“How’s your week going?” Andrew asks when I duck my head into his office on Thursday, just past four. He’s in jeans and a vintage Beatles tee today, and his hair is rumpled, like he just got out of bed.
“I saw you less than twenty-four hours ago,” I remind him with a smile.
“At which point I didn’t have a chance to ask you properly how you’re doing,” he answers, returning my grin, “because to do so would have been to incur Amy’s wrath.”
“Ah, so you’ve noticed too.”
“Noticed? She shoots daggers at you with her eyes every time you talk to me. Then she stares at me like I’m a Christmas present she’d like to unwrap.”
I laugh. “Very humble of you.”
His eyebrows shoot up. “I didn’t say I deserve it. I’m just reporting the facts.”
“Hey, in her defense, it’s hard to be a single girl in New York,” I say, although I don’t know why I’m standing up for Amy. “Who can blame her for setting her sights on a cute, smart single guy?”
Andrew turns a little red, and I can feel my cheeks heating up too, because I realize the words sound flirtatious, although I didn’t mean them to. Then we both start speaking at once. “I’m not exactly—” Andrew begins.
“I didn’t mean—” I sat at the same time.
We both laugh uneasily, and he says, “You first.”
“I was just going to say I didn’t mean to sound like I’m hitting on you.”
“Oh, no, of course not.” His blush is gone, replaced by an amused expression. “Heaven forbid. I probably have cooties.”
I roll my eyes. “I suspected as much. So what were you going to say?”
“Oh. Nothing.” He checks his watch. “Let’s go see if the girls are here, shall we?”
Twenty
T
he visits with Molly and Riajah seem to fly by quickly. Molly chooses a banjo from among eight instruments I scatter on the floor before she comes in, and when she’s picked out a few notes on it, I show her a few simple chords, and we sing together, an exercise that’s designed to help improve the natural cadence of her speech, her ability to watch and repeat, and her comfort communicating with others. Riajah is a bit more difficult; I try the same exercise with her, but she refuses to choose an instrument, so eventually, I wind up playing my guitar alone while she stares at me from the corner. But by the end of the session, she’s tapping her feet and mouthing the words to the chorus, and although she refuses to acknowledge me on the way out, I count it as progress.
On the way to Allie’s foster home, I tell Andrew about the sessions and what I’m thinking of for next week, but then an uneasy silence settles over us for the remainder of the walk, a strange contrast to the ease we usually enjoy. I’m relieved when we finally reach Allie’s house, but the feeling is cut short when Rodney ushers us into Allie’s room, and I see that she’s torn down all her poems.
She’s hunched over her computer, typing furiously, when we
enter, and she either doesn’t hear us or is deliberately ignoring us. “Allie?” I ask loudly, but she doesn’t turn.
“She’s been like this all day,” Rodney says softly.
“Any idea what’s wrong?” Andrew asks.
Rodney shakes his head. “She won’t talk to us. We’ve tried, but she just shuts herself in here.”
“Let me try,” I suggest. I take a deep breath and smile at the men. “I’ll see you in a little while.”
Rodney hesitates, clearly reluctant to leave, but he finally does, followed by an equally uncertain-looking Andrew. I watch Allie from the doorway for a moment. Her keystrokes are an angry staccato.
I walk over to her computer, and as my shadow falls over her, she jumps. “Allie?” I say loudly, trying to keep my voice gentle. “Everything okay?”
Her face turns red, and she slams her laptop closed then glances up at me with a deer-in-the-headlights look on her face. She doesn’t say anything; she just looks at me stonily, so after a moment, I ask, “What were you writing?”
Her stare darkens into a glare as she signs the letters
NYB
to me. It takes me a moment to grasp that what she’s saying is
None of your business.
Instead of reacting the way she likely expects me to, I shrug and turn away. I bite my lip for a moment, my brain spinning over all the possibilities of what could be the matter. She’s removed her poems from the wall, so maybe a boy she’s had a crush on has rejected her. But then I realize none of the poems I’d glanced at last week had seemed romantic in nature. Maybe a teacher criticized her writing, but would that have put her in this sort of dark mood?
I spread out the same instruments on her rug that I used with Molly and Riajah earlier, then I pull out my guitar and wait for
her to look up at me. When she finally does, still glowering, I nod to the items on the floor. “Want to choose one?” I ask.
