Better Than the Best Plan

by Lauren Morrill

  I feel the tears start to well up. I try to swallow the tremor in my voice, but when I open my mouth to speak, it all just comes tumbling out with the tears. “I just needed to get away, okay? I just needed to feel like me.” I drop my head into my hands, trying to hide the tears.

  “Oh, Ritzy,” Kris says, her voice cracking. I hear the mug thud onto the countertop, then a rush of steps as she circles around the island to get to me. Her arm loops over my shoulder, her hand warm on my arm as she pulls me in close. But that isn’t what makes me sit up, swallowing the sob that’s making its way up my throat.

  Ritzy.

  “Who told you to call me that?” I ask, my eyes boring into hers, searching for an explanation.

  She blinks back in shock. “What?”

  “Who told you that’s my nickname? Because I didn’t tell anyone who could have told you. How did you know?” I can hear myself getting hysterical over a stupid nickname, but I can’t stop. “Why did you call me that?”

  Kris bites her lip, stepping back from me slightly. “I’m sorry,” she says, though it’s clear she doesn’t know what she’s apologizing for. How could she? She doesn’t know that I was guarding that name, that I’d put up a wall between it and her. Between it and here. “It’s what I called you when you were little. It just came out.”

  And with the one final, whooshing wave, I feel everything leave my body. The anger and the hurt and the sadness, until all that’s left is just confusion. I suck in a breath and hold it like a promise, until I worry I might pass out, and then I let it out long and slow.

  Kris’s fingers twitch like she wants to be holding on to her mug right now, but it’s across the counter and she’s still facing me. “Do people still call you that?”

  “Yeah,” I say. “My mom calls me Ritzy.”

  Kris nods, like she’s thinking hard, turning something over in her mind. She takes a seat next to me. She leans forward on the countertop. Then she opens her mouth and says, “I think there are some things we should talk about. Some things we probably should have talked about when you first got here.

  “You showed up on my doorstep when you were six months old. You were absolutely the tiniest, most delicate thing I’d ever seen, and I was sure from the moment I took you that I would break you. I’d only just finished my foster parent training program. I’d been called once before to take in a child, but whatever the situation was had resolved before that kid showed up. So you were the first.

  “I didn’t know anything about your situation. And I didn’t know how long you’d be with me. It was just this wide-open gulf, and you were this tiny baby in my arms. I tried not to fall in love with you, because of course you could be leaving anytime. But as the days turned into weeks, turned into months, turned into a year, how could I not? I was raising you, and as much as I knew you had a mother already, I still felt like one to you.”

  She pauses, glancing at me to see if I have any questions, but I’m glued to her every word.

  “Do you know anything about why you came to stay with me the first time?”

  “I didn’t even know I was with you to begin with,” I say. “I found some stuff when I was cleaning out my mom’s room at the apartment. A newspaper article about a farm or something?”

  She nods. “Right after you were born, your mom went to live at an artist colony, I think it was. I don’t know much, just that she didn’t have anyone around after you were born, and she needed help. She had some friends who lived there, and they had kids, and she figured it would be a good place for her to have some extra hands and eyes on a brand-new baby. What she didn’t know is that the couple in charge of the place were also growing quite a lot of weed on the property, which is how they had the money to keep it going in the first place.”

  “So she didn’t know?”

  “She had no idea. But of course, the state and the police and all these other people had to investigate that thoroughly first. That process dragged on for about six months and only ended because the couple eventually confessed. So your mom didn’t have to go through a trial or worry about having a record. Still, it was a long process to get you back. Remember the whole permanency plan from your hearing?”

  I nod, thinking about all the things the judge said my mom would have to do to get me back. It had sounded insane, particularly when you considered that my mom wasn’t even present to get started. Parenting classes? Counseling? Right.

  “Well, she had to do all that stuff and more. Because of the pot, she had to do all these drug rehab programs, which was ridiculous because she wasn’t even involved. Anyway, she did it. It took nearly a full year after the criminal charges were dropped, but she did it all. And all that time, you were living with me.

