Читать книгу At the Center - Dorothy Van Soest - Страница 8

ONE

It was Wednesday morning. Five days ago, Anthony Little Eagle had been placed in foster care. Two days ago, he died. I could still see him, walking by my office last Friday with the uniformed police officer’s hand on his bony shoulder, his dark brown eyes wide with fear, holes in both knees of his jeans, his T-shirt dirty and thin from wear.

Now I heard the knock on the door that I’d been waiting for. I let out the breath I had been unaware of holding in and fingered the beads on the necklace I always wore.

“Come in,” I said.

“Your ten o’clock appointment is here, Sylvia.” Mabel’s voice was uncharacteristically subdued and cracked ever so slightly when she said my name. “Should I see him to the conference room?”

“No,” I said, “here in my office, please.”

“Coffee?”

“No.”

My secretary stood to the side of the door to make way for the reporter from the Monrow City Tribune.

J. B. Harrell strode into my office like he knew exactly what he was after. Everyone said he was the best investigative reporter our city had ever known, and after reading his exposés about bank fraud and the heroin trafficking in some of our upscale communities, I had to agree. I’d never seen him in person before. In his perfectly tailored three-piece gray suit with a blue and maroon striped tie, and his chiseled cheekbones set off by an expensive salon hairstyle, he looked more like a corporate business executive than a journalist.

Something about his appearance caught me off guard, something vaguely familiar. Maybe it was the unusually deep lines in his face, for someone I guessed to be only in his early forties.

I stood and extended my hand but instead of shaking it he glanced around my office. A confusing sense of dread made its way from my abdomen up into my windpipe and got stuck in my throat.

“Please, have a seat,” I managed to say.

I was prepared for him to ask the questions that our agency attorney, Brion Kacey, had instructed me not to answer. I was well-versed in issues of family privacy and client confidentiality. But now I found myself thinking only of what I shouldn’t say—that I felt responsible for Anthony Little Eagle’s death, though I didn’t know what I could have done to stop it. That I’d had trouble sleeping since I heard the news. That I was sorry. I was so, so sorry. The deep sadness I’d experienced up to now was joined by a sense of guilt that was all too familiar to me.

With a noticeable hint of impatience around his lips, J. B. Harrell lowered himself onto the edge of the chair on the other side of my desk. His back was long and straight as his eyes moved from the weaving of the Navajo tree of life on the wall to the collection of Navajo, Hopi, and Pueblo pottery on my bookshelf to the wicker, birch bark, and coiled baskets on the long table under the window, to the gourd-shaped earthenware water bottle in the middle of my conference table. He settled on a group photograph taken in the 1970s, in the months before the Wounded Knee protests, with my face way in the back, circled in black marker. He made a harsh sound, forcing the air through his nose. Memories of the role I’d played in the movement back then—cooking and doing the dishes while the protesters planned their strategy, sleeping with a couple of them—brought a blush to my cheeks.

I ran my fingers one by one over my beaded necklace and saw myself as I imagined Harrell saw me—a sixty-year-old white woman with a gray ponytail wearing a peasant blouse and a long denim skirt that was simple and inexpensive in a too-obvious way. A do-gooder with crinkly age lines radiating out from the corners of perpetually earnest blue-gray eyes in an expression of fake sympathy. Someone not to be trusted.

“Would you care for some coffee?” I asked. “Mabel can run down to the café for some sweet rolls if you’d like. They have delicious croissants.”

Harrell reached into his expensive-looking leather briefcase and pulled out a yellow legal pad and a designer fountain pen. The Edward Curtis print of the Mohave Water Carrier hanging on the wall adjacent to my desk caught his attention. I stared at it with him. It was frustrating to me how most white people saw Curtis’s image of the mother balancing a little boy on her hip and a water jug on her head as a symbol of strength and inspiration. Like they were blind to the harsh terrain and the rocky bluff under the mother’s bare feet, which screamed out the unspeakable circumstances she should not have to endure. That no one should have to endure.

