Handle With Care (3 page)

“I already told her,” Mom said. “She didn’t listen.”

“Without a physician’s statement, we have to look into this further. It’s just protocol, to protect children—”

“I’d like to protect my child,” Mom said, her voice sharp as a razor. “I’d like you to let me get back in there so I can do just that.”

“Dr. Rice is an expert—”

“If he was an expert, then he’d know I was telling the truth,” Mom shot back.

“From what I understand, Dr. Rice is trying to reach your daughter’s physician,” Donna Roman said. “But since it’s Saturday night, he’s having trouble making contact. So in the meantime, I’d like to get you to sign releases that will allow us to do a full examination on Willow—a full bone scan and neurological exam—and in the meantime, we can talk a little bit.”

“The last thing Willow needs is more testing—“Mom said.

“Look, Ms. Roman,” Dad interrupted. “I’m a police officer. You can’t really believe I’d lie to you?”

“I’ve already spoken to your wife, Mr. O’Keefe, and I’m going to want to speak to you, too…but first I’d like to talk to Willow’s sister.”

My mouth opened and closed, but nothing came out of it. Mom was staring at me as if she were trying to do ESP, and I looked down at the floor until I saw those red high heels stop in front of me. “You must be Amelia,” she said, and I nodded. “Why don’t we take a walk?”

As we left, a police officer who looked like Dad did when he went to work stepped into the doorway. “Split them up,” Donna Roman said, and he nodded. Then she took me to the candy machine at the far end of the hallway. “What would you like? Me, I’m a chocolate fiend, but maybe you’re more of a potato chip girl?”

She was so much nicer to me when my parents weren’t sitting there—I immediately pointed to a Snickers bar, figuring that I’d better take advantage of this while I could. “I guess this isn’t quite what you’d hoped your vacation would be?” she said, and I shook my head. “Has this happened to Willow before?”

“Yeah. She breaks bones a lot.”

“How?”

For someone who was supposed to be smart, this woman sure didn’t seem it. How do anyone’s bones break? “She falls down, I guess. Or gets hit by something.”

“She gets hit by something?” Donna Roman repeated. “Or do you mean someone?”

There had been one time in nursery school when a kid had run into you on the playground. You were pretty gifted at ducking and weaving, but that day, you hadn’t been fast enough. “Well,” I said, “sometimes that happens, too.”

“Who was with Willow when she got hurt this time, Amelia?”

I thought back to the ice-cream counter, to Dad, holding your hand. “My father.”

Her mouth flattened. She fed coins into another machine, and out popped a bottled water. She twisted the cap. I wanted her to offer it to me, but I was too embarrassed to ask.

“Was he upset?”

I thought of my father’s face as we sped off toward the hospital following the ambulance. Of his fists, balanced on his thighs as we waited for word about Willow’s latest break. “Yeah—really upset.”

“Do you think he did this because he was angry at Willow?”

“Did what?”

Donna Roman knelt down so that she was staring me in the eye. “Amelia,” she said, “you can tell me what really happened. I’ll make sure he doesn’t hurt you.”

Suddenly, I realized what she thought I’d meant. “My dad wasn’t mad at Willow,” I said. “He didn’t hit her. It was an accident!”

“Accidents like that don’t have to happen.”

“No—you don’t understand—it’s because of Willow—”

“Nothing kids do justifies abuse,” Donna Roman muttered under her breath, but I could hear her loud and clear. By now she was walking back toward the room where my parents were, and even though I was yelling, trying to get her to hear me, she wasn’t listening. “Mr. and Mrs. O’Keefe,” she said, “we’re putting your children into protective custody.”

“Why don’t we just go down to the station to talk?” the officer was saying to Dad.

Mom threw her arms around me. “Protective custody? What does that mean?”

With a firm hand—and the help of the police officer—Donna Roman tried to peel her away from me. “We’re just keeping the children safe until we can get this all cleared up. Willow will be here overnight.” She started to steer me out of the room, but I grabbed at the doorframe.

“Amelia?” my mother said, frantic. “What did you say?”

“I tried to tell her the truth!”

“Where are you taking my daughter?”

“Mom!” I shrieked, and I reached for her.

“Come on, sweetheart,” Donna Roman said, and she pulled at my hands until I had to let go, until I was being dragged out of the hospital
kicking and screaming. I did this for five minutes, until I went totally numb. Until I understood why you didn’t cry, even though it hurt: there are kinds of pain you couldn’t speak out loud.

