can stuff into a grocery sack at the church-run thrift store. Given a month, wouldn’t that help anyone get it together?
INTO THE WOODS
The Path of Needles, The Path of Pins . . . this was the choice offered Red Riding Hood by the wolf in an early version of her story. Both were bad options for navigating the deep, dark woods on the way to the Grandmother’s house, where the wolf would famously wait, ready to spring his trap. Needles? Pins? I’ve seen explanations that range from sexual metaphors to evocation of a dressmaking apprenticeship—no one seems to know the original source; to me, these routes described the always painful, always hazardous paths I trod toward and around Michael’s family, with forks that offered only bad choices. I knew, too, that a stumble over the thinnest root can send you back to the starting place. You can never put your foot down securely, never even know if you are moving forward—or toward what.
There was no right way to walk this walk, so I picked my way through the dark wood from day to day, straining to spot breadcrumb clues, always fearing I’d never find my way back into Michael’s life again.
PATH OF NEEDLES
I had never fully believed we’d get to visit after Michael went back to his mother, especially after Jessica pulled the plug on the very first visit we’d planned. She had asked the confused DSS director to call at the last minute to inform me the visit was off—a call that had sent me cascading into grief and the certainty that the family would deliberately disappear into the cliffs and chasms of the next county. Then, a month after his return, Jessica offered to let Michael come visit us the weekend after Thanksgiving. Everything went perfectly until I took Michael back that Sunday evening: we met halfway in a Wendy’s parking lot, and as I handed Michael to his mother and Benny, Michael cried my name and he reached out to come back to me instead of going to Jessica. I saw Benny’s eyes flare—as the all but official stepdad, he clearly gave the orders now, and he pulled Michael sharply away. Michael reached for me again, wailing. I couldn’t reach back: I had to pin my arms to my sides and keep the dumb plastic grin glued to my mouth, the ultimate betrayal. I drove back home in despair, sure this was the end.
But thanks to their grandmother Irene, who continued to keep the children every other weekend as she had before and during foster care, I was able to spend many Sunday afternoons hugging and playing cars with two-year-old Michael. It was incredible good luck: simply getting to see him this way gave me the patience to hang on when I started to panic. I even got to experience an approximation of Christmas that first winter when Irene invited me to spend the Saturday afternoon before the holiday with all three kids at her home, sharing lunch and watching them go through the Christmas motions. Michael sat on my lap, playing with the antenna on his new remote control truck as Ryan and Isabelle leapt from couch to coffee table in new onesie leopard pajamas, tearing open presents and Precious Moments bibles, while I-Carly and Sam bickered from the TV.
After Christmas, I got my nerve up and asked Jessica to let Michael visit again for several days of our university break and for weekends now and then, to which she agreed as if nothing had happened. But I always feared this arrangement might suddenly end, simply because Benny had decided that Michael and I were too close. At the end of each visit, I begged Will to make the drive with me and be the one to pass Michael back, just in case.
SHORTLY AFTER New Year’s I found out the family’s case had been closed. DSS had released them, and months earlier than I’d expected. Full stop. So I was shocked, a few weeks into January, when Irene called and asked me to stop by her work. Breathless, she told me that the boys’ sister had raised alarms at her new school and that the guidance counselor had summoned their county’s DSS in response to her disclosure.
Isabelle? I was staggered. The first-grader who had cried and pined and begged through half a year of foster care to go back with her mother? I knew she hated Benny, who had usurped her beloved father’s place. But how terrible must things be if Isabelle was the one causing an alarm?
She had seen Mom’s new boyfriend smoking from a pipe, like her dad used to, the girl had said. “A pipe” could have meant marijuana; it could have meant crack or meth. Regardless, she must have hoped that telling the counselor would bring the ceiling crashing in. Maybe Isabelle pictured her mom, brothers, and estranged dad coming back together for a happily-ever-after ending.
“She doesn’t like my rules,” Jessica explained, “all because I wouldn’t let her eat potato chips for breakfast that day. Was I wrong not to let her?”
Was this what I’d been praying for? Didn’t something have to happen now? My lungs inflated with an impure mix of hope and dread.
But then—nothing.
Michael did not magically reappear in our crib, and Jessica and Benny’s TracFone was perennially out of minutes. All we heard was that Benny had been required to show up at the courthouse for a drug test. And that he’d been furious. And that then, when one of the new county’s social workers had come out to Benny’s trailer, Isabelle had run up into the woods and hidden until the worker had heard Jessica’s story and left again. There was a missing piece somewhere: Why didn’t the social worker go talk to Isabelle at school? Ask the child why she was afraid? With my usual trust in authority, I assumed something was going on behind the scenes with the new DSS, something we couldn’t see or know.
For two or three weeks, apparently, Isabelle was not allowed to eat with her brothers, and she had to sit apart at the Little Tikes table. With the whole family in the car, Benny drove her down the road in the dark and threatened to keep driving her right back to the foster home where she’d had to eat all her food and go off to her room if she wanted to cry. Then, abruptly, still attributing what Isabelle had said to revenge for being denied potato chips, Jessica and Benny sent Isabelle to live with Irene, where she remained, going back only for visits. And given the strange lifelong tension between Benny and Isabelle, Jessica must have sensed her daughter would be much safer growing up there.
Once Isabelle was gone, I held my breath, elated for her liberation despite the loss of her dream. Plus, she had been especially close to her father’s mother, so it seemed like a natural fit that could provide the family comfort she seemed to have been craving. “I think the kids are all coming out of there,” said a friend’s cousin who knew the family through a different service agency. Maybe it would all be over, just like that! Maybe my months of fearful longing since Michael had moved home and out of DSS custody had all been a necessary nightmare. Maybe we’d paid our dues karmically, and Michael—maybe even his brother—would be back with us for good!
It was February, and my hopes soared that things might go wrong enough that Michael would be removed and sent back to us. That was when I first started proposing all manner of bargains to God—a compulsion that would continue for years—for I was painfully aware it would take a catastrophe for Social Services to intervene to that degree. Whatever the possible disaster, I prayed ceaselessly that the children would escape unscathed physically and not die in the process. While that might sound like any parent’s daily irrational fear, the only irrational part was the conviction that my own constant panic kept him safe, in some strange, cosmic balance. If I relaxed my vigilance for a second or let myself get lost in an enjoyable moment, I felt the worst might befall Michael and his family. I kept thinking of the high-rise apartment block in an old Monty Python sketch, which collapses to rubble the minute its tenants forget to believe in it. But it was no joke to me. I was relieved eventually to learn there was an actual name for this—“vicarious trauma,” which caregivers, along with counselors, are prone to suffer.
AS MUCH as everyone had wanted Jessica to be the very model of the bootstrap Single Mom, keep her fast-food job, and strike out on her own with all three kids and their electronic welfare (EBT) card, clearly that was not ever going to be: sending Isabelle to live with her Grandma Irene was for the best. Jessica believed I was the only person who considered her a good parent, and not a bad one, for doing it, and I did. I still do. And yet I had secretly, selfishly hoped that having three kids to juggle would make everything break down more quickly and visibly. And I worried: What if having only two kids made life manageable or made the chaos more concealable, at least?
Isabelle’s departure made clear to both boys what