Authors: Torey Hayden
‘No, of course not.’
‘Good,’ she replied with a smile. ‘Some grown-ups do, you know. They get embarrassed holding hands with you because they think they’re too big for it.’
‘I see.’
We wandered in and out through all the people on the streets, past B. Dalton’s, past Woolworth’s and the city’s huge main department store, down around the corner and toward Salvador’s Boutique.
‘You know what?’ Charity said.
‘What’s that?’
‘Guess. Guess what’s going to happen to me.’
‘I don’t know. You’re going to turn into a green monster and take a rocket off to Mars? Is that it?’
‘Nooo! You’re silly. No, I’m gonna move.’
‘You are?’ I was genuinely surprised.
‘Yup. Next weekend. My uncle Myron is coming up from Bitter Creek and he’s helping us take all our stuff back down there. We’re gonna live with him and Aunt Lila and their kids for a while. And I got lots of other family there too.’
‘Wow. That’s big news.’
‘You know where I’m going to go to school? At St Xavier’s mission school. I seen it. Ransome goes there. So does Jennifer. So does Tara. It’s real neat. It’s got a whole new gym built on it. I’ll be in Tara’s class probably, because she’s going to be in fourth grade too.’
‘Well, that’s super. It sounds like you’re really looking forward to it.’
‘Yeah, I am,’ Charity replied. ‘It’ll be nicer than here. My grandfather lives near there and I like him a lot. And I got lots of other family. And Jennifer’s got a donkey. She said I could ride it sometimes. So it’ll be better than living here, I think.’
We had reached Salvador’s Boutique. We stopped and gazed in the window. There was a dress there, all right. A really incredible concoction of passionate orange sequins and sleazy shimmer cloth. It looked like what a cheap tart would buy.
‘See! That’s it. Isn’t it beautiful?’
‘Mm-hmm.’
‘Will you buy it for my birthday? That’s what I want.’
‘Charity, that’s for grown-up ladies.’
‘Well, I’m getting grown up. I’m ten already. And lookit, I’m almost getting breasts.’ She smashed her T-shirt against her chest.
I said nothing because there was nothing there to say anything about.
‘Oh, please, Torey? Please-please-please?
Please?
Couldn’t I just try it on?
Please?
’ She wriggled and squirmed until she looked like she needed to use the bathroom. ‘Oh, please? Please-please-please-please?’
I was bending down to peer into the window for a better look at the thing. It really was incredible. ‘Look, Charity, you can’t even see the price tag on it. That means they’ve hidden it so you won’t know how much it costs. And that means that it must not be worth what it costs or they wouldn’t have hidden it.’
‘
Please
?’
I looked at her. ‘Oh, come on,’ I replied and jerked her into the shop.
What a fool I felt like, asking to see the garish dress. The woman obviously thought it was for me, and when I, all 140 pounds of me, asked for a size 3, I could see her wince. Looking over my shoulder to make sure no one I knew was in the shop, I snatched the dress from her and shoved Charity ahead of me into one of the small fitting rooms.
Charity whipped off her clothes and within seconds was shimmying into the blinding orange disco dress. Even a size 3 was way too big for her, despite her pudginess. The string shoulder straps dropped the bodice of the dress clear below her nipples. The waist was on Charity’s hips, what hips she had. The skirt came almost to her ankles.
Thoughtfully, Charity looked at herself in the mirror. ‘Well, it
is
a little big, isn’t it?’ she said, woefully.
I nodded, not daring to open my mouth. She looked hysterically funny, and I had to bite the inside of my lip to keep from laughing.
‘It’s pretty though, isn’t it?’
She stood there in front of the mirror and studied her image. A slight smile was on her lips, her eyes were dark and clouded with the secret beauty of her dreams. She touched the dress lovingly, and I could detect just the faintest movement of her hips, as if the music had already begun.
I wondered what she saw. For me there was only a little girl, barefoot and dusky skinned, the outline of her cotton underpants showing through the sleazy material. Her long black hair had been caught back in two uneven pigtails and, although she had lost a lot of weight, her cheeks were still chubby and her elbows were dimpled like a two-year-old’s. But I wondered what
she
saw, standing there, gazing at the image in the mirror. The brilliant orange dress glimmered even in the wan fitting-room light.
