Compromised

by Heidi Ayarbe

  “There will be consequences,” she says, her words ringing clear as her pudgy hand squeezes my shoulder.

  I sigh and feel relieved that I’ve confessed. I wonder if that’s how Dad feels. Like all these years of running are done. Behind him. He’s free.

  “You of all people,” she says. “Why would you do such a thing?”

  It seemed so clear before. It made sense. I wanted me back, but what I did to the Triad doesn’t change anything. It just changes me. So I can’t get me back. She’s gone.

  In the end, my dad’s still in jail and I’ll be shipped off with an unknown to who-knows-where. Unless Dad stops being so vague about that mystery relative.

  End of experiment.

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  After a day of talking to counselors and meetings with lots of other random people, they all decide that my punishment is to become a pseudo-indentured servant for Kids Place as well as take anger management classes. That and I’ve been banned from the Halloween social this weekend. Whoopee.

  The plus of orphanages? There’re no parents to press charges.

  The Triad returns with bandaged tongues and swollen lips. At dinner they stand up in front of everybody and Rose pulls me to face them. She wants to make an example of me so others will be shamed into being good. “Do you have anything to say?” she asks.

  “Repent!” I can hear my dad’s voice at those tent revivals. Maybe I spent too much time listening to his sermons instead of counting the cash.

  You know, lots of people think blind people have a heightened sense of sound, touch, taste, and smell. But we’re all born with the same “sensory” capacities, so to speak. A blind person seemingly has heightened other senses because a blind person uses them more.

  I wonder if Dad’s conscience is turned off. Maybe he was born conscience-impaired, and mine is heightened because I use mine for both of us. It doesn’t matter much.

  I stare at the Triad—weeping blisters caked with shiny salve.

  “Well?” Rose nudges me half a step closer. In her thousand-page manual of rules and regulations for Kids Place, she doesn’t once touch on the rules of survival. She doesn’t know them. Rose clears her throat. “Maya has something to say.”

  I nod and look each one in the eyes. “I will not be generic.” Then I turn on my heels and go to my room.

  The next morning, getting ready for school, I open my drawer and find my favorite jeans and sweater. There’s a note with scrawly kid handwriting on it. “You aren’t generic.”

  I pull the sweater over my head and slip on my jeans. I sigh, relieved. Shelly, Jess, and Nicole are gone, so I hug myself and feel strong.

  I am not weak.

  And the Triad has disbanded. At least for now. Everybody just ignores them. And over the course of the next couple of weeks, I get most of my clothes back. Except for the scarf Jess wears. I say to her one day, “Why don’t you just keep it?”

  She blushes and mumbles something about me being a rich snot.

  But I’m not too at ease. I kind of think the Triad’s planning a nasty and painful revenge. Nature is nature. Just ask Roy Horn or Grizzly Man.

  Tonight Nicole and I have kitchen duty together. I’ve had kitchen duty ever since I burned the lips off the Triad.

  Nicole hardly looks strong enough to scrub the dinner trays—her arms spindly with blue veins running through tissue-paper skin. She looks up at me and strips off the yellow kitchen gloves. “Brutal stuff.”

  “Huh?”

  “Bhut jolokia.”

  “Yeah.” I’m impressed she remembers the name. “Like that Mafia guy you talked about—the acid guy who threw finger bones in soup,” I say, and wince at the reference, but that’s how I’ve felt. I finish wiping off the tables and go into the kitchen.

  “Carneglia?”

  I shrug. “Yeah. I guess. They all have the same-sounding last names to me. With all your Mafia stories, it’s hard to keep them straight.”

  Nicole scrubs the dishes harder, a line forming between her brows. She looks up. “Easier than listening to your science spew.” She pauses, looking through the steam from the hot water rinsing the dishes. “Why do you go through my stuff?” she asks. “My pills?”

  I shrug.

  “Don’t. Okay?”

  I nod. “I, um, tried to disguise my handwriting. On the note.”

  Nicole scowls. “You’re so absolutely random.”

