Somehow it seemed like an answer to a question she had never known quite how to ask.
CHAPTER EIGHT
2001
OAKLAND
Cady, Age 13
Her childhood wasn’t all bad. Cady had vague, watercolor memories of being held in the lap of a woman who smelled like talcum powder and almond-scented hand lotion, overlaid with the slight sourness of old milk. She could still recall the warmth of the woman’s skin and the reassuring thudding of her heart. Strong, plump arms encircling her like a loving shackle that would never let her go.
Or there was Ms. Greta, who had a deep, kind voice and an easy laugh, who kept a canister of red-hot candies that she would dole out like vitamins, making the kids giggle when she’d say, “Line up for your vitamins, now, kids, and eat ’em all up.”
But every time Cady started to relax, to learn how things worked, to develop a fondness for someone, she’d be yanked out and placed in another situation. That’s what the social workers called the succession of houses and apartments she was assigned to: “situations.” A series of foster homes, then a string of group homes, moved from one to the next for reasons that made no sense to her; all she understood was that according to the Powers That Be, she was hard to fit.
Cady learned not to get too attached to anything or anyone, tocarry anything that mattered to her on her person at all times, and to keep two big black Hefty garbage bags—her “foster kid suitcases”—ready to go.
As she grew, Cady would note the changes in her body when she looked in the mirror, searching her features for a hint of where she’d come from. She imagined her father’s eyes in her own straightforward espresso brown gaze; she wondered if she might have inherited her mother’s strong jawline, her stubborn chin.Did she look like anyone in this world?What would it be like to share a family resemblance with parents and siblings, grandparents, cousins?
What would it be like to belong?
Once Cady hit adolescence, she graduated to a group home, to the roster of yet another overworked social worker, this one more focused on keeping her wards out of prison than on finding them permanent homes and families.
The other kids taunted Cady with possible origin stories: claiming she had been abandoned at a fire station, or that her father had died in prison after denying paternity, or that she had been taken away from a drug-addled mother. All Cady knew for sure was that there had been a legal issue regarding paternity when she was very young, which was why she hadn’t been adoptable as an infant. There were no immediate relatives and no way to trace family.
The file is sealed, the subject is closed.
A kind librarian once helped her to look up her last name: Drake. It turned out to be a relatively common surname, so it didn’t provide any clues as to her people. But the librarian read that it might have derived from the worddragon.
Cady liked that. When the anger arose inside her, she imagined it as her inner dragon, a scaly, ugly thing that surged up from her gut, swelling with rage at the unfairness of it all. She would watch with vicious envy as harried parents picked their kids up from school, imagining her classmates going home to mothers and fathers and nannies,their bedrooms decorated with pink flowers and soft white coverlets, rooms fit for the princesses their parents believed them to be.
Cady’s only friend at the group home was a girl named Jonquilla, after the jonquil, a kind of tiny daffodil. She went by Jon—some of the kids tried to call her Daffy behind her back, but she beat up the biggest boy and that was that.
Cady recognized in Jonquilla a kindred soul: a fiery, discontented creature. She was drawn to Jon’s fury, her confident righteousness. Soon they were a pair; Cady stopped hanging out with the younger kids, instead choosing to skip school and pilfer candy from Abdella’s Liquor Store on the corner.
One day Cady and Jonquilla walked past a shop Cady had never seen before. Metallic gold letters spelled out its name in a bold arc on the glass.
A carousel horse painted in bright red, blue, and yellow stood in the display window, its prancing legs positioned as though it had just alit. It had gold gilding on its saddle, and its silver mane glittered in the afternoon sun.
“Hey, check this out,” Cady said to Jon. “Do you remember the Tilden Park merry-go-round? Did you ever do Prospective Parents Day there as a kid?”
“Coupla times,” said Jon. “It was lame.”
“I like this horse, though. Do you remember the sea creature at Tilden?”
Jon rolled her eyes. “I dunno. I guess. I thought merry-go-rounds were cool when I was, like, five. Wanna go down to the park, see if we can score something?”
“Maybe... but want to check this place out first?” asked Cady. “What’s it called?”
“Maxine’s Treasures. Can’t you read?”
Beyond the carousel horse Cady spotted a mishmash of oil paintings and wooden furniture, gold-framed mirrors and strange dolls andan old-fashioned record player. She longed to go in, but hesitated. Shop owners had a way of knowing that kids her age who were out and about during school hours were up to no good. Still...
Cady’s gaze lingered on the fascinating jumble of items crowding the store.
“C’mon, Drake,” Jon urged.
Cady followed her friend, but couldn’t stop wondering: Where had all those things come from? Who had they belonged to? What were their stories?
