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Prairie Schooner 78.1 (2004) 36-46



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Stealing Sherisha

Tamara Friedman


In the middle of dinner, Sherisha draws up her knees, grabs my shoulder, and stands up on her chair, her weight planted firmly between legs the size of my runner's arms.

"May I have your attention, please." My mother looks up, startled; my father stares, the alarm in his eyes softening as I reach for Sherisha's wrist; my older sister, Jenny, home for dinner, beams. Only Tanya, the baby, disregards the request, glancing up in mild surprise before returning to the endlessly amusing pastime of arranging her food: a spoonful of peas scattered around a pile of saltine crumbs, bits of fishstick fallout strewn along the periphery of her tray. "I'm staying here," Sherisha says, and looks from me to my father, to my mother, to the baby, to Jenny. "Ain't nobody going to take me away just because I'm brown and y'all but Tanya are orange." She nods once, sharply, then takes my arm and sits back down with a broad, satisfied grin. Jenny claps because she doesn't know better. I hug Sherisha's small shoulders with one arm. My mother smiles sadly, then looks away as her expression deepens to something like anguish. My father's eyes are pink-rimmed, and he takes my mother's hand. We're a good family, still new enough to this that we have the energy for preventing head-banging, fist-pounding, hair-pulling (her own). We're permanent family material. Sherisha ought to know. She's been through nine or ten fosters.

The baby makes her noise, a strange sound like metal sliding across glass.

"I'll get it," my father says to my mother, who has risen to change Tanya. He walks around the table and kisses Sherisha, squeezing my shoulder, before scooping up the baby and holding her up to his smiling, tear-streaked face. [End Page 36]

When Tanya arrived fourteen months ago, my father took his first paternal leave. For three weeks he held her while she shook, gagged, screamed, batted her stiff hands. We hadn't asked for a crack baby, but my father seemed engrossed by all that she required. He bathed her, fed her when she would eat, took her to doctor's appointments; he wrapped her in blankets when she shivered and sponged her wrinkled, ribby body when she broke out in sweats. He and my mother slept in shifts, ready for the SIDS alarm to go off. When the shakes broke, my father kept on holding her. She had grown into his arms; she knew the difference, and preferred his to ours - to mine or Jenny's, even to our mother's. She knew his smell.

We put in for an adoption (still pending) and he took another four weeks off. He could afford to: my mother was selling her furniture designs faster than he could sketch a broom closet. When Tanya slept - and she did, finally, for short spurts at first - he might work on a plan or log into the office from home. But the balance had shifted; work receded from the center of his preoccupations. He stopped his nervous, absent-minded sketching on his napkins, his foot-tapping near the end of the dinner hour, his "secret" weekend rendezvous in the workshop, our basement. He was always upstairs now, in the kitchen, in the nursery on the second floor. He looked like someone serving penance, haunted and serene.

Mornings we jog together, my father and me. We take Pratt up to Warren Park, where ten-year-old Yolanda Jones was found stabbed to death two years ago in March. On a good day - a warm Thursday or Friday - we take Farwell down to the lake.

I like to start before the day does, which means waking up at five in the spring. We stumble out the door, dragging our feet, then pick up our pace after a couple of blocks.

We don't speak between "good morning" and daylight; I like the quiet solitude of dusk, the sense of...

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