HALF-LIFE by Amy Gustine
Sarah didn’t apply for the job with a plan. She just wanted in.
Melanie Cuppernell was returning to work as a third-grade teacher and needed a nanny for ten-month-old Grayson and almost-five-year-old Beatrice, who’d missed the kindergarten cut-off.
“You’ll have to keep her entertained.” Melanie laughed. “And let me tell you, that’s no easy task.”
During the interview in a bright room with yellow sofas and paintings thick with color, Melanie asked questions Sarah could answer truthfully. Where was she from? Here. Age? 22. How long had she nannied for Melanie’s friend Rachel? 2 years. How long had she worked at the daycare before that? 2 years. Melanie didn’t ask about her family, so there’d been no need for lies, though Sarah had a string prepared because Nancy, the social worker assigned to Sarah when she aged out, had warned against telling employers she grew up in foster care. “Some people see it as a negative.”
If asked, Sarah claimed her father died when she was two and her mother, a retired secretary, lived in Florida. This narrative had satisfied Rachel and it would satisfy Melanie. Sarah had refined it to such simplicity, it was impossible to forget. To such banality, no one ever wanted more. If she ever married, Sarah’s husband might want more, but husbands, like other family, were bestowed by the universe, and so far the universe had not been all that forthcoming.
At the end of the interview, Sarah affected a light-hearted voice and asked, “So, are you related to Judge Cuppernell?”
“He’s my dad,” Melanie said. “Do you know him?”
Sarah shook her head. “Just the name.” Judges’ names appeared in the newspaper and on yard signs every few years. And Sarah wasn’t worried about her own name being recognized. Melanie would have no reason to know it and the Judge, if he remembered, which seemed unlikely, would probably dismiss it as coincidence. Before scheduling the interview, Sarah had gone to the library and checked. There were nine Sarah Andersons in Toledo’s white pages and so many on Facebook the computer crashed trying to load them all.
After Melanie backs out of the driveway that first morning, the first time Sarah is alone with the children, Beatrice looks at her with trusting eyes. “What do you want to do?” Her voice rides high with anticipation.
“Nothing,” Sarah says, trying out cruelty.
“Well, we have to do something. That’s what Mommy hired you for.”
Melanie had not lied when she called the girl precocious.
Weekdays Sarah arrives at 7:30, by which time Melanie has left for school and her husband Aaron stands by the front door, tapping at his phone. Every day he says, “Bea’s in the kitchen and the baby’s up, I think,” until one morning Sarah says it before he can and after that Aaron smiles and salutes her as they pass in the foyer. “It’s all yours, Captain.”
She imposes a schedule similar to the daycare. “It will get you ready for kindergarten.”
Beatrice balks. “I do what I want.”
“Not anymore.”
Grayson waits, half awake, in his crib. Diaper change, face wash, breakfast, tooth brushing, clothes, then a walk, though Sarah allows a little variation here. Bea can take her bike or scooter. Snack time, reading time, play time, lunch time, nap time (Grayson) and craft time (Bea), TV time, another walk, song time, snack time (kids) and cooking time (Sarah). At Rachel’s, cooking was both harder – her twin infants liked to be held a lot – and easier – unlike Bea, the babies never questioned why there were two dirty pans but only one loaf of banana bread.
Sarah makes spaghetti because no one counts pasta strands. She makes casseroles because women like Rachel and Melanie don’t have plans for the leftover ham or the vulnerable half of last night’s green pepper. When Sarah tells Melanie, “Just warm it up, it’s all baked,” Melanie, like Rachel, doesn’t notice the ragged edge of the casserole, which attests to its having been cut and the larger portion transferred from the 9x12 to the 9x9 bakeware.
“You’re such a good cook!” Melanie exclaims instead. “I can’t believe what you make out of stuff I throw away.”
“My mom taught me.” It’s one of the few true things she’s ever revealed about her mother, who made delicious meals out of things Sarah couldn’t name, like a blade-shaped lettuce she put in a pan with black water. Once Sarah tried describing the black water’s taste to a stocker at the grocery store, but the woman looked at her like she was nuts. Embarrassed, Sarah switched stores, afraid to run into her again. Months later, at Rachel’s, she sniffed the contents of a brown bottle on the counter. Balsamic vinegar. A taste confirmed: this is what her mother cooked the lettuce in.
Week two, Thursday afternoon. While Grayson is napping and Beatrice is in the basement making Play-Doh cupcakes, Sarah sneaks out, locking the door to make it appear as though she’s still in the house, then stands behind the garage knee-deep in yard clippings and mounds of white-veined dirt dislodged from last year’s pots. Disturbed by Sarah’s footsteps, bees emerge from beneath one of the mounds and draw their turbulent pattern in the air. Sarah takes several steps away and regards the lurch of her watch’s second hand. One minute. Two.
It only takes three and half minutes. Three and a half lousy minutes!
Beatrice’s muted voice hollers Sarah’s name, the “ah” long and echoing, while the bees slowly retract into their nest. As the minutes grind on, Sarah strains to detect any change in the child’s voice, but fear is not discernible in so muffled a version. Beatrice doesn’t come out, or even open the back door, and Sarah remembers how it is to be a child, the unspoken boundary between your life and out there. Your apartment. Your mom. Your kitchen table. You do not cross that boundary alone, and no one has to tell you that. Sarah’s mother never told her. She just knew. You wait.
Twenty minutes and the shouting has stopped. The feeling in Sarah’s stomach is both familiar and strange. A memory she had not remembered until now.
She slips from behind the garage, forces herself to sidle past the climbing rose she will later learn Melanie’s mother planted forty years ago, when they first moved in. She comes by several times a year to fertilize and trim the plant, worrying over its striped blooms because Melanie lacks a green thumb.
Sarah opens the door and hears Grayson crying, finds the two of them in his room. Beatrice has somehow gotten her brother out of the crib and sits with him on the floor, paging through his favorite book, her high-pitched voice wavering through tears, trying to interest him in what the zebra is going to do about his stripes.
When Sarah appears, instead of rushing to her, Bea levels a knowing, angry look. “I thought you left.”
“I just went outside a minute.” Sarah sits down cross-legged and takes the baby, rocking him against her chest, his feet anchored in the flesh of her folded thighs. “You should have come out.”
“Gray was crying.”
Sarah scowls. “Did you wake him up?”
