a fairy tale with my name in it

I don't think anyone has ever heard about the Hart family without being horrified. But if the story hasn't faded into the True Crime file folder in your mind since it happened in 2018—if it has instead stayed fresh and insidious—maybe you are an adoptive parent. Maybe you are a foster parent. Maybe your children are a different race from you. Maybe you are a parent whose children were taken into foster care under the guise of safety, only to encounter its opposite. Maybe you survived foster care yourself. 

If you don't remember: Two white lesbians adopted six Black children (two sibling sets) from foster care. They were the picture of social media love-makes-a-family perfection. A photo of their son Devonte hugging a white cop went viral for its "Black AND Blue Lives Matter!" vibes, presumably. Jennifer and Sarah Hart moved around a lot, leaving a trail of abuse accusations and open CPS cases behind them, but white savior narratives and the failures of inter-agency communication worked in their favor. 

On March 26, 2018, they drugged their children and drove off a cliff along the foggy coast of California's Highway 1. 

In 2019-2020, after listening to the excellent Broken Harts podcast, I wrote a fictionalized version of their story; I wanted to give those kids a different ending. I wondered what might happen if a strong-as-fuck kid got a little help from an adult who teetered on the edge of bravery and weakness. 

Turns out there's not a huge publishing market for 8,000-word stories that arguably have too many characters. But writing it meant something to me, so here it is. I haven't thought about the Harts' story or my story in a while, but I'm about to read We Were Once a Family by Roxanna Asgarian, another take on a story that's almost impossible to digest. It seems like a good a time as any to publish it here as part of my occasional series of blog-self-publishing. (Should I give that series a name? Bread and Bread Press?)

A Fairy Tale With My Name In It

Helia

The moms, Jill and Steph, threw away the old couch after a mouse got into the cushions. It ate through the foam and made itself a little cave and probably thought it was safe. Jill and Steph fought over humane traps vs. regular. Steph said humane didn’t work. Jill said mice were smarter than dolphins and we should treat them with respect. In the end they didn’t get either kind, just dumped the couch next to the broken dishwasher they’d never replaced because, Jill laughed, didn’t we have six dishwashers living here?

My brother Daron sat on that couch and played his guitar. His birthday trailed mine like a puppy, so he hadn’t hit sixteen yet. He had skinny shoulders, a big lollipop head, and a smile that made you fall in love with him while also wondering if he was a little bit damaged. But when he sang, you thought he was a genius. When we went to music festivals, Daron played on the dusty borders of the grounds and pulled in crowds almost as big as the official acts did.

He sang “Here Comes the Sun,” and when he got to the “It’s alright” part, I wanted to cry but didn’t. 

Beyond the yard: black lace shadows of tree branches, the sounds of night birds. One summer, Jill had tried to teach us the names of all the trees, but that was a long time ago, in a different state, and I didn’t know any of the trees in Washington.

“I’m leaving for college next year,” Marius said. He’d just turned eighteen.

“How are you going to pay for it?” I asked. I didn’t let myself imagine escaping to college. “What college is going to take your homeschool grades seriously? And they’re not even good. You failed chemistry.”

“How could I not? Mom just handed me a book and didn’t even explain anything. She doesn’t know anything about chemistry.”

“Too bad you can’t major in Oz,” I said, and everyone laughed.

The four of us had been sent outside without dinner. Usually they punished us one at a time, but Jill had wanted us out of her hair. Some big development in her game, Oz: Broken Kingdom. Our crime was fighting when we were a House of Peace, according to Jill. Marius had tried to offload his chores onto Amity, and Daron had defended her, and now here we all were.

“I’m hungry,” Amity said, her voice as thin as her arms. She was fourteen, but looked eleven.

“Tell me something new,” I said. But I put my arm around her. 

Photo by Tolga Ahmetler on Unsplash

We huddled together on the couch. Sometimes the four of us became one animal with fiery breath, coiled hair, gnashing teeth. Sometimes I thought we scared the moms. We kept outgrowing our clothes and needing more food. We were Black and they were white as eggs. They told us we were magnets for the world’s cruelty, but sometimes I wondered: What if being Black made us strong? Our ancestors had survived the holds of ships and whips like hissing snakes to make us.

Two weeks ago, Marius had made an Instagram account, and Jill had beat him with the kitchen mixer, yelling about internet perverts. But he was still taller than her. 

Other times, we were four mice.

Now we argued about whether to go inside. Daron said it would make things worse. Amity said she was hungry. I said this was bullshit.

Eventually, we heard tires on travel. Twenty minutes later, the kitchen light came on and the screen door creaked open. Steph. She was still wearing her Kohl’s lanyard and khakis. She held a bunch of bananas in one hand and a bag of potato chips in the other. Steph pulled up a lawn chair and opened the bag slowly so it wouldn’t make crinkling noises. There was a bright orange SALE sticker on it. We held the chips to the roofs of our mouths and let them get soggy. Quiet. No one had to tell us.

“She asleep?” Marius asked.

