All the Children Are Home

by Patry Francis

  At the top of the landing, he paused again; and in that pause, I knew he was trying to shake the image of her as she’d been that morning in the bathroom. When she was afraid.

  “And that file? Burn it,” he hollered down to me. “You hear me, Dahlia? Put the damn thing in the fireplace and come to bed.”

  As if he didn’t know it was too late for that.

  I’d started reading the night before, just after he’d fallen asleep. For all the hell it contained, it was a thin folder—a couple of legal documents and a few pages of mimeographed notes from the social workers who’d been assigned to her case over the years. Most were handwritten, some with haste, others clearly labored over. They attempted to describe the first six years of the most grievously neglected and abused child who had ever stood at our door. And that was saying something.

  It began with the removal of two children from the home of a Miss Carrie Rose Mellon. The author, identified as Evelyn Moore from the Department of Social Services, made an effort to keep her penmanship as neat as a schoolgirl’s and her narrative dry.

  The authorities were alerted to a situation at 405 Gardena Street, Apartment B after Mr. Cyril Reedy from Apartment A had become alarmed by the persistent cries from the children next door. He hadn’t seen the woman he assumed to be their mother in several days.

  I was accompanied on the call by Police Sargent Anthony Dutra. No one responded to our knock, so Sargent Dutra and I forcefully entered the apartment. Inside, we discovered two female children, one asleep on a mattress in the bedroom, the other in a crib. They were later identified as Maud-Marie Juniper, age 3 1/2, and Agnes Josephine Juniper, 14 months.

  We suspected the children had been alone for a number of days. The older child, who let up a fierce howl when she awoke to find us standing over her sister, had been subsisting on crackers and dry cereal. There was a milk crate beside the crib and a sour-smelling bottle propped on a rolled shirt, indicating that she had attempted to feed the younger one until the milk ran out. The bottle was full of foul-smelling water. Both children were severely malnourished, unwashed, and infested with vermin. The baby was too weak to cry, naked and lying in the urine and feces of several days. There were conspicuous bed sores. The shape of her head was distorted, apparently from months of lying in the same position. She was distinctly small for the age recorded on her birth certificate, and her legs were bowed. We believe she had rarely been removed from the crib since birth.

  The children were taken to Claxton Hospital for evaluation and treatment. The caregiver, Carrie Rose Mellon, who described herself as a former neighbor, was charged with gross neglect and abandonment.

  On further investigation, the mother was identified as Melody J. Juniper, currently incarcerated in Graves State Prison. Apparently, Miss Juniper, a former ward of the state of Maine, had hidden her children with Miss Mellon prior to her arrest in the hope they wouldn’t end up in care.

  An appropriate placement, preferably in a home where the sisters can remain together, will be sought when they are well enough to be discharged. Family reunification is the ultimate goal.

  In nearly two hours, I had only read the one page. The first thing that stopped me was that there had been two of them. What had happened to Maud-Marie? And why, five years later, hadn’t the “ultimate goal” been achieved?

  I also took in the mother’s age: nineteen. I wondered how a ward of the state of Maine had ended up giving birth in Boston at sixteen. Alone, too, from the sounds of it, since the only one she had to turn to was a neighbor. Had she run away to avoid the maternity homes? Good Lord.

  I couldn’t help thinking of a couple of the girls that age who’d passed through our house in that situation—or remembering the angry words Jimmy blurted out the day they took Agnes away: The kid hasn’t got a chance of seeing happy till she’s eighteen and busts out of the system for good, and by then, she’ll be so messed up, it won’t matter.

  I skimmed until I found that Melody had entered a rehabilitation program after her release in the hope of regaining custody. In the file’s only personal note, someone had written of the mother: Seems to care about her children very much.

  I read the line over several times, finding some hope in that emphatic very—though of course, I had to wonder where this Melody was now.

  The next page answered my question. Apparently, she had maintained contact until two years ago, when she’d gotten married. From that point on, she was referred to as Mrs. Jackson. Husband seems very domineering*, a social worker named Natalie Perkins had scrawled at the bottom of a report. And then only two months later: Mrs. Jackson missed a scheduled visit and when we called, the phone had been disconnected. I would go back to those two lines several times, but the only answer to my question was hidden somewhere in that tiny star.

