Sometimes we do terrible things for a chance - even a slim one - at the idea of happiness. Sometimes we hurt other people for the chance to feel happy. Even those we love - especially those we love. We think we’re infallible. We think they’ll never leave us, no matter what we do.
We can’t help it. Happiness is a fleeting feeling in this modern world. Or, at least, that’s what I tell myself as I sit in the passenger seat of Diana’s car, on my way to the group home for the third time after getting myself kicked out of the foster home. Diana admitted a bit ago she didn’t expect me to last at that one, but she wanted to test something with the family. Another day as the lab rat.
Either way, I guess I can look forward to seeing the workers at the Center again, if only for a few days. Adelaide is always happy to say hello.
She promised me I would only be there a couple days - she has one more home I can try out - so there’s no need to unpack or anything. Just the bare necessities to last a day or two there, or until whenever the mysterious “Ms. Little” is ready for me to arrive.
I twiddle my iPhone - it was paid last week and Diana isn’t supposed to let me have it, but she’s known me long enough to know what I will and won’t do. She’s super cool like that, even though she shouldn’t be. Besides, I don’t have any friends anyway. All I do is play games and listen to music.
Then again, betraying that trust would probably get her fired and put me with a much less cool social worker, so I stretch it thin, but I don’t break it.
I plug the iPhone into Diana’s car system. She gives me a disapproving look, but she doesn’t object. There’s still another hour left on the drive back to the group home, so I might as well listen to music while we go.
I stare out the window as the pine trees pass by as Sia belts her high notes, the notes higher than my happiness in life. Bouncing between foster houses isn’t fun. I ignore this, choosing instead to stare out the window.
In some spots, ravaged by fire, there’s just blackened stumps instead of any pines. Those parts make me the saddest, but I remember something my grandmother told me - the greatest of life comes from the ashes. I don’t really know what she meant by it, but she told me it a lot before she passed away. So I’m guessing that she meant that, in order for the next generation to thrive, the previous must pass on into memory.
She said it a lot about her daughters - my mother and aunt - as well. She was always saddened about how she ended up burying her children. She said many times that no mother wants to bury their children. In her journals, at least. She would never have said that to a seven year old.
Me? I wish my mother didn’t have to die so suddenly. I’ve made peace with her leaving, but I wish it hadn’t been so sudden. I wonder sometimes if it hurt her soul when she left me, or if she just turned and never looked back when she met her grandpa for the first time.
It was almost a decade ago now, but thinking about her still makes me tear up. I don’t know why I keep thinking about her all the time, but I suppose it’s just natural.
She wasn’t a good mom, but she wasn’t bad either. I didn’t know her that well. I was barely seven years old, but I knew enough about drugs at the time to understand what was going on when I came home from school and found her lying in her art studio, her breathing irregular and her eyes wide open. She’d barely managed to look at me and breath out a simple, I love you, before she moved onto the next world. I remember staring at her face for at least an hour, holding her hand, feeling what little warmth was left in her body as I pressed my mom’s hand against my face, knowing my life had just changed in a way I never imagined it would.
My aunt found me crying there hours later, laying with mom’s hand pressed against my cheek in the middle of the makeshift art studio. She cradled me and cried with me, and we both stared at mom’s body - she didn’t look like she was sleeping (death isn’t beautiful) - and she just looked dead. So very dead. So very cold. So very… broken.
Auntie kept me for a week while grandma stayed at the wake. Auntie was there on and off for the first few days, but then ended up staying and I stayed at my cousin’s house overnight. I was too young to stay the entire wake.
Auntie wore mom’s favourite dress, but I just wore my favourite paint-stained clothes - the ones mom and I had gotten in a paint flinging war in that left us both super colourful. I told myself I could still smell mom’s paint in those clothes.
Mom’s coffin wasn’t colourful. It was dark brown, so dark it almost looked black. It didn’t fit her, and I tried to tell everyone that, pulling on Auntie’s buckskin dress and complaining. She paid me no heed.
Nobody listened. I laid over the coffin and cried a few times before whispering doksa one last time to her as the first handfuls of dirt were tossed onto her coffin. I threw the first one.
The next day, both my auntie and grandma had lost their long, beautiful braids. Grandma’s cloudy white hair was above her shoulders for the first time since I was two, and auntie’s black twin braids were gone, replaced with a rough pixie cut that she said she hated every day, but kept meticulously short and neat nonetheless.
