Chapter 13: The Ogre's Lair

I learned something new in the next few minutes. I'd done most of my driving up in North Scottsdale; I'd never lived in this kind of suburb before. Oh, there were a lot of stores where we lived in New York, but they were older and smaller. In Scottsdale the stores were neither small nor old. Further, just about any store you could imagine was within a mile or two.

In spite of all the stores, the traffic moved much better than traffic ever had in New York. I had gotten spoiled in just a couple of months.

As I got closer to Phoenix, I learned that not all traffic jams are created equally. It took a lot longer than I'd figured to get to the CPS office; I was ten minutes late.

I had just gotten seated when a short, thin Hispanic woman appeared. "Sorry to keep you waiting, Mrs. Hunt. We are just so busy..."

"I just walked through the door," I told her. "Traffic," I explained.

"I'm Lydia Sanchez, please, come in."

We went into her office and we talked for a few minutes in general terms, then more and more specific. She was obviously eager to recruit a new foster parent, "We never have enough," she told me. She was less pleased when I said I had someone particular in mind. "We do that, but usually when a child first enters the system."

After an hour, I was sick and tired of hearing about "the system"; only the memory of Amy's smile and the thought of her foster mother's plight kept me there. The Sanchez woman was mildly disbelieving when I told her my husband had died on 9/11; more disdainful that I told her I wasn't working, but was thinking of starting a business.

"And your net worth?"

"With the stock market trending steeply down, it's not what it once was, but I bailed early." Well, my father-in-law had seen to it that I bailed early. "Low 90's."

"Ninety thousand isn't very much."

"Million," I told her.

She looked at me, disbelief clear on her face.

"We'll check, of course."

"Of course." I wrote down a phone number, and my father-in-law's name on a slip of paper. "The phone number is the main switchboard at Citibank in New York; Phillip Hunt is my father-in-law. Tell his secretary you're calling about me." Otherwise sweetie, you will never, ever get past the secretary.

"We'll check." She handed me a thick wad of paper, started going over what each form was.

"This is a request for criminal background investigation, you give it to the Department of Public Safety..."

"I just did that last week, can I use the same one?"

"Of course. They send you the original, you just copy it and give the copy to me."

"I'm volunteering to help with the Scottsdale High cheerleading program. I asked DPS to send it there."

"Well..."

"Just a second," I told her. I dialed Nancy on my cell phone.

"Nancy, Laura. Sorry to bother you again, but could I ask a favor?"

"You're never a bother, Laura. What do you need?"

"I told the DPS to send that form to you. Could you let me know when it comes in? I need to make a copy."

"Oh gosh! I was so busy I forgot all about that."

"About what?"

"Promise you won't get exercised."

"About what?" I asked, curious.

"I got it Thursday. They sent an officer to hand deliver it. I laughed and told him that it usually takes weeks; that I'd never had one hand delivered before. He told me that there wasn't a policeman or fireman in the country who wouldn't go out of their way to do something, anything, for someone who lost family on 9/11."

"Can I get a copy?" I was choking back tears.

"Sure, Laura."

"Thanks, sorry to be a pest."

"You're not."

I looked at the woman. "I'll have a copy for you tomorrow." I hefted the papers. "I will have all of this for you tomorrow."

She looked at me. I looked steadily back at her. "I'll stop by your home tomorrow at 1:00 pm," she told me. "We can get the first inspection out of the way at the same time." Her grin was supercilious. "Unless it's the maid's day off and you'd like a little more time to prepare."

"I don't have a maid, I've never have had one. If you like, we can drive over now. Early bird gets the worm." I'm the early bird, lady. Guess what you are?

"Oh, I'd like to combine things; I really am busy. I have other appointments today. Tomorrow afternoon at 1:00 pm."

"That's fine," I agreed.

"Until then." We politely shook hands and I left, mildly furious.

Don't do anything to queer this, I thought. That broke my mood; I laughed for a couple of seconds in the privacy of my car as the air conditioning worked to overcome the afternoon sun. I'd used that expression a million times before today; I would never use it again.

It took hours to fill out the forms; there was a lot of redundancy. Still, by six I was finished. A bit later, Sherrie and Ann came in the living room.

