A Chance in the World Read online

  But the characters that unfolded in those books and the worlds they lived in showed me a different life, a future far beyond the pain of the house on Arnold Street. I learned that not everyone lived the way I did, that most people came from intact homes that offered joy and laughter, freedom and exploration, promise and possibility. Amid the unrelenting rip tides that churned throughout the home, books became a buoy and a lighthouse. And because of what I read, I developed the ridiculously absurd notion that one day I, too, could have a life like the ones I read about.

  At every opportunity I would steal down to the cellar to dive into my cardboard chest of hidden treasures, planting myself right in the middle of those adventures. I became a fearless explorer, a brilliant scientist, and a master riddle solver. I went to the depths of the ocean with Captain Nemo and 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea, stood right by Howard Carter’s side as he discovered the tomb of King Tutankhamen, and landed on the moon with the crew of Apollo 11. I unlocked more riddles with boy detective Encyclopedia Brown and joined forces with Alfred Hitchcock and the Three Investigators to solve even greater mysteries. My books became my shelter, protecting me as the Robinsons’ slings and arrows rained overhead. And I returned my books’ protection by guarding them the way most children guard their teddy bears. As a little boy, I was mystified when bookworms burrowed into their pages and crushed when a basement flood destroyed several of them.

  Mrs. Levin’s books gave me something else that I did not fully appreciate until many years later: a model for dealing with the Robinsons. It came from my favorite book, Watership Down, a novel I would read over and over again. Published in 1972 and written by the British author Richard Adams, this book tells the tale of a band of resilient rabbits searching for a new home. Led by the small but exceedingly clever Hazel, these rabbits encounter many obstacles in their search. One of their first challenges was one I knew all too well: they encounter a warren of contented rabbits—a home that seems to be exactly what the group is looking for—yet they learn that this new home is not at all what it appears to be and that it is, in fact, a cleverly crafted rabbit farm intended to ensnare them.

  The rabbits escape the farm and often resort to trickery in their pursuit of a new home. Deception may seem unprincipled, but it is absolutely necessary if Hazel and his group of rabbits are to survive, especially when their very existence is threatened by another group of rabbits, the Efrafrans, and their evil leader, General Woundwort. There comes a time when deception is not enough, and the group must take a stand against General Woundwort, although they know it will likely cost them their lives.

  I found kinship in the rabbits of Watership Down. They became my childhood friends, the only ones I was allowed to have, and I could cite their names at the drop of a hat: Fiver, Bigwig, Pipkin, and Blackberry. My friends were smart, fast, elusive, and resourceful—their very survival was predicated on their ability to sense danger. Though confronted by bigger foes, they outwitted them. Perhaps most important, I saw the rabbits as fighters, their combativeness driven by a certainty that they could create a different and better life for themselves. For Hazel and his followers, it was never a question of if they would find a home; it was simply a matter of when.

  Over the years, Mrs. Levin stopped by many times to deliver a new box of books. In my quiet moments of reflection, I often wonder what might have become of me had not this kind woman lit a pathway for me through the suffocating darkness of the house on Arnold Street. The Robinsons never refused her request, perhaps because they knew that would raise suspicions. But had they known those books would sow the seeds of my rebellion, they would have torched them the minute Mrs. Levin was out of their sight.

  I do not know where Mrs. Levin is today, and neither she nor her family knows what has become of me. I don’t even know if Levin was her real name, but that was the name penned inside the covers of many of the books she gave me. For the rest of my childhood, however, she would walk beside me. And as an adult I have found I cannot forget her. Sometimes Mrs. Levin walked from her home a block away; other times her husband drove her over to the house. On occasion I would look up from my reading to see her peacefully strolling to Sunnybrook Farms. The only way I knew to thank her was to hold up my book to show her that I was putting to good use what she had given me. She would smile and nod her head in approval. No words passed between us. None were necessary.

