Page 48 of The Deer and the Dragon
But I’d never been alone.
JULY 23, AGE 4
“What are you looking at?” My mother smiled. Her eyes stayed on her hands as she sewed.
My nose had been pressed against the window of our trailer house as I’d watched the neighborhood kids gather around a car. I tapped my pointer finger against the window as I counted them. I didn’t know the big kids well, but I’d seen them around the trailer park. They were maybe ten or eleven years old. Their younger brothers and sisters were there dressed in shades of yellows and pinks and greens. Two girls who lived three trailers down ran behind the car, laughing as someone sprayed them with the hose. One of them was exactly my age.
I’d heard the music from my room and crawled on the brown, scratchy sofa that my parents had rescued from the curb. The cheap fibers bit into my scabbed knees—another in my collection of scars from falling or from being pushed. It depended on the day. The kid my age, a girl named Hannah, had always been nice. She’d given me half of her Popsicleonce.
My mother scratched my back kindly from over my shoulder and smiled. “I’m just finishing up your bunny!” she said. She gestured to the kitchen table, where she’d been stuffing a hand-sewn rabbit, repurposed from the fabric of old shirts. She’d made it a blue dress and given it long, floppy ears. “If you want to go play with the kids, I’ll be done by the time you get back.”
I looked up at her uncertainly, then back through the window. “They’re washing a car,” I said. “I don’t have stuff.”
She’d made a dismissive noise and fished below the sink. She filled a fire-hydrant red bucket half full of soapy water and handed me a sponge too big for my hand. She popped a red baseball cap onto my head that matched the red shorts she’d made. So much red. Aside from my shoes and the value pack of white T-shirts, my mom made all my clothes. “Now you have everything. Go have fun!”
And so, I walked excitedly toward the children, red bucket in one hand, fingers digging into the sponge with the other. Though the music continued playing, the spraying water stopped as I approached. The laughter died down, and the playing stilled. My feet slowed, scraping against the sidewalk as I looked at them uncertainly. My eyes lifted to meet Parker—a boy two years older than me who’d shoved me to the ground and stolen my dinosaur toy only a few weeks prior. I hadn’t spotted him from the window.
Life is full of firsts. The first encounter with the room going quiet upon your arrival is something you never forget. The first experience with seconds stretching into a miserable eternity, warping your sense of time and its passage, is hard to shake. When they happen at the same time, they burrow beneath your skin like a tick, sucking at you, draining you. At least, it did for me as I stood there, fingers tightening around the sponge, mouth telling me I needed a big glass of water, tummy feeling like I was going to be sick.
“You weren’t invited,” he said.
The girls stood quietly behind him. The others watched from the side, a happy chorus of songs from cartoon movies still playing, but the silence was so much louder than the music as no one spoke. I swallowed as I looked at them, wondering if anyone wanted me there, and quickly had my answer. They didn’t look at me like they were sorry or like Parker was being mean or like they wished I would be their friend.
They looked at me like they wanted me to go away.
“Go back to your house,” Parker said.
I stood on the sidewalk forever, feet frozen to the ground. Sudsy water trickled down the driveway, nearly touching the scuffed, worn sneakers. I stared at the bubbles and imagined the soapy water washing me away instead.
My eyes welled with tears. I didn’t know what to do, except that I had to leave before they saw me cry. Big girls weren’t supposed to cry, especially not at daycare, or at church, or in front of kids washing cars. I couldn’t let them hear the bellyaching wail that needed to come out. Still, their eyes remained trained on me, freezing me, sticking me to the ground.
No, no, no. Please don’t let me cry in front of them,I begged, remembering from my lessons that I could talk to God in my head when I needed to pray. And so I prayed for my sneakers to run. My tears to stop. Me to be safe in my bed. To be far, far away.
I don’t think my legs would have remembered how to move if I hadn’t caught distant movement. From across the gravel road of our little trailer park, an animal shot back and forth. My gaze pulled from the suds, from the children, from the cars and the torment as surprise momentarily made me forget about my need to cry. A white fox spun in a circle, then jumped, snagging and holding my attention. Even from across the road, I met the silver sparkle of its eyes as if it were looking directly at me. Under any other circumstances, I would have pointed it out to the kidsaround me.
But I couldn’t breathe, let alone speak.
The best I could do was keep my gaze off the car, off the garden hose, off the boom box and quiet children, and fixed on the fox. It jumped again, hopping to the side until I pointed my body away from the children to follow it. I rotated to look at it just as it turned to trot toward my house. Swallowing against the threat of sobs, I turned to see the fox as it disappeared in the tall grass beneath our trailer.
Our trailer. The fox was at my house. If I turned and ran, I could be, too.
And so I did. I turned and pumped my arms, not caring how the water splashed and soaked my shirt and shorts as I gave it everything I had. I dropped my bucket and sponge on the landing just outside the front door. I’d scarcely made it through the door before I exploded in earth-shattering wails. My world swam; my throat hurt as the suppressed cry clawed through me. My mom was at my side in a second, sweeping me up and cradling me. She took off my baseball hat and stroked my hair, shushing me until she got me to explain what had happened. When I finally told her, she jumped to her feet with a fierceness I rarely saw. My mom had always been so pretty, but her face was twisted in goblin-like rage. Her baby had experienced her first rejection, and she wanted to make it right.
I begged her to stop, not to go, not to make it worse, and something about the desperation of my plea stopped her with her hand still on the doorknob. She struggled to pry her fingers from the handle and redirect her attention to me. After a long while, she picked me up and carried me to the couch and scratched my back, telling me how interesting I was, how funny I was, and how much they missed out. She told me over and over again that I was the most wonderful present God could have given her and that she knew that I, like her, was destined for great things. God had always told her that I’d share her gift, she’d said, and maybe it was toopowerful for dumb boys named Parker and little kids who didn’t know how to spot something wonderful.
“Where’s your dinosaur?” she asked, hand pausing on my back.
I owned so few things. My dad was a woefully unsuccessful salesman, and my mother, though educated, had forgone any career to be a good wife and mother, which meant she had entirely too much time to focus on her only child. My favorite toys had all come from the Christmas charity drives, though my parents had been too proud to go in. They’d sent me in alone. Given the state of my thrift-store jacket, which was thirty years out of fashion, no one had ever questioned the legitimacy of my financial status. The dinosaur I’d gotten—a Parasaurolophus, which had been a word I’d loved saying, both for its extra syllables and its uniqueness—was the best thing I’d ever owned.
“Promise not to get mad if I tell you?”
She studied my swollen, tear-stained face, then said, “I promise.”
When I told her, she said she’d make me a dinosaur once she finished the rabbit. I shook my head and asked if she could make me a fox.
“Sure, I can get some red cloth—”
“Make it white,” I said. “With silver buttons for eyes.”
