Looks Over(Gives Light Series) (23 page)

We navigated a maze of elevators and dead-end hallways built on top of a granite floor.  Mrs. Red Clay never spoke to me.  She led me to an old wooden door with a scratched glass pane, and we went inside. 

I had never been in a room as emotionally flooding as this room.  Children as young as four or five were sitting on the eroded benches, some with their families, some with elegantly dressed social workers; some completely alone.  Court officers stood guarding a swinging door through which I could plainly hear a woman sobbing.  The walls were a dull blue-white and laden with inane parenting posters:  "It's four o'clock.  Do you know where your child is?"  Where there weren't posters, there was graffiti.  Someone had scribbled "CK YOU" across the farthest wall.  I guess the rest of it had worn away.

I sat with Mrs. Red Clay on an old brown bench, the armrest nearest me plastered with wads of chewing gum.

The swinging door banged loudly as two women came through it.  One woman launched herself at the other, raw screams tearing out of her throat, punching, hitting whatever she could reach.

"Give me back my daughter!" she screamed.

The court officers pulled the women apart.  The shorter woman looked scandalized, grasping her struck face.  She bellowed curses at her assailant, who thrashed and struggled in her officer's arms, blindly swinging her arms, begging, crying, tears streaming down her face.

I'd never felt such a blend of sickness and pity.

The rest of the morning was comparatively uneventful.  Mrs. Red Clay didn't talk to me, and I felt alone and uncomfortable, stranded in a crowded room.  I didn't want to think about what some of these children must have been through already.  A little girl sat with glazed eyes on the bench next to mine, dead to the world.  Her feet didn't reach the floor.  A teenage boy stood hunched against the wall, his hands in his pockets, eyes darting darkly. 
Please don't hurt me
, his posture said; but his face said,
You bite me, I'll bite back.

"St. Clair," a court officer called out, reading from a list of names.

I went with Mrs. Red Clay through the swinging door, and we found ourselves standing in front of a judge's pulpit.

Court wasn't anything like television makes it out to be.  To begin with, there weren't any nosy onlookers.  There wasn't even a place for us to sit.  And there certainly weren't jurors.  Just the judge, a couple of court officers, and the stenographer.

"Form 17?" the judge said.

Mrs. Red Clay opened her handbag and handed him a sheet of paper.  He skimmed it briefly.

"If I'm to understand," the judge said, "the ward's previous foster mother took him out of state without first alerting his case worker, but you think it's perfectly okay to reinstate her custody."

I kind of wanted to jump up and down and shout,
I have a name!
  I wasn't sure the court officers would like that, though, disability aside.  One of them, the big guy, kept eyeing me and sneering.

"Catherine Looks Over did not take the boy to another state.  She accompanied him to two different tribal residences.  Worcester v. Georgia establishes that any land owned by Native American tribes is not subject to the laws of the state surrounding it."

The judge smiled at Mrs. Red Clay under his bushy mustache.  "I've heard about you," he said.  "Alright, I'll buy it.  Still, I understand that one of the properties in question is under ongoing negotiations?"

"That would be the Bear River site in Idaho."

"You finalize that purchase and I'll dismiss these charges."

Mrs. Red Clay paused.

"Ma'am?"

"Sir," Mrs. Red Clay said, "these years are very influential to a child's development.  If we are in agreement that the charges are unfounded, I would like to petition for
immediate
transfer of custody.  Permanent custody."

The judge rifled through his papers.

"It says here that the boy's case worker disapproved of such an arrangement."

"I have collected various statements attesting to Miss Whitler's unprofessional conduct."

"Well, give them to me."

I couldn't believe how mindnumbing the courtroom process was.  It was emotionless and logical.  It was like math.  I watched the judge and Mrs. Red Clay exchange more papers.  I was tempted to start playing the plains flute and see if anyone noticed.

"Very good," the judge said.  "Whitler's dismissed from the case.  I'll have a new social worker sent to the reservation.  Provided that the new case worker likes the living arrangement, the boy goes back to his grandmother on a probationary basis."

