terror-fueled meltdown.
“They had bruises. I guarantee it.” Cami pauses, sitting on the green couch in the bookstore’s classics room, and stares at the titles on the shelf across from her. She is a quiet, think-before-speaking girl, her brown hair cut in a no-nonsense bowl. Working summers as a lifeguard has left her skin almost as brown as her hair. “I think people watching would have described it as dramatic. I remember being embarrassed because everybody was staring at us.”
It wasn’t until another officer picked her up and headed toward the door that Cami realized—with a child’s swift and certain clarity—what Deb had already grasped.
This time was different.
“And I think Bonnie did too, because she started crying even more and acting crazy like I’d never seen before, and then I don’t remember anything until we pulled into a parking lot and an old lady met us and said we should get in her car.”
Within a day or so, Cami and Deb had figured out that they were in some kind of temporary shelter, going back to their mother’s “soon, but not today,” and that the little old lady was “kinda nuts but in a sweet way.” The rules were simple: be good, and on Saturday you got a new toy. Other kids came and went; the sisters stayed.
Time flows differently when you’re four; Cami doesn’t know how many months they were there, just that she started school and joined Deb in calling the lady “Mom”—which really upset Bonnie when she phoned. Cami and Debbie didn’t know that she was trying to get clean and get her daughters back; when their weekly news report included, “Mom made us brownies,” Bonnie shouted back down the line, “She’s not your mom!”
Sometime in the spring, the girls went back to Bonnie’s apartment overlooking the stream. That became the pattern; she sobered up and got a job; they returned; she’d get high or in trouble with the law; and they’d be taken away from her and go to a foster home until she got them back again.
A kid doesn’t necessarily notice patterns. Each move is just what’s happening then. Cami thinks it might have been six placements over the course of three years, but by the time she was seven, it had dawned on her that she and her sister would never live at home for any length of time again. Looking back on those bounces, Cami wonders, “Why didn’t all those judges giving her custody have a lick of common sense between them?”
Cami describes with something between disgust and sorrow how her mother once went to the courthouse bathroom, took a pill, passed out, and hit her head on the sink. A few minutes later, Bonnie walked into family court with a paper towel stuck to her bleeding head, said she had slipped on wet tile in the bathroom, and swore she was drug-free and able to look after “my girls that I love more than life.”
Cami doesn’t know why a drug test wasn’t involved. Protocol dictated it should have been. Hearing the story later, Cody suggests a couple of possibilities. “I wasn’t there, I don’t know, but it could have been the ad litem was sick, or late. The judge was in a hurry. They’re not into returning kids to drugged-up parents, so something sure went wrong. It happens. It’s not supposed to, but supposing it does, how’s a little kid gonna tell the judge, ‘Excuse me, Your Honor, you’re supposed to check her hair and her pee’?”
Reflecting on that moment, Cami has one wish. “As an adult now I want to go back and ask the judge what was on his mind that day. Lunch?”
Bonnie was trying to get it together. But as any who have suffered it personally or by proxy know, the illness of addiction overpowers instinct and reason alike. It also cripples love, but who wants to admit that? Addicted people tend to be incapable of looking after anybody, themselves included, so court-ordered removals are less about who loves whom than about a child’s safety. Lots of people loved Debbie and Cami, including their bio mom and extended-family members on both sides, but the task of providing them with a safe, warm place to grow up would fall to a succession of foster homes—some up to the job, some not.
Cami and Deb had maternal family in the region who declined to take custody, and the only comment Cami offers on this was that she and her sister would have liked to have avoided a few of the homes that fostered them. She does not talk about most of her foster homes. It is embarrassing to be a victim.
“Any way you slice it, by the time a child enters foster care, they’ve been rejected more than some adults are their whole lives,” Cody told me once. “They should all be in therapeutic care. What they’ve had to endure wouldn’t leave some grown-ups standing.”
He could have been describing Cami and Deb. Stability for the sisters was out of the question in the bouncy castle of foster care that followed. Sometimes safety was too. Working hard to create their own security as much as possible, they tried to play by the rules—whenever they could figure them out.
“We tried to be good,” Cami says, straight-cut bangs flopping into her dark eyes as she shakes her head and shrugs. Each place had a different set of rules; what was fine, even expected in one place might be forbidden in the next. Things like using the stove unsupervised, choosing which television shows to watch, being expected to complete chores that you hadn’t done before and thus didn’t know how to handle.
In one home that meant vacuuming. Cami had never used a vacuum before.
“She had to explain it to me. And she kept saying how awful it was that I didn’t know, kind of overly sweet, ‘It’s not your fault, dear.’” Cami’s jaw tightens.
Some foster homes said clearly what was expected; in others, the girls had to figure it out. At first, Cami and Deb tried to be good because they wanted to go back home to Mom. Then they were good because they realized that Mom was never going to get it together, so they needed to get adopted. Good kids get adopted first.
More precisely, Cami thought that they needed to get adopted. Deb lost interest. If this was going to be life from now on, then . . .
Cami’s eyes roll toward the ceiling, and her face lightens with a bemused smile. “I love my sister. I loved her then; I love her now. Oh, but she could be a real devil.”
One of their foster homes included the family’s bio daughter, a blond like Debbie of just about the same age. The two took an instant dislike to each other, probably fueled by Deb’s overt envy of her anti-twin. One day, Deb took the scissors from the drawer only adults were allowed to open and barbered the heads of every doll the bio daughter had.
Straight to the car, I bet, Cami thought when she saw what her sister had done. Sure enough, the caseworker showed up, but only to give everyone a talking to about safety. The sisters didn’t leave for another three months, when Bonnie had enough of a clean streak going to petition for return.
Stories about the tensions and alliances between birth and foster children could fill an entire book. Comedy and tragedy rage in these situations. At another home, Deb broke a house rule and got mad at the foster mother over losing TV privileges. She sneaked into the dining room, took the china plates that were Foster Mom’s pride and joy from their special cabinet, and smashed them in a big pile on the dining room floor. Cami took one look, went to their room, and packed garbage bags for both of them. Sure enough, Foster Mom called their social worker, in tears.
In the car, as the caseworker drove away from that former placement in grim silence, Cami turned and pummeled her little sister. “You jerk! I liked them!” Deb grinned and retaliated. The girls slapped and punched until the social worker threatened to pull the car over.
“Now that I know social workers have to do case notes on the time they spend with foster kids, I wonder what that
