“Easy,” he said without opening the door, “just making sure you didn’t fall in. Make yourself at home. I’m gonna run get you a change of clothes.”
“Fine,” she called out, hoping to sound indifferent, though she was relieved she’d have the chance to bathe alone. She listened for the click of the door, the thud of his boots on the stairs, the rowdy start of the Mustang. It wasn’t until the sound of the engine had faded that she turned on the faucet, stripped to her underpants, and sat in the tub as the water crept up over her till she was submerged in warmth. With a clean washrag and a honey-colored puck of soap, she scrubbed her skin pink and prickly, washed her hair and rinsed until it squeaked when she dragged her fingers through it, tugging at the snarls. She drained the murky pond and refilled with fresh water, just for the pleasure of it, but not before rechecking the lock on the door and bending the razor blade into a makeshift weapon, just in case.
She wondered if the Machers were sweating that they’d lost her again, if they’d see punishment, or if someone would just cross them off some master list of eligible foster parents. Paul and Fran Macher were different from her other families. They had vanity tans and coordinating billowy caftans and sometimes walked around au naturel. They had spent their savings traveling to Woodstock the year before and were desperate to tell you all about it. They were people who believed they deserved nice things but never seemed to work hard enough to have their own.
Paul was often involved in sensational “business strategies” that required him to purchase some volume of inventory (at a deep discount), which he was never able to turn around. He would disappear at odd hours and return bleary-eyed and morose, at which point it was wise to avoid him. Fran stayed mostly at home. She did psychic readings for old women she met in the market, women who wanted to speak to their dead husbands or children or pets. Her favorite pastime was sunning herself on a towel on their little patch of grass, anointing herself with baby oil.
The first time Kit had tried to run off, maybe a month before, she had gone three days without eating before she passed out in a cluster of bluebonnets. She had awoken in a shower curtain hospital cubicle, a bag of cold fluid dripping into her arm. She’d detubed herself and staggered toward the lit red exit sign at the end of the hall. She’d made it as far as the elevator before being escorted back to the holding area where the other, mostly Spanish-speaking, patients sat awaiting treatment.
Kit spent the night there on a cot among the sounds of the ill, in and out of sleep, and in the morning her social worker showed up none too glad to see her. She lay on the backseat of the woman’s sedan as they drove back to her foster home, a prefab box house in a subdivision forty miles west of Houston, indistinct from the other homes on Pine Oak Terrace except for a collection of hanging stained glass in the windows. Peacocks, mermaids, and various scenes of psychedelia. Inside, it was a nauseating mix of pea-soup shag carpeting, wood veneer paneled walls, and an ozone of cigarettes and hairspray.
The tired rep from social services left Kit just inside the door with a final warning. Fran was away at a seminar for Gifted Persons, which left punishment to Paul, historically avoidant of conflict or even really acknowledging Kit’s presence. That day he beaned her square in the face with a dictionary, still wrapped in its plastic, that they had won in a sweepstakes.
The impact split her cheek like a dropped tomato. He swooned when she bled so hard it inked the front of her shirt. Her face felt hot and numb.
“Shit, sorry—I didn’t think it would hit you.” He floundered with a dishrag, dabbing it in the area of her face but not daring to touch her. “Should we get you to a doctor?”
“I’m not going back to the hospital. It’s fine,” she said, the blood pooling in the little reservoir at the base of her throat. Seeing the horrified look on Paul’s toast-colored face, she decided to push it further.
She found a sewing kit in the laundry room and returned to Paul, who was seated and bent over at the waist, drawing slow breaths. She pulled up a chair next to him, threaded a needle, and stitched up her cheek right there at the kitchen table. Her eyes watered reflexively, but it did not hurt.
“What the shit is wrong with you?” he said and stumbled to the bathroom.
She relished twisting the knife to his weakness. Maybe it was a fucked-up thing to do, but this toughness was the only thing she liked about herself, the only scrap of leverage she had. It was more than toughness, though. For as long as she could remember, when her body was injured, it failed to register pain. So, Kit had to learn to look for signs of damage since she couldn’t feel them. But it wasn’t that she felt nothing—she could feel temperature, pressure, tingling, moisture. And she was hypersensitive to touch. If someone got near her, her skin goosed and she could feel their body heat. On the rare occasion someone had tried to touch her affectionately, it burned.
A doctor had checked her out once after she had gone to school with a broken left arm and didn’t realize it until she tried to pick up her book bag and it fell to the floor. The doctor kind of scratched his head and said, “I knew you people were tough but I’ve never seen anything like this.” His best guess at why she hadn’t felt the break had been nerve damage. Then he put a cast on her and signed her discharge papers.
A pretty resident who had been standing in the room lingered after the doctor left. She told Kit’s foster parents to leave the room and asked Kit questions like “Have you been hit?” and “How often?” and “Who takes care of you when you need help?” The resident said she had a hunch that this condition, this numbness, may have been on account of all the bad stuff Kit had been through, that she should see a psychologist to know for sure. She said the same thing to the parents and even wrote down the name of a psychologist in Houston, but they never followed through. They didn’t have time or money to shuttle her to Houston just to talk to a shrink. Not that Kit was eager to get to the bottom of it either. She didn’t see the use in fixing it—to do what? Make her feel pain again? She hoped it never went away, this special power.
Manny knuckled “Shave and a Haircut” on the bathroom door and hung the shopping bag on the knob.