I never doubted that Benny loved Jessica and her kids, yet no one who knew Michael’s family, from within or without, thought my fear for their lives an exaggeration, least of all the children. (“We’re a re-active agency,” different social workers would tell me apologetically the few times I directly dared to seek them out. “We can’t react to something that hasn’t happened yet.”) For a decade my heart twisted coldly in my chest every time I read or heard about a father, stepfather, or boyfriend who had killed an entire family. Sometimes these killings came out of fury, revenge, or impending loss. Even more alarming was when the killer reportedly had decided that life was too painful to live, so he would spare his loved ones in advance. And who could predict the amplifying effects of alcohol and drugs on moods that could shift from day to night within an hour?
Plus it wasn’t just self-medication: Jessica’s desperate fix when marijuana failed to soothe Benny’s fury or despair was to stuff as many Valium as she could find down his throat and hope he’d sleep his way out of it. It’s not even that he was averse to seeking help or spilling a blue streak of terrifying emotions and histories to any professional who would listen; it wasn’t that there were no basic resources for the uninsured and desperate. The help was there, at least to the frustration-filled degree it may be for those who lack means and reliable transportation and are tired of being told what to do, but to me Benny seemed just too ill for the system—too damaged by life and chemistry; too numbed by mood stabilizers; too pulled by his morning beer and all day vodka-spiked Sprite; too yoked by the addictions from which he claimed he’d saved girlfriends; and too purely dangerous for any woman or child to live with.
Except that they did. So why would no one, least of all DSS—or Mom herself—put a stop to it? When, Will and I implored each other, would Jessica ever really leave him? I ranted for years to anyone foolish or caring enough to ask how Michael was doing or, with a worried glance, how “Mom” was doing. And Grandma—biodad Luke’s mom, Irene—and I would rage together to each other, demanding answers of the air.
To her great credit, Jessica often would call me when Benny was near his worst—although I realized I would never see his actual worst, and hers, which might have gotten the kids removed. Jessica knew I’d drive over to get them at any hour, whether they were a county away and it was snowing, or (later) back in this county, which meant winding across eleven miles of gravel above the river’s edge. “Please, phone me anytime,” I begged her.
“Hopefully, she’ll keep calling you” was all our social worker Gerri would say—could say. Until the kids were in imminent, concrete danger, awaiting a midnight rescue by police whom the kids couldn’t call with a crushed or drowned cell phone, by police whom Jessica, the boys, and her parents had been taught from birth never, ever to call. That was the moment when Social Services could legally step in.
NEED TO KNOW
Eight months later the state was doing a random check on the disposition of the county’s cases and picked Jessica’s family file, apparently by chance. A representative from the state was coming to the area, and each of us had to show up and speak with him—separately, like criminals, I thought, to see if our stories matched. We were getting to visit with Michael every couple of weeks then, so I had already started treading lightly, feeling for tremors, ever alert for a misstep. What if I said something negative that the representative would then question Jessica about? She would see I’d known more than she’d realized and that she was right not to trust me. (The one card I held—both major asset and liability—was Jessica’s mistaken belief that I could bring in the authorities.)
The representative was young and looked like any gigantic college boy suddenly boxed into a borrowed suit. The state’s questions were designed to elicit nothing but predetermined short answers—no open-ended questions, none of the “tell me about x” openings that workers from Child Protective Services used to coax information from kids.
I do wonder what he would have done if I’d asked about where the family had been allowed to live and described how they’d gone against the judge’s order. But alienating Jessica would mean losing access to Michael—and she was definitely slated to be interviewed after I was. More important, I could not afford to alienate DSS now, in case Michael and his siblings did come back into the system. Our section of DSS had as its new director a former social worker, someone I deeply trusted. So I was careful as I sat in that dark little office going through unexpected questions. For some reason I was seated beside the representative instead of across from him; the arrangement meant no subtext could possibly show through my expression. He leaned up against a desk and wrote brief answers on a clipboard; as he read the list of questions, his main focus was on what we’d been told about the reasons for Michael’s coming into foster care. Surprised, I explained that we had not been told much of anything, aside from the frustrated remark by the social worker that “Mom’s not doing what she’s supposed to”—an explanation that could have described virtually any case in the system.
I’d always had the impression that “need to know” was the social workers’ standard for sharing anything—coupled with the understanding that we might expect most of the behavior we saw from children in foster care but never comprehend the reasons for it. Jessica had frequently complained to me that they had never told her why they were taking the kids and that she’d been “clean” at the point they did; I believed her and could not understand the reason either.
Yet I also could not understand why DSS had not taken the kids far sooner, especially after they heard about the dog urine smell and chest rattle that Michael brought to day care when he attended, and the stories that his sister Isabelle began to whisper. Back during that first summer when we fostered Michael, Isabelle had directed me along a series of steep and rutted back roads to take her to see their old trailer, neither of us knowing it had been condemned and burned; Jessica often mentioned bitterly that Michael’s father had carried him as an infant into another trailer across the county that had caught fire and exploded a mere two hours later. So why hadn’t the kids been removed much sooner? Whatever the story, those two blackened, toxic trailers seemed like reason enough.
“Had the workers mentioned domestic violence?” the representative kept asking, and I was mystified. Well, no, but Michael’s parents were no longer together, and it had sounded like things were still in a honeymoon phase with Benny. Maybe this was just a generic question asked of everyone—or could it be the real purpose of a state survey? It was clear to me that Michael had been exposed to fighting: he could not bear even slightly raised voices at the dinner table the couple of times Will and I stupidly had argued in front of him. Michael had put his hands on his ears and bellowed. So I knew that fighting or domestic violence had to be part of the problem, but, given all the chatter about the chronic problems of our region—dropout rates, child hunger, child neglect, meth labs, oxycodone, lack of transportation, lack of housing, lack of jobs, lack of healthcare, lack of fathers, and overall generational poverty—I’d figured that adult domestic violence was just one more standard ingredient in a poisonous brew that was causing foster care case numbers to rise. (“There’s no meth case I’ve seen that has not involved domestic violence,” a detective told our training group a couple of years later.)
Maybe the representative asked other families about the whole meth situation, which was exploding in the county’s consciousness at that point, front and center. Or maybe, like the benefits of our spring water, it somehow had not yet registered on the consciousness of the capital.
Locally, sheriff’s deputies were going around to all the civic groups and presenting slide shows of crime scenes and pictures of the kitchen sinks where dirty baby bottles were jumbled together with old matchboxes, turpentine cans, and other meth-manufacturing crap. I must have seen that slide show at least three times, wondering at the flip-book-style progression of a dozen real faces before, during, and after meth, going from firefighters’ carnival beauty queen to skin-draped skull. Trainers told us repeatedly that during meth busts of trailers, kids were sprayed with fire hoses to decontaminate