“A seven-year-old boy is dead.” J. B. Harrell’s first words since he walked into my office were an indictment. His eyebrows came together in a momentary flash of anger and then his face went blank. He wrote something on his legal pad. He still hadn’t looked directly at me.

“Yes,” I said, close to tears. “Anthony Little Eagle.”

The silence between us was disrupted by the sound of Harrell flipping the page of his legal pad. He wrote the dead boy’s name on the pad in capital letters and underlined it twice with quick, staccato movements. I held my breath and thought about our attorney’s instructions.

“Of course you should show compassion, Sylvia,” Brion had said, “but in a professional way. What’s important is not to say anything while a police investigation is under way. I’m usually the one to speak to the media at a time like this, but I’m sure you’ll be careful not to say anything that could be misinterpreted or that might reflect negatively on our agency.”

“When was Anthony Little Eagle placed in your care?” I heard the reporter ask.

In my care, I said to myself. The boy had died under my watch. That made me responsible. What happened was my fault. I had failed to protect him.

“Less than a week ago,” I managed to answer.

“When?”

“You mean the exact date?”

He looked up at the ceiling.

“Anthony Little Eagle was placed in foster care on June 17, 2005.” My voice sounded surprisingly professional considering the self-doubt that was threatening to devour me. I’d made a vow, when I became supervisor of the foster care unit, to do everything within my power to make sure nothing like this would ever happen, and I’d worked hard to keep that promise. So what went wrong? Where did I go wrong?

Harrell wrote the date on his legal pad. “A white foster home, I presume?” he asked in a flat voice, without looking up.

“I’m afraid so,” I said. “We make every effort to locate American Indian families who are able and willing to take foster children. I believe that it’s critically important for children to be placed in homes that share their culture. That’s why we try so hard.”

“Why?” he asked, his voice still flat.

“Why was he placed in a foster home or why was he placed in a white foster home?”

Harrell made a snorting sound. I bristled. I knew the damage done to children who’d been placed in white homes or sent away to boarding schools.

“We only place children when it’s necessary for their own safety,” I said.

“Why, exactly?”

“I can’t share confidential client information with you, Mr. Harrell. I’m sure you understand.”

The reporter stiffened. “I suppose this is when you’re going to tell me that you only remove children from their homes when they’re in danger.”

“That is our policy,” I said.

“And yet it seems that the greater danger for Anthony Little Eagle was in one of your licensed white foster homes rather than in his own home.”

I cringed. Would Anthony Little Eagle still be alive if he hadn’t been removed from his home? Was there any way to have been certain where the greater danger lay? Following approved policies and procedures only went so far. In the end, ensuring child safety boiled down to professional judgment, which I knew from experience was subjective and not without bias.

“Mr. Harrell,” I spoke slowly and deliberately. “Our job is to protect children, and we try to do our best. I can assure you that our agency takes a child’s death very seriously.”

“Murder,” he said. “A child’s murder.” He turned his head and fixed his brown eyes on the Hopi Kachina doll on my desk.

I picked the doll up and moved it to the other side of my desk. “We will cooperate in every way we can with the police investigation,” I said. Why was I resorting to legal jargon? Why did I feel such a desperate need to defend myself?

“Every way you can?”

“Every way possible. I assure you.”

J. B. Harrell put his pen down and scooted back in the chair. He let out his breath with a whistle. “Ms. Jensen,” he said.

“Please, call me Sylvia.” I knew my smile was obsequious but I couldn’t seem to help it.

Harrell flipped back to the previous page of his legal pad. “The foster parents are Paul and Linda Mellon, right? So, was Anthony Little Eagle the first foster child ever placed in their home, Ms. Jensen?”

“No.”

“How many other children have been placed with them?”

“The Mellons have been foster parents for quite some time.”

“How long, exactly? How many children?”

“Since the late 1990s, I think. I don’t know how many children they’ve fostered. I’d have to look that up.”

