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