So I lied. On the last day of school, before the bus came for the Lee Lady Leaders Christmas party they give for the poor kids. Which is shaming in
and of itself. Some of the kids at this thing are old enough to be boning each other, but still the Lady Leaders have one of their husbands coming out all fake-fat jolly in his cotton beard and we’re supposed be like, Yay, Santa!
One of these situations in life where you suck it up and eat your turkey and gravy. I did wonder how we got picked. Did the Leader Ladies ask our
teachers to name the three topmost skanks and food-stamp kids of each
grade? Okay yes, there are the Gola Hams of this world, and the Houserman kids that all six turn up with lice every year, rain or shine. But most of us do a fair job of passing. Then comes the day they call your name over the intercom to go get on the Christmas party loser bus, lucky you. That’s what I was waiting on while we ran out the clock in homeroom. Me and Maggot were playing hangman. He asked where I would be on Christmas, did they do presents in fosters, and the story just rolled out. I said I’d be at the Salvation Army shelter or some church that takes in homeless. To be honest I had no idea, homeless church basement not likely. I just wanted that passed along to Maggot’s higher-ups.
He was totally on board with me coming to Knoxville. Who was not was Mrs. Peggot. On the day we drove down there, I could tell something was changed. At Mom’s funeral she’d been as much family to me as I’d ever had. But Maggot told me she’d had to debate on it overnight before she finally said all right, let him come on. Now the ride in the truck was too quiet. Mr. Peg ran the heat, and it got as stuffy as a closet. Maggot asked him to put on the radio, and he wouldn’t, and that was that. Something was
going on, to do with me. I realized I might not smell great due to barn cleaning the day before, and not getting my turn for the shower. I put my
face to the window so nobody would see, if I tore up. Was this me now, for life? Taking up space where people wished I wasn’t? Once on a time I was something, and then I turned, like sour milk. The dead junkie’s kid. A rotten little piece of American pie that everybody wishes could just be, you know. Removed.
Emmy Peggot, Christ Jesus. In the months since summer she’d gone full Disney channel. Neon windbreaker jacket, bouncy ponytail, boy-band
posters taped up all over her room with their pretty hair and pouty faces, to the point where Mrs. Peggot said she didn’t feel right changing her clothes in there. Which confused Mr. Peg because of him thinking they were girls.
The evening we got there, Aunt June was still at work, so Emmy met us in front of the building. Shocking new development: Emmy stays home by herself now. I couldn’t believe this girl, all hands-on-her-hips, telling Mr. Peg where to park his truck. Helping to carry up all our stuff in the elevator, saying “Make yourselves at home,” and “Mom is thrilled to death you all could come.” Aunt June now going by a new name, which was Mom.
So that was Knoxville again, more surprises. On the drive in, we’d passed this park with people skating on solid ice, even though they’re having a warm snap. Sun blazing, people running around in track jackets and shorts. In any normal place, just try walking out on an iced-over pond on such a day: sorry friend, you’re dead. But in a city, the rules do not apply. It’s like everybody is bored of all the normal things, out looking for the weirder option.
This extended to people doing things that ended them up in the ER, and Aunt June had had enough. She was moving back home. Big shock. We’d waited up for her to get home because Emmy said she had something to tell us. Did she ever. We sat at the kitchen bar eating barbecue wings she’d brought us for a midnight snack. Aunt June laughed and cried, blowing her nose with wads of Kleenex. She was done with being stuck out there in Knoxville, so far from everything. If she was going to work as hard as she did patching up nincompoops that had hurt themselves, she might as well patch up the nincompoops she grew up with, because everything a person could want was in Lee County. She was fed up with the head ER doctor mocking her in front of the other nurses, calling her Loretta Lynn. She’d
finished some course at UT and got hired for a new job in the Pennington clinic that would be an assistant doctor type of thing. Mr. Peg slapped his leg and said he’d be damned, and Mrs. Peggot cried, both for the same reason which was happiness. Aunt June was the apple in their eyes. Her senior picture had the top spot in their living room. She was legend: June Peggot that broke all records by getting herself higher-educated instead of
knocked up, and employed at the largest trauma hospital in the tristate area.
So that was the news. Aunt June had spent her life so far trying to kick the Lee County mud off her shoes, and come to find out all she really
wanted was friendly faces and the smell of hay getting mowed and to have a dog she could take for long walks in the woods. Maggot wanted to know what she would name her dog. She laughed. She said maybe Rufus.
Emmy would be moving back too. They’d finished up the paperwork and she was adopted, Aunt June said, so the secret was out. She put her elbow around Emmy’s neck and pulled her close, both of them just beaming, and damn if they didn’t look it. Like blood.