"What's your schedule for tomorrow, Sherrie?"

"My last class gets out at 11:30. I'm coming home to fix lunch. Ann will be over around 1:00, we're going to study."

"A social worker is going to stop by around 1:00." I grimaced, which got Sherrie's curiosity. I explained about Amy.

"That's really nice, Laura! Gosh, I thought it was nice you letting me stay... But that's beyond nice."

"Sherrie, she just wants to fuck the girl," Ann said, her voice rising in tone and volume towards the end of the sentence.

Sherrie turned to Ann, obviously upset. "Ann, I talked to Jackie, I talked to some of the other girls on the team." She waved at me. "Laura is nice, everyone likes her. She even went to bat for one of the left's -- when was the last time anyone did that?"

"Another fuck," Ann's voice was bitter.

I saw Sherrie's face suffuse red.

"Sherrie, chill," I commanded.

She looked at me. "Please," I added.

I turned to Ann. "You're right... and you're wrong. I like some girls in a way that most people, including you, think is wrong. I do like Amy, and I do want to be with her. I like Fred, but I'm less sure about her; there are some issues there.

"I told you why I've applied to be a foster parent. For Amy. Not for me, not so I can have someone to fuck besides my daughter or some of the other cheerleaders who come to visit.

"I helped Fred because you guys, all of you who've gone before, have created a Frankenstein monster of a system. I told Nancy off about it, too. Right to her face. It's unconscionable to have girls show up at an event like last weekend, knowing they have zero chance of making the team, and telling them about their wonderful opportunities, their future in cheer. Yeah, sure they have opportunities -- so long as they go to another school.

"That sucks; so I told Nancy that I was going to try to change it.

"And you, Ann. Tell me, have I hit on you? On Sherrie? Has anyone bothered you in this house? Have I told you what to do or how to do it? Has anyone?"

"We're too old," she sniffed contemptuously.

I laughed. "Nancy is older than you, I spent most of Thursday evening in her bed. Marybeth taught me how a finger fuck is done; I can't wait until we can be together again. Yet last weekend I told them what to do, over and over."

"Ann," Sherrie sounded despairing. The anger was gone from her voice, replaced by pain.

Ann looked at her. "Laura would be totally justified asking you never to come back, because of what you just said."

"I don't have a problem with that," Ann said with finality.

I knew where this was going. "Please, both of you, me too! Let's declare a moratorium on this! Let's think about other things! Please!"

It had gone too far, though. "Ann, I'm going to be here. I like Laura, I wish my mom was like her." Sherrie told her lover.

"You want your mom to fuck you like Laura's fucking her own daughter?" Ann was red-faced, barely able to think rationally, striking out all around her.

"I want to be around people I like, people I respect," Sherrie said with as much gravity as she could muster, tears draining down her cheek. "Ann, please..."

Ann simply shook her head, grabbed her things and stalked out.

"I never meant..." I told Sherrie, wishing I could just sit there and not talk.

"I know." She looked at me. "In truth, it's been going bad ever since I got kicked out. Ann is totally paranoid that my parents are going to talk to hers. For the last two weeks, she's been getting more and more distant."

Sherrie took a breath and held it for a second. That seemed to calm her. "For the first couple of years in cheer, we joked about the girls who wanted to be with one of the adults. It seemed crazy to us." She looked at me. "It still seemed crazy until I met you."

She waved at the door. "At the end of our junior year, at the retreat... Ann spent the weekend with Marybeth. I didn't see Ann hardly at all, not for the weekend, and then not for most of the next week.

"She came back and apologized, finally. She told me it was something she had to get out of her system. I just let it go, happy to have the love of my life, back in my life. Now, I wonder if she's feeling guilty. When she decided to drop out a few months later, I didn't mind."

"I never wanted to come between you two," I told her.

"I know; we both know that it was Ann that scored the own goal just now." She waved at the door to her room. "I'm going to lie down for a while. I promise, tomorrow I will be a proper lady when the social worker is here, back to my bouncy cheerleader self."

Susan came home just before dinner. She seemed to understand that Sherrie wasn't in a mood to talk. About the only good thing about PMS, I thought, is that you quickly learn to recognize the symptoms -- even if PMS didn't cause them.