Beatrice shakes her head. “He was crying and you weren’t here. I had to get him out of his crib.”
“Did you drop him?”
“He was crying because you left.”
Ah, Sarah thinks. Smart girl. Knows how to turn things around. But so does Sarah. “He was crying because you panicked. I’m gone a few minutes and you panic.”
“I didn’t panic.” Beatrice looks both defiant and ashamed.
“I was just in the backyard. Did you even look out the window?”
Pause. “Yes. You weren’t there.”
She’s lying, but it’s Bea’s truth now. The narrative she will continue to tell herself. And her mother probably. Sarah’s chest tightens again. By four p.m. today she needs a more compelling narrative for Bea to pass along.
The narrative she provides is pain and pleasure.
Grayson sits in his highchair, swirling fingers in the crushed, seedy remains of raspberries, which he eats by the carton, as if they weren’t a dollar an ounce. It seems unlikely, but Sarah remembers picking raspberries with her mother. Unlikely because they had no car, so they must have gone with a friend. Sarah remembers a few first names. Lydia. Joan. Mindy. But without last names there is no way to claw back the years.
With Bea back at her Play-Doh bakery, Sarah takes the baby outside and sets him near the bees’ nest, glancing around to be sure she’s unobserved before prodding it with a stick. When several bees emerge, she traps two in a glass jar laced with sugar water, then slides the lid of the jar away and presses its mouth against Grayson’s bare back, tapping hard on the bottom to startle the bees. To her surprise it works and one of the bees stings the baby. He lets out a wail that tumbles into gulping sobs.
Sarah pulls out the stinger, then rubs the wound, pressing hard enough to distract the nerves. “Oh, I’m sorry. I’m sorry,” she tells the baby. “I had to do it. I had to.”
Inside she shows Beatrice. “Stay away from the back of the garage. There’s a bees’ nest in the ground. One of them stung your brother.” The red circle with its center puncture has already bloomed to two inches. While Grayson wails and Beatrice sits beside him singing, “It’ll be okay, it’ll be okay my baby,” Sarah makes an icepack and applies it to the baby’s back.
Slowly, his crying diminishes and Sarah turns to Beatrice. “Do you want to make some real cupcakes?”
“It took no time at all to spot him,” Melanie tells Sarah.
They’re in the kitchen, Sarah washing frosting fingerprints from the cupboards while Melanie pretends to make headway on the counters. Long smears mixed with sprinkles and Red Hots – which Beatrice inexplicably adores – pock the white marble, but Melanie is only pinching individual candies, making no real progress in an attempt to protect her silk blouse.
Bea greeted her mother nearly quivering with excitement – “Grayson almost died!” – and Sarah quickly intervened.
“A bee stung him. You have a big nest in the backyard. I iced the spot and watched him carefully. He had no trouble breathing, and the swelling was very slight. I gave him a dose of Tylenol for the pain.”
Melanie is pleased at her handling of the crisis. “I knew you were the one for us.”
Now Grayson is playing with some pots and plastic spatulas, Bea has taken herself off and Sarah knows she’s gotten away with it. There will be no mention of her disappearance. She applies another squirt of soap to the sponge and waves Melanie off.
From the safety of a counter stool, Melanie continues her story about a student. “He’s one of my Ethans.” There are three in her class, the name’s popularity having surged at the turn of the millennium. Melanie considered it herself, she tells Sarah, but aware of name contamination – every teacher develops strong associations with previous students that ruin otherwise good names – she chose Grayson instead. “Because it’s my dad’s name, I knew I’d always love it.”
Ethan K. is new at school and Melanie declares, “He’s going to be my problem kid.”
She ticks off the “flags” she found in his file. #1 He lives in an apartment on Moss Road. #2 No father listed. #3 Only one emergency contact listed, a man’s name, and under “Relationship” it says “friend.”
“Today I kept him in because he’s behind in language, so I have him there trying to squeeze out a paragraph about his summer, and I find out he’s alone all the time. His mother ‘works’.” Melanie does air quotes. “Okay, so has she ever heard of a babysitter? Or summer camp? I asked what he did all day and he says he plays his DS. Lovely, right? No wonder he can barely eke out an English sentence. And he eats peanut butter sandwiches every day for lunch.”
“They’re filling, and cheap.”
“Right.” Melanie rolls her eyes.
As she details the many angry outbursts Ethan K. has had in the two weeks since school started, Sarah realizes it could have been her fourth-grade teacher, Mrs. Schuppe, who reported her mother. She’d always assumed it was the neighbor, Mrs. Zabik, because she left the door to her apartment open, would have seen Sarah’s mother coming and going, and her mother had often warned Sarah not to give Mrs. Zabik any information. “Anything you say can and will be held against you.”
But what about Mrs. Schuppe and the teachers before her? They knew of all those days missed, heard her mother’s excuses. A rash. A doctor’s appointment. A family reunion. Or maybe Sarah herself told Mrs. Schuppe something incriminating. Listening to Melanie, she learns again what she already knew: everywhere, by everyone, things can and will be held against you. Things you never even thought to hide, like the street you live on or the emergency contact on your school form. It could have been something as simple as that which brought Sarah to the attention of Judge Grayson Cuppernell.
Four bedrooms. Eight closets. Three bathrooms. A basement storage room full of boxes.
Sarah makes her way through it all during TV time, when both kids are too captivated by Disney to notice her whereabouts. In the hollowed-out pages of a book about the Lewis and Clark expedition she finds a pair of diamond earrings and a couple of old-looking pieces of jewelry – a pin and an engagement ring – all of which she leaves untouched. In the master closet in a shoebox under other shoeboxes she finds a blue rubber dildo. She knows instinctively what it’s for, but not what it means. Does Aaron know it’s there? Is it normal to have such a thing? Sarah washes her hands.
Their medicine cabinet conceals the normal things – tampons, toothpaste, fungus cream, Benadryl, Advil – plus something called Zovirax, which Sarah looks up on Wikipedia using Melanie’s computer. Usually Wikipedia sends her mind dodging and weaving in too many directions, one article pushing her forward to a web of a hundred more, until she quits not because she understands, but because she never will.
In this case, though, it’s only two links to the answer: a picture of the familiar cluster of blisters on the edge of a lip. They bloom on Sarah’s every three or four months.
