Page 2 of The Dearly Departed

I tried to think of what it was I’d been sick with a couple of years ago. Whatever it was had settled in my lungs, and it had made my chest feel heavy, like I could barely breathe. It was one of the only times I could remember going to the doctor and needing medicine.

“Jim coughs.”

Jim was our foster father, and she was right. He coughed a lot.

“Yeah,” I said, nodding. “But he doesn’t have the plague.”

“How do you know?”

I couldn’t help but laugh. “Because he’d be dead. And we’d all be sick too. The plague was really, really contagious.”

She dropped her eyes to the black-and-white drawing of the plague doctor, and as she swallowed, she shifted closer to me, if it were at all possible to get closer on this tiny seat. She pressed her temple to my side and, while still holding her rabbit, wrapped her arms around mine, like she was trying to melt into me.

Anna did this sometimes, too, but usually at night.

Every now and then, she would sneak into the room I shared with Ike and Shawn and crawl into my bed to sleep with me. She said she was scared, and I believed her, but I wasn’t sure of what. The dark maybe. Or perhaps it was that she didn’t like to be alone. She was in a room all by herself, so … maybe she was lonely.

I got lonely sometimes too.

“I wish Jim would die,” she whispered, her voice trembling.

I became tense at her sudden confession. “What? Why would you say that?”

It wasn’t that I loved Jim. I didn’t love him at all actually. It was just that, compared to some of the other foster parents I’d had, he wasn’t the worst.

Sure, he smacked us around occasionally, but there was always a reason. Like, if Ike had talked back or Shawn hadn’t done his chores. One time, I had tried to steal a pack of cigarettes from the gas station, and he’d really kicked my ass for that.

But, no, all things considered, being with Jim was better than some of the other places we’d been. He kept us fed, washed our clothes, and took us to the doctor if we were really sick. I couldn’t ask for much more than that.

Until now.

Because Anna was tightening her grip on my arm and that dumb rabbit, and she was shaking. She was turning her face into my side, hiding herself away from me, but I could feel the wetness seeping through my shirt and knew she was crying.

The book in her lap tumbled to the floor, and she didn’t move to pick it up. She just kept holding onto me and her rabbit.

“Anna,” I said, lowering my voice to a whisper, “what’s wrong?”

Then she said something, but her voice was muffled against my arm. I asked her to repeat herself, told her I couldn’t hear what she had said. I told her I wanted to help, that I would help, and all the while, my heartbeat thumped wildly against my chest until I thought it might explode.

I watched the other people in the library passing by, oblivious to the two kids smooshed together on the window seat, as one of them cried and the other desperately wished for the ability to fix every single stupid problem in this world.

How can they just walk by and not see us sitting here?

Don’t they see that something’s wrong?

I wanted to scream. I wanted to break things. Maybe even this window behind me. I could throw a chair right through it, shatter the glass, and maybe then they’d notice.

They’d probably just yell at me for making a mess.

“Anna,” I begged, dropping the book with the plague doctor onto the floor beside Anna’s book about the ballerina.

One of my arms was trapped in her trembling hold, so I used my opposite hand to gently pry her away from me. She protested, sniffling and shaking her head, but I finally maneuvered our bodies until both of my hands could grip her shoulders and I could see the tears streaking her cheeks. She hung her head and nuzzled her face into her rabbit’s matted fur, attempting to hide her face from view, but that was okay.

I just needed to hear her voice.

“Does Jim hurt you?” I finally asked, already knowing the answer, even before she softly nodded. My stomach sank as my rage flared. “What does he do?”

She shook her head rapidly.