You’re a good boy, Anthony. She had come to get him. He should have known she would. He hadn’t brought any of his things with him, so he was ready. They could leave right away.
But when he tried to turn around, the hands on his back burned like coals through his shirt and into his skin. He tried to push back, but the hands were too strong. His chest tightened and he got a sick feeling in his stomach as the hands pushed him forward, into the railing. His feet slipped out from under him. He heard the wood posts crack. He went over the edge, his mouth turning into a scream that had no sound. He was in a tunnel that pointed straight down and inside the tunnel a rumbling, a rushing, plunging him down and sucking the concrete up. He wanted to shut his eyes but they were frozen and then finally there was no space between him and the ground.
ONE
It was Wednesday morning. Five days ago, Anthony Little Eagle had been placed in foster care. Two days ago, he died. I could still see him, walking by my office last Friday with the uniformed police officer’s hand on his bony shoulder, his dark brown eyes wide with fear, holes in both knees of his jeans, his T-shirt dirty and thin from wear.
Now I heard the knock on the door that I’d been waiting for. I let out the breath I had been unaware of holding in and fingered the beads on the necklace I always wore.
“Come in,” I said.
“Your ten o’clock appointment is here, Sylvia.” Mabel’s voice was uncharacteristically subdued and cracked ever so slightly when she said my name. “Should I see him to the conference room?”
“No,” I said, “here in my office, please.”
“Coffee?”
“No.”
My secretary stood to the side of the door to make way for the reporter from the Monrow City Tribune.
J. B. Harrell strode into my office like he knew exactly what he was after. Everyone said he was the best investigative reporter our city had ever known, and after reading his exposés about bank fraud and the heroin trafficking in some of our upscale communities, I had to agree. I’d never seen him in person before. In his perfectly tailored three-piece gray suit with a blue and maroon striped tie, and his chiseled cheekbones set off by an expensive salon hairstyle, he looked more like a corporate business executive than a journalist.
Something about his appearance caught me off guard, something vaguely familiar. Maybe it was the unusually deep lines in his face, for someone I guessed to be only in his early forties.
I stood and extended my hand but instead of shaking it he glanced around my office. A confusing sense of dread made its way from my abdomen up into my windpipe and got stuck in my throat.
“Please, have a seat,” I managed to say.
I was prepared for him to ask the questions that our agency attorney, Brion Kacey, had instructed me not to answer. I was well-versed in issues of family privacy and client confidentiality. But now I found myself thinking only of what I shouldn’t say—that I felt responsible for Anthony Little Eagle’s death, though I didn’t know what I could have done to stop it. That I’d had trouble sleeping since I heard the news. That I was sorry. I was so, so sorry. The deep sadness I’d experienced up to now was joined by a sense of guilt that was all too familiar to me.
With a noticeable hint of impatience around his lips, J. B. Harrell lowered himself onto the edge of the chair on the other side of my desk. His back was long and straight as his eyes moved from the weaving of the Navajo tree of life on the wall to the collection of Navajo, Hopi, and Pueblo pottery on my bookshelf to the wicker, birch bark, and coiled baskets on the long table under the window, to the gourd-shaped earthenware water bottle in the middle of my conference table. He settled on a group photograph taken in the 1970s, in the months before the Wounded Knee protests, with my face way in the back, circled in black marker. He made a harsh sound, forcing the air through his nose. Memories of the role I’d played in the movement back then—cooking and doing the dishes while the protesters planned their strategy, sleeping with a couple of them—brought a blush to my cheeks.
I ran my fingers one by one over my beaded necklace and saw myself as I imagined Harrell saw me—a sixty-year-old white woman with a gray ponytail wearing a peasant blouse and a long denim skirt that was simple and inexpensive in a too-obvious way. A do-gooder with crinkly age lines radiating out from the corners of perpetually earnest blue-gray eyes in an expression of fake sympathy. Someone not to be trusted.
“Would you care for some coffee?” I asked. “Mabel can run down to the café for some sweet rolls if you’d like. They have delicious croissants.”
Harrell reached into his expensive-looking leather briefcase and pulled out a yellow legal pad and a designer fountain pen. The Edward Curtis print of the Mohave Water Carrier hanging on the wall adjacent to my desk caught his attention. I stared at it with him. It was frustrating to me how most white people saw Curtis’s image of the mother balancing a little boy on her hip and a water jug on her head as a symbol of strength and inspiration. Like they were blind to the harsh terrain and the rocky bluff under the mother’s bare feet, which screamed out the unspeakable circumstances she should not have to endure. That no one should have to endure.
“A seven-year-old boy is dead.” J. B. Harrell’s first words since he walked into my office were an indictment. His eyebrows came together in a momentary flash of anger and then his face went blank. He wrote something on his legal pad. He still hadn’t looked directly at me.
“Yes,” I said, close to tears. “Anthony Little Eagle.”
The silence between us was disrupted by the sound of Harrell flipping the page of his legal pad. He wrote the dead boy’s name on the pad in capital letters and underlined it twice with quick, staccato movements. I held my breath and thought about our attorney’s instructions.
“Of course you should show compassion, Sylvia,” Brion had said, “but in a professional way. What’s important is not to say anything while a police investigation is under way. I’m usually the one to speak to the media at a time like this, but I’m sure you’ll be careful not to say anything that could be misinterpreted or that might reflect negatively on our agency.”
“When was Anthony Little Eagle placed in your care?” I heard the reporter ask.
In my care, I said to myself. The boy had died under my watch. That made me responsible. What happened was my fault. I had failed to protect him.
“Less than a week ago,” I managed to answer.
“When?”
“You mean the exact date?”
He looked up at the ceiling.
“Anthony Little Eagle was placed in foster care on June 17, 2005.” My voice sounded surprisingly professional considering the self-doubt that was threatening to devour me. I’d made a vow, when I became supervisor of the foster care unit, to do everything within my power to make sure nothing like this would ever happen, and I’d worked hard to keep that promise. So what went wrong? Where did I go wrong?
Harrell wrote the date on his legal pad. “A white foster home, I presume?” he asked in a flat voice, without looking up.
“I’m afraid so,” I said. “We make every effort to locate American Indian families who are able and willing to take foster children. I believe that it’s critically important for children to be placed in homes that share their culture.
