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