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