I went with grandma for about a year after that.
A week away from the end of school, crying with my aunt before she moved away, back to the big city to be a lawyer, and grandma was so proud we had a sad party, a party we all ended up crying together at the night before her flight left. A month of crying myself to sleep before I went numb and couldn’t do it anymore and I didn’t have the strength to crawl into grandma’s bed at night. A summer spent of my grandma pinching pennies to allow me the supplies I needed for school - 3rd grade - and I wasn’t looking forward to it because now mom wasn’t here and I’d be going to a new school.
A year of getting to know my grandmother, of learning to love her and our heritage, the proud Lakota. She even made me a grass dancer outfit, and I wore it for mom and auntie when Grandma ended up burying her other daughter, when her cloudy hair went back above her shoulders after a brief venture to the small of her back.
It was a closed casket funeral, for the body of my aunt was too destroyed by the man who killed her for the paper in her purse for us to bear to look at. I remember looking at the casket - a plain, wooden casket that auntie would have loved, for everything was simple to her. Grandma said she was wearing her jingle dress, the good one that she loved so dearly, the one she would take out and put on to dance around for me on a rainy day, to help teach me the steps of the grass dancer since she had no brothers.
Living brothers.
I whispered doksa once to her as well, as the first handfuls of dirt fell on her coffin. I threw the second one this time.
I missed my aunt. I missed my uncle too, but he died when I was too young to know him well. Mom was buried next to him, and auntie, next to her.
And then, almost a year to the day that I came to live with grandma on the last day of school, I came home and found her asleep in her bed. Or I thought she was.
But if she was sleeping, her chest would have been rising and falling, and her parchment skin would be soft and warm to touch. She would open her deep brown eyes when I poked her, call me silly takoja, kiss my cheek, and hug me before taking me to the kitchen for hot cocoa and brownies she baked that day while we worked on my homework or beaded together. She was very firm that I must learn to bead.
If she was sleeping, she would have caressed my cheek with her time-wrinkled hand when she woke up, always remembering to tell me how much she loved me like she always did, every time she saw me.
But she didn’t. She didn’t wake up, she didn’t get to tell me how much she loved me. Instead, she got to hug her daughters again, after such a short time without them. She got to reunite with her husband, dead for the last four decades. Instead she got to see her mother again, her grandmother and all the people who came before her.
Instead, I had to stand alone, for the first time, in front of her coffin - a darker brown than auntie’s, but still lighter than mom’s - and watch my tears dribble down the side like a slow rain while I whispered doksa to her for the last time. I was the third person to throw a handful of dirt on her coffin, after two of my distant cousins I had never met.
And I got left alone.
Again.
That was the day I met Diana.
I had run to the neighbor’s, and the bewildered-and-then-concerned wasicu lady called 911. They brought police and firefighters and a DSS caseworker. She was new, and I was to be her first case on the job. She paid too much attention to me, and I screamed at her several times. Then she hugged me, gave me a pat on my back, and told me she would find someone who could love me like my grandma had.
I tried to run away when she told me that - there was someone who loved me, and she was laying back in the house, sleeping but not waking up.
I understood death at that point. I just didn’t want to accept it, but I don’t think Diana realized I knew what it meant to be dead. I was familiar with the concept of death by this point, having been through the deaths of my Auntie and Mom.
Diana took me to a hospital while she looked for a “forever home” as she called it, like I was some sort of lost puppy. She was still learning.
I had no visitors in the hospital. I had no living relatives - I never knew my father’s name (that secret went with mom to the grave), and I had been present for the burials of my aunt, uncle, and mother.
I had no friends. No close teachers. Nobody to turn to.
Except Diana. She made sure to be at the hospital as often as she could, but otherwise I was to make friends with the nurses while I was there.
I was only there for a week, but I remember one of them as clearly as though it were yesterday - her name was Sunshine, and she really was the brightest speck in my memory of that terrible year.
She made sure to stay near me at all times she was working. We played on the PS2 together a lot, and she even brought in board games like Candy Land and even tried to teach me the basics of Monopoly. (I kinda understood it but not really, and we had fun nonetheless.) Otherwise, she helped me with my reading and made sure I knew what tribe I was from (Oglala) and that, no matter how dire my circumstances might be, that there was somebody who loved me out there, whether it be Diana or herself, or whoever I needed.