"I requested--"

"I know what you requested.  You have your version of the law.  I have mine.  Probationary basis, Mrs. Red Clay.  You don't own Bear River just yet."

And then--maybe out of habit--the judge banged his gavel.

16

Wovoka

"Honey, what's wrong?"

Officer Hargrove put her hand on my shoulder.  I started and smiled.

I was supposed to be making dinner.  I guess I'd gotten distracted.  I didn't want to hurt Officer Hargrove's feelings; but I wanted to go home.  I hadn't been home in a month.  Every day I spent off of the reservation was unbearable.  I didn't know what my friends were up to.  I didn't know who was making deliveries for Granny.  I didn't know whether Dad was behaving himself.

Officer Hargrove looked at the vegetables on the counter.  "Forget this," she said.  "We'll order out."

I grasped her shoulder.

I think I was depressed.  I didn't feel like doing much of anything--not eating, not playing the flute, not even looking through Rafael's drawings.  I sat on the floor with my back against the armchair and smiled when I was spoken to and laughed when it felt appropriate, all the while aware of how fake I was.  I kind of wanted to punch me in the face.

Officer Hargrove dressed for work after dinner.  She leaned down and shook me gently by the shoulder.

"I've got to work the third shift," she said.  "So I won't be home until late.  I'm taking you to visit your family tomorrow.  I've been thinking about it, and nothing says I can't."

I felt like my grin was splitting my face in half.  I could have jumped right off the floor and hugged her.  I clutched her hand and hoped she knew how grateful I was.  I think she did; she smiled at me, in a suspiciously watery way.

It was just DeShawn and Jessica and me when Officer Hargrove left for work.

"I want to play Princess," Jessica said.

DeShawn groaned.

I heard a knock on the door.  I figured it was Officer Hargrove, and she had forgotten something for her beat.

It wasn't Officer Hargrove.  I opened the door and came face-to-face with a cop I'd never seen before.

"You Skylar?" he asked.

I was too stunned to do anything but nod.

"Come on," he said, and gestured for me to follow him.

I thought:  Maybe we had a new social worker already, and I was finally going home.  Then I thought:  Why wouldn't Mrs. Red Clay tell me that herself?  The real problem was that Dad had instilled me from birth with a healthy distrust of the law.  I always wanted to know what the authorities were doing and why they were doing it.

Either way, I couldn't leave with this guy.  I couldn't leave DeShawn and Jessica.  Officer Hargrove didn't get off until three in the morning.

"Sir?" DeShawn asked.  He joined me at the door and gazed up at the officer.

I felt my pockets, searching for my post-it pad. 

"Pack up," the cop told me, ignoring DeShawn.  "Now."

My veins felt filled with ice water.  I maneuvered through the room in a daze.  I tossed my stray belongings in my duffel bag, my fingers numb.  I found my pen and my post-it pad at the bottom of the bag and wrote a quick note.  I ripped off the sticky note and handed it to DeShawn.

Call your mom
, I'd written. 
Don't open the door for anyone.

DeShawn looked alarmed.  "Skylar?"

I tousled his hair and went out the door after the cop.

He led me down to the sidewalk, and from there, his squad car.  He was kind of heavyset, I thought; maybe I could outrun him.  Don't be a moron, I told myself.  All I really wanted was to go home.  If I complicated matters by running from the police, what were the odds that they'd happily sign off on returning me to the reservation?

It sucked, I thought, that strangers got to decide where I was allowed to live.

My heart fell into my stomach.  We drove right out of Angel Falls and missed the turnpike.  We weren't headed to the reservation after all.

I wanted to shout,
Where are we going?
  I couldn't throw open the door; the back doors didn't open from the inside.  I couldn't roll the window down and climb out.  Dad had shown me a trick once, when I was twelve, how to shatter glass just by tapping it with a spark plug.  I wished I had a spark plug.

We pulled over at a station alongside a barren, rural road.  The police officer opened my door and let me climb out, my duffel bag over my shoulder.  By this point I was extremely confused.  A county cop in a tan uniform came out of the building, a piece of chewing tobacco in his mouth.  "Come on, boy," he said to me.

My spirits sank.  I followed him to his car and piled into the back seat.  He turned on the country music station and sang along with his radio.

The stars were out when we arrived at our destination, a real ritzy town I had never seen in my entire life.  Oh, I thought, I know what's going on.  It's a mistake.  They're sending the wrong foster kid to the wrong home.  I looked much more like my Finnish American mom than my Native American dad.  Probably somebody at CPS had gotten his wires crossed and assumed that the Skylar St. Clair who belonged on an Indian reservation couldn't possibly be me.

I dug around in my duffel bag and penned a quick note.  The county cop opened the back door and I got out of the car, my legs stiff.  I handed him the note.

He chuckled.  "No mistake, son," he said, crumpling the note.  "This is a real nice home.  You'll be lucky if they adopt you."

My heart stopped.

The cop put his hand on my back and pushed me up a flight of steps.  I stumbled.  My whole body felt like ice.  This wasn't happening.  This wasn't happening.  This wasn't happening--

"Is that him?  Ray!  He's here!"

The woman in the doorway was extremely blonde.  I'm serious; her dye job was so bright, I felt like a brunet.  She snatched me into her arms and pulled me to her chest in a crushing hug.  I couldn't see the look on my face, but I imagined it was mortified.

The county cop chuckled again.  "You two play nice now," he said.  He retreated down the steps and into his car.

The blonde lady pulled back and examined me.  "Oh," she exclaimed, "I wanted a boy
just
like you!  Come in!  You'll catch a cold!"

No, I really wouldn't.  This was Arizona, not Anchorage.

Whoever this woman was, she didn't possess any of Rafael's empathetic telepathy.  She grabbed me by my wrist, jibbering with excitement, and tugged me into her home, kicking the door shut along the way.  I kind of resented being manhandled like that.  I jerked my hand free from hers and gave her a disbelieving look.  The look went right over her head.

"
Ray!
" she shouted.  "Our new boy's here!  He's Indian, too!  He doesn't look it, though!"

A mousy looking guy with a receding hairline came dismally into the foyer.  He was much older than his wife.  His glasses were big and blocky, and he mumbled something under his breath without looking at either of us.

The woman cleared her throat.  She smoothed out the imaginary wrinkles in her pressed gray suit and neatly folded her hands.  "How do you do, Skylar?" she said--very slowly.  What was that about?  "I'm Carla Buthrop.  This is my husband, Ray.  We're your foster parents."

Except they weren't.

"I think it's just wonderful," Mrs. Buthrop gushed.  "You not being able to talk and your dad abandoning you, and us coming along and plucking you out of the gutter.  I just think it's so terrific!"

Yeah, lady.  Disabilities are a lot of fun.

"I
really
hope you'll be happy here, Skylar," Mrs. Buthrop said.  "I can't have kids of my own.  But I can make other kids happy..."

However airheaded she may have been, I suddenly felt bad for her.  It wasn't her fault that she was kind of...I'm not going to finish that sentence.  I patted her arm in a way I meant to be consoling.  Bad idea.  She crooned and crushed me to her chest again.

"I'm going to make sure your room's ready!"

Mrs. Buthrop tore out of the room like a tornado.  Mr. Buthrop coughed and caught my eye.

"Sorry about her," he said.

It didn't matter.  I'd made up my mind:  With or without the police, I was going home.  Granted, I didn't know what city I was in, but I could probably bus it back to Nettlebush.  I had cash on me.  Maybe not enough cash.  Mr. Buthrop drifted out of the foyer and I followed him.  I made a cursory sweep of the decadent house around me.  A big, open kitchen with a tiled, black-and-white floor.  White was a recurring color scheme around here.  A cookie jar standing on top of the refrigerator.  Now why would it be up there?  A vase underneath the living room server table when it should have been on top.  Rich people were kind of predictable.  And the Buthrops were definitely rich.