Don't Fail Me Now(7)

“No,” I say.

Janet nods. “Not even slapping, spanking, that sort of thing?”

I look over at Cass again. Of course Mom handled us rough sometimes when we were mouthing off or misbehaving, but we got it no worse than anyone else we knew. And if anything, the drugs made her seem kind of helpless. She was always much more likely to float through the house like a ghost or lock herself in her bedroom than take anything out on us. For better or worse, she took it all out on herself.

I briefly consider telling the truth but then decide that I’m not going to give this bitch the satisfaction. “Nope,” I say.

“But you can confirm that substance abuse is present in the home?” Janet looks at me expectantly, pen poised to write down what she thinks she already knows. And I get that she’s just doing her job, and that I probably should be grateful that she’s using words Denny can’t understand, but I still hate her. I hate her for taking the things that make us ache inside and putting them down on paper, which will turn into some typed report that will turn into a file in some computer database so that anyone can just punch in my name and read about the worst parts of my life anytime they feel like it. I hate her for doing it in front of Cass and Denny, and I hate her for the way she turns the pages in her shitty little notebook. But mostly I hate her for thinking she can crack me. I take a deep breath and meet her gaze.

“No,” I say calmly. “I’ve never seen her do anything.” It’s the truth, actually. I’ve never seen my mother use drugs. Have I found tiny plastic baggies in the bathroom garbage? Does the aluminum foil routinely go missing, only to reappear as charred little strips littering the ground below my mother’s bedroom window? Do I notice the heat blisters on her lips and nostrils that she tries to cover with makeup or pass off as cold sores? These are different questions, with different answers. But they’re not what Janet asked. If she wants to know if my mom is a drug addict, she can just march her smarmy pantsuited ass down to the evidence room and look at the eight dime bags of heroin the cops caught her with in the Shell station bathroom while we all sat in the car fifty feet away arguing over what movie to watch when we got home.

Janet narrows her eyes at me as if trying to read my face, and for a second I think she’s going to press me on it. But then she just writes something down, shuts her notebook, and turns off the recorder.

“All right,” she says, standing up. “Thank you. I’ll just speak to the officers, and hopefully we can get you out of here and into a shelter as soon as possible.”

“Wait, shelter?” Cass says, horrified, dropping the deaf-mute act for a minute. “What about Aunt Sam?” She looks at me, wild-eyed with fear, the spitting image of Mom for all the wrong reasons. “She’s coming, right?”

“Aunt Sam’s not coming?” Denny cries, his big dark eyes instantly brimming with tears.

The panic starts to rise again, and before the dizzying whoosh of blood from my racing heart threatens to render me speechless, I scramble to come up with something, anything, I can say to stall whatever’s coming next.

“She might not be coming right now,” I sputter, “but—”

“Oh, like hell I’m not coming,” my aunt says sharply from the doorway. I spin around to see her, looking tired and pissed off in her nurse’s scrubs and running shoes, like a slightly older, less pretty version of Mom from some alternate universe where time marched on in the boring way it’s supposed to. “I’m here, aren’t I?” She crosses her arms and looks us over one by one with some mix of pity and annoyance. “Dragged off my shift at two o’clock in the morning, left a man with a half-stapled knife wound, but here I am. And they told me I had to take a cab since she left you with that janky car, too. So you owe me $18.” With anyone else, this might be a deadpan joke, but Aunt Sam is serious. She doesn’t treat us like her own kids, mi-casa-es-su-casa style, or even like the nieces and nephews we are. When we stay at her house, we’re lodgers who earn our keep, and she tallies every nickel of what we cost her.

Janet flashes her elementary school art teacher smile at my aunt—good luck with that—and holds out her hand. “Mrs. Means,” she says, “it’s so nice to meet you.”

“I’m not a Mrs.,” Sam snaps. “Who are you?”

“I’m Janet Winters, with Maryland Child Protective Services, and I can’t tell you how glad I am that—”

Aunt Sam waves away the attempted handshake. “We don’t need you, sister, are you blind? I showed up, didn’t I? Now I have to get back to my job, so if you’ll excuse me . . .” She claps impatiently. “Come on, let’s go, get your stuff.”

I hold out my hand to Denny, and he grabs it with a sweaty palm, but not before stuffing his drawings back into his bag along with the four-color pen. (It’s probably not on purpose—he’s tired and overwhelmed—but in this family you never know.) Cass reluctantly peels herself out of her chair, gazing almost wistfully at the vending machines, knowing that where we’re headed won’t be nearly this good. Aunt Sam takes off like a race walker, and we rush to catch up, but as I’m stepping out into the hallway, Janet shoots me a look of real sympathy and presses a business card into my palm.

It’s not until I’m buckled into Goldie’s passenger seat, smelling her signature scent of old tacos and gasoline and looking out her milky windows at the sad, squat, salmon-colored building where we’ve been trapped for six hours, that I turn the card over in my hand. On the back, Janet has written: