What I Carry

by Jennifer Longo

  “What am I looking at?” Cop Irvin asked.

  “My life,” I said, surrendering to humiliation. “I took these things. I carry them with me from house to house.”

  I stepped apart from everyone, my heart thudding and shamed, and watched this cop rummage through my secret treasures, searching for anything of value. No one said a word. Cop Irvin held up something shiny. “What’s this?”

  “That is a thimble,” I said, barely audible.

  He tossed it back on the bed. “Okay. And this?”

  “Sobriety coin. From when I got off meth.”

  Cop Irvin frowned. “Okay. This?”

  “A key.”

  “To what?”

  “A Christmas closet.”

  He looked around the room.

  “No, in another house. For gift wrap and a plastic Santa and lights.”

  “Why?”

  Nothing and everything.

  One by one these worthless things, my only worth.

  Library card. Fruit Stripe gum to help me sleep. Dollhouse dollhouse. Paper price tag for the beautiful shoes I wish I’d bought. Paper Dixie cup, my very own.

  Zola’s Allen wrench.

  At last, he picked up the empty pillowcase, turned it inside out, and shook it.

  The Red Rose polar bear. Cop Irvin picked it up, tiny and white and lonely.

  “No, wait,” I said. I took it from him and put it in Francine’s hands. She held it like it was the most precious jewel in the world.

  “Muiriel,” she said, looking around the room. “You put some clothes away. You unpacked.”

  “A little,” I said.

  And then, its entrance right on cue, through the open window a bat flew in.

  Cop Irvin ducked and swatted. So did everyone else, except for Terry Johnson and me. And, of course, Francine.

  “Keep your pants on, my God!” she shouted, and stood on the bed to shoo the bat out with her bare hands. She rolled her eyes at Cop Irvin. “Little hairy thing with wings,” she said. “Get ahold of yourself.”

  That woman, barehanding a possibly rabid bat; she was mine.

  “Francine,” I said.

  “What is it, sweetheart?”

  I could not say.

  She put her arms around me, and I let her. “I’m so tired,” I said.

  “I know,” she said into my hair.

  “Francine,” Joellen shouted from downstairs, “do you have speakerphone on this thing? She found it; she found the bracelet!”

  Joellen. Thank God. All my life she has never let me down.

  “For Pete’s sake,” Francine sighed. “It’s a rotary dial phone.”

  She started out of my room, then turned. “Let’s go,” she said to Cop Irvin, and led him back down to the kitchen, her warm hand squeezing mine on her way out.

  We stood alone in silence.

  I gathered up the things I’d carried for so long, back into the pillowcase, and sat on the bed. Sean took the bag from my clenched hands, set it on the dresser, and put Terry Johnson on my lap.

  “Be careful,” Sean said. “He’s a delicate creature.” And he sat beside me. Then Kira on my other side, and Elliot beside her.

  “Does that happen?” Kira asked. “They call cops on little kids?”

  I nodded.

  “That is…,” Kira said. She took my hand. Elliot gave me a tissue.

  Sean petted Terry’s head, his free arm firmly around me.

  Nothing more. And it was everything.

  “Joellen,” I shouted, “can Zola come up here?”

  “Here she comes!”

  Then footsteps on the stairs, and I held my arms out to Zola as she flew up onto the bed with us.

  “I’m Zola,” she said to Kira and Elliot, and offered them her hand to shake. “It’s like Charlie and the Chocolate Factory,” she said. “Bunch of old people in a big bed together. Is this what you do for fun?”

  “Yes,” Sean said. “Yes, it is.”

  “Muir,” she said. “I told them I didn’t take it.”

  “I know you did. You told the truth, and a lot people are afraid of the truth. But you have to keep shouting it until someone hears you. Make them listen. Your mom hears you, and your grandma. And I do. I always will.”

  She nodded. “Who is this?” she said, reaching for the Terry Johnson sculpture on the bedside table.

  The real Terry walked across everyone to investigate Zola.

  “Oh, it’s you!” she said, and rubbed the real Terry’s ears.

  I put the sculpture back on the table.

  “My prized possession,” I said. Kira tried not to smile.

  “Oh, here.” I reached in the pillowcase and put the Allen wrench in Zola’s hand. “In case you get lonely.”

  “You don’t need it anymore?”

  “No,” I said. “I don’t think so. Not anymore.”

  * * *

  —

  When everyone else was gone, Francine made us toast. She put the polar bear on her own bedside table, and we sat on the porch steps, watching Terry Johnson eat grass in the yard like a very small cow.

  “Francine.”

  “Hmm.”

  “That foster mom blamed Zola because she was the only black kid in the house.”

  “I know,” she said. “Joellen is reporting her.”

  “How did you know?”

  “Because she’s a middle-aged white woman, and so am I, and I know we are very often the absolute worst. When you are a middle-aged white woman, never forget to call your brethren—sisteren—out on their shit. And your own.”

  “I won’t forget. Barb was doing it to Kira, too. But Kira shut that shit down.”

  “Oh, Lord. See what I mean? Every damn time.”

  “Did that cop even need to be here?”

  “No,” she sighed. “But they can’t ever get to you without going through me first. No one can. And they won’t get through me. Do you understand?”

  “I do.”

  “Do you trust me?”

  “I want to. I think so.”

  “Okay then.”

  “I’m not…” I watched Terry Johnson jump after a moth. “I’m nervous. I have friends.”

  “I know.”

  “I have a job walking around a forest with little kids. And I have Terry Johnson. And you.”

  “Yes, you do.”

  “I feel guilty.”

  She frowned. “Why?”

  “No one else gets out like this. Other kids don’t deserve it less because they got in trouble, because they don’t have a ‘perfect’ record, because someone abused the crap out of them. It isn’t fair. It doesn’t happen.”

  “Okay, then do something about it. Don’t waste your energy wallowing in guilt. Take this one time things turn out right, go to school, figure out who you are, and work to change the legislation. Or work in social service, be a judge, run for office, or you know what? Be a foster parent. You would be a really good mom. Guilt never fixed anything. Hard work fixes shit all the time.”

  Exactly the right thing. Every single time. How was she doing this?

  “Will Zola be okay?”

  “She will,” Francine said. “We won’t let her not be. Joellen is with her. I’ll keep track of her—you can help me. She’s with her grandma, her family is fighting for her. She isn’t alone.”

  My heart sped up. “Francine.”

  “Yes.”

  “Do you think it means I’m dead inside that I don’t want to find my mom?”

  She looked at me. “Of course not. Where are you getting this garbage?”

  “Am I wounded?”

  She squinted like she couldn’t see me well. “Wounded? How?”

  “Like, am I ruined because I w
as left alone? Will I ever know how to be a good person who loves other people? Is it too late for me?”

  She stayed close beside me. “Oh my,” she said. “Someone has done a number on you. Look at me: No one has any right to tell you how you feel, to feed you such ridiculous lies. You aren’t wounded; you are not broken—you are a human person with human feelings and emotions including sadness and loss, which are perfectly normal and need to be felt, and worked through, not obfuscated by bullshit pseudoscience that some grifter invents to write self-help books and make money off vulnerable people. Repeat after me: People can be dickheads. Go on, say it.”

  “People can be dickheads.”

  “People can be wonderful.”

  “People can be wonderful.”

  She smiled.

  “That’s it?” I asked.

  “Well. Basically. Trust yourself. You know the truth.”

  “What does obfuscate mean?”

  “To cloud. To confuse. To lie.”

  “Francine.”

  “Yes, sweetheart.”

  “I feel old.”

  She sighed. “I know. It’s been a long day.”

  “No,” I said. “Old. Like I skipped childhood. Like I’ve already lived a whole life.”

  She nodded. “Because you have. You need to rest.”

