I knelt down in the back of the boat, and immediately I saw it: The Mr. Squiggly box was jammed in next to the orange gas tank.
“See?” the doctor said.
I climbed out and handed the lead man the bag. He smiled a wide, gap-toothed smile. “Welcome to the Nation.”
THE PARABLE OF
the Child Thief
When the girl was six years old, three people came from afar bearing gifts. The woman who was to be her new foster mother knelt beside her and nervously presented a doll that was almost as big as the child. The doll had long dark hair and beautiful, old-fashioned clothes, and came with a complex historical backstory that tied into a series of books and videos, live-action events, and a restaurant chain. The new foster father crouched on the other side of the girl and showed her a soft-skinned ball that when spoken to or touched in the right way could turn into a cube, a pyramid, a polyhedron. He put it on the floor beside her and told her (in a forced, cheery voice) that it also could change colors, sing songs, and play counting games. It had won several Best Educational Toy awards.
The old man who came with them had also brought a gift, but he kept it in his pocket, and waited.
The girl sat on a patch of carpet in the classroom, staring into the middle distance with half-closed eyes, her head nodding as if she were listening to music. The doll lay on the floor beside her. The ball rocked back and forth, eager to play. The girl did not seem to notice either toy. She had her own possessions. On her lap lay a raggedy teddy bear with a jaunty pirate patch over one eye. And in her left hand she held a deck of playing cards fastened by a rubber band.
The girl’s tiny size and skinny limbs were alarming. Developmental difficulties, the file said. But if she was not beautiful now, she promised beauty. Her features were delicate. Her skin was the color of polished oak. Her dark hair, a wild natural afro, burned with red highlights in the sunlight that slanted through the window.
The new foster father spoke to her, but she did not look up. Only her thumb moved, rubbing back and forth over the deck’s rubber band as if strumming a guitar string.
The foster father looked up at the Village director and said, “Is this normal?”
“Yes, of course,” the director said. Meaning normal for the girl. The child never spoke, and often did not interact with children or teachers. If not for the fMRIs that showed a frontal cortex blazing with light when questioned by psychologists, she might have been diagnosed with severe mental retardation. Even her physical capabilities were not well understood. Some days she barely moved. But when a caretaker was distracted, she could disappear in an instant. She’d been known to escape locked rooms. She had stolen, magpie-like, a hundred small and shiny things. Martha, the houseparent who had taken over after Mr. Paniccia decided not to return to the Village, had discovered several of her caches, hidden mounds of safety pins, coins, chrome salt shaker lids, smart pens, syringes.
The foster father could not hide his annoyance. “I mean, has she been medicated?”
The foster mother put on an icy smile. “I’m sure they haven’t—”
“She receives medication daily,” the director said defensively. “We’ve been very clear about that.” The foster father looked up sharply at her tone. These people were not the usual foster parents. They were enormously rich, as well as famous, though the director had never heard of their names before she’d looked up them up online. Everyone in the room, except perhaps the girl, understood that this visit could make the difference not only in the girl’s life, but in the lives of all the children who lived here.
Once, decades ago, the Village was a new concept: Not an “orphanage” but a cluster of fourteen homes in suburban Illinois that surrounded a learning center and a small playground. Over seventy-five children had lived here at one time, and many of them came from families or foster homes where they had been physically or sexually abused. A number of them, like the girl, had mental disabilities. Once, decades ago, the Village had been well funded.
The director said, “We’ll of course provide you with everything you need for her care for the first month. The prescriptions are good for the next year.”
“We’ll be seeing our own doctors,” the old man said. It was the first time he’d spoken since the visit began.
“Of course,” the director said. She seemed disturbed by the old man. Perhaps it was the way his eyes never left the girl, as if he was hungry for her.
“Tell me about the teacher,” the old man said. “The one who fell.”
“Mr. Paniccia?” the director said. “That was an accident.”
“The file says—”
“I don’t think we should discuss that here in front of the girl.”
The foster mother looked as if she was about to say something, but then quickly rose and clacked away from them on her high heels, clutching her handbag. She was thin and blond, a woman carved from money. The bag cost more than what the director made in month.
The foster father said, “Why don’t you wait outside, Dad?”
This was the first of the three visits required before they could bring the girl home. The old man came each time, and spoke little. On the third visit, he helped secure the girl in her car seat (an infant’s seat, because she was so tiny), then sat in the backseat beside her. The teddy bear was placed between them. She held on to the deck of cards.
When they were well on their way to the airport, the old man’s son caught his eye in the rearview mirror and said, “Happy now?”
The old man didn’t answer. But yes, he was very happy.
It was not until later, when the son’s concentration was on the road and his daughter-in-law was either asleep or pretending to be behind her sunglasses, that the old man leaned close to the little girl and said quietly, “I have a present for you.”
The girl gazed out the car window, refusing to look at him.
He reached into his pocket and brought out a small box. Inside was a gold chain looped around a bronze ring. “This belonged to your mother,” he said. “One of them.”
He lifted the chain by his fingertips and let the ring dangle before the girl. The first step in building trust, he’d decided, was not dolls or toys. She was too smart for that. He needed to give her something of great personal value. “You see how it has six sides? I can tell you a story about that.”
The girl seemed not to hear him. She would not look at the ring.
His son said, “What are you doing now? Can’t you wait until we get home?”
The old man apologized. And when he looked back at the girl he realized that the chain had slipped from between his fingers. The girl’s gaze was fixed on the traffic outside. The old man scooted sideways, checking the seat, the floor of the car. Then he noticed that the girl’s left hand was closed, and peeking from under her fist was a glint of a gold chain.
—G.I.E.D.
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
We lay in the dark, side by side, neither of us moving—yet I knew Ollie was awake. It must have been one of the first skills evolved by mammals, this hyperawareness to our cave-mates sprawled around us in the dark, an instinctive understanding of which movements were the random shufflings of sleep, and which were stirrings of restlessness, fear, or hunger. The rhythm of breath may have been our first language.
Dr. Gloria sat in an armchair near the window, legs crossed, notepad on her lap, writing. She did this all the time, filling page after phantom page. Who would read this invisible book?
Ollie and I were exhausted and should have been able to sleep—even here, in the heart of the Mohawk Nation, in the house that untaxed tobacco had built. The home of Roy Smoke. When he told us his name I thought he was fucking with us, but he assured us that Smokes had lived here for generations. He loaded us into a gleaming pickup that probably cost a fortune to keep in gasoline, then drove us three minutes down the road. Somewhere in the dark we crossed over from Quebec to New York. There was no port-of-entry on the Akwesasne Reserve, not even a border marker that I could see.