Lola and I steal butter knives, screwdrivers, fingernail files, anything we can find to help us survive one more night. It isn’t enough to watch out for Roberto or Anya. They plot against us just as much as we struggle to outsmart them. They break dishes, bully other kids into breakdowns, burn cigarette holes in the ratty sofa, then blame us. Or really me. Anything to get Lola and me apart.
Lola can’t sleep. The constant strain of being on guard. The endless chore of changing diapers and comforting babies. She’s started picking at her hair, pulling out dull black clumps while the smudges grow darker under her eyes. She’s become one of those kids who shows up to school but is never really there. I tell her it will be okay. At least we have each other. And as long as our mom keeps following the steps, meeting the court’s requirements, we’ll all be together as a family soon.
Except as days turn into weeks, weeks into months, it’s becoming harder for either one of us to believe. Home is a distant memory. The nightly survival dance is our new reality. As I watch my little sister slip further and further away.
I’m the oldest. It’s my responsibility.
We should join sports, I announce one day. After-school activities. Anything to give us more time away from Mother Del’s. As a sixth grader, I have options. Soccer in the fall, basketball in the winter, softball in the spring. I’ve never played any sports before, but that’s not the point.
For Lola, however, after-school activities for third graders barely exist. Programs are meant for weekends, organized through a community or rec center, coached by a parent. She can kill an hour or two, but not much more.
Walking home from the bus stop one day, however, I find the answer. A poster for the local theater. A production of Charles Dickens’s Oliver Twist. Child actors wanted. I can’t help but laugh. Seriously? Oliver Twist? Have they hung out in foster care recently? But then I read on: Rigorous. Intense. Only Serious Talents Need Apply. Rehearsals are several hours every other night and most weekends. In addition, once the play is off and running . . .
It’s perfect. Lola and I will join community theater, and never come home to Mother Del’s again.
I drag Lola to the auditions. She doesn’t want to go. She’s tired. She’s depressed. She just wants to hang out with the babies. But then, we are there. She walks onto the stage, doing as she’s told. The lights come on, she looks up . . .
And my little sister comes alive. For the first time in months. She sparkles. She doesn’t just stand on that stage, she owns it. Afterward, everyone bursts into applause. The other little kids look at her, awestruck. And that’s it. My little sister becomes the first female Oliver Twist.
I go to work on set design, recruiting Mike Davis, who needs to avoid Mother Del’s as much as we do. For someone who bounces and jangles all the time, he has an amazingly steady hand once he’s focused. He’s also an incredible artist, turning plain plywood into elaborately painted backdrops. While both of us steal any sharp objects we can find. For our inevitable return to Mother Del’s.
I think Oliver Twist would agree, hope is a funny thing. You need it. Then there are times you have to let it go again. Except, of course, you can’t give up completely, or there’s no coming back.
We have weekly meetings with our mother now. We tell her about our new lives in theater. She relates stories from her new job as an ER nurse. And yet the better she appears, the more Lola and I retreat. Because it’s too hard to go from her to Mother Del. It’s too painful to hope that she might really remain sober. That we might someday be a real family again.
Manny. We see him once a week at the family meetings, as well. He lights up every time he sees us, but now, six months later, he also runs easily to his foster mom at the end of the hour. I take to staring at my mother’s face. The way she forces herself to watch as her son embraces another woman. Her penance, I think. I wonder if it would make her feel better to know what Lola and I are going through, that we dread every second at Mother Del’s. But maybe that’s petty of me. Manny appears to have decent, caring foster parents. I have to hope it’s true.
The theater gives me hope. Watching my sister work the stage, belt out her lines. Painting away with Mike quiet by my side. Later, running up the scaffolding, taking our seats along the lighting catwalk, the entire playhouse sprawled out beneath us. Up that high, everything feels small, insignificant. For a moment, we don’t even worry about Mother Del’s.
We’re just kids doing things kids like to do. Run. Climb. Laugh.
First kiss.
And another moment of hope: I’m going to survive this. And my sister and my brother. We’re going to be one of those success stories. The kids who took all their rage and frustration and rose above it. A model for others to follow.
We return at night to Mother Del’s. To the babies and their crying and whimpering. To Roberto and Anya and their mind games. It’s not so bad, because tomorrow we will have the theater again. And again. And again.
Which means we should’ve known, right? We, of all people. Nothing so good lasts forever.
Eight weeks after rehearsals start, we come home to a bottle of whiskey. Left on the floor of the babies’ room. A note: Heard your mother’s a drunk. What about you?
Then a giggle coming from down the hall. Roberto and Anya waiting. Watching. So much bigger and stronger than both of us.
I look at the bottle.
I’m the oldest. It’s my responsibility.
And yet Lola . . .
“I love you,” she tells me. Then, before I can stop her from grabbing and chugging the entire bottle: “I’m sorry.”
The bottle empties. My sister collapses. I’m on the floor beside her, a scene from a very bad play. Then Mike is there, too. But neither of us says a word.
Where are these perfect families? Can there even be such a thing? One where everything goes so right, where no one ever hurts each other?
Or is there just me and my family, and all of the lessons we’re still learning the hard way?
Chapter 23
D.D. AND PHIL HAD WANTED to speak to Juanita Baez’s lawyer before approaching the foster home. But after leaving two messages for the lawyer and receiving no reply, they switched gears. Mother Del’s, then the lawyer. Because the clock was ticking, and they couldn’t afford to just stand around.
Or in D.D.’s case, to gaze longingly at a cell phone, desperate to see photos of a new Dog in hopes of a distraction.
So Mother Del’s it was.
They found the place easily enough. A squat two-story residence stuck in the middle of a haphazard row of town houses, it had a waist-high chain-link fence cordoning off a dusty stamp of a yard that was dotted with discarded toys. Phil opened the gate and did the honors of escorting D.D. up the cracked walkway to the front porch. Two bikes leaned against the railing, clearly sized for younger kids. Tucked next to the house was a bin of plastic balls—nothing that could go too far or inflict too much damage, D.D. noticed.
She knocked. Waited. Knocked again. Finally, the door opened. A black kid stood in front of D.D. He appeared to be about eight, with a shaved head and huge dark eyes. He looked at D.D., then Phil, then D.D. again. He didn’t say a word.
“We’re looking for Mother Del,” D.D. said at last, put off by the boy’s unblinking stare.
He nodded.
“Can we come in?”
He nodded again. Still didn’t move.
D.D. placed a hand on the door and gently pushed. The boy fell back a step. D.D. and Phil followed him through a cluttered family room—yellow-stained walls, broken-down brown sofa, plastic cups, soda cans, empty chip bags. Finally they came to what appeared to be the dining room.
An enormous wooden picnic table sat in the middle, headed by an even larger woman. She looked up at D.D. and Phil’s approach, white face enveloped in folds of flesh and capped by coarse salt-and-pepper hair. D.D. would peg the woman’s age at anywhere between thirty and one hundred and thirty. It was just too hard to tell.