At the Edge of the Haight Read online

  “I don’t mean that the way it sounds,” he said.

  “It’s okay,” said Ash. “Better a pothead than a corporate dick. And I didn’t mean that the way it sounds either.”

  Dave laughed. “Shane would have liked you.”

  Dave did not have a clue about Shane. That was clear. I didn’t either, but Dave had no idea what his kid was thinking.

  One weekend Shane and his friends had jumped on a boxcar and went almost all the way to Canada, riding with a group of vagabonds. Dave couldn’t figure out why his son would do something that careless, not to mention thoughtless. He never considered how his parents would agonize. The counselor at school told them that normal teenage behavior looked so much like mental illness that sometimes it was hard to tell the difference. She thought Shane was what she called oppositional, but, basically, he was fine, he’d come around. But after the train episode, Shane seemed more restless. He wouldn’t talk to Dave or his mom. They’d wait up until he got home every night. When he didn’t come home, they didn’t sleep. When he did come home, he didn’t talk to them. When he disappeared the last time, they thought he’d be back. They never guessed he would go all the way across the country or live outside.

  “I wish I could describe how I felt,” Dave said. “Guilty and angry at the same time, but mostly worried. It was like the ground opened up and swallowed my insides. I was sick. We both were.”

  “I didn’t know Shane,” I said. “I didn’t know what he was into or what he was thinking.”

  “I want you to know what it’s like for your parents, if they don’t hear from you,” said Dave. “Do they know you’re here?”

  Ash and I didn’t say anything.

  “I just need to know where he was, how he lived when he was here,” said Dave, his hands clasped, in the middle of the table, like he was in church. “Please.”

  Ash was staring down at the table, rubbing his beard stubble. Maybe Dave was thinking that this was what Shane must have looked like. Clothes so dirty they were stiff, smelling like every place he’d slept. Even I could smell Ash, but maybe that was because I’d had the chance to get clean. Everyone else always seemed worse after I’d had a shower.

  “Like I told you, I didn’t know Shane,” I said.

  “Just please let me know what you saw when you went in after your dog,” said Dave. “I’m sorry. This must be hard for you. If you want, I can help you call your parents later.”

  Why did he think he could fix things for us? Or that we had anything in common with his kid? He should have been the one to see Shane out there, dying. Why should I get stuck with that forever? Then I found myself talking, mostly because I was angry in a way I couldn’t stop and I wanted to hurt Dave, a firefighter who couldn’t stop anything. I told him how I found the guy standing near the body that I now knew was Shane. I told him how I ran and wasn’t sure what I’d just seen.

  “Was Shane awake?” said Dave. “Did he say anything?”

  I told him that Shane looked like he was gone. I thought about how easily I’d said it at school. “My dad died before I was born.” But I didn’t know exactly what had been going on with Shane. I’d seen fights on the street. Someone was always getting loaded into the box, lights flashing. In Los Angeles once I saw a car smash into a guy on a bike. I could still call up the sound his body made when it hit the metal, a loud plunk, no screaming. He’d tumbled over the front of his bike and gotten up by himself. Blood ran down his head, but he kept saying to leave him alone, he was okay. But I’d I never seen anyone actually die.

  “Did he seem to be suffering?” Dave said. “I need to know that. I need to. Please.” His voice was collapsing.

  “I can’t say,” I said. “I don’t know.”

  “I’m sorry,” he said. “It’s just that you might have been the last person to see him alive. Maybe you saw him when he passed, and that makes you connected to him in some way. At least that’s the way I see it.”

  “There’s not anything else I know,” I said. “He didn’t say anything to me. He wasn’t talking.”

  “Did you tell anyone? The police?”

  “Like they were going to do anything,” I said, “besides hassle me every single day.”

  “But maybe there’s something I can do,” Dave said. “Shane’s mother wants to meet you too. She has so many questions.”

  “I don’t think so,” I said.

  “Listen, just meet with us once more,” said Dave. “I can’t tell her I found you and then let it go. She won’t forgive me.”