  “I tell you all that because here’s the thing. I wanted to keep you. I so desperately wanted to keep you. I tried, in fact, probably harder than I should have. But your mother, she wasn’t going to walk away from you. She did everything the court required. She attended every DCF meeting. She jumped through every hoop, followed every rule. And it wasn’t easy. They really don’t make it easy, especially with kids as young as you. She really had to prove herself to them. But every challenge they laid, she met it, and so just after your second birthday, you went back to her. ‘Family reunification,’ they call it. I wasn’t there to see it. I don’t think I had the strength to endure it. But you have to know that for nearly two years your mother fought for you. She never stopped being your mom, and she fought to make sure the court knew it. She didn’t leave you, Maritza. She went away, but she never left. Trust me on that.”

  The kitchen is silent. Tears are still rolling down my cheeks, falling onto my shirt, soaking the fabric. But I cry with no sound. I don’t dare make one, for fear that I’ll miss a word of this.

  “Do you have any questions?”

  “Yeah,” I say, sniffling and wiping at my tears. “I mean, that’s a great story, but it makes it even harder to understand why she turned around and walked right out of my life fifteen years later.”

  Kris lets out an enormous sigh. I can tell she’s trying to figure out what to say now.

  “I wish I knew the answer to that,” she says. “I’m sure your mom had her reasons, right or wrong. And even though I can’t fathom it, I really do believe she thought she was doing the right thing. But I’ll be honest, it doesn’t make a whole lot of sense to me.”

  “Why did you even take in a foster kid to begin with? Weren’t you, like, really young?”

  She nods. “I was. But I’d just ended things with my fiancé, a guy I’d been with since college. I was on the cusp of doing the whole family thing when he left, and I just felt so ready. I didn’t want to wait or start all over. And I was in a position where I felt like I had a lot to give. I was working on my dissertation, and I saw flyers up in my department at school. BE A FOSTER PARENT, they said in these big block letters. It felt like an order, or at least a good idea. They were offering the certification classes right on campus. So I signed up.”

  “Was I your only foster kid?”

  She smiles and gives a little half shrug. “I didn’t really anticipate having you for as long as I did, and I’d had no idea how hard it would be to give you back. It took me a long time to get over it, and by the time I felt ready, my life was different. I’d met Pete. I’d started teaching; I had research. But honestly, I think I used all that as an excuse because I worried I couldn’t do it again.

  “As for your nickname, you were, I don’t know, maybe nine months old? You pulled yourself up on the coffee table and then tried to climb up on it. I stopped you, but you grinned at me with this toothy, mischievous baby smile that had me in stitches,” she says, now beaming with the memory. “And I remember it just came out.”

  Me, a baby. That coffee table in the next room. A memory of us, of me, here. I want to hear more, but I’m also scared, like hearing it will somehow unravel my own memories of childhood. It’ll be like that picture in Back to the Future. The more she tells m
e, the more my mother might fade from the image. I never had any memories of being that small. Nobody does. But you sort of construct them, either from photographs or stories or just ideas of what your babyhood was. And for me, my head and heart had always been filled with thoughts of my mother rocking me to sleep or cheering me on as I took my first steps. But now I’m realizing that none of that was real. It didn’t happen. Because my mother wasn’t there. It was Kris. She was the one who fed me and sang songs to me and held my chubby little fists as I took my first steps. The reason I don’t have pictures from that time isn’t because my mother was too poor to afford a camera (as she told it), it was because she wasn’t there to take the photos.

  Kris replaces a tentative hand on my shoulder, and when I don’t recoil, she squeezes. “I didn’t think anyone called you that but me. Sometimes I’d call you Ritz Cracker, which always made you laugh.”

  And in spite of the tears and exhaustion and confusion, I laugh now, too.

  “So you gave me my nickname,” I say.

