Sara Lost and Found

by Virginia Castleman

  I wait for a moment, listening to the shuffling get softer and softer. “You can open your eyes now. She’s gone,” I tell Anna, flicking on the flashlight. I aim it at my sister’s pale face.

  “How do you know she’s not hiding outside?” Anna whispers back in a rare full sentence.

  I point to the thin streak of dim light under the door. “No feet.”

  Anna sits up and lets out a long sigh.

  “We’d better go to sleep.” I settle back onto the bed. “Remember what Mrs. Craig said. We might be going to that new foster home soon. Until Daddy gets out of—” I stop, not wanting to say the J word to Anna. All at once I realize why Mrs. Craig calls jail “the special place”: to protect Anna from knowing her daddy’s locked up in a cage—something that would give her worse nightmares than she already has.

  “How come so many places?”

  “You mean how come we have to go to so many foster homes?”

  Anna nods.

  I think about it for a minute. I want to tell her that if she’d quit wetting the bed and biting everyone, we might stand a better chance of staying in just one home instead of bouncing around, but that would hurt her feelings.

  “How come?” she repeats.

  Anna thinks in pictures, so I know I have to think of images she can see in her head. “Well, foster parents are kind of like spare tires,” I say, looking in her eyes for a sign of understanding. “Remember when Daddy had to put the spare tire on his truck because one in front went flat?”

  Anna nods.

  “Well, foster parents are like spare tires until we get our real tires back, Daddy or Mama. Or until we get a new set of tires,” I add. Just saying it gets me wondering what it would be like to get adopted. Not that that will ever happen. We have Daddy and all, but still, what would it be like to have parents who are there all the time and who don’t keep disappearing?

  Then I start thinking about Daddy locked up in some jail and how much he needs us and how hard he has tried to be good each time he got out and got us back, and suddenly I feel awful for even thinking about what having new parents would be like. He needs me to protect Anna while he and Mama are gone. I push the other thoughts away.

  Anna pulls Abby out from under the covers and holds the doll in front of her. “Looks like Mama,” she coos.

  I look at the doll and back at Anna. “Kind of,” I say, even though I really don’t think so. Still, I know Anna wants the doll to look like Mama. “Only Mama’s arms aren’t on backward.”

  Anna looks puzzled.

  “Abby.” I point to the doll. “You’ve got her arms on backward. Want me to fix them?”

  Anna started pulling Abby’s limbs off after she had to stay at that temporary foster home without me. Anna nods and hands me the doll. About the only time she’ll ever let Abby go is to have her put back together. I pull the plastic arms out of their sockets and snap them back into place like I’ve done a million times before.

  “All better,” I say, handing Abby back.

  “Bad doll! Bad, bad doll.” Anna takes Abby and slams her hard against the covers.

  I grab her arm. “You’re going to break her for good if you keep doing that,” I warn. “One of these times, I won’t be able to put her back together.”

  In the shadows, Anna’s face crinkles at the thought, which is what her voice sounds like—all crinkled—when she says, “Daddy’s song?”

  I’d forgotten all about her wanting a song, but not Anna. She remembers everything—good and bad. The more bad that happens, the quieter she gets.

  “Okay, okay. I’ll sing. But then we have to get some sleep.” I clear my throat and in my softest voice sing Daddy’s song:

  Old tears, they keep falling—

  They keep falling for you.

  I once held you close to me,

  Now you’re gone.

  But I still see your smile.

  I still feel your touch.

  I want you to know

  I still love you so much.

  Old tears, they keep falling,

  Falling for you, now you’re gone.

  As I sing, I picture Daddy up onstage, tall as a giant, gazing down at all the dancing people. A big black cowboy hat shades his sparkling blue eyes from the spotlights. Beads of sweat roll down his forehead and the sides of his face. He raises his arm up and dabs off the sweat with his sleeve, and everyone hoots and cheers. Smiling, he touches the tip of his hat to say thank you.

  But mostly I see myself, right there onstage beside him, looking up into his proud, sweaty face, singing his song with all my heart. I reach out and take Daddy’s big hand and kiss it. Just thinking about it, I can almost smell the smoke on his fingers.

