Orphans
BY M.K. LAUGHLIN I AUGUST 5, 2008

So far

Will's earliest memory is a man dressed in a green undershirt, sitting on a couch beneath a lamp with no shade. "I need a cigarette," says the man, and a woman arrives with a lit one caught between two fingers. She raises it to her mouth and smirks, inhales, poses. She blows a smoke ring that the man breaks to pieces with a loosely clenched fist. Will likes to think these are his parents. People ask if he remembers them and he says yes, I do: Daddy wore green undershirts and Mama smoked rings. He memorizes cigarette brands and the names for different shades of green, and when people are around to listen he lists them aloud. This is his parents' memorial, Will's own little eulogy, but he doesn't call it that himself because he doesn't know what the word "eulogy" means yet.

Today

A woman visits, a pretty one with an inconsistent Southern accent. She's dressed in a green outfit that looks like a sweat suit only too shimmery to sweat in, like the velvet sheen on Santa's pants. Will has trouble taking his eyes from her face but eventually he has to, because there are other things to notice: Sister Beatrice pacing, which she rarely does, smiling, which she never does, because her smile lines bunch up against her mole; a trio of female strangers in a corner chatting on cell phones the size of playing cards; a sweater-wearing Chihuahua echoing its yips off the cinderblock walls.

The woman in green has long fingernails. Her hair is blond and her shoes are black with green bows and green spike heels. She walks over to Will's table where he's sitting with his bunkmate Pasha and the only working set of Hungry Hungry Hippos. When she reaches down to pick up a marble Will sees that the bones in her wrist are too close to the surface of her skin, that there are faded white lines etched across the tan expanse of her forearm.

"Hello, little cutie," she says, and he decides that he likes her. He says, "Your sweat suit is pretty and green."

Pasha says nothing. Pasha holds a fistful of marbles above the board and drops them one by one. Will presses the lever to make the hippo snap them up. He chants colors so the woman knows that he likes green too. Emerald, jade, olive, lime, army tint, shamrock, and that's all he's got for now. The woman smiles. Will switches to cigarettes. Marlboros, Camels, Newport, Virginia Slims, Smokin' Joe Premiums, and he's out again. And now the woman frowns, tilts her head and shakes it. She takes a step toward Pasha and ruffles his hair—blond hair—and flips her own, gestures for Sister Beatrice. They whisper together and Will overhears a request to "take him out to test-lunch."

"We're here right now, in the playroom," one of the female strangers says to her cell phone. The dog barks from her arms. "You should see all the cute little orphans running around and oh my God, I hope that paparazzi horde outside doesn't scare them it's like, Jesus Christ, can't we get a little f-ing privacy?"

"Hem, huh, now, now," grunts Sister Beatrice.

The clock hangs on the wall above them and it's shaped like a cartoon cat. The curled tail flicks for every passed second. Will sometimes gets headaches listening to those tickings. He really wants to go out for lunch and can't understand why he's never picked. Later that night he complains to Pasha in bed, and Pasha promises to bring home some fries if they go eat at a place that serves them.

Later

Will plays checkers with his new bunkmate Jamal as the TV flickers in the corner. Jamal has brown skin mostly, but his palms are pink and the soles of his feet are pinkish-whitish, and the puckery stub where his middle finger and pointer finger tip should be is near to purple. Will doesn't ask about the fingers. He crayons almost exclusively in brown and purple these days, but he can't decide if it's because he likes the color combination or hates it.

Jamal builds red pyramids across the middle of the board and then takes them apart. Will builds towers with the black ones. "Let's switch colors," says Jamal, but before Will can answer a figure on the television screen catches his attention and the words get stuck in the voicebox section of his throat.

The woman in green fills the screen but now she's a woman in blue. Her eyes reflect the flashings of a bee swarm of cameras and she smiles beautifully and she's got a kid perched on her hip, a little one with blond hair swept into a Mohawk and baggy camouflage cargo pants. A Nintendo DS sticks out from the kid's back pocket. A lollipop slants up from his fist. It takes Will a moment to recognize Pasha.

"At first I didn't think there was such a thing as American orphanages," says the woman, aiming her lips at the round black head of a microphone. "I was like, completely ignorant about group homes and shelters and centers and stuff. God bless those nuns, you know? They do good work. They got so many needy children right here in America. Why go like, abroad, when I can get an orphan right here?"

