Compromised (6 page)

B
eulah sits next to me in her polyethylene terephthalate suit. She wears a watered-down blue one that matches the vein in her temple. We pull up to the jail in silence. It'll be the first time I've seen him in almost a month. Corroded iron gates screech open to let the bus drive through. We get off and brace ourselves against the icy morning air. I don't think I ever stared so hard at my shoes in my entire life. A square box houses a couple of guards who watch us through barred windows. The generic clock hangs crooked on the wall behind them. Eight fifty-three.

It reeks. I turn and see that the jail is located right in front of the city sewage treatment plant. Appropriate.

Everybody wears their Sunday best. A few babies cry.
The guard standing at the box house looks bored. He snaps his gum and glances at his watch. At nine
A.M
. he opens a gate that leads us to a metal door. We walk down a long corridor through airport-security–like devices. Mustard walls and dingy linoleum. There are no leering prisoners screaming vile things at us. It just looks like a school I went to in downtown Sacramento for a few months—minus the nervous-looking teachers.

I check in my bag and give my name to the clerk at the end of the hall. He nods and motions for me to take a seat. “It'll be a few minutes. You can go in round two.”

I inhale the heavy smells of metal and floor polish and scuff my shoe on the floor. Everybody whispers. I watch the first group of people trickle into a room. Some come out crying. Most leave stone-faced.

The guard motions for me to go in. “I'll wait here,” Beulah says, scratching her gnawed-off nails across her polyester pants.

This line of work really doesn't suit her.

I walk into the small room and my stomach knots. He sits behind one of those Plexiglas barriers. He hasn't shaved and his beard has grown thick and wiry on his broad chin. He looks off into space, dark circles under his
eyes. There is no spark anymore.

He forces a smile and puts his hand up to the glass. I match my palm to his and swallow back tears. He motions for me to pick up the phone.

“Hey, Maya. It looks like I've made quite a mess this time.”

“It's okay,” I say.

He grins. “That's my girl.”

I feel more at ease. We're back to us. Just a little, anyway. “I'll take care of things, Dad. Really. I'll figure something out.”

He winks and whispers. “A prison break?”

“If I pass you hot sauce and a radio, you could make a break for it in about, hmmm, fifteen years. I saw it on
MythBusters
.” For just a second I fantasize about Dad slipping between his cell bars and running away. But on
MythBusters
the prisoner was in Mexico. Under the hot sun. Maybe I could slip Dad a heat lamp, too. I'd pick him up in a run-down car, and we'd head to Canada.

Then I'll be a felon, just like Dad.

“How's school, baby?”

“Dad—”

“How's school? You have any projects coming up?”

I shake my head. “Same old stuff, Dad.”

Then we just sit and stare at each other through the smudged glass. I put my cheek to the glass, and he does the same. I can almost feel his scratchy beard.

“You are so much like her.”

I shake my head. “I'm nothing like her.”

“Do me a favor.”

I nod.

“Get the box of her things out of the house.” He has a shoe box of Mom's stuff. I never look at it. I can't. She
chose
to leave. What mom does that to her daughter?

“No,” I say. “
That
I won't do.”

“Your mom has a sister, Maya. I told them about her, but they said nobody by her name lives in Rugby. The authorities haven't been able to find her.” He clears his throat again. “I'm having, um, credibility problems here.”

I push my hair back behind my ears and try to control my voice. “An aunt?”

He nods.

“For real?”

He nods.

I feel like I've been bulldozed. “An aunt? After all these years—”

“It's just—” He clears his throat. “When your mom died, things were pretty bad between us. And we just drifted. She wanted to get custody of you back then, but I couldn't let that happen. So I left. We left.”

I stare at him through the smudged glass and try to retrieve a memory of this aunt, but I come up blank. I don't remember anybody but Dad and me at that cemetery. Where was she?

Beulah said Dad had been pretty vague about the relative thing. I don't think an aunt is anywhere near as vague as what I imagined, say the cousin of a third cousin twice removed. How is an aunt vague?

Why can't they believe him?

Then I think about the other shoe boxes Dad has stashed, full of the Social Security cards, bank statements, checks, credit cards, and histories of all of those people Dad created—none of them real.

An aunt.

“She'll take you now. She's a good woman,” Dad says.

Everything has been a huge lie. Everything. We could've had a family. We could've had normal.

“I'm sorry, baby.”

I blink back the tears that burn my eyes.

“In the shoe box, there's information. Her name is, was, I don't know—Sarah Brandt. But she could've gotten married, divorced, remarried. You've got to get into the house. Find the spare key.”

