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Zero to One Hundred

AFTER A long and contentious spring semester, I was cleaning up the chaos of my university office. Our creaky old asbestos-ridden Language and Literature building was due to be renovated, and in the interim we were all getting moved across campus to a still older, creakier building pervaded by an untraceable smell of mold. Rumor had it that once renovations were complete, some newer, trendier departments might actually snap up our original building and trap us for good in that crummy location; the hallways were full of sniping and suspicion, which my staticky office radio couldn’t block out. Tired of the grumbling, most of all my own, I just wanted to pack up my file cabinets—back then in 2002 most of us still had massive, dog-eared files and sheaves of Xeroxes and brittle newspaper clippings—and get things ready for the moving crew. At least we didn’t have to do that part ourselves. Outside my windows, the pear trees were in blossom. I couldn’t wait to get out into the mountain sunshine. I was ready to forget everything and launch into summer freedom.

Finishing up a publicity archive for our department’s film series, I still had several newspaper issues to go through before I felt I could quit for the afternoon. All the local papers did was reprint verbatim the press releases we sent them, but I felt obliged to keep a record to show to potential donors or at least the department chair during my upcoming annual review. But as bored as I was restless, I stopped to read the lead article in the previous Sunday’s Sentinel. As it was Foster Care Month and almost Mother’s Day, the article profiled Laurie Marsh, a florist by day, who ran one of the county’s longtime foster homes with her husband, an auto mechanic. Photographed holding her grandchild on her knee, she spoke of the dozens of children who had come through their home, staying anywhere from overnight to two years, and even returning as teen parents with their own infants; with Laurie’s help they could learn to care for their babies before aging out of the system. Later I learned that Laurie framed a photograph of every foster kid who passed through their doors, eventually covering an entire living room wall. She spoke of offering a safe place to damaged children on the worst days of their lives. She didn’t claim to save or fix or do anything more practical than offer a clean shirt, a dry diaper, or a hug, and she shrugged off the opportunity to condemn the parents whose actions had caused their children to be there.

At that time, fifteen years ago, I’d hazily imagined foster children as blank-eyed, abandoned waifs who were hopscotching between group and family homes while waiting for an adoption that might never come. Everything I knew I’d learned from TV, so it was no wonder I conjured up stereotypes: elfin boys hiding sullenly behind swept bangs, blonde girls with dirty cheeks clutching Band-Aided teddy bears, and of course the babies—the fabled stream of needy, crack-addicted babies so many of us yearn to have placed in our outstretched arms the moment the foster home license arrives in the mail. But where we lived, that’s not what the need was.

I was surprised to read that many more children were removed because of neglect than because of abuse. But what did neglect even mean nowadays? I pictured a thin boy in an Oliver Twist tunic who was peeling lead paint off the walls and watching endless episodes of Cops on TV. That couldn’t be right, I knew, but abuse sounded like the photographable, fixable stuff of TV movies, while neglect sounded more amorphous, lacking any concrete remedy.

I was intrigued by the article. Something clicked: maybe I could be a foster parent. I was all about fixing, as misguided as we’ve been told that is when it comes to spouses. As a university teacher, I fixed students’ papers all day, didn’t I? And found professionals to fix the students themselves when crises hit. I’d once saved a neighbor’s horse from choking on a plastic bread bag by reaching down her throat, and I’d gotten certified in CPR every year since it was introduced, just in case I was ever the only one in a crisis who knew it. Fixing was not something I thought I could do better than others, but I was not afraid to try. I couldn’t do much worse than your average Good Samaritan, could I? Especially when the odds already seemed stacked against success, whether that was reviving someone in cardiac arrest or, as a future foster parent, helping a girl avoid motherhood at fourteen.

How badly could I screw up something that had started out already broken? “You don’t have to be perfect to be a perfect parent,” the foster/adopt ad campaign says, although in the naive dramas of my imagination, I privately suspected I might be. Plus, like every foster parent I came to know, I viewed myself as being fairly organized and didn’t mind tracking down information and calling strangers on the phone—basic advocacy skills—fueled by a useful middle-class presumption that the person on the other end of the phone ought to listen to me. And although I mostly ignored my carbon footprint, there was something ecologically pleasing about the notion of repairing something—someone—already here on Earth. Not that I had much choice about that, since I’d recently learned, in my late thirties, that I couldn’t have children of my own. As I read that newspaper article, I decided I was ready to start foster parenting that day.

Right that day, without the first thought of licensing, training, fire inspections, or what my new second husband might think. The temporary nature of foster placements even sounded like a good thing—like some clear-cut work project with deadlines and spreadsheets, a sense of accomplishment and finality. Fixed, submitted, filed—then time for a vacation break or instantly produced screenplay before the next thing. No prob, Bob, in the words I’d later learn from a big-eyed backhoe on TV.

PUTTING OFF cleaning my office, I read the article from start to finish and was full of spring possibility and that end-of-semester rush of energy that made it feel like anything would be possible in the next twelve weeks—writing an entire novel, losing thirty-two pounds by running a marathon, and, most of all, enjoying the ecstasy of sleeping like a normal person instead of writing sure-to-be-ignored margin comments in tiny crabbed letters until 2 a.m.

At the end of the article was a phone number and the name of a social worker to call for information about becoming foster parents; dissemination of that information was the true purpose of this profile. So the next day, after my husband’s equivocal maybe, I found myself sitting in my university office, dirty beige phone receiver in my clammy hand, heart pounding sickly—as it would so many times, for different reasons, in future calls to the Department of Social Services (DSS). I took a shaky breath and dialed, but the person I needed, like any good social worker, was out. (And I don’t mean out getting her nails done, although somehow they all manage to have glossy, chipless manicures, but out in people’s homes, interviewing kids at school, picking up a child for a visit or supervising one, appearing in court, or attending staff meetings. Frustrating, but what would it mean if social workers were always in their offices, waiting for a call?)

The next day and a hundred happy fantasies later, I reached Geraldine Taylor, the licensing and training coordinator. And all my excitement, my visions of cruising music festivals and craft shows with a backpacked toddler, came to an abrupt halt. All stopped by one question from Geraldine: “Can you tell me about your water source?”

CHUTES AND LADDERS

That was May 2002. Michael, the child around whom I would shape my entire future, did not yet exist. When eventually he was born, three weeks premature, the doctors watched and waited through the first hours of his life until the bubble—the hole in his lung—finally closed. At it happened, his first home lay just a few miles from our own, down the steep slope of a back road that I hadn’t known existed. I would not see their trailer for several years, until it had been abandoned, condemned for meth contamination, and then mysteriously burned.

A year and a half into Michael’s life, his chest rattled by asthma, we would meet him.

I’VE ALWAYS admired my husband, Will, for having kid charisma in spades, with the patience to spend summer mornings teaching his friends’ kids to dig up plants or wade around our muddy pond and fish. Unlike me, he is a biological parent and a natural—my ambassador to the world of children. Still, I’d worked four years at a historic farm park and had spent a year as a live-in nanny, tightly bonded to a newborn, so I could stay in the Bay Area. This can’t be the only time you do this, I remember instructing myself, amazed that even off duty and living two floors below, I’d waken at 3 a.m., seconds before the baby cried from the crib beside her parents’ room. I’d hoped to mold her into an adventurer and so hauled her in the baby backpack up through the fragrant, urban hillside eucalyptus groves and pushed her stroller through the endless avenues, past the Asian fruit stores, and along the perpetually cold and foggy beach. I heard her first word, leaf, spent $25 for her to ride a pony around a ring, and watched her learn to toddle-run through the Jurassic carrot-top palms in the arboretum. Whatever my future held, I resolved I’d have this kind of experience again.

Years later, I had it to some degree when my stepson, Vince, would come to visit—although more often Will would drive a day and night to see him—but he and Will were so fiercely enfolded in their tent of time together that the best I could do was trail along on their outings and bite my tongue at their daily trips to Walmart to buy more worthless plastic, as even they called it. (To his lasting delight, Michael would inherit a whole closet full of those Lego pieces, Hot Wheels, netherworlds, and minigarages in the years to come.)

So a decade later and a continent away from my nanny days, with a home and barn filled with rescue pets, I was excited to move back to the human dimension—at least so long as no one brought us a teen as stubborn and secretive as I had been. (That karmic wheel spun around much later.) The thing I didn’t realize then is that it’s not just hardened teens or older children that people fear—by the time a baby is born, the damage can already have been done. For every baby who hears the poetry of Robert Frost or Goodnight Moon read to her in utero, dozens hear shrieked curses instead, dozens have synapses permanently frayed by alcohol. They don’t just “move on.” Whatever chain of misfortunes has landed them in foster care has already marked them and sent them careening down the very first game board chute, while everyone else their age is scrambling up the ladder.

BEFORE WILL and I could even start the training required for prospective foster parents, we ran into obstacles. First, the emotional kind—Will was basically on board, but obtaining the agreement of his then preteen son, who lived halfway across the country with his mother, was painful. Vince had sobbed over the phone, unable to bear the idea of another boy’s getting so much time with his dad—time that Vince himself had missed. Impatient as I was to get a foster child in our home, I felt awful for provoking this.

But the physical obstacles were what made me gnaw my knuckles with frustration. We lived in the mountains, where pure springwater is bottled and sold region-wide, yet the environmental bureaucrats in the polluted, chlorinated state capital had deemed this very same mountain springwater unsafe for foster homes. Period. Our only alternative was to spend thousands drilling a well. So much for the supposed abuse, neglect, hunger, and epidemic meth and opioid use in infamous Appalachia. The problem was the premium mountain springwater. Miraculously, a state senator spent months pushing a bill through the legislature that relaxed the water restrictions, freeing us and scores of other families in the mountain counties to pursue foster care licensing.

I’m not one of those people who believe that everything happens for a reason, much as I wish I could. But if we’d been able to jump into fostering with no obstacles and delays, we’d likely have had a different child or two in our home already by the time Michael was removed, and then what would have become of him? Would my now beloved Michael have gone instead to one of our new friends? Would we ever even have met him? Sensed a cosmic missed connection? The whole thought of such a miserable parallel universe made me dizzy.

Will and I went through the standard foster parent training with an unusually small group—two single-mom best friends—led by the awesome social worker we now called Gerri, with her cynical optimism and equally awesome wardrobe of gypsy skirts. In addition to leading training for new and renewing foster parents, she was the one designated to assess and license homes, to find and make the best possible placement for a child coming into foster care, and to serve as foster families’ liaison to the agency, offering ongoing support and addressing foster parents’ questions or concerns. (A birth family involved with the agency was assigned a separate worker to serve as the family’s advocate and guide.) With Gerri, we worked through six booklets; learned to inventory needs and strengths and to recast one as the other, like sides of an algebra equation; heard the words love and logic linked for the first time; went through background checks, for which we held our breath over Will’s teen years and I thanked God for all I had gotten away with during my pre–midlife crisis in my twenties. Last stop was the sheriff’s department, where we rolled our fingerprints over the new touch screen. Will’s usual jokes went unreciprocated, while I studied the list of criminal charges posted on the wall, amazed at all the gradations.

As we finished the training, we grew ever more energized at the prospect of seeing the composite children in our workbooks, their strengths, needs, and behaviors neatly charted, come to life in three dimensions. We were ready, we thought, for bedwetting, fire starting, tears, crayoned walls, and tentative hugs. We were ready to dump massive quantities of abstract, unconditional love on a kid, despite having been warned that this was not the universal fix.

We were ready to respect the bioparents, as Gerri called them, as wounded grown children still dealing with their own unmet needs but always doing their best to cope. We were ready to accept that, no matter what, they were the parents “our” children would always love and need the most. Good students that we were, we believed such understanding could override our instincts.

