Don't Fail Me Now(2)

But there’s no box for “possible fathers” on Denny’s worksheet, and our family history is too R-rated to fully explain to a six-year-old.

“You know, maybe we should do something else,” I say, but Denny’s already hard at work, a pencil clutched in his little fist, moving slowly across the already-crinkled page on his lap. He proudly holds up the tree, on which he’s written mom, dad, michel [sic], cass, max, and denny (with one backward N) in crooked capitals. (Max does not exist. Max is Denny’s imaginary friend. He surfaced about seven months ago, when mom lost her latest job, showing up sporadically when Denny gets scared, and we can’t seem to make him leave, no matter how hard we try. Max is—there’s no nice way to put this—kind of a dick.)

“Nice work,” I say. “I think your teacher wants full names, though. Here, how ’bout I write them down and you can copy them in.”

Denny yawns and passes the paper back to me, letting his head drop against my chest. I glance up at the wall clock and catch Officer Tight Hair giving me a look again. Does she think Denny is my son, that I am some kind of preteen mom, too young and sad to even get my own show on MTV? I guess I can’t blame her; it feels like that sometimes. Lately, all the time.

Madison Means Devereaux, I write on the back of the photocopy, trying to make my loose, loopy handwriting clear enough for Denny to read. My mother, Maddie Means, was neither mad nor mean before Buck Devereaux came along. They met in junior high, when Buck transferred schools after his own dad ran out on him (foreshadowing alert!), leaving his mom high and dry and unable to afford the nice suburban neighborhood she had been accustomed to living in. Mom sang in the choir back then, got straight As, and dreamed of going to Juilliard like Nina Simone. She was a pastor’s daughter with a dangerous, dormant rebellious streak just waiting for the right trigger.

Speaking of which: Allen Buckner Devereaux III, I write, wanting to roll my eyes hard at the difference between Buck’s aristocratic-sounding name and the man himself, a handsome but aimless dropout grifter who couldn’t hold a job or, based on the photos I’ve seen, keep a shirt on for longer than a church service. Right after he left, during her saddest moments, when she would crawl into my bed and curl around me, her sharp, sweet booze breath hot on my neck, Mom used to say that from the day they met it was true love. “I looked in those clear green eyes and saw my future,” she’d whisper, hoarse from crying. I have those same green eyes. People always comment on them, so striking against my coppery skin. But I look in the mirror every day, and I can’t see any future hiding behind my irises. All I can see in my father’s eyes is the past.

Michelle Hope Devereux. I was conceived the same month my mother turned sixteen, which helps to explain why I’m named after Michelle Kwan, who skated her way to Olympic silver that winter while I was doing somersaults under Mom’s school uniform. There was a party in the basement of my grandfather’s church—Mom has a whole photo album devoted to it—with pink balloons and streamers, lemonade in plastic cups, and a big sheet cake with yellow buttercream frosting and pink letters spelling out Sweet 16 Maddie Means. In the pictures, Mom is wearing an orange silk dress with a matching short-sleeved jacket, smiling a coy, closed-lip smile as she poses with her parents and my aunt Sam and an endless parade of friends and relatives who have since cut all ties. Buck and his mother are there, too, loitering awkwardly in the background, beige from head to toe among a sea of black parishioners in their most festive jewel tones. It’s the only time I’ve ever seen a photo of Buck wearing a tie. I wonder if they knew about me yet. I wonder if he was already plotting his escape.

I pause and look down at Denny, whose eyes are fluttering closed against my collarbone, his breath slowing into little waves punctuated by open-mouthed sighs. It’s amazing how quickly kids can rebound; he was sobbing all the way to the station, asking me a million times where Mom was and where we were going. I tried to keep calm and reassure him without really answering any of his questions—I’ll do anything to protect Denny’s innocence, since he’s the only one of us who’s got any; he doesn’t remember the first two times Mom got arrested because he wasn’t born yet. Cass and I, on the other hand, we know the drill. We don’t cry anymore. We just shut off.

This time, though, I know it’s bad. They can’t reach Aunt Sam—I’ve overheard two different officers leave her voicemails—and the next call they make will be to Child Protective Services. That’s just what happens when you’ve got a junkie mother, a deadbeat dad, a missing aunt, and no other known living relatives. I swallow hard and put pencil to paper again, to keep the panic at bay.

Reverend Jeremiah Means and Cynthia Smith Means. After I was born, Grandma and Grandpa let Mom stay in the house to raise me, and they paid for all our food and clothes. But they also made it clear that Buck wasn’t welcome in their home unless he came on bended knee with a ring, so depending on whom you ask, he either started taking odd jobs or grifting, going around charming people into giving him goods and services he had no intention of paying for, although Mom swears that didn’t start until later, when they got really broke. It took him two years, but by the time Mom turned eighteen, the ring—a square quarter carat set in a thin gold band engraved with the letters BM, which is appropriate given how quickly things went down the toilet—finally showed up. By all accounts my grandparents were horrified that their bluff had been called, but they gave their blessings anyway. Two months after the ceremony, which Grandpa officiated in the sparse backyard under a near-dead crabapple tree, they got on a church bus headed to a conference in Philadelphia. It was barreling down the highway at sixty-five miles an hour when the front tire blew and the driver lost control, flipped over the median, and hit a tractor-trailer. Everyone on board was killed instantly.