Something Like Hope (11 page)

       
C
inda’s gone off the deep end with the geese, naming them John and Julia. John is named after John Travolta because
Grease
is Cinda’s favorite movie. She sings that one song, “We go together …,” about twenty times a day until China threatens to punch her. She’s so damn white, she messes up the shoobie-doobie part. She can’t get it right even when we coach her. Julia is named after Julia Roberts because
Pretty Woman
is Cinda’s other favorite movie.

The names are harmless, I know. What’s crazy is that she’s got stats on the death rate of goslings. Cinda tells me that only a small percentage of the hatchlings will reach adulthood. Starvation, disease, hunters, collisions with planes. These are the risk factors. And then there are the predators: coyotes, foxes, dog packs, birds like hawks, eagles, falcons, and vultures.

When I return to my room she’s crazy with fear and
manic energy. Her face is pressed against the windowpane even though it’s dark out. She can’t see a damn thing, but she scans the pond anyway, or the area where the pond should be.

“Shavonne, we’ve got to do something! John and Julia are in danger! The woods behind the parking lot are filled with predators. It’s not safe. I won’t let anything happen to them. Do you hear me, Shavonne?”

I hear her, all right. I hear her telling me she’s going insane. She stays awake all night, looking out the window into the darkness. I tell one of the guards to get the nurses. They know about Cinda and will get permission from the doctor to give her a shot of Haldol in her ass. That usually fixes this shit. It will knock her right out and maybe she’ll forget all about the damn geese and predators.

But the guard tells me to shut up and mind my own business. “Who died and made you the doctor?” She sneers at me and goes back to her copy of
People
magazine.

Most days I’d use the rude comment as an excuse to fight. But this time, I let it go. In a way, I admire Cinda’s half-crazed vigil. For whatever reason, she cares about the geese and has made a commitment to protect them. Even if no one cares about her (which is the truth), she still cares about someone else, if you can call a goose a someone.

I had someone to care about. Jasmine. And I messed it up. Maybe the truth is that what I really want is someone to care about me. Is that too much to ask for?

       
C
inda spotted a red fox this morning. It loped out of the woods at the edge of the parking lot. She said it trotted by the pond and then vanished back into the underbrush. She waited for Cyrus to come on shift and then pumped him for information about foxes. Cyrus told her what he knew, which was considerable. He said the fox was probably either starving or sick. Otherwise, it would never have come so close to humans. Cyrus said there were too many deterrents for a healthy fox to come near: garbage, exhaust fumes, the smell of food from the kitchen. These were all things linked to humans, and foxes fear humans.

Cyrus said that the fox would have a difficult time getting past the male goose. The goose would hover off the ground, flap his wings madly, hiss, and jab at the fox with his beak. The goose would then position himself directly between the attacker and the nesting female. A smart fox would turn away, Cyrus said.

The real danger, however, lies in the weeks immediately after hatching. The tiny goslings will trail behind their parents in a line. On land, or close enough to shore, a fox could make a mad dash and snatch one. If it’s successful, it could keep snatching them until they’re all gone.

I can see the wheels turning in Cinda’s head. The babies haven’t even hatched yet and the predators are lining up. It’s too similar to Cinda’s life, or mine, for that matter. The foxes are the pimps. “Hey, shorty, you too fine to be all by yourself, without no man to buy you the nice things you deserve.” “Damn, baby, what’s it gonna take for me to get a piece of that ass?” “You got to come work for me. I’ll treat you so nice.” The dog packs are the johns or tricks. “I’m so hungry.” “Give it to me.” “I want …” And the hawks and vultures are the rapists and child molesters. “I will take what I want. I want you. So I will take you.”

I can see that Cinda is setting herself up for disaster. She knows the odds, can see how it will end. And still she’s counting on a different ending. Counting on her ability to force a different outcome. She says, “I won’t let anything get to them, Shavonne. I won’t allow it.”

I say, “How the hell are you gonna protect those geese, Cinda?”

“I don’t know yet. But I’ll figure it out. They need me.”

And there you have it. The geese need her. Shit. That’s exactly why I don’t let myself have fantasies about my daughter needing me. It’s Cinda’s need. It’s my own need. I’m not fooling anybody.

       
I
can’t watch my back all the time. I try, but then danger comes from so many different directions and takes different shapes. Today it comes in the form of Ms. Choi.

She has real power for a guard. You can see this in the way other guards kiss her fat ass: buy her sodas, ask her permission to go on break, shit like that. Even the administrators leave her alone—not because they can’t squash her with absolute power or rank. They can. But they don’t because she’s a life-sucker. Going head to head with Ms. Choi is like tangling with a big cactus. Whatever you might do to her, she’ll get you back ten times worse because she’s that much meaner.

