Russell Banks - A Permanent Member of the Family

“Not much,” I said.

“Not much that was good. That was when county sheriffs and federal prosecutors were busting day-care centers and kindergartens for child sex abuse and weird satanic rituals and making kiddie porn. Remember?”

I told her I thought that was in the eighties.

She said, “It was in the nineties, too. You didn’t know what to believe. People were confused. I was glad Helene was still a little girl, even though it kind of fucked up my downtime, if you know what I mean. Because she was so dependent and all.”

I said I knew what she meant. “I helped raise four kids of my own,” I told her. “All adults now.”

She said to me, “Anyhow, Rudy flipped out at my birthday party and started throwing my set of good wedding present steak knives one by one at the door that led from the kitchen into the living room, and when I bitched at him he puts down the remaining three or four steak knives and pulls out this big sheath knife he’s wearing on his belt and throws it so hard it penetrates six inches right through the door. Everybody goes silent. Helene hides behind my skirt and starts to cry.

“Fortunately, Huey, Dewey and Louie muscled Rudy and his bowie knife out of the apartment, leaving Veronica nodding out on the couch, missing the whole show, although it was probably one she’d seen many times before. Afterward, scared that Rudy might come back alone, everyone split. So now it’s just me, Helene and Veronica alone in the apartment. Happy fucking birthday. We never even got to the cake part.

“I double-locked the door, threw a blanket over Veronica, put Helene to bed and went to bed myself, but Helene was still scared and wanted to sleep in my bed with me, so I let her. Rudy didn’t come back to get Veronica for three days, like he’d forgotten where he left her. But by then I’d gotten into her head a little, or maybe she arrived that night already primed to dump Rudy and kick drugs and only needed a little reinforcement from a third party, so to speak, like from a role model, an older independent woman able to take care of herself and her seven-year-old child.”

“Like you,” I said. “You and Helene.”

“Yeah, like me. Me and Helene. The back bedroom already had a mattress on the floor and I put Carl’s old sleeping bag and a lamp back there and hung a sheet over the window for privacy. I gave her some of my old T-shirts and jeans which were way short in the legs but she said she liked the pedal pusher look. Once she got rested she was real polite. Just not talkative.

“Veronica didn’t appear to own anything and didn’t have any money. She was like a child in certain ways. I had to buy her a toothbrush and let her borrow my shampoo and personal hygiene items and told her to eat whatever she wanted from the fridge and cupboards, which I sort of regretted once she got going because she was like a dog that’s lived on the streets all her life and thinks she’s never going to get another decent meal. By Sunday, not two days in, I had to restock practically everything, even the little boxed juices and Cheetos I kept for Helene’s TV snacks.

“At breakfast the Monday after the party, we had our little talk. I asked Veronica if she’d walk Helene to school because I was supposed to get to the agency early to start learning a new computer program for booking airfares. Computers were just entering the travel industry then and everybody was scared of them, especially me because in school I was always lousy at math. Mainly I have people skills.

“Veronica goes, ‘Sure, whatever,’ which was sort of her default answer to any question put to her, but she said it so nicely and with a smile that you didn’t mind.

“I told her, ‘Here’s the deal. You need a place to get your shit together. And I need a babysitter.’ My old babysitter had just quit to work for this recently divorced female professor at Reed College who’d offered her twice what I could pay. I had permission to bring Helene to the office on Saturdays, so if Veronica could walk Helene home from school every weekday and stay with her till I got out of work, she could keep the back room. Plus I’d pay her five bucks an hour for babysitting twenty hours a week, which came to a hundred bucks a week. It was a stretch, but I had a little saved and a raise coming once I learned the new computer program.

“‘But no Rudy,’ I told her. ‘And no drugs. Except maybe if you want to burn a little weed with me in the evenings. That’s up to you.’ I knew I shouldn’t be smoking in the apartment with her trying to quit using, but I needed my weed. In those days after Carl left I didn’t want to give up my few remaining pleasures, and weed was definitely one. Still is.

“She seemed excited and said, ‘No problem!’ Helene was happy with the deal too. Veronica was like her new best friend and playmate. All weekend when Veronica wasn’t asleep in her room she was stretched out beside Helene on the living room floor watching Helene’s favorite TV shows with her, even the cartoons, and talking about them with her like she and Helene were kids the same age. Maybe that’s another reason why I keep looking for her all these years later.”

“Could be,” I said. “Makes sense.”

She went on with her story as if I hadn’t said anything. “With me, though, she talked almost not at all, even when I asked about Rudy, if she had been living with him for long and so forth. Instead of words she answered with a humming sound, which I took to be a yes. When I asked where she was from originally she said, ‘Here,’ which I took to mean Portland. When I asked if her parents were still alive she nodded yes and said her mother was alive but she wasn’t sure about her father and crinkled her brow like it was painful to think about them, so I decided not to push it. I figured she was another of those throwaway kids who cross their mother or father or stepfather somehow and get tossed out or walk out and live on their own from about the age of thirteen or fourteen. Who knew what she’d done to survive? All she had to trade on was her body and her youth, and with the piercings and tattoos, not to mention the drugs, she’d done a lot to destroy her body, and the passage of time was doing the same to her youth, the way it does to everyone’s. Pretty soon she wouldn’t have anything to trade on, except loyalty to assholes like Rudy.”

I told the woman that I could dig it, as I had someone like that in my own family. I didn’t say whether it was someone like the parents who tossed their child out or like the daughter who walked out on them, but in fact it was both.

She said, “So okay, then you can imagine how I felt when I got home from work that evening and the first thing Helene tells me is that the man who threw the knife at the door was here. ‘But he’s gone now,’ she says. ‘Veronica told him to fuck off.’

“I said that’s great but she shouldn’t say fuck. The kitchen was all neat and clean, spotless actually, much cleaner than when I do it, dishes washed and everything put away. I went into the living room and it was the same there. She’d even folded my laundry and stacked it neatly on my bed. She was in Helene’s room putting away Helene’s dozen Barbies and all their flimsy wardrobes and accessories.

“I said, ‘So you told Rudy to fuck off?’

“She just smiled.

“I said, ‘Good girl,’ and thought that was the end of ol’ Rudy. But of course it wasn’t. Any more than her being clean for a few weeks was the end of her using drugs. But for a while, for a week or ten days, though she talked about Rudy constantly, she referenced him strictly in the negative, saying things out of the blue like, ‘I can’t believe I stayed with such an asshole,’ or when I offered to let her use my phone in case she wanted to call somebody to say where she was, she goes, ‘Rudy never let me call anybody.’ I guess there wasn’t anyone she wanted to call, though, because she never used the phone that I know of, and people didn’t have cell phones then.