“Were you really raised in foster care?” I ask as I lay on top of Emanuel’s chest in his bed.
We’re both naked, wrapped in each other’s arms with his white blanket partially covering our bodies. I find myself tracing the rim of his pectoral muscles, loving the way they jump and respond to my touch.
“Yes.”
I continue to stare at his chest instead of looking up at his face as we talk.
“What happened to your parents?”
He adjusts in the bed, shifting his body weight and tightening his arm around my shoulders before responding.
“Dead. Both of them.”
“I’m sorry.”
“Don’t be. I didn’t know them. They didn’t know me. They gave me up long before they died.” There was a rigidity in his voice as he spoke of the parents he never knew.
“I never knew my dad either,” I confess. “He was married, and not to my mom, when she got pregnant with me. According to her he gave her some money but never wanted anything to do with us.”
“Is that why you moved around so much?”
I shrug and push out a breath. “I used to think so. Thinking she was moving away from the memories of him, but as I got older I realized that wasn’t it at all. My mother is the quintessential party girl who never grew up. She neverwantedto grow up, even with a baby on her hip. By the time I was thirteen, our roles were effectively switched. I was the one waiting up at home, alone, for her to return, asking where she’d been all day and night. On more than one occasion I found myself waiting in the dark because she’dforgottento pay the light bill with the money she got from random men. I don’t remember her working much.”
“Where’s your mother now?”
“Psh. Your guess would be as good as mine.”
“You don’t speak to her?”
“A few times a month when one of us calls the other. I spoke with her a couple of weeks ago. She knows I’ve moved. She mentioned possibly coming for a visit.” I roll my eyes. I wasn’t going to hold my breath. My mother often talked of visiting while I was in Boston. Out of the eleven years I lived in the city, she visited a total of maybe four times.
A comfortable silence grew around us until Emanuel’s chuckles broke it. That’s when I look up at him.
“I want in on the joke.”
He grins as he stares down at me. “We both had some fucked up childhoods.”
A smile cracks open on my face and I turn my head into his chest, giggling. It feels comfortable to laugh about the craziness of my past with someone who got it, at least on some level. For years the two people who were closest to me had more or less of an idyllic childhood. Angela was the princess in her family, who was very close with both of her parents, who provided a stable home life for her and her brother, Sean. Matthew was an only child to two of Boston’s elite. He was given just about everything he wanted, and had a cushy job at his father’s hedge fund waiting for him once he graduated with his MBA from one of the top schools in the nation.
I loved Angela, and even Matthew when we were together, but neither one could relate to what I went through growing up. Or the desire for stability that drove me, as a result of it.
“How many homes were you in?” I question.
“Six or seven … I lost count.”
I continue asking questions about his growing up in foster care. I want to know more. But some of the answers are hard to listen to. I begin to understand why he chose to drop out of high school and enlist in the military at seventeen, given his experiences.
The last thing I remember is wrapping Emanuel even tighter in my arms, holding him close, as I drift off to sleep to the sounds of his breathing.
****
“Janine! Are you still asleep in there, girl? Open the door!”
I groan and turnover, hating the dream I’m having and hoping it will go away so I can continue to lie snuggled up in Emanuel’s arms.
“Janine!”
“Butterfly, I think that’s for you,” his deep, raspy morning voice says in a low tone, piercing the thin veil of sleep I’d been under.
