Homeroom at Mount Clemens High.
The lame teacher makes a lame joke about Melania Trump.
The lame teacher is still rhapsodizing over Hamilton. Hamilton is so over!
The lame teacher says the lamest shit, like, “I’ll take Mary J. Blige over Nicki Minaj every time”—
And she’s white!
Honeychile hates her but everyone else loves her.
Whatever . . .
At lunchtime, all Zelda wants to do is keep talking about the crazy asthma attack but Honeychile’s so bored. Zelda keeps checking in to see if she’s okay and Honeychile says, “Why do you keep asking me that? It’s annoying!” Her BFF (though not for long if Zelda doesn’t shut the fuck up) shrugs and says, “Because you’re acting weird.” “In what way?” demands the scowling Honeychile. “In that way,” says Zelda. “You’re, like, being a total bitch.” “I’m being a bitch? I’m the one who almost died, not you!” “I know,” says Zelda, with a pout. “And I probably saved your life, which is why I can’t understand why you’re not, like, being more grateful and acting like such a total bitch to me.” “Well,” says Honeychile with a crooked, baiting smile. “If you hate me so much, why don’t you just go away?” “I will! I totally will!”—and Zelda leaves, exhaling the B-word as she huffs off.
Though she probably had a point. Honeychile couldn’t quite put her finger on it but she was feeling different, if different was even the word. Maybe she hadn’t gotten enough sleep. She’d been so unsettled by the asthma attack and what followed that whether she’d slept at all (when they transferred to the den) was a muddle. Her parents didn’t want her to come to school, they wanted her to stay at home and rest, but Honey was so insistent—so bitchy—that Harold nodded to his wife that going to class might be the best thing. (The nurses there were pretty great and doted over her. Harold would call ahead to give them a heads-up about the night’s events.) He grabbed the stethoscope they kept in the first-aid kit and listened to their daughter’s chest; no wheezing whatsoever. Under protest, Honeychile demonstrated her lung capacity with a series of long, deep breaths. See? she said contentiously. I’m fine! Rayanne reluctantly gave in because she didn’t want to provoke another respiratory crisis.
She insisted on driving the girls to school, instead of their taking the bus. When she dropped them off, she made Honeychile promise she would go to the nurse’s office at the first sign of distress. Honeychile rolled her eyes and said Whatever and Rayanne attributed her truculence to the effects of the shot she’d given her, which sometimes happened. Zelda got out last and whispered to Rayanne, “Don’t worry, I’ll totally watch her.” She actually winked at the worried mom.
Alone now, Honeychile tried to break it all down. She felt freakishly disrupted. She wondered if she was about to get her first period (Rayanne hadn’t even thought of that). She’d already been twice to the ladies’ room to check but there was nothing. What was it, then? When she finally realized what had been preoccupying her all morning, her mood grew stranger still.
She’d been thinking of Mrs. Collins from the moment she “awakened,” right around the time Rayanne injected her with the EpiPen. Another peculiar realization was that she hadn’t given a single thought to Hildy Collins in the years since her adoption—well, maybe she had but not much of one. That amazing, beautiful woman! As she ruminated on Hildy, Honeychile felt remorseful for not having bothered to contact the person who’d played the most pivotal role in her young life. She never went to visit; never phoned; never sent a letter of thanks or a How are you? text or e-mail. (Did she even have her phone number or e-mail?) She knew that in Hildy’s world, the adoptee’s cutting of ties would be considered healthy, evidence of a rousing success, but still—the conscience-stricken girl couldn’t help but feel that not having reached out was a monstrously indecent thing, an enormous failing as a human being.
Mrs. Collins had been in charge of her case since she was seven years old. She’d stood by Honeychile through it all: the corrupt residential homes, the well-meaning families who shamelessly “returned” her, the lonely hospitalizations and traumatic surgeries. Mrs. Collins was the one who held her hand during those dreadful adoption fair weekends in the parking lot of Macomb Children’s Services—prospective parents came to gawk and sample the wares like at some slave auction—because of her strange looks, she was given cloying attention by people who never dreamed of taking her home. When her heart, soul and pride were in tatters, it was Hildy who gathered her up and sewed Honeychile back together again.