I kept quiet, eating wings and getting my mind blown. To think life could turn around so. Being a dead person’s child, then in seventh grade start calling somebody Mom. It gave me the strangest feeling. I just kept reaching in the box and taking more without a please or thank-you, forgetting for that short while to feel like the person nobody wanted.
A murder was all over the news that Christmas, and Emmy was possessed. She’d park herself on the floor in front of the TV and wait for the latest. It was a whole family dead. Their neighbors got interviewed and said what
neighbors always say on TV after a shocking crime, about the victim or murderer either one: totally unexpected, you never saw a nicer person. In other words, they’re paying zero attention to their neighbors. Not so where I come from, considering just for example how the Peggots had their eye out for me on numerous bad occasions of my life, starting day one.
What tore Emmy up was this baby that survived the ordeal. The killers left him for dead along with the rest of the family, on the shoulder of a highway where they got carjacked in the worst way. The police found him crying in the arms of dead Mommy, next to shot-to-hell dead Daddy and dead big sister. Every night on TV they showed the same photo of this family, all smiles, matching outfits, taken obviously prior to the shit road trip. You could tell they were something over the top, religionwise, like
Jehovah Witness. But that little blond baby. You’d think he was Emmy’s own. She’d asked Aunt June to find out what hospital had him so she could call about his condition. Answer: No ma’am, that was not happening, and Emmy needed to find something more appropriate to occupy her mind. She was not supposed to be watching the news, this being the permanent top story, but Aunt June on her evening shift was in no position to stop us. Then Mr. and Mrs. Peggot got interested, almost to the same degree as Emmy.
I’m going to say though, the news was bad all around, murders being only one aspect. From TV, I’d always thought people in cities have it made. Not true. The cold snap finally hit while we were there, and the news showed all these hard-luck cases trying to get in the library, bus station etc.
To sleep. Like they didn’t have relatives. I mean, it sucks to barge in on
people that don’t really want you. But you’ve not seen the like of these sad individuals with nobody to barge in on, and nothing to eat. Because where are you even going to steal an apple off a tree? In the city if you’re out of money you are screwed, no two ways about it. Giving rise to mayhem, such as carjackings.
After Aunt June put her foot down on the murder-baby talk, Emmy needed somebody else to talk to. She picked me. It started a couple of
nights after we got there. All the shit I had to think about had turned me into not the greatest sleeper, so I was awake, flopped on the sofa cushions with Maggot sawing logs. He slept like a dead person, only louder. Emmy, being too grown up now for sleeping with boy cousins, was bunking with Aunt June, while Mr. and Mrs. Peggot shacked up in her room with the Backstreet Boys.
Quiet as a cat, she slipped into the living room. Came and stood over me in the dark, little skinny thing in her white gown, like she’d crumple and
leave dust on your fingers if you touched her. Where was Miss Salute-My- Shorts now? Was daytime Emmy a fake, I wondered, and this little moth- wing girl the real person? Was I supposed to say something? She sat down on the floor and started crying. Really quiet except for little gasps, like getting surprised over and over.
“Is it still about the murder thing?” I finally asked. She didn’t turn around but nodded her head.
“Sucks,” I said. “People dying for no good reason. I hate that for them.” “He’s so little, and all alone. I can’t quit thinking about him. I know I
should.”
“It’s not your fault. You can’t really help what’s in your brain.”
She turned around and looked at me. I sat up. “I know everybody says that. Clean out your juvenile little head and put something nice in there. I get that all the time, and I’m like, Seriously? Just spray around brain-Lysol and get over it? How’s that work?”
“Oh my God,” she said. “Your mother. I’m sorry for your loss.”
She sounded like an adult. I was surprised she knew about Mom. I told her thanks, and I was sorry about hers too. “Before Aunt June, I mean. If there was a real one at some point.”
“My birth mother. Yeah.” She shrugged. “I can’t really talk about her.” “But now you’re adopted. So maybe it turned out for the best.”
“Oh, totally. I’m lucky.”
“Heck yes you are. I wouldn’t wish foster care on anybody.” “It’s really bad?”
“So far, yeah. I hate it pretty much every minute of the day. It’s like a cross between prison and dodgeball. And there’s not enough food.”
“Dodgeball, like whenever you play with older kids that want to laugh at you?”
“Yeah. Hurt you, and then laugh at you.”
She seemed to be thinking about this. I mean really turning it over. She whispered, “Do the kids get abused? I’ve heard that.”
“My mom definitely had molester type shit done to her whenever she was little. In a supposedly Christian home. I just basically watch my back, night and day.”
She blinked a couple of times. I was surprised how well I could see her in the dark. I knew I shouldn’t shock Emmy, given she was already upset. But she’d asked. Nobody ever did. I told her I was sure there were good fosters out there that are God’s angels, like everybody says. But I had yet to meet them because they didn’t take kids like me.