She shakes her head firmly and rolls her eyes.
“You don’t have to play,” I tell her. “But I’m going to. I thought you might want to join me.”
She snort-laughs and rolls her eyes at me again. I act like I don’t care, and I begin strumming my guitar slowly, searching for a song that might elicit something from her.
I begin with Daughtry’s “Over You,” in case Allie’s problem has to do with a boy, but she just ignores me. Then I transition into “Puff the Magic Dragon,” and her expression grows bored. It’s only when I begin playing the Beatles’ “Hey Jude”—one of Leo’s favorites—that I finally see a spark of interest on her face. When I finish the song, I let silence hang between us until she finally says something.
Who’s Jude?
she signs, her eyes still suspicious.
It’s exactly the question I was hoping for. “Jude is John Lennon’s son Julian,” I tell her. “John Lennon is one of the Beatles.”
“Duh,” she says aloud. “Only idiots don’t know the Beatles.” Then she pauses and adds, “If his name is Julian, why do they call him Jude, anyways?”
I smile. “Paul McCartney—he’s another Beatle, but I guess you know that—wrote the song for Julian when Julian’s parents, John and Cynthia, were getting a divorce. Julian was sad, and Paul knew that sometimes, music helps people. He was originally singing, ‘Hey Jules,’ his nickname for Julian, but he changed it to ‘Hey Jude,’ because he liked the sound of it better.”
She looks at me for a moment. “So why was Julian sad, anyways?”
I shrug. “I think divorce can be tough on a person,” I tell her. “I think maybe Julian felt a little bit like his parents didn’t care about him, or that he was being abandoned by his mom and
dad.” Something in her face changes. I’ve hit a nerve. “I think Paul McCartney was trying to tell Julian that it wasn’t his fault, that he didn’t have to carry the world on his shoulders, and that it was all going to get better.”
She thinks about this for a minute. “Did it? Get better?”
“For Julian?” I nod. “Yes. He’s all grown up now, and he’s a musician too, just like his dad.”
“Because his dad loved him, after all,” Allie says.
“His mom and dad both did.”
Allie turns quickly away and wipes furtively at her face. I wait for her to turn back around before setting my guitar down and signing,
What’s wrong?
“Nothing,” she snaps. “And you don’t have to sign. I can talk, you know. I’m not stupid.”
I wait a moment before asking gently, “Did something happen with your mom?”
She snorts, but the pain that flickers across her face tells me everything I need to know. “No, nothing happened” is what she finally says. I assume she’s stonewalling me again until she adds a moment later, “That’s the problem. Doesn’t she care about me? At all? She comes twice a week because she has to, and I have overnight visits with her in her new apartment sometimes, but the rest of the time, she doesn’t even care if I’m alive.”
“What makes you think that, Allie?” I ask, and her eyes narrow.
“Because why wouldn’t she get her crap together quicker so she could take me home? Why would she be moving so slow and just leaving me here in some stranger’s house in the meantime?”
“There could be lots of reasons that have nothing to do with you. Can you think of any?” It’s my job to get her to cycle through the options herself and to explore what she’s feeling about her
mother, but it’s hard to resist the urge to comfort her and tell her I know her mother must love her.
“Yeah,” Allie says after a pause. “But I think it’s because she hates me.” She looks down, and I hear her sniffle a few times.
I wait for her to go on, but when she doesn’t, I say, “It may not feel to you like your mother loves you, but she has a lot of problems in her life right now, Allie. Sometimes those kinds of problems make it hard for a parent to act loving.”
She snorts. “You don’t know anything about it.”
“You’re right. I don’t. That’s why I’m asking you to guess some reasons.”
She’s silent for a minute. “Fine. Maybe she’s got some stuff to deal with, you know? Maybe she’s just not ready to be a mom again yet. Okay?”
I smile at her. “That sounds much more likely, Allie. Don’t you think?”
Allie makes a face and looks away. After a moment, she looks back at me. “I checked with my social worker, you know. My mom could get me back by September if she just grows up and stops doing all the wrong things. But I bet she doesn’t even care.”
“What were you doing on your computer there?” I ask, nodding to her laptop. “E-mailing her?”
“I don’t even know her new e-mail address,” she grumbles. “But I was going to give her a letter next time she comes for a supervised visit.”