AFTER CONQUERING the water situation, we did not expect trouble from the fire inspector. We’d thought we were ready for him as well—our ingenious, custom-built 1980s house had previously housed a family with disabled children and seemed perfectly safe; our smoke alarms worked only too well and could detect a bag of slightly singed popcorn before you’d even opened the microwave. We had our fire extinguishers, upstairs and down—okay, no problem to get bigger ones and fix them on mounting brackets. The door to the hot water heater had to be vented. The closet next to it had to be permanently emptied (and was every time we got a relicensing inspection). Thank goodness they did not measure the length of the dryer hose, which snakes its way through the basement before venting outdoors. But an upstairs bedroom window was a few inches short of standard width.

Who knew that becoming a foster parent would involve recutting a window so it would be wide enough for a fire ladder to fit through its frame? (Never mind the bigger question: Would that ladder truck, stationed in the center of town, actually get here in time?) In an endeavor driven by heart, soul, compassion, and angst, who would think so much comes down to measurements?

I understand, of course, why foster homes have to be physically safe in every aspect. And I understand why the inspections have to be picky. I understand why smoke detectors have to be placed seven feet high and not five, since smoke rises to the ceiling and then drops down. I just wish that the regulations went both ways, so that when foster children return to birth homes—where everyone smokes, does their own wiring, and produces heat by opening the oven doors, lighting unvented kerosene heaters, and stoking woodstoves illegally installed in trailers—those birth homes would have to have at least one working smoke detector with an unexpired nine-volt battery that hasn’t been filched for use elsewhere. But there’s no such requirement.

Eight hundred dollars and five months later, the fire marshal okayed our beautifully vented water heater door and a new window in a bedroom we hadn’t even planned to use.

THAT WAS summer 2004, more than two years after I’d first read the newspaper story about Laurie Marsh and her husband. We were ready. Ready to begin waiting.

All those websites and billboards about “waiting children”—with their dark-ringed eyes, dropped teddy bears, and reproving stares? Well, that waiting went both ways, we learned, especially as we were licensed by a county’s social services agency. Thankfully, our local social workers were conscious of the need to make a good match, especially as we were just starting out, but we understood they couldn’t predict when birth parents would mess up so badly that a judge would approve intervention. Even then, we knew from our licensing classes that social workers were required first to search for family members who could handle a kinship placement.

So we were waiting for a midnight phone call. Waiting for a placement. And waiting some more. Waiting until we’d forgotten we were waiting at all.

CHILDPROOF

I thought I had no illusions. I thought I might be the first person who’d bought into the official DSS line. After many years of pleasing teachers, I could parrot the workbooks right back: the actual goal of foster care is that children will go back home again. Reunification. A mouthful of a term I found oddly impersonal from the start. I learned that food cabinets could be filled and support services found to fit a family’s needs; I believed that drug addictions and abusive relationships were problems weak parents sweated out, talked through, and moved on from. Not problems that some just got better at hiding. Ever the compliant student, I had the notion that foster kids were like library books taken briefly out of circulation, improved with new binding and taped-up pages, then returned to a rebuilt, sturdier shelf. At that point, I assumed, my real life would resume with its movie dates, trail rides, and the spontaneous girlfriend weekends I’d read about in Oprah.

I didn’t want to adopt. I’d said that up front once we started the licensing process—a conviction that would change the instant a real child was in our home. Until that point, I saw foster kids as theoretical beings in transit—souls in purgatory—whose wait might be made more pleasant by a stopover in our home. But what would make the next decade so wrenching—seeing children going back to seemingly unchanged situations, again, again, again—was largely absent from my early fantasies.

For Will the thorny issue about foster parenting was rules: he’s a true product of the sixties, who endears himself as a teacher by never doing anything the way he’s supposed to. He was not about to change that approach for this foster parenting venture driven by state regulations, court orders, and restrictions, which include not being allowed to introduce foster children as foster children (“our friend who’s staying with us right now” was the trainer’s suggestion). I knew that Will would be fantastic with actual kids, but his resentful reluctance to accede to requirements like getting twelve hours of training per year even while we were waiting to get our first placement, or taking the deadbolt off the front door as the fire marshal required, was already causing tension between us. Entirely predictable tension, but I constantly feared he might back out of the whole endeavor.

MIDWAY THROUGH that winter of 2005, we finally got a call from Gerri, the social worker who’d licensed us. She knew I’d be terrified to start with an older child, no matter how she’d tried to dispel my wrong belief that the youngest children were blank slates psychologically. Today I understand that even a fetus can experience stress, connecting shouting voices with surging cortisol, even if Mom is not punched in the stomach or pushed down stairs. Before these babies are even born, their reflexes are set.

But, okay, it was our first time out, and there was a sixteen-month-old, Michael, who had two older siblings—all were with a relative for the moment, but when she went back to work in a few weeks, Michael would come to us, Gerri said. No county foster home was available that could take all three children, plus Michael had to-be-expected developmental delays and might benefit from individual attention. (It was almost funny that I’d expected those delays to be emotional: He needs to learn to bond, to love, to trust. Instead I was shocked at the prosaic nature of his preschool services worker’s goals for him: “We want him to learn how to hold a spoon. To drink from a cup.”)

WERE WE ready for this?

Between grading midterms, Will got caught up on his HBO and snow shoveling, while I calculated how to rework my teaching schedule, plugged up the electrical outlets, and figured out the puzzles of child locks and stair gates—all good preparation for working the mystery latches and Möbius straps of a car seat. Two days later, though, Gerri called back and said stop, don’t buy anything yet—at the first hearing, the judge sent the kids back.

That was the first big “huh?” of our lives as foster parents. One day parents are unfit and the next day they aren’t? A different judge can turn things around just like that?

Judges seemed to be the wild card in every birth and foster family’s outcome. And this was months before another foster mother told me about an infant who had recently left her care: the three-month-old had arrived with twenty-eight broken bones and a terror of bathwater; the detectives were still trying to pin this abuse on the birth father when a judge sent the baby back to the grandmother’s home, next door to the father’s place, on one hour’s notice.

ONE HUNDRED

I didn’t expect to hear anything more about Michael or his family—I assumed we’d just go back on the roster of families open for a placement. Then the night before the end of our spring university semester, a new, young social worker called. “Mom isn’t doing what she’s supposed to” was the worker’s only tight-lipped remark. Something had happened; I never found out what. (It’s the first thing everyone wants to know, however obliquely they ask . . . and you can’t tell anyone anyway. Later, the question changes to “So, is she doing better now?” She always means “Mom,” while people rarely ask about the dad. Like our opinions would make any difference. Like we could be the judge.)

Michael, now a full-fledged toddler, would be brought to our house from day care the next day, while his brother and sister would be taken on to be placed with two other families. Zero to one hundred: nine months in one night. My head was reeling. We went directly to Walmart and got diapers, two baby bottles, a sippy cup (a term I couldn’t believe I’d hear so many adults say with a straight face), and a crib, which Will spent most of that night piecing together. He would wait at home to greet Michael while I was teaching my last class.

I got through that class in a fog, pinching my forearms with excitement. Would I think back on this, like a movie character, as a true before-and-after moment? One of the few in life you could distinctly recognize? This was the day my life would change—maybe. I thought this in actual words, yet words were all they seemed to be.

The next day DSS called after the family’s social worker had raced from court to pick up the siblings from school and day care before Mom could zoom up and confront her. But Michael was coming with just the clothes on his back, as is commonly the case. I might want to head back to Walmart, I was warned, and pick up a couple of outfits for him to start with. In training we’d learned we could spend $160 every six months on clothes and shoes for a foster child. Walmart wasn’t required, but shopping there and at consignment stores was the only way to make that budget work, no matter how you felt about the store’s sweatshop supply chain.

I zombie-walked into Walmart for the second time in twenty-four hours, hardly able to grasp that Will was having our life-changing experience, while I was out buying a Cookie-Monster-plays-soccer outfit in stretchy gray and pajamas adorned with a red-haired Rugrat in a pith helmet. This was the dawning of yet another realization—that you have to pay a lot more for toddler clothes that don’t advertise something. And even the expensive clothes—Old Navy or OshKosh—either have a brand logo front and center or they’re advertising fake brands of surfboards or safari lodges. If you want an outfit with a plain picture of your basic steamroller—one that doesn’t have eyes and a name and well-known catchphrase—you pay a premium.

It was evening by that point. Will called to say that Michael had arrived, eaten a cut-up hot dog and some scrambled egg, and was settling with a bottle while they waited for me. I knew Michael would have had a bewildering day, and that he’d have to go to sleep soon so he’d be ready to go to his required educational day care in the morning. Yet I walked through Walmart stunned, unable to focus. I hadn’t even realized toddlers’ clothes were sized by years, months, and the letter T. Or that diapers were sized by weight—a weight I couldn’t begin to estimate. I felt like an imposter in the children’s department, and I sensed the eyes of other new parents on me as I scrutinized clothing tags and held combo outfits up to gauge the fit for a child I hadn’t ever seen. Would they peg me as a kidnapper? Or what if his mom was actually there and saw me? All the experienced foster parents had horror stories of running into angry birth parents, invariably at Walmart.

I got home at 7 p.m., turned the doorknob, and eased over the threshold, hoping to get close enough to see Michael before he saw me. I found him and Will in our bedroom, where Will was lying on our bed, flying Michael over him in the classic airplane maneuver. A half-full milk bottle stood on the nightstand. Will set the boy on his chest so that Michael was on hands and knees. I didn’t want to startle Michael because I knew he’d be wary. So I said hello, and we were silent for minutes, as he turned his blond head slowly to the left and stared at me.

Who does he think I am? I wondered. And what is he seeing? Shouldn’t I be feeling something? But ballooning stillness itself became a feeling, and my lungs filled with an immensely tranquil emptiness I’ve never found in meditation. It was the space love would rush into as soon as I let go and let the next breath in.

BY THE second morning I wanted to adopt. Could we? Was it even remotely possible? But of course we were foster parents—that’s what we’d signed up for. His mom was complying with the plan Social Services had drawn up, and Dad was temporarily “out of the picture,” in the shorthand expression that everyone I met seemed to like to use.

At first we had no idea how long Michael would stay with us, and little understanding of the stages of the court process. Terms like adjudication and stipulation were as alien to us as they probably were to the “bios”; I know of one determined foster mom who attended every hearing and always tried to find a way to slip the judge photos of the kids who were thriving in her care, hoping the judge would grasp the stakes. Other foster parents I met felt it was their duty to be present and, for the sake of the kids in their care, attended and squelched whatever discomfort they felt. Coward that I was—and completely shaken the first time I encountered Michael’s mom in an agency hallway—the notion of attending court (which is apparently more commonplace now, a decade later, as is education about the process) seemed incredibly confrontational to me. Foster parents were rarely, if ever, invited to testify, and we were pledged to support the agency’s decisions about the case anyway. Simply sitting in court, I felt, would have seemed to spell out the us-versus-them divide that we tried so hard to erase from our hearts and minds. Worst of all, to me, it seemed invasive of the bioparents’ privacy. Curious as I was, I didn’t think any bioparents would see us as their allies. If I showed up at court, I didn’t think they would ever forgive me.

For Michael and his siblings, sometimes I heard when court dates were coming up, while other times they were mentioned after the fact, in passing—a reminder of our irrelevance, was how I took this. Like everything the children’s first social worker, Kayla, said, I constantly found myself wanting to say, “Please, wait, slow down, explain.” I didn’t know if I was snooping or stupid or if it seemed like I was overstepping and second-guessing her plan. But pushy was not how I wanted to seem with a social worker, and I knew it would not get results. In hindsight, I think this worker was almost as new as I was in my very different role; still, I was relieved when another Child Protective Services director took over the office after Michael’s case closed. It was too late for all my questions, but from that point on, it seemed to me that transparency increased for the foster parents.

All I really cared about was knowing our sentence—how soon we’d have to give up our toddler. When I first heard that Michael would be with us for three months, I was baffled—what kind of change could happen in that time? The parents had split before the children were removed, his mom had a new boyfriend who planned to come to several visits, and Dad would soon end up in jail for unrelated reasons. I didn’t want to get into the family’s business, but weren’t we supposed to be some kind of partners in this? Was some kind of change not the point? Three months—twelve weeks—barely a season—seemed like nothing. I was confused, and if I didn’t know why we had Michael in the first place, how could I know what progress they were seeking? Or was it none of my business?

