Sometimes my mom would ask me why I didn’t put the clothes back in my dresser or my closet when I was deciding what to wear before school. Usually it was just because I was rushed and I figured I would put the stuff away when I got home from school. At least that’s what I would tell myself at seven thirty-five in the morning, when I had about five minutes before the school bus arrived to brush my hair and put on my makeup and find my winter boots and throw my homework in a backpack that some days weighed as much as a Mini Cooper. It was crazy how much crap we were supposed to have with us.
So, Christmas morning at Poacher’s was sort of a wake-up call. I stared at Trevor with his hair in his eyes and a girl named Izzie who I didn’t like much, her head in a knit cap to keep warm, and Joseph, who I could see had an erection even under the quilt, and two empty orange vials on the windowsill. And I just wanted out. So, I pushed off my own quilt and stood up. My footing was a little funky because I was standing on a pretty soft mattress.
When I tiptoed past Poacher’s bedroom, I could see he had passed out in his army jacket. I knew he kept some of his cash under his mattress when he was sleeping because he didn’t trust us, but it wasn’t all that hard to reach underneath it and steal two twenty-dollar bills. Then I stole two more. He didn’t even move.
I got dressed in the bathroom so no one would hear me and made a list in my mind of what I should put in my knapsack. I didn’t lift any pills or any of Poacher’s stash, but I did take a lighter. I guess I was still thinking of that Jack London short story. I wanted to be damn sure I could start a fire if I had to. The biggest decision, weirdly enough, was my X-Acto. I tried to convince myself that I didn’t need it. I wouldn’t need it. I would only take my Bactine and some Band-Aids in case I got a cut. But, in the end, I did take the X-Acto. I might need a weapon, right? I remember thinking to myself, But, Emily, you need to promise yourself that you won’t use it as a weapon against yourself.
Of course, I did. That was just one of my many promises to myself that I broke.
When I unlocked the door it made a ridiculously loud click. Had it always made that much noise? Probably. I’d just never noticed. Then I heard somebody coughing, and I was pretty sure it was Tory, a new girl I did like even if she had the ugliest face tats I’d ever seen in my life, and I slipped through the door.
Outside it was sunny. I could see a dusting of fresh snow on the ground. It was pretty and I watched my breath steam into the air.
I zipped up my parka and pulled tight the hood. I had wedged a lot of clothes into the backpack, but I was wearing a lot, too. I was wearing as much as I could. I wished I had left the posse a note, but I didn’t know if it was supposed to be a suicide note or a thank-you note. I guess since I had brought all the clothes that I could and my X-Acto, I was hoping more to live than to die. I’m still here, right? But who knows how my mind works. I sure don’t.
I remember I heard a harp in my head and I couldn’t figure out why. Then I got it: it was the harp from that Beatles song Poacher liked about the runaway girl. “She’s Leaving Home.”
Nope, I thought. I am not leaving home. I am just … leaving.
A.C.
Chapter 13
I am exactly five feet, two inches tall. I was more than a head taller than Cameron, and supposedly a head is about ten inches long. So I would say that Cameron was just over four feet tall. Four feet and a couple of inches. He had hair the black of a stovepipe and the tiniest little ski jump for a nose. Once I tried to write a poem about what he looked like, but I just got depressed. I ripped the paper into shreds. I still know the first couplet, but I can’t bring myself to say it.
His eyes were green.
His mummy bag was red. His mummy bag twine was blue.
The first day after Cameron and I met, I tried to turn him in. It was one thing for me to live like a lunatic hobo, but it was another thing for a nine-year-old kid. I explained to him why even with his incredibly awesome mummy bag he couldn’t live on the streets, but he was pretty firm. He said he would not go back to a foster home. I told him there were plenty of great foster homes, but he didn’t believe me. (In truth, I’m not sure I believed me.) So I decided I would just bring him to the police station on North Avenue. I knew where it was. But he figured out where we were going and took off. I would say he took off like a shot, but that would be a serious exaggeration: he went as fast as he could with a huge black plastic garbage bag in his arms, which was not very fast. Watching him run was actually kind of comic. Fortunately, I’d cadged some money on Church Street, so after I’d caught up with him I was able to win him back. I brought him with me to Muddy Waters, that hipster coffee joint Andrea had shown me, and bought us both hot chocolates with whipped cream. (Now that’s living large.) This was when he showed me his robot made of duct tape.