That evening Sarah rides her bike to the drugstore, but she can’t find Zovirax on the shelves and goes up to the pharmacy counter.
“You need a script,” the pharmacist says.
Sarah assumes she can get one at the free clinic. “How much is it? I don’t have insurance.”
The pharmacist taps at the computer. “A hundred and fifty.”
“Dollars?”
“I know. It’s expensive. Have you tried the new exchanges?” The pharmacist explains Obamacare.
It sounds like an innocent enough trade: information for medicine. But the government took her mother and gave her nothing. She is reluctant to exchange with them again.
The next day Sarah puts the Zovirax from Melanie’s medicine cabinet in her pocket. It is a very small piece, she figures, of what this family owes her.
Wednesday, two p.m., she announces she’s going to the neighbor’s for an egg.
“You can’t,” Bea says. “Grayson is sleeping.”
“You’ll stay here and watch him.”
“I can’t do that.” Bea flashes a big grin. She thinks Sarah is kidding.
“Sure you can. Just sit here and wait. If he cries, go upstairs and talk to him. He won’t though. I’ll be back in a bit.”
“What’s a bit?”
“Ten minutes,” Sarah says.
Bea looks at the big grandfather clock she can’t read. “I want to go with you.”
“You’ll be fine here. You have to stop panicking about being alone. It’s no big deal. I was alone all the time when I was your age.”
“You were?”
“Yeah, sometimes overnight.” Sarah stops herself from saying more, in case Bea repeats this to Melanie.
“Okay.” Bea sits down on the couch and crosses her legs, her tiny hands cupping her tiny knee.
Outside Sarah stands in the bushes next to a window sneaking looks into the living room, where Bea sits rigidly, glancing repeatedly at the clock. After two minutes, she looks at the TV remote lying on the end table. House rules: no more than two hours a day, and that’s reserved for an hour after nap time and an hour after dinner, when Melanie and Aaron need a little quiet time.
At Bea’s age, Sarah watched a lot of TV because TV hours are different. Faster. Fuller. They make it easy to pretend your mother is in her room napping and they count the day for you. When the shows about evil twins and men saving women from kidnappers come on, it’s lunchtime. The news: dinnertime. Shows with men on a stage telling jokes: bedtime.
Very slowly, as if Bea is afraid the remote will bite her, she picks it up and turns on the set. It springs to life with a happy brown-haired woman talking about how to grow a vegetable garden. Bea taps at the remote until Tom and Jerry appear, then scoots back on the couch and relaxes.
Good girl, Sarah thinks. These are the things you have to learn.
She thought she would know him. Only now does she realize she’s been picturing his robes, his desk, the Great Seal of the State of Ohio behind him, but not the man himself.
He’s short, 5’7” or 8”, her eye level. His right cheek is mottled light and dark in large, irregularly shaped patches and she knows instinctively this is a disease or defect of some kind. It will get worse. Do they hurt? No, she decides. Maybe unsightly, even embarrassing, but they do not cause physical pain.
“Hi, I’m Melanie’s dad. Did she tell you I was coming by?”
Sarah eyes the Judge, then looks behind her toward the kitchen, where Beatrice and Gray are eating lunch, to reinforce her role: she is the one in charge now. But they hear his voice and Beatrice comes running down the hall.
“Grandpa!”
He hauls in a dirty canvas bag filled with tools. “Mel says you’ve got no water pressure in the kitchen. I’m going to take a look.”
He removes a small screen from the spout’s end and cleans out a build-up that looks like hardened baking soda. “Mineral deposits,” he explains. “Mostly calcium.” But getting rid of it doesn’t help the pressure, so he heads down the basement to shut off the water. “I’ll have to replace the valves.”
Sarah empties the sink cabinet, stacking the cleaners and plant food out of Grayson’s reach. The Judge lies on his back, reaching into the cabinet over his head. The knees of his jeans are white with wear and a triangle of hairy flesh shows where his old button-down pulls free of his belt.
“Can you hand me the wrench with the red handle?”
She looks in the bag for anything with a red handle.
“These are pliers.” He hands them back. “The wrench is the one with the round head.”
They work like that for an hour, the Judge asking for various tools and once for a cookie sheet to protect the back of the cupboard. “I’m going to use the blowtorch to solder this in, so keep the kids away.”
Bea asks what a blowtorch is and when her grandfather explains, she says, “I already got burned once today.”
Sarah stiffens.
The Judge slides out of the cabinet and sits up. “You were? What happened?”
Bea presents her leg. “I was cooking.”
That morning Bea and Sarah made cookies, another food of uncountable raw ingredients and indeterminate portions, which makes it easy to squirrel some away in her tote. Sarah had explained the oven’s heat, showed Bea how to use a potholder, but when the cookies were done Bea leaned on the door while taking them out. To her credit, she didn’t even cry. Good girl, Sarah told her. Brave girl. You’ll know better next time. You’ll be more careful. Pain is an efficient teacher. Fortunately Bea doesn’t repeat these words to her grandfather.
The Judge kisses the red line on her knee. “Ovens are hot. Nothing for little girls to mess with.” Then he winks at Sarah, assuming Bea being near the oven was an accident.
“So what was it like,” Sarah asks Melanie, “having your father be a judge?”
Melanie shrugs. “There were a few interesting moments.”
“Like what?”
“This one time, I was maybe seven or eight, and these people were upset about a ruling Dad made on an abortion clinic. They were protesting in front of our house, this house, actually.”
That’s when Sarah discovers this is Melanie’s family house. Her parents gave it to Melanie and Aaron two years ago.
“My mom had the twins in the bath, so my brother Tim and I were watching this out front and trying to figure out what was going on. The people had signs with fetuses on them and stuff like ‘Cuppernell kills babies.’ Finally Tim, who was just starting to read, goes into the bathroom and asks my mother, ‘Does Daddy murder babies?’
“My mom loves to retell that story,” Melanie says. “She always says Tim was waiting until he’d been told what to think of this act Daddy supposedly performed, ready to side with him in case it turns out killing babies is something Daddy is supposed to do.”
“So what happened?”
“Mom locked us in the house and marched outside and told the people she had four children in there and they were scared and could read those signs and could those people please go.”
“Did they?”
“Yeah. They actually apologized. My mom always said it was because they never thought of Dad as someone with four little kids of his own. I guess they thought that meant he was a good guy.” Melanie shrugs again. “I never did figure it out. I mean, if it was so easy to give up, why had they come?”