(“You didn’t know why they were removed?” an agency staff member asks me now, aghast. “The children’s social worker never told you?” My usual assertiveness had failed me, I’m chagrined to say, the second I thought I might displease an authority or seem a pest. And back then I’d had no comparable experience to go by.)

Later, we would hear the estimate of a three-month time frame miraculously grow to six, due to some time-consuming practical issues. Anything that meant Michael would be with us longer was manna to me. But his mother had rights, and her social worker was determined that Mom would have a successful reunification with her children, no matter what obstacles might arise. Or, as a more diplomatic staff member eventually told us, “Mom’s done everything we’ve asked her, and she deserves the right to fail. Or to succeed on her own terms, even if it’s not the future you’d most like to see.” If I’d read that in a training manual, I know I would have agreed wholeheartedly.

FROM OUR first moments face to face with Michael, we had every bit of the staggering love-and-wonder rush that I imagine every new parent experiences, and more. We always knew there was an expiration date ahead—the snapshots of memory weren’t going to be wistful nostalgia to laugh over with a teen. More like a Snapchat photo, for once that child was gone, those memories would surely vaporize: the sweet, clean, pointed face; the little sailor suit I crammed him into for a Walmart portrait; a love of chicken nuggets so great that he brought his stuffed toy rooster into the kitchen and begged me to cook it; the laughter at a bubble in the stream; his mania for cars, motors, and real, dangerous tools (this was a kid not fooled by their colorful plastic facsimiles); the “God bless” litanies I helped him recite with names of people I didn’t know; the untraceable, lingering smell of his room and hair. Every gain was a loss as well, in the moment it occurred.

SWEET HOME

During one of the hearings leading up to the reunification, the lawyer representing Luke, the children’s dad (who was in jail), told the judge that the children’s still-married mother should not be allowed to take them to live with another man—and the judge agreed. It was his lawyer’s idea, not Dad’s, as it turned out: he despised Benny, the new boyfriend, but Luke hated DSS more and wanted the kids taken out of foster care and returned to one parent, that is, to their mom.

At first this ruling had meant an unexpected gift of time—instead of having the children returned to her after just three months, Jessica first would have to get a home of her own, apart from her boyfriend. This meant a long process of qualifying for a federally subsidized housing voucher, then finding one of the scarce rentals that would accept the government payments, then furnishing it using Goodwill coupons and somebody’s borrowed pickup truck, and so on. Even with the constant hurried help of her social worker, it would take months. It was a huge reprieve for Will and me. Not only would we have more days with Michael and further opportunity for him to grow and learn but, less charitably—as many foster parents know—such a delay also would mean time for the birth parent to screw up—or more time for old screwups to come to light.

JESSICA WAS always sweet and complimentary to me when she carried Michael down the stairs and buckled him into my car after the weekly supervised visits at DSS. His siblings would be rocketing around, and Jessica would talk to them sternly, calling the kids ma’am and sir as the social worker looked on approvingly. Jessica’s hair was often a completely different color from visit to visit, but she always looked like she’d made an effort to think about how she’d be seen, as I did myself.

I glimpsed small lapses, though, once the family progressed to unsupervised visits. To me, this new stage of the case plan was awkward and unwelcome, as no social workers were even in the vicinity; the agency was short-staffed that summer and I was asked to meet Jessica and Benny alone for the weekly rendezvous to drop off and pick up Michael and his siblings for full Saturday visits. Suddenly Jessica was wearing tiny halters or tube tops instead of Coke-branded sweatshirts, with her hair pulled up in a streaky knot instead of clean and brushed. She and Benny would drive off with the children to a vaguely located lake—and come back with balled-up wet clothes turned inside out, half belonging to kids unknown and half of Michael’s missing. Brother Ryan would be talking in fragmented riddles and sister Isabelle would be in a speechless huff. The swimming diapers Michael had been wearing that morning would be gone, of course, and so would all the extras; when Jessica returned him to us, he’d be shirtless and in a wet swimsuit. By the time we’d get back to our home, the padding of his car seat would be soaked in urine.

I PICKED up all three kids from these daylong unsupervised visits, because Isabelle’s foster mom ran her florist business out of her house and was minding a baby, while Ryan’s had four or five other kids to juggle. But much more unnerving than the extra driving and messy car was being all alone to hear Benny’s recountings of jet-skiing and of how toddler Michael had gone underwater, but—no problem—Benny had scooped him out of the water and held him aloft overhead in triumph, like a football at the goal line. No mention of life jackets for any of the kids; clearly no use of sunscreen, even though I’d put it in the diaper bag and tried to coat Michael with it before leaving. Ryan, always, would come back exhausted, with a shirtless red blaze that often covered his torso.

Jessica and Benny must have thought my mania about sun exposure was a middle-class phobia and a predictable failure to realize that sunburns, spankings, and all-day soda were just part of growing up. Of toughening up. I said something about the jet skis and seeming lack of life jackets to the kids’ by-then third social worker, who was just out of college and substituting in to cover staff vacation time. Basically I got the message that this was Mom’s time, not mine, and it was up to Jessica to determine what was safe. But thanks for “transporting” them.

WHEN I was consumed with the imperfect details, the big picture was elusive, but even at the time I realized there was no greater blessing for us than the motion made by Luke’s lawyer and the judge’s requiring Jessica to secure housing separate from Benny’s. The extra months we gained with Michael as a result were an irreplaceable gift, giving our hearts more time to knit, allowing Michael more time to live free of cigarette smoke and learn to take asthma meds through a tube, and permitting us to go to the beach with Michael and his sister. Ryan too was able to go on the first vacation of his life with his foster family, traveling to the World of Coca-Cola and Stone Mountain, Georgia; the colored lasers that illuminated the cliff carvings at night impressed him more than anything he’d yet seen.

Then, in late summer, we heard that Jessica indeed had found a trailer that qualified for a rent subsidy. Like Benny’s place, it was also in the next county—not only remote but out of the jurisdiction of our DSS, which gave Jessica and the kids a clean slate and, if a crisis should come, different foster homes. And as slow to react as we thought our DSS was, this neighboring one was rumored to be slower. But at least our own DSS would have to monitor Jessica’s family for what we hoped and believed would be six months after reunification—in fact, it turned out to be two months, barely—before their case was closed.

Early on, Jessica had wrinkled her nose and mentioned that the rental was in a pretty crummy small trailer court, but that was it. (Well, at least there’ll be people around, I remember thinking.) Yet once the kids started going for weekend visits, the penultimate step of the whole reunification process, we heard nothing, oddly, about the new trailer. Jessica and Benny now brought the children all the way back to us, which cost them significant gas money but was no doubt worth it to keep us out of their lives and their business. The kids said little—even the older two, who could speak. What these visits were like was perplexing to piece together, and surely they’d been told not to say anything for fear of never getting their family back—but I remember sitting with their paternal grandmother, Irene, and looking at the patterned walls of her trailer, while she tried to find out what they’d eaten that day, and if they’d had lunch, because she said they’d never had lunch in the past. (Yes, we learned, they’d had box macaroni and lettuce, which I hated myself for thinking sounded suspiciously balanced to impress DSS.) I was also trying to decipher what Ryan, who always spoke cryptically, even when he wasn’t covering for adults, meant by “the new Hardee’s, you know, the new one,” in an unnameable county or town.

Ryan’s more experienced foster mom, Mona, was equally disgusted at the vagueness and confusion of the whole transition, even though she had pressed for a plan for Ryan to leave as her twin nieces had just moved in to stay while both of their parents were deployed overseas. Since he had started spending weekends with Benny, Ryan had come back to her house saying things like “I don’t eat with brown people,” and he was refusing to sit at the dinner table with Mona’s nieces. So Mona was well ready for him to be gone, but not like this.

As for Michael, he would walk around the day care on Monday mornings, saying, “Belt, belt, spank, spank,” while the director and I looked at each other with big eyes and pressed lips.

Somehow, we learned that the kids had been in the new trailer once and found a nail to hang a backpack on but that it had no furniture. (“Sweet Home in a Trailer,” the boys always loved to screech—the 8 Mile version of the classic—oblivious to Eminem’s bitterness.) I think perhaps the new trailer became their storage space, because I remember some commotion when the year’s lease was up, their vehicle was down, and the landlord wanted their stuff the hell out of it.

We never understood how this arrangement could go undetected—and by we, I mean the children’s Grandma Irene, Ryan’s foster mom, and me. Clearly the kids were spending all their visiting time at Benny’s place, cruising around bareheaded on dirt bikes and four-wheelers with Benny’s grandson. Yes, I shuddered to think that Jessica’s boyfriend had grandchildren who were older than Michael. This was pre-reunification, so surely all we had to do was to somehow get DSS to see this, to realize that the judge’s order was being violated and that Jessica and the kids were not staying in that new place at all! Mom was still married, albeit to an inmate, yet she wanted the kids to spend their nights with a man they vividly remembered watching fight with their dad? Just a quick, pointed disclosure and DSS would realize that the whole housing situation was a scam, and then surely the reunification would dissolve and we’d have the children and be home free! They could even send Isabelle to our home, I thought, beneficent in abstraction.

The one big but? Somehow, this exposure of the children’s new living arrangements had to happen without appearing to come from us, because once the kids were back with their mom for good, she could cut all of us, even Grandma Irene, off completely. So how to move forward?

Isabelle’s foster mom had her business to run and a baby to consume her time; brisk and efficient, after caring for many dozen foster kids, she had seen it all and had a caring but more logical perspective than the rest of us did. Nothing that a judge or social worker did surprised her, and the process was just the process, in her view. So Ryan’s foster mom, Mona, would be the one to speak up, we decided. She was the one with nothing to lose, as she was in a hurry for Ryan to leave in the first place so she could settle her nieces, so she started to wonder aloud to the social worker if the kids actually were getting fed during these weekend days, because Ryan came back so hungry. Shouldn’t DSS be monitoring those weekend visits? Dropping in unannounced?

Mona raised enough doubt that the agency promised someone would drop in on the family—and, in fact, the head of our Child Protective Services unit at the time lived closer, so she would do it, rather than Kayla, the young social worker who had first worked so hard to get the children into custody and now seemed so determined to push them back out again.

And so the supervisor did stop by, on a Sunday morning, we were informed. And all was fine. Food in the cabinets. “No concerns.” Full speed ahead.

“Benny’s place is much more appropriate for kids,” Kayla quickly told me later that week while not meeting my eye. I was stunned; Mona and Grandma Irene were stunned. So Kayla had known—and her supervisor had known—that the family was at Benny’s place? Yet, in their view, apparently, Jessica had met the letter of the law—and maybe they just gambled that the law wouldn’t look. After all, I guessed, if Mom and the kids could live where she didn’t have to work to support herself, and could slide off their caseload and budget . . . “More appropriate than a trailer park—and, honestly,” Kayla shrugged, “Mom’s going to need the help.”

Also irrelevant was that neither Jessica nor Benny could drive legally, although they always had a vehicle. “We don’t get into law enforcement issues,” Kayla said.

(The only one who did care about licenses, it turned out, was the secretary of the new day care to which Jessica was slated to send Michael. She later confronted Jessica once or twice about dropping him off but having no driver’s license. And so the developmentally delayed Michael stopped going there and just stayed home or with Benny’s grown daughter instead.)

Unreal. Everyone knew—they’d just agreed to leave us out of the loop. And now, even worse, Jessica and Benny, who hated scrutiny more than anything, would know why DSS had come that weekend to check. Someone had put them up to it. Jessica, Benny, and the family social worker were all on one side, and we—Irene, Mona, and I—were on the other. Leaving the kids in the middle, obediently keeping the secret.