Steph nodded. “On the couch.” I pictured the console in Jill’s hand, her hood pulled over her head, which was how she let us know not to bother her. 

“Must be nice to sleep on a new couch with no mice in it,” Marius murmured. 

Back before all of it, Marius and I lived with my Aunt Liz. Jill and Steph made a thing of us being One Family, but technically we were two groups of siblings. I only have one picture from that time, taken in Liz’s living room with the matching floral furniture. Aunt Liz is wearing tan dress pants, big glasses, red lipstick. She looks a little tired, but she’s holding me on her lap and her arm is tight around Marius. I remember her telling us to do our chores--little-kid chores like pick up our toys. “You kids! What Ima do with you?” she’d exclaim, like we were a funny TV show she was watching, trying to figure out how this overwhelmed lady was going to get out of her predicament. 

One day she was called into work on a Saturday, and she asked our mom to watch us. Supposedly my mom was an addict, but I never saw her high. The day she came over, we just watched SpongeBob. During commercials, she asked us about school, even though it was summer. 

Aunt Liz came home, and our mom left, and it was fine, but I guess word got back to our social worker because the next day, we were taken away, and I didn’t see Liz again except in court, where she was always trying not to cry. We went to court enough that I know she fought for us. At least I don’t have to wonder about that.

*

Jill cooked pancakes. That smell crept up the stairs. Eight feet thundered toward the kitchen. Morning light streamed through the window, past the dead basil plants on the sill, making Jill’s messy hair look like a lion’s mane. 

“Mom, you are the best,” Daron said. That grin.

She grinned back. “Say it again, baby.”

“The best.”

Steam curled from the stack and Marius reached for one. Jill smacked his hand with the spatula. He held his arm close to his body and didn’t try again. She was playful this morning, as if we hadn’t spent half the night outside, but you never knew. 

“You are all so cute,” she said. “Wait, before we eat--I want to get a picture. Go put on your planet pajamas.”

Photo by Tiko Giorgadze on Unsplash

We were a hodgepodge of T-shirts and sweats. For Christmas, they’d given us all--themselves included, as if they were both Santa and children--matching pajamas. Dark blue with diagrams of the solar system printed all over. Dozens of Earths.

“Mine are too small,” Marius said.

“I just bought them three months ago,” Jill said, her voice full of accusation.

“I bought them,” Steph said quietly.

“Oh, I forgot,” said Jill. “It’s your money. I just eat bonbons all day.”

“What are bonbons?” Amity asked, and no one answered.

“Just put them on. One picture,” Jill said.

We creaked back up the stairs and changed and grinned into the sun and Jill’s phone.

“Say ‘Harlow Tribe!’”

We said it.

Jill looked at her phone the whole time we ate. Steph was halfway to work, already in her khakis and polo, and I could see her mind going wherever it went, even as she was telling us to study hard. 

“It’s Saturday,” Daron protested.

“No, it’s Friday,” she said. “Do your worksheets. Don’t rush through them.”

We circled the table and Jill retreated to the couch with her phone and an energy drink in a silver can. Daron and I were both in tenth grade, I guess, so our worksheets were the same. We were supposed to calculate the circumference of a circle. He turned his into a moon as he hummed.

“Do your damn work, Daron,” Marius told him.

“I’m gonna be an artist and a musician, not a math person,” Daron said.

“Mathematician,” Marius said.

“Quiet over there,” Jill called. “I’m trying to concentrate. You’re supposed to be studying.”

“That’s our teacher,” Marius said, and I couldn’t help but laugh. And then I couldn’t stop laughing.

“You fucking ingrates,” Jill said, suddenly in front of us.

“I’m sorry, Mama,” Daron said. The rest of us called her Mom; he was the only one who called her Mama. 

“For what, Daron?” I said. 

“I’ve had enough of your fucking attitude, Helia,” Jill said. Something had been set loose, and it never stopped without hours in our rooms or outside or without food, or until she retreated into her game.

“You try raising four kids. Try it sometime. Except you won’t because at this rate you’re not going to graduate high school. So unless you want to work by the side of the road, and earn your money and get pregnant that way, I don’t see how you’re ever gonna be anything other than a spoiled little kid.”

She was inches from me. She smelled of cooking oil and new couch, a thread of sweat beneath it all. Her eyebrows were the same dull tan as her skin. 

“Helia didn’t mean it, Mama,” Daron said.

“Oh, you’re psychic now, Daron?” Jill didn’t look at him, but I could tell that the sound of his voice loosened her shoulders. 

“Nah, Jill’s right,” I told him. “I mean it.” 

If I’d thought about it, I wouldn’t have been able to say what I said next. So I didn’t let myself think. 

“You’re a terrible mother. Our real mom was a drug addict and she did better than you.” When I thought of her, I thought of SpongeBob and peanut butter crackers, her sleepy voice saying “What’s your favorite subject? I always liked history. Do they still teach you about the Indians who used to live here? They got robbed, don’t let ‘em tell you otherwise.”

Jill and Steph hated it when any of us said “real mom”; we were supposed to say “biological mom” or better yet, not talk about them at all, because we were supposed to Live In The Present. 

