Back in the playroom, Elsa beamed and giggled, and I could tell that she considered the parade an unqualified success. “Frances, are you always such a stickler for the rules?” she asked in a teasing voice.
“I guess I am.” I forced a laugh. Though what happened later might make this seem like a dubious claim, I’m pretty sure I already knew then that it’s not worth it to have conflict with people you aren’t invested in.
“No hard feelings, right?” Elsa said. “It seemed like the moms were totally psyched to have us come through.”
I said nothing, and turned away from her.
At the end of the night, when we chose Derek to turn off the lights, Elsa said, “I’ll stay behind with him. You can go up.”
“That’s okay,” I said. “I’m usually the one to stay behind.”
“All the more reason for you to go up.” Her tone was friendly, like she was doing me a favor.
“Actually,” I said, “I prefer to stay.” I was standing by the sink, and I turned on the water.
“You’re doing a very thorough job,” Elsa said, and I flinched. I’d thought she had left with Karen and the kids, but she was standing next to me.
“Gotta watch out for cooties,” I said. “Ready, Derek?” He raised his arms, and I lifted him.
“I’ve noticed that you wash your hands a lot,” Elsa said.
I turned and looked at her, and I could feel how my mouth was a hard line. “You’re very observant,” I said.
She took a step back.
I carried Derek to the light switch, and he turned it off. On the other side of the door, I set him down. He took my hand, and though my entire body was tense from the exchange with Elsa, I felt some of Derek’s placidity, his sweetness, seep into me. Elsa reached for his other hand.
“Oh my,” she said. “What have we here?”
“No!” Derek said. “It’s mine.”
I glanced down and saw that Elsa was extracting from his grip one of the piglets from the farm-animal box.
“That’s not yours,” Elsa said. “That belongs to all the children at New Day. Look.” She held the piglet toward me. It had peach skin and pink hooves and a little curly tail, and it was arching up, its snout pointed skyward. “This pig doesn’t belong to Derek, does it, Frances? If he took it, I bet the other kids would feel really sad.”
I said through clenched teeth, “Let him have it.”
“What?” Her voice was confused, no longer intended for Derek.
“It’s not a big deal,” I said.
“Don’t you think that sends a confusing message?”
“It’s a plastic pig,” I said. “He’s three.” I thought of the objects I had coveted as a child: an eraser in the shape of a strawberry, which belonged to Deanna Miller, the girl who sat next to me in first grade; a miniature perfume bottle of my mother’s with a round top of frosted glass. My mother had promised that she would give the bottle to me when she was finished with the perfume, but year after year, a little of the amber liquid always remained. There were not that many times in your life when you believed a possession would bring you happiness and you were actually right.
“You know what I’ll do, Derek?” Elsa said. “I’ll put the pig back, but I’ll put it in your cubby. That way, when you come down here tomorrow, you’ll know just where it is. Okay?”
I knew she would think we’d compromised, but she could compromise by herself. While she was in the playroom, I lifted Derek and carried him upstairs.
I kept waiting that week to get a call from Abigail, the New Day director, saying she’d received complaints from the mothers about our excursion to the second floor. I would apologize and take responsibility for my participation in the parade, but I’d also explain that Elsa was the one who had initiated it and that, in general, I had some concerns about her behavior as a volunteer; while eating dinner at night, I rehearsed the way I’d phrase this. But the days kept passing without a call. By the end of the week, I still hadn’t heard from Abigail, and then I knew I wasn’t going to.
The next Monday was quiet. Orlean had, to the envy of everyone, gone out for pizza with his father, and Dewey didn’t come downstairs because he had a cold, and Tasaundra and her mom had moved out of the shelter and gone to stay with a cousin in Prince George’s County. A new girl named Marcella was there, a chubby, dreamy eight-year-old with long black hair.
