Property of the State

by Bill Cameron

  Her eyes carry a disconcerting longing that makes my chest ache.

  “Yes.”

  A cocoon of warm air seems to surround us. I feel lightheaded and loose, not just from the Baileys. A quiver runs through her, a soft sigh slides from her throat. But when I cup her breast, she goes rigid.

  “Joey. I can’t.”

  I pull my hand back.

  “It’s okay.”

  “I’m sorry.”

  “Don’t be.”

  She slides away from me, sits back on the couch. I close my eyes. The Baileys bottle sloshes. I want a drink too, or something stronger. I try to breathe instead.

  “I’m sorry anyway.”

  I know why—I think I do. I read your poem. I want to say it aloud. For two days I’ve been chasing this moment, Trisha and I alone in a place where I could finally draw back the curtain and see what she’s hiding inside. But now we’re here and all I can think about is how secrets are meant to be kept. Drill a hole in a headboard, affix a latch no one else can see, and box up the darkness.

  She stirs beside me. I open my eyes, sure she’s getting up to leave. But she only takes something from her bag.

  “Have you ever seen one of these?”

  She hands a coin to me. A nickel is my first thought, but the weight is all wrong. In the dim light, I can make out the image of an antelope on one side. “What is it?”

  “It’s called a Krugerrand.”

  “It’s gold.”

  “A quarter ounce. They come in different sizes, but all mine are a quarter ounce.”

  “All yours? How many do you have?”

  “A few.” She’s quiet for a while. Then, she sighs and lies down against me. “A lot.”

  “This is what you hide in your headboard, isn’t it?”

  “Were you curious?”

  “It was your secret to keep.”

  “And now it’s yours.” Her words are like a band across my chest. I draw a long breath as I return the coin.

  “Trisha…”

  “What?”

  “What’s this worth? Hundreds?”

  She’s a foster, like me. In a good home, maybe, but no matter the placement, fosters don’t have stacks of gold coins.

  “I didn’t steal it, if that’s what you’re thinking.”

  “Of course not.” I’m thinking about the poem. And what she said at Yancy’s.

  I was being an entrepreneur.

  “It was a gift.”

  My dad is an entrepreneur.

  “From who, Trisha?”

  “From whom?”

  Ever the writer. “Fine. From whom?”

  “It doesn’t matter.” She kisses me again, her lips sticky with Baileys and evasion.

  “Did Mr. Vogler give you the Krugerrands?”

  Her hand presses hard against my chest. “So what if he did?”

  “Trisha…”

  She’s quiet for a long time, but it’s not until I feel her shaking beside me that I realize she’s crying. For a moment, I’m not sure what to do, or what to say. So I worm my arm underneath her and pull her close. She turns and presses her face into my chest. I can feel her tears.

  “What does he make you do?”

  “Who says he makes me? I’m well-compensated.” Her voice seems to tear the air between us. “This one paid for my trip to the gynecologist this afternoon.” I don’t say anything. I don’t know what to say. She’s shaking in my arms, choking back deep, wet sobs. I hold on to her and let her cry. After a while, she draws a breath and coughs. My shirt is wet beneath her cheek.

  “Trisha, you need to tell someone.”

  “I told you, didn’t I?”

  “Someone else. Someone—” who can do something about it.

  “And then what happens?”

  I know what she means. She reports the situation to her caseworker. The one who doesn’t remember her name. An investigation opens. Most likely they pull her from the house right away while they sort everything out, which means a new placement. Mr. Vogler denies everything. His wife backs him up; she’s never seen anything improper. Trisha’s the transient, no matter how long she’s lived with them. There will be interviews, therapists, but the way the world works, the worst thing likely to happen to the old fucker is he gets dropped from the foster rolls. Meanwhile, Trisha is shuffled off to strangers. The new situation could be no better, and you can be damn sure there won’t be any Krugerrands the next time.

  Sometimes it’s better to screw one old man for some gold coins than to roll the dice on another placement.