“And do you know if any other children have been injured or died while in their care?”

I clenched my fists. Now he had gone too far. Yes, I felt responsible. Yes, I felt guilty. Yes, I was asking myself if there was something I could have done to prevent Anthony’s death. But to insinuate that other children had been injured, let alone died, in the same home? That was plain unfair. And was he actually accusing the Mellons of murder? I sat up in my chair and looked straight at him, daring him to look at me, to just this once for God’s sake look at me. But he didn’t. I was beginning to suspect that the man wasn’t as principled as I’d thought. That he might in fact just be full of himself, like so many men I’d known in my life.

“I can assure you, Mr. Harrell, that if any child had been harmed while in the Mellon home before, our agency would not have placed any other children with them.”

“I see.” He flipped through the pages of his legal pad until he found what he was looking for. “Then perhaps you can explain,” he said, running his finger down the page, “the incident that occurred in that home in 2000.”

A bead of sweat was making its way down my left temple. What incident was he referring to? Was it possible he already knew I’d been on leave in 2000, that I’d been arrested for driving with a blood alcohol level of .2 and would have lost my job if I hadn’t checked myself into a treatment center? Surely he didn’t know about the mornings I’d come to work late and hungover, about the bottle of wine I’d kept in the bottom left-hand drawer of my desk. I reached for a tissue, blew my nose, and wiped the perspiration from my upper lip. Harrell was studying his notes. I wondered if he was going to use my history against the agency, if he planned to make my drinking part of a series about the failings of the foster care system. Well, it wasn’t too late to stop him. I looked at the clock on my desk and feigned surprise.

“I have another appointment,” I said, with a smile I intended to appear apologetic. “I’m afraid our time is up.”

“Here it is,” he said. “A foster child, a five-year-old girl, was injured and taken by the Mellons to the hospital on June 8, 2000.”

“I’m sorry,” I said, no longer able to keep my voice from trembling. “I wasn’t here then, but if there was any suspicion that foster parents were responsible for a child’s injury, I can assure you that there would have been an investigation.”

“So you assure me that no child ever came to any harm at the hands of Mr. or Mrs. Mellon in the past but you provide me with no evidence, is that what you’re saying, Ms. Jensen?”

“I can assure you...I mean, I’m not aware of any other accident.”

“Incident,” he said. “Any other incident.”

“Mr. Harrell, I want to find out what happened to Anthony Little Eagle as much as you do, believe me.” I found myself experiencing a disturbing need for him to understand that I wasn’t the enemy, that I wasn’t your typical bureaucrat who didn’t understand issues of privilege and oppression. Couldn’t he tell that I was different?

“And you, of course, can assure me of that, too.” He tore a page from his legal pad and scribbled something, crumpled it up, and dropped it on the floor. Then he put his pen and legal pad away and closed his briefcase with a loud click.

His quiet hostility left a bitter taste on my tongue. I watched him glance around my office one more time. My head grew heavy. I rested my elbows on the desk and held my chin in the palms of my hands. Then I saw him looking at the picture on my desk of me sitting on a big rock.

“That was taken in Machu Picchu in the 1980s,” I said, glad to have something to say. “It was an incredible experience to be there and imagine the beauty of the city built on those rocks.”

“The city where they sacrificed small, perfect children to gain the favor of the gods,” he said.

His words jolted me back to my trip to Peru. I heard the voice of the Spanish tour guide describing the beauty of a ten-year-old child whose father had offered her to the Inca emperor as a Capacocha sacrifice, telling us that there were skull fractures on the backs of the heads of most of the sacrificial mummies.

I looked at Harrell. “I’m devastated about what happened,” I said. “I’ll do everything I can to find out what happened.”

“I’m glad to hear it, Ms. Jensen,” he said, standing. Then he turned and walked out of my office.

I slammed the photograph facedown on my desk, and all I could see was Anthony Little Eagle, his skull fractured, lying dead on the concrete patio below the balcony of his room.