Elsa’s dress-up clothes went over well enough, except that the entire process, from the kids’ choosing what to wear to putting on the outfits to taking the clothes back off again, took less than fifteen minutes. Elsa encouraged the kids to draw pictures of themselves in the clothes, but all anybody wanted to play was “Mother, may I?” I wondered if Elsa would keep hatching schemes week after week or if she would soon realize that from kids, you didn’t get points just for trying.
While I was putting together a wooden puzzle of the United States with Marcella and Meshaun, Derek came over to the table. He said, “Miss Volunteer,” and when I said, “Yes, Derek?” he giggled and ran behind my chair.
“Where’s Derek?” I said. “Where did he go?”
“He behind you,” Meshaun said.
I whirled around, and Derek shrieked. He tossed something into the air, and when it landed on the floor, I saw that it was the pig from the week before. He picked it up and made it walk up my arm.
Elsa squatted by Derek. “Do you like your pig?” she asked.
I couldn’t help myself. “His pig?”
But I noticed that Elsa had that fighting-a-smile expression people get when they’ve received a compliment and want you to think they don’t believe it. “It is his,” she said. “I gave it to him.”
Then I saw that the pig wasn’t identical to the one from the week before—this pig’s snout was pointed straight in front of it, and its skin was more pink than peach.
“I felt like such a witch taking the other one away,” she said.
I stared at her. “When did you give it to him?”
“I dropped it off last week.”
Knowing she had come to the shelter at a time other than Monday evening, I wondered what Abigail had made of that, or whether Elsa had met other volunteers. And had Elsa summoned Derek in order to give him the pig in private, or had she handed it over in front of other children? She should be fired, I thought, if it was possible to fire a volunteer.
That night as we left the shelter, Elsa said, “Anyone up for a beer?”
“Sounds good to me,” Karen said.
“I need to be at work early tomorrow,” I said. Karen and I had never socialized outside the shelter.
“Come on, gal,” Karen said, and at the same time, Elsa said, “You know, Frances, I looked up your company on the Web the other day, and it seems pretty cool. My clients sometimes need graphic work, letterheads and the like, so I’m always on the lookout for people doing innovative work.”
“I mostly do administrative stuff,” I said.
Elsa elbowed me. “No low self-esteem, you hear? You’re just starting out. Listen, I’m impressed that you even landed a job at such a great place.”
I offered her my closed-lipped smile.
Elsa turned away from me. “Karen,” she said, “do we have to forcibly drag this girl out for one lousy Budweiser?”
“At her age, she should be dragging us,” Karen said.
“I really can’t,” I said. “Sorry.”
As I walked away, Elsa called, “Hey, Frances,” and when I turned back, she said, “Bye, Miss Volunteer.” Her voice contained a singsongy, excessively pleased note that made me suspect she’d thought up the farewell earlier and saved it, for just this moment, to say aloud.
When I got back to my apartment, I again washed my hands and forearms and then I changed out of my street clothes. I knew that I washed my hands a lot—I wasn’t an idiot—but it was always for a reason: because I’d come in from outside, because I’d been on the subway or used the toilet or touched money. It wasn’t as if, sitting at my
desk at the office, I simply jumped up, hurried to the bathroom, and began to scrub.
Usually when I got home at night, my roommate, whom I hardly knew, wasn’t there. She had a boyfriend, a Romanian grad student, and she spent a lot of time at his place. It was mostly on the weekends that I saw them. Sometimes on Saturday mornings when I left to run errands, they’d be entwined on the living room couch, watching television, and when I returned hours later, they’d be in the same position. Once I saw him prepare breakfast in bed for her by toasting frozen waffles, then coating them with spray-on olive oil, and I wondered if this was an error due to the language barrier or if he was just a gross person. I was glad on the nights they weren’t around. After I was finished washing my hands and changing my clothes, it was like I’d completed everything in the day that was required of me and I could just give in to being tired.
The next week, when Elsa let Karen off, I leapt from the car as well. “I’ll walk from here,” I said. “I need some air.”
“Are you kidding me? It’s ninety-five degrees.” Elsa patted the seat. “Get back in.”
