Page 29 of The Wrong Family

“Mama!” the little boy called, running toward Clee. She’d not seen Juno standing nearby and was cooing to the toddler. Why would she lie and pretend to be single? Claim that she didn’t have children when she so clearly had two of them? For some people, the lie was the escape. Or perhaps she really was a sex addict and didn’t want Juno to know that she had a family. Clee never found out that Juno followed her around Food Mart. Neither did any of the others. For a while Juno was able to be as invisible as she felt and if anyone ever saw her—which they occasionally did (once at a restaurant)—she’d act like it was purely coincidental. She hadn’t needed to follow Chad; no. He’d pursued her from the start. Juno had his number and every other man who started their game with the same line: “I’m not like this, you’re the exception.”

Fourth degree criminal sexual conduct carried a minimum two-year prison sentence. The law frowned deeply on the abuse of power; for a therapist to have sex with a client was certainly that. And if that’s all she’d been charged with, perhaps there would have been something to fight for, but by the time Juno served a four-year sentence (two for the sexual misconduct and two for intentional affliction of emotional distress and sexual harassment by a professional) everyone from her life had moved on. She didn’t recognize them any more than they recognized her, those old friends. Her hands had touched things their hands would never touch; her eyes had witnessed things that would make them wet their practical high-waisted panties. Even as Juno scurried away from her former neighborhood, she’d realized that she didn’t want to be there anymore anyway. It felt soiled now; a white shirt you could never get the blood stains out of. Could a person change too much to go back? She used to say no, but now she lived the yes.

It was thirty-two degrees outside, according to the news, which Juno watched from Nigel’s den, wrapped in a thick fleece throw that smelled of Nigel. Juno knew the smell; she knew all their smells. Nigel smelled reedy, like grass and spices. Winnie didn’t have a smell of her own anymore; she coated herself with expensive perfumes and she smelled like a department store. And Sam, well, he smelled salty, like a kid. He left behind the faint scent of baloney.

She stared mindlessly at the TV, her hair still damp from the shower she’d taken. The shower had tired her out. On TV a reporter was standing in grass, wearing a thick puffer jacket. She looked uncomfortable in it, despite the resplendent Christmas tree behind her. Everyone was sick to death of winter, and it was only December.How long until Groundhog Day?she thought.

She turned off the TV and stared resolutely at the blank screen. It had become more difficult for her to get up from the crawl space in the last few weeks, the pain in her joints flaring beyond the help of the aspirin from the Crouches’ medicine cabinet. She wished there was still a stash of oxy in there, but that was gone now, thanks to Sam.

Most days she chose instead to lay curled in the nest she’d made with the foam mattress she’d snuck from the camping supplies. She’d taken blankets and a sleeping bag, too, from the linen closet upstairs, and once Winnie donated a garbage bag of old throws, as she called them, which Juno ferried down the hole before Nigel could cart it away. No one ever noticed her thefts, though Juno supposed they weren’t really thefts, since everything was technically still in the house, and it was stuff they were getting rid of anyway. Winnie and Nigel were too busy with their own shenanigans to notice hers.

She’d amassed a small wardrobe of discarded sweatshirts and sweatpants from the giveaway bags, things she washed weekly in the Crouches’ laundry room. When the weather got very cold, and the ground in the crawl space turned icy, Juno would crawl up at night and sleep in her old digs underneath the snowsuits and Halloween costumes in Hems Corner. That was a treat. On those days, she stayed upstairs for most of the day, collecting supplies and standing near a window for a few minutes to soak up some of the sun (if it showed itself). She washed her clothes and blankets, took a bath, ate a warm meal, and watched the news. By that time Juno was nearly asleep on her feet. When she lowered herself back to her crawl space after a day at the Crouches, she was tiiiired.Or maybe it’s your kidneys that are tired, she told herself. But as dandy as her growing nest and wardrobe were becoming, nothing compared to the bliss of sleeping in the apartment during this glorious week without the Crouches.

She could hear the faint rumble of the dryer from where she sat, trying to read but too distracted.

