“—an individual,” she continues, “who wishes to remain anonymous.”
“But why?” I wonder out loud, though I don’t really have to think too long or hard to come up with an answer. My mind settles on one man. He never did like me anyway, that’s for sure. I heard them, right there, in that very next room. Fighting about me when they thought I couldn’t hear.
“Tell me about Joseph,” she says again.
“I told you already. I don’t want to talk about Joseph.”
“Then how about Miriam. Tell me about Miriam.”
“Miriam is a troll,” I say, letting my chip bag dance to the floor.
The woman is straight-faced. “What does that mean?” she asks. “A troll?”
“An imp,” I say. That’s just it. Miriam in a nutshell. I didn’t like Miriam, that’s for sure. But I did feel kind of sorry for her. She was small, maybe four feet tall, with mousy gray hair, her skin knobby like a streusel topping. She sat in her bedroom all day and night. She hardly said more than two words to me. She only ever talked to Joseph.
But that’s not the way she looked when she and Joseph, Matthew and Isaac showed up at the home to fetch me. No, that day Joseph made her up in a pretty gingham dress, short-sleeved with a V-neck and a big bow that wrapped around her like a hug; he made Matthew and Isaac put on nice shirts and pressed pants. Even Joseph was handsome in a striped shirt and a tie, a kindness to his eye that I never saw after that day. He made sure Miriam was taking her pills, that she put her lipstick on and that she smiled every time he so much as nudged her side. At least he must have because I don’t remember seeing Miriam smile a day in her life. But something or other impressed the caseworker who was convinced that living with Joseph and Miriam would be a wonderful thing for me. Blessed and fortuitous were the words she used. Cursed and damned were more like it. My caseworker swore that Joseph and Miriam had gone through a screening process and foster care training; they had children of their own. They were now licensed foster parents and were, for me, or so she claimed, a perfect fit.
No one asked if I wanted to live with Joseph and Miriam. By then I was nine years old. No one gave a hoot what I wanted. I was supposed to feel lucky that I was moving onto a foster home, that I didn’t have to stay in the group home forever. Joseph and Miriam were an extended sort of family, which was also a good thing. Supposedly. Though my relationship to Joseph and Miriam was so spotty I had a hard time connecting the dots. But there was paperwork, the caseworker said. Proof. And then she sat me down and looked me in the eye and said, “You’ve got to understand, Claire. You’re getting older all the time. This might be your one and only chance at a family.”
But I had a family: Momma and Daddy and Lily. I didn’t want another one.
Lily got swept up in an instant because she was two years old. Infertile couples, like Paul and Lily Zeeger, were looking for just that. A baby, if possible, but a toddler if a baby was hard to find. Little Lily barely remembered Momma and Daddy. In time, she wouldn’t remember them at all. She’d come to believe that Paul and Lily were her parents.
But no one wanted a nine-year-old, and sure as heck, no one would want a ten-year-old or an eleven-year-old, either. Time was ticking away, or so my caseworker, Ms. Amber Adler, said.
I packed what few belongings I’d been allowed to bring with me: some clothes and books, the photos of Momma that Joseph would later tear to shreds.
“And Joseph. Is he a troll, too?”
I pictured Joseph in my mind. The towering man, the sinister eagle eyes and aquiline nose, his short, military-style pumpkin-colored hair and the bristly beard that kept me awake at night, as I lay on my bed, listening in fear for the sound of unwelcome footsteps on the creaky wooden floor outside my door.
The bristly beard scraping across my face when he lay down beside me in bed.
“No,” I said, looking the silver-haired lady straight in the eye. “No, ma’am. Joseph’s the devil.”
HEIDI
I can’t stop thinking about it, about the blood.
As I pass my neighbor, Graham, on the way up from the laundry room, I’m unsettled, incognizant of the way he says to me in that always jovial, always dependable tone of his, “You just get more and more beautiful every time I lay eyes on you,” and I have to ask him to repeat himself.
“What’s that?” I ask and he laughs.