Pasha buries his head into the woman's chest. The rounded tops of her breasts pop up on both sides of him. A sudden pressure pits the center of Will's stomach.

"I knew little Pasha was mine from the moment I saw him," says the woman. "There was just this, like, connection. I was meant to be his mommy. Check this, I even started writing a song about it for my next album."

Flashflashflashflash go the cameras.

The woman sings: "Baby boy with eyes of blue do you know that I love you, a-whoooooooooooooooooo..."

Will picks up a checker and squeezes until the circumference imprints itself on his palm, until the woman's singing stops jumping up and down in quavers. He imagines himself riding on her special hip that everyone wants to take pictures of, with a Nintendo and a red lollipop that is probably cherry his all-time favorite flavor. He remembers the way the woman smelled as she stood above him, not like soap or sweat or food but something else, something sharp and secret that did not usually live in the rec room. He remembers the way the woman's lips curved downward when he recited the cigarette list and suddenly things make sense.

"I shouldn't have mentioned the cigarettes," he mutters.

Jamal blinks. "What?"

"I shouldn't have said that. She didn't like that. Not everybody likes to smoke. Sister Beatrice says it's bad."

A high-pitched whine fills his ears. The wall cat-clock ticks and flicks its tail. On the screen Pasha puts the lollipop in his mouth and sucks until his cheeks hollow into gullies.

"Fucking cigarettes!" screams Will. He bursts into tears and Jamal leaps out of his seat and scatters checkers across the tile floor. "Don't cry, Will," he says. "I'm not gonna tell on you. I'm not gonna tell you swore. Please don't cry." He pats Will's back with his maimed hand.

Will can't stop. The sobs make his chest burn and snot clogs his throat holes and he remembers the time that Sister Beatrice said he was too young to remember his parents. She said, the man in the undershirt and the smoke ring woman were just people from a dream; imaginary people. Will cried himself into a mucus flood on that day too, but this is worse, because this feels like the truth. The smokers were his parents and they didn't want him to have a new home, so they made him memorize cigarette brands and recite them and other people just didn't like that kind of thing, and then they picked your bunkmate instead of you and left you behind with the checkers and a headache and a clock that never shuts up.

And later

Everyone wants to watch TV but there's something wrong with the set. The lower channels all have the same show, an upside-down car lying across the bottom of a valley. The valley is brown except for scattered patches of fire. There are white letters across the screen, all capitals: SINGER, ADOPTED SON IN CRITICAL CONDITION AFTER CRASH. Will can't read the words "critical" or "condition." He stops trying to sound them out when a big color picture of Pasha flashes across the screen.

Picture-Pasha splashes ankle-deep in ocean water at the side of the woman in green, who wears a tiny v-shaped scrap of pink cloth on her bottom half and a pink-and-blue striped bra. Pasha has on big white swimming trunks with lighting bolts on the side. Droplets of water caught in a moment of spray arch up from his kicking feet. He smiles so widely his tongue looks ready to fall out. The woman has dark sunglasses on and Will can't see her eyes.

Rollover, says the television, and: medi-vac. Alcohol. Critical condition.

Sister Beatrice rushes in and grabs the remote.

"Dear Jesus," she says. "Oh Lord, children, it's time to pray. Oh my God. We're going to pray for Pasha. Jesus Christ."

Jamal and the others obediently shut their eyes and make the Sign of the Cross. Will keeps his eyes open and can see clearly when Sister Beatrice begins to cry through her own closed eyes, behind her own folded praying hands.

"We pray for the recovery of our dear friend Pasha, and his...mother."

Something about the way Sister Beatrice pronounces the word mother makes Will think she doesn't really want to pray for her. He wonders why. He wonders what it would feel like to be inside the car at the bottom of a brown fiery valley with the whole world watching, thinking, praying, saying your name in hard tones of voice. If it hadn't been for the cigarette brands he chanted over the Hungry Hungry Hippo game maybe he would have found out—he, and not Pasha, who used to wet the bed at night and didn't like to talk to strangers.

"In God's name we pray," says Sister. "Amen."

"Amen," says Jamal.

Will thinks of his parents, who maybe weren't his parents after all but angels, guardian angels, and they made him memorize cigarette brands to save his life.

"The Lord works in mysterious ways," sobs Sister Beatrice, and Will, crying himself now, for several different reasons, says quietly, prayerfully, "Smokin' Joe Premiums."

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