“It’s cooled down a lot since this afternoon,” I said. By the time I turned toward Karen, she’d climbed the steps to her building and was reaching for the door handle. Her building was on the corner of Connecticut and Cathedral, and though I’d passed it many times—my own apartment was just a few blocks north, on Porter—I was struck as I never had been before this moment that it was just the kind of place where a moderately successful single woman in her late thirties would live: on a heavily trafficked street, with a brightly lit and tastefully appointed lobby visible through the glass door. From behind her, I said, “Karen, can I talk to you for a sec?”
She turned around. “What’s cooking?”
“Has it ever occurred to you that Elsa might be a little—I don’t know—unhinged?”
Karen laughed. “She marches to the beat of a different drummer, that’s for sure.”
“I think it goes beyond that. She seems to have really bad judgment, like with the parade. She didn’t even realize how the mothers reacted.”
“I thought the parade was kind of cute.”
I tried not to show my surprise. Maybe the parade hadn’t been the best example. “She doesn’t talk to the kids on their level,” I said.
I waited for Karen to react, but she was chewing on the inside corner of her lip. Even to my own ears, my assessment of Elsa sounded less like concern than gossip.
“I can picture something bad happening to one of the kids because of her,” I said.
“Granted, she’s eccentric,” Karen said. “I take it her divorce was pretty rough and now she’s putting the pieces back together.” I wondered if Elsa had confided in Karen—perhaps when they’d gone out for beer. “But I’m not real concerned,” Karen added. “She’ll calm down in a few weeks.”
So for Karen, life was unmenacing until hard evidence proved otherwise; despite her laid-back demeanor, I’d pegged her for being, at her core, a preemptive worrier like me. After all, given that she was unmarried, hadn’t the world failed her already? There were many less appealing women who found husbands, so why hadn’t she? Didn’t she see that life could be unfair and unpredictable and that you needed to exercise some vigilance?
“You don’t think I should say anything to Abigail?” I finally asked.
Karen shrugged. “I just don’t know what there is to say.”
It was storming the next Monday: not just rain but big rolling gray clouds split by lightning, followed by cracks of thunder that faded into softer rumbles. Abigail was peering out the front door when I arrived. She was often leaving as I was arriving, and I said, “Don’t get too wet.”
She shook her head. “Svetlana called in sick. I’m staying over.”
“Lucky you,” I said, and she grinned. Abigail was in her fifties, a woman with short silver hair who wore jumpers or long cotton skirts and had a master’s degree from Harvard; I knew this because the diploma hung framed in her office, where I’d sat for an interview.
I was, apparently, the first volunteer there. When the kids came out from the dining room, Meshaun was clutching a red rubber ball, and Orlean was trying to take it away, which made Meshaun howl. “Whose ball is it?” I asked.
“Me!” Meshaun shouted.
I turned to Orlean. “Is that true?”
“Yeah, but he ain’t playin’ with it. He just holdin’ it.”
“If it belongs to him, he gets to decide what happens to it.”
“Geez, woman.” Orlean sighed loudly. He crossed the hall, passing Derek’s mother as she emerged from the stairwell. Orlean leaned his back against the wall, folded his arms across his chest, and glared, and I tried, out of respect for his disappointment in me, not to smile.
“You know where D’s at?” Derek’s mother said.
“Are you talking to me?” I said. “Sorry, but I just got here.”
“Monique told me she was gonna watch him while I was at the CVS, and now she says she don’t know where he is.”
“Derek’s lost?” I stood, my heart beating faster. “If he’s lost, you should tell Abigail.”
As Derek’s mother walked toward Abigail’s office, I hurried downstairs, but the playroom was silent, and all the lights were off. “Derek?” I called. “Are you here, Derek?” I flicked the lights on and looked under the tables, behind the shelves. But I would have been able to hear him breathe, and the only sound was the drip of the sink.