The next day Sarah Googles Aaron, Melanie, the Judge and his wife. Wife: zero hits. Melanie and Aaron: two each. Judge Grayson Cuppernell: five thousand, eight hundred and twenty-four.
As the leaves began to redden and fall, Sarah works her way through. Most are official documents and news articles of little significance, but she feels increasingly powerful with the gathering of his facts. Where he went to law school and college. When he graduated. Newsworthy cases. One day she finds an article about a gavel he gives to kids finalizing adoptions. The other judges who do adoptions – it’s called “Probate Court,” Sarah learns – give them too. The article shows Judge Cuppernell handing the gavel to a pretty white girl being adopted by her uncle. Sarah stews on this. Gavels are a symbol of power. Instead of pretty white girls with nice uncles they need to give them to children being put in foster care, something to slam and say, “No! Order, order in this house!” Or they could give them to kids aging out. You are your own parent now. Call your life to order.
The lessons continue. Sarah teaches Bea how to slice the neck of a banana laterally so the top won’t bruise. She teaches her how to mix Grayson’s formula and change his diaper, how to crack an egg and how to set the heat level on the stove. “Five is usually good. When in doubt, choose five.” It’s too soon for spaghetti, pouring out the boiling water too dangerous, but she teaches her how to make rice, which Sarah used to put in her mother’s shopping cart by the five-pound bag.
“Really?” her mother would ask, lightly knuckling the top of her head. “Five pounds? That’s a lot of rice.”
On the days her mother slipped away Sarah would eat it for lunch and dinner with big pats of butter and lots of salt. When they were out of butter she’d put on ketchup or mayonnaise, and when her mother returned after a night or two, sometimes three, fuzzy-eyed and penitent, Sarah would make twice as much, and after dinner, her mother would take a bath and Sarah would sit on the toilet and tell funny stories, or ask lots of questions, vainly trying to keep her awake. When she drifted off, Sarah drained the water and covered her with towels.
Sarah teaches Bea how to work the cordless phone and about 911. “It’s only for emergencies, if there’s a fire or Grayson chokes.”
The notion of confronting the world alone unsettles Bea. “But you would call.”
“What if I’m not here?”
“Then Mommy or Daddy will call.”
“What if Mommy and Daddy aren’t home?”
“Then I’d be with Grandma, or Aunt Lydi.”
“Someday you’ll be alone.”
“I will?”
“Everybody is. You have to keep your wits about you.”
“What are wits?”
Sarah puts the girl on her lap. “Your smarts, your thinking. You can take care of yourself, Bea. You just have to learn some stuff.”
“I don’t want to learn stuff. I want you to do it.”
“But what if something happens to me?”
“What is going to happen?” Bea starts to cry, little hiccupping bursts that tighten Sarah’s throat.
“You need to toughen up.” She lifts Bea off her lap and gives her a light swat on the butt. “There’s nothing even wrong right now. What are you crying about?”
Sarah lives in an efficiency apartment in a complex off Bancroft Street. The Saturday after Thanksgiving she is watching reruns on TBS while the microwave blasts away at leftover spaghetti when a thunderstorm comes up, rain beating the single-paned windows. Sarah has always liked storms, so she takes her dinner and stands watching the lightning, feeling the thunder through her slippered feet, when the cracking noise reaches through and before she can see what is happening out there in the dark, she drops her plate, covers her head and her knees skid across the carpet, the cold air and rain on her now, and when the cracking noises have stopped Sarah looks up to see an oak tree suspended above her bed.
“My God, that’s terrible,” Melanie says. “Where did you go?”
“I checked into a motel.”
“A motel? Really? Don’t you have a friend or somebody to stay with?”
Sarah shrugs, embarrassed. She attended seven schools after she was taken from her mother. Kids’ names surface. Amber. Tanya. Ricky. Pat. Julie. She doesn’t know where any of them are now. That was Sarah’s life. One day she was sharing a toothbrush holder with you, the next she never saw you again.
“Do you have renter’s insurance?” Melanie persists. “Maybe it covers motel.”
“No, actually my mom said I shouldn’t bother. My stuff, it was so cheap. Not worth the premium.” It was actually Nancy who said this. In her delicate way, with a tilt of her head and a sad smile, the way Nancy said everything.
“What about your lease? Do you have to honor it?”
“I don’t know.”
Before she can stop her, Melanie gets the Judge on the phone. “Dad, yeah, I have a legal question.”
Sarah has nothing to worry about. The Judge says she will definitely be able to break her lease.
Melanie insists she stay with them until she finds a new place to rent, but the fourth bedroom is crowded with a huge desk and two bookcases, so she’ll have to sleep with Bea.
“Do you want the top or the bottom?” Bea asks.
Bunk beds make Sarah feel as if she’s in a coffin, so she takes the mattress off and sleeps on the floor, tells Bea it’s like a magic carpet. Of course Bea wants her mattress on the floor too, and they sleep like that, side by side, flying all night.
Evil. That is the word Sarah finds in the blog about Judge Cuppernell taking away Reginald Diglio’s grandchildren. It appears entry after entry. One-hundred thirty-eight times. Sarah counts. She finds a news article from five years ago profiling Diglio, who at the time was circling the courthouse in his pickup truck from 8:00 a.m. to 5:00 p.m. Monday through Friday, protesting the placement of his grandchildren in foster care. He had a sign mounted in the truck’s bed. “Cuppernell took my kids.” The picture of the sign shows a poster board with slanting, furry-edged letters, bleed under from some sort of homemade stencil she guesses, and Sarah feels an upwelling in her throat. The tears surprise her. Yes, yes, she thinks. He took away your kids.
But the article itself is like reading a blank wall. Simple facts. Only one is useful: Reginald Diglio lives on Mester Road, a long two-lane stretching from the western edge of the city into the country, where houses give way to cornfields and scrapyards.
It takes more than an hour to bike there. Sarah’s legs are used to it, though, and it’s a warm day for early December in Ohio. Sunny, high forties. She’s feeling strong and optimistic when she enters the last stretch and the signs change over, white with fat black numbers: County Route 24. Half a mile later three giant children’s faces come into view.