  She smiles and shrugs. “I’m guessing your mom had the same impulse I did, to shorten Maritza to Ritzy. So we both gave you that nickname.”

  And with that, the image of my mom in the picture sharpens a little.

  “I should have told you all this when you first got here. I just didn’t know if you’d want to hear it. And when you didn’t ask, I figured it was probably best to let you lead the way? I’m so sorry, I guess that was a mistake.”

  “It’s okay. I really didn’t know … I don’t know. I didn’t know what I didn’t know, you know?”

  “Unconscious incompetence, it’s called,” Kris says. I hear her slip into what I imagine is her professor voice, the one she probably uses in lectures with her students. “It’s from a learning model. You don’t know that you don’t know, so you can’t ask for the information. That’s why it was on me to tell you. And I promise, I won’t make that mistake again.”

  The smell of something burning starts to drift over. I wrinkle my nose, and Kris leaps from her seat.

  “Shit, the kettle!” she cries, yanking it off the burner. The bottom has a patina of soot. She sets it down in the sink and sighs. “Maritza, you need to be honest with me, okay? I know I’m not your mother, and I’d never try to be. But I do care about you. Can you understand that?”

  I nod.

  “I think maybe we haven’t been doing a very good job at this,” she says.

  “At what?”

  “At being, well, whatever it is we are.” She gestures at an invisible bond between us.

  “And what are we?”

  She pauses, thinking for a moment. “I think the fact that neither of us has any idea is a pretty good sign that we’re falling down on the job.”

  I quirk a crooked smile. She’s right.

  “So what now?”

  “Well, now we try again. Better this time,” she says. “You need to talk to me. Tell me what’s going on with you. Don’t be afraid to ask for things.”

  “Okay,” I say. Then knowing it’ll be a struggle, I add, “I’ll try.”

  “I’m going to treat you like family, because that’s what you are to me.”

  Family.

  “I’m sorry. For making you worry,” I say.

  “I know you are,” she says. “And in the spirit of family, you’re grounded.”

  CHAPTER SIXTEEN

  Libby leads me down the familiar, beautifully landscaped path to the clubhouse, where she swings open the door. Inside is the barely contained chaos I heard yesterday on the phone, the energy practically pulsing at the four walls of the building. There’s music playing at top volume, one of those kiddie remakes of a pop song that sounds like the singers have been sucking down sugar and helium. There are a few kids executing wild attempts at break dancing that mostly look like they’re having fits on the floor. At a table nearby, a small group in smocks are painting, though it looks like they’ve long since abandoned the paper in front of them and are instead opting to create their masterpieces on the wooden tabletop (and, in the case of one little girl, up and down her pale, freckled arms). In the back of the room, I spot Ryan starting to scale a bookshelf, a backpack on his back.

  “Ryan, I told you, we do not play Arctic explorer inside,” Annie says, her attempt at patience starting to fray around the edges. As soon as she’s sure Ryan is on his way down the bookcase instead of up, she hurries over to the table, where she plucks the paintbrush from the little girl perfecting her body art and takes her by the hand. “To the bathroom, please. Wash this off.”

  “But I did butterflies!” The little girl stomps off toward a door at the back of the room, huffing with each step.

  “Painting on paper only, please!” Annie says to the rest of the group, though that ship has long since sailed.

  “Annie, your reinforcements have arrived, background checked and ready to go. Or reinforcement. Singular,” Libby says, gazing around the room like she’s observing hyenas on safari. “You good?”

  Annie reaches up and brushes a lock of blond hair from her brow, leaving a streak of blue paint across her forehead. “I will be,” she says, turning to me. “Thank god you’re here. Two eyes are definitely not enough on this wild bunch.”

  As if on cue, a cup of red paint tips over on the table, running in a river straight to the edge and gushing over onto the floor.

  “Oh crud,” Annie says, but I rush forward, grabbing a roll of paper towels from the counter by the door.