“You little bitch,” Jill said. She pushed my shoulder so hard I stumbled back. Amity tried to catch me, but her chair tipped and there was a clatter of wood on wood, and my siblings’ murmured cautions.

She grabbed my hair and yanked hard. Jill was only five or six inches taller than me, but she was sturdy. I pushed at her and nothing happened.

“Let go!” I screamed. Someone else screamed too, and someone cried, and Jill laughed. 

I kicked and bit. My teeth grazed the pale underside of her wrist. And then I ran. 

Photo by Jakub Kriz on Unsplash

“Helia! Helia wait!” I thought Jill would come after me, but between us, there was Daron.

I ignored him and pushed past the others. I yanked open the back door and pushed at the squeaky screen door. Daron ran too.

“Don’t follow me!” I yelled. My face was burning.

“Helia,” he panted. 

At the old couch, I paused. “What.”

“Where are you even gonna go?” His voice was quiet, his eyes dark and sad. 

“Anywhere,” I said.

We both stood there, breathing hard. “Just admit it,” I said. “At least admit it. You never do. At least say what she is so I don’t have to think you are messed up in the head.”

He’d been four when he and Amity had come to live with Jill and Steph. What does a four-year-old know? Sometimes it seemed like he was still four. I wanted to tell him there was a world out there, but I barely remembered it myself. I wouldn’t have been a convincing storyteller.

“If you want to hide out here, I’ll bring you food,” he said. It was probably the nicest thing he could have offered, but it pissed me off to think of another night like last night, another night of acting like we were the ones who should be punished.

“Fuck you, Daron,” I said.

Jill and Steph told us to stay out of the woods. They said there were bears, and a men’s prison only twenty miles from here, and sometimes convicts escaped. In fairy tales, don’t they always tell kids to stay out of the woods? Aren’t the parents always wicked, or dead?

I ran through the trees, sending a surprised squirrel charging up a gnarled trunk. Soon I spotted The Neighbors’ house. I didn’t know their names, but we shared the first half of our gravel driveway, before it forked like a snake’s tongue. They were old--not creeping-around-with-a-walker old, but too old to have kids who lived at home. White. Average. Different from us. Jill and Steph had told us they were racist and homophobic, and to stay away. 

For the first time, I saw their house from the back. It was two stories like ours, with reddish wood siding that looked two-toned in the light rain. There was a dog in their backyard, a big old yellow lab who walked with a limp. 

I held out my hand and he lumbered over to sniff. He let out just one bark. I jumped a little, but stayed where I was. Then the back door swung open and I saw one of The Neighbors. The woman. 

She squinted at me. “Hi...you live next door, right?”

I nodded. When was the last time I’d talked to someone outside my family? Probably at the Moon Festival back in the fall. We’d been dancing and posing for photos like we always did. A guy told me he liked my hat, and I told him I liked his necklace, and then Jill pulled me aside and told me I needed to keep an eye on Amity. Sometimes at night when I couldn’t sleep, I thought of his necklace: rope coiled around translucent crystals, like something a dragon would wear. I thought of his eyes: blue-green, looking at me. Not at Daron. Not at the Harlow Tribe.

I wondered if he would be at the Sun Festival in June. If he would recognize me. I would wear the hat again, to be safe. We would smile at each other like old friends. He would say, I have something for you and reach into his jacket pocket and pull out a little velvet pouch and it would be a dragon necklace like his, but different. My friend makes them, so I just thought… he’d say, a little shyly. I hoped you would be here. He would help me fasten it, and his fingers would touch my neck. He would have a car, and his skateboard and backpack would take up most of the back seat, so only the two of us could ride in it. Just keep driving, I would say. Are you sure? he’d ask. And I would be sure.

Photo by ifer endahl on Unsplash

The Neighbor Woman wore jeans and a plaid flannel shirt over a V-neck. She had wrinkles and thick glasses, hair pulled back with a bandana. She looked nice, and confused. “Do you need something?”

I nodded again.

“Come on in. Dudley’s friendly. And old. Even if he bit you, he doesn’t have a lot of teeth left.”

Rows of broccoli grew in a raised bed on one side of the yard. The other side was mostly dirt, and scattered with dog toys. It was just a yard, but it felt like I was seeing something different and spectacular, like standing at the gates of Disneyland. (We went once, in matching T-shirts and mouse ears. Jill made us take a picture with every character.)

“Did you need--” the Neighbor Woman said again.

“Tortillas,” I said. It was the first thing that came out of my mouth, maybe because that’s what Jill had been microwaving when she sent us outside without dinner.

The Neighbor Woman raised her eyebrows. “Oh, hmm. I think I have some. To be honest they might be a little bit stale. Let’s check.”

And just like that, I followed her into the house, my heart pounding. What if I never went back? What if I told her Actually it’s not tortillas I need, it’s a completely different life. Please call the police. Call DFPS or whatever it is here in Washington.