  “You know where to find us,” I said.

  Root was sitting up on the seat when we got back to the car, his nose out the window. I gave him a biscuit I’d taken from the cafe, marked homemade organic. The city stepped all over itself for dogs. Dave reached in and petted Root’s head like he wasn’t sure if Root would take off his fingers.

  “You could probably teach him some tricks,” he said. “He seems smart.”

  What was it with this guy, thinking I needed his advice? If he really wanted to be useful, he could fork over some money for a hotel so I could stop worrying about getting knifed. Maybe Ash would ask on the way back. There was no way I was going to. I’d had enough.

  “This must be the place,” said Dave, pulling his car over at a bus stop on Haight Street. He opened my door and stood awkwardly next to me. I wondered if people would look at us and think he was my dad, obviously here from out of town, his fancy jeans held up by a wide belt. I could see the comb marks in his gray hair, slicked back with gel so thick it glistened in the sun.

  “Take this phone at least, so I’ll know how to reach you,” he said.

  I kept my hands in my pockets. A new phone would last about a day on the street, before someone grabbed it. Or maybe I could sell it.

  “I got it for Shane,” he said. “He lost about one a week. Please take it. Or how will I get in touch with you?”

  I reached for Root. Shane had a phone and his dad and mom still couldn’t find him. I didn’t have a phone or anyone looking for me, except a guy who maybe wanted to kill me.

  “I’m around,” I said.

  “Well, okay then,” he said. “So long.”

  He looked so sad that I almost told him he could hang out for a while. I could feel it coming through his pores, a heaviness that was going to take over everything it touched. But what was he going to do here? I was torn, watching him standing near his car with that stupid belt and his dead kid on his T-shirt, looking at me. He wanted too much.

  “Yeah,” I said. “Bye.” It was all I could offer him then.

  chapter 8

  Ash gave me a hard time that night. I should have taken the phone, at least gotten money from Dave. I didn’t say anything because I just wanted to have him next to me. He smoked and then was out, but I lay awake, turning over whether I should trust Dave. Why was he different from anyone who acted sweet to get what he wanted? I couldn’t help it, going back to the day when Valerie Nelson opened the door at her house and showed me around. “Make yourself at home,” she said, smiling, but someone paid her to say that. She told me to call her Miss V, put her arm around me and led me down the hall to a room with three cribs and one small bed pushed against the wall. Usually she took in sick babies, she said, but her house was empty the day they moved my mother to the hospital, so she had space for me. She said it was a relief for a change to get a kid who could talk.

  “Don’t get me wrong, Miss Maddy,” she said. “Each one of us is special and we all have needs. But a person gets tired going all day, no one to talk to.”

  In a corner of the room was an oxygen tank sitting on a doll-size wheelchair. The bed had a pale pink bedspread and soft pink sheets pulled tight, waiting for someone. A big stuffed panda lay against the pillow. Miss V cooked macaroni and cheese from scratch, smooth and buttery. She poured me chocolate milk and sat with me at the table while she ate a salad. What was my favorite subject in school, she wanted to know. And what about my friends? Did I need clot
hes washed? I didn’t say anything, but I kept eating. Her nails, long and red, had a sparkling star painted on each end. She clicked them on the table and looked at me, trying to make it all seem normal.

  I let her tuck me into bed and put the stuffed panda under the blanket, right next to me. She said we would talk about visiting my mom the next day, which just reminded me that I was in a strange bed, by myself. I was used to my mom being in the other bed where I could see her if I opened my eyes. A day before I didn’t know Miss V, but there I was in a bed in her house while she fussed in the kitchen. I could hear dishes clinking, water running. I tried to force myself to sleep but I started shaking, even though I wasn’t cold. I couldn’t stop no matter what I tried to think about. Miss V came into the bedroom the next morning and said she’d never had someone squeeze the panda so hard, even asleep. She was so nice it made me cry and I hardly ever cried. That was still true. It’s not that I didn’t feel like crying, curled close to the warmth of Ash’s body. It’s just that it took so much to get the tears outside on my face. Usually they were backed up in my throat or in my head.

