Laura van den Berg - Find Me

In the living room, a boy in a werewolf mask was sitting on the orange shag carpet. The black rubber face was bearded with fur. The eyes were red and hungry. The mouth was open in a roar, the teeth long and yellow.

“Say hello to Marcus,” Ms. Neuman said, as though we were already supposed to know each other. She pulled a pack of Virginia Slims from the waist of her sweatpants, lit a cigarette, and drifted into the kitchen.

“How long?” I asked the boy from the edge of the living room, still wearing my backpack.

“Six months.” The wolf ears on the mask were small and pointed, like they once belonged to a gentler kind of animal.

“And she hasn’t killed you yet?”

“Does secondhand smoke count?”

Secondhand smoke did not count.

The boy told me he could read my past and my future. I sat facing him, my backpack heavy on my shoulders. The carpet was soft. The fangs on his mask were as long as fingers.

“How?”

“Let me see your hands.”

I held out my hands and he started rubbing my palms. His skin was warm and soft and I knew I should have been disgusted or afraid, but instead I felt calmed. He pressed the lumps of bone at the base of my thumbs and the rough swirls on my palms. He asked me to cup my hands and peered into them like I was holding something precious.

“Your right hand is what you have when you’re born,” he said. “Your left hand is what’s been given to you.”

On my right hand, the heart and head lines were straight and smooth. On my left, those same lines were broken and wavy.

Soon I would learn that Marcus always wore masks. The Grim Reaper, the Incredible Hulk, Richard Nixon, Michael Myers, Ronald Reagan, Darth Vader. Monsters and dead presidents were his favorite.

One night, he showed me why.

We were in the bathroom, sitting in the tub, the shower curtain printed with cartoon bears closed around us. We sat with our knees pulled to our chests, our toes touching. He asked if I wanted to see and I said that I always wanted to see. He peeled away the werewolf mask and I saw the shriveled eye, the lid drooping, the iris peeking out like a raisin. On this eye, there were no lashes. It didn’t blink like the other eye did. The skin around it was a thick, puckered swirl.

I wanted to touch, but I kept my hands in my lap. The tub was smooth and white. The fat bar of soap in the dish smelled of lavender.

“The cat got me,” he said.

As a child, he was left alone in an apartment in Dorchester and his father’s cat, Annabelle, attacked him. The cat was named after his own mother, or the Biggest Bitch That Ever Lived. His father would go for days without feeding her. She pissed in sneakers. She stood on her hind legs and ribboned the wallpaper with her claws. He was three when it happened. He remembered the heavy heat of her body, the needling teeth. His parents found him wailing and blood-wet. The scars on his face reminded me of the whorls on tree bark.

“Fuck that cat,” I said in the bathtub.

Ms. Neuman was not married. She worked as a receptionist in a dentist’s office and was always home by five. She bought us new clothes at Bunker Hill Mall and we would wait months before snipping off the tags, the evidence of their newness, of how much she was willing to spend. She painted our nails a shade of electric blue called Aruba. She gave us a weekly allowance, twenty dollars each, and we did not have to do anything in return. She had cupboards filled with chocolate cupcakes, the rich insides stuffed with cream, and Kool-Aid, which looked like red dust in the bottom of the glass.

We went to school at Clarence Edwards Middle. That year, there were presidential elections and scientists invented a vaccine that protected patients against five different diseases with a single shot. That year, the building exploded. That year, we learned about exponents and fractions and the Latin words for “happy” and “nothing” and “I run.” For the first time in my life, I did my homework.

After school, Marcus and I went to a drugstore and bought hair dye called Chocolate Cherry. Ms. Neuman was particular about cleanliness, so we squeezed on the color in the backyard. We put on the plastic shower caps that came in the box and sat under a tree, our scalps itching. We were both thirteen, on the cusp of teenagehood. Our bodies were still thin and hairless, but I knew mine was starting to change. Just six months before, on the farm in Walpole, I woke in the night with a dreadful pain in my stomach and blood on the insides of my thighs. Marcus had a white tuft at the top of his hairline, soft as animal fur; it had been with him for as long as he could remember.

We rinsed our hair with a garden hose. We took turns bending over and shutting our eyes and feeling the cold splatter. Marcus stood with his legs parted, the water rushing between his feet. The dye turned our hair the color of grapes and stained our fingernails.

“That,” Ms. Neuman said when she saw us, “is not a color found in nature.”

That was the point, we wanted to tell her. We were in camouflage, both of us hoping to pass undetected by the world we knew before.

Marcus is the closest thing I have ever had to a real brother. I knew him just long enough to love him. I have not seen him in many years.

One night, Ms. Neuman woke us at four in the morning and brought us downstairs. All the lights were out. The TV was blaring. She sat us down in front of it. The local weatherman was talking about the highs and the lows, the chance of rain. He was wearing a pinstriped suit and a black toupee.

“Do you see him?” Ms. Neuman bent over and tapped the screen. Right then the man grinned and pointed at the weather map. A cartoon sun winked at us.

Marcus and I nodded. Our hair still smelled like ammonia and it looked like we had dirt under our nails. We could see the lacy edges of her slip peeking out from underneath her bathrobe. Her collarbone was raised and spotted with tiny moles.

She tapped the screen harder. “Would you believe I used to be married to this man?”

I looked at the man on TV, his fake hair slipping around on his head, and felt glad he wasn’t living here anymore.

From then on Ms. Neuman did this once a week, always the same routine, like she thought we would forget about whatever happened in the night.

* * *

In Allston, on the western edge of the city, my first fosters, Mr. and Mrs. Carroll, both worked as security guards at an art museum. We lived in a brick house on Park Vale Avenue. At night, I would sit on the stairs and listen to them talk about all the strange and useless things they were tasked with guarding, like sculptures made from plastic sticks of butter or giant balls of string.

“The secret to life,” Mr. Carroll liked to say, “is to do whatever stupid-ass thing you want and call it art.”

I always thought it was funny, what they said about their jobs, because the neighborhood they’d spent their lives in was named for a painter, Washington Allston, or so I learned in school.

Allston was isolated, pushed away from the rest of Boston by Brookline, split in two by the Mass Pike, blocked from Cambridge by the Charles. The Horace Mann School for the deaf was nearby and sometimes I would see buses filled with deaf children roaming the streets. They had a particular way of looking out the windows, a slow, deliberate turn of the head, as though if they could see deeply enough, sound might follow.

The Carrolls had a son. He was in his thirties and lived near Fenway. He was a psychologist. The word “psychologist” made me picture the big-breasted school counselor who wore reading glasses on a lanyard and broke up fights, but when I asked Mrs. Carroll if her son worked in a school like mine, she laughed and told me that he worked at a university, that he was the owner of an advanced degree. There were framed photos of him in cap and gown all over the house. He was never looking right at the camera, like his attention had been captured by something just beyond the lens.