The Neighbors’ kitchen was warm and smelled like coffee. A man who must have been the Neighbor Man sat on a wooden chair with his feet up on a second chair, looking at an iPad. 

“I’m Patricia, by the way, and this is Arnold. What did you say your name was?”

“Helia Harlow.” Who was the last person I’d introduced myself to? Even at the Moon Festival, most people knew who we were or didn’t need to know. My name used to be Helia Chambers, which sounds normal. Helia Harlow sounds like a sexy cartoon, like someone who’d hang out with Batman. That might be appealing to some people, but I’d rather be normal.

“I’ve seen you and your family, and I always wanted to say hi, but you always seem so...busy. I’m glad you came by. Arnie, do we have tortillas?” She was moving things around in the refrigerator.

Arnold looked up from his iPad. His glasses were almost exactly like Patricia’s, rectangular with thin gold rims. Wisps of gray hair flopped against his forehead. “When did you make those fish tacos? That was a couple of weeks ago, wasn’t it?”

“We had such a big stack of tortillas. I know I didn’t use them all, but I can’t remember whether I threw out the rest or not.”

“You shouldn’t waste food,” I said. I tried to suck the words back in my mouth, but it was too late.

Patricia turned from the fridge. She gave me a funny look, but she didn’t seem mad. “No, you’re right. Food waste is a real problem. Helia...where do you all go to school? If you don’t mind my asking. Our boys went to West Linn High. Years ago. We still go to the football games every now and then.”

“Our moms homeschool us.”

“Ah. Well, more power to them.” She closed the fridge. “Helia, I’m sorry, we don’t have any tortillas. I could have sworn we did. Would you like to stay and have some tea? Or a Dr. Pepper?”

Jill and Steph never let us have soda. “Okay, thanks.”

“How many siblings do you have?” She poured the soda over ice, fizz shooting up like fireworks. It tasted like fireworks too.

“Three.”

“I’ve got four myself,” Arnold said. “Three sisters and a brother, and I’m smack in the middle. I don’t know about you, but growing up, there was never enough to go around. I got new clothes because I was the oldest boy, but I was always fighting for food. Or just fighting,” he laughed.

“Did you have to go outside without dinner when you were on punishment too?” I asked.

Patricia had been bustling around the kitchen, but now she sat down at the chair between me and Arnold. “Is that something that happens a lot at your house?” 

Photo by Unseen Histories on Unsplash

“Sometimes.” It came out as a whisper. I wanted to drink all my Dr. Pepper because when else was I going to get the chance, but I couldn’t. I just held it close to my face and let the bubbles spray me. 

And then I was in Liz’s living room again, drinking her Coke from a jelly jar. And she was saying something I’d completely forgotten. “Y’all are young and you’ll forget me, but I won’t ever forget you. But I think I’m in you. When you go with those white folks, you still gotta ask yourself ‘What would Aunt Liz do?’” She’d laughed because she was comparing herself to Jesus, in a way. But later, when she was cleaning the sink and thought we weren’t paying attention, she emitted a strange, animal sound, followed by a gulp for air. 

What would Aunt Liz do?

She’d fought for us. It seemed like maybe I should too.

“A lot,” I said. “They take away our food and they hit us for things they shouldn’t. When we do normal teenager stuff. They want us to stay little so they can control us, but they can’t. I’m grateful for how they took us in and everything, but--”

Patricia and Arnold exchanged glances. They probably thought I didn’t notice, but noticing how adults’ moods shifted with a twitch of an eyelid was pretty much what had kept me alive.

There was a knock at the door that made me flinch so hard I knocked over my glass. Soda pooled and Patricia jumped up. “It’s fine,” she said. “Really, don’t worry.” 

She grabbed a dish towel and Arnold headed for the door, and I ran again. I was in a hallway lined with family pictures and somehow the back door wasn’t where I thought it should be. So I charged upstairs and ran into the first room I reached.

It must have been one of their sons’ old rooms. It had a twin bed with a plaid cover, a row of comic book figurines on a shelf, and a dusty smell. I crouched between the bed and the window. I heard voices downstairs. I couldn’t make out what they were saying, but the rhythms were friendly. Footsteps on the stairs.

“She got in an argument with her brother,” Jill was saying. “You know how kids are. And to be honest, sometimes I have trouble admitting how grown up they’re getting. Steph and I are still on this learning curve, and we really believe in learning--that’s the point of life, you know?”

It was her festival voice, throaty and warm, like she was letting you in on a secret. 

“Helia, honey,” she called. Her voice grew closer, swinging into other rooms like a roving flashlight beam until she was standing in the doorway. She never called us honey at home. “There you are. What’s going on? You can talk to me.”

“You know what’s going on.”

“Daron said you came over here. He was worried about you.” She wouldn’t hit me in front of Patricia, would she? “I was worried about you too, Helia. You can’t just run off like that.”

I couldn’t believe Daron had ratted me out. But of course Daron ratted me out. 

“Let’s go home,” she said. She extended her hand for me to pull myself up, which made me pull myself into a tighter ball.