  Miss V drove me to school the next day, where everything was the same. The sticker of the dog, happy and smiling, was still on my desk. No one knew about my mom or even asked questions. I went to recess, sat in the lunchroom, walked around like I was supposed to be there. When Miss V picked me up she said she was going to take me to see my mom. She might seem different, Miss V said, because of the medicine they were giving her. Her brain was not functioning right and they were trying to figure it out. It was like having a car that slipped into the wrong gear. It went too fast, without warning, and other times couldn’t start up. No one could tell when it would happen. Did I understand? My mom had been broken-down when they took her to the hospital, but she was getting good care now, so I shouldn’t be scared. Medical science had made advances that could help her. Miss V put her hand under my chin.

  “You’re too young to have to understand this, but somehow I think you do,” she said.

  “How long will she stay in the hospital?” I asked.

  Miss V said she didn’t know, but she would try to make sure I got to visit whenever I could. At the hospital, she parked and walked with me down a concrete path that cut through a bright green lawn. When we got inside she told me to sit down. She went up to a desk at the front of the room and said she had Miss Maddy Donaldo to see Mrs. Donaldo. I flushed bright pink when she announced my name like that. I didn’t want anyone seeing me at the hospital visiting my mom who had something wrong with her brain. No one else had a mom who couldn’t get out of bed. No one else had a babysitter they didn’t know hauling them around to see a sick mom. Of course, no one from school would even be there, but that didn’t occur to me then.

  When I went in to see her, my mom looked at me part of the time, but she was like Miss V said, a broken-down car. She didn’t see me at all. I asked her when she was coming home, but she didn’t seem to hear. Miss V squeezed my hand and didn’t say anything until it was time to leave. She said to give my mom a hug, so I wrapped my arms around her. She had lost the sweet tangy smell of the perfume she used to spray up in the air and walk through. She put her cheek on the top of my head but her arms hung limply at her side. It was weird to hug someone who didn’t at least put a little effort into it. Ash called that a dead man’s hug. He didn’t know I had a mom who hugged like that.

  “I’m sorry, Miss Maddy,” Miss V said when we got back to the car. “You shouldn’t have to see your mother like that.”

  “Like what?” I squeezed myself against the car door.

  “It’s her depression, is what the doctor told me. She’s had a psychotic episode. There are people who say don’t tell kids the truth, but I think we should. Kids can catch on faster than adults, in my experience.”

  “My mom is . . .” I couldn’t think what to say. My mom was what? I reached over and pinched Miss V on the thigh as hard as I could. For the first time, I could feel that mean small center of myself. She didn’t know me, so why was she trying to tell me about my mother?

  She grabbed my hand and I pulled it away. “She is not psycho,” I said.

  “Of course not,” said Miss V. “She has an illness and they are taking good care of her.”

  I stayed with Miss V another week. I made up things to say about school, but I was not going to tell her about my mom. She’d ask me what my mom cooked for dinner or what we did before bed and I acted like I hadn’t heard. When I was younger, my dad brought me a miniature metal safe with a slot for change. I forgot the combination lock, but I kept the safe on a shelf, full of pennies and scraps of paper. It was what I did at Miss V’s, hide everything inside.

  The next week someone from the child agency came and took me to stay with my cousins Karen and Chip. They were not even close cousins, but they took in foster kids. I’d only met them once, but Miss V said I had to move in with them because they were family, which was the best place for children. I wanted to stay with her. I’d gotten used to the bedroom, the way she let me stay up late and watch TV game shows with her, then put out three cereals in the morning so I could choose which one I wanted. But she said her house was the place you go for short stays when you were in the midst of an emergency. She held out the panda, creased in the middle from where I’d gripped it, and said I could take it. I shook my head no, I didn’t want to. She said I was going to start a new part of my life and it would come with opportunities. She was right about that. I went to a different school the next week. I didn’t have time to return my library books to the other one and no one asked me about them. It was like I stole them without trying.

