water and held him aloft overhead in triumph, like a football at the goal line. No mention of life jackets for any of the kids; clearly no use of sunscreen, even though I’d put it in the diaper bag and tried to coat Michael with it before leaving. Ryan, always, would come back exhausted, with a shirtless red blaze that often covered his torso.
Jessica and Benny must have thought my mania about sun exposure was a middle-class phobia and a predictable failure to realize that sunburns, spankings, and all-day soda were just part of growing up. Of toughening up. I said something about the jet skis and seeming lack of life jackets to the kids’ by-then third social worker, who was just out of college and substituting in to cover staff vacation time. Basically I got the message that this was Mom’s time, not mine, and it was up to Jessica to determine what was safe. But thanks for “transporting” them.
WHEN I was consumed with the imperfect details, the big picture was elusive, but even at the time I realized there was no greater blessing for us than the motion made by Luke’s lawyer and the judge’s requiring Jessica to secure housing separate from Benny’s. The extra months we gained with Michael as a result were an irreplaceable gift, giving our hearts more time to knit, allowing Michael more time to live free of cigarette smoke and learn to take asthma meds through a tube, and permitting us to go to the beach with Michael and his sister. Ryan too was able to go on the first vacation of his life with his foster family, traveling to the World of Coca-Cola and Stone Mountain, Georgia; the colored lasers that illuminated the cliff carvings at night impressed him more than anything he’d yet seen.
Then, in late summer, we heard that Jessica indeed had found a trailer that qualified for a rent subsidy. Like Benny’s place, it was also in the next county—not only remote but out of the jurisdiction of our DSS, which gave Jessica and the kids a clean slate and, if a crisis should come, different foster homes. And as slow to react as we thought our DSS was, this neighboring one was rumored to be slower. But at least our own DSS would have to monitor Jessica’s family for what we hoped and believed would be six months after reunification—in fact, it turned out to be two months, barely—before their case was closed.
Early on, Jessica had wrinkled her nose and mentioned that the rental was in a pretty crummy small trailer court, but that was it. (Well, at least there’ll be people around, I remember thinking.) Yet once the kids started going for weekend visits, the penultimate step of the whole reunification process, we heard nothing, oddly, about the new trailer. Jessica and Benny now brought the children all the way back to us, which cost them significant gas money but was no doubt worth it to keep us out of their lives and their business. The kids said little—even the older two, who could speak. What these visits were like was perplexing to piece together, and surely they’d been told not to say anything for fear of never getting their family back—but I remember sitting with their paternal grandmother, Irene, and looking at the patterned walls of her trailer, while she tried to find out what they’d eaten that day, and if they’d had lunch, because she said they’d never had lunch in the past. (Yes, we learned, they’d had box macaroni and lettuce, which I hated myself for thinking sounded suspiciously balanced to impress DSS.) I was also trying to decipher what Ryan, who always spoke cryptically, even when he wasn’t covering for adults, meant by “the new Hardee’s, you know, the new one,” in an unnameable county or town.
Ryan’s more experienced foster mom, Mona, was equally disgusted at the vagueness and confusion of the whole transition, even though she had pressed for a plan for Ryan to leave as her twin nieces had just moved in to stay while both of their parents were deployed overseas. Since he had started spending weekends with Benny, Ryan had come back to her house saying things like “I don’t eat with brown people,” and he was refusing to sit at the dinner table with Mona’s nieces. So Mona was well ready for him to be gone, but not like this.
As for Michael, he would walk around the day care on Monday mornings, saying, “Belt, belt, spank, spank,” while the director and I looked at each other with big eyes and pressed lips.
Somehow, we learned that the kids had been in the new trailer once and found a nail to hang a backpack on but that it had no furniture. (“Sweet Home in a Trailer,” the boys always loved to screech—the 8 Mile version of the classic—oblivious to Eminem’s bitterness.) I think perhaps the new trailer became their storage space, because I remember some commotion when the year’s lease was up, their vehicle was down, and the landlord wanted their stuff the hell out of it.
We never understood how this arrangement could go undetected—and by we, I mean the children’s Grandma Irene, Ryan’s foster mom, and me. Clearly the kids were spending all their visiting time at Benny’s place, cruising around bareheaded on dirt bikes and four-wheelers with Benny’s grandson. Yes, I shuddered to think that Jessica’s boyfriend had grandchildren who were older than Michael. This was pre-reunification, so surely all we had to do was to somehow get DSS to see this, to realize that the judge’s order was being violated and that Jessica and the kids were not staying in that new place at all! Mom was still married, albeit to an inmate, yet she wanted the kids to spend their nights with a man they vividly remembered watching fight with their dad? Just a quick, pointed disclosure and DSS would realize that the whole housing situation was a scam, and then surely the reunification would dissolve and we’d have the children and be home free! They could even send Isabelle to our home, I thought, beneficent in abstraction.
The one big but? Somehow, this exposure of the children’s new living arrangements had to happen without appearing to come from us, because once the kids were back with their mom for good, she could cut all of us, even Grandma Irene, off completely. So how to move forward?
Isabelle’s foster mom had her business to run and a baby to consume her time; brisk and efficient, after caring for many dozen foster kids, she had seen it all and had a caring but more logical perspective than the rest of us did. Nothing that a judge or social worker did surprised her, and the process was just the process, in her view. So Ryan’s foster mom, Mona, would be the one to speak up, we decided. She was the one with nothing to lose, as she was in a hurry for Ryan to leave in the first place so she could settle her nieces, so she started to wonder aloud to the social worker if the kids actually were getting fed during these weekend days, because Ryan came back so hungry. Shouldn’t DSS be monitoring those weekend visits? Dropping in unannounced?
Mona raised enough doubt that the agency promised someone would drop in on the family—and, in fact, the head of our Child Protective Services unit at the time lived closer, so she would do it, rather than Kayla, the young social worker who had first worked so hard to get the children into custody and now seemed so determined to push them back out again.
And so the supervisor did stop by, on a Sunday morning, we were informed. And all was fine. Food in the cabinets. “No concerns.” Full speed ahead.
“Benny’s place is much more appropriate for kids,” Kayla quickly told me later that week while not meeting my eye. I was stunned; Mona and Grandma Irene were stunned. So Kayla had known—and her supervisor had known—that the family was at Benny’s place? Yet, in their view, apparently, Jessica had met the letter of the law—and maybe they just gambled that the law wouldn’t look. After all, I guessed, if Mom and the kids could live where she didn’t have to work to support herself, and could slide off their caseload and budget . . . “More appropriate than a trailer park—and, honestly,” Kayla shrugged, “Mom’s going to need the help.”
Also irrelevant was that neither Jessica nor Benny could drive legally, although they always had a vehicle. “We don’t get into law enforcement issues,” Kayla said.
(The only one who did care about licenses, it turned out, was the secretary of the new day care to which Jessica was slated to send Michael. She later confronted Jessica once or twice about dropping him off but having no driver’s license. And so the developmentally delayed Michael stopped going there and just stayed home or with Benny’s grown daughter instead.)
Unreal. Everyone knew—they’d just agreed to leave us out of the loop. And now, even worse, Jessica and Benny, who hated scrutiny more than anything, would know why DSS had come that weekend to check. Someone had put them up to it. Jessica, Benny, and the family social worker were all on one side,