DO A quick search of internet comments about social worker interventions, and suddenly every commenter, left wing to right, is a Tea Party libertarian, so certain everything social workers do is government interference and overreach—“Getting in our business” is the all-purpose description. Whether it’s free-range kids, homesteading megafamilies living in tents, poverty rates of investigated families—the latest media outrage seems to bring liberals and libertarians together in judgment of social work. But at the time, when we were facing Michael’s imminent return to a new home with a sudden near stepdad, I wanted to demand: Where does all this “interference” happen? Because it sure isn’t here. Everything our social workers did, they ascribed to state codes and mandates that protect the primacy of parents’ rights, so was it really just our little agency that seemed so conscientiously cautious? So careful in their prescribed responses? So full of belief in the parental potential of people most of the rest of us would have written off? At the time I didn’t know what to believe or whom. I simply knew that my own beliefs, complaints, and hopes were entirely beside the point.

MY FEARS took deeper root when the children began to leave us—first brother Ryan, five, and sister Isabelle, almost seven, went back together to Jessica; then, two weeks later, at just over two years of age, Michael left foster care with us and joined his siblings and mother in her boyfriend’s remote, phoneless trailer, more than seventy minutes from our home. How could this be called reunification, I bitterly asked Mona, when the children were moving—I certainly couldn’t say returning—to a family configuration that had never existed, to a home in a county where they had never officially lived, to a home that was not leased in their mother’s name, and to a situation in which a judge had ordered the children should not live? At the same time, to fulfill the court’s decree the family was renting a crummier and more expensive town trailer in which they had never spent a night, paid for by government housing funds; the unused trailer was the essence of government waste, which perfectly suited the landlord.

I STILL don’t understand how this situation could have happened, but neither that supervisor nor the social worker stayed at the agency much longer. Yet, if we’d made any kind of a protest, well . . . we’d signed the foster parent agreement that we would actively support the agency’s reunification goals and never interfere.

“You’re not going to stop this,” the social worker told the director of our day care who had called to report Michael’s “belt, belt” warnings after the weekend visits. They would all go to live with the boyfriend with the ice-blue eyes and endless suitcases of Busch beer in the trunk of his car. “Nothing’s going to stop this.”

And nothing did.

NIGHT OR DAY

Our experience as foster parents was unusual. Unusually unusual, given how different each child and family’s experience can be. Michael had indeed stayed with us six months before being returned to this new incarnation of his family (Dad newly out of jail and Mom living in the next county with a much older boyfriend—hardly an uncommon relationship dynamic, I was to discover). Amazingly, we were able to remain involved after reunification, thanks to Michael’s paternal grandmother and his still-young mother, Jessica. At first I was filled with cold doubt and despair when Jessica hesitated to let me plan a visit during Michael’s first weeks back home; I didn’t know whether to blame the social worker, who might well have advised a break from us to let Michael settle, or Jessica’s boyfriend, who seemed eager to fence his new family off from any more prying eyes or interference, or my own voracious need to cling to Michael and nail down some assurance of a future with him. Most likely, it was a combination of the three that initially scared Jessica away. But after a couple of false starts, she stayed true to her word: Michael had lost enough people already, she’d often said, and didn’t have to lose Will and me. Jessica had lost plenty of special people herself, she would tell me, from her only protective and nurturing relative to the afterschool support team that had cheered her through middle school to the teachers who’d wept when she was pulled out of ninth grade to tend her siblings at home. Even the destruction of her first hard-earned car, which had been borrowed without her permission and wrecked, sounded like the soul-killing loss of one more treasured relationship. So whatever resistance, natural jealousy, or awkwardness Jessica might have faced in allowing Will and me to maintain our bond with Michael as he grew, she would not let her youngest child lose the love and support of which she had been robbed repeatedly herself. I longed to believe this, but I knew there were conditions—and that Benny held sway over all decisions.

For Michael and his siblings, home life was often chaotic, traumatic, dangerous, exciting, and unpredictable—sometimes visibly so and always weighted with secrets and adult pressures. Before, during, and after foster care, older sister Isabelle clung to the role of little mother to Michael, while Ryan and Michael often believed themselves responsible for the well-being of Jessica and Benny.

Despite how friendly and bluntly honest he could be, I was terrified of Benny, whose background check had not raised concerns at DSS: his record showed prison time and lost driver’s licenses—but no substantiated child abuse. The same boyfriend taught the boys one of their favorite sayings—“It’s not a threat, it’s a promise”—and never went anywhere without a knife pouch on his belt. To this day, the teenage Michael hates walking in the dark, even if he is holding my hand, because he remembers running for his life from Benny’s shouted threats through the night, pulling his mom along as she stumbled. Benny’s white-blue eyes shock even now when called up on a computer image search; in a nonstop stream of talk, he’d enumerate for any stranger the elements of his swirling inner turmoil, an uproar that Michael came to believe only he could quell. And when Michael was a teen and at last in our custody, he would ask if our family could get into the witness protection program, although we were never part of any case against Benny.

Also unsettling was that Jessica was almost young enough to have been my daughter, while Benny and I were of the same generation, albeit worlds apart culturally and economically. And I eventually heard that before their removal, Michael’s siblings had seen Benny and their father fighting and supposedly trying to stab each other in a parking lot; for years the boys revisited this story, insisting it was “over a dog.” They later admitted seeing Benny choke their mother as well, but they knew to keep that a secret from us. From fear of Benny, but even more, I guessed, of betraying the family and losing the mother they had only recently regained. The idea that such violence might cause her to leave Benny and take the children with her was not the simple option it might appear, no matter how much help she was offered; the kids seemed to know that keeping their mom was a package deal, bound to the very force that might destroy her.

These children breathed fear on a daily basis—fear mingled with the ever-present cigarette smoke so its scent was no longer detectable, just part of the air. Unsurprisingly, that was how Benny said he had spent his childhood as well, trying to protect himself and his mother from alcohol-fueled violence, and never knowing safety or freedom until he’d grown big enough to fight back. That such cycles repeat is news to no one; the question of how to stop them in the next generation is what confounds parents of all kinds.

Back before reunification, I thought I understood why Michael needed to return to his mother and siblings—so long as Jessica fit my version of single-mom nobility. So long, I guess, as her choices of how and where to live and with whom were not hers to make. But, of course, those choices were all part of the basic American freedom package of having her life and kids back. And I shared the social worker’s muttered doubt that still-fragile Jessica could handle and financially support three spirited kids on her own.

IN THE PICTURE

At DSS you learn that every birth parent is called “Mom,” or, more rarely, “Dad,” as in “Mom was appropriate” or “Dad’s in jail” or “We’ve given Mom a month to get it together.” Maybe it’s shorthand that saves the trouble of remembering names; or maybe all clients have somehow blended into one dysfunctional parent. It’s this way as well, we learned, in school, mental health, and juvenile court counselors’ offices, where the kids always have first names, often infamous ones, and the parents don’t; where Mom and Dad get pronounced with practiced neutrality. “But Mom’s got to do her part,” social workers will warn, or, more charitably, “We can give Mom some vouchers.” Meaning she can get a couch she has no means of transporting to her home, and all the used blue jeans she can stuff into a grocery sack at the church-run thrift store. Given a month, wouldn’t that help anyone get it together?

INTO THE WOODS

The Path of Needles, The Path of Pins . . . this was the choice offered Red Riding Hood by the wolf in an early version of her story. Both were bad options for navigating the deep, dark woods on the way to the Grandmother’s house, where the wolf would famously wait, ready to spring his trap. Needles? Pins? I’ve seen explanations that range from sexual metaphors to evocation of a dressmaking apprenticeship—no one seems to know the original source; to me, these routes described the always painful, always hazardous paths I trod toward and around Michael’s family, with forks that offered only bad choices. I knew, too, that a stumble over the thinnest root can send you back to the starting place. You can never put your foot down securely, never even know if you are moving forward—or toward what.

There was no right way to walk this walk, so I picked my way through the dark wood from day to day, straining to spot breadcrumb clues, always fearing I’d never find my way back into Michael’s life again.

PATH OF NEEDLES

I had never fully believed we’d get to visit after Michael went back to his mother, especially after Jessica pulled the plug on the very first visit we’d planned. She had asked the confused DSS director to call at the last minute to inform me the visit was off—a call that had sent me cascading into grief and the certainty that the family would deliberately disappear into the cliffs and chasms of the next county. Then, a month after his return, Jessica offered to let Michael come visit us the weekend after Thanksgiving. Everything went perfectly until I took Michael back that Sunday evening: we met halfway in a Wendy’s parking lot, and as I handed Michael to his mother and Benny, Michael cried my name and he reached out to come back to me instead of going to Jessica. I saw Benny’s eyes flare—as the all but official stepdad, he clearly gave the orders now, and he pulled Michael sharply away. Michael reached for me again, wailing. I couldn’t reach back: I had to pin my arms to my sides and keep the dumb plastic grin glued to my mouth, the ultimate betrayal. I drove back home in despair, sure this was the end.

But thanks to their grandmother Irene, who continued to keep the children every other weekend as she had before and during foster care, I was able to spend many Sunday afternoons hugging and playing cars with two-year-old Michael. It was incredible good luck: simply getting to see him this way gave me the patience to hang on when I started to panic. I even got to experience an approximation of Christmas that first winter when Irene invited me to spend the Saturday afternoon before the holiday with all three kids at her home, sharing lunch and watching them go through the Christmas motions. Michael sat on my lap, playing with the antenna on his new remote control truck as Ryan and Isabelle leapt from couch to coffee table in new onesie leopard pajamas, tearing open presents and Precious Moments bibles, while I-Carly and Sam bickered from the TV.

After Christmas, I got my nerve up and asked Jessica to let Michael visit again for several days of our university break and for weekends now and then, to which she agreed as if nothing had happened. But I always feared this arrangement might suddenly end, simply because Benny had decided that Michael and I were too close. At the end of each visit, I begged Will to make the drive with me and be the one to pass Michael back, just in case.

SHORTLY AFTER New Year’s I found out the family’s case had been closed. DSS had released them, and months earlier than I’d expected. Full stop. So I was shocked, a few weeks into January, when Irene called and asked me to stop by her work. Breathless, she told me that the boys’ sister had raised alarms at her new school and that the guidance counselor had summoned their county’s DSS in response to her disclosure.

Isabelle? I was staggered. The first-grader who had cried and pined and begged through half a year of foster care to go back with her mother? I knew she hated Benny, who had usurped her beloved father’s place. But how terrible must things be if Isabelle was the one causing an alarm?

She had seen Mom’s new boyfriend smoking from a pipe, like her dad used to, the girl had said. “A pipe” could have meant marijuana; it could have meant crack or meth. Regardless, she must have hoped that telling the counselor would bring the ceiling crashing in. Maybe Isabelle pictured her mom, brothers, and estranged dad coming back together for a happily-ever-after ending.

“She doesn’t like my rules,” Jessica explained, “all because I wouldn’t let her eat potato chips for breakfast that day. Was I wrong not to let her?”

Was this what I’d been praying for? Didn’t something have to happen now? My lungs inflated with an impure mix of hope and dread.

But then—nothing.

Michael did not magically reappear in our crib, and Jessica and Benny’s TracFone was perennially out of minutes. All we heard was that Benny had been required to show up at the courthouse for a drug test. And that he’d been furious. And that then, when one of the new county’s social workers had come out to Benny’s trailer, Isabelle had run up into the woods and hidden until the worker had heard Jessica’s story and left again. There was a missing piece somewhere: Why didn’t the social worker go talk to Isabelle at school? Ask the child why she was afraid? With my usual trust in authority, I assumed something was going on behind the scenes with the new DSS, something we couldn’t see or know.

For two or three weeks, apparently, Isabelle was not allowed to eat with her brothers, and she had to sit apart at the Little Tikes table. With the whole family in the car, Benny drove her down the road in the dark and threatened to keep driving her right back to the foster home where she’d had to eat all her food and go off to her room if she wanted to cry. Then, abruptly, still attributing what Isabelle had said to revenge for being denied potato chips, Jessica and Benny sent Isabelle to live with Irene, where she remained, going back only for visits. And given the strange lifelong tension between Benny and Isabelle, Jessica must have sensed her daughter would be much safer growing up there.

