Derek yelled, “Mama!” and tumbled into her lap.
“Would someone like to say the Pledge of Allegiance?” Alaina looked around at the children. “Who knows it? ‘I pledge allegiance to the flag…’ ”
“ ‘…of the United States of America,’ ” Orlean said, but then he didn’t continue; only Alaina did.
It was excruciating. When she got to the end, the room was silent, and I couldn’t look at the mothers. How loud and earnest we must have seemed to them, how repugnantly bourgeois, clutching at their children. I started clapping, because I didn’t know what else to do, and then the kids clapped, too.
It wasn’t just that the mothers intimidated me; they also made me jealous. I’d once heard Tasaundra and Dewey’s mother having an argument on the pay phone about buying diapers, and as she yelled and cursed, I couldn’t help but be impressed by her sheer forcefulness. The mothers’ lives were complicated. And by definition, they all had children, who had come from having sex. Even when they lived in New Day, a place where men were prohibited from entering, romantic entanglements found these women: problems they thought about hard while sitting on the front steps, smoking. Other people were so unsuccessful in fending off love! Members of Congress who had affairs with their aides, or students I’d known in college, girls who as freshmen declared themselves lesbians, then graduated with boyfriends—to give in to such love represented, for them, a capitulation or a betrayal, yet apparently the pull was so strong that they couldn’t resist. That was what I didn’t understand, how people made the leap from not mattering in each other’s lives to mattering.
Another thing that impressed me about the mothers was their sexiness. Derek’s mother wore sweatpants and T-shirts, but some of the others, whether or not they were overweight, dressed in tight, revealing clothes, and they looked good: tank tops and short skirts, no stockings and heeled mules, gold necklaces and bracelets and rings.
Back in the playroom, Alaina beamed and giggled, and I could tell that she considered the parade an unqualified success. “Frances, are you always such a stickler for the rules?” she asked in a teasing voice.
“I guess I am.” Though what happened later might make this a dubious claim, I already knew that it wasn’t worth it to have conflicts with people you weren’t invested in.
“No hard feelings, right?” Alaina said. “It seemed like the moms were totally psyched to have us come through.”
I said nothing, and turned away from her.
At the end of the night, Derek waited with me when the others went upstairs, and Alaina said, “I’ll get the lights. You can go up.”
“That’s okay,” I said. “I’m usually the one to stay behind.”
“All the more reason for you to go up.” Her tone was friendly, like she was doing me a favor.
“Actually,” I said, “I prefer to stay.” I was standing by the sink, and I turned on the water.
“You always wash your hands, huh?” Alaina said.
“Gotta watch out for cooties,” I said. “Ready, Derek?”
“I’ve noticed that about you, how much you wash your hands,” Alaina said.
I turned and looked at her, and I could feel that my mouth was a hard line. “You’re very observant,” I said. She took a step back. I said, “Derek, do you want to turn off the lights?”
Normally, I wouldn’t have picked up a child after washing my hands, but I liked Derek so much that it was a kind of visceral distraction; plus, it was a way of proving Alaina wrong. Besides, I told myself, I could stop on the way home to wash my hands again at a café on Eighteenth Street.
I carried Derek to the light switches, and he turned them off. On the other side of the door, I set him down. He took my hand, and though my entire body was tense from the exchange with Alaina, I felt some of Derek’s placidity, his sweetness, seep into me. Alaina reached for his other hand.
“Oh my,” she said. “What have we here?”
“No!” Derek said. “It’s mine.”
I glanced down and saw that Alaina was extracting from his grip one of the piglets from the farm animals bin.
“That’s not yours,” Alaina said. “That belongs to all the children at New Day. Look.” She held the piglet toward me. It had peach skin and pink hooves and a little curly tail, and its snout pointed skyward. “Frances, don’t you think if he took this pig, the other kids would feel really sad?”
I said, through clenched teeth, “Let him have it.”
“Doesn’t that send a confusing message?” Her voice was normal, no longer singsongy for Derek.
“It’s a plastic pig,” I said. “He’s three.” I thought of the objects I had coveted as a child: an eraser in the shape of a strawberry that belonged to Deanna Miller, the girl who sat next to me in first grade; a miniature perfume bottle of my mother’s with a round top of frosted glass. My mother had promised that she would give me the bottle when she was finished with the perfume, but year after year, a little of the amber liquid always remained. There weren’t that many times in your life when you believed a possession would bring you happiness and you were actually right.
“You know what I’ll do, Derek?” Alaina said. “I’ll put the pig back, but when you come down here tomorrow, you’ll know just where it is.”
I knew she would think we’d compromised, but she could compromise by herself. While she was in the playroom, I lifted Derek again and carried him upstairs.
* * *
—
I kept waiting that week to get a call from Linda, the New Day director, saying she’d received complaints from the mothers about our excursion to the second floor. I would apologize and take responsibility for my participation in the parade, but I’d also explain that Alaina was the one who had initiated it and that, in general, I had concerns about her behavior as a volunteer; while eating my dinner of microwaved cheese quesadillas at night, I rehearsed the way I’d phrase this. But the week passed without a call.
