“I didn’t say anything,” I said loudly because I didn’t think he could hear over the explosion of drumbeats. And then I made my way over to the drum circle and I started jumping up and down and spinning. It seemed to give the drummers a blast of new energy, a strange girl under the spell of their rhythm. They swayed back and forth and played like one huge instrument. Someone handed me a conga and I banged on it so hard that my hands ached and nothing mattered. I rocketed between the drummers until I was dripping with sweat and then I fell over on the grass and lay still. I stared up at the stars and they kept playing.
I could see Dave, walking out of the park, back toward Haight. “Shane was fucked up,” I yelled as loud as I could. “You don’t know how fucked up he was.” But Dave was too far away to hear me.
On the bench, he’d left his phone on top of a folded-up note. “Maddy,” it said, “use this to call us whenever you want. No matter what you think, we care about you. But we both know this: you don’t get to pick your children any more than you get to pick your parents. You will be in my prayers every night when I close my eyes.”
chapter 25
I started writing the letters the next day. I was never going to mail them, even though I wrote the first one sitting outside the post office, next to a row of chipped blue mailboxes. They creaked when anyone opened them and dropped in mail. I sat chewing on the end of a pen I’d gotten from the library. “Dear Mom,” I wrote, but that sounded too light, like I was gone for the weekend and there was something I wanted her to remember. What could I say to someone who didn’t know anything about me? I’d never called her Mother. Maybe I should have used her first name. Dear Hannah. That sounded wrong too, so I went back to where I’d started. Dear Mom, wherever you are, if you can still understand words on a page.
I told her how I was in San Francisco and that I was okay, still trying to figure things out. It sounded lame so I drew a picture of Root with his mouth open like he was smiling and wrote “your other kid.” I thought about the last time I’d seen her, how she didn’t seem to recognize me. How would she now? She hadn’t seen the outside of me for a long time. I wondered if I’d know her either. She would be different than she was all those years ago. But if anyone saw her, it should be me. Dave should not be the one who told her about me. That was mine. I crossed out Mom and settled on Hey. If I didn’t use her name then I could be as mean as I wanted. Even if I mailed them, she might be so off in her head that she wouldn’t understand them.
I wrote the next few letters in the library. It was warmer there and the librarian said I could have as much paper as I wanted. She showed me her drawer, which had dividers for pens, paper clips, and animal-shaped erasers. “I’m overly organized, right?” she said. She told me she’d give me free stamps if I wanted to mail anything, that writing a letter was one of the most meaningful things that could happen between two human beings. I wondered what it would be like to have a place where everything belonged. What if I’d gone with Dave? His house would be like that. I could have forgotten that I ever had a mom who couldn’t get out of bed and take me to school.
“Maybe you never should have had a kid,” I wrote. “You couldn’t take care of anyone, even yourself. It was good someone came and took me away.” I kept going on that way and the words spilled out of me fast. I boiled with nastiness until I got so tired I had to put my head down on the desk and stare at a shelf of books across from me. There was so much to tell her, but I couldn’t figure out how to say it. Most of what I’d written she already knew.
One day the next week I sat at a table in a corner of the library, away from the line of people waiting to use the computers. “Hey,” I wrote, “I’m here in the library, and you’d think it would be the best place to figure out what to do. I could look up what it’s like to be a vet or a teacher. It seems that the library is what I like. I always have. It used to be my favorite part of going to school. I would sit in there so I didn’t have to talk to anyone. Then I’d start in telling the other kids weird random facts. Did you know I was good at that? There are nine planets in the solar system. Spiders aren’t related to beetles.” I kept writing until I had a few pages and I went and took more out of the librarian’s drawer. She was sitting with a group of kids, helping them with homework.