Once Isabelle was gone, I held my breath, elated for her liberation despite the loss of her dream. Plus, she had been especially close to her father’s mother, so it seemed like a natural fit that could provide the family comfort she seemed to have been craving. “I think the kids are all coming out of there,” said a friend’s cousin who knew the family through a different service agency. Maybe it would all be over, just like that! Maybe my months of fearful longing since Michael had moved home and out of DSS custody had all been a necessary nightmare. Maybe we’d paid our dues karmically, and Michael—maybe even his brother—would be back with us for good!

It was February, and my hopes soared that things might go wrong enough that Michael would be removed and sent back to us. That was when I first started proposing all manner of bargains to God—a compulsion that would continue for years—for I was painfully aware it would take a catastrophe for Social Services to intervene to that degree. Whatever the possible disaster, I prayed ceaselessly that the children would escape unscathed physically and not die in the process. While that might sound like any parent’s daily irrational fear, the only irrational part was the conviction that my own constant panic kept him safe, in some strange, cosmic balance. If I relaxed my vigilance for a second or let myself get lost in an enjoyable moment, I felt the worst might befall Michael and his family. I kept thinking of the high-rise apartment block in an old Monty Python sketch, which collapses to rubble the minute its tenants forget to believe in it. But it was no joke to me. I was relieved eventually to learn there was an actual name for this—“vicarious trauma,” which caregivers, along with counselors, are prone to suffer.

AS MUCH as everyone had wanted Jessica to be the very model of the bootstrap Single Mom, keep her fast-food job, and strike out on her own with all three kids and their electronic welfare (EBT) card, clearly that was not ever going to be: sending Isabelle to live with her Grandma Irene was for the best. Jessica believed I was the only person who considered her a good parent, and not a bad one, for doing it, and I did. I still do. And yet I had secretly, selfishly hoped that having three kids to juggle would make everything break down more quickly and visibly. And I worried: What if having only two kids made life manageable or made the chaos more concealable, at least?

Isabelle’s departure made clear to both boys what happened when someone failed the basic loyalty test. Ryan, especially, never forgot this and made keeping family secrets his specialty. And like his elders, he often spoke of facts, arrangements, and events in a rushed, jumbled, confounding, broken way that, purposely or not, further obscured any truth and avoided confrontation while leaving the listener unsure of what he’d said and afraid or embarrassed to press for specifics. It was the perfect cloaking device.

DAY AND NIGHT

My acquaintance’s prophecy to the contrary, the boys did not “come out of there” as their sister did, but on and off, as Benny and Jessica gradually allowed Michael to visit with Will and me, we became more friendly and operated with the illusion of trust. We let that polite illusion settle over everything, but it seemed then as delicate as one of those foil emergency blankets that reflects body heat but seems likely to blow away or be crumpled up and thrown away in an instant. Even so, absolutely nothing required that Jessica allow Michael to see us, and at almost any point for the next decade she had the full right to cut our ties completely and at any moment.

No matter how illusory that veneer of trust was, I sincerely believed that anything I might do to help any close or extended family member, child or adult, find medical care or community opportunities or simply to get from one place to another would strengthen the whole in some small way and bond us through experience and goodwill.

Beyond that, I tried to use my letter-writing skills to help Benny resolve any number of bureaucratic issues. My reliable phone and computer gave me the ability and persistence to track down answers, while my convenient credit card too often made utility cutoffs and medical bills magically disappear. Will hired Jessica’s brother, father, and Benny to re-roof our garage; we shared Thanksgiving and Scout potlucks, where conservative Christian parents overlooked the long hair and alcohol-infused slurring, accepted Benny’s offers to assemble the pinewood derby track for the boys’ annual wooden car competition, and said nothing when he cussed out the judge for the regional race.

But Benny seemed never more purposeful than when it would fall to him to take Michael or Ryan up into the hills on his four-wheeler and comfort them about the most recent failings of their birth father, Luke—everything from a missed visit to another prison sentence. Benny was there for them, he wanted them to know: for good and bad, this understanding sank in. Certainly at times the boys loved Benny and felt sorry for him when he suffered days-long spells of silent sadness. The boys would creep around the house, watching videos or playing Guitar Hero on mute, or they messed around outside in the woods with scavenged car parts for hours, as Benny lay in the corner of a darkened room, haunted by old losses, a sheet draped over the window to mute the light. Often at these times, Jessica would call to ask if I wanted to come get the boys for a few days, knowing I’d jump at the chance. “Can’t Mom come with us, too?” the boys would often beg me, fearing they’d return to find her dead, not knowing I’d asked her myself, out of their hearing. Occasionally, she would allow me to drop her off somewhere, but usually she’d say that Benny was harmless at that point and that she was afraid to leave him alone in a depressed condition. Relieved as the boys seemed once they’d climbed into my car, I was sure they felt guilty to leave her behind.

Seeing Benny laid low, it was hard to picture his frightening rages, much less the usual brassy cheer and party spirit he brought to everything when he felt okay. In good times, Benny loved to work and seemed to feel most himself when working, whether work was crawling across a roof in blistering July heat, replacing spark plugs for a neighbor, or rolling paint down a wall in invisibly blended strokes. Work was his salvation, but there was never enough of it to last long.

As time went on, though, I noticed that Jessica began to arrange never to be alone with Benny, whether that was by babysitting cousins’ kids, offering a couch to semihomeless friends, or even allowing Michael to stay behind to soothe Benny through an extra-bad morning and saddle himself with the impossible burden of curing an adult’s grief.

Jessica watched the moon phases, as I began to, half-believing the full moon predicted the times of greatest danger. I worried Benny might die at his low times, but that they all might die at the peak ones. I tried hard never to be out of phone range. I didn’t travel out of state or overnight without them. And I knowingly missed the last years of my only grandmother’s life because she lived across the ocean. No one asked me to do this. I just knew I couldn’t leave them.

FOR ONCE in my life, I wanted people to tell me my dread was baseless—that I was being paranoid and overreacting. I never doubted that Benny loved Jessica and her kids, yet no one who knew Michael’s family, from within or without, thought my fear for their lives an exaggeration, least of all the children. (“We’re a re-active agency,” different social workers would tell me apologetically the few times I directly dared to seek them out. “We can’t react to something that hasn’t happened yet.”) For a decade my heart twisted coldly in my chest every time I read or heard about a father, stepfather, or boyfriend who had killed an entire family. Sometimes these killings came out of fury, revenge, or impending loss. Even more alarming was when the killer reportedly had decided that life was too painful to live, so he would spare his loved ones in advance. And who could predict the amplifying effects of alcohol and drugs on moods that could shift from day to night within an hour?

Plus it wasn’t just self-medication: Jessica’s desperate fix when marijuana failed to soothe Benny’s fury or despair was to stuff as many Valium as she could find down his throat and hope he’d sleep his way out of it. It’s not even that he was averse to seeking help or spilling a blue streak of terrifying emotions and histories to any professional who would listen; it wasn’t that there were no basic resources for the uninsured and desperate. The help was there, at least to the frustration-filled degree it may be for those who lack means and reliable transportation and are tired of being told what to do, but to me Benny seemed just too ill for the system—too damaged by life and chemistry; too numbed by mood stabilizers; too pulled by his morning beer and all day vodka-spiked Sprite; too yoked by the addictions from which he claimed he’d saved girlfriends; and too purely dangerous for any woman or child to live with.

Except that they did. So why would no one, least of all DSS—or Mom herself—put a stop to it? When, Will and I implored each other, would Jessica ever really leave him? I ranted for years to anyone foolish or caring enough to ask how Michael was doing or, with a worried glance, how “Mom” was doing. And Grandma—biodad Luke’s mom, Irene—and I would rage together to each other, demanding answers of the air.

To her great credit, Jessica often would call me when Benny was near his worst—although I realized I would never see his actual worst, and hers, which might have gotten the kids removed. Jessica knew I’d drive over to get them at any hour, whether they were a county away and it was snowing, or (later) back in this county, which meant winding across eleven miles of gravel above the river’s edge. “Please, phone me anytime,” I begged her.

“Hopefully, she’ll keep calling you” was all our social worker Gerri would say—could say. Until the kids were in imminent, concrete danger, awaiting a midnight rescue by police whom the kids couldn’t call with a crushed or drowned cell phone, by police whom Jessica, the boys, and her parents had been taught from birth never, ever to call. That was the moment when Social Services could legally step in.

NEED TO KNOW

Eight months later the state was doing a random check on the disposition of the county’s cases and picked Jessica’s family file, apparently by chance. A representative from the state was coming to the area, and each of us had to show up and speak with him—separately, like criminals, I thought, to see if our stories matched. We were getting to visit with Michael every couple of weeks then, so I had already started treading lightly, feeling for tremors, ever alert for a misstep. What if I said something negative that the representative would then question Jessica about? She would see I’d known more than she’d realized and that she was right not to trust me. (The one card I held—both major asset and liability—was Jessica’s mistaken belief that I could bring in the authorities.)

The representative was young and looked like any gigantic college boy suddenly boxed into a borrowed suit. The state’s questions were designed to elicit nothing but predetermined short answers—no open-ended questions, none of the “tell me about x” openings that workers from Child Protective Services used to coax information from kids.

I do wonder what he would have done if I’d asked about where the family had been allowed to live and described how they’d gone against the judge’s order. But alienating Jessica would mean losing access to Michael—and she was definitely slated to be interviewed after I was. More important, I could not afford to alienate DSS now, in case Michael and his siblings did come back into the system. Our section of DSS had as its new director a former social worker, someone I deeply trusted. So I was careful as I sat in that dark little office going through unexpected questions. For some reason I was seated beside the representative instead of across from him; the arrangement meant no subtext could possibly show through my expression. He leaned up against a desk and wrote brief answers on a clipboard; as he read the list of questions, his main focus was on what we’d been told about the reasons for Michael’s coming into foster care. Surprised, I explained that we had not been told much of anything, aside from the frustrated remark by the social worker that “Mom’s not doing what she’s supposed to”—an explanation that could have described virtually any case in the system.

I’d always had the impression that “need to know” was the social workers’ standard for sharing anything—coupled with the understanding that we might expect most of the behavior we saw from children in foster care but never comprehend the reasons for it. Jessica had frequently complained to me that they had never told her why they were taking the kids and that she’d been “clean” at the point they did; I believed her and could not understand the reason either.

Yet I also could not understand why DSS had not taken the kids far sooner, especially after they heard about the dog urine smell and chest rattle that Michael brought to day care when he attended, and the stories that his sister Isabelle began to whisper. Back during that first summer when we fostered Michael, Isabelle had directed me along a series of steep and rutted back roads to take her to see their old trailer, neither of us knowing it had been condemned and burned; Jessica often mentioned bitterly that Michael’s father had carried him as an infant into another trailer across the county that had caught fire and exploded a mere two hours later. So why hadn’t the kids been removed much sooner? Whatever the story, those two blackened, toxic trailers seemed like reason enough.

“Had the workers mentioned domestic violence?” the representative kept asking, and I was mystified. Well, no, but Michael’s parents were no longer together, and it had sounded like things were still in a honeymoon phase with Benny. Maybe this was just a generic question asked of everyone—or could it be the real purpose of a state survey? It was clear to me that Michael had been exposed to fighting: he could not bear even slightly raised voices at the dinner table the couple of times Will and I stupidly had argued in front of him. Michael had put his hands on his ears and bellowed. So I knew that fighting or domestic violence had to be part of the problem, but, given all the chatter about the chronic problems of our region—dropout rates, child hunger, child neglect, meth labs, oxycodone, lack of transportation, lack of housing, lack of jobs, lack of healthcare, lack of fathers, and overall generational poverty—I’d figured that adult domestic violence was just one more standard ingredient in a poisonous brew that was causing foster care case numbers to rise. (“There’s no meth case I’ve seen that has not involved domestic violence,” a detective told our training group a couple of years later.)