I smiled at her and she looked at my image in the mirror. ‘I think it’s beautiful,’ she whispered.
‘Yes, it is.’
Gently she ran her fingers over the material.
‘How much is it, Charity?’ I asked, reaching for the tag. The dress cost $15.98, a great deal more than I had intended to spend for her birthday. Charity knew it. She looked at me, she looked at the dress and then back to her image in the mirror. Then without saying anything, she bent over to take it off.
‘Hey, wait a minute, babe. Come here.’
She straightened up and moved over to where I could reach her from where I was sitting. I ran a hand along the material. ‘You know,’ I said, ‘I suppose I could buy it for you. This once. Maybe a birthday present and a goodbye gift combined.’
Hope had gone out of her face. ‘It’s too big,’ she said forlornly.
Turning her around so that she could see herself in the mirror, I moved behind her. I pulled on the straps and that hoisted the bodice up under her chin. ‘Maybe if I took the straps up for you,’ I said softly. It was still hopelessly too long, but once again Charity’s eyes were clouding with visions of that inner world I could not see. The faint smile returned.
‘It is
so
beautiful, Torey. I think it’s the most beautiful thing I ever seen in my whole life.’
‘Yes, and it makes you beautiful, too, doesn’t it?’
She nodded.
We said no more. Carefully she slipped the dress off and smoothed it out in my lap. Before putting her shorts back on, she paused and studied my face.
‘Are you going to miss me when I go?’
‘Yes,’ I said. ‘I’m sure I will.’
‘You won’t forget me, will you?’
‘No, I won’t.’
‘Say, cross your heart and hope to die if you ever forget me. Say it, okay?’
‘Cross my heart and hope to die,’ I repeated.
‘No, no. You didn’t cross your heart when you did it. Do it again. Like this.’ She demonstrated. I did it. ‘Okay, cross my heart and hope to die if I ever forget you, too, Torey Hayden. Because you really are my best friend. Of anybody, you really are my best.’ Then she bent and pulled on her shorts. ‘Tor, can I ask you something else?’
‘What’s that?’
‘Well, when the time comes, can I kiss you good-bye?’
‘Certainly.’
Gently she leaned forward and kissed me then. ‘In case I don’t see you when I go.’
She must have known. I never did see Charity again after that day. We went home, I fixed us lunch and she took her orange dress out of the box. Afterwards she put it on and I pinned the straps. I stitched them with white thread because I had no orange, and then she danced for me to ABBA while I sat on the floor of my closet and cleaned. And the last I saw of her was that sunny Saturday afternoon when she disappeared with the shimmering disco dress tucked under one arm, its beauty as lusty as a Las Vegas sunset.
W
hen I came into Seven Oaks on Monday I found disaster. Bill Smith rolled his eyes as I walked by. ‘Hopeless,’ he hollered after me. ‘That kid is absolutely hopeless.’
‘So,’ I said to Kevin as I sat down in a chair near his bed. ‘A little birdie tells me things didn’t go so well.’
Kevin was in bed, fully clothed but under the bedspread, nonetheless. He had it pulled up to his ears.
‘What happened?’ I asked.
Kevin just shrugged and pulled the bedspread higher.
‘Now, come off it, Kevin. Talk to me. You don’t solve anything hiding under a spread like that.’
He shook his head.
‘The world hasn’t come to an end, has it? There’ll be other families.’
He shook his head again.
‘Yes, there will. If there was this one, there’ll be others. Now tell me what happened. Maybe it wasn’t even that bad.’
But he wouldn’t. Bugged by his lapse into this old trick, I got up. ‘Listen, I’ll be back in fifteen minutes and you better’ve decided to talk to me or I’ll leave altogether. Got it?’ So I walked out.
Down in Bill’s office I got the official version. Bill was nursing a cold cup of coffee and shaking his head. ‘That kid is impossible. I tell you, I’ve never seen a kid like that one for screwing things up. Holy Moses, he’s a walking disaster area.’