  CHAPTER 10

  We wear the mask that grins and lies,

  It hides our cheeks and shades our eyes,—

  This debt we pay to human guile;

  With torn and bleeding hearts we smile,

  And mouth with myriad subtleties.

  Why should the world be overwise,

  In counting all our tears and sighs?

  Nay, let them only see us, while

  We wear the mask.

  —PAUL LAURENCE DUNBAR, “WE WEAR THE MASK”

  There was no air-conditioning in the Robinson home. The only relief came from a broken-down electric fan whose whirring motion sounded like baseball cards stuck in the spokes of a bike. When the fan failed to ease the humidity, the Robinson family would have me run towels under cold water so they could apply them to their foreheads. On the morning of July 14, 1973, about a year into my tenure with the Robinsons, Betty asked me to fetch her a washcloth from the linen closet in the back bedroom. Her request set off a chain of events that would shape my sense of the world for many years to come.

  Grabbing the washcloth, I caught wind of a strange smell but was too focused on completing my task to determine what it was. I walked back into the kitchen where Betty sat by an open window. She was brushing her hair with a heavy silver brush. “Go run that washcloth under cold water and bring it back to me,” she said. “Hot today.”

  I returned and handed her the cold washcloth and stood waiting for her next command. She raised the washcloth to her forehead but wrinkled her nose. “What the . . . ?” she said. She unfolded the washcloth, and I could see the large yellow stain, bright against the white cloth. “Where did you get this from?” she demanded.

  My ears pricked at the tone of her voice. “From the linen closet, ma’am.”

  Betty got up, the chair creaking against her weight. Still carrying the brush, she walked into the back bedroom much faster than she usually moved. Moments later she emerged in the doorway between the kitchen and the bedrooms and yelled, “You pissed in the linen closet!” I had done no such thing, but before I could protest my innocence, she swung the heavy brush, crashing it into my forehead. My legs came out from under me, and my arms pinwheeled backward. The kitchen began to tilt horizontally, and the fruit-decorated borders of wallpaper began to swim. She swung again, and I fell back to the ground, slamming my head against the linoleum floor. Bright flashes of light danced across my vision.

  She stood over me, swinging the brush at my head again and again. I tried to use my arms for cover, but they were slow to respond. There was a sudden clattering, a foreign sound amid my wailing cries and her unintelligible screeching. I opened my eyes. Through a window of space between my elbows, I saw the large part of the brush skitter across the floor and come to a rest against the brown kitchen door. Why was it in two pieces, and why had it changed color from just silver, to silver and red? Had somebody painted . . .

  An agonizing pain suddenly bloomed in my back. I screamed, pulling my arms away from my head to my lower back. That was when I first felt something running down my face. Betty must have noticed it, too, because she immediately stopped kicking me.

  “Get over to the sink,” she commanded.

  The sink was only a few feet away, but given my dazed state, I couldn’t locate it. I knew I had to stand up or more blows would fall on me. I managed to get to my feet, but the world started to tilt again. Like a gymnast trying to stick a landing, I put out my arms to regain my balance. My battle with equilibrium was interrupted by a sudden shove in the back. “Move!”

  I lost my balance, and putting my hand down on the f
loor, I noticed a large pool of blood. Was that mine? Before I could answer my own question, I felt blood running down my forehead and into my eyes, blinding me. Now the blood seemed to be everywhere: on the floor, on my hands, on my shorts.

  Another shove from behind and I stumbled forward, banging into the narrow pantry wall. I felt along the wall until I got to the sink. Betty forced my head down into the sink, turned on the cold water, and dipped my head under the faucet. She kept running her hands through my hair. The water running off my head pooled in the sink, and I watched it course in a crimson stream down the drain.

  “Stop bleeding!” she said, fear and panic in her voice.

  “I can’t,” I said.