She took the clothes out, warm and smelling of the dryer sheets, and folded each one into the grocery bag she was borrowing from Winnie. She knew the vacation was temporary, and soon she’d head back to the crawl space. But if Juno were honest, she was able to spend multiple days in the crawl space in moderate comfort: changing out her clothes, sleeping without worrying about people messing with her or cops chasing her off. Cops young enough to be her son, boys who had little to no respect for people her age, never mind homeless people her age. No, she preferred it down here under the Crouch house, suffering in peace. She had a fleet of apple juice and water jugs now: three for waste, two for water, one for trash. She kept those in what she considered her toilet area—the farthest corner of the crawl space. Juno considered her crawl over to be exercise, which she got very little of these days. She figured it wouldn’t matter for long; her kidneys burned like coals in her body, hot and sweating under the pressure of too many work hours and poor work conditions.

“Sorry, ladies…” She used one hand to reach back to massage a kidney and the other to slam the dryer closed. Juno’s things were packed and ready to go. She carried the bundle to the closet and lowered everything into the crawl space, the smells of dirt and ammonia sweeping around her in a gust of dead air. She was used to it, though Juno had no doubt she was now sharing her lungs with mold spores.

Standing up, she looked down with satisfaction at the things she’d managed to get done this morning: laundry, a shower, TV time, and she’d even got a little exercise in. The last thing she needed to do was eat.

The walk to the fridge was a long one; Juno never knew if there would be food to take. Glory hallelujah, someone had gone to the market, and if Juno could bet money on it, she’d say that the someone was Nigel. Leftovers were vegetarian meat loaf and real mashed potatoes. By the time they got back the food would go straight to the trash anyway. Juno ate it cold, straight from the tub. Then she washed and dried the Tupperware, putting it into the drawer with its fellows.

Outside it was raining; the grass was a spunky neon. The blue-gray clouds drooped like bellies over Seattle. Despite the clouds, there were spears of light breaking through, hitting the lawn and sidewalks and street beyond with the type of light you’d see in a Thomas Kinkade painting. Two memories surfaced uncomfortably in her mind. She looked away despite the beauty of the scene in front of her; in fact,becauseof the beauty of it. Juno the therapist had loved grass, a rarity in New Mexico. It had become a fascination in Washington to Juno the newly homeless. There was always grass, deep-watered, green and soft. When she slept in the park, she’d kept Kregger’s Swiss Army knife by her side, though the thought of trying to stab someone with the tiny blade held in her swollen, arthritic hands was laughable. It made her feel better to have it there, nevertheless. She hadn’t known where else to go, and there were always people chasing you away. The park had been the only welcoming place for Juno, so she stayed through summer and into fall. But Washington changed come fall, the never-ending drizzle coating the ground she slept on and leaving the grass wet. She remembered the damp seeping through her clothes night after night as she tried to get warm. She was never dry for those months and she’d become deathly ill, her fever spiking so high she’d been delirious. Some good Samaritan—a jogger who’d seen her in the same spot the day before—had called the ambulance. After that, she’d had the blue tent for a while.

Juno knew about Skinner and his rats, had studied his methods in school, so her aversion to wet grass was just a fact. It was how humans worked, picking up pieces of their experiences and choosing to fall either to the pain or triumph. If anything, Juno was just sad it had to be that way, that she associated terrible things with something she once loved. She suddenly felt hot all over as she had that day, before she slipped into that fevered sleep. The last thing she’d seen before her eyes had sealed shut was a blade of grass, so lush and bright she’d focused on it with all her might, her teeth clacking together. There were a hundred drops of the finest rain clinging to that one blade of grass. It was sharp around the edges, like the blades of her old carving knife. Juno had looked closer and seen that there were tiny writhing hairs, reaching their little arms toward her grotesquely.You’re not really seeing what you’re seeing, she’d thought.You’re sick, not stupid. And then she’d blinked a few times, her vision clearing. She’d had to remind herself to see things from the right perspective. It was just too much thought about grass, and when Juno woke up in the hospital, she found she hated it, simple as that. There was no grass in the crawl space, though, just dirt, dirt, dirt.

Enough is enough, she told herself.Get your chores done and crawl back into your hovel.