Ash asked what I was writing and I didn’t answer. I didn’t want him or anyone else reading the letters so I’d wait until he was gone to take them out of my pack and bury them near where we slept, another small part of me hidden away. He wanted to know why I hadn’t told Dave anything more about Shane. I said I didn’t actually know anything about Shane. I had heard things, but they probably weren’t even true. Why would I trust anything that Jeremiah said? If you went across the park and showed people my picture, they would say they didn’t know me either. Or that I was a slut or a tweaker with a weird ass dog and I hung out with three other kids.
“Dave wanted to take me home, make me into his own kid,” I told Ash. “I wasn’t going to tell him that his real kid might have deserved what he got.”
“I’d want to know what my kid was like,” Ash said, and he looked at me in the way he had, like he could see into the center of me.
“You could have told him,” I said. “Free country.”
I wanted to say that maybe it wasn’t just Shane. We all got what we had coming. Could anything change that?
“I wish I thought people got born into other lives, based on what shit they did to other people,” I said. “Then maybe I’d have a normal family. Or maybe that’s why I’m here. Maybe I did something so bad that I got fucked up parents.”
“Reincarnation,” said Ash. “I’d probably be a worm or a fish.”
“You’d be a millionaire who lives in a castle on the beach and takes in strangers who will then probably kill you.”
“Thanks. I don’t even like the beach,” Ash said. “But I’m down with castles.”
I held out the phone Dave left with me. “Sell this,” I said. “We can stay in a room downtown for a few nights.”
I thought it would make him happy, but Ash said it was stupid to sell the phone because Dave was paying for it and we could use it to do whatever we wanted. He said he was going to take some classes and he would use the phone to get a job.
“The city is crazy with computer jobs,” he said. “Why shouldn’t I have one?”
“Because you dropped out of college? And you live out here? And what is the point?” I said. “Plus, you better hope they don’t give you a drug test at your job like your mom wanted to.”
Ash put his arms around me and picked me up like I was a little kid, then set me down. We walked down the street, Root following. At the smoke shop Ash pulled out cardboard for a sign. $$ for school. People walked by, but no one dropped change. So he turned over the cardboard and wrote beer fund. Underneath he drew a smile and two big eyes. People started leaving quarters and a few bills. Being real got them, plus it was the week before Christmas. Ash left the money out in a used paper coffee cup where everyone could see. He said no one wanted to be the first to give, or to do anything. As soon as he had enough, he bought a handle of vodka and put it down in my lap. I drank a few gulps and passed it to Ash. He stashed the rest of his change in the pocket of his shirt, a soft flannel that looked like he’d lifted it from the army surplus place.
“Nice,” I said, fingering it. “Where’d you get those?” I pointed at an almost new pair of tan desert boots on his feet. “Are those for your computer job?”
It hit me almost before he said anything. “They’re Shane’s,” he said. “Turns out I’m about the same size so Dave gave me a box of his stuff before he left. He said his wife shipped it out and that he liked to think of me wearing it. He left a pile at the shelter too.”
I looked at him but didn’t say anything. “What?” he said. “I was supposed to wait for everyone else to take them? Why does it matter?”
It wasn’t that he was wearing a dead guy’s clothes. Maybe we all were. Who knows why st
uff got left in the giveaway box. Everything started somewhere, then ended up in a place you couldn’t have pictured. It was that now Ash also had some weird connection with Shane. My own dad didn’t want to know me. I would never write him letters. And there was Dave, so attached to Shane that he’d saved his boots. Maybe Ash was going to replace Shane. They didn’t need me.
“You better take care of those boots,” I said. “They’ll get trashed.”
“He would have given them to you,” he said. “But they fit me.”
On Christmas, someone left a stack of pizzas and a half-gallon of orange juice on the lawn. Hardly anyone was out, so we had them to ourselves. Most people had taken off to where it was warmer, maybe south along with flocks of Dave’s birds. We slept outside unless it was raining hard. The shelter would be open until April, the end of what passed for a season here even though the fog and wind blasted all year. Hope was back at Jay House. They kicked her out for a week for missing curfew and showing up in the morning, trashed. But then they said she could stay if she promised to stop hanging with her old crowd, like that was going to happen. She said they expected slip-ups and called us a trigger to her past. “Bang,” she said, making her hand into a gun shape, pointed at her head.