  “I’m worn out. I feel useless.”

  “You could never, in a million years, be useless. You are a precious jewel, don’t you know that?”

  I could not look at her. “I think I’m scared.”

  “Of what?”

  I tried to swallow, and forced myself to tell her the truth. “I won’t make it on my own.”

  She took some hairpins from her pocket, stuck then in her mouth, and pushed them one by one into her messy, familiar bun. “Twenty years, a hundred or so kids, and I’ve loved them all, but I can tell you I’ve never worried that one wouldn’t be with me the next Christmas. I’m worried now.”

  Me too.

  “Stay with me,” she said.

  “I can’t.”

  “Why?”

  “I’ll be trapped,” I choked out.

  “What does that even mean? Home is just a soft place to land in between adventures, or trouble, or what the hell ever. It’s a harbor, not an anchor. Be brave, see the world, every forest and mountain, and know you always have a safe place to rest and come back to. Muir, you can’t see the paradigm if you’re in it.”

  “I don’t know what a paradigm is.”

  “Forest for the trees. You’ve been telling yourself this story for so long, that you can’t depend on anyone in the world but yourself, and yes, you come rightly by it, and you’ve kept yourself alive that way. But try to see outside that story, and for God’s sake, don’t let fear lie to you. Joellen is here, just like she’s always been. Your friends are here. I’m here. A home doesn’t have to be a trap. Muir, I don’t feel sorry for you. I just love you.”

  “I can’t,” I said.

  “You can. I’m here now.”

  “You’re too late.”

  I lay down on the porch then, my head on her knees, and cried.

  “I’m so tired,” I sobbed.

  She did not talk. She patted my hair and gave me tissues from her pocket. Such a mom thing, tissues always at the ready.

  “I don’t care how bad your last therapist was,” she said. “We’ll find you a good one, and it will change your life. Okay?”

  I nodded into her knee. “What if I grow up and decide I do want to find my mom?”

  “Then I’ll help you. I’ll do everything I can, and we’ll find her. Or we won’t. Either way, I’ll be with you, because as long as you’re breathing, nothing is ever too late. I don’t want to hear you say that again, understand? We do not talk or think that way in our house.”

  Terry Johnson was worried. He sat on Francine’s lap to lick my face.

  The Salish Sea was salty in the evening air. The flowers beneath my window nodded in the breeze beneath the flitting bats. I sat up.

  She moved my hair off my face. “Oh! Oh, I forgot, I have something for you. I need to…” She got up and went in the house.

  Terry Johnson whimpered but stayed with me.

  “I don’t know, man.” I rubbed his ears. “She’s your mom.”

  She came back out, sat on the steps beside me, and said, “Lift your hair up.”

  She put something cool, a delicate gold chain, around my neck, and fastened it.

  The chain.

  “Kira brought it to me a few days ago,” she said. “She’d gotten it almost all the way untangled, her mom worked on it, even Sean tried. Poor Kira, she was embarrassed to ask me for help; she wanted to do it for you by herself. I promised her I would get it free, and so here you are…early birthday gift from all of us.”

  I touched the cool links of the necklace, perfect and strong and whole. All this time, all those hands, still not broken.

  There is not a fragment in all nature, for every relative fragment of one thing is a full harmonious unit in itself.

  For the first time in so long, my racing heart was warm and calm. Happy. I put my arms around Francine and hugged her tight. “Should we take Terry Johnson for his before-bed walk?”

  “Let’s,” she said. “I’ll get him leashed up.”

  Because that was the routine in this house. In our home.

  * * *

  —

  “Together, please, we have to smoosh. Oh my God, you people are hopeless. Closer, so we can see the ‘Muir.’ ” Kira held her phone out as far as she could, but the four of us—Sean, Elliot, Kira, and I—were not going to fit in the frame with the entire text of the carved sign at the entrance of Muir Woods.

  “Just let me take one of you guys,” Elliot said, camera, as always, at the ready.