Later, Jackie showed up, late in the evening.

Sherrie had gone back to her room; Susan had been falling asleep and had gone to bed.

"I was over at Marybeth's. We were talking about things. Ann showed up; she was really loud, kept wanting Marybeth to fuck her. That's what she said over and over." Jackie nodded at Sherrie's door. "I take they had a fight."

"Yeah. I'm not going to talk about it, okay?"

"Sure." She waved at Sherrie's door again. "Should I talk to her?"

"You can try."

Jackie knocked; after a minute, she went in to talk to her sister.

Much later Jackie came out, gave me a hug, a smile and left. I was just thinking about bed myself when the phone rang.

"It's Marybeth."

I sighed, and she did too. "I think we've talked her out of killing herself."

I gasped in surprise.

"Nancy's with her now; some of the girls from the team, past and present, who knew her."

"She and Sherrie had a fight."

"Over you."

"About me."

"Over you," Marybeth insisted. "There you were, someone Sherrie could look up to. For the first time, I guess, Sherrie has found a positive adult role model. Sherrie made no bones about it, talking to Ann."

"I wouldn't even call Sherrie and I friends. She's someone I rent a room to."

"Sometimes it's just that you're there." Marybeth sighed again.

"I suppose when you're as close to these girls as we are, you lose sight of the simple things. You think because you're there, that they all look up to you. Amy, now Sherrie... right now there are too many undercurrents, Laura. The undertow is a lot stronger than I thought.

"But, not to worry," Marybeth went on briskly. "This isn't the first time we've had someone despondent over lost love, lost this, that, or the other thing. You know me, I have a plan for everything."

"And I've got more than an inkling of what lies ahead,"

I told her soberly. Human emotions, I thought, are like explosives. You mess with them at your own risk. Sex? That was the part most fraught with risk.

"Having second thoughts?"

"More like tenth or fifteenth. Push on, said the big fool. Push on." I can deal with this, I thought. I can. There are ways to go about this, ways that Marybeth and her friends have exploited for a long time. Fifty years, she said; that was a long time. A very long time.

Marybeth echoed my thoughts. "You haven't done this long enough, Laura, I have. There are the occasional Anns. One day you will know the pleasure of meeting someone five or ten years down the line. You will see her bright smile, her happy eyes; feel the warm hug of shared memories. You will listen to her stories of success, the stories of personal satisfaction and happiness, family and friends. That happens dozens of time for each Ann. That alone is worth it.

"And we never, ever leave a sister hurting, not if we can help it."

"And Sherrie?"

"Be a comfort, be a role model, be Laura Alban Hunt. Of all the people I've worked with, few are as strong as you. Maybe none of them."

"Have there been others like Ann?"

"Oh sure. Three, or four, along the line. It can be hard, sometimes, sustaining some of the girls. Even with the strongest desire to help, it can be hard to keep them sheltered from the real world. They have problems with parents, with school, with lovers... ten thousand rocks in the road, ready to trip up the unwary. We do our best; I personally think we've done a whole lot better than anyone else could. We have to focus on success in the long run."

I knew Marybeth was paranoid about phones. I'd deliberately kept my comments vague and over general. But that, I thought was a coded message. Sometimes your conscience catches up. I imagine it wouldn't take very long, once you started having doubts at all, for your conscience to consume you. Of course, I had doubts. Why hadn't I been consumed?

My passion, I thought. Yes, for sex. But also just for the girls. I honestly wanted them all to have the best shot at cheer I could give them. It was something they would be able to look back on in the future, like Marybeth said -- something to be proud of. And if there were additional happiness to be found along the way, personal as well as athletic, that was okay too.

"Well," Marybeth said into the silence, "I think I'll go apply a little more TLC."

Tuesday morning started with a trip to school to drop off Susan. Then came the visit from Lydia Sanchez; to say that it wasn't a high point in my day was a vast understatement.

"I looked at Amy Becker's file," Lydia Sanchez said after we'd toured the house. "We would take serious exception if you are attempting to circumvent the rules. To, shall we say, insure that Amy Becker spent considerable time with her current care parents. That causes the child confusion."