Sarah stops across the road. The sign is enormous, wider and taller than either of the rusted trucks sinking into the yard. Superimposed on the kids’ smiles are foot-high letters: Judge Cuppernell took my grandchildren. The rest of the yard is cut into rows by dozens of white paint buckets with metal pipe cemented inside and a piece of plywood lashed to the top displaying a name. Headstones for pets, perhaps. Rudy. Polly. Iris. Tim. Between the rows are other metal, plastic and wooden things, intended, she assumes, as sculpture. Behind them stands a dilapidated two-story wooden house. One side disappears into a thicket under which Sarah glimpses what appear to be a mattress and couch slowly rotting.
For five or six minutes she takes in each sculpture, their menacing shapes, like bodies mid-attack, until the front door flies open. Someone shouts, words lost to her as she gets her feet on the pedals, fumbles, turns her tire onto the grass, slides, regains her grip and pedals off, heart like a crack of thunder against her ribs.
“The other kids sense something’s off. It’s because he’s angry all the time. Abused kids are always angry.” Sarah overhears Melanie saying this to someone on the phone.
She has come home mid-conversation, Bluetooth earpiece in place, waved to the kids and Sarah in the sunroom and slid into the kitchen. Sarah strains to hear the rest of the conversation while helping Beatrice finish a Lego princess castle.
“So he walked home today, and I watched out the window. He’s always alone, always, but today these other kids ran up to him and for a second I thought he’d made friends, you know? Then suddenly he slaps one of them across the face. They all stopped, but Ethan never even paused. Just kept walking. Now there’s something wrong there, don’t you think?”
Melanie’s voice is hard. “I’m sure it’s his mother. I talked to her. She doesn’t care. Too busy with her boyfriend, or her bongs, or something.
“Believe me, I know,” she says, in a tone that makes it sound as though whomever she’s talking to may be questioning how she can be so sure. “She’s skinny, too skinny.”
Melanie considers being too skinny the same thing as being too fat: suspect. “Drugs,” she says. “Maybe alcohol, but I bet drugs.”
A few days before Christmas, Melanie asks about Sarah’s plans. “I take it you aren’t going to Florida? Is your mother coming here?”
Sarah claims her mother is in town staying with an old friend. “I’ll go over there Christmas day.”
“Okay, then I’m going to give you your present now.”
It’s a gift certificate to Williams-Sonoma.
“You’re such a great cook. I’m sure you can find something you’ll love there.”
Christmas morning Bea shakes Sarah, who pretends to be groggy, though in fact she’s been lying awake for an hour.
“Come on, Santa came! Santa came!” Bea pulls at her arm, but Sarah sends her off.
“I’ll be down. I have to go to the bathroom.”
She listens to the baby’s cry, Bea’s cheerful shouts and Melanie and Aaron’s muttered permissions. The scent of pancakes and bacon, the only two things Aaron can cook, reach her.
At eight Sarah dresses quietly and slips out of the house. First the bus to the Catholic church on Cornish, two warm Masses, then two rides around town, switching every twenty minutes so the driver doesn’t get suspicious, and an early dinner at the Chinese restaurant on Passe Road, the only place open on Christmas day. From there it’s a two-mile walk back to the Cuppernell’s.
The house is dark, as Sarah expected, Aaron, Melanie and the kids having gone to her parents’ for dinner.
Sarah gets out the pan she bought at Williams-Sonoma, the important one. Her mother owned its twin, the words “All-Clad” engraved in the handle. She had the small saucepan and a stockpot too, but these were indulgences. “The only pan that really has to be top quality is the large sauté,” her mother explained, “so your meat and fish sear evenly and you can scrape the fond off with a metal spatula. Never use non-stick for this. No good. You can’t get the fond.” Her mother showed her how to polish the pans with a white powder and hang them on a rack above the sink in their mint-green kitchen.
Sarah isn’t hungry, but she defrosts a chicken breast anyway and while it sizzles, she wonders where the pans ended up. She never thought to ask for them. Then again, she was ten when her mother died and a month passed before her foster parents said anything. By that time, the pans were probably long gone.
The chicken is perfect, browned without burning, juicy in the middle. Sarah wraps it up, then polishes her pan with the powder the saleswoman recommended. She hadn’t recalled its name or what the label looked like, but when she finishes, she knows this is the right stuff because the pan shines, brand new again.
The Saturday after New Year’s Sarah has an appointment to see an apartment and Melanie insists on driving her. She’s long since discovered Sarah has no car.
Stained tan carpeting, white walls. It’s another holding cell, like the bedrooms she slept in as a foster child, but it’s partially furnished with a leather couch, bedframe, table and chairs, and the rent is the same as her old place.
“Furnished?” Melanie sneers, turning to Sarah. “Did you want furnished?”
The landlord, a skinny guy wearing yellow pants, loses interest. No sale here.
On the drive home Melanie pulls into another place with a “Units Available” sign out front. Much newer, the complex is set back from the road behind a rolling lawn. The cars line up, protected from the light snow by a long peaked roof. White numbers reserve each spot.
They look at a one-bedroom. It has floors Sarah thinks are wood, but Melanie informs her it’s “just laminate. Looks nice for an apartment, though.”
The pan could hang here. And she’d keep her laundry quarters in a bag in this drawer. But it costs three times her old place.
Sarah says she’ll think about it. Feeling the need to justify her delay, she claims to be saving for a car.
On the way home Melanie asks if she knows anything about cars.
“No,” Sarah admits.
Melanie smiles. “I’ve got just the man for you, then.”
Within a week Judge Cuppernell has found a used Civic thirty miles away and he’s coming to get Melanie and Sarah to look at it. They ride south on a blustery Sunday in the Judge’s Suburban. Melanie is laughing because Aaron has never been alone for this long with both kids. “Can you believe it? He’s just going to die.”
Her father seems to find this just as funny. “That poor guy. Fathers really have it tough these days.”
Melanie slaps him playfully on the arm. “Oh right, tough. Really tough. How about grandfathers? Have you ever even changed a diaper?”
The Judge laughs. “Avoiding that is one of my main goals in life.”
The Judge looks under the hood and examines the tires, asks questions of the owner, a Hispanic man with a goatee, then has Sarah start up the car and gun the engine. “No blue smoke,” he says, taking her place in the driver’s seat. “Let’s take it for a spin.” As they drive the Judge explains what he’s testing for – alignment, noisy brakes, stopping distance – then pulls over and tells Sarah to take the wheel. “Let’s get on the expressway. See if you feel comfortable with the acceleration.”