I’d seen and heard the words foster home before, in books that I read and television programs I watched. I figured that they were for orphans and inner-city kids, kids whose parents were drug dealers—not girls like me who lived in nice houses and got plenty of Christmas presents and never went to sleep hungry. As it turned out, though, Mrs. Ward, who ran this temporary foster home, could have been an ordinary mom. I guess she had been one, judging from the photos that plastered every surface like wallpaper. She met us at the door wearing a red bathrobe and slippers that looked like pink pigs. “You must be Amelia,” she said, and she opened the door a little wider.

I was expecting a posse of kids, but it turned out that I was the only one staying with Mrs. Ward. She took me into the kitchen, which smelled like dishwashing detergent and boiled noodles. She set a glass of milk and a stack of Oreo cookies in front of me. “You’re probably starving,” she said, and even though I was, I shook my head. I didn’t want to take anything from her; it felt like giving in.

My bedroom had a dresser, a small bed, and a comforter with cherries printed all over it. There was a television and a remote. My parents would never let me have a television in my room; my mother said it was the Root of All Evil. I told Mrs. Ward that, and she laughed. “Maybe so,” she said, “but then again, sometimes The Simpsons are the best medicine.” She opened a drawer and took out a clean towel and a nightgown that was a couple of sizes too big. I wondered where it had come from. I wondered how long the last girl who’d worn it had slept in this bed.

“I’m right down the hall if you need me,” Mrs. Ward said. “Is there anything else I can get you?”

My mother.

My father.

You.

Home.

“How long,” I managed, the first words I had said out loud in this house, “do I have to be here?”

Mrs. Ward smiled sadly. “I can’t say, Amelia.”

“Are my parents…are they in a foster home, too?”

She hesitated. “Something like that.”

“I want to see Willow.”

“First thing tomorrow,” Mrs. Ward said. “We’ll go up to the hospital. How’s that?”

I nodded. I wanted to believe her, so bad. With this promise tucked into my arms like my stuffed moose at home, I could sleep through the night. I could convince myself that everything was bound to get better.

I lay down, and tried to remember the useless bits of information you’d rattle off before we went to sleep, when I was always telling you to just shut up already: Frogs have to close their eyes to swallow. One pencil can draw a line thirty-five miles long. Cleveland, spelled backward, is DNA level C.

I was starting to see why you carried those stupid facts like other kids dragged around security blankets—if I repeated them over and over, it almost made me feel better. I just wasn’t sure if that was because it helped to know something, when the rest of my life seemed to be a big question mark, or because it reminded me of you.

I was still hungry, or empty, I couldn’t tell which. After Mrs. Ward had gone to her own bedroom, I tiptoed out of bed. I turned the light on in the hallway and went down to the kitchen. There, I opened up the refrigerator and let the light and cold fall over my bare feet. I stared at lunch meat, sealed into plastic packages; at a jumble of apples and peaches in a bin; at cartons of orange juice and milk lined up like soldiers. When I thought I heard a creak upstairs, I grabbed whatever I could: a loaf of bread, a Tupperware of cooked spaghetti, a handful of those Oreos. I ran back to my room and closed the door, spread my treasure out on the sheets in front of me.

At first, it was just the Oreos. But then my stomach rumbled and I ate all the spaghetti—with my fingers, because I had no fork. I had a piece of bread and another and then another, and before I knew it only the plastic wrapper was left. What is wrong with me? I thought, catching my reflection in the mirror. Who eats a whole loaf of bread? The outside of me was disgusting enough—boring brown hair that frizzed with crummy weather, eyes too far apart, that crooked front tooth, enough fat to muffin-top my jeans—but the inside of me was even
worse. I pictured it as a big black hole, like the kind we learned about in science last year, that sucks everything into its center. A vacuum of nothingness, my teacher had called it.

Everything that had ever been good and kind in me, everything people imagined me to be, had been poisoned by the part of me that had wished, in the darkest crack of the night, that I could have a different family. The real me was a disgusting person who imagined a life where you had never been born. The real me had watched you being loaded into an ambulance and had let myself wish, for a half a second, that I could stay behind at Disney World. The real me was a bottomless soul who could eat a whole loaf of bread in ten minutes and still have room for more.

I hated myself.