  I guess that does it for my stellar don’t-kill-yourself note. It’s good to know that it’s not as great as I thought it was. Maybe it wouldn’t have made a difference with Mom after all. Not like that matters to me anyway.

  Nicole dries her hands on a dingy towel.

  “Nicole?”

  “What?”

  “I mean it. What I wrote. Really.”

  “Why do you give a shit? I didn’t care when they threw you in a Dumpster and took your stuff. I didn’t care when you walked around feeling sorry for yourself all those weeks. I don’t care now.”

  “Yeah. But you didn’t wear my stuff.”

  She shrugs. “You have no style. Don’t think it was anything more.”

  “And why did everybody give me back my favorite jeans, sweater? The rest of my clothes?”

  Nicole smirks. “Carneglia. They don’t want to be an ingredient in finger soup. You’re scary!” She makes a phantom noise and laughs.

  But I know it’s more than that. It’s like Nicole has some power in this place. The Triad never touched her. Even though the only ones who talk to her are the little kids, others do what she wants them to.

  One day Shelly told me it was because of the crazy look. “Her eyes,” she said. “They have that crazy thing to them. Like she could snap at any time.”

  I never see that, though. I just see sadness.

  Nicole cocks her head to the side and stares at me for a long time. “I’m going for a smoke.” She walks out. Before leaving, she turns back. “The clothes are yours. You earned them. Not a lot of kids here have a vertebra, you know.” I watch her and look out at the empty cafeteria. I feel better about cleaning up the rest of the kitchen alone. It’s nice to be alone here, because it almost never happens.

  I watch as Nicole paces outside and blows puffs of smoke into the autumn air.

  In the meantime, the pepper incident doesn’t do anything but make me some kind of underdog hero. Weird. I don’t want that, though. I just want things to be back to the way they were. I have these fantasies that Dad gets out of prison; that they aren’t processing me into orphanhood; that Oprah’s Angel Network will find reason to bail us out.

  I think back to all those promises he’s made. He’s kept some. Okay, a few. But he always found a way to put food on the table and keep me in school.

  We were having a picnic at a park near our trailer home in El Paso. Yellow tumbleweeds tripped over our blanket; dust pelted my bare legs. Dad wrapped me in his Windbreaker, his heart pounding next to my ear. His cheeks were sandpaper rough. His shirt smelled like smoke and French fry grease. But when I moved in closer, I could smell the tangy soap he used before working the night shift at the bar.

  “I’m going to buy a beautiful home one day, Maya. You’ll go to the best schools. There’s nothing you won’t be able to do.”

  I tried to smile. But tent revivals and Arizona were too fresh on my mind. I hated feeling bad for those people. I wondered, though: If they really believed, did Dad do any harm?

  Dad said, “What is the easiest human trait to play on?”

  “Guilt,” I answered. I had learned well.

  He ruffled my hair, then leaned back against the lone tree at the park, his eyes heavy from having spent the entire night feeding drunks. “Greed. Greed beats them all,” he murmured, a smile on his lips.

  I let him fall asleep, not wanting to bug him even though I so much wanted to swing. He was so tired all the time. Even then I was trying to take care of him.

  The next week Dad took out a simple ad in the Pennysaver. And before
long, we bought a house. And a swing set.

  CHAPTER NINE

  Beulah sits next to me in her polyethylene terephthalate suit. She wears a watered-down blue one that matches the vein in her temple. We pull up to the jail in silence. It’ll be the first time I’ve seen him in almost a month. Corroded iron gates screech open to let the bus drive through. We get off and brace ourselves against the icy morning air. I don’t think I ever stared so hard at my shoes in my entire life. A square box houses a couple of guards who watch us through barred windows. The generic clock hangs crooked on the wall behind them. Eight fifty-three.

  It reeks. I turn and see that the jail is located right in front of the city sewage treatment plant. Appropriate.