  I was forced to put down the papers several times as the odors of sour milk and shit rose off the page. There was no mention of garbage, but as I read the dry report, I inhaled that, too. I heard the cries of the toddler, the gasps of those who entered the apartment, the prim Evelyn Moore, who would not be at this job for long—I was sure of that—and the police officer, one Sargent Anthony Dutra. Was he a father or a grandfather? Did he still wake up in the middle of the night and find himself back in that apartment like I would after reading about what he’d seen that day?

  But what I heard loudest was the silence of the child in the crib. The one who had turned her mouth toward a sour bottle of water, too weak to raise a cry for her own survival. Agnes. A kid who was none of my business, as Louie said.

  Well, that was me. According to my mother, I spent my days, my life, worrying about things that didn’t concern me. Anything to avoid thinking about your own failures, she told me once. One of many statements that could never be taken back.

  I returned to the file, wondering who had lifted Agnes from the crib in that condition. Was it Miss Moore of the perfect penmanship or Sargent Anthony Dutra? Had they stood aside and waited for the ambulance? If I had been there, I would have done it myself, not even noticing the sores, the shit, and the bugs. I would have held her to my chest and told her what I told the rest, not just my own three, but the Emergencies, too.

  There, there. Silly meaningless words, but sometimes all we’ve got.

  Agnes had been different from the others, though. At six, there was still a shadow of that silent baby in her. If she turned to anyone for nurture, it was Zaidie. Now that I’d read the file, I wondered if she’d seen her lost sister in her. It was a natural role for Zaidie, too. I still remembered how she had tried to mother Jon when they first came.

  Again, I paused, wondering if we migrate as naturally as birds in winter toward those who can give us back what we’ve lost. Was that how Louie had come to me? And Jimmy?

  Nonsense, my mother would say. She’d been horrified, but clearly not surprised, when I first told her about Jimmy. Wouldn’t it be easier to pick up a little job somewhere if Louie’s not making enough money? Why take in other people’s problems? Two digs for the price of one. Or maybe three.

  “As if you know anything about me or my kids,” I said out loud all these years later. When I finished reading the report the first time, I went up to Zaidie’s bedroom, and let the hall light illuminate the empty bed where Agnes had slept. Across the room, Zaidie had pressed herself against the wall, the way she was forced to sleep when Agnes crawled in beside her.

  I wasn’t the kind of person to show my feelings, especially to my girl. Somehow it had always been easier with the boys. I could blame the way I’d been treated as a child. What happened to me later on. But maybe it was just how I was. Like Mother, for all my resentment toward her.

  That night, though, I stroked Zaidie’s pale hair and told her how grateful I was that she had come to us. And then I sat on the bed where Agnes had slept and stared into the black night like I sometimes caught her doing, wondering what she’d seen, until I heard Louie shuffling down the hall.

  “Are you coming to bed or no
t?”

  Chapter Seven

  The Biggest Word in the Sky

  JIMMY

  I FIGURE YOU GET ABOUT THREE DAYS IN YOUR WHOLE STUPID LIFE when you feel so good nothing can touch you. Or more like three minutes. Anyway, there I was sitting on a rock at the edge of the woods in the freezing cold, wearing a jacket with a broke zipper, and yup—smack in the middle of one of my three. The reason? Debbie D’Olympio had just asked me a question that made me believe in those miracles Nonna was always going on about.

  Debbie and I had been meeting at the Grainer School playground every Wednesday, three sharp, for almost six months—practically an eighth-grade record. At first, we sat on the swings like kids, teasing each other about dumb stuff, writing in the dirt with our feet. Then, a couple of months ago, we moved to the rock. It’s not a place where I could kiss her or anything, especially since the little kids get out of school around the same time, but sometimes we horsed around like I do with my little brother and sister. Only different. Okay, way different.

  On the way to the playground, I always stopped by Bruce Savery’s house to ditch the hat Ma makes me wear and remind my buddies who I was going to meet. That day Brucie and Kev came up from the basement where they’d been playing darts to watch me Brylcreem my hair like it was some kinda spectacle.

