again and spat on it—spat on my hand—before returning it to its task. This went on until his face screwed up and he emitted a terrifying moan. Then, shockingly, white stuff shot out of him in all directions, like a faucet gone haywire.
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