Maybe the representative asked other families about the whole meth situation, which was exploding in the county’s consciousness at that point, front and center. Or maybe, like the benefits of our spring water, it somehow had not yet registered on the consciousness of the capital.

Locally, sheriff’s deputies were going around to all the civic groups and presenting slide shows of crime scenes and pictures of the kitchen sinks where dirty baby bottles were jumbled together with old matchboxes, turpentine cans, and other meth-manufacturing crap. I must have seen that slide show at least three times, wondering at the flip-book-style progression of a dozen real faces before, during, and after meth, going from firefighters’ carnival beauty queen to skin-draped skull. Trainers told us repeatedly that during meth busts of trailers, kids were sprayed with fire hoses to decontaminate them—as if being carried from their homes by strangers in the dark was not horror enough—before being taken to the hospital for late-night evaluation. Their hair strands were plucked to test for meth exposure, and they moved on to emergency placements wearing hospital bracelets and oversized new tracksuits. All their clothes and toys were supposed to be confiscated, further amplifying their loss, but kids’ consignment stores were booming at the time, and who was really watching to see if adults came sneaking back?

RACCOON RIDGE

Through the long, snowy spring after Michael had left his new day care following the dispute over who could drive him, Jessica allowed me to keep him from early morning until evening every Wednesday—the day I had set aside for grading, which I then crammed into the overnight hours or any others I could, just to have those eleven hours to pour into Michael.

That summer, he came for more weekends and another beach vacation week, but for much of it I was consumed with jealousy as Jessica worked sporadically at a fast-food job and sent him over to Destinee, one of Benny’s grown daughters who lived a few miles away with her son and husband, Denver. Long-limbed and pretty, with Snow White’s heart-shaped face and raven hair, she wore thick eyeliner and mascara that gave her eyes a harsh cast; in conversation she moved up close and entertained whoever was present with rowdy charisma and a frequent smoker’s laugh. For no visible cost, she kept Michael and Ryan every day with her own son and some neighboring kids who seemed to wander in. She fed them hot dogs on forks, obsessively cleaned their ears with bobby pins, and toilet trained Michael (after all my tedious race car potty sticker charts and praise) by having him spend the day naked and going like a dog outside. This method worked great, his mom and others agreed—it was how everyone potty-trained in summer, diapers cost too damn much. And now, in Jessica and Benny’s car, he wore big kids’ underwear beneath gigantic T-shirts.

Destinee’s home on Raccoon Ridge sat atop a series of sharp switchbacks flanked by dizzying drop-offs that seemed as effective as a medieval moat for keeping strangers away. A three-sided deck was built onto the house, and although it was then early in the super-electronics age, their living/dining room had the largest-screen TV I’ve still ever seen—no doubt salvaged from one of Denver’s commercial jobs—with gigantic soap opera faces talking desperately, their stereo-amplified dialogue dogging every real-life conversation.

Relentlessly competitive, Destinee was either Jessica’s best friend or treacherous enemy, depending on the week. From what I gathered, she hadn’t actually lived with Benny during her childhood, but her uncanny knack for reading people’s vulnerabilities, drawing them in and getting them to meet her needs, and lying convincingly about the plain truth even when the stakes were nonexistent—all this seemed to signal that wherever she’d grown up, it had been in round-the-clock survival mode, having to struggle for every scrap. Such survival tactics are hard enough to accept compassionately in a child; when they’ve hardened into adult behavior, they are near-impossible to respond to with anything but outrage. With Destinee you never knew if she knew she was purposely pushing your buttons or if it had long become second nature—but she was so good at it that I’d always blame myself and bite back a reaction. In her party-girl rasp, Destinee would talk about Michael possessively—“you just love hot dogs the way I fix ’em, don’t you, honey?”—then laugh about how he’d suddenly disappeared and was found outside, pooping in the yard. She was planning to fix him a Thomas the Tank Engine birthday cake because he adored trains—how could I fault her for that? How could she have known I wanted to buy him the perfect Thomas sheet cake, tracks and all, from the grocery store bakery? I just wanted to either cry or scream.

Why, if Michael wasn’t staying home with his mom—why, if he was spending the days at Destinee’s—could he not just come to me? Clutching the steering wheel around the bends, I drove up Raccoon Ridge twice to pick him up and felt my stomach curl with resentment. I tried to drop hints to Jessica, because I knew that if I asked outright to keep him on these summer days, she would refuse in some utterly confusing way to avoid the discomfort of having to say no directly. I would appreciate Michael, teach him, love him (spoil him, I could guarantee Benny would say—and I knew they said that among themselves all the time, meaning the normal, unextravagant things I did for Michael, such as taking him to a swimming pool or library magic show). I’d happily drive him back and forth twice a day, whatever. Ryan too, gladly. But Jessica’s job seemed to vaporize, and then she and the kids were hanging out all day and evening with Destinee while Benny and Denver were out working. I took what time I could get, drawing comfort from Michael’s carrying around in his pocket a tiny plastic farm wife figurine that he thought was modeled on me—he called it “my Debbie,” and he also had one he called “Will” that perched, cowless, on a milking stool. But Michael’s face still looked narrow and pinched, like that of an aging elf, as it had since he’d first gone back home. Now only when he was asleep did I see his nose, his cheeks, his lips regain their soft, round shape. How long before he would forget about me?

IT WAS hard to get a read on Destinee, for she always seemed always to be “on” and poised for action. I wondered how she’d come to live in this state, when Benny was from elsewhere, but I knew that asking would be rude if not disastrous. She was an indoor chain smoker; crewcut her son’s and Ryan’s hair for summer, as most local families did; and thought nothing of “popping” children on the wrist or behind if they “needed it.” Her voice was always a little too loud, as if she had grown used to speaking over blasting metal music or TV, and her thickly lined eyes were always brimming with energy. And consciously or otherwise, she could pack more subtext and landmines into a sentence than any playwright I’d ever read.

The second time I picked Michael and Ryan up on Raccoon’s Ridge, Destinee cornered me—although it was not in a corner but in the middle of her living room. I felt cornered anyway.

“So Ryan says you’re a Jewish.” No noun.

True to Destinee’s instincts, this was something I had tried to keep unstated. I didn’t need anything to differentiate me even further—it was quite enough to be the strait-laced foster parent among the family’s four-wheeling Don’t-Tread-on-Me crowd.

I steeled my smile for some hostile comment or, worse, some request for financial advice. She stood two inches from me, her large blue eyes paling. I could tell from her tone that she was not going to issue the usual invitation to come to church—and even though Destinee wore a cross, I’d never heard any mention of their actually going to one of the fundamentalist churches around them.

Yet this turned out to be the most human interchange we’d ever have. “I loved The Passion of the Christ,” Destinee told me. Mel Gibson’s movie, with its infamously sadistic gore, had just come out on video, and she and all the kids had watched it three times on the enormous living room screen. “I’ve been looking for someone to ask—what was that language they were speaking? When Ryan told me what you were, I thought you would know.”

So of all the terrible accusations that she might have made about Jews, especially after seeing that movie, hers was just a simple, burning fan question about Aramaic. And somehow I knew the answer. I learned then that she had been raised Catholic, which both surprised and reassured me a little, though I’m not sure of what. I’d definitely gotten off easy.

“You and Will should come to our four-wheeler parties,” Destinee told me another time, in front of Benny and a garage full of his friends who were assembling for Michael a ride-in plastic car I’d bought him. I was hoping they’d help him do it, as I was unable to, but these grown men were having too much fun solving the tricolor plastic puzzle themselves. “We go for, like, three days,” Destinee continued. “Y’all should come.” I cringed, hoping no specific dates would follow. Whatever went on in those parties, I didn’t want to be trapped in complicity.

Four-wheelers were the enemy, in my predictable view, bringing a daily roulette of death, paralysis, or brain damage for these kids. I was hugely relieved every time they had to pawn one of the ATVs. Although Benny often promised to take us on one of the unreliable four-wheelers when it was running, Destinee and Denver’s alcohol-driven four-wheeler weekend was the last place Benny and Jessica would want Will and me. I didn’t know if Destinee meant this invitation sincerely—it was the greatest thing she had to offer—or whether it was just to laugh at us or rile Jessica. Destinee’s first impulse was always triangulation, I would soon learn—so automatic and perfectly executed that I couldn’t even tell if she knew she was doing it. Another hardwon survival skill, no doubt, but hard to appreciate when I was the one in the middle of it. Still, I was always mystified that they didn’t all always act like we were extensions of the DSS machinery. (Jessica claimed to like the social workers—and well she might, for all the practical help and encouragement they had given her.) Was it because they knew I had everything to lose or because they actually saw the sincere ally I often tried to be? Was I just overthinking everything, as usual? As for Destinee in particular, did the invitation come from her disruptive reflexes or did she simply see everyone as potential party material?

THROUGH THE few years I witnessed, Destinee sowed chaos and was fueled by it, provoking feuds and betrayals, building brief alliances, and even likely saving Jessica’s life by a well-timed call to the police, which went unappreciated, to say the least.

In truth, she was severely ill and addicted. The kids believed she had made her own young son smoke and then cough for the doctor so she could get codeine; and when a padlock was picked and half of Ryan’s huge bottle of tonsillectomy pain medication disappeared, the suspicion immediately fell on Destinee and her friends. Jessica would have to make a police report to replace it, I told her; seething as she was, she chose to gamble that Ryan wouldn’t really need it all—and he didn’t. My urging Jessica to report it, I see now, was typically naive—in Jessica’s world, suffering from the actions of others was always preferable to snitching. And although at that point they were not speaking, Destinee’s life had fallen apart and she was living on Jessica and Benny’s couch and eating their food—because she had nowhere else to go. Having “nowhere else to go” was a reason I came to realize trumped everything, on both sides of the family, no matter the difficult situations it led to. Was there a line between being Christian and enabling? Between protecting family members and being consumed by them? Who was I to say? Was it actually my family?

STEPPING STONES

Before he’d been home a year, we began getting Michael every other weekend. I was thrilled, and I lived by counting down to those days. Friday evenings I was filled with the joy of reunion and the need to make every little meal and activity perfect; I would lie down and sleep curled to him, just to absorb every possible moment through my skin. Sunday mornings my heart would fill with dread and I would be counting down hours in the other direction instead. Will and I took both boys back to Benny’s place on Sunday afternoons—Ryan had come to us from his grandmother’s—and Ryan would often have tantrums in our Subaru, kicking the seat and hammering the ceiling. Why didn’t I think that our destination might be the cause? Instead, I thought his incoherent tantrums were directed at us or stemmed from his inability to spend more than ten minutes in a car. Ryan didn’t really seem to notice us otherwise, so I was surprised when Jessica sent Ryan to us by himself for a weekend to distract him from a week of extreme distress after his father was in a serious accident. I was amazed but glad that Jessica thought we could be some comfort or provide some distraction.

I was always sweating over what would be too much to ask for and what would scare Michael’s family off. But Jessica said yes to almost everything I asked to do with Michael or Ryan. Once their school year started, I did anything I could think of to be with them, driving more than an hour each way to take Ryan home from an after-school Cub Scout meeting, both so he could have that all-American normalizing experience and so I could push Michael on the playground swings. That winter and spring I babysat them weekly at a horrible pizza joint (burned crust, dry pizza topping)—flipping the jukebox cards and giving up quarters to blast Lynyrd Skynyrd and Hank Williams Jr., pulling the boys down off the wooden booth dividers, chasing them, policing their squabbles, and finding new ways to waste time in a boring place when I didn’t want that time to end—all while Benny went to a required treatment group in the town hall basement. He couldn’t be seen illegally driving himself to the meeting, so he and Jessica would switch places in a shopping center parking lot.