Patricia had been hanging back by the doorway, but now she took a few tentative steps forward. “My oldest--this is his room--stayed out all night once because I wouldn’t let him go to a concert all the way in Seattle. He wanted to drive there with a friend who’d just gotten his license, and then sleep in the car. I thought that was asking for trouble. So he stormed out of the house. We didn’t have smart phones then, so it took me hours to track him down.”

I wanted to tell her that Marius had asked, shyly, if he could get his learner’s permit, and Jill had given him an hour-long lecture about how cops would pull him over because he was Black and shoot him. That back when we lived in the city, Daron walked to the gas station and bought a bag of chips with money a neighbor gave him for raking leaves, and Jill made him return it and apologize to the cashier for stealing. Patricia lived in a different universe, and it had crashed into ours for a second, as we hurled through space. For a second I thought I could show her ours, but I’d been wrong. 

*

Stephanie

She was the first person to call me Steph. This was college. This was South Dakota in the nineties, so whatever you might be imagining college might be like, erase it and cover it with gray snow for weeks on end. Junior year there was a blizzard so furious you couldn’t tell what was ground and what was sky, and yeah, that seems like an apt metaphor for everything since.

The streetlights did their best. Warm globes of yellow-gold in all that gray. That’s what I thought Jill was. I didn’t know she was winter.

I’d seen her around our dorm. She wore overalls with crop tops and streaked her hair with pink dye, which no one else did back then, at least not in South Dakota. More than that, I heard her. She always seemed to be calling to someone at the end of the hallway. 

Photo by Mira Kireeva on Unsplash

“Steph!”

I didn’t answer at first, because who was Steph? I was Stephanie Wisniewski, two months shy of twenty (I skipped kindergarten), never been kissed, late for my shift at the campus bookstore.

“Come here.” She was leaning out of her room and I was close enough that I could smell it, like rising dough. “I’m watching DragonHeart. Do you want to watch?”

“I have to work. I’m running late.” One of my boots had split along the toe, and I wasn’t sure what to do about it. I didn’t have duct tape, and getting duct tape would necessitate a trek through the snow in bad boots. “You don’t have duct tape, do you?”

She laughed her throaty laugh. “Wow, kinky.”

Blood rushed to my face and ears. “No, I mean to fix my boot. I’m late to work and--”

“Do you really think work is going to be open today? Have you looked outside?”

“Oh. I guess you’re right.”

“Have you seen DragonHeart? The dragon is amazing.” She said it like he was an actor who’d been cast, not a bag of puppet parts and computer effects.

And so I walked into her world: of dragons, of microwave popcorn, of warmth and cold, of an outside that only became more wintery and impossible.

*

Helia 

In between what happened that night and what happened next, there were the usual things, which felt unusual in ways I couldn’t quite place. 

“You think our moms have sex?” Amity asked one night from the bunk below mine.

“Yuck, Amity. I don’t ever want to think about that.” 

“If they were more romantic and whatnot, maybe they’d get out of our business.”

Outside, an owl hooted into the darkness. 

“Are they going to let us grow up?” Amity asked.

I leaned over the edge of the bunk to look at her. “They can’t exactly stop us, can they?”

Her elbows were folded beneath her head, her hair bundled into a white scarf. In the dim light that filtered in from the hallway, her face was a dark blue shimmer. “Seems like they’re trying to find a way. Starve us. Stunt our growth. Keep us babies.”

“It feels like something’s changing, doesn’t it?” I said.

“Or like nothing’s changing, and we’re all going to explode. I can’t tell the difference.” Then she yawned. “Where would you go if you had money and a car?” 

It was a game we played sometimes.

“The Sun Festival,” I said. 

She made a face. “But we’re actually going there in June. You’re supposed to say something like ‘Tokyo’ or ‘Antarctica.’”

“I know what I’m supposed to say.”

“Do you really like kettle corn that much? Because I know it’s not for the music.”

“There’s a guy,” I said. “I talked to him last time. He had these blue eyes, and I don’t know--”

“You’re throwing away Tokyo and Antarctica for a white boy at a hippie music festival?” But she was grinning, and I knew she’d be my wingman.

Photo by Mustafa akın on Unsplash

*

Stephanie 

At work, Jill and the kids were a picture on my lockscreen, smiling and small. I talked about them all the time. My wife, my kids. When I talked, we sounded like an update of that sitcom that was on when I was in middle school, Just the Ten of Us. Flustered dad, four teenagers always getting into scrapes. 

“Why don’t you ever say her name?” asked one of my younger coworkers. “It’s always ‘my wife, my wife.’ I don’t say ‘my boyfriend’ constantly, because everyone knows his name is Rob.”

I didn’t have an answer, except that maybe Jill and my wife and the person who hit the kids with kitchen gadgets seemed like three different people. But I just talked about gay marriage, how she wouldn’t understand how hard we’d worked to be able to say my wife. 