  When I finish the song, I don’t even try to stop the hot tears that stream down my cheeks onto the pillow. I look over at Anna, thinking my sister’d be crying now too. But her eyes are closed, and her slow, deep breathing tells me she’s already sound asleep.

  I pull Mama’s letter out from under my pillow, where I hid it, and run my fingers lightly over her words, trying once again to sound them out, picking out the ones I can read.

  My dear Sara and Anna,

  Ruh-n-eeng. Running.

  I stop reading. My thoughts run away with her words. Running what? Out of time? Out of space? Or did she mean running away from me? The girl who is just like Daddy? I look at her picture, trying to see if an answer is maybe hidden in it somewhere. My throat tightens around all the words I can’t say to her, and I stuff the letter and picture back under my pillow.

  With a snap, I turn off the flashlight.

  CHAPTER 5

  I OPEN MY EYES TO the touch of sunlight warming my cheeks. Everything feels cozy and safe. Dewdrops shimmer on the window and roll down the glass, reminding me how fast things can change.

  I sit up slowly, wondering if Anna’s had an accident again. She doesn’t mean to wet the bed. It just happens.

  “Call the plumber! We’ve got a leak!” I whisper whenever the sheets are damp. It’s something Ben would say. I keep hoping she’ll laugh about it, but Anna hardly ever laughs about anything. She’s too scared of what might happen if somebody finds the soiled sheets. Every family’s reaction is different.

  One family rubbed Anna’s nose in it. “Bad girl! Bad, bad girl!” they shouted, like she was a dog or something. Just thinking about it makes me wince. What if those scars on her arm are there because she wet the bed and someone else lost control? Did they grab her and dig their fingernails into her arm? I push away those awful thoughts and shake Anna’s thin, bony shoulders, urging her to open her eyes.

  “It’s morning, Anna. Wake up.”

  “Caseworker here?” Anna’s voice is all froggy. She stretches and rubs her eyes.

  “No. We get to stay here a couple of days, remember? Rachel’s talking to someone downstairs, but it doesn’t sound like Mrs. Craig.”

  “Like us?”

  I study my sister’s worried face. Sometimes it’s hard to know what she’s talking about. “Will the new family like us?” I ask to see if that’s what she means. She nods. I smile, secretly pleased that I guessed right.

  “Sure, they’ll like us. What’s not to like?” It’s the same thing I told her the last time we were about to be placed in temporary foster care, and the time before that.

  “Do you have to go—you know—?”

  She turns away and shakes her head.

  “Well, I do. Be right back.” If I don’t get to the bathroom soon, I might be the one having an accident. I slide from the warm sheets and head down the hall toward the bathroom, but I hesitate at the top of the stairs.

  The sound of Rachel’s soft voice draws me a few steps down, and I peek through the railing. Rachel is sitting in the front room, talking on the phone and drinking coffee. I close my eyes, breathing deep. The smell is comforting. Closing my eyes, for some reason, also helps me hear better, and I strain to make out her words. She has a lazy way of talking. Sometimes her words don’
t end up in the right order. “Put on the table the napkins,” she might say. It’s fun to hear her get things mixed up.

  Ben says it’s because she says the sentence in her head in Russian and then translates it into English, so sometimes the translation comes out funny. Rachel once told me that even after sixty years in this country, she still dreams in Russian!

  “I hear welfare kept the family afloat for years, but with the papa making so little money, and with the mama running off—” Rachel leaves the thought hanging, as if the sentence doesn’t need an ending. “Kids raising kids,” she murmurs. “The courts came finally in and said living like this was unfit. None of the relatives would take them, so the courts did.”

  When I get that she’s talking about us, my chest tightens. Even though I have to pee so bad it hurts, I glue myself to the stairs, wanting to hear more.

  “Last I heard, the courts are thinking of charging the mama and papa with neglect.”

  Neglect? What does that mean? Does that mean that Daddy will have to stay in jail longer? And what about Mama? What are they going to do to her?

  “The mama is from the law hiding in Utah or someplace.”

  Mama is hiding? Is that why she hasn’t come to see us? Where is this Utah? How come she has to hide? Why can’t we hide with her?