‘But what happened? What did he do?’
‘Nothing. That was what the dumb jerk did – nothing. He just got there and froze. Wouldn’t do a damned thing. Wouldn’t talk, wouldn’t even get out of the stupid car. And can you imagine? They had planned some sort of special picnic for him to meet the other members of the family. And the dumb kid wouldn’t even get out of the car.’
‘Oh, but Bill, that must have been terrifying for Kevin. Think of it. A big hoopla full of people you’d never seen before when you didn’t even know the people you were with.’
‘He was stupid and that’s all there is to it. Do you know how hard it was to find those people? I beat the goddamned bushes bare to find them. And now they don’t want him. What a hopeless kid. He’s nuts, that’s what he is, a goddamned nutto. Why did they send him here anyway? He’s a nutto.’
‘Don’t make such a case out of it. It’s been God knows how long since he’s been in a proper family. The closest he ever came was last summer in that group home. He was just scared. I mean, the boy has a right to be, doesn’t he? He doesn’t know them. It was all new to him. He just choked, that’s all.’
‘Hmmph,’ said Bill, ‘what a lost cause.’
Back in his room, Kevin was still hiding under the bedspread.
‘Get out of bed, Kevin. Get out or I’ll pull you out.’
No response.
‘I’m not joking. I’ll come over and I’ll pull you out. Now get up.’
Silence.
‘I’m coming. Here I come, Kevin, and I’m not happy. This isn’t a joke.’ I took a giant step toward the bed.
Reluctantly, Kevin sat up, still keeping the spread around him.
‘Now get up. All the way. Get up and put the spread back where it belongs. You look like a grandmother, for pity’s sake.’
Wearily Kevin replaced the spread and shuffled over to a chair.
‘So what happened?’ I asked. I smoothed the bed out and sat on it.
Kevin hunched up in his chair and stared at the floor.
‘Look, Kevin, I know you’re disappointed. I know you’re unhappy. What happened was an awful thing to live through. But it’s over and done with and the world still has not come to an end. So let’s sort it out so that it doesn’t happen again.’
Still no response.
I stood up. ‘I’m going. We’re past this kind of behavior. It’s rude and I won’t tolerate your being rude to me. You have the choice of talking to me or I leave. Which is it?’
He shrugged in a half-hearted manner. ‘I’ll talk.’
‘All right. So what’s up?’
Another shrug.
‘What happened to make it not work out?’
‘Their toilet was funny.’
‘Huh?’
He had his head tucked protectively down between his shoulders as if some invisible person were standing over him about to smack him. ‘I said, their toilet was funny.
‘It was funny. It was big. I was scared to use it.’
My heart sank. Were we ever going to come to the end of his fears? I wasn’t feeling a whole lot better about this failure than he was or Bill was, and it took hard work to hold my tongue.
‘Kev, maybe this just wasn’t the right place for you.’
‘But it was,’ he said sorrowfully. ‘It was just me. I messed it up. I was so scared of messing up that I think I tried so hard not to that I did. I just messed the whole thing up.’
‘No, it wasn’t you, Kevin. It was just the circumstances. They hadn’t ever fostered kids before, so they were probably just as nervous as you were. It happens. It isn’t any fun when it happens like this but it does sometimes. It wasn’t just you. Don’t worry about it.’
He stared glumly at his hands.
‘There’ll be others.’
He shook his head. ‘No, there won’t be. Who’d want a kid like me?’
‘I reckon lots of people, Kevin. They just don’t know it yet.’
The placement hadn’t been right. That atrocious weekend turned out to be a disguised blessing because we later learned the Burchells were not what they had appeared to be. Unable to have children of their own, they had decided to adopt. However, the adoption agencies unanimously decided that they were not good candidates for adoptive parenthood. The marriage was not working. Their expectations both of each other and of children were unreasonable, and both partners had brought into their relationship some serious personal problems. With this new rejection, the couple had decided to try fostering as their only way to obtain the children they thought they needed to keep their faltering marriage together.