Three Little Words (16 page)

I was excited when a beautician volunteered to give the girls in our cottage manicures. Because I had watched Mrs. Chavez at work, I knew all the procedures. As the manicurist unpacked her tools, I pointed to a tube that looked like an accordion. “That’s cuticle remover.” I indicated a stone. “And that’s a pterygium stone.”

“Well, you know a lot!” she said. “Would you like to go first?”

“Why does Ashley get everything first?” Keri screeched.

Keri grabbed a bottle of clear liquid. Before anyone could react, she uncapped it and threw it in my face. The beautician screamed, “That’s acetone!”

My eyes felt as if they were on fire. “Help me!”

Ms. Lisa, who worked in the cottage, steered me into the staff bathroom and poured water over my face to flush out the chemical. “Are your eyes okay?”

“I think so.” I blinked. “But they’re still burning a little.”

Ms. Lisa was shaking. “You could have been blinded.”

After that, my survival strategy was to mind my own business and stay out of trouble.

As I was having lunch with Sabrina in the dining hall, she nudged me to look in the direction of one of the staff tables. “You know who they are?” I noticed a man and a woman chatting with Mary Fernandez and some Lopez Cottage primaries.

“New staff?” I guessed.

“Shoppers!” Sabrina said under her breath.

“What are they going to buy here?”

“Us.” She rolled her eyes. “They’re a family looking for a kid. They are pretending they aren’t watching us, but see if you can totally tell who they’re checking out.”

“Nadine?” Sabrina nodded. I asked her, “Have you ever seen anyone who seemed interested in you?”

“Not yet, but I’ll know when it happens.”

“Me too,” I replied with confidence.

I began to pay attention to the mating dance of adoption. The staff told prospective parents something about a child, then permitted them to observe her or him during meals, campus events, sports, or talent shows. Which of the bystanders would I want as parents? My ideal mother would look like Ms. Sandnes, and I would not have minded Mr. Todd or Mr. Irvin for a father. And I wouldn’t care if my parents were Caucasian or African American either. I liked the women who wore tailored slacks or shorts, pastel tops, trendy loafers, and quality earrings, like Mary Miller’s. The men who dressed in golf shirts with the horse logo seemed the most well-to-do.

If a family picked you, they gave you their album. Some contained a few snapshots of their house and family members. Others were elaborate scrapbooks depicting trips to Disney or the Grand Canyon and included formal portraits of relatives. I liked the ones that showed every room in their house. After a day or so, you would meet your family and your official period of visitation began. The chosen ones returned from restaurant meals and overnights hand in hand with their new “mom” and “dad.” Eventually, they drove off into the sunset with their “forever families”—or so they thought. Many came back. Sometimes it was weeks after placement, sometimes years after the adoption finalization had taken place. Workers called this a “disruption,” as if it were temporary, though few children ever returned to the same adoptive family.

I remember when Ms. Beth sent for Daphne after school. Her brother and sister, who lived in other cottages, went as well. When she returned, she was carrying an album. My chest felt like it was filled with lead. Why her? There were three of them and only two of us. Her sister was just as problematic as Luke was, and I was not only younger than Daphne, but I had better grades. It was not fair!

Then Scott starting visiting with a family, leaving his two brothers behind, including Ryan, who was my favorite guy on campus.

“That’s terrible,” I said to commiserate with him.

“I want Scott to have a chance.”

“Maybe if they like him, they’ll take you, too,” I suggested.

“Not many people want three teenage boys.”

I worried that someone would want Luke and not me. I always assumed I would be the one rejected because that is what had happened before in foster homes. But for the first time, I realized a separation could be permanent.

After Will and Leroy joined Ms. Sandnes’s family, I had to share her time with two troubled boys.

“I have to get some poster board for my science project,” I told Ms. Sandnes one day while she was restraining Leroy.

“Can’t you see I’m busy now!” she snapped.

I went to my room and lost control. I started pulling out hunks of my hair. Finally, Ms. Sandnes checked on me. “Ashley, let’s talk about what’s bothering you.” Ms. Sandnes rubbed my back. How could I tell her that I wanted her all to myself?

Mary Fernandez started a photo album for me containing the pathetically few pictures I had managed to accumulate over the past nine years. She pointed to one of Grandpa feeding the chickens. “Tell me about him,” she urged.

“I don’t remember him very well.”

“What happened the last time you saw him?”

I tried to find a place to concentrate my vision, but my eyes ached. “I’m tired.” I slumped in my chair and then blurted, “He was shot.” Tears welled up faster than I could corral them.