  How long Betty tried to stop the bleeding by running water over my head, I can’t recall. I do remember her telling me to keep my head in the sink until she came back. She wasn’t gone very long before I felt my head yanked out of the water. Wheeling me around to face her, she wrapped my head in a towel, which she fashioned into a turban. I noticed her heaving chest and the “Ooh La-La” stenciled in bright-pink cursive writing on her dark blue shirt. “Sit there in the chair and keep this towel on your head,” she said.

  I did, resting both of my hands on the turban. Though the towel muffled the sounds, I could hear her dialing the rotary phone. Her first two attempts failed. “Come on!” she screamed.

  Her third effort succeeded, and when she began talking, her tone wavered between panic and eerie calm: “Hi, Edith . . . It’s Betty . . . Yes, how are you? . . . Yes, it sure is hot . . . I know, I know . . . Look, Edith, little Stevie has fallen out of a shopping cart and bumped his head pretty bad . . . I need to take him to the hospital and there is nobody here . . . Can you give us a ride? . . . Great, thank you . . . We’ll be right outside.”

  Betty hung up the phone and turned her attention to me. “Everybody is gonna ask you what happened. You’re going to tell ’em that you were playing in the backyard in the shopping cart when you stood up and fell backward. You kept playing and didn’t know you were hurt until I told you to come in to take a bath.” She grabbed me by the shoulder. “If you tell ’em anything else, they are going to send you right back to that bad home we saved you from. You got it?”

  Through muffled sniffles, I nodded my head yes. Though I did not remember all the details of the Andrades’, I remembered being left on the back porch, and that was enough for me to never want to return there.

  “Now, whatcha gonna say?” she asked.

  “Gonna say that I was playing in the shopping cart and fell backward.”

  A car horn sounded. She stood me up and, cradling her arms around my head, walked me through the front door and into the hallway. Before we left the house, she issued one last warning, a familiar refrain I would hear—and believe—with all my heart: “If you tell ’em anything else, we’re gonna know. We know people everywhere.”

  We stepped out into the summer sunshine, ready to play our respective parts. We walked down the stairs, and then I felt Betty’s suddenly gentle hands guiding me into the backseat of the car. She closed the car door and got in on the other side, again wrapping her arms around my head cradling me against her bosom.

  “I didn’t know it was that bad, Betty,” Edith said, before putting the car in drive. She lived right across the street—a kind woman who always made it a point to speak to me.

  “He took quite a fall,” Betty said. “I didn’t even notice until I gave him a bath.”

  We sped over to St. Luke’s Hospital. The ride, which took a few minutes, was marked by a silence between the two women—strange given how well they knew each other. I’ve always wondered whether Edith, a part-time nurse, believed Betty’s story.

  To get to the emergency room at St. Luke’s Hospital, you mount a slight hill that takes you to a circular driveway. As soon as Edith came to a stop, Betty got out of the backseat and came around to the other side, where I was sitting. She guided me out of the car and we walked, my head still wrapped in the towel and bent forward as if in prayer. Blood was spattered on my legs and sneakers, one drop formed exactly like a tear. The concrete sidewalk was gray and scattered with small pebbles. After several steps the ground suddenly changed to linoleum, the air from simmering heat to refreshing cool.

  The environment wasn’t the only thing that changed; Betty’s demeanor did too. She became hysterical, demanding that someone attend to “her son,” a term she had never used before nor would afterward. I felt a flurry of activity around me, and someone said, “We’ve got him now.”

  Betty let me go, but not before giving my arm a quick pinch. I knew exactly what that meant.

  The next several hours were a blur of white coats, beeping machines, and painful needles. My head was shaved, and I received dozens of stitches, purplish, jagged tracks of yarn that would join the collection of mysterious scars I already had. At every turn I was asked what happened. I repeated the same story, despite the heavy silence that followed each time.

