“I’m Mrs. Muller. I work in admittance. You told the paramedic your name is Sasha Porter, is that correct?”
I couldn’t remember telling anyone anything about myself. Maybe I had been talking in my sleep.
“My name is Sasha Fawne Porter, yes. Fawne is spelled with an e at the end. That was the way my grandmother spelled her Chinese name.”
“You said you were thirteen years old?”
“I’ll be fourteen in two months.”
She lowered her head and looked at me over her glasses as if I had said something outrageous. “What is your present address? Where do you live?” she followed quickly, as though I needed a translation.
Maybe I shouldn’t have let her know my grandmother was Chinese. She remained poised with her pen and didn’t look at me until she realized I wasn’t answering her question.
“Don’t you know where you live? What’s your address?”
“We don’t have an address.”
“What do you mean, you don’t have an address? I asked you where you were living.” She had a thought. “Was it on a boat?”
“No. We live on the street, sleep on the beach,” I said.
She stared at me and pressed her thicker lower lip over her upper one. It made the brown spot at the bottom of her chin look more like a teardrop. “How long has this been going on?” she asked, as if it was my fault.
“I don’t know the exact number of days. A year, I guess.”
“Where do you go to school?”
“I don’t right now,” I said.
She smirked and shook her head. “Where’s your father?”
“I don’t know. We don’t know exactly. We think he went to Hawaii.”
“Hawaii? So your mother and father are divorced?”
“No. He just left.”
“Just left?” She nodded, as if she knew him, and tapped the clipboard with her pen. “Okay. What about other relatives here?”
“We don’t have any here. My mother has an aunt and cousins in Portland, Oregon. My father’s relatives are in Ohio, but we don’t talk to any. I don’t even know their names. His parents died a long time ago. He has a sister, but she stopped talking to him a long time ago, or he stopped talking to her.” I nodded. Maybe these details were important. “Yes, Mama said he stopped talking to her.”
“So you have no one to take responsibility for you?”
“Just my mother,” I said.
“A lot of good that’s going to do us,” she muttered. She checked something on her clipboard and turned to leave.
“Where is my mother?” I called.
She paused and turned back to me. “Didn’t anyone tell you?”
“No.”
“Your mother is dead. She died instantly and was taken directly to the morgue.”
2
Alone
The nurse who finally came to give me the medicine Dr. Decker had promised started to check my pulse and take my blood pressure and then gave me a tablespoon of some syrup for my nausea, which she said was all she could do for me right then. She saw that I had been crying. I started to cry again, and she told me I should try to be a big girl.
“That lady said my mother died,” I said through my tears.
“Yes. Very sad, but you have to be a big girl now. It will make everything go that much easier for you.”
A big girl? How does a big girl react to the news of her mother’s death? I wanted to ask. Doesn’t she cry?
The nurse looked up when Dr. Decker came in quickly. “What’s happening?” she asked him, sounding a little annoyed.
“Milan isn’t coming. Once he heard she’s uninsured, he suddenly had another emergency.”
“And?”
“I’ll set the leg,” he told her. “We’ve got to move her along. There’s quite a backup out there.”
“Tell me about it,” the nurse said. “We should have a traffic cop.”
“Okay, let’s get to her.” He finally looked at me. “We’re going to get you on the way to getting better,” he said.
He tried to explain everything he was doing every step of the way, but I had long since lost interest in myself and was only vaguely aware of the activity around and on me.
“This kid’s practically in shock,” the nurse said. “Besides the injuries, she just found out her mother died.”
“The faster I get this done, the faster she’ll get out of it,” he said, obviously not wanting to stand around and have a conversation.
Get out of what, I wondered, sorrow or pain? I moaned, but because of my slight concussion, Dr. Decker said he didn’t want to give me anything too strong for pain. He said he would prescribe some Tylenol, and he was sure it would help a little.
“Just hang in there,” he said, and flashed a smile as if it were on a spring in his face.
After my leg was set, they moved me to a ward. It was nearly morning now. Through the window across from my bed, I could see the sunlight creeping up on the horizon as if it were afraid night would slap it back. Everyone else in the ward, six others who looked like mostly elderly women, seemed to be still asleep. To me, the one nurse in charge, Mrs. Stanton, appeared to be as old and as sickly as the other patients. Her face was so pale and her eyes so watery I thought one of them might have gotten up and put on a nurse’s uniform. She settled me in and told me to try to get some sleep.
“Do you need anything?” she asked.
What a question, I thought. Yes, I need something. I need my mother not to be dead. I need a home. I need to be in school and have food and clothes. I need to remember how to laugh. I saw from the look on her face that if I had said anything like that, she might have been the one to laugh, so I didn’t say anything. I hadn’t said anything to anyone since that woman had told me my mother was dead and in the morgue. All I had done was moan and cry. Mrs. Stanton went off to check on another patient, and I closed my eyes.