  Rachel’s voice rises to a harsh whisper. “And a single papa the father is trying to be, but he’s got an on-again-off-again nighttime music job that takes him all over. A drummer, he is, though some sense into him someone should drum, leaving those girls alone like that!” Her face turns pink. “A drinking problem he has too!” She leans forward and sets her coffee mug down. “I think somewhere inside he loves those girls.” She pats her heart. “Always, always he tries to get them back.”

  My chest suddenly feels like something heavy is pushing against it. Why is everything such a mess? Why can’t someone, anyone, fix it and make it all better?

  Rachel nods her head in silent understanding of what the person she’s talking to is saying. My guess is that she’s talking to Ms. Thistleberry, who’s probably peeling vegetables while they talk.

  “More money goes into kenneling a pet than the state spends on children in their care! I know. I know. Terrible,” Rachel adds, making a clucking noise with her tongue.

  I shift uncomfortably. The stair I’m sitting on creaks, and for one awful moment I worry that she’s heard me, but she doesn’t look up.

  Mama is running from the law. Daddy is in jail. Now the court owns us. How will Daddy find us? How will we ever get home?

  “It is sad, yes. And you’re right. It’s hard for older kids like these girls to get adopted.” Rachel gathers herself up from the chair. “Everyone wants the little ones. And poor Anna. Around her sister, she does fine, but separate them, and oh my.”

  The cup in Rachel’s other hand rattles against the saucer. She sets it down beside the phone base. “She gets lost somewhere inside here,” she says, tapping her head. “And that biting. Poor thing. Chances are . . .”

  As she shuffles toward the kitchen, her words grow harder and harder to hear. I lean forward until I’m about to fall. Chances are what?

  “Even sadder still,” she says, returning to the front room, “these poor girls will maybe never see their mama and papa again.”

  Never see them again? What is she talking about?

  I slide from my hiding place and hobble to the bathroom. My stomach hurts so bad. Don’t know if it’s because I have to go or because of Rachel’s words. Maybe both.

  Never see Mama and Daddy again? I try to hide the feelings from my face so Anna won’t see, but feelings like that are hard to hide.

  When I get back from the bathroom, Anna takes one look at my face and her eyes open wider. She sits crouched on the edge of the bed, like a frightened cat preparing to pounce or hiss if anyone comes near.

  “Bad?”

  “Not really,” I lie.

  “Nobody wants Anna?”

  I catch my breath. Could she have overheard Rachel saying how hard it is for older kids to get adopted?

  “No!” I punch a pillow. “We go together, or we don’t go at all. Mrs. Craig said so. Remember?”

  “Words break,” Anna reminds me as she swings her legs down over the side of the bed.

  Will Mama’s words break? I wonder, slipping her letter and picture out from under the pillow and back into my jacket.

  “Hey, watch out for Abby! You almost kicked her in the head.” I lean down and scoop up her doll and all its pieces. One by one, I snap them back together. Daddy bought the doll at the flea market for only twenty-five cents and gave it to Anna on her tenth birthday. Mama was long gone, and Daddy even stayed home that day and played with us. It should have been the best birthday ever, but then he went out drinking and got arrested. The judge said he could get us back if he went to parenting classes, so he did.

  But every time he tried to make things right, something went wrong. Something always goes wrong.

  “Maybe some words break, Anna, but not mine.” I watch all the worry lines in her forehead soften. “This is one promise that won’t ever get broken.”

  Saying it makes me feel better. Anna is as worried about us getting split up as I am. Every day we wonder who’s going to pull us apart. The police? Mrs. Craig? The judge? Foster parents? Who? Who should we be scared of most?

  I plop down on the bed and hug Anna. “We go together like the big hand and little hand on a clock,” I say.

  I get up and fish around in the pocket of my jacket for some buttons Mama left behind. Sometimes in the middle of the night we’d play a game called Tiddlywinks with the buttons. We’d press a big button onto the edge of a smaller one and make it “hop, hop, hop,” as Anna would say, until it landed in the cap of Daddy’s beer bottle.