When I returned upstairs, the hall was crowded with Abigail, Derek’s mother, Na’Shell’s mother, Na’Shell, Meshaun, and Orlean, plus Elsa and Karen had both arrived; Elsa was holding a collapsed, dripping umbrella as Abigail talked. I was glad I hadn’t been present when Abigail told them Derek was missing—Elsa probably had opened her mouth, covered it with her palm, and gasped. Abigail gestured at me and Derek’s mother. “I want the two of you to look outside. Elsa, you go upstairs, and Karen, you go downstairs. I know we’ve already checked the building, but we’ve got to be thorough.”
I still had on a raincoat, and Elsa offered me her umbrella, which I didn’t take. Despite the seriousness of the moment, it felt awkward to walk outside with Derek’s mother—I wasn’t sure if we were supposed to split up or stay together. I glanced at her, and her face was scrunched with anxiety.
“He couldn’t have gone far, right?” I said.
“I’m gonna beat his ass when I find that boy,” she said, but she sounded more frightened than mean.
We did split up—I walked toward one end of the block, turning my head from side to side and calling his name (a passerby might have thought I was calling for a puppy), then I walked to the other end of the block. The rain was falling solidly. Out on the street, the cars made swishing noises as they passed, and my stomach tightened with each one. The roads had to be slick, and the rain on the windshields would make everything blurry. It was hard to know if it was worse to imagine him alone or with someone—if he were alone, surely the thunder and lightning were terrifying him.
I walked around the side of the shelter, expecting and not expecting to see him everywhere I looked. In my mind, he was wearing what he’d been wearing the day Elsa had taken the pig away from him—a red-and-blue striped T-shirt and black sweatpants. I found his mother standing on tiptoe, peering into the Dumpster in the back parking lot and shoving aside pieces of cardboard. “You think he could have gotten in there?” I said. She didn’t reply, and I said, “You know the volunteer who has kind of light brown hair and hasn’t been coming here for very long?”
Without looking at me, Derek’s mother said, “You mean Elsa?” If a bird had flown out of her open mouth, I would not have been more astonished.
“I think she came here a few weeks ago some night besides Monday,” I said. “Right? She brought Derek a little pig?”
“I don’t know nothing about that.”
“I’m wondering if you’ve seen her here other times. Has she ever invited Derek to do stuff dur
ing the day?”
For the first time, Derek’s mother looked at me, and I saw that she was on the verge of crying. “Monique’s a fool,” she said. “I knew I shouldn’t of left her with D.”
“It’s not your fault,” I said. “It’s really not. Kids wander off.”
Then her face collapsed—big, fat, scary Derek’s mother—and as she brought her hands up to shield it, her shoulders shook. What I was supposed to do, what the situation unmistakably called for, was to hug her, or at the very least to set an arm around her back. I couldn’t do it. She was wearing an old-looking, off-white T-shirt that said LUCK O’ THE IRISH across the chest in puffy green letters and had multiple stains on it, and I just couldn’t. If I did, after I got home, even if I changed out of my clothes and showered, her hug would still be on me.
“I’m sorry,” I said. “I’m so sorry—I’m—by the way, I don’t think we’ve ever been introduced. I’m Frances.”
She lifted her head and looked at me, appearing bewildered. In that moment, from inside the dining room window, Karen joyously called, “We found him! Come inside, y’all! We found Derek!”
The entry hall was so thick with mothers and children that I couldn’t even locate him at first, and then I saw him, before she passed him off to his mother, in Elsa’s arms. On his left cheek was the imprint of a pillow or a wrinkled sheet, and he was yawning without covering his mouth. I heard Elsa say, “And then I just thought, could that little lump on the top bunk be Derek? I was on my way out, but something made me check one more time…”
The combination of the accumulated people, the relieved energy, and the storm outside made it seem almost like we were having a party; at any moment, a cake would appear. “You gotta watch your babies like a hawk,” someone beside me said, and when I glanced over, I saw that it was Meshaun’s mother. Her voice was not disapproving, but happy. “Like. A. Hawk,” she repeated, nodding once for each word.
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