  Everybody wears their Sunday best. A few babies cry. The guard standing at the box house looks bored. He snaps his gum and glances at his watch. At nine A.M. he opens a gate that leads us to a metal door. We walk down a long corridor through airport-security–like devices. Mustard walls and dingy linoleum. There are no leering prisoners screaming vile things at us. It just looks like a school I went to in downtown Sacramento for a few months—minus the nervous-looking teachers.

  I check in my bag and give my name to the clerk at the end of the hall. He nods and motions for me to take a seat. “It’ll be a few minutes. You can go in round two.”

  I inhale the heavy smells of metal and floor polish and scuff my shoe on the floor. Everybody whispers. I watch the first group of people trickle into a room. Some come out crying. Most leave stone-faced.

  The guard motions for me to go in. “I’ll wait here,” Beulah says, scratching her gnawed-off nails across her polyester pants.

  This line of work really doesn’t suit her.

  I walk into the small room and my stomach knots. He sits behind one of those Plexiglas barriers. He hasn’t shaved and his beard has grown thick and wiry on his broad chin. He looks off into space, dark circles under his eyes. There is no spark anymore.

  He forces a smile and puts his hand up to the glass. I match my palm to his and swallow back tears. He motions for me to pick up the phone.

  “Hey, Maya. It looks like I’ve made quite a mess this time.”

  “It’s okay,” I say.

  He grins. “That’s my girl.”

  I feel more at ease. We’re back to us. Just a little, anyway. “I’ll take care of things, Dad. Really. I’ll figure something out.”

  He winks and whispers. “A prison break?”

  “If I pass you hot sauce and a radio, you could make a break for it in about, hmmm, fifteen years. I saw it on MythBusters.” For just a second I fantasize about Dad slipping between his cell bars and running away. But on MythBusters the prisoner was in Mexico. Under the hot sun. Maybe I could slip Dad a heat lamp, too. I’d pick him up in a run-down car, and we’d head to Canada.

  Then I’ll be a felon, just like Dad.

  “How’s school, baby?”

  “Dad—”

  “How’s school? You have any projects coming up?”

  I shake my head. “Same old stuff, Dad.”

  Then we just sit and stare at each other through the smudged glass. I put my cheek to the glass, and he does the same. I can almost feel his scratchy beard.

  “You are so much like her.”

  I shake my head. “I’m nothing like her.”

  “Do me a favor.”

  I nod.

  “Get the box of her things out of the house.” He has a shoe box of Mom’s stuff. I never look at it. I can’t. She chose to leave. What mom does that to her daughter?

  “No,” I say. “That I won’t do.”

  “Your mom has a sister, Maya. I told them about her, but they said nobody by her name lives in Rugby. The authorities haven’t been able to find her.” He clears his throat again. “I’m having, um, credibility problems here.”

  I push my hair back behind my ears and try to control my voice. “An aunt?”

  He nods.

  “For real?”

  He nods.

  I feel like I’ve been bulldozed. “An aunt? After all these years—”

  “It’s just—” He clears his throat. “When your mom died, things were pretty bad between us. And we just drifted. She wanted to get custody of you back then, but I couldn’t let that happen. So I left. We left.”

  I stare at him through the smudged glass and try to retrieve a memory of this aunt, but I come up blank. I don’t remember anybody but Dad and me at that cemetery. Where was she?

  Beulah said Dad had been pretty vague about the relative thing. I don’t think an aunt is anywhere near as vague as what I imagined, say the cousin of a third cousin twice removed. How is an aunt vague?

  Why can’t they believe him?

  Then I think about the other shoe boxes Dad has stashed, full of the Social Security cards, bank statements, checks, credit cards, and histories of all of those people Dad created—none of them real.

  An aunt.

  “She’ll take you now. She’s a good woman,” Dad says.

  Everything has been a huge lie. Everything. We could’ve had a family. We could’ve had normal.

  “I’m sorry, baby.”

  I blink back the tears that burn my eyes.

  “In the shoe box, there’s information. Her name is, was, I don’t know—Sarah Brandt. But she could’ve gotten married, divorced, remarried. You’ve got to get into the house. Find the spare key.”

