“Did you just find out?” I ask. “About being given up?” But she says no; she’s known for a while. “Someone told you?” I want to know, but she says, “I figured it out on my own.”
She started having dreams, she tells me, about another mother, another father. About fingers getting pointed at her, angry, denunciatory fingers, and those same five words repeated over and over again like a broken record: You’ve been a bad girl. It was years ago, many years. She was still at home living with her folks. She told her adoptive parents about the dreams, though she didn’t really need to. They’d already heard her, calling out in her sleep. They knew about the nightmares, or what she thought were nightmares at the time. Turned out they were flashbacks. She was remembering. And little by little she put the pieces together and figured it out. There was the fact, too, that she didn’t look a thing like her family, all tall and thickset with strawberry blond hair and light green eyes. They looked nothing like her. She was upset, overcome by a sense of abandonment and sadness, whether or not she had a family who loved her. She felt hurt, rejected by the parents who gave her up. But it was more than that, too; she’d been lied to and made to look like a fool.
Her adoptive family was contrite. “They were good people,” she tells me then as we walk down the splintered street. “They are good people.” We’re closer now, moving in parallel lines. We don’t touch, not intentionally, no, but every now and then the swing of her arm grazes the swing of mine. “They wanted to make it better,” she tells me of her adoptive parents. She doesn’t tell me their names or anything about them, but she admits that they stuffed her full of love and affection; they sent her for therapy. And at the mention of therapy, a signal goes off in my brain.
Dr. Giles.
“They did the best they could with what they were given, you know? I was a screwed-up kid. Still am, I guess. I made her cry a lot, my mother. I made him mad. But they were good people. They didn’t yell, they didn’t hit me when I was being bad. And it’s not like they were just going to drive on into the next town and leave me with some new family I didn’t know. Who does that kind of thing?” she asks with a sardonic laugh. I don’t say a thing. She isn’t looking for me to say anything. “They were stuck with me, you know? They’d adopted me. They signed the papers and all, though still, I put them through hell. I know I did. Couldn’t help it, that’s just me. It’s who I am. But still,” she says, “when I turned eighteen, I took my cue and decided to leave. They didn’t need me sticking around anymore, poaching on their family. It was their family, anyway, not mine.
“I tried to find my family,” she confesses. “My real family, anyway. And I did,” she says, her voice gloomy and withdrawn. There’s a long hiatus in her admission. I think that’s all she’s going to say. I tried to find my family and I did. I want to know more; I want to pry. I want to ask what happened. But I don’t. I leave it at that, knowing that when she’s ready she’ll tell me more.
Instead, I unclasp the shark’s tooth necklace from around my neck and hand it to her. For strength and protection. Right now, she needs it more than me.
“I can’t,” she says, but she does it, anyway, taking the cord from my shaking hands as we continue on into the darkness of night, walking until I think I can walk no more, but even then, I don’t want to go home.
“I tried to find my family,” she says again after some time, after a long time, so long that I’d decided she was never going to tell me, “and I did. I tracked them down.” I can hear her breathing in the sleepy night, her breath weighted down like mud. It doesn’t come easy. An upshot of the walking—or maybe the stress. Maybe the grief.
“But they still didn’t want me,” she adds. “After all those years, they still didn’t want me,” and my heart snaps for her, knowing what it did to me after my mother rejected me. I listen as she tells me how she found her family, but as soon as she did, they tried to elude her, to refuse her phone calls, to pay her to go away. And suddenly my mother’s one single rejection doesn’t seem so bad. If I saw my mother again and she refused me for a second time, I don’t know what I’d do. I think I’d likely lose it.
Quinn
“Pipe down, lady,” says the bus driver, a big man with an even bigger voice. He hardly turns in his chair, just enough to see that I’m not being raped at gunpoint. But he doesn’t slow down the bus. He doesn’t step on the brakes or reach for his walkie-talkie doodad to call for help. “Everything okay?” he asks, his voice as apathetic as if he’d asked if I wanted fries with my meal.
Behind me sits the bum who likes to touch my hair. And it’s instantaneous almost, the sense of relief. Not a killer, I tell myself. Just a creep.
But the relief is short-lived.
When he smiles, I see half of his teeth are missing. The rest are yellow and misshapen. He’ll lose those, too. I just know it. I’m not sure I’ve ever looked him in the eye before, other than a sideways glance and a simple request: Stop touching my hair, please.
He’d be creepy even on a good day, but this isn’t a good day. He’d be creepy if the sun was out and it was the middle of day, but this is not the middle of day, and outside the world is quiet and dark. Here and now he’s downright scary.
He has a lot of hair, on his head, on his face. It’s frizzed and crimped and standing on end. I can hardly see his cratered skin for all the hair. He wears a hat on top of his head, a navy-colored driving cap that doesn’t do a thing to keep his ears warm. He carries with him a backpacking pack with the harness and hip belt, and a trekking pole. There isn’t much to his coat, a soft-shell hoodie the color of mushrooms. But the size of him—big—might be enough to keep him warm. On his feet are mismatched gym shoes. A handout from some aid organization—Goodwill or the Salvation Army, I’m guessing, or a lucky Dumpster dive. His hands are unwashed. He smells. He wears a lanyard around his neck with a nametag that says Sam. I’d bet my life he’s not Sam. He found the nametag or, better yet, he stole it.
I look behind him and realize that, save for a couple of scenester teens in the back of the bus, we’re the only people here. They pay us no mind. They wear sunglasses at night. They send text messages to each other. They wear headphones and use words like tight and dope and tool, none of which have the same meaning as was intended by Merriam and Webster. One of the boys rises to his feet and says, “I’ve gotta bounce.”
Another says, “Bless up, my friend.”
They can’t save me. No way.
The rest of the bus is filled with row upon row of empty pews. No one to help.
And then the creep says, “I like your hair,” as he reaches out again to touch it, and I jerk back with haste, dropping my purse so that half of its contents fall to the floor: my wallet, my makeup case, my phone. I reach my hand beneath the grimy bus seat as far as it will go to make sure I haven’t managed to miss something, but my hand comes up empty. Well, empty save for the spit off someone else’s chewed-up gum.
“It’s pretty,” the creep says, and I say to the driver, “Let me off. I need to get off the bus. I need to get off this bus right now,” while sweeping my belongings up off the dirty bus floor and into my bag.
And what does the bus driver say to me? “Next stop’s a half block away,” is what he says. “Unless it’s an emergency, you’ll just have to wait.”
And then he yells at the homeless man to leave me alone and for the next twenty seconds he does.
He stops touching my hair. He leans back in his seat and stops talking to me.
I grab my belongings and stand. I pull the cord for the next bus stop, grateful that it’s my own. When the bus comes to a halt, I don’t walk. I run.
My feet pound the pavement. I’m not entirely alone on the street tonight, but I feel entirely alone. Knowing every soul I pass is a potential threat, there’s no telling who’s good and who’s bad.
Who I can trust.