“What would the letter say?”
“It would say stop being a shitty mom.”
“Well, that sounds fair,” I say. Allie looks at me closely, and I know she’s trying to determine whether I’m being sarcastic. I’m not. “But what if what you said a moment ago is true? What if she’s just trying to deal with her stuff?”
Allie’s face contorts into a look of disgust. “You know what?
You’re just like everyone else. You say the right thing, but it doesn’t mean anything.”
I consider this and realize she’s completely right. I’m just giving her platitudes. So I think for a minute and say, “Okay. What she’s doing, it sucks. It sucks big time.”
A tiny smile tugs at the corner of Allie’s lips. “For real?”
I nod. “But what if you give her the benefit of the doubt? What if she really is trying to make a better life for you? Do you think that’s possible?”
Allie doesn’t answer. But after a moment, she gets up and crosses over to her keyboard. She doesn’t do anything at first, but then she reaches for the keys and slowly, tentatively, pecks out the first few notes of “Hey Jude.” Then she looks up, raises an eyebrow at me, and says, “Well?”
I smile, pick up my guitar again, and begin to play. And for the next twenty minutes, with me on guitar and Allie on keys, we play Paul McCartney’s beautiful melody from nearly five decades ago again and again and again. I can hear Allie humming after a while, so I take her cue and begin to sing along with the music. After a few times through the song, I begin improvising the lyrics so that they connect more directly to Allie’s situation. Soon, to the tune of “Hey Jude,” we’re both singing, “Hey, Mom. Where you been? I’ve been waiting . . . for you to come get me.”
When we finally finish, our fingers tired, she gives me a high five.
I look up just in time to see Andrew watching us from the doorway with a smile on his face.
F
or the next several days, the session with Allie bothers me. I begin to have trouble sleeping, and the dreams—or whatever they are—don’t return. I lie silently beside a lightly snoring Dan,
willing myself to forget about Allie, to fall asleep, to see Patrick and Hannah again. But the tiles of my ceiling only grow blurrier, and the moments tick by until the room begins to gray around the edges as the first rays of dawn saturate the room-darkening blinds.
It begins to occur to me that maybe I won’t get another glimpse into the life with Patrick and Hannah. Maybe being exposed to Hannah was a strange means to an end, a roundabout way to put me in Andrew’s path so that he would lead me to Allie. I feel an almost gravitational pull to the girl. In fact, I can’t stop thinking about her and how I might be able to help her, even when Dan surprises me with a weekend in the Hamptons. I lie beside him on the sand and pretend to read
People
magazine while my mind spins over the songs I’d like to try with her. At night, as we sit by a bonfire Dan has built on the beach, I pretend to listen as he regales me with stories about his coworkers, but really, my mind is on Allie.
On Tuesday, I have a session in my office with Max, and after we’ve played the xylophone together and talked about a new boy at school named Toby who isn’t being very nice to him, he asks me a question that makes my heart ache.
“Miss Kate?” he says as he fidgets with the hem of his shirt. “How come some parents don’t want their kids?”
“Max, why do you say that?”
“I don’t know. Sometimes they just don’t.”
“Who are you talking about?” I ask gently. When he doesn’t say anything, I ask, “Your mom?”
“No, silly!” Max says, rolling his eyes dramatically. “She loves me.” Then his face falls. “But what about my dad? He didn’t want me.”
“What makes you say that, Max?”
“Toby at school told me that’s why my dad went away.”
I bite my lip as I search for the right words. Joya has been raising Max alone since he was ten months old, after his father left one day for work and never came back. Three months later, he had divorce papers delivered to Joya, and she’d signed them without fighting for more child support, because they’d also contained a provision that gave her full custody. She told me once that she didn’t want Max having any exposure to a man who didn’t want to be his father.
“First of all, Max, do you think Toby really knows anything about your life?”
He thinks about this for a minute. “Maybe not.”
“So what do you think really happened with your dad?” I hold my breath, hoping I’m not inadvertently leading him down a hurtful path.
“I don’t know. Mom never says anything.” He pauses. “Maybe my dad didn’t want to be my dad.”
I think about how to respond. “Is it possible he just wasn’t ready to be a dad yet at all? And that it had nothing to do with you personally?”