“So I get to find the long-lost aunt.” A few people look over at us, and I lower my voice. “Why didn't she try to at least keep in touch all these years? Why did she just let you leave like that? Why didn't she care enough—” Why am I surprised?

Dad shakes his head. “Look in the shoe box.”

“I don't care about Mom and her things and her family,” I whisper.

He leans in closer. “Mom's more than a bottle of pills, Maya.”

A bell rings and a guard shouts, “Two minutes!”

“Maya, listen to me.”

I close my eyes.

“I signed some papers.”

“What papers, Dad?”

“It's for the best, Maya. It's for you. Things are pretty complicated.”

“What papers, Dad?” I shake my head and don't even try to stop the tears that spill down my cheeks. “No, Dad.”

“I have no choice. It's done.”

We all have choices. We
all
do. Mom did. Dad did. Mystery Aunt Sarah did. They chose wrong.

“But—” I protest.

“Look at me.” I stare into Dad's iceberg eyes. I've always wished I had his eyes and not Mom's gray, dreary eyes. I push the thought away. He clears his throat. “It's for the best.”

Leaving me. Abandoning me. That's the best? How is that any different from Mom?

“Get her things from the house,” he says. “Find Sarah. They won't.”

The guards start to shuffle everybody out of the room. One taps Dad on the shoulder. He hangs up the phone.

Click.

So that's it. After all these years, he gives up.

We've never given up.

He stands and pauses, like he's going to say something—something to make it all okay. “I love you, Maya,” he mouths. “I love you.”

I watch as he walks away. He doesn't turn around. He just leaves, and I sit there with the telephone stuck to my ear.

P
ressure is an easy scientific equation that measures the force on an object spread over the surface area. So the definition of pressure is force divided by the area where the force is applied. When too much force is applied to a surface area, watch out.

I'm pretty sure my head's going to explode. Or maybe it already did. That's why my thoughts are fuzzy and my days seem to last forever. I know that the world is about four and a half billion years old and humans have been around for only two hundred thousand years of it. But this past week has felt like an entire Proterozoic Eon.

The method, I sigh. This can work. I take the aspirin the school nurse gave me. Think. Think.

I scribble out the method and crumple up the page. I can't even figure out a decent hypothesis. This will never work.

“Sorry to interrupt.” Beulah peeks her head into the room.

We all look up at her. Nicole stops talking long enough for Beulah to say, “Maya, can you come with me?”

“Looks like you're getting the call,” Jess sneers.

Shelly clasps her hands. “Oh, I hope they're nice.”

Nicole turns away and stares out the window.

I follow Beulah out to the conference room.

“We are thrilled you're going to be part of this family.” The woman holds out a porcelain hand. Her eyes dart between her husband and me. He holds out his hand as well; it's waxy with manicured nails. He has beady eyes and wears a starched white shirt and too-skinny blue tie. He sits back in his chair and puts his arm around the lady, squeezing her shoulder.

She winces and shifts in her seat. “It's been a while
since we've opened our home to a—”

Orphan. Stray. Urchin. I'm about to fill in her sentence but decide I'd better keep quiet to spare her the embarrassment.

“A teenager,” the man finishes. “We had a couple of bad experiences.” He looks at me with little brown eyes, heavy pouches underneath. “But your case interests us.” He tsks. “Unfortunate circumstances.”

Having your dad sign you away is “unfortunate”?

“Anyway,” the man continues, “my name is Donovan, and this is Cherise.”

“Cherry.” She blushes. “You can call me Cherry.”

Donovan nods. “We're God-fearing folk at our home and expect you to attend services with us. You'll get baptized right away, of course.”

I feel my jaw tense. Who are they to tell me who I'll pray to? I'll pray to a freaking McDonald's arch if I want. I open my mouth to protest and look over at Beulah.

This is an argument I can't win.

I have no choices. My family made theirs and left me with none. Nice.

Donovan goes on and on about devotion and God and
prayer. I listen when he starts talking about tithing and duty to church.

Cherry nods enthusiastically.

Maybe they're part of a freak cult and are looking for virgin sacrifices. That's why they want me. It's not likely Beulah will buy into my theory.

For being so God-fearing, Donovan doesn't seem to worry about staring at my chest. I want to tell him that as much as he stares, they're not going to grow any bigger. I know. I've tried.

I look at Beulah. She has pasted a grin on her face from her box of expressions. “We wanted to place you, Maya, before…” She pauses and takes out a damp handkerchief. “We just think it's better to get you into a nice family home as soon as possible to avoid any further, um, incidents.”

I clench my jaw. So I just sped up the process by standing up for myself. Maybe the wallflower thing would've been a better way to go. It always worked for me before. But things are different now.

“It says here your full name is Amaya Terese Sorenson.” Cherry looks at my file. “What an interesting name.”

