Blues

Chapter One

Jack adjusts his crooked wire glasses on the bridge of his nose, gazing out the window at the ground that's frozen solid. It's obvious that he's fallen asleep with them on, as he always does.

"You need to start taking those off before you go to bed," I reprimand, knowing I've given the lecture I at least a hundred times in the past year. "We can't afford another pair. If they break, you're blind."

He makes a face at me, not wanting to deal with my parenting this early in the morning. The truth is that, naturally, I don't possess any sort of maternal tendencies. Circumstance has stuck them onto me, and there is little I can do to change the way things are.

"Remember, no lessons after school," I continue. "You've got to come back and rehearse. Last day."

"I don't want to rehearse anymore," he complains.

"Well, I've been saying that for the past fifteen years. Doesn't really get you anywhere in this country."

I don't mean to snap at him, but sometimes I can't help it.

"I already practiced every day this week."

"Jack," I say, looking at him now. "Listen. This isn't your school play or an after-school band recital. This is our lives on the line, here. It's about making the audience like you, because if they don't like you, they don't want you. And we need these people to want you, Jack."

"I know that," he says, getting upset now.

"Then you've got to rehearse."

Now, all of a sudden, he's crying.

"Hey," I say, sitting down and pulling his shoulder to make him face me. "What's that all about?"

"I don't want to go," he says. "I like it here."

"I know Hawthorne is familiar, Jack," I try to reason, "but it isn't a home."

"Yes it is," he persists. "There's heat and food and people that care about us. That's a home."

"Where we're going, we could have a lot more than this," I say. It's exceedingly hard to try to sell something that I don't, for one second, believe in. "You could have your own room. Maybe your own bathroom. Or a puppy."

"I don't care about that stuff."

"You say that now, but wait until you snuggle that fluffy little guy."

Jack and I sleep in a double of two hundred square feet, give or take. There are five other bedrooms on the floor, and a communal bathroom two floors up that a total of thirty kids share. Privacy is a luxury we've all renounced and learned to live without. It is the price we pay for a free bed in a building with a door that locks.

"What if they split us up?" he finally asks.

It's the question that's been keeping me awake at night, and now I'm expected to answer it. We've been promised by the government that after the Pageant, siblings will be kept together in the same housing placements. To purchase a kid, a family must commit to purchasing their siblings. But there have been so many lies fed to us by the State about this entire process, I have reason to trust no step of it.

I lie, regardless. "They won't, Jack. That's against the rules."

"But what if they do?"

"They won't," I say again. "No more what-ifs, okay? Tomorrow is going to be different, but everything is going to be just fine."

He says nothing.

"Go get ready for school."

I leave him then to get ready myself, for a long day of a job I'll never do again. It is the middle of winter now, and lately I've only been working outside. Recently I have adopted the habit of washing my hair only at night, because if I do so in the morning these days it will freeze when I head to work. I put on wool tights under my jeans, two pairs of socks under my boots, a thermal under the sweater I'll wear under my jacket. I must be eighty pounds heavier in the winter than I am in the spring, just from all the layers I wear.