During family work Mr. Bruce showed us the photos the Mosses had taken the day we went to the beach. Luke erupted like a volcano. “I hate those people!”

Mr. Bruce asked him, “What do you think should happen to them?”

Luke had been running around the room slapping the walls as he passed. He leaped on the couch. “Marjorie Moss should go to the electric chair!” He continued jumping on and off the couch as though it were a piece of gym equipment until the session was over.

Many of the residents, including Luke, attended Parkhill School on campus, which was designed for children with behavioral or emotional problems. Others, like me, attended public schools. I was in the gifted program at Dickenson Elementary School. In October the other pupils elected me Student Council representative for the fourth grade. Ms. Sandnes was thrilled. “Next year you could run for president!” she said.

“Do you think I’ll be here next year?” I asked. Since I had never completed a full year at one school, this was good news—except it also meant that maybe the administration did not think anyone would adopt me.

Although I rode the bus with several other Children’s Home residents, I sat as far away from them as I could. One afternoon while standing in the bus line, I noticed two girls staring at me. Both were fifth graders. The blonde had French braids; the other had short brown pigtails. They both had on floral-print dresses with lacy socks folded down over shiny Mary Janes and looked like child models in doll commercials. The blonde approached me hesitantly. “Are you really from that orphan place?”

“Yeah, so what?”

“You brush your hair, and your clothes even match,” the other girl replied.

The blonde asked, “What’s it like living in an orphanage?”

“There’s always someone to play with,” I replied. “And we have a big gym, a pool, and lots of field trips.”

The next day they sought me out on the playground and brought others to hear about my life in foster care. I had a stockpile of Moss horror stories that kept them entertained for weeks. Soon others chimed in with their own woeful tales. One of the girls said that her mom had run off with the mailman. A boy admitted that when his father got drunk, he beat him with a belt. Several divulged that their fathers slapped their mothers. After someone disclosed that his father was in jail for possession of marijuana, I bragged, “My uncle is in prison for murder.”

To keep my audience enthralled, I developed a comedic routine featuring “funny” lines about my life. “Every time my mother came around, she was with a different man.” I paused for effect. “The last time she brought a woman!”

I really got them interested when I told stories about living with my grandfather. I went into detail about driving fast and playing chicken in the beat-up car with no doors and seat belts. “I thought I was going to
die!
” I said theatrically. “But I only busted my lip.”

When I had earned my place as the center of attention, I launched into the tale of Grandpa’s gunfight. I made popping sounds with my mouth, then staggered around. Falling to the ground in slow motion, I got shrieks of appreciation.

I had just read a book about Egypt and was determined to be Cleopatra for Halloween. I made a list of all the accessories I would require, including a black wig and a golden armband shaped like a snake. Ms. Sandnes found hand-me-downs for the other kids and spent most of her budget on me since she knew I wanted the costume so badly. Because of security concerns, we could not trick-or-treat in regular neighborhoods, so the staff drove us to dorms at the University of South Florida, where student volunteers decorated their doors and stocked treats as a community service program. Just like kids all over the country, we ran around collecting as much candy as we could, but we had to do so in this phony situation. Then we were herded back to the cottages, where the staff locked away our loot and doled it out later.

In November the Merritts showed up for my tenth birthday. Mrs. Merritt had crocheted a vest for me and made a pillow from one of the latch-hook projects I had made at her house. Luke, Mary Miller, and our therapists joined us for cake in the conference room. Luke ripped open my presents, tasted the icing before the cake was cut, and as he blew out my candles, he spit all over everything—spoiling every aspect of my party.

At the end Mary Miller said, “I have another surprise for you.”

We went out to her car, and she lifted out the bike I had left with Mrs. Chavez. Then she handed me a brown box. “I’m sorry it isn’t in better shape.” I opened the lid. Inside was my Easy-Bake oven. The original carton was soggy and smelled like the Mosses’ moldy shed. The packages containing the cake mix were mildewed.

“What about my dolls and sleeping bag?”

“Mrs. Moss claimed that this was all she could find.”

I returned to my cottage fuming about Luke’s behavior, my ruined oven, everything else that Mrs. Moss had kept, all my other possessions that had been left behind in various foster homes, and even the bike, which had rusted in the rain. I also wondered whether my mother remembered what day it was.

A few days later we had my cottage birthday party. Ms. Sandnes picked out gifts from among the donated clothes and toys in the storage unit. She bought me another cake studded with icing flowers and adorned with my name in green letters. Everyone gathered to gobble the cake and ice cream. It was the same party we had every few weeks for one or another of the cottage kids, so I did not feel particularly special.