* * *
—
The next Monday was quiet. Orlean had, to the envy of everyone, gone out for pizza with his father, and Tasaundra and Dewey and their mom had moved out of the shelter to stay with a cousin in Prince George’s County. A new girl named Marcella was there, a chubby, dreamy eight-year-old with long black hair.
Alaina’s dress-up clothes went over well enough, except that the entire process, from the kids’ choosing what to wear to putting on the outfits to taking the clothes back off again, took less than fifteen minutes. Alaina encouraged the kids to draw pictures of themselves in the clothes, but all anybody wanted to play was “Mother, May I?” I wondered if Alaina would keep hatching schemes week after week or if she would soon realize that with kids, you didn’t get points just for trying.
While I was putting together a wooden puzzle of the United States with Marcella and Meshaun, Derek came over to the table. He said, “Miss Volunteer,” and when I said, “Yes, Derek?” he giggled and ran behind my chair.
I whirled around, and Derek shrieked. He tossed something into the air, and when it landed on the floor, I saw that it was the pig from the week before. He picked it up and made it walk up my arm.
Alaina squatted by Derek. “Do you like your pig?” she asked.
I couldn’t help myself. “His pig?”
But I noticed that Alaina was fighting a smile the way people do when they’ve received a compliment and want you to think they don’t believe it. “It is his,” she said. “I gave it to him.”
Then I saw that the pig wasn’t identical to the one from before—this pig’s snout was pointed straight in front of it, and its skin was more pink than peach.
“I felt like such a witch taking the other one away,” she said.
I stared at her. “When did you give it to him?”
“I came by last week.”
Knowing that she had been a
t the shelter at a time other than Monday evening made me curious about what Linda had made of that, or whether Alaina had met other volunteers. And had Alaina summoned Derek in order to give him the pig in private, or had she handed it over in front of other children? She should be fired, I thought, if it was possible to fire a volunteer.
That night as we left the shelter, Alaina said, “Anyone up for a drink?”
“Sounds good to me,” Karen said.
“I need to be at work early tomorrow,” I said. Karen and I had never socialized outside the shelter.
“You know, Frances, I looked at the National Conservancy Group’s website the other day,” Alaina said. “I know your president from back in the day. David, right?”
“I don’t really work with him directly,” I said. “I’m entry-level.”
Alaina elbowed me. “No low self-esteem, you hear? You’re just starting out. Listen—I’m impressed that you landed a job at such a great place.”
I offered her my closed-lipped smile.
“Karen,” Alaina said, “do we have to forcibly drag this girl out for one lousy Budweiser?”
“At her age, she should be dragging us,” Karen said.
“I really can’t,” I said. “Sorry.”
As I walked away, Alaina called, “Hey, Frances,” and when I turned back, she said, “Bye, Miss Volunteer.” Her voice contained a performative note that made me suspect she’d thought up the farewell ahead of time and saved it, for just this moment, to say aloud.
* * *
—
I washed my hands and forearms at the café on Eighteenth Street, and then, when I got back to my apartment, I washed them again and changed out of my street clothes. I knew that I washed my hands a lot—I wasn’t an idiot—but it was always for a reason: because I’d come in from outside, because I’d been on the subway or used the toilet or touched money. It wasn’t as if, sitting at my desk at the office, I simply jumped up, raced to the bathroom, and began to scrub.
Usually when I got home at night, my roommate, whom I hardly knew, wasn’t there. She had a boyfriend, another grad student, and she spent a lot of time at his place. It was mostly on the weekends that I saw them. Sometimes on Saturday mornings when I left to run errands, they’d be entwined on the living room couch, watching television, and when I returned hours later, they’d be in the same position. Once I’d seen him prepare breakfast in bed for her by toasting frozen waffles, then coating them with spray-on olive oil. I was glad on the nights they weren’t around. After I was finished washing my hands and changing my clothes, it was like I’d completed everything that was required of me and I could just give in to inertia.
* * *
—
It was storming the next Monday: big, rolling gray clouds split by lightning and followed by cracks of thunder. The director, Linda, was wearing a jacket, peering out the front door, when I arrived. She was often leaving as I was arriving, and she said, “The rush-hour downpour—gotta love it, huh?”
I was the first volunteer there. When the kids came out of the dining room, Meshaun was clutching a red rubber ball and Orlean was attempting to take it away, which made Meshaun howl. As I tried to adjudicate, Derek’s mother descended from the second floor and said, “You know where D’s at?”
“Sorry, but I just got here,” I said.
“Monique told me she’d watch him, and now she don’t know where he is.”
“Derek’s lost?” My heart began beating faster. “If he’s lost, you should tell Svetlana.”
As Derek’s mother walked into the dining room, I hurried downstairs, but the playroom was silent, and all the lights were off. “Derek?” I called. “Are you here, Derek?” I flicked the lights on and looked under the tables, behind the shelves. But in the silence, I would have been able to hear him breathing.
When I returned upstairs, the hall was crowded with mothers and children, plus Alaina and Karen had both arrived; Alaina was holding a collapsed, dripping umbrella as Svetlana asked when people had last seen Derek. I was glad I hadn’t been present when Alaina had learned that he was missing—she’d probably opened her mouth, covered it with her palm, and gasped.