Why was she thinking of Mrs. Collins, and with the insistence of one possessed? It couldn’t be that she wanted to find her birth parents—she never had an interest and still didn’t. She was sure of that. Yet even the cliché possibility of a sudden, involuntary curiosity about her origins unsettled and depressed her. She’d read online about happy, well-adjusted adoptees who wake up one day with such an impulse, out of the blue; apparently it was some kind of instinct, like salmon fighting upstream to die in the trailer-trash gravel where they were spawned and abandoned. Honeychile had another seizure of guilt, knowing the anguish it would cause Harold and Rayanne if she announced that finding those pieces of shit was just something she had to do. They’d of course be supportive and understanding but in private would be terribly hurt, even frightened about the results.
The other strange part of her musings about Mrs. Collins was the movie that was playing in her head. She pictured herself making a surprise visit to Hildy’s workplace—but arriving by locomotive, of all things. The unlikely express started somewhere in the sky, floating gently down until it stopped right outside the building. In the movie, Honeychile stepped out from a sleeper car, very regal and grand.
She had lots of luggage and a porter helped her down the little set of stairs.
The bus, not a train, took Honeychile to that familiar place. Walking the two blocks to Mrs. Collins’s office in downtown Mount Clemens, she began to get excited about seeing her oldest friend in the world.
All this time, the woman who saved her was working just miles away from where Honeychile lived! How is it that they’d never run into each other? (It was better they hadn’t, because this way, Honeychile could show her initiative.) Again, she castigated herself for never having had the simple courtesy to acknowledge Mrs. Collins’s countless kindnesses—then pushed the thought away so as not to ruin what she hoped would be a lovely reunion. She broke into a smile, imagining Hildy’s response to seeing her. Because of her idiosyncratic looks, unlike other children Hildy had placed but hadn’t seen in critical years of growth, there’d be no mistaking the spunky, legendary Renée “Honey” Matlock, the unlikely golden child of Macomb Children’s Services.
Honeychile recalled the time just after an adoption fair when she told Mrs. Collins about overhearing an earnest husband say to an overexcited wife who was enthralled by the prospect of taking Renée home—“Do you think you’re strong enough for the stares and the comments?” “The world can be like that,” said Hildy, drawing her close. “The world can be heartless and cruel but not all of the world. I want you to hear that, Renée. I really want you to hear and know that.” The hug and those words meant everything to a throwaway nine-year-old child. When Harold and Rayanne fell in love with her, Mrs. Collins said, “Do you remember what I once told you about how the world can be? How there are bright suns that shine through to light up the darkness? Well, these two are bright suns. And they want you. They really, really want you. So now it’s up to you, Renée, to be brave. To let yourself feel the warmth of those two loving suns.”
Because by then, she had almost given up.
What would have become of her if it weren’t for Mrs. Collins? Or Harold and Rayanne?
She owed all of them so much.
When she saw the building, there was a brief moment of doubt that Hildy had retired or that her office had moved. As she walked in, the light and the look of the place, the whole amazing, complicated feeling of it assailed her again, with its familiar mixed emotions of high and low. There was a metal detector and to her enormous delight, she recognized the guard. Even the name came back to her:
“Lemoyne!”
“Well, well, if it isn’t the champion!” (He’d always called her that.) “Now, look at you. Look how grown-up you are!”
“I maybe grew an eighth of an inch?” she said drolly.
“Champion, you taller than everybody here. You walk tall!”
“You’re the best, Lemoyne.”
“Who you here to see?”
“Mrs. Collins . . .”
“Do you have an appointment?” She shook her head. “My champion! Tell you what—I haven’t seen her come in yet, but you can tippy-toe back to her office and see if she snuck by. Gonna need to frisk you, though.” Thinking he was serious, she lifted her arms. “Ha ha! My champion. I’ll let you slide, but just for today. But I’m gonna get fired if you carrying a pistol.”
“Left it at home.”
He laughed again, shook his head and said My champion as she wandered back.
When she arrived at Mrs. Collins’s office, a secretary was on the phone. Honeychile didn’t recognize the woman. Secretaries come and go but Hildy Collins stays.
She hung up and said, “Can I help you?”
“I’m Renée—Matlock. ‘Honeychile.’ Mrs. Collins placed me. Is she here?”
“No, she isn’t,” she said gruffly.
“Do you know when she’ll be back?”
“No, I don’t.”
There wasn’t a trace of friendliness—the lady seemed irritated, even upset—and Honeychile made a mental note to be sure to mention that to Hildy. It simply wouldn’t do for a saintly woman like Mrs. Collins to have a mean bitch sitting there, undoing all her great work. “Do you want to leave your number?”
“Is she on vacation?”
“Personal business,” she said.
