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).