  I didn’t tell anyone, even Ash, about how I got taken away from my mom and then from Miss V. He and Fleet and Hope, they all had their own problems. Ash had a mom somewhere in Arizona, but he never talked about her except when he picked up a package at the post office around the corner. He usually divvied up the food with us, candy bars, peanut butter, little boxes of Cheerios. She must have thought he was on a backpacking trip somewhere. He said that was like her. She saw what she wanted, which was not a kid like him who would not sit still or listen. She would have been happier with a robot programmed to act right.

  “Look who’s got it going on,” Ash would say, opening a box from her, picking the money out of the bottom, always five $10 bills. It meant no signs, no sitting on the sidewalk trying to cadge change. He had enough to stay buzzed or do whatever he wanted all week. Last year he used it to buy a book for a business class at the community college on the other side of town. He went for a while, then said it was a waste, that he already knew how business works. Why shouldn’t he use the one thing he was truly good at to raise some cash? So he lifted a pack of Sharpies from the craft store on the street and there he was, in business, making signs. He sat on the sidewalk next to his own sign, name it, in big red letters. It didn’t draw as many people as the guy who hauled an old typewriter out on the street and wrote poems, rhyming or free form, your pick. Ash made him a free sign, poetry for rent, because you couldn’t own poetry, the guy said, even though he charged by the line for what he pecked out on the typewriter. Ash stuck it out for a while, then he got another package from his mom and he quit. There were probably signs of his sitting in houses around the country, asking for money, beer, free hugs.

  The last time I saw my mom she barely looked at me. She was out of the hospital, living in a boarding house that didn’t allow kids. We met at the county office, in a room filled with plastic chairs, tables, and toys that looked like kids had thrown them off a tall building. They were smashed every way, trains without wheels, torn picture books, puzzles with only a few pieces. I was ten, too old for any of them anyway. I sat with a woman from the agency who put one hand on my arm and managed to turn the pages of her magazine with the other. There was a picture on the cover of a smiling woman with two little kids on her lap. Everything would work out if I could step into that.

  My mom was there and not there. S
he saw the outside of me and that’s what I saw of her. Her hair had grown past her shoulders and it sat in one wavy gray pouf. She had never been very interested in food, always on the edge of too skinny, but now she was flabby. Her stomach pushed up against her shirt and her upper arms jiggled when she moved them. She’d reached for the end of my shirt and fingered it slowly the whole time I was there. No hug. No how is school? How is your new life? What’s up with Karen and Chip? I’ll get you out of there soon as I can. There was a hard pit in my stomach. I couldn’t look at her anymore. I decided right then that I was going to get out. I was not going to wait at my cousins’ house and go off like my mom. If my mom didn’t go to bed and think about me, I wasn’t going to think about her.

  I turned over and pushed Root, spooned so tight next to me that my arm was numb. He sighed, moved a few inches and went back to sleep.

  chapter 9

  The weather turned wet and windy, one storm after another rolling in from the ocean. It was impossible to sleep in your bag, rain plinking on you and gradually working its way inside. The ground never had a chance to dry so we slept at the shelter when we could. I kept going over it, how the guy who killed Shane could show up there while I was eating a plate of spaghetti and attack me from behind. I tried to face the door, especially at dinner, in case he tried to slip in. When the lights went off, I climbed in a bunk and turned sideways so I could watch for him.

  After the rain broke we went back to 40 Hill, but the leaves had melted into a slurry. Some of the bottles were smashed or hung down loose against the branches. Fleet found a guitar someone left near the lake and she played it nonstop. She said she’d taken lessons when she was little, but I couldn’t tell. She sounded like she was playing with her eyes closed. She punched me when I put my fingers in my ears, which made Root sit up like he was going to lunge at her. I would have thought the sound of her playing would set him off, but he didn’t mind that. He minded it when she pounded my arm.