Abigail at Red Shield

There are twenty families living at Red Shield, but there aren’t any other six-year-olds. Miss Cheryl, who’s in charge of the kids’ room, says that’s real unusual, but she doesn’t say whether it’s unusual there’s no other six year olds or that it’s unusual that you, a six year old, are here at Red Shield. It definitely feels real unusual to you, being here.

Like how even though each family has their own bedroom at Red Shield, everyone eats dinner between 5pm and 7pm in the same big dining room. And how sometimes people here fight in front of everyone, and sometimes they cry in front of everyone, even moms. Some of the families at Red Shield are just a mom and a baby. A lot of them actually. There’s a part of you that feels lucky that the three of you are all in here together — you, your mom, and your little sister, Samantha. When people are shouting or crying in the dining room, mom always tries to talk to you and Samantha about random things so you’re not scared or sad. Like she’ll ask your favorite animal, or how many cheerios you think there are left floating in your milk and if you want to count them. You don’t. It doesn’t really work.

Two weeks ago, mom packed up yours and hers and Samantha’s clothes in the same big, black garbage bag, and you all left grandmom and pop pop’s and came to live at Red Shield.

“Why do we have to live at Red Shield?” Samantha said to mom the day you came here, while you all were waiting in the intake room. The three of you had to sit there for ninety minutes for your garbage bag of clothes to get out of the bed-bug zapper before they would bring you to your room on the second floor.

It was the only question in the world worth asking, but you, the older sister, couldn’t ask it. You tried. When you opened your mouth, your throat closed up.

“We’re not living at Red Shield, Sammy,” said mom. “We’re just staying here for a little. Hey, we get our own room. I think I heard they have bunk beds.”

“But why are we staying at Red Shield?”

“We’re staying at Red Shield, just for a little, so that the three of us can be together.”

And then Samantha looked at you, and you nodded. It was like you beamed the words right into her brain, because then she said, “But the three of us were together at grandmom and pop pop’s.”

Mom looked away. When you followed her eyes, it was like she was looking at the security guard in the corner and not looking at the same time.

“I’m not going to hide anything from you girls. Your grandmom and pop pop asked me to leave,” she said, and then she looked right at you and you looked back as long as you could, which was like two seconds. Samantha didn’t ask the next question. She didn’t ask if grandmom and pop pop asked for all three of you to leave or whether they asked just her, your mom, and you didn’t beam it into her head to ask because you already knew the answer. You didn’t want to make mom say it out loud.

“How you doing, Clara baby?” mom said then, touching your hair, and you said good.

But later that night, and every night in the two weeks since, you have not been good, not really. The truth is that the morning you all left grandmom and pop pop’s, grandmom took you to the side and said that all you had to do was call and she would come running. “Like that,” she said, and she snapped her fingers and hugged you up tight. She whispered into your ear that you and Samantha always had a home here. She said she would only sue for custody if you told her you wanted it. Then she explained to you what “sue for custody” means.

“That way you could stay here in the house,” she said, still whispering. “You and Samantha. Wouldn’t you rather stay here with me and pop pop? You should have a choice.”

And every night since you got to Red Shield, you wish she never gave you that choice. You lay up in the top bunk, way after lights out, listening to Samantha and mom’s breathing below you steady into sleep, some nights hearing crying from the room next door, wondering what you’re supposed to do.

* * *

Every family gets their own room in Red Shield, but nobody’s allowed to be in their room during the day time. Kids aren’t allowed to be unsupervised at all. And since it’s summertime and there’s no school, you have to be in the kids’ lounge all day long while mom is at her IOP program, which they might as well call the baby lounge since all the toys are for babies, like the counting blocks and the animal alphabet and the bucket of playdough where all the colors are mushed together into the same smelly, nasty gray. You called it “graydough” on your third day, but Miss Cheryl must not have gotten the joke because she didn't laugh. Most of the kids at Red Shield are pre-K, so at least Samantha has a whole crowd of friends.

They do have a fifty-inch TV, though, and a password for Netflix, and Minions is on Netflix so that’s one good thing about the kids’ lounge. As far as you’re concerned, that movie will never get old. The other good thing is the mini basketball hoop hanging from the wall in the back and the mini basketball, which every day after lunch is wide open for you to shoot around. Practicing your shot is the one thing, besides a good movie, that makes everything else disappear.

Except today. When you go back there, the older kids are all hanging out around the hoop, messing around with the ball and doing stupid trick shots, like backwards and between the legs. They miss almost every shot. There’s three of them, two boys and a girl, all way older than you, in fourth and fifth grade. You sit down by the bookshelves as soon as you see them, but one of them, James, catches you looking from over the pages of a book.

“Yo,” he says across the kids’ lounge and waving you up. Then he turns to the others and says the little girl wants to play.

“That little girl can’t ball,” says the girl, Ade.

