“Well,” I say.
“Well,” the woman says.
“Well,” Diamond says, so I open the door.
She’s gone five days. The only difference is she has less stuff now.
She runs and jumps into my arms and I carry her around the cottage on my hip. She bucks up and down and I tell her to stop and then we sit at the kids’ table and color, occasionally looking up to comment on each other’s pictures. I color the sky red and the grass blue and Strawberry Shortcake gray but I stay within the lines. Diamond colors everything the right color but doesn’t stay within the lines. When we finish one, we tear it out, make a neat stack on the table.
“I want that one,” Diamond says, so I give her my coloring book. She looks at the picture I was working on—Strawberry Shortcake taking a bubble bath while her cat paws at a bubble—and says she doesn’t want this one, she wants another one. I sort through the shelf of coloring books she can’t reach and hand her Beauty and the Beast and Spider-Man and Blue’s Clues and they all go skidding across the floor, open-faced. Then she shoves the baby, who falls, cushioned, on her ass. The baby looks at me to confirm that something terrible has happened to her before screaming.
I drag Diamond to her room and push her in, hold the door closed while she tears it apart. There’s only so much damage that can be done: chairs topple, shoes hit the wall. She sticks her fingers through the vent and reaches for my legs and says she’s going to tell her daddy, that her daddy is big and mean and he is going to kill me.
“You gone die,” she says.
“Okay.”
“My daddy gone kill you.”
“That’s fine,” I say, each of my responses sending her further out of control. I remember the time she was admitted to Beech Grove. I went to see her and she was bloated and looked at me like she’d never seen me before, and the nurse acted as though it was normal for a thin, energetic child to turn fat and unresponsive in the span of two weeks. After that I threatened to quit and my boss agreed to bring her back because I do certain things that the others can’t, or won’t.
Diamond finally tires herself out and slides to the floor, and I sit against the other side for a few minutes before letting myself in. We right her chairs and put the covers back on the beds. She puts her shoes in the closet, brings me her trash can to show me the busted plastic. Then we lie in the bed by the window, facing each other. We alternate closing our eyes, looking at each other in turns. Next month, she’ll go to court and testify against her father. Already, she spends so much of her time talking to therapists about the things he has done to her. I want to take her out to my car and drive until we find a nice little house in a nice little town. We’d watch movies together at night in our pajamas and I’d forget about my husband and my growing dependence on Adderall and she’d forget about all of the bad things that have happened to her.
“Come on,” I say. “Let’s go outside.”
I push her on the swing and she tells me to push her higher, higher. I push her so high the swing set starts jumping. When I get tired, I sit next to her and she trails her foot across the oval of dirt to slow herself before jumping off. Then she climbs into my lap, facing me, and I help get her legs into position. I’m too old to swing—it makes me nauseous—and I’m certainly too old for spider, but I hold still as she places her hands on either side of my face as if she’s going to kiss me, or take my temperature, and tell her to hang on.
Back inside, I put in The Nutty Professor and we sit on the couch. Diamond watches the movie as if she hasn’t seen it thirty times, bursting into laughter at all the right places, while I look out the window, past the pile of bikes and wagons, to the street. Whenever I tell someone I work here, they say they never see kids outside, that they didn’t know kids actually lived here.
The next day I’m not working but I go in anyway and pick up Diamond. My boss doesn’t care and no one else knows what goes on. I’ve only seen the director twice. Both times he gave us a packet to study for tests that were never administered and then went around the room asking us to toot each other’s horns.
Diamond has a stain on her shirt so I take her to her room and sort through her drawers. I hold up a shirt and she shakes her head. Night shift does laundry and they never see the girls so they don’t know who wears what. Finally I find a shirt that’s hers, that she doesn’t mind wearing, and put her in it. It’s yellow with flowers around the collar and a small pocket. I give her a quarter for the pocket and then we go out to my car and I buckle her into the passenger seat of my Toyota.
She leans forward and punches buttons—1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6—before we can hear what’s playing.
“Chill out,” I say, grabbing her hand.
“I want ice cream,” she says.
“There’s ice cream at my house.” I think of all the things at my house—big-screen TVs and dozens of DVDs and fresh food, three different kinds of Blue Bell—and how they don’t mean anything because I’ve always had them.
I park in the driveway and wave to my neighbor watering his lawn. He’s an old man who still calls black people “Negroes.” I once saw him methodically drown a possum in a trash can full of water. He pulled the thing out and it was still alive so he plunged it back into the can and held it there before pulling it out again. He did it over and over, so slowly it was like a horror movie.
My husband has his straw hat on, the khaki elastic-waist shorts he always mows in. He turns the mower off and says hey and I say hey and he turns it back on. Diamond and I go inside and stand in the living room.
“Where your dog?” she asks.
“In the backyard.”
We walk into the dining room and look down at the dog. She has a shock collar around her neck—a recent development. She is an unpredictable animal that barks at nothing and doesn’t like people but loves other dogs and even cats. As a puppy, she seemed fine, normal even, and then she turned into a creature that scratched itself bald and would eat until it threw up and then eat that.
I had wanted a dog for years and felt certain it was my fault despite what the vet said—that some dogs are born bad, like some people.
“What her name?”
“Roxie, but I call her Shiggydiggy. She only knows one word and that’s bath. Shiggydiggy wanna bath? And then she goes and hides under the bed and I have to fish her out with a broom.”