I didn’t care if I was enabling, helping, whatever—I just hoarded the minutes and hours with Michael, wherever and whenever. As for my three classes, my sixty students—the upside was that I no longer obsessed so much about grading and teaching. Or at least I piled another, much heavier, obsession on top of my anxiety about work. I barely slept, except in two-hour spurts, and my goal was to plow through the grading of stacks of student stories. I was just doing what I could—at home, at school—to make it through to the next moment of relief when I’d see Michael’s face break into a smile—“It’s my Debba!” Wherever and whenever. Whatever it took, it was worth it.

PICNIC

For several years I supported Jessica in all the practical ways I could, including helping her attend community college and a workforce readiness program. Yes, I wanted more chances to see Michael and Ryan, but part of me also genuinely wanted to see justice done: Surely it was not too late for Jessica to get back some of the life she’d been robbed of as a teen? Against her wishes, she often told me, her parents had forced her to quit the school she loved in ninth grade so she could take care of her younger siblings. And these were not homesteading, haymaking farm days—this was the early 1990s, and her parents wanted their eldest girl at home so they could go out and party.

I continued to run into Jessica’s former teachers who, after seeing us together, would pull me aside and say, “Oh, I worried so about her every time she came to school” and “I was so sorry when she quit.” I would want to reward their sympathy with a glimpse of a happy ending and an Educating Rita optimism about the power of education, but if I mentioned she was in a community college class, their eyes would narrow nonetheless and they’d say, referring to Michael and Ryan, “I’m so glad those boys have you.” Unlike me, then, perhaps these grade-school teachers saw the big picture, sensing without knowing what lay ahead: that despite passing a semester, Jessica would not be able to go back to classes after receiving financial aid and disappearing mid-semester, once for serious health reasons but once coerced, in my opinion.

I never did know what to say when people I looked up to, like those retired teachers, would say they were glad the boys had Will and me or something similar. Usually, I’d unravel their comfort and set them straight, saying I was deeply grateful to Jessica for keeping the boys in my life but that I had no power to keep them safe. An abrupt way to repay a kind sentiment, but why should anyone rest easy if I didn’t? I am superstitious as well, so I often felt that a kind comment was a bad omen I had to undercut—don’t let down your guard, I wanted to say. My foster parent friends would have said, “Pray for us”—words I often wanted to say but, as a Jewish atheist, didn’t have the nerve to speak. “If you see something, say something” was more the gist of it—please go ahead and make the call about whatever it might be. (A Big Brother–type volunteer told me, almost offhand, ten months after he’d gone to pick up Michael at home for the first and only time, that he’d been shocked to find Michael’s mom unable even to get up to see them off—if only he’d told his mentoring supervisor right away, they’d have had to report it, and perhaps Michael’s whole house of cards might have folded. He could have avoided so much. Instead, the well-meaning mentor’s solution had been to have me bring Michael directly from school to meet him.)

I was so sure the last days were coming—it was just a matter of when and where the boys would be when the perfect storm of triggers hit, setting off Benny’s personal apocalypse. I didn’t mean to be rude or just shrug off any stranger’s kindness, but the more comfortable and complacent anyone felt about the boys’ fate, I believed, the more surely disaster was bound to come.

BUT IN the meantime all Jessica had had to say was that she wanted to go back to school and I snapped to it, concocting a plan that exhausts me to even think about now. For half of a fall semester and all of the following summer one, I drove from my county to the next, picked up Jessica, brought her back to the community college, turned around and got Michael from his third new preschool and took him to work with me, taught my class, went and got Jessica, and took them back again to pick up Ryan from afterschool care and then home again. In the summer semester, I wasn’t working and it was all much simpler—just long days spent with Jessica and the boys that were as gratifying to me as the experience seemed to be for her.

For Jessica, even attending the community college as a regular part-time student with a basic course plan was a triumph. It was even more of a boost when she realized that she was one of the few students consistently doing the work outside of class in a room full of dour recent high school graduates. The teachers liked her for this, she said, and respected her for being a mom. It was probably the first time in her life she had felt like a role model. I wanted her to bask in it, and I was thrilled when she would talk about the book they were analyzing or phone me simply to ask about a verb form. The mini-essays she wrote and printed out on a rickety dot matrix printer were all connected to her life and opinions—another thing she rarely had been invited to express, other than personal gripes about people.

The biggest triumph of all came a few weeks into her second, restarted semester after difficult surgery had made it impossible to complete the first. This was in the summer, when she was made class note taker for her math course, an honor that also paid $10 a day. But it seemed that even small victories flew from her grasp, like the enchanted golden Snitch of Harry Potter’s Quidditch that was driven to escape: only a few weeks into this new position, she realized that the whiteboard markers in the poorly ventilated amphitheater were triggering the migraines that so crippled her that she left class in tears daily.

For me, the lowest point also came during that summer session. I’d had an idyllic, if consuming, schedule, when I’d drive Monday through Thursday to pick up Jessica for class in the morning, and we’d bring the boys along. I reveled in the triumph of getting them away from the TV and into safety for even a few brief hours. We’d drop Jessica off, then spend the time hitting balls on crumbling tennis courts with giant rackets—Ryan’s favorite activity—or we’d attend the library story hour or play miniature golf or hang out at the county rec center—all the fun, really normal, low-key summer things I wanted them to get to do. I loved the time with them, loved the morning breezes and the sunshine reflecting off the deep green, towering trees.

The night before, I’d spend an hour making beautiful lunches for us, with little tubs of mandarin oranges and quesadillas for Michael; sandwiches with pickles and hot peppers for Ryan, who craved eye-tearing heat and sensation; sensible, adult whole wheat sandwiches for Jessica and me; and uncrushable, portion-controlled pods of Pringles. I’d pack it all into an insulated backpack, chilled with ice packs and sweating frozen juice boxes wrapped up in grocery bags to keep them from waterlogging everything. Once Jessica finished her two classes, we’d have lunch at the new, raw wood picnic tables the community college had just put up behind the main building on the austere campus.

The picnic area looked out onto forested slopes and over a dark blue reservoir, the peaceful view softened by the summer haze. The boys would eat briefly, then run around after each other in the short grass, shrieking at bees and climbing onto the tabletops and benches to jump back off them again. I cringed at the marks their shoes left on the unfinished wood—I imagined the picnic tables were a construction class project that had yet to be stained and sealed. There behind the building we couldn’t see people coming and going from their cars in the parking lot—really couldn’t see anybody. As busy as I would have thought a community college might be in summer, most of that activity must have happened in the evenings, because it seemed quite empty and serene.

No matter where we’d been before arriving on campus, or how many times I’d prompted the boys to use the restroom before we got there, Ryan would always have to go into the college building to use the men’s room. Michael was still young enough that I could whisk him in and out of the ladies’ room, which was near the back entrance, and we rarely encountered anyone in there. But Ryan was old enough to use the men’s and absolutely refused to do otherwise; I suspected he just liked going into the novel, air-conditioned building and all the way down the long, cool central hallway. As much as I wanted to stay out of the building, I itched to at least accompany him inside and stand outside the restroom door, to make sure no stranger danger could reach him, but Jessica would say, “Oh, no, he’s fine.”

Other than taking something off a bulletin board or trying to put pennies into a vending machine, there was little trouble he could have gotten into, and quite possibly, he didn’t cause any. Nonetheless, I would cringe and hold my breath, literally clamping my teeth on my tongue, when Ryan would once again clank through the smoked glass doorway and go down the hall and out of sight. Sometimes I couldn’t restrain myself and would anxiously ask Jessica if she wanted to go in after him; I knew she was annoyed by the nervously corrective tone that so often colored my voice, but if he had been gone a little while, sometimes she would.

Why I was the one suffering nerves, I don’t know—as was so often true, I should have taken the advice I’d heard many times on videos from the Love and Logic Institute, which DSS used in training both foster and birth families, when they say to parents, “Now, who has the units of concern?” What they mean is that parents should not carry the worry for kids’ actions when the kids should shoulder that worry. But in this case, at Ryan’s age, it was not the kid’s so much as the mother’s burden to carry. So I would lie awake at night, mourning the hours of lost sleep because I knew I’d have to be up at six in order to get Jessica to her nine o’clock class, and last in my rosary chain of worries would be the one about Ryan going into the community college building to use the bathroom. So much for the Serenity Prayer—by this point, I’d completely lost any wisdom to know the difference.

All was good between Jessica and me so long as I offered no advice, which would be the case with any mother-friend, really. So Ryan’s men’s room trips were definitely not my burden to carry, yet I felt absolutely mortified one day, a few weeks into the summer session, when Jessica met us at our usual wooden table where I was unpacking our picnic and snatching after the blowing paper towel napkins.

Jessica was white faced and narrow eyed. “My kids can’t be in there anymore,” she said. “I can’t bring them here at all. They can’t be anywhere on the grounds.” We had been told to leave.

She was furious and confused; I felt like I’d been slapped. And I was baffled. What in the world could either of the kids have done that was so bad? Wasn’t this a community college? A no-frills one, to be sure, but wasn’t it for parents trying to better their lives, among others? Wasn’t Jessica practically a poster child for her generation’s struggles and here fighting to walk a good path? “I knew Ryan shouldn’t have gone in the building,” I blurted, even as I tried to muffle my words.

But really, whatever had happened, it was one of those rare times, I realize, when both Jessica and I were angry, and we were actually both angry at, and hurt by, the same thing. By that point, she was probably used to authorities issuing orders without explanation, but all these years later, I still wonder about the reason.

Then, at night, I fumed for all of them. How many more worlds would Jessica be told her family didn’t belong in?

INDEPENDENCE DAY

Why did I continue to help? I didn’t have to do those things for and with Jessica to keep seeing Michael—that was always entirely clear to me. All I really had to do was not betray Jessica and Benny to any authorities—a much more difficult challenge. I didn’t have to help get the power restored or take Jessica on special outings with us. All that was my choosing. If I couldn’t have my first prize of Michael free and clear, then, like Benny, I wanted us to be a family. And I wanted Jessica to break free of everything that had held her back—to be free to have some fulfillment in life. Everyone else in the family was busily wishing she would break free of Benny, but I accepted that this was a lost cause—she’d seemed tantalizingly close to doing that at times, but I just wanted her to have the chance to live more fully. To read, to have real work, to be.

Helping or “helping”? Now, I might see my efforts of those years as enabling, patronizing, naive—but at least it was in the direction of health and for the purpose of good. Yes, my own unproductive hours on the university tenure clock and unwritten pages went whizzing by, and if I’d invested even half the hours I spent on Jessica, much less the boys, on our marriage instead, who knows how much healthier and better a wife I would be. Nonetheless, I hoped that Jessica would acquire some momentum and agency, recover some long-stolen sense of what still could be. I didn’t think her life would change or that she would ever break into some Martina McBride chart buster and walk away from Benny, but Jessica surely deserved the simple experience of being in a place where adults read, write, and calculate—where she could be the adult mom in a small comp class of eighteen-year-olds who wants to be there and makes it worth the teacher’s time, as virtually all her instructors had told her she could be. Every week she would write her one-page compositions and have me check the spelling before typing them on her antiquated desktop computer—the most memorable for me was an argument paper against a proposed state lottery, based on her experience as a new mother whose husband would insist they end their pressure-washing workweek by driving to the state line and spending all their diaper and rent money on the lottery tickets he was convinced were one number from making them rich. Her husband was not bad at math, he’d told her, and he’d figured the odds.

JESSICA’S PARENTS, who often leaned on her for help, were the least supportive of all when it came to any post-GED education: I doubted this when she told me, until the day her father looked up from working on a car in the driveway and told her she was “gettin’ above your raising”—a phrase I’d only ever heard used as a joke. I didn’t think real people still said it. He said he couldn’t understand the words she used anymore. When she was in grade school, the teachers were still trying to make kids lose their Appalachian accents, and she’d had speech therapy galore. That seemed to have made no difference, luckily, but now six weeks of community college had her speaking to her family like a Hogwarts professor? I didn’t think so.