“Where you been at?” says James. “That little girl puts up shots every day, that little girl can hoop better than you.”

You try not to smile when he says that. Walking over, you learn that they are playing a game they’re calling “Abigail.”

“Abigail’s like Horse,” says James, and they all laugh for some reason, “just with more letters.”

“You could say it’s bigger than a horse,” says the other boy, Nathan, and they all laugh again. Whenever someone says the word Abigail, they all laugh. Nobody laughs louder than James.

“She don’t know what Horse is,” says Ade.

But you do too know what Horse is. And if Abigail is the same as Horse, then you know how to play Abigail just as good as anyone else, except, you have to admit, you might not know how to spell Abigail.

“Man,” says James, reaching up and slapping the shoulder of Nathan, who is almost as tall as your mom, “neither does this fool. Why you think we got a white board? Ade is keeping score. Don’t worry about spelling, you just focus on your shot, girl.”

You never played basketball like this before, making your shots harder than they have to be to make it harder for the person after you. Now you’re doing behind the back shots and off the bounce shots, and some shots you aren’t even shooting the ball — you’re shooting stuffed animals or counting blocks or, once, when she leaves the room, Miss Cheryl’s car keys. That one you have to do super fast before she comes back. Nathan loses out pretty early, but you keep up with James. And even though James is older than you and Samantha combined, you are keeping up with him, A-B-I-G-A-I to A-B-I-G-A-I, neck and neck. Right when you have him on the ropes, you pull out the graydough shot. You roll the whole thing into a ball, but it’s a mistake, it’s too heavy. You can’t even reach the rim with it. James does an easy layup then with the playdough and wins, but that’s basically cheating. Even Ade says so since you can’t throw it high enough and he dang well knew that. And then Ade says to you not to stress that cheating stuff because you, Clara, have definitely got the sauce for a six year old. Nobody ever said that about you before. You never in your life got to feel like a little sister like that.

The glow of what she said, the sauce, it stays with you the rest of the day, even after mom comes back from her IOP program. That night is the first night since coming to Red Shield that you fall asleep before Samantha and mom do. Up in the top bunk, the game of Abigail plays across the back of your eyelids and, for once, all that fills your head are the shots you’ll try tomorrow, all the ways you’ll win.

* * *

The next day though, James and Nathan and Ade are all back on the computer with their usual bored looks. Ade waves hi to you but that’s it. And nobody even mentions basketball or Abigail. After lunch, nobody even looks over at you shooting by yourself. You don’t ask. You want to, but you can’t bring yourself to. Then the next week, James is gone from Red Shield, and then Ade goes a few days after that. Some new kids show up in the kids’ lounge in the weeks to come, and one of them is even your same age. But she doesn’t care about basketball, and for the rest of the summer, you never get to play another game of Abigail.

Then you and mom and Samantha move out into an apartment. When school starts up, you play basketball as much as they let you in gym class, and in the winter, you join the team. And even though there are some bad apartments and houses and neighborhoods that you and mom and Samantha move into over the years to come, you never go back to Red Shield. You keep playing though. Basketball becomes even more a part of who you are, and whenever you play Horse, you always call it Abigail. When anyone asks, you only ever tell them it’s because Abigail’s got more letters than Horse, so that makes the games more interesting. All your life you never tell anyone the real reason, how it was Abigail that kept your family together. Because looking back, it was definitely that day in the kids’ lounge when you lost to James that all the pressure sort of rolled off your shoulders. It’s what broke that unbearable spell you were under, what kept you in the end from calling grandmom and having her come and take you and Samantha away. The truth is, that one game of Abigail has come to mean your mom to you.

And then one day, you see James in the cereal aisle of the ShopRite. It’s a small city like that. Even though it’s been so many years since Red Shield, you recognize him right away. His face is the exact same, and even if you weren’t sure, there’s his mom. You forgot about his mom, but you couldn’t ever miss her — the electric wheelchair she uses to get around is blocking up the whole aisle. There’s the oxygen tank attached to the back of her chair, and the tubes running out the top of it and up into her nostrils. The scuba diver sounds bring you right back to the dining room at Red Shield, all those moms crying. Now that you’re almost grown, you know it wasn’t their fault, or not totally your mom’s fault at least. They only needed help and they didn’t get any. But as kids it felt different. And nobody ever talked about it, what all was the matter with your parents that you ended up at Red Shield, but with James’ mom, it was always kind of right there in your face. Still, nobody would ever have made fun of her because nobody had any room to talk. In that awkward, special way at Red Shield, you were all in it together.

At least, that’s how you always thought about it. But watching them now in the cereal aisle at the ShopRite, without them seeing you, James and his mom and the other lady they are with — a social worker or something you guess — the lady says something that makes your heart stop. You wish you never heard it as soon as you hear it, the name she calls James’ mom by, his own mother.