“What do you mean, kids like you?” I shrugged. “I don’t know.”
She took in a big breath and let it out. “I was so mean to you and Matty last summer. I’m sorry. This has been a year.” Again, it was like she’d turned into somebody’s mother or one of the nicer ladies at church. I couldn’t figure out what I was dealing with. I wished I was older.
“You were okay,” I said. “At times.”
She smiled. “Yeah. After you saved me from the sharks.” She pulled up her knees and showed me the silver bracelet I gave her that day. She was wearing it around her ankle. Leave it to somebody like her, to think of something like that. I couldn’t believe she still had it.
“It’s not like they were going to take you down. I never got why you were so scared.”
“Because they’re evil creatures with dagger-like teeth? Why were you
not?”
“No reason. I’m just not. I like thinking about the ocean, and what all is living in there. It’s like my brain-Lysol. It calms me down or something.”
“Seriously. Sharks calm you down.”
I could see pieces of the everyday Emmy sneaking back into the conversation, but I didn’t mind. Maybe it meant this thing we were doing now, whatever it was, might not just go poof in the morning. “Not sharks
specifically,” I said. “The whole being-underwater thing. I put myself there and float. Just, you know. Inside my skull movie.”
“You have a skull movie? You could see yourself drowning. That’s relaxing.”
“I don’t, though. That’s the one bad thing that for sure won’t ever happen to me.”
“Because what? You took Junior Red Cross swimming?”
I laughed. “No. To tell you the truth, I haven’t ever been swimming that much. In water that was deeper than like, an inch.”
“And still you’re drown-proof, because?”
I’d never told anybody the weird way I got born. But being awake in the dark with a girl was outside my normal. The whole world quiet. I tried to put it in the best light: I took Mom by surprise, coming out so fast I was still in the water bubble that protects babies in the before-life.
“The caul,” Emmy said. “What?”
“You were born in the caul. That’s the medical terminology. Mom saw it happen one time and said it even freaked out the doctors. You’d be amazed how many babies get born in the ER.”
Nothing at all would surprise me as far as Aunt June and the ER. But I liked knowing what happened to me was real, with a name. “Yeah, that. I had the call. If that happens to you, it’s a guarantee you won’t drown. So the ocean is this giant thing that won’t ever defeat me.”
Emmy laughed. “That’s just some old hillbilly superstition.”
I got a little hurt at her for that. Even if she was right. “Your mammaw is the one that told me, so take it up with her. Ask about Jesus coming back from the dead, while you’re at it.”
We’d been talking so quietly, our faces were just a few inches apart. Now I sat up. This whatever-it-was was over. Probably in the morning it would
be a never-happened. But she didn’t go away. She sat up too, looking at me a while, and then said the words I hate: “I’m sorry.”
“Yeah, well. No big deal.”
“It is, though. I could understand why you’d want to think about
someplace totally safe. After everything you’ve been through. Your mom and all.”
“My mom dying is not even the worst part. If you really want to know.”
She sat facing me, waiting. She smelled like fruit shampoo. I wanted to say something mean, or just the truth. I wanted to tell her about my baby brother that was technically younger than the murder-family baby, and dead. I said that word: Sorry. “But you know what? If that kid ends up dying, it’s not the worst thing. Being dead is better than an orphan your
whole fucking life.”
“No!” she said, so loud she put her hand over her mouth. Then took it off and whispered, “He’s got grandparents. They’re in some other country, but they’re going to come get him.”
“Good for him. Somebody wants him.”
She reached over and touched me on the head. No person had touched me since Mom. My hair was on its own devices at that point, and I knew the sorry sight I was. With every part of me growing out of my sleeves or growing fuzz or changing shape that year, even the bone part of my nose, some way. And I was still sleeping in Tommy’s shirt.
“Poor Demon,” she said quietly. “Can’t they find anybody to adopt you?” She’d only ever called me Damon before, like Mrs. Peggot and Aunt
June, to show she was taking their side. I didn’t want to be poor anybody. But I felt like kissing Emmy. Or throwing up, from how mixed up I was. Possibly both. You’d want to do it in the right order, though.
“Everybody thinks adoption is just automatic,” I said. “But there’s a lot more orphan kids in Lee County than people wanting them. My caseworker says it’s nothing personal.”
“Is she nice, at least? Your caseworker?”
Somehow, I knew not to mention that Miss Barks was a babe. Or that I saved up things to tell her week to week because she was the only person I talked to anymore. “She’s got a ton of kids she’s looking after. Mostly younger than me. So, you know. Nice, if she’s got a minute.”
“That must be so hard.”
We both lay back down, and she looked at me in the eyes, and we were sad together for a while. I’ll never forget how that felt. Like not being hungry.