I slept on and off. The clatter of dishes and trays woke me when breakfast was served. I looked at it but turned away and didn’t eat or drink anything. The nurse who had replaced Mrs. Stanton shook me to tell me I should try to eat. “And you have to drink something. I don’t want you to get dehydrated,” she said, as if I worked for her. She stood there waiting to see me reach for the glass of juice and then handed it to me. I drank some, and she repeated that I should try to eat. “If you don’t nourish your body, it won’t heal,” she warned. She said it as if it wouldn’t be her fault or any doctor’s. Whatever had happened and would now happen was my fault. It sounded as if she meant it was my fault that I had been born.
A different doctor stopped in to visit the patients in the ward. I heard the nurse complaining about me. He read the chart clipped to the bottom of the bed and then examined my bruises, checked my eyes, and listened to my heart and lungs through his stethoscope. His name tag read “Dr. Morton.” He looked older than Dr. Decker, but something told me he wasn’t. Later, I heard he was interning.
“You’ve had quite a shock to your body,” he told me. He looked at my chart and added, “Sasha. You want to eat and drink so you get stronger, okay?”
He was talking to me in a tone of voice he might use with someone only about five years old. I didn’t reply, and he turned to the nurse and said, “We might need the psychologist to stop by for this one.”
“Is my mother really dead?” I asked when I saw that he was going to move off.
He looked at the nurse.
“Her mother was hit by the same car,” the nurse told him. “She expired at the scene.”
“Oh. Well, what about…” He nodded at me.
“There are no other relatives listed. I’m sure Social Ser-vices has been contacted. Homeless,” she whispered, but not low enough for me to miss.
“Right. You hang in there, Sasha. We’re going to look after you.”
He smiled at me, patted my hand, and moved on to the next patient. The nurse trailed along like an obedient puppy as he went from bed to bed.
Loo
k after me? How were they going to do that? I wondered. How was anyone? Despite how terrible our lives had become, I wished Mama and I were back on the boardwalk selling her calligraphy and I was selling my lanyards. I wished we were back in the struggle. At least we were together then, and I had someone. Besides, she might have gotten better. Maybe she would have stopped drinking and found a place to work again, and I would have been able to return to school, any school. I used to feel tears come into my eyes when I would see other girls my age in their school uniforms, laughing and talking as they walked to school. The furthest thing from their minds was wondering about where they would sleep and what they would eat. If only I could somehow turn back time and change everything.
I closed my eyes and dreamed about it. Mama was pretty again, and I had new clothes and friends. We had at least as good an apartment as we had had with Daddy. Because Mama worked, I would start dinner for us before she came home. She would be so proud of me, and we’d laugh and tell each other about all the things that happened to both of us during the day. I’d have very good grades to show her, and then I would go off and do my homework. She would still do calligraphy, but now only for her own enjoyment. Because she was happier when she was doing it, she would do more elaborate pictures, and before long, she would be selling them to art galleries, not arts-and-crafts stores or bars. We’d have more money than ever, and Mama would start talking about buying a car.
“We’ll go on trips every weekend, see beautiful things, and stop at nice restaurants along the way,” she would say. “I told you. We can get along without him, and we can keep the struggle from doing us any more harm, because we’re together, partners, mother and daughter, more like sisters, good friends.”
She would hug me and hold me, and I would inhale the sweet scent of her perfume and hair, which was long and soft again. Men would be very interested in her, of course, but this time, she would be far more careful and go out only with responsible ones. Someday someone like that would propose to her, and our lives would improve tenfold. We’d live in a house, not an apartment, and Mama would not have to work anymore. This wonderful, well-to-do man would love me and be a real father to me. He’d come to parents’ nights and do homework with me and want to show me things and take me places, just as any other girl’s father would want to do with his daughter.
It occurred to me that most other girls would think my dreams were too simple, too ordinary. They would be dreaming of being popular singers or movie and television stars. They’d want big houses and expensive cars, even boats. They’d dream of jewelry and fashionable dresses and shoes, love affairs, and romantic adventures.
“Even your dreams are poor, pathetic,” they might say, and not want to be my friends.
I’d have to be very careful about telling anyone about my fantasies. I’d have to pretend I wanted exactly the same things they did. In fact, I’d have to keep many things secret, especially our struggle. What I would certainly have to do is come up with a story. In my dream, when I explained this to Mama, she nodded, understanding my problem, and said, “It’s best you tell them that your father was killed in a car accident. That way, they’ll feel sorry for you and not mock you.”
Exactly, I thought. Daddy was dead to me, anyway. It was almost not a lie.
I dreamed so hard I began to believe it was real. For a while, I was happy, and I felt no pain or discomfort, and then someone in another bed screamed with her own pain, and I was ripped out of my fantasy and dropped right back into this gray ward, with other patients who I found out were also uninsured homeless or deserted people. One lady told another we were all in the “human Dumpster.”
How long would they leave me in there? I wondered. Would I have to be there until my leg healed? And then where would they send me? What was being done with Mama? Would I ever see her, or would she simply be taken away and buried somewhere without anyone present? She used to say she would end up in Potter’s Field, a burying place for strangers, for people with no means.
“Where is Potter’s Field?” I had asked her.
“There’s one everywhere.” She had looked at me, considering whether to tell me any more. I was thirteen by then and not attending school. Whenever she was sober enough, she always expressed regret about my not being in school and often tried to teach me things.
