The Shadow Girl of Birch Grove (3 page)

I didn’t see Hosea at first because of the crowd surrounding him. Then someone

moved and I spotted Mrs. Richards’s bleached blonde head in the corner of the

room.

A doctor said, “Call it.”

A nurse said, “Time of death, one oh two a.m.” and the group moved away

from my friend. I ran to the bed and took Hosea’s hand, wanting to will him back

to life.

“Hosea, Hosea,” I said, but I knew by looking at his face that he wasn’t

Hosea anymore. “Please, please!”

Please. It’s such a simple word. We say it without thinking. Please pass

the salt. Please close the door. We forget it’s also an appeal, an entreaty for

mercy.

I cried, “Please, please! Please, bring him back. You brought me back –

bring him back, please!”

A man in scrubs pried me away from Hosea’s body and said, “We did

everything we could. He’s gone.”

“Why can’t she…” I began.

“She? Who?” he asked.

I shook my head, so exhausted and hurt and angry that I couldn’t organize

my thoughts. “I don’t know.”

“It was bacterial meningitis,” the man in scrubs said. “It went through him

faster than we could control it. We understand how you feel.”

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The Shadow Girl of Birch Grove – Marta Acosta

I took one look at his composed face and know he doesn’t understand,

because if he did understand, he would be weeping, too, for this boy who loved a

world that never loved him.

A security guard comes and pushed me to the lobby. I fell back into one of

the hard plastic chairs and my mind shut down so that I wouldn’t have to think

about what has just happened.

A man stumbled in through the automatic glass doors of the entrance,

clutching his left wrist with his right hand. He moved his hand, and blood

sprayed out and across my shirt. Hospital staff hurried him through the double

doors.

I fell asleep to the cries of patients, the snores of family, and the sweet

rotten stench of the blood on my shirt.

A doctor escorted Mrs. Richards out of the ER at daybreak. She looked

pale under the fake tan, and she was shredding a tissue.

I stood up, my body aching from sleeping in the chair.

“I thought it was the flu,” Mrs. Richards croaked to the doctor.

“People make that mistake,” the doctor said.

When Mrs. Richards finally seemed to see me, she said, “You’ve got blood

on your shirt. You should have scrubbed that off with cold water and soap. If

blood sets, you can never get the stain out.”

I didn’t have the words for the fury I felt. I threw myself at Mrs. Richards,

reaching up to hit her face and then the arms she flung up to protect herself until a

security guard lifted me off my feet and away from her.

Hosea’s body was shipped to a grandmother in Louisiana. I spent the days

after his death sitting numbly through my classes and expecting to get sent to

another home. Though Mrs. Richards never mentioned the incident, she looked at

me differently after that.

When my head cleared, I tried calling the Baby Snatchers during my lunch

breaks. I stood by the only working pay phone at school with a handful of coins.

I was transferred from person to person. I told them all how Mrs. Richards had

ignored Hosea’s fever. My life as a foster and at time at City Central has given

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The Shadow Girl of Birch Grove – Marta Acosta

me an understanding of the legal system. “It’s criminal negligence,” I said.

“You’re supposed to investigate.”

The last administrator said with exasperation, “You again? Look, your

friend caught a virus. Sometimes it’s deadly. Your guardian wasn’t responsible

for that.”

“It was an infection, not a virus.”

“Either way, he’s dead and there’s no one to blame. Let it go. Move on.”

Hosea’s bedroom was cleaned out and everything was disinfected.

I compulsively filled a notebook writing my friend’s name over and over

again on the front and back of every page.

A new roommate, a skinny, sharp-featured sixteen-year-old who called

herself Wilde, asked, “What are you doing?” She twisted a lock of her long black

hair.

“People die or leave and you forget them, the sound of their voice, they way

they look. I don’t even have a picture of him, and I don’t want to ever forget

him.”

“What about a tattoo?”

“With what money, Wilde?”

“I’ll do it. I’ve done a bunch of them. I’m an artist.” Her own sallow skin

was adorned with professional tattoos, and she’d told us she’d traded sex for

them.

“Is it safe?”

“Don’t worry.” She brought a sketchbook out of her canvas messenger bag.

Her nails with their chipped blue-black polish were bitten raggedly to the quick,

and her hand moved skillfully as she sketched out both simple and ornate versions

of my friend’s name.

She showed me one, a lacy H over an elongated leaf. “I can use your scar

for the leaf, you know, and make it ornamental, like I did with mine.” Wilde

extended her arm to show me the flowers inked around the round scars she’d

gotten when her meth-head mother had burned her with cigarettes. “Then it’s

something that you made for yourself, not something that someone did to you.”

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“No thanks,” I said. “This one,” I said and pointed to a bold upper-case H.

I showed her where I wanted it, below my left breast.

We waited until Mrs. Richards left the house on an errand. Wilde slipped

out back, where she hid her stash of illicit possessions. She returned carrying a

red and black Chinese silk pouch. She assembled her tools on the old bureau we

shared: a pencil, sewing thread, India ink, and paper towels, a pint of vodka.

Our other housemates were grieving, too, and they didn’t say anything

when she dropped a needle in a pan of boiling water and scrubbed her hands in a

sink of water with bleach.

We went back to the bedroom, and then Wilde used thread to bind the

needle tightly to a pencil. “The thread holds the ink,” she explained. “I got some

vodka. It’ll help.”

Remembering the smell of alcohol on my step-father, I said, “I don’t need

it.”

“You’ll wish you did,” she warned.

I lay on the bed and hitched up my ratty shirt. Wilde had already drawn the

letter on with a felt pen. Now she squatted over me and said, “This hurts, so you

got to man up.” She pulled her hair back into a knot and began to work.