At work I moved shifts around a grid, told people to fold sweaters, voided the tangles that new hires made on the cash register. It was simple and methodical, or it was harried and hurt my feet. But it was the size of itself, and it made home seem like a problem that could be solved as well. We’d have a quiet Sunday, Daron playing the guitar and Jill talking about taking a road trip to California, and I’d think, Yes, okay, we’re like any family. Good days and bad days. 

Jill fell asleep on the couch more nights than not. But one night two weeks ago, she’d slithered in next to me when I was almost asleep. She smelled like dirty hair. She handed me a piece of mail, and I tried to wave it away. “I can think about bills right now.”

“It’s from Amity’s old social worker.” A teacher had reported bruises on her arms. Jill had said Amity’s skin was too dark to even tell, and the whole thing was proof the teacher had it in for gay parents. Now she said, “They found our address.”

“How? Facebook?” 

“I’m not an idiot, Steph,” she snapped. “I always just say we live in the Pacific Northwest.”

I sat up. “What are we going to do?”

“I don’t know. If they take the kids--”

“You have to know,” I said, my voice cracking. “You have to know what to do.” That was the deal. I worked, Jill made the decisions. Sometimes I wanted it to be different, but right now, I wanted her to tell me she had a plan.

“God, you’re fucking useless,” she hissed.

“I know, I’m sorry.”

“They’d die without us,” she said. She was always dramatic like that.

“What if--” But I didn’t have any words to finish the sentence.

“Never mind,” Jill said. “I’ll think of something. I’m going back downstairs.”

*

Helia

I couldn’t sleep. I tried facing the wall and then the window, and then I got out of bed. The door to Jill and Steph’s room was still open the same three inches. I walked past the boys’ room and downstairs, only squeaking one floorboard on the way. I didn’t know what I was doing; I was half dreaming.

The only light downstairs came from the stereo clock and the moon, which was full that night. Jill was asleep on the couch, which made me stop and gasp. Maybe she slept there every night after falling asleep playing Oz: Broken Kingdom. Maybe that was the first time. Everything but the green readout on the stereo was gray. 

Her laptop rested on top of her stomach, open but dark. Her arms were tucked tidily beneath her thighs and her lower jaw hung loose. I let a full second elapse between when my bare heel touched the floor and when the ball of my foot followed. Heel toe, heel toe, until I was standing in front of her. 

I could say I came downstairs for a snack. I’d get in trouble, but she’d believe me. My stomach was somersaulting in a way that felt a lot like hunger.

I touched the laptop. I lifted it. I heel-toed to the kitchen. Then I folded myself into a corner and opened it.

Photo by Sabri Tuzcu on Unsplash

I don’t know what I was looking for, but I hadn’t expected to see my own face staring back at me.

There we were at the beach last June, craggy rocks behind us, shiny wet sand at our feet. We all wore matching T-shirts that said LOVE WINS over big rainbow hearts with different colored shorts. 

I remembered the day, of course. It had been too cold to swim and none of us had swimsuits anyway. Daron had spilled iced tea on his shirt and Jill had screamed at him. Amity and I fought. Jill had promised we’d stop for dinner on the way home, but she changed her mind and said she just wanted to get back to the goddamn house before midnight. 

In the picture, the midday sun hit our faces. The light loved us. It was such a strange thing to know: That my own face wouldn’t tell the truth. 

I don’t know why that was the picture up on her Facebook page, since it was almost a year old. Beneath it, Jill had written:

Hello, spring. Goodbye, winter. This spring equinox, the whole Harlow Tribe is thinking of new beginnings. Of course there’s the big New Beginning that all of these kiddos got when they came to live with us, and you’d better believe I’m thankful for the gift that is them--in all their pure, simple, child-beauty--every day. But oh, so many little new beginnings too. The baby chicks that Helia is raising are like little puffballs of hope. The flowers we’re growing for botany class are shooting their petals up to the sun. The bees are buzzing. Aren’t we all just flowers turning our faces to the sun? Love wins. Life wins.

I’d just read a fairy tale with my own name in it. Chicks? Flowers? We had neither of those things, unless you counted the dandelions that sprang up in the yard. A pang of envy shot through my body, for the girl in that photo. Her sunbrown skin, her fluffy chicks, the mom who loved her. 

There were no pictures up in our house, just a handful of empty frames that Jill had hung in the hallway. None of us knew what she planned to put in them, and none of us asked.

I kept scrolling, and it was more of the same.

I don’t know about you, but sometimes I feel like the pain of this world is Just. Too. Much. The hatred. The division. Harmony Fest is a balm on the deep wounds in my heart. Here, amid old friends and new, we are one color, one mind, one heart. Here no one looks at my beloved children like they might steal something. Instead, they join our little Harlow Tribe in song and dance. We break bread together. We chant and pray that you, too, may find harmony.

There was Daron with his guitar, the rest of us fanning out behind him like a flock of birds. We’d all worn white that day, which Jill said looked good against brown skin. “Makes them look like cult members, though,” Marius had whispered. 

Photo by Anthony DELANOIX on Unsplash

Maybe we hadn’t been all those things Jill wrote, but we had been happy. We had danced. And somehow that made me even sadder. If the story from the beach day and the story from the Harmony Festival were exactly the same, nothing meant anything at all.

