I was sorry when he got his placement, to a group home in Pomona. He was the first kid I'd really enjoyed spending time with since my days with Davey, the first one who could remotely understand what I had been through. We were just getting to know each other, and now he was gone. I had to get used to that. Everybody left you eventually. He gave me one of his drawings to remember him by. It was me as a superhero, in a tight white T-shirt and ragged shorts, my body clearly the subject of much observation and thought. I'd just vanquished a biker archvillain, my Doc Marten bootheel planted on his bloody bare chest, a smoking gun in my hand. I shot him through the heart. I don't let anyone touch me was printed over my head.
OUTSIDE the junior boys' cottage a few days after Paul left, I sat at an orange picnic table, waiting for my interview. I ran my hand through my chopped hair, let the winter sun warm my scalp. The families weren't supposed to be shopping, it was supposed to be a "getting to know you" visit, but it was an audition and everyone knew it. I wasn't worried. I didn't want to get placed. I'd rather stay here until I was eighteen. Paul was right, there was lots worse than Mac. I didn't want to get involved with anybody ever again. But nobody got to stay.
At a table under the big pines, another interview was taking place, a sibling set. They were always the worst. The cute little brother in the woman's lap, the older brother, past cute, pubescent, downy-lipped, standing off to the right, hands in his pockets. They only wanted the little one. Big brother was trying to convince them how responsible he was, how he'd help take care of the little guy, carry the trash, mow the lawn. I could barely watch it.
I had my first interview on Tuesday. Bill and Ann Greenway from Downey. They'd been foster parents for years. They just had one go back to her birth parents. They'd had her three years. Bill wiped his mouth with the back of his hand as he told it, Ann blinking back tears. I studied my shoes, white Keds, blue stripes down the sides, oversized lace holes. One thing in my favor, I wasn't going back to my mother anytime soon.
I didn't say much. I didn't even want to look at them. I could get to like them. I liked them already. Their kindnesses made small sucking noises at me, like water in the bathtub. It would be easy to let them take me home. I could see their house, bright and comfortable, on a street of tract houses but nice, maybe two-story. Pictures of kids on the tables, old swing set in the backyard. The sunny high school, even their church sounded inviting, nobody got fanatic there, or worried too much about sin or damnation. I bet they called their minister by his first name.
I ccuid have gone with them, Ann and Bill Greenway of Downey. But with them, I might forget things. All the butterflies might fly away. Pressed wildflowers and Bach in the morning, dark hair on the pillow, pearls. Aida and Leonard Cohen, Mrs. Kromach and picnics in the living room, pate and caviar. In Downey, it wouldn't matter that I knew about Kandinsky and Ypres and the French names for the turns in ballet. I might forget black thread through skin, a .38 bullet crashing through bone, the smell of new houses and the way my mother looked when they handcuffed her, the odd tenderness with which the burly cop held his hand over her head so she wouldn't hit it getting into the squad car. With Ann and Bill Greenway of Downey, they would dim, fade away. Amsterdam and Eduardo's hotel, tea at the Beverly Wilshire and the way Claire stood trembling when that bum smelled her hair. I would never again look at homeless kids in doorways off Sunset and see my own face staring back.
"You'll like it with us, Astrid," Ann said, her clean white hand on my arm.
She smelled of Jergens hand lotion, a pallid pink sweetness, not L'Air du Temps or Ma Griffe or my mother's secretive violets, a scent which for chemical reasons could only be smelled for a moment at a time. Which do you like better, tarragon or thyme? All that was a dream, you couldn't hold on, you couldn't depend on frosted glass birds and Debussy.
I looked at Bill and Ann, their well-meaning faces, sturdy shoes, no hard questions. Bill's graying blond crew cut, his silver-rimmed glasses, Ann's snip-and-curl beauty shop hair. This was attainable, solid and homely and indestructible as indoor-outdoor carpeting. I should have been grabbing it. But I found myself pulling away from her hand.
It wasn't that I didn't believe them. I believed everything they said, they were a salvation, a solution to my most basic lack. But I recalled a morning years ago in a boxy church in Tujunga, the fluorescent lights, chipped folding chairs. Starr charmed as a snake while Reverend Thomas explained damnation. The damned could be saved, he said, anytime. But they refused to give up their sins. Though they suffered endlessly, they would not give them up, even for salvation, perfect divine love.