At the end of February tiny pale pink flowers sprouted on the trees around the lake. They were all you could see, glowing at night. Then, just as suddenly, they dropped off into the leaves and mud. We sat on piles of cardboard to keep dry. Ash found a refrigerator box someone left on the curb and dragged it over. It was big enough to hold our sleeping bags and Root, who spread out across the bottom. Ash said he was going to make a built-in bed and then we could rent it out. We stayed in there until it got too soggy and collapsed on top of us.
I kept thinking about what happened to Shane, even though no one talked about it anymore. There was nothing left of him here. Sometimes I passed the green metal bench where Dave and I had sat. I didn’t notice that day that it had a plaque in memory of some guy who died, with writing in raised letters. “He found peace in this spot.” It was like we’d been sitting on the guy’s lap while Dave was trying to adopt me. Ash said not to look at the bench. Forget it existed. How hard was that? But it seemed that something had shifted, my world was falling in on itself. I sat on the bench, that spot of peace, and listened to the drummers who showed up even when the park was thick with fog and drizzle, a never-ending chorus.
Ash couldn’t take it so he’d go look for the neighborhood kids who let him hang in their basement and play video games, until their mom showed up. She was happy to give him a space to get warm, no kid should be out on the street, she said, but he could not sleep down there. I stayed in the park or went to the library, where I kept writing letters. The librarian said I was a faithful correspondent, but never asked who I was writing to, which was fine. I wouldn’t have said.
I told my mom about Root and Hope and Fleet, then, because of Marva, about where we stayed. Maybe she would want to know where I put down my head at night. So I wrote about the circle of trees at 40 Hill, the bed of leaves where we slept. I couldn’t tell her about Shane or that Dave and Marva had found where she lived. Writing about Ash was hard enough. I didn’t know what I thought about him lately. He kept wanting to hang around with me, but he had a problem with everything I did. “Do you think there are people in the world who are part of your orbit?” I wrote. “That’s what he says. You are meant to find them and then you circle around one another, like planets.” I didn’t say we had fights because of his weird ideas. “Sometimes,” I wrote, “I want to know what you’d think.”
chapter 26
We could hear the bushes crackling before we saw her. I snapped a leash on Root, who’d been asleep, folded over on his side. He picked up his head and put it back down when he saw her. She was small, with eggplant purple hair and black glasses sitting midway down her nose.
“I’m looking for Maddy Donaldo?” She pushed the glasses up with her index finger. How would she know where I stayed? No one but us came up to 40 Hill.
“I’m here to check in with you,” she said, then started in on a talk she must have planned and tried out on herself. Dave had contacted her, said that I’d been in the park for two years and needed to get inside. Anything we spoke about would be confidential. Just between us, she said, like I didn’t know what she meant. She said her name was Cade and she could point me to resources, or we could just stay here and talk about anything I wanted. And then, no invitation, she sat down in the damp leaves and leaned back against a tree.
“I had to give my dog away,” she said, “because he kept getting into it with every other dog he saw, which was not good for what I was doing. What I am doing.”
I told her that Root usually knew who to trust. Then for some reason I told her how I found Root, that I basically rescued him and he had my back. She said she got that, her dog had had the same instinct. He’d been abused, which is why anything triggered him. She missed him, but she got her fix when her roommate came home with foster dogs. She was all over them, spoiled them with table food and let them sleep on her bed. She said she’d been a foster kid for a while so she could relate. When she got up to leave, she asked if I wanted to come with her on the bus to her office so we could talk more. I said no and she handed me a card, saying she’d be back, if I didn’t mind. I couldn’t say anything. I didn’t own the park.