Jessica had a genuine hunger to learn and, like everyone, needed to be listened to by someone who cared about her opinions—yet the peremptory wishes of men quickly overrode her instincts. She would devour any book: her class reading of Into the Wild, an account of the fatal adventure of a young survivalist in Alaska; the boys’ hardcover library copies of Harry Potters, which she would finish in a night; the Lee Smith novels I passed along; Fried Green Tomatoes, The Color Purple, and The Glass Castle; and the cover-stripped romance novels she found in the dump’s Swap Shop shed. She often spoke of loving to read and told the boys how important it was, even though Ryan could go for weeks without a signature on his school reading log.

More puzzling was that when Michael was in primary school years later, long after Jessica’s community college dream had folded, she began doing his homework for him. He did have a lot of it, and he struggled with handwriting, so initially Jessica would take his dictation, writing down words or math numbers in big, looping, girl-cute printing, then have him trace over it in faltering pencil. This in itself was not always a bad thing, but she soon was literally doing the homework for him, not even with him, even when he wanted to do it on his own, he’d tell me; often the work he turned in contained mistakes he would not have made himself. He didn’t want to hurt his mother’s feelings, Michael said. The homework pages became almost a weird game of keep-away, with me trying to have him do it in my car or with me rather than taking it home. “Please tell Michael he has to do it himself,” I would beg his new and astonished teacher, whispering so Michael wouldn’t hear me and repeat it.

To this day, I am guilty of helping him with homework too much myself, always with the intention of keeping him on track once the afternoon spells of attention deficit and hyperactivity kick in full force; I prod him to do a better job, write in complete sentences, restate questions, show his work, find the evidence, and I simply try to get him to think. Or, as many parents of children with these problems may recognize, to keep him from spending all his energy on studying for the test he already took or writing a paragraph that addresses something entirely different from the narrowly prescribed topic—I was well aware that he would burn the house down before he’d redo it. So I don’t have much standing to admonish anyone for helping with homework, although I also know Michael would not do it if I didn’t at least try to corral him and keep him on track.

As frustrated as I was, and as hard as it became to get Michael to do the barrage of elementary homework, or even to hold a pencil instead of snapping it, I felt sure, I told the teacher, that his mom was just entirely bored and sad that she had never gotten to finish high school herself. I was sure, I said, that she found these small daily challenges as satisfying as others might find guessing Wheel of Fortune phrases or doing crossword puzzles. Jessica might have been pulled from high school by her parents and from community college by her boyfriend’s jealousy—but she could still do these simple assignments while feeling like a good parent who was helping her child get to a better life than she’d had. Even when Benny’s teenage son lived with them, she took copious notes from his math book on his behalf—notes that she longed to explain to him and that I doubt he even looked at. For once, I thought, I could understand exactly what she felt.

“I expect you to go to college,” she’d say to Ryan and Michael, and simply saying it means something, even without a clear path to reach it, and even if the person saying it puts up one obstacle after the next. Needles and pins.

AS MUCH as I wanted to do some tangible good, my reasons for helping the family in practical ways were selfish. In addition to my being able to keep Michael on alternate weekends, I was elated that I could spend time with him and his brother while their mother was in classes, or we were all driving back and forth; soon Jessica incorporated me in the boys’ many medical appointments, which gradually became entirely my responsibility. I bought her a cell phone and calling plan in the hope the boys would call to escape Benny’s rages—and so I’d always have a way to call and make arrangements to see Michael; this also meant replacing a series of phones the enraged Benny broke to cut them off from me or other help, events that Jessica explained away as “accidentally dropping the phone in the toilet” or in a glass of water—an excuse designed to forestall questions.

At least I never bought the endless cigarettes, but every year I wondered if the kids’ Christmas money did. It was always clear to Michael that the first and last of all money always went to cigarettes. Indeed, the price of cigarettes seems to be a constant unit of measurement in foster parents’ complaints—and even from the children’s grandmother, who is a heavy smoker herself but said she never bought cigarettes until the week’s food was in the house. For foster parents, every basic item or experience the birth parents fail to provide is always expressed in terms of something the children could have had: for the price of a pack of Camels, that child could have had at least thrift store sneakers, gone to a school dance, had spare underwear to keep for accidents at school. It was the measure I heard most often—and used myself.

JESSICA AND I kept up a friendly and warily trusting relationship for several years, though, by talking about books and the pride we shared in her children. The first time she sent the boys to stay for an extended time with Will and me was just before Halloween, two years after they’d gone home and halfway through her first community college semester, before and after the surgery that went wrong. The feverish infection and complications that followed seemed likely because she was on Medicaid at that time and the surgery was the last low-reimbursement one the surgeon performed before heading to a Caribbean cruise. Initially, the boys were to stay with us for just two weeks, but this stretched through Christmas Eve, and then again after. I was glad that Jessica was getting some rest and help for her pain before her Medicaid coverage ran out, and I was thrilled to have the boys with us for that much time, even though it meant driving them from one county to the next for elementary and preschool each weekday. Gas and road hours seemed like no price at all to pay, and it was a relief to get to pick matching clothes and smell hair that was clean and smoke-free. The hours on the road meant all the more opportunity to play hand-me-down purple cassette tapes of nursery rhymes and folk songs, pumping in those essential memories and rhythms, vocabulary, and classic images they needed a chance to absorb. First nursery rhymes, then Bible stories, then mythology, information I always thought needed to simply lie dormant in a child’s consciousness. Aren’t they are the building blocks of—something, surely?

After her ordeal I tried to help Jessica get better health care, with worrying results: when I accompanied her to a follow-up appointment with the surgeon and, at her request, tried gently to assert the concerns of family and friends about her rocky recovery, the surgeon told her never to bring another person into her appointment again; a replacement doctor I helped her find turned out to be even worse. Then her time on Medicaid ran out, leaving her without a doctor or any of the follow-up medications she was going to need and always suffered without. I found Jessica an overloaded but free health clinic that would go the many extra miles needed for its patients—so long as they managed to get there and keep appointments.

ORIENTEERING

The Path of Needles, the Path of Pins.

“Y’all are family,” Benny would say when it suited him, and, even though I was slightly younger than he was, he introduced me once as “the mother of all of us.”

Mother of us all, with the bottomless checkbook; but Mother of Dragons is what I needed to be.

The Path of Beercans, the Path of Weed.

I know there are stories they still haven’t told me.

The Path of Pit Bulls, the Path of Switches.

Path of Shotgun Shells, Path of Blades.

For a week at the worst point, sheriff’s deputies patrolled our road overnight and ran their engines at the end of our driveway.

The Path of Big Gulps, the Path of Pills.

The Path of Cigarette Butts, picked up and resmoked down to the filter.

The Path of Dollar-Brand Trash Bags, burst and leaking in the rain.

Map of Trauma.

The Map of Secrets.

THE PATH of Lice. Just to put it all in concrete, miserable perspective. Head lice are on the path that almost every kindergarten family walks. By first grade, at least. Everyone shared these, but the boys came to us to treat them, to wash all their clothes and graying towels with the hottest water and chemicals, to buy can after can of useless furniture and linen spray. Shuddering at the thought, I combed and combed their hair, searching for nits, until my eyes teared and burned beneath the yellow bathroom light. I’ve finally forgotten the scorching smell of RID shampoo, but for years, whenever I got tired, or was lying on the verge of exhausted sleep, behind my eyes I would see the bugs moving along the hair parts, see those tiny gray hyphens wiggling their routes through pale scalp, and I’d know that they weren’t gone, we didn’t get them all, they were coming back from somewhere, and we would have to start over.

“Come on, please check my head,” Michael would beg me for years to come, at the slightest itch of anxiety.

The only good thing: the lice kept crawling up Michael’s long, thin hair, so finally we were able to get it cut. For three years he’d had to grow it to fit the cute image of a baby biker or junior outlaw for Benny, with constant pressure on Michael to say that was his wish. His long hair infuriated his father’s family, which only intensified the unspoken battle. I had to smash down my opinions, but I couldn’t understand why, long or short, his beautiful hair had to be unshaped and raggedly uneven. But saying the first word about it would have conjured up a massive wave of critical subtext that could have shut everything down. “At least it makes him look neglected,” I said to his aggrieved grandmother Irene more than once, “so maybe someone will stop and pay attention.” “It’s just not the style anymore,” she’d always answer. “The least they could do is trim his bangs so he could see.”

I’d grown up through the 1970s, so to me, long hair was not so bad, though I recoiled from the idea of his being Benny’s mini-me. “But he has such a pretty face,” my mother would say, convinced the girlish angel-look made him more of a target than he was anyway. Plus, “looking like a girl” definitely mattered to Michael, causing him endless pain and fury, equaled only by his dread of causing Benny a single hurt feeling.

I hid behind the advice of teachers, who spoke carefully but unmistakably about hair length and the spread of lice. Michael and a girl in his class kept infesting each other, putting their heads together while working on the kindergarten learning center projects, the teacher said—that was how it always happened in their classes.

“It’s what the teacher said,” I told Jessica the third time around. “And the school nurse. That they’ll keep passing it back and forth.” The girl came to school with her hair in French braids, pulled back, or under a bandana.

And what Michael’s angry tears at being mistaken daily for a pretty girl couldn’t do, at least the lice did. His mother conceded that Michael could decide for himself about his hair, although he knew what she wanted. He was scared. He wavered. I know it’s now not acceptable to say what a boy should look like. But he got his hair cut, and afterward he looked like a boy. The lice never came back. To both of us, I think, it was an immense relief.

THE ROAD

My car was the constant—with or without children, Jessica and I seemed always to be in it. She had no license or car of her own for reasons both practical and dubious. She did drive at the times it suited her or when she could get access to a vehicle. (Benny had no license either, but he seemed more fearless and often found some roundabout way to get the uninsured cars registered, although one of Michael’s most persistent memories is seeing Benny unscrewing a license plate from a neighbor’s car and being told to go back inside.) And every time I see another economy car spray-painted flat black, as theirs was following one of Benny’s close calls with the highway patrol, I wonder why the occupants don’t realize it makes them a more obvious target. However, the overall lack of legal transportation seemed to be one way Benny kept a tight rein on Jessica and corralled her movements. Having lost multiple licenses, Benny really ran the bigger risk, but to me his gallantry in running that risk was one more control trap. Yes, when Jessica wanted something and had a car available, she did drive, although she seemed to prefer that I didn’t know it. In general, though, the notion that she could drive off on her own and be down the road and free, out from under Benny’s thumb, was little more than a fantasy.

But I don’t think Benny minded her going off with me. At least it didn’t arouse his usual suspicions of cheating—although he certainly didn’t share her excitement about school and her newly forming identity. Jessica loved being the good student, the one who talked in class, who was chapters ahead in the reading. It’s not that Benny was against education itself (the very thing he should have feared, had Jessica taken it much further), but the immediate possibility of Jessica’s meeting other men at the community college set him on edge, she told me. God forbid she might ask some random guy to light her cigarette, back in those days when you could smoke freely in entranceways and parking lots. Of all the forces working against her, from within and without, I’d bet that Benny’s possessiveness was the biggest factor in what ultimately doomed her efforts to take classes.

As we drove, Jessica shared grueling stories from her childhood; it’s a wonder she survived it and, understandably, generously, wanted better for her kids. It was from her I first understood that the notion of moving on from the past is just one more comfortable myth.

There’s moving, yes. Moving in spirals, sometimes in and sometimes out. And then there’s moving on, the comforting, hear-no-evil myth.

“The past is never dead. It’s not even past.” Like any good twentieth-century English major, I’d learned that from Faulkner. But for the next ten years—and easily foreseeable for the next twenty—I was about to learn it the hard way.

I NEVER found the right balance of helping versus enabling. To put it mildly. And was a balance even possible? For someone as guilt ridden, class conscious, and habitually apologetic as I was? Someone who went overboard with everything, from grading feedback to birthday presents to counting calories as a once-anorexic teen? Most of all, how was keeping a balance possible when all I wanted was for the boys to have every chance in life? Or at least every chance to survive childhood?