  But there’s another game we play with buttons. I string two of them together onto an old shoelace we found, just like Mama showed me. I tie the lace into a loop and, gripping each end, twirl it round and round until it squeezes my fingers purple. Then I pull the string loose and tight, loose and tight. Whir, whir, whir. The two buttons spin so close together that they look like one. Anna might be twelve, but she still likes the button game. I spin the buttons and she calms down, as if pulling the strings draws the fret out of her.

  A car door close by slams shut, and Anna and I look to the window.

  “Court lady?”

  I run to look and see the neighbor lady pulling her car out of her driveway.

  “No.” I relax a little. “It’s just Ms. Thistleberry backing out of her driveway.”

  When I sit back down on the bed, Cowwy falls to the floor. I bend down and pick him up.

  The first thing I notice is that he’s damp. I frown, wondering what he might have fallen into. But the smell says it all.

  “No!” Anna jumps out of bed and rips the sheets off, wadding them up.

  I drop Cowwy and grab the sheets from her.

  “Shhhh. It’s all right, Anna. I’ll say I did it.”

  “No! No! No! No!” She pulls away and claws at the bed.

  I look around for a good hiding place. Maybe I could drop the sheets out the window and bury them somewhere later.

  “Don’t look,” I blurt.

  “Where?” She looks around.

  “Where I hide the sheets. That’s where. That way if Rachel asks where they are, you can say you don’t know, and you won’t be lying. Hurry, Anna! Hide your eyes.”

  She presses her shaky hands over her eyes, but I can still see her flushed face behind them.

  I quickly rip a pillow from the pillowcase and stuff the soiled sheet inside. Then I drop the pillow onto the floor and kick it under the bed. I can hear Rachel coming up the stairs to check on us.

  “Crawl under the blanket!” I jump into bed beside Anna right as Rachel knocks on the door. When she opens it, a lone ball of fuzz that must have fallen out of Cowwy rolls across the hardwood floor.

  “Rise and shine,” she sings out.
“Today’s your lucky day, and I don’t want that anything should spoil it.” She swooshes to the closet.

  What does she mean, today is our lucky day? I start to feel uneasy but lie stiff, afraid to move for fear she’ll notice the missing sheets.

  “Look here at what I saved for you. Anna, how about you wear this green cotton dress with on it all the flowers? It goes with your red hair. And the pretty sandals. And Sara, I—”

  She stops midsentence, looks at us, and sniffs the air. Her nose wrinkles up and twitches like a rabbit’s. She sniffs two more times. “What is this I am smelling?” She says it “smellink.” “Anna, did you wet again the bed?”

  “No.” I can feel Anna’s legs shaking under the cover. I reach over and squeeze her hand. She squeezes back.

  “You wouldn’t be telling to me a little story now, would you?” Rachel says, patting the blanket. “You know we can get those special pants for Anna for nighttime.”

  Anna makes a face. “Baby pants.”

  “They’re not baby pants, Anna,” Mrs. Silverman says, bending down to look under the bed.

  My heart thumps so hard it feels like it’s going to beat right out of me. Think fast! Hurry! She’ll figure it out! And if she tells Mrs. Craig, we might not get into a good foster home. No one wants a bed-wetter. I grip my end of the blanket and hold tight.

  “She’s here!” I shout.

  CHAPTER 6

  “WHAT ON EARTH? WHO’S HERE?” Rachel shuffles toward the door.

  “Mrs. Craig! She’s here!” I slide out from under the blanket and jump up and down on the bed—something I know Mrs. Silverman never allows.

  “Stop that jumping right this instant or a mark I’ll give you on the chart!” she scolds, wagging a finger. With heavy steps, she crosses the room and bends, peering out the window. I sneak Anna a grin and wink, just like Daddy used to wink at me when he was playing a trick on Mama.

  “She was not to be here until tomorrow. Her car I do not see.” Rachel stops talking and slowly turns around. “If this is a clever trick you’re playing because your sister wet again the bed, then you, missy, are in big trouble. You’ll make two marks on the chart. Maybe even lose a star. You know better than to tell stories or hide things. I don’t harm your sister. She has accident, we wash. Now put on yourself some clothes and come down when for breakfast you are ready. And bring the dirty sheets with you.”