Robin Hobb - The Inheritance and Other Stories

I came back in the gray part of morning. A man and a woman were waiting for me. They wore long overcoats and stood, as if sitting in our chairs might make them dirty. An outline was chalked on the floor, and they wouldn’t answer any of my questions. Instead, they asked me questions, lots of them. Had the Skoags killed Lavender? Why? Did I see them do it? Did my mom help them do it? Why had a Skoag been living with us? Had he ever tried to touch me? But the anger inside me wouldn’t let me answer their questions. “Where’s my mom?” I demanded each time, and finally they put me in a car and took me to the Children’s Home and left me there.

The women at the Children’s Home all wore gray pants and white shirts. They all called me “honey.” They gave me two pairs of pants, two shirts, underwear, socks and shoes, and a bath. They threw away all my own stuff. Then they showed me a bed with a brown blanket on it in a row of beds with brown blankets and told me the bed and the box at the foot of it were mine.

The next day, more people came to talk to me. Nice people, with kind voices and gum and Life Savers. A lady told me my mommy was sick but was in a place where she’d get better soon. But she said it like really my mom was very bad and had to stay somewhere until she was good again. They told me the Skoag was gone and I didn’t have to be afraid anymore. I could tell about it and no one would hurt me. They told me the best way to help my mom was to answer all of their questions. But their voices sounded like creaking cage doors and iron gates swinging in the wind. I knew that talking to them wouldn’t help Mom. So when they asked me questions, I always said I didn’t know, or I answered the opposite of what was true. I contradicted myself on purpose. I said Lavender was my father. I said my mom was his secretary. I said I was going to throw up. Then I did, trying to make it hit their shoes. After three days they left me alone.

After that I had to go to school classes each day with the other Home kids and special anti-substance-abuse classes for the kids of junkies. I got beat up nearly every day. The bigger kids called me “Billy Bun, the Skoag fucker’s son.” One of the kids had a checkstand newspaper with a picture of my mom on the front and big black print that said, SKOAG’S LOVE SLAVE WITNESSES RITUAL EXECUTION!!! GROPIE CONFESSES, “THEY KILLED HIM FOR LOVING ME!” I hit that kid and grabbed the paper and tore it up, and the playground lady said I was an animal not fit to associate with other children. I had to stay in for three recesses. Which was fine with me. That night I got out of bed and went down to that kid’s bunk and pissed on the foot of it. So he got in trouble for wetting his bed. I learned fast.

A very long time went by. Probably it was only a month or two, but it seemed forever. My real life had ended, and someone had stuck me in this new one. I felt like I was someone else, that both Lavender’s life and Lavender’s death had happened to someone I knew, some dumb little kid who hadn’t seen his mom was a junkie and his friend was her pusher. I’d never be that stupid again. The counselor told me that I must always remember that none of it was my fault. I was only a child, and I couldn’t have done a thing about my mother’s decision to become a Skoag gropie. They worked real hard at taking away my guilt and replacing it with bitterness toward my mom, who had ruined my life. But then a spring day came, and I looked out the classroom window and saw a lady with a coat and hood and gloves and a scarf wrapped around her face. I didn’t recognize her, so I just went back to arithmetic. At recess they let her take me home.

Things are simple when you’re a kid. So simple and so awful. I accepted what happened and the aftermath, just kept on day after day, and nothing surprised me because I never knew what to expect. So I wasn’t shocked to find that our door had been busted in, and someone, our neighbors or the street kids, had trashed the place. The smeared chalk outline was still on the floor, with piles of human shit all over it. Lavender’s wall hangings were dead brown tatters, and his flowers were a moldering mess of brown stems and petals and broken glass on the table. The cupboard doors had been ripped down, the microwave was gone, and my couch smelled like urine. Food had been thrown around and mouse droppings were everywhere.

Mom picked up a kitchen chair and set it on its feet and brushed off the seat. She took off her coat and scarf and gloves and put them on the chair, baring her scars so matter-of-factly that they didn’t shock me. They were part of her now, like her fat belly and dark eyes. She picked up a scrap of paper off the floor and wrote down a list of cleaning supplies and cheap food and gave me some money. Then she picked up our old broom.

No one bothered me on the way to the store. The checkout man stared at me for about two minutes before he rang up the stuff. Coming home, I passed a Skoag on the street, a big fat one, and he turned and started following me. But all Skoags are slow, and I ignored the way he tooted for me to come back, he wanted to be my friend, he had candy for me. I just hurried, going through alleys until I lost him.

I got home, and the place looked almost normal. Most of the mess had been scraped into brown sacks for me to shuttle out to the Dumpster. The chalk lines were gone, and as if that was some kind of undoing magic, I half expected to see Lavender come out of the bedroom, or to hear his cello thrumming. Instead there was silence, and the crisp brown tatters of his wall hangings dangled over the edges of a garbage sack.

I stood there and the silence filled me up, made me as deaf and isolated as my mother. Welling up with the silence came the sudden grief of knowing he was really dead. I sat down on the floor and started crying and calling out, “Lavender, Lavender!” Mom kept right on trying to put the cupboard doors back on, using a table knife for a screwdriver, and I kicked my feet and slapped my hands on the hard cold cement and screamed until someone upstairs started pounding on the floor with a broom handle. I guess Mom felt the vibrations. She came and held me until I stopped crying, and said I was okay. But I wasn’t. I knew just how alone I really was. My pain was like an invisible knife stuck in me that no one could see to pull out. I knew my mother was hurt just as badly, and there was nothing I could do to help her, either. That was when I decided to forgive her for the awful thing she had done to me, for making Lavender go away.

We found a rhythm in our days, a steady beat that kept us living. Mom became a very good housekeeper, mostly to fill her time. Everything was cleaned up, and she pieced back together the broken stuff. She saved from each aid check until we could buy an economy microwave and have hot foods again. She mended all my clothes and sewed things from my outgrown stuff. Every two weeks she’d put on her gloves and scarf and go after her aid check, but I did all the shopping. I went back to school. I got beat up every day on the playground. Then I stole a baseball bat from school and lay in wait for the kid who had done it and really worked him over. The third time a kid beat me up, and then got bushwhacked, the other kids made the connection. They left me alone. They knew they could hit me at school, but sooner or later the price for doing it was higher than anyone wanted to pay. So I got by. I’d still see the fat Skoag outside the grocery store, and he’d call to me, but I outran him. So no one bothered me. The silence of my home spread out and wrapped me up. No one talked to me much, and that seemed fitting. What better way to mourn Lavender’s passing than with silence? I was nine years old, and the best part of my life was over.

Mom got fatter and slower. I thought she was going to die. She moved like an old, old woman and sat like she was blind as well as deaf. Once a week an aid lady came, with pamphlets about how not to be a Skoag gropie, and Don’t Do Drugs coloring books and balloons and crayons for me. She’d give Mom a signed slip, and Mom had to turn it in to get her aid check. The aid lady was younger than Mom and wore gray pants and a white shirt. I secretly believed she was from the Children’s Home and might take me back there. She always made me show her my hands, and every week I had to pee in a bottle for her, even though everyone knows that Skoag slime won’t show in a pee test. She left signing booklets for my Mom, but she didn’t want them. So I took them and learned to sign dirty words to the kids at school.