I remember I was kind of afraid that some grown-up would see us and think I was his babysitter and I was the one who had given him his black eye. But no one seemed to care, which is kind of interesting in and of itself.
I still thought I might go to the police station without Cameron and ask whoever was there to keep their eyes out for a nine-year-old boy with a mummy bag. I kept this as an option in the back of my mind.
Two days after we met, Cameron told me that he had almost no memories of his mom and none of his dad. He never met his dad. He said he got confused about whether some of the things he remembered were from when he was a toddler and still living with his mom and his grandparents, or whether they were from his days in his first foster home.
We were sitting in the sun down by the lake, which was rock-solid frozen. But the sky was blue like a sapphire, and with the exception of the seagulls, the world felt very still. The seagulls, of course, were crazy. I love seagulls, especially the giant ones that will walk right up to you and practically threaten you into giving them your bread. I also love to watch them fly. Unlike some birds, seagulls always look to me like they enjoy flying. (Not all birds, of course, make flying look like a chore. I think barn swallows are having a blast, too.) Anyway, I used to really enjoy the seagulls. That might just mean that I had nothing better to do a lot of the time that winter, but there are worse ways to kill an hour or two than watching seagulls until it gets too cold, and then going to the library and reading till the place closes for the night.
It sounded like Cameron’s mom was rail thin and always pretty strung out. At least based on the way he described her she was strung out. I’m thinking crystal meth. But he never said she was a druggie. I’m just making a guess from a few of his clues. He remembered her as pretty old. Thirties, he thought. She was no teen mom, in other words. He had grandparents in a town south of Burlington called Shoreham, but his grandfather was seriously violent. He was always whaling on Cameron’s grandma and mom and Cameron when they were all living together. His grandparents had an apple orchard up a hill from Lake Champlain and Cameron recalled it was huge. Of course, when you’re a little kid, everything’s huge. For all I know, it was five apple trees in the backyard. When he’d been in the first grade, he confessed, the apple trees had spooked him. He half expected them to come to life in the night and start hurling apples at him. Or they would do things much worse. Unlike the trees in The Wizard of Oz, these bad boys could walk. In Cameron’s imagination, they stomped from the orchard to the house and smashed in his bedroom window, climbed inside, and stabbed him to death with splintered branches.
I think his mom might have been cooking meth at his grandparents’ house, which was probably one of the reasons why his grandpa was beating the crap out of everybody. Meth causes all kinds of trouble. One time the police came to the orchard—at least Cameron thought maybe this happened.
He couldn’t tell me how he had wound up in that first foster home or any of the details of why his mom had abandoned him. He had no idea if his mom was alive or dead. Sometimes he would tell me he hoped she was alive and she’d get her act together and find him.
“Want me to find her for you?” I’d a
sk. I figured I could begin by asking someone at the shelter for grown-ups. It was on the other side of Burlington from the teen shelter. I went to their day station sometimes and was able to get a peanut butter and jelly sandwich. (You have no idea how good a peanut butter and jelly sandwich can taste until you’ve lived in an igloo made of trash bags.) Like the social workers at the teen shelter, everyone there seemed nice enough. And, of course, I could have gone to the police. But how would I do that without having to confess that I knew where Cameron was? If I had to guess, I would have said that Cameron’s mom was in jail: the Chittenden Regional Correctional Facility in South Burlington, maybe. It was right across the street from a great bakery. Yup, razor wire and baguettes. I knew where it was. But Cameron never wanted me to investigate. I think he was worried that he’d just wind up back in another foster home—which, of course, was a risk. It was a risk for him, and it was a risk for me. And there was also the chance that someone would figure out that Abby Bliss was really Emily Shepard and just hate me to death.