  Kevin stood behind me in the bathroom mirror, asking if I’d frenched her yet. As if he knew the first thing about kissing a girl, never mind frenching.

  “I woulda had her at the Sugar Shack by now,” Brucie bragged. He claimed to have gotten Janice Meachem to second base back in the fall when the high school kids first renamed an old cabin in the woods for that song on the radio.

  I stuck Brucie’s dad’s Brylcreem back in the medicine chest and slammed the door a little too hard, hoping they didn’t notice. I wasn’t about to tell them I already had brought Debbie out to that dumb shack. Or how the old bum who used to live there ruined everything.

  It all started in the summer when I was helping my dad out at the garage like I do every Thursday. I had just finished stacking oil cans into a neat triangle and I thought I’d sneak off for a soda when I spotted the bum, putting air in the tires of his bike. It was summer, hot as hell, but he was dressed in heavy clothes. And the smell? Whoa. I didn’t want to make him feel bad, though, so insteada looking for a place to puke, I held out my pack of Camels.

  “I’ll spot you back someday,” he said, hands shaking like old Mrs. Ryan’s do since she got the dropsy.

  “Thanks,” I told the guy—as if he was the one who gave me something, right? Anyway, when I said it, I made the mistake of looking straight into his eyes. Maybe just for a minute I thought it might have been my old man or something. Hard to explain what happened next, but it was like his whole life was in those eyes. And now it was in mine.

  Everyone in town musta seen that bum riding around on his crappy bike, but nobody knew who he was till they found his body in the woods around Thanksgiving. By then, Richard J. Cartier had been dead for a couple months.

  “Awful fancy-sounding name for a hobo.” Ma shook her head when she read it in the Gazette. “Imagine.” But I could tell she felt sad, too.

  So anyways, there I am at the Sugar Shack with Debbie D’Olympio and what am I looking at? A cup of coffee Richard J. Cartier left on his dang table. And I’m thinking how that day at the gas station when he passed his life into my eyes, he only had about a month left. Kinda made me shudder.

  Oh, I snapped out of it fast enough, but by then, Debbie was spooked, too—which is how stuff like that works.

  “Maybe we should go?” she said, chewing her Teaberry gum double time and staring at that coffee cup, almost like she could see it, too. “My mom’s probably worried about me.”

  At that point, someone else woulda pushed her a little, gotten something to tell the boys about. But once you let yourself feel sorry for one person, next thing you know you’re feeling sorry for the whole dang world. On the way out, I grabbed the bum’s moldy cup a coffee and threw it hard as I could into the woods. It shattered on a rock.

  Nope. I sure wasn’t about to tell Brucie and Kev none of that. Instead, I said, “Oh, don’t worry. Debbie’ll be getting a good look at the inside of the Shack soon enough.”

  THOSE WERE GOOD times—Brucie and Kev watching the way I combed my hair with two fingers like there was magic in it. Walking down the street, pretending I was wearing a leather jacket and a white T-shirt that showed off my muscles like the guys in the movies did. I played it so good that other people saw the way I felt inside instead of the gawky kid in a jacket with a broke zipper and a striped jersey like my kid brother might wear.

  But there was always that one minute before I turned the corner of the school when I remembered who I was. Sixty seconds when I was so sure Debbie wouldn’t be there the breath froze up inside me.

  That was when I remembered Dad. He wasn’t one for talking much, but those Thursdays in the garage, I watched how he handled cars with tricky problems no one else could fix. Sometimes he’d stop and I’d see that same doubt pass over him. Then he’d let out a few swear words, set his face a certain way, and go back in. That was how he became the best mechanic in the whole world. Or at least in Claxton.

  So I did the same. And there she was sitting on that rock in her pink parka like one a those mirages you read about. Every single time. Shoot. Soon as I saw her I was the guy in the leather jacket again. If someone was calling my name, man, I didn’t even hear it. I lit up a Camel and passed it to Debbie even before I said hi—cool as heck.

  Sounds dumb, but the biggest thrill of my life was watching her stick that cigarette between her lips and pretend to draw. Brucie and Kev woulda said it was a waste of a good smoke, but when she passed it back and I tasted her Teaberry gum? Man.