“It comes from the Bible,” she’d continued. “My father was a Bible thumper. He would read aloud from it almost every night he was home. You know who Judas was, right?”
“Yes, he sold out Jesus for thirty pieces of silver.”
“Good. Well, he regretted it afterward and went back to the high priests who had paid him. He threw the money on the floor. Afterward, he hung himself. The priests decided the money was tainted with blood and used it to create Potter’s Field, where strangers and the poor were to be buried. They called it Potter’s Field because it was located in a place where they mined clay for pots. As your father would stupidly say, that information and a dollar fifty will get you on the bus.”
“But that’s all it costs.”
“Duh. That was your father’s opinion of knowledge,” she had told me.
It was almost impossible now to remember Mama from those early days, when she would have more sober hours than not. Before she began drinking for the day, her eyes were still clear; she was still standing straight and had a look of determination in her face. But that got to be less and less the rule and more the exception.
Sometimes I thought maybe an alien had gotten into her. The alien didn’t have any of the self-pride and self-respect Mama used to have. Maybe Mama wasn’t dead. Maybe just the alien in her had died on the highway, and she would wake up and come back to me. I was looking at the door of the ward just the way Mama used to look out at the ocean for that boat that would save us, hoping that she would suddenly just appear, smiling.
“It’s going to be all right now,” she would say. “We’ll be fine, Sasha. I’m back.”
I blinked when a tall woman dressed in a fashionable designer turquoise pantsuit with gold epaulets stepped into the doorway and caused my dream Mama to pop like a bubble.
This woman had thick light brown hair styled at shoulder length and carried a purse that matched her outfit. The nail polish on her long nails even matched her outfit. She gazed into the ward, looking carefully at each patient until her eyes came around to me. Once she saw me, she seemed to freeze, her eyes locked on me, her soft, puffy lips just slightly open. Whom was she trying to look like, Angelina Jolie?
I couldn’t take my eyes off her. She had the look of a movie star, her makeup perfect, her complexion rich and peachy. But she looked somehow more important than a movie star. The regal way she held herself gave her an aura of authority, control, and power. The diamond ring on her left hand was so large that it seized on the ray of light spilling in from the nearest window and then seemed to brighten and become even more dazzling. She wore what looked like diamond teardrop earrings, too, and a necklace of small pearls.
A long moment passed before she stepped into the ward, and when she did, she stepped in as though she were trying to be careful, as careful as someone navigating a floor of mud. Maybe she thought the patients in the ward were contagious. She did look as if she was holding her breath. I waited when she paused at my bed.
“Are you Sasha Fawne Porter?” she asked.
She couldn’t be someone from Social Services, I thought. Could she? Who else would be looking for me? Who else would know my full name?
“Yes,” I said.
She nodded, opened her purse, and took out a very thin handkerchief to dab away something on her right eye. I saw nothing. Maybe she was wiping away imaginary germs. Why would there be a tear?
She focused on the area under the blanket where my cast was located.
“Are you in a lot of pain?” she asked, nodding at my legs.
“Only if I move too much,” I said.
“I’m so sorry.”
I looked at her and wondered why she was s
o sorry. “Are you with Social services?” I asked, and she widened her eyes.
“Hardly,” she said. She hesitated, and then she said, “I’m Jordan March. Mrs. Donald March.”
The way she told me her name—announced it, I should say—caused me to scan my brain, searching for something in my memory that would tell me who she was. Had I seen her on a magazine cover? Was she really a movie star or on television, someone who visited patients in hospitals as an act of charity? Why would she think I would know who she was?
“It’s your right leg that was broken?” she asked.
I pulled back the blanket to show her the cast. “My femur,” I said, remembering Dr. Decker’s description. “At the head.”
“Yes, I know.”
How did she know? Was she a special nurse? Or maybe she was a doctor. But she didn’t call herself Dr. March. Would a doctor talk like that?
“You don’t have any other broken bones, right?”
“No.” If she were a doctor, she would have known that, I thought.
“But you’re badly banged up,” she concluded, her gaze fixed on my black-and-blue arms.
“I have a slight concussion, too. And my neck hurts, so it’s hard to raise my head.” I don’t know why I wanted to tell her everything. Maybe it was because there was no one else really asking me.
“Oh, dear, you poor, poor child.”
Poor is right, I thought.
I watched her look around the ward. Some of the others were looking our way and listening. She didn’t smile at anyone. She pulled herself back a little and blew a small breath through her nearly closed lips.
“Well, this won’t do,” she said. It seemed to be something she was saying more to herself than to me. “It won’t do at all.” She turned and walked out quickly.
“That your mother?” the woman nearest to me asked.
“No way,” I said. “My mother is prettier.” Was prettier, I thought, and then argued with myself. This woman was beautiful, there was no denying that, but Mama had that exotic look, and she was natural. She wasn’t just beautiful; she was different. In Los Angeles, women like the one who had just been to see me were not unusual. Mama used to say, “It’s the only place where women don’t care that beauty is only skin-deep. Few want to go any deeper.”