  “So I get to find the long-lost aunt.” A few people look over at us, and I lower my voice. “Why didn’t she try to at least keep in touch all these years? Why did she just let you leave like that? Why didn’t she care enough—” Why am I surprised?

  Dad shakes his head. “Look in the shoe box.”

  “I don’t care about Mom and her things and her family,” I whisper.

  He leans in closer. “Mom’s more than a bottle of pills, Maya.”

  A bell rings and a guard shouts, “Two minutes!”

  “Maya, listen to me.”

  I close my eyes.

  “I signed some papers.”

  “What papers, Dad?”

  “It’s for the best, Maya. It’s for you. Things are pretty complicated.”

  “What papers, Dad?” I shake my head and don’t even try to stop the tears that spill down my cheeks. “No, Dad.”

  “I have no choice. It’s done.”

  We all have choices. We all do. Mom did. Dad did. Mystery Aunt Sarah did. They chose wrong.

  “But—” I protest.

  “Look at me.” I stare into Dad’s iceberg eyes. I’ve always wished I had his eyes and not Mom’s gray, dreary eyes. I push the thought away. He clears his throat. “It’s for the best.”

  Leaving me. Abandoning me. That’s the best? How is that any different from Mom?

  “Get her things from the house,” he says. “Find Sarah. They won’t.”

  The guards start to shuffle everybody out of the room. One taps Dad on the shoulder. He hangs up the phone.

  Click.

  So that’s it. After all these years, he gives up.

  We’ve never given up.

  He stands and pauses, like he’s going to say something—something to make it all okay. “I love you, Maya,” he mouths. “I love you.”

  I watch as he walks away. He doesn’t turn around. He just leaves, and I sit there with the telephone stuck to my ear.

  CHAPTER TEN

  Pressure is an easy scientific equation that measures the force on an object spread over the surface area. So the definition of pressure is force divided by the area where the force is applied. When too much force is applied to a surface area, watch out.

  I’m pretty sure my head’s going to explode. Or maybe it already did. That’s why my thoughts are fuzzy and my days seem to last forever. I know that the world is about four and a half billion years old and humans have been around for only two hundred thousand years of it. But this past week has felt like an entire Proterozoic Eon.

  The method, I sigh. This
can work. I take the aspirin the school nurse gave me. Think. Think.

  Purpose: Find Mystery Aunt Sarah

  Hypothesis: If I find my only other known living genetic link on earth, assuming she’s still alive, then…what? I’ll live happily ever after?

  I scribble out the method and crumple up the page. I can’t even figure out a decent hypothesis. This will never work.

  “Sorry to interrupt.” Beulah peeks her head into the room.

  We all look up at her. Nicole stops talking long enough for Beulah to say, “Maya, can you come with me?”

  “Looks like you’re getting the call,” Jess sneers.

  Shelly clasps her hands. “Oh, I hope they’re nice.”

  Nicole turns away and stares out the window.

  I follow Beulah out to the conference room.

  “We are thrilled you’re going to be part of this family.” The woman holds out a porcelain hand. Her eyes dart between her husband and me. He holds out his hand as well; it’s waxy with manicured nails. He has beady eyes and wears a starched white shirt and too-skinny blue tie. He sits back in his chair and puts his arm around the lady, squeezing her shoulder.

  She winces and shifts in her seat. “It’s been a while since we’ve opened our home to a—”

  Orphan. Stray. Urchin. I’m about to fill in her sentence but decide I’d better keep quiet to spare her the embarrassment.

  “A teenager,” the man finishes. “We had a couple of bad experiences.” He looks at me with little brown eyes, heavy pouches underneath. “But your case interests us.” He tsks. “Unfortunate circumstances.”

  Having your dad sign you away is “unfortunate”?

  “Anyway,” the man continues, “my name is Donovan, and this is Cherise.”

  “Cherry.” She blushes. “You can call me Cherry.”

  Donovan nods. “We’re God-fearing folk at our home and expect you to attend services with us. You’ll get baptized right away, of course.”