  “No,” she said. “We have to all be in it; I’ll get it.”

  Early-morning coastal June fog swirled around us, floating ghostly into the trees. My whole body buzzed with anticipation.

  “I told you, we should have brought a selfie stick,” Elliot said.

  “No way.” Sean stretched his arm from the weird position he’d been holding it for the picture. “No nonessentials; the key to a well-packed suitcase is not organization. It is simplicity.”

  “Be still, my heart,” I sighed, and fell into his arms.

  “Get a room,” Kira said, but smiling. “Excuse me,” she called to a woman pushing a stroller. “Could you take our picture, please, under the sign? So all the words show?”

  “Love to!” The woman took Kira’s phone and immediately began art directing, producing major eye-rolls from Elliot. “Okay, let’s go boy-girl-boy-girl. You there, Tall Guy, let’s see some crouching….Good, okay! Tattoo Girl, you look great, chin up a little….Beautiful! Hiking-Shorts Guy, left arm behind you, perfect, and you…” She looked past the screen to me.

  Being unremarkable has been the hallmark and savior of my existence. There is no tactful way to describe invisible.

  “Happy Girl,” she said. “Yes, you. Move right beside Hiking Shorts. I love it. Okay, now everyone say, Muir National Monument National Park Service Department of Interior!”

  Best. Picture. Ever. All four of us blank-faced, together beneath the entrance sign of the final stop on our graduation road trip to California, approved by Kira’s mom and dad, Elliot’s mom and dad, Sean’s mom, and mine. My Francine.

  Luckily the art director held her finger down and took a burst of, like, twenty-three pictures, so we also have one where we’re all laughing, holding on to each other. Happy.

  “That poor kid,” Elliot whispered as the art director strolled away with her baby. “Honey, put your face in the cake….Pretend you’re having fun—no, not like that….”

  “She’s an artist,” Kira s
aid. “You should understand her pain. Getting you three to cooperate the rest of the summer will be my grand oeuvre.”

  We were her living art project. Every day since graduation, every place we’d been, she was collecting leaves, jars of sand, rocks, pamphlets, pieces of string. These things she carried with her from each place to take home and, with Elliot’s photographs, turn into something beautiful.

  Only months before, travel for any reason, let alone for sentimental pleasure or adventure, was a dream I could never have imagined. Losing a penny of my small savings to frivolity was the death knell of my survival alone in the world, but now I could breathe. I could let some money go, work to replace it, maybe even graduate from college. Because I could live in one home. Francine’s and mine. Our home. At least until I turned twenty-one.

  Or maybe forever. For now, three years to breathe was a miracle.

  Already plans were in place for Yosemite in July, to walk the valleys and climb the mountains my Muir loved and kept safe. Sean was in charge of packing for our partial John Muir Trail saunter. He wanted to walk with me, he said, on the path where he and his mom found a way to keep his dad in them for always, and learned to live without him.

  Then Kira would join us at the trail’s end to gather together at Manzanar, where her family’s roots were embedded in the desert, roots that grew into the strength that kept them together and alive, and brought them back to their island home.

  Our family stories. And we began, at her and Sean’s insistence, with mine.

  “Muir, look,” Kira said. “The collection is begun.” We stood together beside Elliot and scrolled his camera through the cordons of what Kira had christened our San Francisco Muir Trip.

  All of us and a random NICU nurse Kira procured, smiling after a tour of the neonatal unit and a lunch of mac and cheese and lime Jell-O in the hospital cafeteria, everyone pointing at me in front of the John Muir Medical Center sign.

  Sitting together on the front steps of John Muir’s house in Martinez, where he tried so hard to live with his wife and daughters, aching until, because they loved him so much, they set him free to wander alone in the wilderness, his only true home.

  Sean, Elliot, and me on a blanket at Ocean Beach, watching Kira surf wave after wave, the happiest I’d ever seen her, which made me the happiest I’d been.