The Broken Window

understand don’t you . . .” Not exactly, I don’t. I stare at him blankly. Kleenex twisting in Mother’s damp hands. She blurts that she loves me like a natural-born son. No, loves me more, though I don’t understand why she would. It sounds like a lie.
    Father leaves for his second job. Mother goes to take care of the other children, leaving me to consider this. My feeling is that something’s been taken away from me. But I don’t know what. I look out my window. It’s beautiful here. Mountains and green and cool air. But I prefer my room and that’s where I go.
    August, seven years old. Father and Mother have been fighting. The oldest of us, Lydia, is crying. Don’t leave don’t leave don’t leave . . . I myself plan for the worst, stocking up. Food and pennies—people never miss pennies. Nothing can stop me from collectingthem, $134 worth of shiny or dull copper. Hide them in boxes in my closet . . .
    November, seven years old. Father returns from where he’s been for a month, “scratching for the elusive dollar,” which he says a lot. (Lydia and I smile when he does.) He asks where the other children are. She tells him she couldn’t handle all of them. “Do the math. The fuck you thinking of? Get on the phone and call the city.”
    “You weren’t here,” she cries.
    This mystifies Lydia and me but we know it’s not good.
    In my closet are $252 in pennies, thirty-three cans of tomatoes, eighteen of other vegetables, twelve of SpaghettiOs, which I don’t even like but I have them. That’s all that’s important.
    October, nine years old. More emergency foster placements. At the moment there are nine of us. We help, Lydia and me. She’s fourteen and knows how to take care of the younger ones. Lydia asks Father to buy the girls dolls—because she never had one and it’s important—and he said how can they make money from the city if they spend it on crap?
    May, ten years old. I come back from school. It took all I could do to take some of the pennies and buy a doll for Lydia. I can’t wait for her reaction. But then I see I made a mistake and left the closet door open. Father is inside, ripping open the boxes. The pennies are lying like dead soldiers on a battlefield. He fills his pockets and takes the boxes. “You steal it you lose it.” I’m crying and telling him I found the pennies. “Good,” Father says triumphantly. “ I found ’em too and that mustmean they’re mine. . . . Right, young man? How can you argue with that? You can’t. And, Jesus, almost five hundred bucks there.” And pulls the cigarette out from behind his ear.
    Want to understand somebody taking your things away, your soldiers, your dolls, your pennies? Just close your mouth and pinch your nose. That’s what’s it like and you can’t do it very long before something terrible happens.
    October, eleven years old. Lydia’s gone. No note. She doesn’t take the doll. Fourteen-year-old Jason comes to live with us from Juvenile. He pushes into my room one night. He wants my bed (mine’s dry and his isn’t). I sleep in his wet one. Every night for a month. I complain to Father. He tells me to shut up. They need the money and they get a bonus for ED kids like Jason and . . . He stops talking. Does he mean me too? I don’t know what ED means. Not then.
    January, twelve years old. Flashing red lights. Mother sobbing, the other foster children sobbing. The burn on Father’s arm was painful but fortunately, the fireman says, the lighter fluid on the mattress didn’t ignite fast. If it was gasoline he’d be dead. As they take Jason away, dark eyes under dark brows, he screams he didn’t know how the lighter fluid and matches got into his book bag. He didn’t do it, he didn’t! And he didn’t pin up those pictures of people burned alive in his classroom at school.
    Father screams at Mother, Look at what you did!
    You wanted the bonus! she screams back.
    The ED bonus.
    Emotionally disturbed, I found out.
    Memories, memories . . . Ah, some collections I would gladly give away, leave in a Dumpster if I could.
    I smile up at my silent family, the Prescotts. Then I turn back to the problem at hand—Them.
    I’m calmer now, the edginess dulled. And I’m confident that like my lying father, like panicked Jason Stringfellow led off by the police, like the sixteens screaming at the climax of a transaction, those pursuing me—They—will soon be dead and dust. And I’ll be living out my days