  Things would likely have ended there, and I would have returned to the Robinson home without incident, if it was not for a woman I came to call Nurse Nancy. I don’t know if that was her real name. As I think about it now, she must have been coming on to her shift after I’d been there for a while and as they were sewing me up. If she had been there when I first arrived, I would have noticed her. That’s how it is for children who have been discarded and forgotten. When you first encounter people who are not willing to throw you away, you notice them immediately. You notice what they look like, what they say to you, and the way they look at you. You notice it all because you have to, because you need to. Some part of you knows that these images will be the only thing that will sustain you in the future, through the darkness you know is coming.

  Nurse Nancy walked into the room from the right side and leaned against the wall, standing directly across from me. She said nothing that first time—just stood there, shifting her weight from time to time. She was a small woman, and her glasses dangled from a string around her neck. Her brown hair was cut short but curly, and her white shoes jumped out against her pink uniform. Her eyes were a deep brown and never seemed to leave mine. Each time I looked up, they bore into me, and I looked away, nervous and afraid that she would see the truth in them. Finally, I stopped looking altogether and kept my eyes pointed down at the floor. I could still see those pristine white shoes, though, and they jumped out even more against my blood-spattered sneakers.

  Since we entered the hospital, Betty had not left my side, continuing her performance as the deeply concerned mother. She was patting my arm and holding my hand. I was confused. Is this how it is? Do people hurt you and then are nice to you? At one point Betty reached her hand up to touch my face, and I recoiled at the motion, believing that she was going to strike me again. Out of the corner of my eye, I saw Nurse Nancy shake her head and then walk out of the room.

  She returned a short time later with two men. They wore long coats and had stethoscopes around their necks. They introduced themselves to Betty and began examining me. Why does it take two of them? I wondered. Their movements were more deliberate and purposeful than those of the other white coats. Though I was numb, I could sense movement around my head. One of the men lifted the back of my hospital gown and probed the area where Betty had kicked me. I winced at his touch, and the examination came to an abrupt end.

  Nurse Nancy and the two men left the room together. Betty’s gaze, hawkish and suspicious, followed them out the door. A few minutes later, they returned. “Mrs. Robinson, will you step outside, please?” one of the doctors asked. Betty, who had been seated, stood up and walked out of the room. Nurse Nancy remained in the room, along with the person who had stitched me up. “Quite a fall you took there, young man,” Nurse Nancy said.

  Though her tone was soft and gentle, her words made me nervous, and I kept my eyes fixed on the floor before I answered. “Yes, ma’am.”

  Voices sounded outside the room. Although I strained to hear, I couldn
’t understand what they were saying.

  “You’re going to be okay,” she said. “We’re going to keep you overnight, just to make sure that your head isn’t broken.”

  I said nothing but was relieved that I wouldn’t have to go back to the house on Arnold Street.

  “Where is Mrs. Robinson?” I asked.

  “She is outside talking with the doctors,” Nurse Nancy replied. “Is that okay?”

  “Yes, ma’am.”

  Nurse Nancy pointed at a strange-looking chair in the corner. “So here is what we are going to do. We have a nice room for you upstairs, and we are going to take you there in this nice little wheelchair.”

  I hopped down from the table and sat in the wheelchair. What kind of chair is this? I wondered as I used my feet to move it forward and backward, forgetting for a few precious moments everything that had recently happened to me.

  Nurse Nancy was now behind me, and the chair began to glide across the floor, its wheels making no noise. I became conscious of how clean and quiet everything was. As we made our way through the hospital hallways, we saw all different types of people. They smiled and nodded at me. I had never felt such kindness.

  We arrived at my room. Everything was white, clean, and orderly. There was a window to the outside, and through it I could see what looked like another part of the hospital. I hopped up on my bed, swinging my feet in the air, and began peppering Nurse Nancy with questions: “What is this place?”

  “This is where hurt children come to get better.”

  So that’s what I am, I thought. “How long am I going to stay here?”

  “We don’t know.”

  “Is Mrs. Robinson coming back?”