Svetlana, whose apparent lack of panic was both reassuring and unsettling, gestured at me. “Why don’t you go outside with Crystal and look?” Crystal, I realized, was the name of Derek’s mother.
I still had my raincoat on, and Alaina offered me her umbrella, which I didn’t take. Despite the seriousness of the moment, it felt awkward to walk outside with Derek’s mother—I wasn’t sure if we were supposed to split up or stay together. I glanced at her, and her face was scrunched with anxiety.
“He couldn’t have gone far, right?” I said.
“I’m gonna beat his ass,” she said, but she sounded frightened.
We did split up—I walked toward one end of the block, calling his name in such a manner that a passerby might have thought I was summoning a puppy. The cars made swishing noises as they passed, and my stomach tightened with each one. The roads had to be slick, and the rain on the windshields would make everything blurry. It was hard to know if it was worse to imagine him alone or with someone—if he was alone, I hoped the thunder and lightning weren’t scaring him.
I walked around the side of the shelter, expecting and not expecting to see him. In my mind, he was wearing what he’d been wearing the day Alaina had taken the pig, a red-and-blue-striped T-shirt and black sweatpants. I found his mother standing on her tiptoes, peering into the dumpster in the tiny rear parking lot and shoving aside pieces of cardboard. “You think he could have gotten in there?” I said. She didn’t reply, and I added, “You know the new volunteer who has kind of light brown hair? She came here a couple of weeks ago some night besides Monday, right? She brought Derek a little pig?”
“I don’t know nothing about that.”
“I’m wondering if you’ve seen her here other times. Has she ever invited Derek to do stuff during the day?”
For the first time, Derek’s mother looked at me, and I saw that she was on the verge of crying. She said, “I never should of left D with Monique.” Then her face collapsed—big, scary Derek’s mother—and as she brought her hands up to shield it, her shoulders shook. What I was supposed to do, what the situation unmistakably called for, was to hug her, or at the very least to set my arm around her back. I couldn’t do it. She was wearing an old-looking, off-white T-shirt that said LUCK O’ THE IRISH across the chest in puffy green letters, and I just couldn’t. If I did, after I got home, even if I changed out of my clothes and showered, her hug would still be on me.
“I’m sorry,” I said. “I’m so sorry—I’m—by the way, are you under twenty-four? Because I read about this program where if you are, you can take a class to prepare for the GED and it’s subsidized. Maybe that would be a good thing for you and Derek?”
She lifted her head and looked at me, appearing bewildered. In that moment, from inside the dining room, Karen rapped on a closed windowpane and made a thumbs-up gesture. “Oh!” I said. “I think they found him!”
Back inside, the entry hall was still dense with mothers and children, and Derek, before she passed him off to his mother, was in Alaina’s arms. On his left cheek was the imprint of a pillow or a wrinkled sheet, and he was yawning without covering his mouth. I heard Alaina say, “And then I just thought, Could that little lump on the top bunk be him? I was on my way out, but something made me check one more time….”
The combination of the accumulated people, the relieved energy, and the storm outside made it seem almost like we were having a party; at any moment, a cake would appear. “You gotta watch your babies like a hawk,” someone beside me said, and when I glanced over, I saw that it was Meshaun’s mother. Her voice was not disapproving but happy. “Like. A. Hawk,” she repeated, nodding her head once for each word.
* * *
—
When we finally took the children down to the playroom, I couldn’t shake a feeling of agitation. Alaina held hands in a circle with Na’Shell and Marcella while, in an English accent, singing the My Fair Lady song “I Could Have Danced All Night,” and if I’d ever hated anyone more, I didn’t recall when.
At the end of the hour, I did, for once, let Alaina stay behind and turn off the lights, and as Karen and I climbed the steps with the children, I murmured, “Do you think Alaina could have had something to do with Derek’s disappearance? She’s kind of obsessed with him.”
In a normal-volumed voice, Karen said, “No, she found Derek.”
“Yeah, supposedly,” I said. “But she came here once in the middle of the week just to give him a present. And she showed up late tonight, which she never does.” As the children joined their waiting mothers in the entry hall, Karen and I said our goodbyes to them. Then, still speaking under my breath and just to Karen, I said, “Has it ever occurred to you that Alaina might be a little—I don’t know—unhinged?”
Karen laughed. “She just marches to the beat of a different drummer.”
“She has really bad judgment, like with the parade. She didn’t even realize how the mothers reacted.”
“I thought the parade was cute.”
I tried not to show my surprise. “I don’t trust her,” I said. “I wouldn’t put it past Alaina to have hidden Derek in some closet so she could be the one to find him.”
For several seconds, Karen looked at me. But all she said was “I don’t think she’d do that.”
Then Alaina herself was at the top of the stairs, and as the three of us walked out the front door, she said, “Whew—what a night, huh? I think we all need a drink, and tonight I’m not taking no for an answer, Miss Frances.”
“I’m not going out for a drink with you,” I said. I looked at Karen as I added, “Bye.”
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