As they pull back into the seller’s driveway, the Judge says, “It seems pretty solid to me, and these have good safety crash ratings, for their age anyway. I want you to take it in, though, and make sure the air bags check out.” He gives her the name of a mechanic he trusts.
Sarah swallows hard as she writes the check. Five thousand dollars. Nearly her entire life’s savings. She’s close to tears, but that’s not why.
She doesn’t go back to the furnished place Melanie sneered at or the complex with the rolling lawn. She finds a place with carpet not as stained and nothing by way of furnishings but an old rug left rolled in the bedroom closet. Sarah moves in early February, taking delivery of a brand new mattress which she puts on a metal frame scored at Goodwill, where she also bought sheets, a blanket, dishes and silverware. She’s started from scratch once before, knows the priorities.
Melanie gives her the yellow couches from the sunroom.
“They were my mom’s. I’ve been looking for an excuse to get rid of them so her feelings won’t be hurt. If you take them, she’ll be happy and I can get something I like. I mean, don’t feel you have to keep them. As soon as you find something better, just toss them.”
Sarah spends the last of her savings paying two guys from her old apartment complex to haul the couches, but she heaves the stranger’s rug in the dumpster. Throwing it over the edge – gone, forget it, she doesn’t need it – is exhilarating.
Now that Sarah has a car, Melanie begins leaving her money to buy groceries. She tries new vegetables and spices every week, makes casseroles from recipes rather than remainders. One day she goes to a store that sells nothing but fish because she’s going to try making seafood paella, a recipe she found in one of Mrs. Cuppernell’s old cookbooks. At the counter she explains to Bea why the fish are on beds of ice and what “deveined shrimp” means.
On the way home they pass Melanie’s school. It’s lunchtime and the students are out playing, so Sarah texts Melanie, who brings them in to see her classroom. While Bea looks around and Grayson dozes in the stroller, Melanie and Sarah stand at the window.
“Is that him?”
Ethan stands alone against the building, his thick, uncombed hair snagged on its bricks, trying to feign preoccupation with a stick, but it’s painfully obvious he’s just standing, excluded from four-square, basketball, the climbing wall, the monkey bars.
“The way he acts, nobody likes him,” Melanie says. “It’s heartbreaking.” She goes over to help Bea feed the fish.
Ethan tries to twirl the stick like a baton, but it’s too rough and scrapes his fingers. He examines his hand, rubs the pain away, then begins rolling the stick against the building, trying to sand it smooth, until one of the playground monitors, a surly woman in a bright yellow jacket, tells him to quit. Sarah can’t hear every word, but it’s clear she’s telling him he’ll damage the building and Ethan is pleading his case: it’s just a stick against brick. The monitor shakes her grumpy face and points to the ground. Ethan throws the stick down and walks several feet away, to stand behind the trunk of a massive oak. The woman yells something else and he sulks back toward her, forced to take up a position in full view of the other kids. Childhood, Sarah thinks: a prison made up of lack. A lack of words, of knowing better, of being believed. You are at everyone’s mercy.
Back at Melanie’s house she looks through the toys and comes across a Rubik’s cube, its edges pockmarked by Gray’s teething, its colors hopelessly jumbled. On the way home, she buys a new cube and the next day prints off tips on how to master it. That evening, she gives them to Melanie.
“He’ll have something to do on the playground at least.”
A week later Melanie reports that Ethan takes the cube out every day and that some other boys have started gathering to watch him.
“It’s really improved things for him. It was a brilliant idea. You should be a teacher. Have you ever considered that? Going to college?”
Sarah dodges the question with a vague plan about saving money and going when she can “concentrate on her studies” and she’s “figured out what she wants to do.”
The truth is she has no idea how to go about getting into college or paying for it. Melanie mentions something about a college counselor but Sarah has no recollection of such a person at any of her high schools. A few weeks later, when she sees a show about Albert Einstein, Sarah wonders if that’s what went wrong. Maybe you couldn’t switch schools, houses or families too often or too quickly. It frayed the net of space and time. You had to stay put, let the moments link themselves like runners passing the baton. If you don’t, your life slips through, like her mother’s pots and pans.
Rubik’s Cube as anodyne has a short half-life. A month later Melanie reports that Ethan is being made fun of now because he is too attached to the cube.
“He’s amazing at it, actually, very, very smart, and at first the other boys were impressed, but they can’t do it as well, and so now they’re mad, and he just won’t put it down. I finally had to take it away. I mean, I give it to him during recess, but that’s it. Otherwise he’ll never listen or do anything else.”
When Melanie sees him aligning the squares, his face no longer a simulacrum of absorption, but truly captivated, she says it makes her cry. “I mean, the thought that a colored block of plastic is all he has.”
“He has his mother,” Sarah says.
Another eye roll. “He comes to school in the same clothes all week and when we have food, you know, for holidays or birthdays, he eats like he hasn’t had a meal in days.” Melanie shakes her head. “I wish I could get some evidence on her, something to report to child services.”
“Don’t do that.” Sarah hears the sharpness of her tone too late, but Melanie is oblivious.
Unloading a stack of papers covered in large, loopy handwriting, with the lines sloping up and down, she says, “I’m keeping my eye on things. I don’t like that woman.”
Sarah finds Ethan’s last name in Melanie’s grade book, looks up his address and drives by several times thinking vaguely of warning them: be careful, they’re watching you. Their building is a yellow brick fourplex on a street that backs up to a grocery store and gas station. The windows are the same type of silver ones she has in the new apartment and she wonders if they ice up the same way.
One Sunday Ethan is sitting on the front stoop in a jacket and no hat, hands clasped between his knees. Sarah circles the block, then pulls over and gets out. “You okay? Are you locked out?”
Ethan looks at her a long moment as if he doesn’t speak English. “No.”
“Well, what’re you doing sitting out here? It’s awfully cold, and you don’t have a hat or gloves.”
“I’m okay.”
“That’s a light jacket. Do you have a coat? A winter coat?”
Ethan stares at her sullenly. “Who are you?”
“I’m a friend of your mom’s.”
“She’s inside.” Ethan scoots over for her to pass.
“Aren’t you coming in?”
“I have to stay out here.”
“Have to? Why?”
Again he gives her that look that lets her know she has no business here.
“Is your mom making you stay out here?”