She was right. It hurt like hell. She jabbed the needle repeatedly in my

tender flesh, and I fought the instinct to jerk away. My eyes welled with tears,

and I gritted my teeth and didn’t cry out.

“One day, you’re gonna tell me how you got that scar,” she said.

“I don’t remember, and I don’t want to.”

“Lucky bitch. I remember every goddamn one of mine.” A long time later,

Wilde dabbed at the tattoo with a paper towel and said, “Done! Check it out.”

I got up, feeling woozy, and looked in the small mirror over the dresser.

My skin was blotchy red and the lines of the black H were thin and clear. Now

Hosea would be near my heart as long as I lived. “Thanks,” I told the girl. “I owe

you one.”

“No worries. You always cover for me when I’m out,” she said and smiled.

“You’ve hardcore, girl. Go wash it with hot water and soap. It’ll scab up at first,

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then after it’ll be cool.”

Wilde and Mrs. Richards got in a screaming match at the end of the week. I

was at the small desk in our room when Wilde stormed in, screaming curses back

at Mrs. Richards.

She grabbed her messenger bag and began shoving her things inside. “I’m

outa here,” she said.

“Where are you going?”

“I’ve got friends. You wanna come?”

I was still thinking about it when she shook her head. “You’re small and

the cops will notice you. If not them, then the pervs. This is a shithole, but at

least you’re safe here.”

“Wait a sec,” I said. I went to my own hiding place, a gap between the

heavy dresser and the wall which was too narrow for anyone else to reach into. I

reached around until I felt the thin edge of an envelope. I brought it out and took

out the few dollars I’d saved up.

I handed Wilde the money and said, “Take this.”

“You don’t have to, Jane.”

“You need it more than me,” I said, but she wouldn’t take it. “It’s payment

for the tattoo.”

She pulled off the fake silver earrings dangling from her lobes and said,

“For you. Next time we meet I’ll pierce your ears for you.”

“Thanks. Be careful.”

She grinned. “I know the streets. I’m cool. Okay, well, bye.” When she

hugged me, I smelled her clove cigarettes and patchouli oil, and I held on tight

until we heard our foster mother screeching in the other room.

“Bye, Wilde.” I followed her to the living room, where Mrs. Richards was

blocking the front door.

“You’re not going anyplace,” Mrs. Richard said. “I’ve called CPS and they

said you stay right here. You’re a minor and you can’t leave--”

Wilde said, “Fuck you,” and pushed right by Mrs. Richards.

I followed Wilde outside and watched her stride down the gray, dirty

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sidewalk, past the house with the men who drank beer out every day on the porch,

past the kids doing watch-out shifts for the dealers, past the yard where pitbulls

lunged at the chain link fence, and past the old homeless woman with her

shopping cart full of cardboard and rags.

When Wilde got to the corner, she turned. I waved at her and she waved

back and then she was gone.

Even though Wilde seemed tough, I knew there were smiling predators out

there hunting for girls like her, girls as colorful and loud as jungle birds, girls as

fragile as those tropical creatures. I hoped she would make it, but I feared that she

wouldn’t.

I’d hated Mrs. Richards before, and after Hosea died and Wilde left, I hated

her even more. I didn’t want to be here, but all I knew was the ugly dangerous

landscape around me. I was too small and too poor to protect myself on my own.

Two days later, I was sitting in my usual place in the cafeteria when a

brawny black football player came and stood beside me. Since I couldn’t slide

under the table to get away, I sat still and stared at my food until he said, “Yo.”

“Hey,” I answered. When I raised my eyes I saw him gazing impassively

down at me. The people sitting nearby got quiet, waiting to see what was

happening, and I tried not to let my fear show on my face.

The jock reached up to twist one of the huge fake diamonds glittering on his

earlobes. “Can’t let you stay here now that the Rev’s gone. Grab your gear,

peewee, ‘cause you gotta go.”

I glanced at the crowded cafeteria. “Where?”

He tilted his head in thought, sending his dreads swinging to one side. “I’ll

get you someplace.”

I slung my frayed backpack over my shoulder and picked up my tray, the

Meatloaf Monday special, hoping that he wouldn’t make me sit outside in the

freezing drizzle.

As I followed him toward the back of the cafeteria, I looked around for

help. The security guard was busting up a fight by the soda machine. “It wasn’t

the same without Hosea anyway,” I said to break the fear that gripped me.

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The jock spoke so low that I almost missed his words. “He was something

special.”

“You saw it too?”

“My momma’d say he had the gift of grace.” The jock looked me in the

eye and for a second, we had a connection, both hurting at the loss. Then the

connection was gone and his face became as impassive as a mask. He pointed to

an empty chair at the egghead table.

The kids sitting there looked at the jock the way rabbits look at wolves,

frozen by the desire to run and the knowledge that wolves love a chase. The jock

said, “She’s sitting here from now on.”

A girl spoke up, “You can’t tell us what to do.”

He laughed and said, “Oh, yeah, I can.”

“You’re a jerk,” she said even though she drew back as if expecting him to

strike.

“Shut up. She’s sitting here.” He gave her an intimidating glare before

strolling back to his area.

The smart kids called themselves the Alphas and they completely ignored

me for days, not realizing that I was most comfortable when I was ignored.

While I’d never been a bad student, neither had I been a good one, and I

barely listened to the buzz of their conversations as I stared at the wall, or did

homework during lunch. When the Alphas talked about moving away from here

and going to college, though, I paid attention.

Lily, the girl who’d talked back to the jock, said, “I want to get as far away

from my parents as possible. We’re like potassium and water.”

The other kids laughed and I said, “Huh?”

“If potassium comes into contact with water, it instantly combusts,” Lily

said slowly so if she was talking to a child.

A boy said, “Jane, if you gave a damn and pulled your grades up, you could

get a full ride anywhere. College admissions officers love foster kids.”