Or maybe that can wait, Juno thought as she spotted the family computer sitting dormant on the desk. It was the grass that made her want to do it, remembering how she’d blinked a few times, gained perspective and had seen the right thing: an inch-long blade of grass with two little drops of water balancing on its tip; something simple that her feverish brain had made ugly.You’re doing the same thing with Winnie that you did with that grass. You’re making her the enemy.

Yes, that was what she was doing. But still. She couldn’t leave without checking Winnie’s search history. Maybe that would give her some answers.

Juno scanned over the last few days of internet search history. Just a lot of normal shit like vegan recipes and celebrity gossip…and there it was. On Thursday night, Winnie had searched for a Josalyn Russel at 11:30 p.m.—hours after she usually went to bed. What she’d seen in the envelope must have left such a sour impression on Winnie’s mind that she’d lain awake for two hours before finally going to her computer. That’s what Juno imagined, anyway.

So there it was: Winnie had received Juno’s envelope in the mail, and then, when Nigel was in bed, had searched for this woman on the internet. She clicked on the link, the last website Winnie visited, and it took her to the article that Winnie had been reading.

Juno rubbed a square of her shirt between her thumb and index finger as her eyes scanned the article. She was braced for something, but she wasn’t sure what. She had always prided herself on excellent gut intuition. What she felt about people was usually right, and from the moment she’d moved in, she’d had a feeling. She read through the article twice, making sure she didn’t miss anything.

The article was about Tent City. Juno’s eyes stretched to their full capacity. She’d spent some—but not a lot—of time in Nickelsville, Seattle’s portable, self-managed tent community. Intended as a temporary answer to the lack of bed space in shelters, they got by. Their purple tents were donated by the First Methodist Church of Seattle, and a rotating security guard kept loose order. She’d been there a few weeks when a rogue band of meth-heads staged a coup and took control. In the words of her mother and Ray Charles: hit the road, Jack. She did, but her options were either finding a bench, or joining those who set up camp in wooded areas along I-5. Juno chose the latter. But why would Winnie be interested in a homeless camp?

Juno devoured the article, looking for something that could possibly be of interest to Winnie. Thousands of teenage runaways go missing every year, the article said, their families never hearing from them again.

And then Juno found it: a quote from Winnie Crouch, an employee at Illuminations for Mental Health at the time.

“There are women in these camps, very young women like you and me who are living hand to mouth, with no sanitation or access to medical help. In fact, one of the young women I work with was pregnant and living in a tent when she disappeared.”

22

WINNIE

She lay in bed, listening to the sound of the crickets in Greenlake Park, drifting toward sleep. The trip to the cabin had been as horrible as she had anticipated—worse even. She couldn’t wait to get home. But now here she was, back in her own bed, feeling just as horrible as she had then.

Someone was working against Winnie. At first she thought she was being paranoid, which was her MO anyway—poor, paranoid Winnie. But there was no way to explain the notepad, or the library book, or the envelope that had come in the mail with those clippings inside it. Deep down, she knew she’d told Nigel only half the story, established a firm villain all those years ago—Josalyn Russel.

Josalyn Russel hadn’t left her home and family because she was a drug addict; she’d become one as a result of what they’d done to her. Josalyn had run away from home three months shy of her eighteenth birthday. She stayed under the radar for those three months, and then, when she turned eighteen, came forward to access social services. She was bipolar and in need of medication. When Winnie was assigned her case, Josalyn had been a wisp of a girl, no more than a hundred pounds. She kept earbuds in her ears at all times, her message clear: she was not offering conversation. Winnie didn’t push her, she never pushed them. She was there to be an advocate for Josalyn in a world that didn’t understand her. On her arms were delicate tattle-tale scars of years of self-harm. She was a runaway: defiant, nonverbal, and had severe trust issues. She liked junk food—Funyuns and drinks that were blue. Winnie paved an avenue for trust with snacks.

Josalyn began talking a little. First, it was about home—her parents divorced, and her mother remarried a younger man. Then one day, she told Winnie her stepfather had molested her. “His friends, too,” she’d told her, looking at the floor. “He passed me around, and when I cried, he acted like it had been my idea.”

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