That was the last speck of sunshine I’ve seen since. That was nine years ago. She really was aptly named.
The ringing of Diana’s phone startles me from my somber thinking. She answers it.
“Y’ello?” She twangs into the phone with her deep southern accent. She listens intently, then suddenly we take an unexpected exit off the interstate, into some ghetto neighborhood. She pulls over, her eyes wide and she covers her other ear with her hand as she listens to whatever important thing is going on on the other end of the phone.
I lean forward and turn down the music, pretty much muting Kesha from her newest single.
“Oh?” Diana’s whisper is excited, and I wonder if that’s good for me or for her. “Well, I’ll head on over with Markus now!”
She hangs up, and I give her a questioning look.
She’s bright. “Looks like you won’t have to go to the group home after all. Ms. Little got the room ready already, apparently she thought you were going to be there yesterday. She’s been asking why you didn’t show up all day, apparently.”
I blink. So I guess I won’t have to worry about my phone.
“She lives out in the hills. Like, deep in the hills, however, so it’ll be another hour or so before we’re there.”
I groan inwardly. “Can we at least stop for some food first? I’m starving.”
She sighs. “You know I’m not supposed to feed you.”
I raise an eyebrow. “Has that ever stopped you before?”
She fakes a stern look, then it fails and she grins. “Nope.”
Twenty minutes later, I’m relaxing in a booth at Denny’s, listening to music through my earbuds while we wait for our food. Diana’s husband is rather rich, so one of the great things about her is that she’ll take me out on her dime wherever I want. She’s not supposed to, but she does anyway because she’s known me a long while and trusts I won’t tell anyone.
I swipe all over on my phone, running from some temple monster in Temple Run while we wait for our food.
Diana prods me across the table. I look up sorta - I’m not sacrificing my possible high score for a conversation - and pull out one earbud.
“Ms. Little lives out in the middle of nowhere,” She starts without preamble. “So, fortunately for you, there are really no rules for living in her house. Well,” she adds thoughtfully, “No extra rules that have to do with any DSS stuff, as she’s so far out that running away would probably just result in your death from being lost and exposure, anyway.” She shakes her head, pushing away the dark thoughts. “She does, however, have some pretty stringent house rules that she makes her children follow.”
I raise an eyebrow at children, but she scoffs. “She sometimes houses foster kids for us - only boys, and only for short periods at a time. I’m not sure how I convinced her to take you as a possible adoption, but somehow she agreed.” She pauses, thinking. “She does, however,” she continues on, talking slower, “have one adopted son right now. His name is Aiden. He’s about a year older than you, I think. I’d have to look into it, but you might as well just wait until we get there to find out.”
I raise an eyebrow at her. Anything else I need to know? She sighs. “Go back to your phone.”
I obey, cursing silently to myself that I died. Again. There goes my highscore.
Her phone dings. She looks down, her eyes scanning the text.
“Looks like it’s just you and me going,” she announces. I stay silent. “Rafael and Jaime are both too close to being out of the office for the day to bother driving up here.” She pats my hands. “Looks like it’s just you and I going to meet your new grandmother.”
She pauses. “Well, grandmothers.” She emphasizes the s. “Ms. Little has a roommate and a wife - Hong is her wife, but her file is inconclusive about whether or not they’re romantically involved or if Hong just needed citizenship. I believe it to be the latter. Her roommate is an older Native woman named… Black Feather.” She studies for a moment. “Hmm. There doesn’t seem to be a first name listed, just her last name.”
“What about their son?” I ask, bored more than anything else. Hopefully he’s more interesting than a bunch of old women, although Black Feather sounds interesting. I wonder what tribe she’s from. “What’s he like?”
She smiles at me. “He’s almost eighteen, about a year older than you. His name is…” She glances down at her phone before speaking clearly. “Aiden Eric Marshall, but I can’t tell you much, seeing as I’ve never met him. He was placed with them when he was eight and just never left.” She looks thoughtful for a moment. “Well, I know he has a twin, but I don’t know if they’re fraternal or not. I do know they aren’t close, though.” She looks sad for a moment. “His twin, Townsy… name’s actually Alexander - don’t tell anyone I said this,” she suddenly looks intensely at me, “but Townsy has always hated Aiden. Dunno why, the files don’t say anything.” She shakes her head. “It’s not my case, either, so I can’t really read into it much.”