I could not tell you what made me go into the bathroom that was attached to my room—wallpaper spotted with pink roses, shaped soaps curled in dishes next to the sink—and stick my finger down my throat. Maybe it was because I could feel the toxic stuff seeping into my bloodstream, and I wanted it out. Maybe it was punishment. Maybe it was because I wanted to control one part of me that had been uncontrollable, so the rest of me would fall into line. Rats can’t throw up, you’d told me once; it popped into my head now. With one hand holding up my hair, I vomited into the toilet until I was flushed and sweating and empty and relieved to learn that, yes, I could do this one thing right, even if it made me feel worse than I had before. With my stomach cinching and bile bitter on the back of my tongue, I felt horrible—but this time there was a physical reason I could point to.

Weak and wobbly, I stumbled back to my borrowed bed and reached for the television remote. My eyes felt like sandpaper and my throat ached, but I could not fall asleep. Instead I flipped through the cable channels, through home decorating shows and cartoons and late-night talk shows and Iron Chef cooking contests. It was on Nick at Nite, twenty-two minutes into The Dick Van Dyke Show, that the old Disney World commercial came on—like a joke, a tease, a warning. It felt like a punch in the gut: there was Tinker Bell, there were the happy people; there was the family that could have been us on the teacup ride.

What if my parents never came back?

What if you didn’t get better?

What if I had to stay here forever?

When I started to sob, I stuffed the corner of the pillow deep into my mouth so Mrs. Ward wouldn’t hear. I hit the mute button on the television remote, and I watched the family at Disney World going round in circles.

Sean

It’s funny, isn’t it, how you can be 100 percent sure of your opinion on something until it happens to you. Like arresting someone—people who aren’t in law enforcement think it’s appalling to know that, even with probable cause, mistakes are made. If that’s the case, you unarrest the person and tell him you were just doing what you had to. Better that than take the risk of letting a criminal walk free, I’ve always said, and to hell with civil libertarians who wouldn’t know a perp if he spit in their faces. This was what I believed, heart and soul, until I was carted down to the Lake Buena Vista PD on suspicion of child abuse. One look at your X-rays, at the dozens of healing fractures, at the curvature of your lower right arm where it should have been straight—and the doctors went ballistic and called DCF. Dr. Rosenblad had given us a note years ago that should have served as a Get Out of Jail Free card, because lots of parents with OI kids are accused of child abuse when the case history isn’t known—and Charlotte’s always carried it around in the minivan, just in case. But today, with everything we had to remember to pack for the trip, the letter was forgotten, and what we got instead was a trip to the police station for interrogation.

“This is bullshit,” I yelled. “My daughter fell down in public. There were at least ten witnesses. Why aren’t you dragging them in? Don’t you guys have real cases to keep you busy around here?”

I’d been alternating between playing good cop and bad cop, but as it turned out, neither worked when you were up against another officer from an unfamiliar jurisdiction. It was nearly midnight on Saturday—which meant that it could be Monday before this was sorted out with Dr. Rosenblad. I hadn’t seen Charlotte since they’d brought us
to the station to be questioned—in cases like this, we’d separate the parents so that they had less of a chance to fabricate a story. The problem was, even the truth sounded crazy. A kid slips on a napkin and winds up with compound fractures in both femurs? You don’t need nineteen years on the job, like I have, to be suspicious of that one.

I imagined Charlotte was falling apart at the seams—being away from you while you were hurting would rip her to pieces, and then knowing that Amelia was God knows where was even more devastating. I kept thinking of how Amelia used to hate to sleep with the lights off, how I’d have to creep into her room in the middle of the night and turn them off when she’d fallen asleep. Are you scared? I’d asked her once, and she’d said she wasn’t. I just don’t want to miss anything. We lived in Bankton, New Hampshire—a small town where you could actually drive down the street and have people honk when they recognized your car; a place where if you forgot your credit card at the grocery store, the checkout girl would just let you take your food and come back to pay later. That’s not to say that we didn’t have our share of the seedy underbelly of life—cops get to see behind the white picket fences and polished doors, where there are all kinds of hidden nightmares: esteemed local bigwigs who beat their wives, honors students with drug addictions, schoolteachers with kiddie porn on their computers. But part of my goal, as a police officer, was to leave all that crap at the station and make sure you and Amelia grew up blissfully naïve. And what happens instead? You watch the Florida police come into the emergency room to take your parents away. Amelia gets carted off to a foster-care facility. How much would this lousy attempt at a vacation scar you both?