I slammed the laptop shut. I panicked that the noise it made was too loud, but the kitchen stayed quiet. Slowly, I opened it again. I couldn’t look at any more Facebook, but I clicked to the other tabs. Oz: Broken Kingdom, of course. Jill’s corseted avatar blinking and posing next to the lion. In the game, the lion looks like a bodybuilder. He wears a jeweled robe. He glowers. In the movie, which Jill had sat us down to watch on Family Movie Night last spring, the lion was gay and blushing and clung to his own tail. But he wasn’t ever cowardly, not really.

A Chase Visa Card page with the words PAST DUE in red.

Next: four tabs of search results, for four different searches.

How much benadryl teenagers sleep all night

How much alcohol not feel pain

Can you adopt baby with open fsd case?

Assisted suicide washington state

It was like staring at puzzle pieces when you’ve lost the box. I didn’t know what I was looking at, or for. I clicked over to her email tab for clues. It was mostly junk, but one from the Sun Festival caught my attention. Dear Mrs. Harlow, Thank you for your inquiry, but per the terms and conditions of your purchase, tickets for the Sun Festival on June 23 are non-refundable. 

That was my box top. There would be no dragon necklace boy. No kettle corn. No dancing. Jill was canceling everything.

I sat there listening to myself breathe. I read once that if you pick up a rabbit, it can kick so hard it breaks its own back. That’s what I thought my heart might do, beat so hard it broke itself. But it kept telling me I was alive.

*

Stephanie

It was a wet Tuesday in March. I’d gone to work with a scratchy throat, but it turned into a tennis ball, and my skin started to hurt, so eventually I gave up and drove home, the rain against my car roof drowning out my radio.

I could have sworn I had a bottle of NyQuil at home, but the only thing in our medicine cabinet was some kind of natural elixir made of honey and elderberries. 

“I don’t know where it went? And what about that big bottle of Tylenol? I thought that would last forever.”

“It expired,” Jill said. “I threw it out.”

“Are you sure, because I just--”

“It expired.”

“Can you run to CVS? Please, Jill? I feel like hell.” 

Photo by Towfiqu barbhuiya on Unsplash

“It’ll take a half hour just to get there. It’s pouring.”

“I just drove in it. It’s not that bad. We lived in South Dakota. Remember that blizzard when--”

“Fine. Just stop with the third degree. What do you want?” She pulled up the hood on her gray sweatshirt. “Where are my boots. Marius, did you fucking borrow my boots again and not put them back?”

Marius didn’t look up from his science book. “Your boots don’t fit me anymore, Jill.”

The kids and I formed a search party and found them on the front porch, toes neatly aligned. 

“Maybe some NyQuil and Tylenol and some of those menthol cough drops? Thank you so much. I just need the world’s longest nap.”

“Benadryl will knock you out better than NyQuil,” she said.

*

It was as if the whole house exhaled, the fresh wet air filling our lungs. I couldn’t remember the last time I’d been home alone with the kids. It might not even have been this house. My head throbbed and I felt a little dizzy, as if the floor plan had just shifted and grown.

Upstairs, as I lay beneath a pile of blankets, came the lightest knock on the door.

“Mom? You asleep?”

“Not yet.”

For a second, I thought it was Amity, and then I realized it was Helia. Amity was getting taller. Helia was curvier, but tiny and compact. 

“Can I show you something?”

“Kiddo, I’m not really in a good headspace right now.”

“It’s important. Do you know where Jill’s laptop is?”

“She usually puts it in that drawer when she comes to bed.” I pointed to the nightstand next to her side of the bed. There was a matching one on mine. Whenever I started to let it get cluttered with books or water glasses, Jill yelled about hoarder houses and surprise visits from FSD. Our case was about Amity’s bruises, I pointed out, not a messy house. Jill told me they were all racists and homophobes, and they would use anything against us.

Helia climbed into the bed, on Jill’s side, and opened her laptop. She’d always had a brazen quality. I remembered when she first came to us, big eyes and crooked teeth and tightly braided hair that Jill thought looked ghetto. She’d asked how two women could be married. She’d asked for snacks. She’d asked to keep her last name.

And now, she showed me the searches. 

“She closed some of the tabs from the other night,” Helia said, “but look, there are new ones.”

The first one was about scenic overlooks in Mendocino County. For a second, my memory flooded with road trips past. The music festivals, the Bernie Sanders rally, Disneyland in matching T-shirts. If you could put up with all the picture-taking, they were the best times.

But the other searches were about blood alcohol level, driving impairment, medicine.

“She doesn’t even drink,” I said. “And didn’t even want to buy me Tylenol. I don’t get it.”

“Mom.” Helia’s eyes were as big as they’d been when she was seven. Tears pooled at the bottom but didn’t spill over. “She’s planning to kill us.”

The thing she was planning wasn’t a road trip. Or, it was a one way road trip.