But maybe Cameron was also afraid that all we’d find out was that his mom really was dead, and then he’d have nothing to hope for. (Been there, done that.)
Or maybe he just knew what a seriously shitty mother his mom was. After all, she’d deserted him, right? I didn’t even know her, and I kind of hated her for peacing out on her kid. That’s just nasty. I mean, obviously I wasn’t his mom, but already I’d figured out that I had some responsibility for him. And that winter I took that responsibility very seriously. No matter what, I was going to keep him safe. No one, not while I was around, was ever again going to punch that little guy in the face. No one. No, sir. My life had stood a loaded gun.
I love it when the snowflakes are flying like butterflies.
You probably think that’s the start of one of my poems. Nope.
It’s something my mom once said. She was standing in the den and looking out the window at our backyard and the edge of the woods in the distance. The forest was mostly pine trees, but there were a few maples, too. (Maples make me recall sugaring and syrup, and someday I have to tell you about the sugarhouse rager. That was kind of a fiasco, too.) My mom’s back was to me, but she knew I was there. It was about five in the afternoon, toward the end of February, so the light was just starting to fade. And the flakes were huge and fluttering and seemed to be almost rocking back and forth, back and forth, to the ground. They were falling very slowly.
My mom said unexpectedly beautiful things like “the snowflakes are flying like butterflies” a lot. Remember, her name was Mira. She could be exotic. Poetic. Surprising.
The snow looked like that to me one day when Cameron and I were standing under the eaves of this theater down by the waterfront. It was closed that afternoon, so no one was there and we were safe. I remembered what my mom had said about snowflakes and told Cameron. I thought he would like it. I guess he did. But he said, “Butterflies don’t live much longer than snowflakes. Most butterflies only live, like, a week or two.”
“How do you know that?” I asked, but I was pretty sure it was true. I just wanted to know where he’d learned this little bit of knowledge. Who tells a little kid that butterflies die in a couple of days?
He shrugged. “A teacher.”
“Wow. You had pretty serious teachers.”
“I don’t know. She wasn’t our teacher very long. One night she drank this Windex stuff and got sick. The principal said she thought it was Kool-Aid. They’re both blue, right?”
I nodded. The principal had obviously been lying to the kids. No one mistakes Windex for Kool-Aid. “Did she die?”
“No. But she never came back to school.”
So, to answer my own question: Who tells a little kid that butterflies only live for a couple of days? A seriously depressed, suicidal schoolteacher. That’s who.
I’m sure there are a lot of great foster parents and foster families out there. I really am. Unfortunately, Cameron never got any of them. He got the dad and mom who went to jail for making kiddie porn out of his foster home sisters. He got the mom who pushed her foster kids—all three of them, even Cameron—face-first into dog shit when his six-year-old foster sister had diarrhea and trashed the bedsheets. He got the dad who slugged him so hard that he got that black eye.
And, of course, he had his memories, dim as they were, of his own flesh and blood. His mom. His grandpa.
Is it really any wonder that he wasn’t about to trust anyone older than me?
One of my doctors here asked me the other day if I worried about trying to find friends for Cameron. Yeah, no. I was worried about trying to find him food. I was worried about trying to keep him warm. I was worried about trying to prevent him from getting stolen or killed by some psycho. The doctor wanted to know how I felt about the idea that I was harboring a runaway and wasn’t allowing a child to go to school. I got all defensive because she made me sound like some selfish bitch—like I was some whack-job kidnapper who was treating Cameron like he was a pet.
I defended myself by saying that I brought him with me to the library all the time. We read together all the time. I taught him plenty, I really did. And it’s not as if people were lining up outside the igloo to care for him—or me. Finally I said to the doctor, “Sure, he was a runaway. But it’s not like anyone was looking for him. It’s not like anyone was looking for me.”