  That day, she was acting funny, though. “It’s awfully cold out; don’t you think, Jimmy?” she said, doing this cute little shiver. “Maybe we should, um, go somewhere.”

  At first, I didn’t get it. Was she asking me to go to her house and meet her mom? I came to my senses real quick, though. There was no way Debbie’d bring a kid like me over to that fancy split-level where she lived. I can hear it now: Mom, this is my, um, friend, Jimmy Kovacs.

  Now it woulda been a fine enough name if the guy I was named after wasn’t always landing himself in the court report. Ma hid the Gazette every time James Kovacs Sr. messed up, but someone—usually good ole Brucie—made sure to bring it to school and read it out loud in the cafeteria.

  If only the guy coulda done a respectable crime every now and then, it mighta made kids think twice about crossing me. But not James Kovacs Sr. No, he went for weaselly crap like “Shoplifting,” “Drunk and disorderly,” and “Domestic disturbance”—whatever the heck that means.

  “So?” I always said, cool as I could be in a situation like that. “Guy ain’t no one to me.” I didn’t even look up from my lunch tray. But after the bell rang, I went straight to the bathroom and puked.

  “Do you think the little stove in that place you took me before works?” Debbie asked, interrupting my dumb thoughts. She peeled off one of her fur gloves and stuck her hand in the pocket of my jacket with mine.

  “Don’t worry; I’ll get that old thing fired up, all right,” I said, like I knew what she was talking about all along.

  I had stomped out my cigarette, and we were halfway across the playground when I heard my name again. Next thing I knew Agnes was barreling toward me. “Jim-meee!”

  My first instinct was to keep going and pretend I didn’t know the kid. After all, she wasn’t nothing to me. Just another one a Ma’s Emergencies. I woulda got away, too—if only Debbie hadn’t stopped to look back.

  “Is that girl calling you?”

  So okay, I didn’t much like the way she said you—like she was seeing me different all of a sudden—but at that point, I coulda let it go.

  “Never seen her before in my life,” I said, squeezing Debbie’s hand. I picked up the pace
.

  I woulda kept going straight for the shack and second base—if it wasn’t for that creaky sound that came out of the kid’s chest when she got too excited or tried to run to Tucker’s store. Once when she caught a cold, it got so bad, I could practically hear it leaking through the walls of Zaidie’s room.

  So right after claiming I’d never laid eyes on her before, I spun around and made a liar outta myself. “What the heck, Agnes? You know you’re not supposed to run.”

  Kid was so happy to see me she just stood there, wheezing and smiling, smiling and wheezing like some kind a fool.

  “Didn’t uhhh you uhhh hear uhhhh me, Jimmy? I was uhhh calling uhhhh you.”

  “And you’re not supposed to talk, neither. Jeez, kid. You want to end up in a oxygen tent again?”

  But when the kid had something to say, nothing stopped her. So I told Debbie to give me a minute. Then I led Agnes back to the rock that was supposed to be our special place.

  “Shush now. Quiet,” I said, patting her hand like I was Ma or something. “You gotta rest before this turns into one a your full-blowed attacks. Where’s your teacher, anyways? Your new mom? And I thought you had a sister or somethin’.”

  She pointed down the street. “Kathy uhhh leaved.”

  Somehow in the middle of all the gasping and wheezing, she managed to explain how she snuck out of the dismissal line before anyone noticed.

  So what could I do? I sat with the kid on the rock, holding her hand and shushing her every time she tried to tell me something—which was about every two minutes—until the wheezing slowed down. And the whole time the stupid kid was smiling at me like I was Wyatt Earp and the Easter Bunny all rolled into one. Jeez.

  I musta been pretty worried cause I forgot all about Debbie. I didn’t even hear her coming up behind us.

  “What’s wrong with her?” she asked, looking at the kid the way people did when they caught Richard J. Cartier going through the trash cans.

  I mean, did she have to say the word wrong like that—as if it was the biggest word in the sentence? Or maybe in the whole stupid sky? Reminded me of Bruce Savery reading the Court Report at school. Wrong. Almost made me want to go out and commit a dang domestic disturbance.