There are those times you wish you could rewind to the world as it was before. Five minutes before I told my parents I was seeing a woman. Five minutes before my dad died. Five minutes before Helia came into the room, when the biggest problem in our lives was Jill’s missing boots.

Except maybe that wasn’t the biggest problem. Maybe something had been growing slowly like the mold that formed in the corners of the bathroom, and Helia was making me look at it when I wanted to let the shower steam swallow me up.

“I could run away, or I could try,” she said. “Me and Marius have talked about it. But there’s no way we all could. I don’t even think I could convince Daron or Amity. But you could convince them.”

“I’ll talk to Jill.”

“No!” Her voice was so loud that both our heads snapped to the doorway, like they’d been mounted on the same spring. It was that dual motion, that proof that we’d been wound by the same tinkerer, that convinced me.

*

Daron and Amity were our first babies--they were four and almost three when they came to live with us. We were overwhelmed, of course. Another kind of blizzard, this one made of diapers (Amity wasn’t potty trained yet, and Daron had accidents all the time) and Cheerios and long nights of rocking and crying and trying to make sleep bargains with the white moon that peered through the nursery window. But also: We were in love. With the kids and with each other and with this wild possibility that we could have a family. Say what you will about Jill, but she was in love too. 

We lived in Minneapolis, then, in the south half of a brick duplex. Two bedrooms upstairs and a tiny kitchen and living room downstairs. A washing machine we shared with our neighbors. One afternoon I was holding Amity on my hip and trying to pour detergent in the washer with one hand, when I heard Daron’s whooping voice followed by a clatter and thud. 

Photo by Erik Mclean on Unsplash

Daron was at the bottom of the stairs, toys scattered in a trail behind him. I put Amity down and ran to him, certain his neck was broken, instantly bargaining with the moon in my mind: I’ll give you everything. Snap my neck right now. Save him. 

That’s how simple it was. My life had become currency. Useless currency, because if parents could trade their lives to save their children, no kids would ever die. Almost none. 

Daron was fine in the space of a few minutes. Some ugly bruises bloomed the next day, but that was it. The fear and shock and strange reassurance lingered--my own bruises.

Here’s the thing: You are ready to throw your own life down the stairs at any minute to save theirs. But to do that, you also have to believe they can live without you. It’s as intimate as hot breath under a blanket, and it is utter surrender to the fact that you are two separate beings. That’s the part Jill was missing. 

*

“We have to go now,” I said to Helia. My throat seemed better, suddenly, and my body was on fire with a different kind of fever. 

The kids would go away, to a different foster home; maybe Marius would live on his own. I wouldn’t be a parent anymore. Maybe Jill and I would go to jail. A new wave of sickness washed over me. It was like throwing up, relief and terror rolled into one impossible push.

“Where?” said Helia.

“I don’t know.” We only had one car. Jill had taken it. Maybe we couldn’t do this. Maybe we needed to take time, to plan our escape as carefully as Jill was planning our demise.

“I know,” said Helia. “We can go to Patricia’s. If you’re with me, she’ll believe me. And the other kids will come too.”

“Who’s Patricia?”

“Our next door neighbor. She’s nice.”

“Oh, right, the one from the other day.”

I was so weak. My muscles, but also my resolve. Jill told me all the time, in big ways and small. With the heels of her hands pushing my clavicle against the wall. With her huff of laughter when I said things like Maybe I’ll get my master’s degree. 

Helia was strong. All these years in Jill’s regime and she’d never stopped thinking or talking back. She was a kid and she was Black in a place where she would never blend in. Because of those things, she needed me. But I needed her to tell me I could do this. 

“Listen up, everyone,” I yelled from the top of the stairs. “We have to go next door for a little while.”

I felt for my phone. It was in the back pocket of the work khakis I was still wearing. We would have nothing else. Not even extra clothes. We wouldn’t be a “we” for long. 

Daron appeared at the bottom of the stairs, and I saw the crumpled four-year-old overlayed on the fifteen-year-old. That sweet round nose. The tight circles of fuzz above his lip.

“Why?” he asked. Innocent. He was too much like me. I said a silent prayer: Please make him stop believing that he can win what’s unwinnable. 

The answer came like a gift, summoned from long-ago FSD home inspections. “Carbon monoxide. We have a leak. We have to get out. I’ll text Jill.”

“I didn’t hear the alarm,” Amity said.

“Only the one in moms’ bedroom went off,” Helia said. “I was there. I heard it. Come on, get your shoes.”

Photo by Filip Zrnzević on Unsplash

Outside, the rain had lightened and a few thin rays of sun created reflections in the puddles. 

I would never be strong like Helia, but maybe I was a bee, who stung once to defend its hive, and then died. 

I gripped Helia’s shaking hand on my left, and Amity’s on my right. Daron had grabbed his guitar but not his shoes, and I wanted to yell at him to listen to Helia, and also to hug him, my barefoot musician. Marius nudged Daron from behind. Our shadows clumped together, a gray shape-shifting animal with five heads. 

“I’m sorry,” I whispered, too quietly for anyone to hear, and then we crossed the gravel driveway onto someone else’s land.