  After a while, she pushes herself up onto her elbows. I can feel her warm breath stir my eyelashes.

  “You look as sad as I feel.”

  I open my eyes, find her gazing at me. “It’s been one of those weeks.”

  “Aren’t they all?” She runs her fingertip across my face, pauses at the fading scar beside my nose. “What’s been going on with you lately, Joey?” I can feel her breath on my cheeks. “Seriously.”

  And there it is. She showed me hers, now I show her mine. Only fair, right? But I swallow thickly and hesitate a moment too long, betrayed by a lifetime of keeping secrets.

  She pulls back.

  “I see how it is.” Her lips compress.

  “Trisha—”

  “No, I get it.” She starts looking around like she’s misplaced something. “You’ve got your thing—whatever that is—and I’ve got mine.”

  “It’s not like that.”

  “How is it, then?”

  I gaze at her in the dim light, mouth agape, but no words will come. All I want to do is sink through the couch and disappear.

  “How about this, then? Tell me one thing.” She pins me with her amber eyes. “Who was that girl?”

  “I—” The temperature suddenly drops ten degrees. “What girl?”

  “The one with the green hair at the Square today.”

  “That was just—”

  “Just? You were holding her hand.”

  “She’s…” a naked girl I have to get used to. “…Philip’s sister.”

  She pulls at one of her braids, and her gaze shifts to the empty air between us. “Philip’s sister. Of course.”

  I try to understand why she held on to this all day, all evening. The answer seems obvious enough. She believed one thing about us right up to the moment I wouldn’t answer a simple question. Then she started believing something else.

  “I guess you got yourself a—” Her voice cracks and she shakes her head. “You got yourself a rich girlfriend now.”

  I’d give anything for an undo.

  “At least I have my Krugerrands.” She jumps to her feet and storms across the rec room. I should follow, but something holds me back. From the landing, I hear the bathroom door slam.

  I grab the Baileys, suck down a long gulp. Then another. The creamy booze curdles in my belly and I feel like I’m going to be sick. She’ll come back, I think, or hope. Then I’ll fix this—somehow. I lie back as the room spins around me. But I drink again, and again—until the bottle is empty. After a bit, I doze off. Or pass out.

  Then wake—abruptly. For a moment panic surges through me, but the room is dark and still. I push myself up and shuffle out to the landing to check on Trisha. The bathroom is dark. I suppose she could be roaming the house, but after what happened, I can’t imagine why she’d stick around. She must have slipped out the kitchen door before Philip and his mom got home, or if she left after, maybe they didn’t notice the security system alert.

  I return to the couch. A bit later, when I hear Philip playing his violin, I flee to Kristina’s room. The atmosphere is thick with dread. I crack open the window, desperate for fresh air, and fall back on the bed.

  My shirt is still damp from Trisha’s tears, but I don’t b
other to change. It’s not much, but it seems the least I can do. In the end, maybe the only thing we have in common is our status with the State of Oregon. Rejected, neglected, abandoned, molested. But aside from that, she’s a girl desperate for someone to share her secrets and I’m a boy who will never tell.

  2.12: Are You Awake?

  At some point during the night, I awake to find her in bed, curled around me. My head is mush from the Baileys, my tongue glued to the roof of my mouth. I didn’t hear her come in. Now she has one leg thrown across my thighs, an arm draped over my chest. Her breast makes a hot spot on my chest. She breathes into my ear. In my sleep, I must have snaked an arm around her back; my hand rests on her hip. She shifts slightly and coos in her sleep. Then she’s still again.

  I don’t know what to make of her presence, nor how she found me. Rather than ponder questions I can’t answer, I leave my hand on her hip and breathe in her scent. Her exhalations are steady and soft. Half lost in a dream of her amber eyes, my thoughts clarify. Together in the darkness, I match her stillness.

  And then her breathing changes.

  “Are you awake?”

  It’s Kristina.