The door opens. Sarah looks up, startled.
Ethan’s mother is very skinny. She has a pale face pockmarked lightly around the mouth and thin hair dyed the color of a brand-new penny. A dark line cleaves its two halves.
“Your friend is here,” Ethan says. His voice is high, almost broken.
“I don’t want anything. And I don’t appreciate you talking to my kid.”
“I’m not selling anything,” Sarah mumbles.
Ethan looks between his mother and Sarah.
His mother steps outside. “Are you looking for somebody?” Her voice is hard and annoyed.
“Sorry, I just stopped because I thought maybe he was locked out.”
“You just drive around talking to strange kids?”
“Well, it’s pretty cold.”
“What?”
“It’s cold, so I was worried.” Sarah has to use the bathroom. She contracts her muscles and the urge recedes.
Ethan speaks up. “She said you were friends.”
The mother looks at Ethan, registering his claim, then back at Sarah, alerted that something is wrong. “Is that your car?”
Sarah looks behind her. The license plate is fully visible. “I’m from Children’s Services,” she blurts.
Immediately, the woman’s attitude changes. She becomes both stiffer and more friendly, a smile stretched across her face like it’s being pulled by a string.
Sarah introduces herself as “Ms. Adams.” “May I come in?”
The woman stands back, pulling the cracked storm door wide. “Of course, of course, we got nothing to hide.”
An unfamiliar feeling of power washes through Sarah, loosening her stomach and slowing her heart. “Ethan is coming in too, yes?” she asks, glancing behind her as she steps into the building’s common hall, a wide space dimly lit by a single bulb recessed behind a yellow plastic cover.
Inside the apartment the living and dining space is one long room. The table is covered in stacks of mail and various other misplaced things. She spies a screwdriver and several bottles of nail polish. Unopened boxes stand in the corner and the drapes, little blue and yellow flowers, must be leftover from previous occupants. They were not chosen by the same person who owns the scroll-armed purple couch and striped gray chairs.
“Would you like a drink? A soda or a coffee?” Ethan’s mother asks.
“No, thank you.”
“Well, have a seat, have a seat. What’s this about? Did someone call you or something?”
“Maybe we should talk privately.” Sarah mimics the cadence of Nancy’s voice and the kinds of things she used to say.
Ethan’s mother tells him to go to his room, then motions for Sarah to sit and both women perch on the edge, Sarah on the couch, Ethan’s mother on the nearer of the two chairs.
“I’m just here to find out a little information. So I see Ethan was outside. He said he had to stay out there. Why was that?”
“I just wanted him to go play a little while. He doesn’t do anything but those video games. I thought he needed the exercise.”
“It’s pretty cold. Does he have a heavier coat? Some gloves and a hat?”
“Oh yeah, yeah.” She goes into the hall, opens a narrow closet where coats half-conceal an old vacuum cleaner and yanks out a red ski jacket. “See, he’s got a good coat, and I told him to wear it, but he likes that team jacket. He’s a Broncos fan.”
“Well, he shouldn’t be out in this cold dressed like that.”
Ethan’s mother nods. “Right, sure. Absolutely.”
Sarah wonders if this is how the Judge feels behind the bench: everyone must listen.
“So Ethan’s father? Does he live nearby?”
“He’s out in Texas. Maybe Arizona. The moron moves a lot.” Ethan’s mother rolls her eyes just like Melanie.
Sarah asks about friends, if Ethan has other boys over to play, and his mother shrugs. “We’re pretty busy.”
“How are his grades? Does he do well in school? Does he like his teacher?”
At the mention of Melanie, his mother’s expression changes. “Is that who called you? That woman?”
Sarah fumbles, then grabs hold of the obvious: it’s confidential.
“His teacher’s had it out for me and Ethan since day one because Ethan, he’s got the ADD, and he’s a handful, but that’s not my problem. It’s her job to deal with it.”
Sarah asks a few more questions, random ones she’s not even sure seem reasonable or professional, but she doubts his mother has the experience to know the difference.
“Okay, I think it’s all good. I appreciate your time today.”
Sarah’s bladder hurts and at the last moment, when the blast of cold air hits her, she decides she can’t make it.
Ethan’s mother takes her back inside, points down the hall to a peach and black tiled bath. The peach toilet seat has yellow spots. Sarah stands, holding the towel rack. The tub has a charcoal rim of filth and a tangle of dark and red hair completely covers the drain. The place could definitely use a scrubbing.
She flushes and after washing her hands leaves the water on to muffle the sound of the rusty medicine cabinet hinges. Nothing remarkable. One bottle of OxyContin, but it has a script label. Sarah checks. Luanne Holman. Probably a maiden name.
Ethan’s mother is waiting for her in the hall, by the entrance to the kitchen. Behind her Sarah glimpses a mess of pots and pans, plates and cups.
“Maybe you should do a little cleaning, I mean, just in case. It would look better, you know.”
“Right.” The woman glances behind her. “Right, I will. I’ve been really busy. I will, though.”
On the front step Sarah puts out her hand. “Sorry to bother you.”
“No problem, no problem. I’m an open book.”
Sarah steps down to the walk, then turns. “I’m sorry. To be honest, I missed your last name. Was it the same as Ethan’s?”
“Oh, yeah, yeah, Kiebach. Sorry.” She offers to shake hands. “Kim Kiebach. People call me KK.”
Sarah considers every scenario. Obtained under a false name? Left by a friend? Borrowed for a bad toothache or migraine? There are several plausible, innocent reasons for the pills.
Over the next few weeks she avoids the topic of Ethan, then one Friday Melanie comes home and slaps her leather tote on the counter.
“We had Ethan K.’s mother in today. He was in a fight on the playground again, so we call her in and she says they’re moving. It’s April for crying out loud. She’s going to move the kid two months before school is out? Like he doesn’t have enough problems fitting in.”
“Maybe it’s a job change or something.”
Melanie snorts. “Right, a corporate relo.”
Sarah escapes quickly and drives home thinking about what she’s done. They’re moving because of her. Which might be good. Or disastrous. There’s no way to know.
She spends the summer staying home with Grayson so Melanie can take Bea to the pool and clean her classroom or go out with friends. One week Melanie and Aaron go to Nashville and Sarah stays with the kids and sleeps in their bed, remembering the big blue dick in the shoebox. Does it mean Melanie isn’t happy with Aaron? Maybe it means he has a small penis.
