Leaving: A Novel Read Free

He’d died when Lida was only five, and he was young in that picture, so when Lida imagined her father, Ronald, she mostly imagined that picture of Corbet.
    She cleared her dish, washed it, and put the place mat back in the drawer; she erased all signs of herself, nothing to make him think of her, nothing to make it her fault if he did.
    She took the quarter for the bus off the shiny oak vanity and hopped to the doormat on one socked foot as quietly as possible, though she couldn’t help but make a hollow thudding. This last test was obligatory now that she was nearly out, to prove that she deserved to make it.
    Her shoes sat by the front door. She had come to putting them there so she didn’t have to make any more noise upstairs, but she told Ruby it was out of respect for the wooden floors. Ruby liked the idea so much that she insisted everyone do it. But if Lida saw Easton’s hard, scuffed black loafers touching her shoes, she picked hers up and moved them to the other side of the entrance.
    It was not yet six-thirty in the morning when she stepped outside. Cranston Avenue was still silent and dark. She walked with her head down, careful to step over the cracks in the sidewalk. Other children came out of their houses now. So loud—slamming their doors, running across the street, calling to each other. The recklessness of it made her heart freeze. She didn’t talk to anyone, and no one talked to her. Except for Marcus LeRoy.
    She recognized Marcus from behind by the sky-blue pick in his hair. In elementary school they used to play kickball together on the street. Then he started to come over after school, and sometimes they danced to Easton’s James Brown records in the living room if nobody was home. But over the last summer, Marcus’s father had made him help out at the health food store, so she hadn’t hardly seen him at all.
    Marcus sat on the bus bench at San Pablo and turned around to wave to her as she approached. He smiled. He looked different. His shoulders were just starting to fill out and he seemed taller. She hugged her purple notebook to her chest, held the sides of her bare arms, and whispered without moving her lips, “Rabbit, rabbit, rabbit.”

CHAPTER 1C
    FEBRUARY 1993
    “FUCK YOUR MAMA!”
    Love, Lida’s eldest child, clenched his long fingers into fists; his bony knuckles sharpened, and his manicured nails cut into the palms of his hands. His arms stiffened at the sides of his thin body, and he glared at the White attendant, his eyes squinting and venomous.
    The attendant didn’t challenge Love by looking directly back at him, which he feared would just escalate the child’s behavior. Instead, he looked away, at the floor, at the ceiling, out toward the courtyard of the school. But Love had an acute sense of fear; on the streets, fear in others was not only a sign of their inability to defend themselves, it was a sign that they could not control a situation, could not keep you safe. It was the same with the attendants here, on the inside, at Los Aspirantes. The fearful attendants were the ones who didn’t keep the other kids from kicking you under the table, from punching you in line, from sneaking into your room with a nail.
    Los Aspirantes School for Severely Emotionally Disturbed Children had two blocks of classrooms. The lower block served day-treatment children, those who still lived with their parents, grandparents, aunts, or in foster care but had been kicked out of the public schools, or assessed under AB 3632 as needing more intensive mental health provisions. The upper block schooled kids from the residential program, the group homes, each of which housed six children, staffed 24-7 in three shifts. Some of these kids had been removed from their homes under the Child Welfare Protection Act, then failed in their foster placement due to violent or destructive behavior. Others had been released to Los Aspirantes after serving time in Juvi and had become 601s, criminal wards of the