  For a second I feel like the bed has vanished beneath me. My body goes stiff and seems to shrink in on itself. Then a laugh presses upward through my throat, something wild and out-of-control. I’m afraid to let it go, because if I do, I’ll sound like a mad man.

  “Jesus.”

  “I was cold.”

  We’re under a sheet, a comforter, a quilt. We’re in a house heated by a steam boiler the size of an SUV. She’s not cold—she’s on fire.

  “Are you familiar with the concept of pajamas?”

  “You’re too tense.”

  “I can’t imagine why that would be.”

  “I told you to get used to this.”

  “No, you told me to get used to a naked girl traipsing around the room, changing clothes and stuff. Not a naked girl wrapping herself around me in bed in the middle of the night.”

  “I’m wearing underwear.”

  “A distinction without a difference.”

  She’s quiet for a long time. “Maybe you have a point there.”

  I sigh. Sleep is impossible. The fog returns, centered on my forehead and chased by pain the shape of an axe blade. Inside, a tiny voice tells me to pull my arm from around her if I want to calm the flutter in my chest and the awkward stirring below my waist. Instead, I wriggle uncomfortably, unable to remove my hand from her thigh. A sound leaks from my throat, half-moan, half-whimper. After several minutes, she expels an exasperated sigh.

  “You are such a baby.”

  “What?” I hate the whine in my voice.

  “You heard me.” She slides her hand down my belly and snaps the waistband of my sweat pants. I squirm to escape, but she throws the blankets off and draws away. In that instant, my mind fixes on the memory of her breast pressed against my chest.

  She goes into the bathroom and clunks around for a while. When the door opens, I catch a glimpse of a tee-shirt and yoga pants before she flicks the bathroom light off. She climbs back under the covers, but keeps to her side of the bed. My body tingles like there’s a buffer of ionized air between us.

  “Better?”

  What the hell am I supposed to say to that? As she exhales agitation and drums her fingers on the comforter, I lie there, staring at the blinking smoke detector on the ceiling and wondering where they’ll stick me when all this comes crashing down. Mars, I hope.

  But after a while, her breathing slows and she turns onto her side toward me.

  “You are a baby, you know.”

  Sigh.

  She chuckles for a moment, then goes quiet. “Listen, I know it was weird today at the Square. It would have been weirder if you’d stuck around though.”

  You’re telling me. I wonder what she’d say if I admitted to spotting her with Mr. Huntzel.

  “It’s fine.”

  “If it’s fine, why are you lying there huffing and puffing like I’m the third little pig?”

  I sit up. “I’m huffing and puffing? You’re the one who—”

  She laughs and smacks me on the arm. “Got ya!”

  “Jesus.” I drop back on my pillow. “You are a total mystery. Hell, you’re miles past a mystery. I mean, you act like…this…is nothing.” Why my mouth is running is the real mystery. “You don’t even know me.”

  “I know more about you than you think.”

  “What’s that supposed to mean?”

  “You think you can keep your secrets from me, Oliver?”

  “I don’t have any secrets.”

  “Everyone has secrets.” She leans toward me. “Tell me one. See if you can surprise me.”

  “I’m an orphan.”

  “That’s not a secret.”

  “It’s the only thing you need to know about me.”

  “We’re all orphans.”

  I don’t feel like arguing. Her mother is asleep a hundred feet away. Talk about secrets—that woman has secrets. Bianca and Italy, the sack of money, the hospital? But before I tumble down that rabbit hole, Kristina asks a question that makes me wonder if her secret is the ability to read minds.

  “What do you remember of your mom?”

  Ice water runs through me. It’s been a long time since Reid asked me the same question. “Nothing.”

  “You were still with her until you were almost six.”

  “How do you know that?”

  In the darkness, I can sense her smile. “Maybe I’ve been checking up on you.”

  Her mother must have told her father what she knew, and he shared my life over a Honkin’ Huge burrito. “Why are you asking me this shit?”

  “My house, my rules.” Her tone is suddenly combative. “Answer or find somewhere else to squat, orphan.”

  “I don’t remember anything!”

