Two double-wide trailers for classrooms. Renovated BIA family group housing with houseparents, teachers, teacher’s aides, all supposedly trained in child psychology or working on their own teaching licenses. At first she was the assistant director, which meant she helped collect data, strategize, order supplies, lead meetings, organize funding, construct endless progress reports, plans, plus a host of functions that weren’t in her job description. Heartbreak mitigation. That was not described. Her heartbreak. Kids’ heartbreak. Parents’ heartbreak. Also: mop puke, replace paper towels, lock and unlock doors, rock sobbing hurt little boys until their fury slept, play Crazy Eights with little girls while they told how their mom had stabbed their dad, or vice versa, make muffins with the moms who were getting straight, raise hell with the moms who weren’t. She didn’t deal with the dads. Left that to the director. Then she became the director.
She tried not to bring the day home, but it did come. In her zeal for stability and calm, it came home. In her need for dependable household structure, it came home. In her frequent failure to hold structure, her episodes of neatness and relapse, her struggle to find balance, it came home. In her need for privacy, when she made her own sweat lodge and just sat inside, steaming the sorrow out, it came home. In her coping strategies—smudge the dysfunction off with burning sage, surround the bed with eagle feathers, drink, once a week, two glasses of the best wine she could afford, alone—it came home. In her attempts to rebuild what she had so carefully constructed before—the Irons as a strong family, as good people—it came home. She had understood that the only way was through LaRose, but she could not bear it.
Now, knowing that she’d see him, that again there was a place for her as a mother, she swept through her days in an excited bubbling way nobody ever saw with her. Her jerky, angular movements eased into grace. Her eyes rested on her paperwork without comprehension or worry. Even the ends of her hair hung slack, relaxed, not skinned back into a tail or poked up in a beaded clip.
Emmaline left her back-of-the-trailer office and drove home carefully. She hadn’t picked LaRose up from Nola because Peter had asked Landreaux not to send her, or for him to go either. He knew Nola would have a hard time with either parent. Peter had heart pangs when he remembered how LaRose had run to his mother at the grocery, electrified by the sight of her, dropping everything to gallop at her headlong. That’s why the sisters or the brothers were dispatched. Now Josette and Snow were in their room, door locked, checking each other for ticks. Snow continually whimpered and sometimes danced around screaming. On the living room floor, LaRose was wrestling with Hollis. He had him down and was holding his fist in Hollis’s face demanding he give up.
Hollis beat his arm on the floor.
He’s got you by the balls, said Coochy, sitting back on the couch. He was eating a cold piece of bannock.
Don’t say that to him!
Wanna take me on? said LaRose, swaggering.
Hollis was laughing. He destroyed my ass.
Don’t say that to him, Josette said, coming out of the bedroom.
How many?
Like, twenty. She freaked. She’ll be taking one of her forever showers now.
Emmaline drove up and LaRose heard her car. He slammed out of the house and ran across the cindery yard. Emmaline got out just in time to catch LaRose as he jumped into her arms. He was still small enough to ride her hips, her arms hugging his waist. He molded to her, then leaned back and told her all about the secret fort in the lilac bush, a new action figure, the church preschool where Nola took him. But not Maggie. He didn’t talk about Maggie. He felt in some vague way that he should not have told his sisters about the banshee. There was always something like that, something not okay, and he always tried to avoid it. But sometimes he wouldn’t know what it was until he said it, like with the long-toothed boney thing that screamed for the dead. Other things that Maggie told him in their lilac-bush hideout he knew right away not to tell because she said so. She said: Never tell I told you this—your dad was really aiming for my little brother, your dad’s a killer, your dad murdered my little brother, I’ll show you the place, my brother’s blood soaked into the ground, the worms came up, the buzzards landed, you could go crazy if you stood there, at night his ghost would choke you, nothing grows there now or will ever grow there, though just that afternoon LaRose had seen to his relief that things were growing all over.
BIINDIGEG!
Here’s my boy!
The apartment was filled with the friends of Mrs. Peace, all excited to see LaRose. He was a favorite.
Here’s the boy who likes us, said Sam Eagleboy. The boy who wants the stories. You raised this boy good, Emmaline.
Sam was a thin man with beautiful upswept lines around his eyes and mouth, as if he was smiling even when he was serious. There was nothing wrong with him except he was old. He wore a brown checkered shirt, neatly tucked. An agate bolo tie, jeans held up by a belt of cracked amber leather. On his slim feet, running shoes. Sam put in miles walking the halls and grounds. Malvern Sangrait, a mean little washtub of a woman, glowered from her permanently squinted left eye and gave a suspicious little huff. She leaned forward on her walker. She was wearing eyeliner and Meow Girl red lipstick.
So you got your boy back, she said to Emmaline. Her hair was pulled to one side with a purple plastic barrette. He’s skinny, ooh. They didn’t feed him good.