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By Root 1150 0

into her head, sat in a facing chair, tapped on her knee, said, “Here I am.” She screamed louder now. It had nothing to do with the flickering haze or her Finch, but everything to do with her girls. They weren’t with the aunts and uncles. My God, my God, why hadn’t she seen it before? They’d never been with them, the whole month she’d been locked away in this crazy house. Wouldn’t the aunts have made sure she talked to the girls on the phone had they been tucked away safely in their Queen Street row house? And if she knew her Uncle Blue, he surely would have snuck Shern in, told the guard she was a young-looking sixteen. At the very least they would have stood the girls in the courtyard under her window so they could blow one another kisses through the chain-link screen. Where were her girls? “My God!” She was hollering out loud now. “My girls, my girls, where are my girls?” She banged against the chain-link screen to try to get the aunts and uncles to hear her, to turn around, to explain to her what had happened to Shern and Victoria and Bliss. She jumped up from the chair, lifted the chair and threw it against the window, picked it up and threw it again. She felt helpless, hopeless, she had to know about her girls.

The nurse was in the room now; she could smell the White-All shoe polish. A whole host of people were in the room; she didn’t even need to turn around to confirm it, their various scents were so crowding the air at her back. And now she was in their clutches, two, four, six, eight sets of hands had her, all talking fast, demanding so many milligrams of this, liters of that, and then the puncture in her buttock, and she could feel it streaming all around her, except now it was tighter than a haze and darker than navy; it was thick like gumbo and black as pitch tar and completely surrounded her. She couldn’t see through it, or hear through it, or even smell through it, except for the tiniest pinhole that let in a ray of ether that went straight to her nose and kept her hanging on. And of course she couldn’t have known that her status in this mental hospital came up for review that following day. It had been a month. They couldn’t hold her longer than this without her permission. Unless of course she demonstrated that she would pose a danger to herself or others if she were released. Then they could hold her, could even restrict her visitors in fourteen-day allotments. Which of course now they were going to do.

10

That Addison Street row house was calm for a change. More than quiet, it was actually absent of the bitterness that usually kept the air there unsettled. The air had a snug feel now, like a contented child falling off to sleep, like Victoria, all cried out and napping on Ramona’s bed.

Ramona hadn’t been able to summon the right words to apologize to Victoria for slapping her, didn’t know how to explain to the child that for fifteen years she’d seen fosters come and go, she’d washed their clothes, cleaned their dirt rings from the tub, combed their hair, sometimes even wiped the remnants from their diarrhea-stricken behinds; never ever had even one of them offered to move even a plate from the table; Mae spoiled them that way. And it was actually easier for Ramona because she never had to worry about getting too close or feeling too sorry watching their childhoods wrinkle and sag as they were shuttled in and out of the temporary, tenuous haven of Mae’s, Mae’s house often just a stop-off between the hell they were leaving and the one they would return to. She could douse them all with her hatred while Mae forced her to wait on them hand and foot. But now this one had dared to step out of the mold and offer to help, even poked around in the bitterness and stirred up other than the hate that Ramona felt for every child who’d come through there. She didn’t know how to explain any of it to Victoria or how to say she was sorry. But everything she did from that moment on said, “I’m sorry.” When she held Victoria to her like she thought a mother would, even though Ramona really couldn’t know what a