“When you talk to her,” said Honeychile, “I’d very much appreciate it if you not tell her I stopped by—I want it to be a surprise. Will you promise not to tell her?”
“I won’t tell her,” said the woman, with a tortured smile, relieved that the conversation was coming to an end.
After she left, Honeychile thought she might have made a tactical error by asking her not to tell. Being a shitty person and even shittier secretary, now the woman was certain to tell Hildy about the drop-in.
She waved goodbye to Lemoyne on her way out, but he was busy watching a mom go through the metal detector. Her toddler watched in fascination and once she cleared the device, the woman swept him up in her arms. Lemoyne patted the boy’s head.
“That’s a champion you got right there,” he said.
On the street, Honeychile made the spontaneous decision to go to Hildy’s house. It was about a two-hour walk to Clinton River Drive, over by Shadyside Park.
She’d been to the bungalow-style residence on the leafy street many times before. By the time she got off the bus and rounded the corner for the two-block approach, she was rerunning the tape of her epic betrayal of Hildy Collins and felt miserable all over again. Children’s Services employees were discouraged (in some cases prohibited) from inviting children in the system to their homes, for all kinds of reasons—the paramount one being “liability,” that heartless institutional chestnut that drained the blood from any human equation. Liability banned teachers from hugging students, and shut down playgrounds because of potential injury on slides and swings. God forbid a woman like Hildy, acting out of love, love for her children—lost children, damaged children, broken children—God forbid she invite those innocent, beautiful souls to her home to give them treats (a broken child could choke on a treat and die); God forbid she hold them close (a damaged child might accuse her of unspeakable things); God forbid that her love, a love that healed, restored and renewed, be expressed in the small, essential ways that nourish, allowing saplings to grow into mighty oaks . . . a watering love that provided, sustaining the child until the end of its life. God forbid! Hildy invited Renée into her home and fed her, laughed and cried with her, watched Tangled and The Goonies and The Princess Bride with her, taught her how to bake cookies and put on lipstick, how to look in the mirror at a beautiful girl and not an ogre—and I repaid her love by ignoring her. Oh! How nasty, how awful! Zelda was right!
Through her tears, moving toward the house with dread, she said to herself, “I am the biggest bitch in the world! Soooo nasty to Mom and Dad last night—just because they were terrified I would die! What the fuck is wrong with me?” She shivered with a horrible thought: What if Hildy wouldn’t forgive her? Honeychile had told herself she was special (because Mrs. Collins made her feel that way) but had proved by her abominable behavior how very unspecial she was. What if Mrs. Collins, in shock and disappointment, realized years ago that Renée was just like all the others, the selfish legions who’d flown the nest never to return, not even for a thank-you or hello. Even worse, what if the squadrons of children Mrs. Collins invited to her house through the years had kept in touch, sending birthday cards, get-wells and detailed letters about their wonderful new lives . . . what if they’d even invited Hildy to their homes? And Hildy had come?
What if Honeychile was the single exception?
Oh! Oh! It was just too terrible to think of—
Again, she pushed the black meditation from her head. She wanted only to be joyful, grateful and thankful when she saw her . . . she wanted it not to be about her but about Hildy.
When she saw the sheriff’s car in the driveway, Honeychile had a random thought that Mrs. Collins married a policeman, followed by the nervous theory that she’d moved away and a cop was living in her old house.
She rang the doorbell and waited for what seemed an eternity before peeking through the window. She saw Hildy get up from the couch to answer. There were some men with her. One was on a chair, one was standing.
“Renée!” she said, with a startled smile.
“Mrs. Collins!” she exclaimed, hugging the woman close.
“Darling,” said Hildy. “Is everything all right?”
She asked with the concern of a mother—of all mothers.
“Yes, yes!” said Honeychile. “I just . . . I was so missing you.”
“That’s lovely, sweetheart—and I’ve missed you too. But it’s not a good time, Renée. I have some visitors.”
Honeychile was finally able to see the woman as she was now, not then. Her face had thickened in the intervening years; it was blank and pasty, half-wet with perspiration and tears. The eyes were hollow and dark, rheumy with worry.
“Is everything okay?” said Honeychile.
Mrs. Collins sighed, exhaling a bitter, fearful breath.
“You see”—she smiled incongruously, in the habit of comforting a child, of soothing others—“well, no. You see, Renée—I can’t find my Winston.” The girl silently gasped, and again came the smile from the formidable being who’d so tenderly mentored her. “I just—well—you see, we can’t find my boy.”