The Goldfinch(31)

“So when’s the last time you saw him?” said the Korean lady, who’d asked me several times to call her by her first name (I’ve tried and tried to recall it, and can’t). I can still see her plumpish hands folded on the table, though, and the disturbing shade of her nail polish: an ashen, silvery color, something between lavender and blue.

“A guesstimate?” prompted the man Enrique. “About your dad?”

“Ballpark will do,” the Korean lady said. “When do you think you last saw him?”

“Um,” I said—it was an effort to think—“sometime last fall?” My mother’s death still seemed like a mistake that might be straightened out somehow if I pulled myself together and cooperated with these people.

“October? September?” she said, gently, when I didn’t respond.

My head hurt so badly I felt like crying whenever I turned it, although my headache was the least of my problems. “I don’t know,” I said. “After school started.”

“September, would you say then?” asked Enrique, glancing up as he made a note on his clipboard. He was a tough-looking guy—uneasy in his suit and tie, like a sports coach gone to fat—but his tone conveyed a reassuring sense of the nine-to-five world: office filing systems, industrial carpeting, business as usual in the borough of Manhattan. “No contact or communication since then?”

“Who’s a buddy or close friend who might know how to reach him?” said the Korean lady, leaning forward in a motherly way.

The question startled me. I didn’t know of any such person. Even the suggestion that my father had close friends (much less “buddies”) conveyed a misunderstanding of his personality so profound I didn’t know how to respond.

It was only after the plates had been taken away, in the edgy lull after the meal was finished but no one was getting up to leave, that it crashed down on me where all their seemingly irrelevant questions about my father and my Decker grandparents (in Maryland, I couldn’t remember the town, some semi-rural subdivision behind a Home Depot) and my nonexistent aunts and uncles had so plainly been leading. I was a minor child without a guardian. I was to be removed immediately from my home (or “the environment,” as they kept calling it). Until my father’s parents were contacted, the city would be stepping in.

“But what are you going to do with me?” I asked for the second time, pushing back in my chair, a crackle of panic rising in my voice. It had all seemed very informal when I’d turned off the television and left the apartment with them, for a bite to eat as they’d said. Nobody had said a word about removing me from my home.

Enrique glanced down at his clipboard. “Well, Theo—” he kept pronouncing it Teo, they both did, which was wrong—“you’re a minor child in need of immediate care. We’re going to need to place you in some kind of emergency custody.”

“Custody?” The word made my stomach crawl; it suggested courtrooms, locked dormitories, basketball courts ringed with barbed-wire fence.

“Well, let’s say care then. And only until your grandpa and grandma—”

“Wait,” I said—overwhelmed at exactly how fast things were spinning out of control, at the false assumption of warmth and familiarity in the way he’d said the words grandpa and grandma.

“We’ll just need to make some temporary arrangements until we reach them,” said the Korean lady, leaning close. Her breath smelled minty but also had the slightest underbite of garlic. “We know how sad you must be, but there’s nothing to worry about. Our job is just to keep you safe until we reach the people who love you and care about you, okay?”

It was too awful to be real. I stared at the two strange faces across the booth, sallow in the artificial lights. Even the proposition that Grandpa Decker and Dorothy were people who cared about me was absurd.

“But what’s going to happen to me?” I said.

“The main concern,” said Enrique, “is that you’re in a capable foster situation for the time being. With someone that’ll work hand in hand with Social Services to implement your care plan.”

Their combined efforts to soothe me—their calm voices and sympathetic, reasonable expressions—made me increasingly frantic. “Stop it!” I said, jerking away from the Korean lady, who had reached over the table and was attempting to clasp my hand in a caring way.

“Look, Teo. Let me explain something. Nobody’s talking about detention or a juvenile facility—”

“Then what?”

“Temporary custody. All that means, is that we take you to a safe place with people who will act as guardians for the state—”