“So don’t mention his brother. Got it,” I say.
“And one last thing before we go,” She says, smiling mischievously. “I got ahold of your art supplies before we left. Ms. Little said she set up your room next to an extra room you can use to paint in.”
I grin widely at that, ditching Temple Run for the news. Of everything I’ve heard so far, this is the best news. I haven’t been able to paint or bead since public school, a whole four houses ago.
“Do you have the ones I framed?” I ask her.
She shakes her head. “I already gave those to Ms. Little. She hung them up in your room if I remember correctly. Either your room or the painting room. One of the two.”
I frown slightly. “Uh,” I say. “They’re kinda private.”
“I kept the covers on them when I gave them to her. If she looked at them, there’s not much I can do about that. Besides, I’m sure seeing evidence of your talent just inspired her to set up the painting room for you in the first place.”
“Sure,” I say, my mouth dry. I’m not sure how many people I want looking at the portraits I painted of my family, as they have moved on.
She looks at my sympathetically. “Markus, it’ll be alright, ok? Things are never as bad as they seem.”
Of course, is the only thought I have as the cute waiter arrives with our food. I put my headphones back in and avoid her eyes while I eat my pancakes and eggs. Diana nudges the syrups towards me, along with some sausages.
“Eat up,” she says. “I know you’re not looking forward to this, but I promise it will be better. If it’s not… well, you have my number and I imagine you can keep that phone hidden for awhile.”
“At least a few days,” I mumble. I drown everything in maple syrup, ignoring the strawberry and blackberry syrups.
I look up in time to see Diana put her own headphones in, studiously ignoring me as I do her. We eat in silence.
Diana pays and I head out to the car. Nothing exciting. The trip there is even more boring, and I sum it up in 2 words in my head; Fucking long.
We drove by more burned pine tree husks; I could just imagine grandma telling me the stories of the phoenix - honestly, I’m not sure where she found that story. It’s Egyptian - grandma was an old Lakota woman. She must have read it in a book when she was younger and it stuck to her.
Maybe she saw the similarities with thunderbirds, despite thunderbirds not rising from the dead.
Miles and miles of interstate, some of it blackened husks of pines and some of it the dark and smoky greens that give the hills their name. I breathe a sigh of relief when we finally take an obscure exit that immediately disappears around a hill and I can feel the silence of the world around us as the interstate vanishes suddenly.
Staring out the window, I catch glimpses of pronghorns and deer prancing through the forest, keeping pace with us as we drive. They look curious for brief moments before disappearing up the hills, and I’m watching the quietness of the forests go by when Diana pokes my shoulder.
I pull my earbud out. “Hmm?”
“We’re should be almost there,” she says, a little bemused. “Do be nice to Ms. Little and ensemble when we meet them, hmm?”
I nod absentmindedly. The quiet driving through the forests has made me a bit sleepy, and I feel I’m gonna doze off to the rocking of the car if I’m here much longer.
“Wouldn’t Aiden be at school now?” I ask nervously, suddenly realize she said ‘and ensemble.’
Diana coughs discreetly. “Aiden is, for the most part, home-schooled. Between the three ladies, they are more than qualified to teach someone… well, I’m willing to bet that between those three women in that house, you could get a Master’s in near about any subject you may choose to specialize in. Getting Aiden through high school was a breeze if I recall. He graduated last year, and he’s been working on college generals this year.”
I squeeze the seat harder as I listen to this. He’s already working on college? I’ve nearly dropped out of my junior year, and I’m not even a year younger than him.
Oh god, I’m gonna look like an idiot next to him.
We sit in silence for a few more turns through the forest. I don’t have much to say, and I put my earbuds in for the remainder of the journey as I slowly begin to dread arriving.
Diana pulls up short, knocking me forward in my seat. “We’re not here,” she explains as she glances at me. I look up – the Jubilee. “I stopped for a coffee.” She yawns. “The drive is making me uncomfortably tired.”
“Can you grab me a soda?”
“Just come in with me,” she gestures at me. “We’re close to their house. You’ll probably be here often anyway.”
I get out of the car, leaving my phone in it as Diana expects. With a small hop onto the curb (because why not?) I follow Diana into the store.