  “Bullshit.”

  Her heartbeat thumps in the darkness. The scent of my own sweat stings my nose, draws tears from my eyes. “What the hell is with you?”

  “I was raised by wolves. Now spit it out.”

  I sigh. “Well, I was born under a tree—”

  “You remember being born?”

  “Obviously not.” I rub my eyes, swallow a thick wad of phlegm. “Do you want to hear this?”

  “Sorry. Born under a tree.”

  “It was in the forest on a hillside above Sandy.”

  “Sounds nice.”

  “This is how nice it was.” I lick my lips. “Eva Getchie, my alleged mother, went into labor while out hunting mushrooms. She sat under a tree for ten hours until my head appeared. Then she grabbed me by the neck and yanked me out and threw me down in the dirt. Got up, walked home. Some other mushroom hunters found me the next morning, barely alive. So even if I did live with her off and on for a few years until her rights were finally terminated, don’t you think it’s just as well I don’t remember any of it?”

  For a long time she doesn’t say anything. I’m glad she doesn’t ask questions, because I don’t want to explain how Eva spent time in jail, how my first caseworker tried to reshape her into a proper mother after her release. Parenting classes, counseling. A spectacular failure, but the worst of it, I’m told, was before my memories begin. An emptiness balloons inside me. I feel stupid and guilty, find myself aching for the oblivion of sleep. Based on past history, I won’t wake up till after she’s gone—though I may suffer dark dreams.

  Of course, she’s not finished. “Bloody Christ, you’re a walking tragedy.”

  This is why I never tell Reid anything, though I suppose there are rules to keep him from openly mocking me. Still, why Kristina? Why not Trisha, for fuck’s sake? A few hours before, if I’d had the courage to answer a single question, I might still be downstairs. Trisha and I could listen to
Philip play his violin, unburden ourselves in the dark.

  Would it have been so bad to tell her about Wayne, or about Eva? To explain the strange doings of the inhabitants of Huntzel Manor, including the girl with the green hair? To give her more than silence? Surely that would be preferable to feeling so raw and exposed. From that scene in Yancy Krokos’ shipping container to the revelation of the Krugerrand, it’s clear all she wanted was someone to understand, someone like herself. A foster, an orphan. And if anyone might understand me back, wouldn’t it be Trisha Lee?

  Yet, somehow, Kristina Huntzel is the one who peeled me open and laid bare every raw nerve.

  Jesus.

  2.13: YouTube

  Trisha doesn’t respond to my texts. I spend most of Saturday away from the house, unable to face hours upon hours in Kristina’s pink room. My phone is effectively dead in my hands.

  I’m at Uncommon Cup. Come hang out?

  Silence.

  We could talk. Or just do homework.

  Nothing.

  Too bad I can’t concentrate on Chemistry worksheets or Trig problems. My thoughts rattle around inside my skull like ball bearings in a tin can. In a fit of childish mortification, I left Trisha’s laptop in Kristina’s dresser when I escaped the house. Seemed like a good idea in the moment, but now I’m stuck with no way to work on half my assignments, or scour Google. My crap 7-11 cell phone doesn’t do Internet. True, at Uncommon Cup, I’m surrounded by laptops, but instead of asking a stranger to do a search, I wait till I go to the counter for my fourth double-shot of the day to ask Marcy what she knows about Bianca Santavenere.

  She thinks for just a second. “Well, she’s no Lindsay or Charlie, but on the Famewhore Catastrophe Continuum, Bianca is at least a C-list calamity. Why?”

  “I dunno. Her name came up.”

  “You never struck me as an aficionado of three-digit cable channel pseudo-celebs.”

  I feel stupid. “I saw a video, this Italian show where she was cheering for a kid playing a violin. But I don’t speak Italian.”

  “You don’t say.” She gives me a look. Another customer appears, so I return to my seat with my espresso. It’s still hard to concentrate, but I tell myself the math won’t do itself. Based on my pathetic progress, it won’t get done by me either.