I carried the card in my pocket, even though I knew I wasn’t going to call her. Ash said she might trap me into a cult. Maybe the next time he saw me I’d be wearing an orange robe, chanting “Hare Krishna” or waving incense and talking in a secret language. But he said I could do whatever I wanted. He said he might check out Mendocino with Hope, come back in the spring. The corners of his mouth turned up in a fake smile and I tried to ignore him. I might not be there when he got back. Maybe I’d be living with Cade and her rescued dogs. How much coming and going, tearing up a heart, could anyone take?
I took the card out one day after breakfast, mostly to make him mad.
“What the hell, Maddy.” He grabbed it and ripped it up. I punched him in the arm, not hard enough to make Root get worked up.
Cade came by every week, the top of her head stripey where the black roots were growing out. She said she’d planned to do a different color every month, but she got tired of it. She used to set little goals for herself the first time she moved inside. It helped clear her head. She grew up in the city, out near the beach, and she’d stayed in the park twice, the second time for most of a year. She still wasn’t sure what was going to happen, even though she worked for a program now and was taking college classes at night. She didn’t think about dope every second, but she thought about it every day. That hadn’t changed. If you stopped to think about it, a lot of people were addicted to something, whether it was dope or booze or approval. She didn’t have any answers, or at least not one that she could give everyone.
We’d see her on the street, talking to Jax or handing her card to kids on the sidewalk. The pouch that Jax hung on the back of his chair bulged with power bars and juice boxes whenever she left. Some of her cards usually ended up in the dirt around the street tree, along with the weeds and cigarette butts. Someone had put a fence around the tree, like it was in jail.
Whenever Cade came by she talked to me like she’d known me a long time. I had no idea what Dave and Marva had told her, but she didn’t ask questions. She didn’t have to. She’d lived in the park with a guy named Toledo, who still slept out near the windmill and worked at a gym where he showered and worked out. She said it wasn’t her job to change him. Besides she never wanted to live with a guy. Dogs were all she could handle. “Right,” I said, not because I agreed, but because she knew that well enough to say it out loud.
I didn’t talk to her about Ash, who kept saying he was leaving. He couldn’t stand for me to talk about Cade, even though she seemed to be in my orbit. “Forget I ever made that up,” he said. When some guys from Portland showed up, he said he was
going up there. Don’t bother, they told him. Portland was over.
“What isn’t over?” said Ash. “This is over.” He was in front of the smoke shop with a sign, donate here. Fleet was next to him, with Robo. Root was still muzzled but that didn’t stop him from checking out a small black dog in a red bandana with the guys from Portland. One of them opened a guitar case, the inside a faded blue velvet, and put it on the sidewalk. He started picking a blues tune and singing in a deep voice, something about going home to his baby right now. People leaned over to drop change as they walked by. A few stopped and listened until the blast of a revving engine drowned him out. We all looked down the street at a black sports car, its motor full on racing while it sat there. No one moved. Time stopped, the way it does when you know your life might change in a quick second. And then the car took off and skidded into the intersection, where it spun out in front of us in fast swerving circles. Fleet, who usually clammed up, screamed like it was aiming at her. We backed up against the wall while it made a final turn, ending with its front wheels up against the curb.
Ash and the guys from Portland ran to the driver’s window and banged hard. It was tinted so dark they couldn’t see inside. I held tight to Root, who was trying to bark and break from his leash. They kept it up until the driver rolled the window down a few inches and shouted that he was practicing doughnuts for a movie shoot. Get the fuck away or he’d call the cops. Then the kids were shouting back at him, who did he think he was, he was going to get his ass kicked. He had the door locked, but they were pulling on that too when two cop cars pulled up, sirens and lights on.
The cops ordered the guy out of his car, while we watched from the sidewalk. A crowd gathered around us and started to ask what happened.
“He tried to get away,” said Ash, pointing to the man, who was surrounded by cops. “But a group of us pulled him out of the car.”
At the Edge of the Haight Page 21