In August, when Aaron and Melanie take the kids to her parents’ cottage on Lake Michigan, Sarah spends her vacation in bed watching TV. The hours are different now, still faster, but not fuller. At the end of the two weeks they’ve accumulated to nothing. She doesn’t remember a thing.
School starts, Bea goes to morning kindergarten and returns to report being the only one in her class who knows how to cook, what 911 is and her own address and phone number. “Some kids didn’t even know the name of the street they live on!”
In September, Bea turns six and the family throws a huge party. Aunts, uncles, cousins. Aaron’s parents are divorced and remarried, so there are six grandparents. Sarah is invited because, as Melanie says, “You’re like family now. Bea would be devastated if you don’t come.”
Saturday morning Sarah considers calling to say she’s sick. Bea needs to learn: devastation is just a state of mind.
But she goes. She goes, and there, the backyard strewn with balloons bobbing on fish line strung from tree to tree, her cake takes up most of one table. Sarah and Bea made it yesterday afternoon, Bea in awe of Sarah transforming five regular square cakes into Dorothy’s slipper. Yes, covered in Red Hots, which the guests will have to pick off because only Bea could stand to eat so many.
Everyone knows Sarah but she doesn’t know them. She is the famous nanny, who taught Bea to cook, who made the cake, who, Melanie has joked, stole Grayson’s first word. Instead of “Dada” or “Mama” it was “Saha.”
Sarah eats a burger and flirts with Melanie’s cousin Michael, a guy just good looking enough to make her tingle but with crooked teeth that give her confidence. Michael is finishing a master’s in engineering at the local university. They talk for twenty minutes before he’s yanked off to provide piggyback rides. Sarah has little experience with men or their signals, but she thinks he looks reluctant to go and for a while watches him play, hoping he’ll break away, until he doesn’t and she becomes self-conscious and moves off toward the food tables.
It’s eighty-five degrees out, one of the last hot days, no doubt. Melanie offers Sarah a beer.
“No, thanks.”
“We have wine coolers and a couple bottles of Pinot for the grownups if you want that instead.”
“I don’t drink.”
“Never?”
Sarah makes up an excuse about allergies.
The party is winding down. Fallen balloons float at ground level among the remaining guests. One of them drifts into the climbing rose on the garage and the crack makes Sarah jump. She glances around but no one else looks startled. Michael is nowhere in sight.
She wanders around trying not to look as though she’s looking for him, then returns to the tables, where she tidies up the pile of presents, stacking dolls and Lego sets, more Play-Doh and bubble wands, gathering up the wrapping paper before she realizes the garbage is overflowing. She’ll have to take it inside, bring out another bag. Hands full, she moves to the back door and, catching a glimpse of people through the screen, is about to raise her voice and ask for someone to open it when she hears Aaron say, “Well, yeah, next year we’ll probably do preschool for Gray instead of a nanny. It’d be a lot cheaper and get him more socialization, more academic prep. Bea’s smart as a whip, you know, and I think in a way it’s held her back, being home. Next year she’ll be in first grade, so Grayson can go to Montessori. He’ll be three. He can handle all-day.”
Sarah’s cheeks go hot, shame washing over her as if she’s been caught holding that blue dick. Yes. Of course. This, too, will end.
“Need some help?” The Judge is there, opening the door and Sarah has no choice but to step up into the kitchen. Aaron and the two people he’s been talking to smile, seeming unconcerned about what Sarah may have heard. Aaron plucks a garbage bag from the box on the counter and holds it wide for her to stuff in the paper, then the three go back out while Sarah ties the bag, prolonging the process to calm herself. When she looks up the Judge is sitting at the table, mopping his sweaty, blotched forehead with a handkerchief. He wears tan shorts and a golf shirt.
“Honey,” he says, “can you get me a glass of ice water? I think I overdid it running around out there with the kids. It’s damn hot today.”
Sarah runs him some water without waiting for the tap to cool or adding ice.
“I saw you talking to Michael,” he says. “He’s my nephew, known him his whole life.” The Judge takes a drink of water and wipes at the sweat still beading his hairline, which is now the midpoint of his skull. “He likes pretty girls.”
“I’m good. I can take care of myself,” Sarah says.
The Judge looks unconvinced. “Melanie tells me you helped her with a kid she had this year, somebody with problems.”
“I just gave him something to do on the playground. You need something to do when you’re alone.”
The Judge drinks his water. “So you grew up around here. What high school did you go to?”
“Several,” Sarah says. “I was in foster care.”
The Judge’s expression changes. Alert is the only word for it. “Foster care? Here? In Lucas County?”
Sarah nods.
“For how long?”
“Nine years.”
“You aged out?”
Sarah nods. “My mother died.”
“She died?” The Judge seems to relax a little. “Is that why you went into foster care?”
“No. They took me away first. My mom wanted me back. She was fighting, but then she drowned.”
The Judge pauses. “I’m sorry. That must have been terrible.”
“In the bathtub. She fell asleep and slipped under. There was no one there to drain the water.”
This settles on the Judge like déjà vu. She can see it in his wrinkled brow, the intensity of his stare.
“What is your last name?”
“Anderson. Sarah Elizabeth Anderson.”
For what seems a very long moment they stare at one another, each knowing what this means, and yet not. The back door slams. Bea is shouting, “It has my name! Sarah, it has my name!”
At Goodwill Sarah found an old doctor’s kit, complete with white lab coat, and sewed Bea’s name on the pocket. Bea starts with her grandfather. As she bangs away at his knee and shines a light in his ear, Sarah imagines becoming a doctor, but quickly decides the stakes are too high. Maybe she could be a teacher. So much to explain. Buy one good pan and scrape the fond. Stay put if you can. Pull taut the net of space and time.
Bea has finished with the Judge and moves over to Sarah.
“I have to listen to your heart.” She rests the stethoscope on Sarah’s stomach.
“I don’t hear anything.”
Sarah moves it to the right place. “Try this.”
“It’s loud.” Bea’s expression grows serious and her lips begin to move, counting the rapid beats.
“Well, what do you think?”
Bea nods. “You’re healthy.”
“Thank you,” Sarah says. “That’s a relief.”
Amy Gustine’s stories have appeared in North American Review, Black Warrior Review, Confrontation, Natural Bridge, and The Massachusetts Review.