I nod. They stare at me.

“What kind of name is that?” Cherry asks.

“It's Basque.”

“Basque, huh? What kind of people are those?” Donovan asks suspiciously. He's probably one of those camouflage-wearing militia guys—you know, the kind who'll have a ham radio in his garage to report suspicious ethnic activities to his grand wizard. He apparently hasn't ever eaten lamb stew at Louis's Basque Corner.

“Honey, you know the Basque people! We saw on Discovery they live in the mountains over in Europe.” Cherry claps. “I never realized Sorenson was a Basque name.”

God, she makes us sound like cavemen.

Actually, my last name is Aguirre. But that was about six last names and Social Security cards ago. Another great way for Dad to make a buck. He'd read the obituaries, then kind of reassign Social Security numbers for those who needed them. It was a popular business in New Mexico. Dad always said it was his way of opening up the borders—being a cultural attaché between the United States and Latin America. I always thought of it as recycling lives—administrative reincarnation, so to speak.

“So it looks like we're your family now. You can be relieved you've been placed in such a loving home. With
role models that you can look up to.” Donovan leers.

As much as I hate it, he has a point. Dad's a federal prisoner who signed me away as if I were a piece of real estate. Knowing Dad, he would've liked to auction me on eBay, sell me to the highest bidder. But that's probably illegal.

Whatever.

Dad'd be the one to find the loophole to pull it off.

No one says anything. The windows bulge from the silence.

Beulah titters nervously and hands out stale cookies with Hawaiian Punch. “It'll just take some time to get to know each other.” She turns to me. “The Nicholsons have received countless children into their home. We are so grateful,” she coos. She lowers her voice and turns to me. “You have no family, Maya. And these people want to make you part of theirs.”

No family. That again.

The other day when I asked about Aunt Sarah, Beulah told me that Dad had been lying. “Aunt Sarah doesn't exist,” she said. “We looked.”

This is not how I imagined things going. Dad wasn't supposed to sign those papers. He was supposed to fight for me; get a lawyer; make us a family again. I'd stay at
Kids Place until the state came to some kind of settlement and he'd have litter duty or something. Whatever those white-collar criminals get. Even Martha Stewart got to go home and plant potatoes. Okay. After nine months in jail. But still, nine months is nothing. Anybody can hold out for nine months.

“What about contact with my dad? Can I talk to him?” I'm sure I'll want to. Sometime. When the anger goes away.

I wonder if it will go away.

It never has for my mom.

But he's all I've had all these years. It's not as easy as signing a piece of paper for me.

Donovan shakes his head. “Now that I'm your interim guardian, I think it would be best for you not to see him.”

“Excuse me?”

“Your dad is in federal prison. Outside Elko.”

No more Carson City minimum security jail for Dad.

My stomach flip-flops. It's okay not to talk to him when I don't want to, but when somebody else mandates that, it's not.

Donovan continues, “You need to be steered away from those kinds of people—away from the influence of such a sinful man.”

And into the arms of the creepiest family in Reno.

Jess wasn't kidding about foster homes. No wonder Nicole runs away.

“He's my dad,” I finally manage to say. So he signed a piece of paper. Maybe he was forced to. Maybe. I think of a hypothesis that would work with that scenario. There are too many maybes, but none of them take me where I need to go. I feel like I'm hitting dead ends in my lab rat maze.

I scan the faces sitting at the table and can feel the gastric fluids bubbling in my intestines. It's as if they all got together and decided that there was a right kind of dad, and mine wasn't it.

“Evolve!” I want to shout. But Cherry probably thinks she comes from a rib and the word
evolution
is blasphemous.

“Right now, your father is just another man in prison.” He does that annoying quote thing with his fingers when he says “father.” Donovan has cold eyes. Cherry blushes again.

I cross my arms and look away.

He mutters something under his breath, then half smiles. “So we'll be back on Wednesday to take you home.” They get up and embrace Beulah. I'm afraid they'll wrinkle her, but she springs back, her suit as pressed as before.

They move toward me, but I shove my hands into my pockets and turn away.

I fight back tears. October drizzle blurs the window-pane. I watch as they pile into a two-tone station wagon plastered with bumper stickers: a glowing Guadalupe;
WHO WOULD JESUS BOMB
?;
THIS
fi
SH WON'T FRY. WILL YOU
?;
ARE YOU FOLLOWING JESUS THIS CLOSE
?; and, my personal favorite,
DARWIN IS DEAD
.
JESUS IS ALIVE
.
WHICH ONE DO YOU TRUST WITH YOUR ETERNAL SOUL
?

It's Monday. I have two days.

I lay my head in my arms and cry.