  “I got it,” I say. It’s one thing I at least know how to do. I have the paint mostly cleaned from the floor when I hear a loud whistle. I look up to see Annie standing in the middle of the chaos, her hands on her hips, leveling a stern gaze around the room. And I’m shocked to find that the kids, upon hearing the whistle, stop. The painters look up, paintbrushes paused over their art. The dancers freeze in place, save for one who rushes over to the bookcase to turn off the music streaming from an iPad on a stand.

  “Okay, everyone, we’ve got a new counselor here to help us out. Everyone say hi to Maritza.”

  “Hi, Maritza,” comes the singsong reply.

  I stand up from the floor, paint-covered paper towels still wadded in my hand. “Hi, everyone!”

  “Quickly, let’s go around and introduce ourselves, okay?”

  And then, rapid-fire, I meet Abel, Everly, Hadley, Otis, Cal, Theo, a pair of identical twins named Violet and Iris, Charlie, Sarah, and Celia. Ryan waves at me from the back.

  And that’s all the orientation I get, or maybe all the orientation these kids can handle, before the chaos resumes. The music blares, the dancing continues, and at the table, new sheets of paper are laid across the rapidly drying layer of paint to begin creation anew.

  “I tried to get them to wear name tags, but that was like getting cats to wear shoes. It was just not happening,” Annie says, coming over to stand next to me and survey the madness.

  “Are there any, um, activities?” I’ve never been to camp, but the notion always conjured up images of structured crafts, campfire songs, maybe some kind of sports situation. A schedule at the very least.

  Annie sighs. “Not really. Mostly we just keep them entertained and alive while their parents play golf or tennis or take a steam. Less camp, more babysitting, you know? We do have swimming at eleven, followed by lunch, before their parents pick them up at twelve thirty. Oh, and at some point, we’ve got to work on the Fourth of July show, but I can’t even begin to think about that right now.”

  A little boy with curly red hair who introduced himself as Abel—he of the grape gum in the ponytail incident—runs over, practically skidding to a stop at our feet. “Is it lunchtime yet?”

  “Abel, you just got here. Lunch isn’t until the end.”

  He pauses, turning the information over in his mind. “How much longer?”

  Annie points at the clock on the wall behind him. “Lunch is at noon. You tell me how much longer.”

  Abel just rolls his eyes in respo
nse before turning and bolting back to the amateur dance crew.

  “Oh, by the way, can you sing?” Annie asks me.

  “Um, what?”

  “Can you sing?” When she sees my horrified face, she rolls her eyes. “I’m not asking if you’re gonna audition for a reality singing competition. I’m asking if you can passably carry a tune.”

  “Why, exactly?”

  “We’re supposed to put on a Fourth of July musical extravaganza”—she gives sarcastic jazz hands—“and I can’t sing to save my life. Aubrey was supposed to take the lead on that one, but you know how that went.”

  Most of my singing experience is relegated to performances with Lainey in Barney. I don’t know if I’m any good, but Lainey never complained. “As long as I don’t have to sing in front of anyone, I think I can maybe handle that.”

  “Great. Just teach them some patriotic songs or whatever. I’ll deal with making a backdrop. You’ve got two weeks.”

  I give her a two-fingered salute. “Aye, aye, captain,” I reply.

  “Save it for the production,” she says.

  The rest of the morning is basically spent playing elementary school traffic cop, trying to stave off tears and injury every few minutes. At ten thirty, Annie gives another one of her loud camp whistles, and the action stops long enough for me to tell everyone that they need to start thinking of which famous American they want to dress up as for the show. It’s an idea that comes to me while watching our little break-dance troupe in the back choreograph their own routine to a song from Hamilton. It would be like one of the elementary school plays I did as a kid, where we’d dress up as something and stand on risers and sing a bunch of songs on a theme. We were little, so basically anything we did was adorable, and the parents were only half listening anyway, most of them buried behind their phones snapping pictures or recording video. Well, everyone except my mom, who usually either missed the show for some class she was taking or forgot to attend altogether.