Amanda studied her ringless left hand.
“You know, when I was little, I thought I’d get married,” she said. “Like my parents. They have long family trees, you know? My mother can trace her ancestry all the way back to Scotland. My father, his family was French, and they lived in New York City. His dad was a professor too. He could trace his lineage back.”
Larry looked at his wedding ring. He planned to wear it to his grave.
“I think when my parents adopted me, they thought I would take on their heritage. Like a sponge. It was more like an assumption—that by adopting me, they would make me just like them. But that’s not really how it works, is it? People trace their lineage for a reason, don’t they?”
“Well, it could be that members of those families were adopted too.”
“Touché.”
She had stopped eating. She wiped her mouth with a napkin.
“I’m not saying what happened to you didn’t count,” Larry said, thinking he had hurt her, somehow.
“No. I understand.”
But from her face, he could see that she did not agree.
8
There were mornings Dennis forgot all about the hole, and days lost in the rooms, but sooner or later, it came back to him, and sometimes, deep in the night when the watchman was snoring at his desk, Dennis would creep down from his bed and stand over it, the leaves of the bush touching his legs.
Who are you?he wanted to know.Who am I?
Awareness came, like a rainstorm that blesses. The garden of his soul was growing. It was often weeds, but weeds are better than dry, bitter soil. He felt things now. He knew.
A typical day at Brightwood went like this:
Wake-up buzzer down the hall. Feet on the floor, always cold no matter what the season. It rained a lot at the coast, and the windows always sparkled with water.
Showers. The boys showered every two days. They switched between floors. The industrial showers were on the first floor, and a staff member always lounged and watched with disinterest. In the shower, the skin of the boys was the color of cement.
The boys cleaned their pits, cleaned their groins, asked no questions. Toweled off with a square mitten of rough cloth, dropped it in themassive laundry baskets for the staff to launder in the fetid basement that no one else entered. It steamed down there on laundry days. The basement floor was cracked pavement that ran in a thousand rivulets.
Clothes on. These were picked from the shelves labeled with their names. Dennis was always a small. He never seemed to grow. It was true of all the kids at Brightwood. Hopelessness shrunk them, just as it turned them gray with despair. You could smell it on them. They did not smell like children.
Socks on, sneakers. The kids wore the same Velcro shoes. Shoes and bedding were shared because then it was easier for the staff to delouse everything. The center was constantly fighting outbreaks of lice, ringworm, and bedbugs. The sand fleas were especially bad.
Breakfast. March into the dining room. The older boys fought with the blunted forks and bullied the younger ones. The children ate with their elbows tucked in, to protect their food. Touching was not allowed, but some of the younger kids developed swollen shins from being kicked under the table. It was so common, it was called orphanage ankle.
Quiet time/reading time. No one read. It was amazing that the hours even passed at Brightwood. Days and weeks and months and years somehow passed, and looking back, you could hardly remember what happened.
Lunch.
School five days a week—okay, more like four. Or three. Depending on how often the teacher of the day got busy, or called in sick.
Exercise. Go out on the front lawn, under the supervision of the staff. Be ordered to run and play. Most often the kids just stood there, like robots. Be told to play badminton. The net breaks and never gets fixed. On rainy days, which were often, the boys crowded into the gym, which became thick with bad smells.
Dinner. Or supper, as the cook called it. Everyone liked the cook.She had round cheeks and poured rivers of margarine on everything. Dennis’s favorite thing to eat was her corned beef and boiled potatoes, soaked in that buttery margarine.
There were too many kids at Brightwood to celebrate birthdays, the staff said, but when it was your special day—for Dennis this was in the fall—the cook snuck a cupcake or donut near your plate. The other kids were envious of even this scrap of attention.
Evening quiet time. Sometimes an activity was planned, always by the newer staff, wanting to pretend this was a nice place. They made popcorn on the stove and burned the pot for the cook to clean the next day, annoyed. They marched the kids into the dining room, where they had pushed the tables away, and everyone crowded on the floor to pretend to have fun, watchingLady and the Trampor some old movie where adults danced and sang in the rain. Who ever did such a thing? After Ralph had left for the night, Dennis looked out the windows and wondered where he went.
Bedtime. The kids had their own rooms. It was to protect them from each other. There were small red lights above the doors. The staff told them these were cameras, but that was a lie. The security system at Brightwood had broken years before, and no one had gotten it fixed.
Lights out.
