Somewhere Out There(47)
“Sure,” Melissa said. “I’d offer to show you where you were for the brief time you were here, too, but we don’t house babies anymore. They’re kept in a different facility altogether. The infant room has been remodeled into a study hall.”
“Oh, that’s okay,” Natalie said. She’d been so focused on finding out more about Brooke, it hadn’t even crossed her mind that she might want to see where she had spent a month of her own life—she wouldn’t have remembered it anyway.
Melissa moved her eyes back to the computer. After a moment of scrolling, she smiled at Natalie. “Found it.” She stood up and headed out the door, Natalie following right behind her.
They walked down a long, narrow hallway that was lit by buzzing, yellow-tinged fluorescent lights and then went up a flight of stairs. The walls there were plaster instead of cement, painted the same dingy white as the linoleum, and were covered in brightly colored posters with inspirational sayings on them, including one that said, “The struggle is part of the story.” As she walked by it, Natalie noticed that beneath that statement someone had written “Fuck you and your story” in thick black ink. She winced, practically able to feel the anger coming off the resident who had penned those words.
When they got to the second floor, Melissa led Natalie down another hallway, this one lined with several gray doors. Melissa stopped at the third one on the right and gestured for Natalie to enter. “This is it,” Melissa said as they each stepped inside. “She stayed in a lot of different rooms before she hit ninth grade, a new one every time she came back from another foster home, but this is where she spent her last four years.”
Natalie moved her eyes around the room, which was about the same size as Hailey’s bedroom at home, but rather than her daughter’s frilly canopy bed covered in a lime-green comforter and lavender pillows, the space had four black metal, twin-size bunk beds squeezed along its perimeter. There were no windows, no other furniture besides the beds, and nothing hung on the walls. The space was blank, industrial. There were dented cardboard boxes with handles under the bunks, which Natalie assumed served as makeshift dressers. There was nothing about the room that said home.
Natalie took a step over to one of the bunks and sat down on the thin mattress, resting the heels of her palms on the scratchy gray blanket. She thought of her children, how they might react to being relegated to a room like this—how they might survive knowing their mother had given them up—and she had to fight back an ache in her chest. She thought about the room that she had grown up in, with its big windows and comfy, full-size bed. She remembered wanting to redecorate it when she turned thirteen, abandoning the pink and white frills for blue paint and posters of Luke Perry and Jason Priestley. She thought about how lucky she was to have been adopted, that her parents had saved her from living in a place as sterile as this.
Natalie moved her eyes upward and noticed that the plywood beneath the top bunk mattress was etched with so many names, it was difficult to decipher one from the other. “Julie Peterson was here, 1987,” Natalie read aloud.
“The kids like to leave their mark,” Melissa said.
Natalie slowly scanned the wooden board above her again, and without a word Melissa, seeming to sense what Natalie was trying to do, stepped over to another bunk, checking the plywood on that bed for Brooke’s name. When neither of them found it, each moved to a different bunk. Natalie was just about to give up when Melissa spoke. “Here she is.” She pointed to a spot above where she sat, and Natalie quickly joined her. Melissa stood up, leaving Natalie to look at the spot where the younger woman had pointed. It took her a minute to find her sister’s name, but when she did, she reached up and slowly traced her index finger over the gouged wood, the muscles in her throat thickening. “Brooke Walker,” her sister had carved in jagged letters. “Here too f*cking long.”
“Wow,” Natalie said, and her eyes blurred with tears. The fact that her sister had sat in that exact spot—that she’d taken the time to make sure there was evidence of her existence in that space—hit Natalie hard. She couldn’t imagine the life of a young girl in these surroundings: sharing a room with seven likely revolving-door strangers, sleeping on a thin mattress with a flat pillow and a stiff, scratchy blanket. Having no one to tuck her in at night. Nothing to make her feel treasured and safe.
“Miss Dottie should be free by now,” Melissa said. “And I have a meeting I need to attend pretty soon . . .”
“Oh,” Natalie said, standing up and wiping her cheeks with the back of her bent wrist. “Of course. Sorry.”
“No need,” Melissa said. “I’m happy to help.” She led Natalie to the end of the hallway and down another set of stairs, then turned a corner and pushed open a pair of black swinging doors. The room was set up with multiple rectangular tables and metal benches. To their right was a large, square open space in the wall, and through it, Natalie could see four women working in the kitchen. One of them stood off to the side with a clipboard in her hand. She was a tall woman with a sturdy-looking build and olive skin. Her silvery black hair was pushed down beneath a net, and she wore a bright red chef’s coat, white sneakers, and jeans.
“Miss Dottie!” Melissa called out, and the woman left the kitchen and came to stand in front of Natalie. “This is Natalie Clark,” she said, and quickly explained why Natalie was there.