“People were looking for both of you,” she said.
I thought of the hours and hours we spent in the library or near the boathouse by the lake or on the benches on Church Street. “Well, then, no one was looking very hard,” I told her.
This wasn’t a great thing to say, but I was pissed. And what I did those months? It’s all very hard to explain. I was just doing my best.
And given Cameron’s total refusal to come with me to the police station and go back into a foster home, sometimes it seemed to me I really had two choices. Either desert him or protect him. I chose to protect him. I knew it wasn’t going to be forever. Eventually, I knew, we’d have to come in from the cold. I guess I just thought it would be together.
Just for the record, when it got a little warm I did try to find Cameron some friends. I did try to find him some buddies. You’ll see.
In the middle of January, there was a huge protest march in Burlington against nuclear power. It began at the waterfront, not all that far from our igloo, and went up Main Street to the university, where there was going to be a big student rally and a bunch of speeches inside this massive chapel on the commons. The protesters lucked out: the skies were clear and there was a midwinter thaw. It must have been forty degrees that Saturday, and it felt even warmer because of the sun. Cameron and I watched the parade—the drummers and the people with placards about Cape Abenaki and Fukushima and Chernobyl and Three Mile Island and some place I’d never heard of called Rocky Flats—from just outside Muddy Waters.
“Kind of like closing the barn door,” one older guy with white hair in a red check jacket said to us, his arms folded across his chest. I explained to Cameron what that meant—how the expression was kind of a joke about bothering to close a barn door after the horses had left. Then I told Cameron—who knows why—to try and imagine the power of more than a million horses. That was how much power there was in a four-hundred-megawatt plant. (It’s just amazing the fun facts that stay with a girl when your mom and dad work for a power company.)
The fellow beside us looked at me and said, “You sure know your stuff.”
I shrugged and said, “Science class,” and then turned away. I was afraid I had already drawn too much attention to us.
It’s funny, but in the years before the Cape Abenaki meltdown, everyone in Vermont was arguing about wind power. People in favor of wind talked about how it would dial down our need for fossil fuel. People opposed said it would ruin the state’s natural beauty. Looking back, I bet people on both sides wish today that the state’s biggest problem was a couple of fucked-up ridgelines. They wish they could spend boatloads
of time complaining about a line of wind turbines on the top of a mountain. It would mean they still had their homes. Me? I actually thought the turbines were kind of pretty in a Star Wars distant planet sort of way.
Really, I got almost no shit about nuclear power when my parents were alive. So I guess it’s both strange and somehow predictable that now the Shepard name is right up there with Satan.
Even when I was with Cameron, I hadn’t begun to think of what precisely my “endgame” would be. (I learned that term at a video store in the mall. They were showing a video of a popular TV detective drama, and one of the cops used it. I got right away what it meant. I liked it. It was so fatalistic.) But by late January I had the sense that this was all leading somewhere.
One crazy cold night Lexie and some dude I’d never met appeared down by the waterfront. Lexie was a friend of Missy’s, and once in a while she would show up at Poacher’s in the months I was there. The first time I’d heard her name, I thought it was some joke about Oxies. I imagined her swallowing whole handfuls of them—lots of Oxies—and somehow “lots of Oxies” was transformed into “Loxie,” which eventually became “Lexie.” I thought it was a nickname. Nope. Her real name was Alexandra, and, like Missy, she had grown up near Boston and come from serious scratch. She had dropped out of UVM and was older than most of us. But she was very slight. I’m not sure she was five feet tall. A lot of nights—maybe most nights—she crashed with people she still knew at the university. She only came to Poacher’s when she needed to flip a little candy and didn’t want to wind up passed out underneath three scummy frat boys. (You know you’re a hot mess when you go to Poacher’s because it’s the “safer” alternative.) She seemed nice enough, but I really didn’t hang with her. I had Andrea.