Physically, Ms. Choi is fat and disgusting. She wears her black hair in cornrows so tight they pull her eyebrows up. She drives a Lincoln Town Car with custom plates that say
CHOI-GRL
. No one knows how she got the Chinese
name, because she’s Caucasian, even though she talks like she’s black.

On her face is a constant glare, and she seethes hatred from strange green eyes. The color itself is beautiful, but that’s only if you can think of them apart from the rest of the package. The hate that comes out of those eyes almost makes my own seem trivial. It’s a hate that takes delight in others’ pain.

“You think you’re so damn smart, don’t you?”

“Excuse me, Ms. Choi?”

It’s shift change, and the three-to-eleven staff are coming in. Choi heads straight for me, finger pointing, green eyes blazing. I have no idea what I’ve done to make her mad.

“Don’t give me that shit, Shavonne. You know exactly what I’m talking about, right?”

“No, Ms. Choi. I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

“See? That’s just the kind of answer a smart pretty girl like you would give, isn’t it? Covering all the bases, Shavonne. That’s what you do best, right? Plot, scheme, set people up? Well, I can set people up too. You just wait and see, little girl.”

She sneers this last part and makes it sound ugly. Kiki leans over and says, “Don’t sweat it, girl, she just be trippin’.” Kiki is plump, voluptuous. She works furiously at her long thin braids, holding pieces of weave in her mouth. Very quietly, so only I can hear she says, “That bitch is so fat and ugly and mean, she can’t keep no man around. She just broke up with Kowalski because she found out he’s
been fuckin’ one of the girls on the overnight shift. You wasn’t doin’ him, was you? Maybe that’s why she be raggin’ on you.”

I whisper back, “No, never. All I know about that man is that he restrained Samantha.”

“Well, it don’t matter. He just some big dummy. Double dummy. First, he stupid and blind enough to go with that pig. Second, he stupid enough to start givin’ it to one of them new girls up on the beginner unit. Fool, thinkin’ that nobody’ll find out. Girl, you should
know
this! You always know what’s goin’ on. What’s up with you?”

“I don’t know, Kiki. I haven’t been paying attention.”

“Shoot. I know that’s true because you involved in this shit! They only found out because of that story you told about gettin’ pregnant! Mr. Slater went and interviewed all the male guards who could have been with you. Tyreena was waitin’ outside Slater’s office to clean. You
know
that girl can clean! You know she like to clean so much that—”

“Kiki, get to the point. Did Tyreena hear something?”

“Oh yeah, I almost forgot. She heard the big dummy break down crying. He spilled the whole story ’bout cheatin’ on Choi with a resident. Said it wasn’t his fault. Said the girl came on to him! I can’t believe you didn’t know, Shavonne. You usually down with everything.”

I thank Kiki for the info. It all makes sense. No wonder Choi is out to get me: my lies fucked up her situation. In her mind, I’m to blame for losing her man. Jesus, what a mess. I need time to figure out how to deal with this woman before she gets to me first.

       
T
he retarded girl, Mary, is ready to burst. It turns out that she’s almost eight months pregnant. She’s got that dark line down her belly and her navel is pushed out. The baby kicks all the time and she lets us feel it.

She won’t talk about the baby’s father. That means one of two things: either she was raped, or she went along with it but the guy’s old as hell. I know the female guards here would say, “Honey, they both the same thing.” But they’re not. Ask any fifteen-year-old girl at the Center how old her last boyfriend was. She’ll say twenty or twenty-five or even thirty years old. It’s not right or wrong. It’s just how it is.

My mom was sixteen when she had me. Guess how old my father was? Thirty. Almost twice her age. That’s why Mary’s not talking about it. Whenever someone asks her, she just flashes that dumb smile and looks down at her feet, or her belly, or someplace far away. Who knows where.

Those of us with children of our own avoid Mary. We don’t want to think about it, our babies at home being raised by our mothers and grandmothers or even by strangers. But really we avoid Mary because we know what’s going to happen to her. We can practically feel the Social Services people closing in, old women in panty hose and those starchy skirts, all the cheap perfume to cover up the cigarette smoke from their hurried breaks outside in the cold.

Maybe this girl, Mary, can’t take care of her kid. But it sucks. How’d she get pregnant in the first place? Who was watching out for her? Who was protecting her? Everyone’s willing to step up and take care of her innocent little baby, but what about an innocent fourteen-year-old retarded girl who doesn’t know who to trust?

This is why I stay away from Mary and others like her. The sad sacks. The helpless. The misfits and fuck-ups. Mary, Cinda, and all the others. They’re not like Tyreena and Kiki, who know how to protect themselves. They’re tough, so nobody’s going to hurt them. I wish I could be like that.