Don't Fail Me Now by Una LaMarche
ONE
Sunday Night/Monday Morning
Baltimore, MD
“Michelle? I’m scared.”
Denny’s voice cuts through the static that’s been building in my brain, a surround-sound symphony of panic made even worse by the digital hiss and spit of the police intercom. My little brother nestles his face into my side, and I lift my half-asleep hand to rest on the soft, tight curls at the nape of his neck.
“It’s okay,” I say, squeezing him three times in quick succession, which is our family code for it’s going to be okay. The simple act still soothes me, even though now that I’m grown I can see the irony: A family that needs that kind of a code is not now, and has probably never been, okay. I bend down to kiss the top of his head. “Can you go back to sleep?”
Denny shrugs, burrowing deeper into my T-shirt. “Ina wanu gotslepgin,” he mumbles into my armpit.
“Huh?”
He looks up at me with big, watery eyes. “I don’t want you to go to sleep again,” he says.
“Oh, I wasn’t sleeping, only . . .” Only paralyzed with anxiety. Not exactly a bedtime story fit for a first grader. “I was just zoning out.”
“I want you to stay with me,” he whimpers.
They’ll try to split you up! I get a flash of my mom, wild-eyed with terror.
“I will, meatball, I promise.” I use our family’s pet name for him—Denny was the roundest, brownest baby you ever saw—in a cheap attempt to make him feel safe and am rewarded instantly with a teary, hesitant smile that turns into a yawn halfway through, revealing a missing front tooth that—surprise, surprise—the “Tooth Fairy” still owes him for. She tends to save her quarters for other things. I feel another twinge of dread.
Don’t let them split you up!
“Hey, do you have any homework we could finish?” I ask, trying to sound like this is a normal, fun activity that siblings often do together when they find themselves stuck in a police precinct at one A.M. on a school night.
Denny nods and leans down, sending the cavernous neck of his men’s-size Goodwill T-shirt sliding up over the back of his big mug-handle ears, and pulls his backpack out from under Cass’s feet, which causes my sleeping sister to thrash dramatically before burying her face back into her hoodie. The officer at the front desk, a hard-looking Latina with her hair pulled back so tight it gives her cartoon-villain eyebrows, glances up at the commotion and glares at us, and my jaw tenses.
We don’t want to be here either.
Fresh shame floods my cheeks as I think back to all of the hushed whispers and pitying glances that greeted us when we got brought in four hours ago, and also to the tall, pasty cop who poked his head out of a door down the hall and made a joke about “crack babies” to whoever was inside.
“Here,” Denny says, holding a sheet of paper up in front of me, interrupting my revenge fantasy about punching that ignorant douche right in the center of his big pie-dough face. It’s a photocopy of a drawing of a wide, squat tree with two big branches that curl out from the center, making a heart in the middle. Inside the big, fluffy outline of leaves there are four rows of blank boxes. At the top, in a thick, curly font, it says my family. “I’m s’posed to fill it in, but I forget how,” he says, rubbing his eyes.
I remember this assignment. Denny’s in first grade now and has the same teacher I had when I went to his school eleven years ago, Mrs. Mastino. I remember filling out my family tree and having my mother proudly stick it to the fridge with three letter magnets: M, H, and D for my initials. I remember how it stayed up there for two years before she finally ripped it up and threw it away along with all of the other memories of him.
I take the paper from Denny and point to the bottom row of boxes. “You fill it in starting backward,” I explain, furrowing my brow, wishing I had a coffee or a soda to aid me in my fake enthusiasm. “This here is us: you, me, and Cass.” I point to the next row up. “That’s mom and Buck, then above them is—”
“You mean Dad,” Denny says, and I trap the tip of my tongue between my teeth, biting down until it goes numb, a coping trick I picked up a long time ago and the reason why I still can’t taste some things until they reach the back of my throat.
“Right,” I repeat slowly. “Dad.”
I don’t remember when I started calling my father Buck, but it’s the only way I can stomach referring to him now. It just makes it easier. “Buck” sounds like a mangy dog or a farm animal too lazy or stupid to find his way home, not like a grown man who walked out on his twenty-two-year-old wife and two kids and never looked back.
Denny, who came later, isn’t Buck’s son, but for the sake of simplicity we all just pretend he is. I mean, we don’t lie to Denny—he knows his absent father was different from ours—but it’s just easier for everyone to sort of merge them into one deadbeat-dad amalgam. No one except my mom knows who Denny’s biological father is, and I would bet money that even she’s not 100 percent sure. She was hanging out with a couple of guys around that time, bleary-eyed dudes reeking of skunky cologne she would introduce as “Uncle Trey,” or “Cousin Freddy,” even though we were old enough by then to know they weren’t relatives. I went out of my way not to see them. At the sound of her key in the door, I would drag Cass up the tacky carpeted steps to our room, and we’d play Barbies or Legos and I’d turn on the radio to drown out the voices and clinking bottles downstairs.