A large and bored woman greets us in the store - her name tag reads Veronica, and I make a note to befriend her. She probably sees a lot, and if Diana is right and I’ll be here often anyway, wouldn’t be amiss to get to know her.
I grab a half mix of Dr Pepper and Coke from the fountain, and Diana grabs a coffee. She raises an eyebrow at the choice of soda this early in the morning, but I shrug her off.
We walk up to Veronica, and she also raises an eyebrow at my drink choice. “Bit early, isn’t it?”
Diana snorts through her coffee. “I told him that too.”
Veronica rolls her eyes. “Can’t make a teenage boy be reasonable. Lord knows I’ve tried - that Marshall boy is down here often enough getting soda at all hours of the day and night.”
Diana nudges me with her elbow. “Told ya the soda was ridiculous.”
I roll my eyes at her, and Veronica chuckles at us both.
“So what’re you two misfits doing here abouts?” She asks as she scans through Diana’s muffin. Apparently the early dinner wasn’t enough for her.
“I’m dropping off this one to meet his new family,” Diana says. She’s not so great at privacy. “Testing the waters at Ms. Little’s place for a few days, see if he meshes well there.”
“Oh?” Veronica looks up, curious. “Ms. Little and Hong? Them lot?”
“Yep,” I say. “Totally thrilled.”
“I can tell,” Veronica’s eyes crinkle at the corners when she smiles. I watch as her eyeliner smudges. “Don’t worry about a thing, young man-” She cuts herself off, thoughtful for a moment. “What’s your name?”
“Markus Chahotun,” I tell her. “Guess I’m the next basket case to try out here.”
Diana raises an eyebrow at that, and I think she can tell I’m anxious.
Veronica, on the other hand, chuckles heartily and just says, “You’ll be fine, darling. You can always come hang down here if the old ladies get too much for you - Black Feather owns the Jubilee, and I’m not gonna say no to an extra hand to help around.”
I perk up at that. A little extra cash and a way to get out of the house. “How far away is their house from here?” I ask her.
Veronica shrugs. “Just around the corner, quite literally. Can easily walk here to there.”
“Well, look at that!” Diana sounds a bit relieved as I make my first friend in the area. “I’m sure he’ll be down occasionally.”
Veronica just smiles warmly at me as she hands Diana her receipt. “I’ll see you later, I take it,” she says to be as she waves farewell.
“I’ll try and make it by,” I nod to her.
Diana heads out to her car and I follow. “Look at you,” she tells me as we hop back into her car. “Making your first friend already.”
I sip my soda, feeling more nervous than ever in a long time. “Not sure I should.” I twiddle with my straw as I think. “How much further is it, anyway? Is it really close enough to walk?”
“I could get there without looking at my phone from here,” she tells me. “Stone’s throw away, if that.”
I shift uncomfortably as I sip more on the soda. “So we’re almost there.”
“Yep,” she says without looking at me as she backs out of the Jubilee. “Just around the corner or so, Black Feather built the Jubilee on the edge of their land.”
“Who’s Black Feather?”
She stops the car and sighs on the tail end of backing out. “I prefer not to mention her until necessary,” she tells me quietly. “She’s a secretive woman, and although she technically owns the house and a majority of the land in this area, she doesn’t require much out of the people on the land.”
I think for a moment, wondering why the secrecy about her. “Why not mention her earlier?”
Diana sighs. “She likes her solitude. Prefers keeping to herself. Many of the boys they foster never meet her at all.”
“Does she just not like kids?”
“More like people,” Diana responds with a snort. “The last time I saw her was over a year ago, and it was a passing glance. She’s busy, stays in her room.”
“What’s she do?”
Diana shakes her head. “Nevermind that, we need to get you there.”
I hold onto my seat tightly as Diana pulls out of the Jubilee and onto the main road again. I look back as the Jubilee vanishes behind the walls of bushes on the edge of the property.
Diana doesn’t even drive a full minute before making a left turn into a road I would have never noticed on my own. It’s a bumpy dirt road, leading down a hill through an archway of perfectly tended flowering trees, making for a very fantastical entrance.
I glance a woman out the corner of my eye, hidden within the bushes - a feeling of long black hair, silvering at the roots and braided off to the side of her face, filled with curiosity and suspicion.
When I turn to get a better look at her, she’s vanished.
