were plucked to test for meth exposure, and they moved on to emergency placements wearing hospital bracelets and oversized new tracksuits. All their clothes and toys were supposed to be confiscated, further amplifying their loss, but kids’ consignment stores were booming at the time, and who was really watching to see if adults came sneaking back?
RACCOON RIDGE
Through the long, snowy spring after Michael had left his new day care following the dispute over who could drive him, Jessica allowed me to keep him from early morning until evening every Wednesday—the day I had set aside for grading, which I then crammed into the overnight hours or any others I could, just to have those eleven hours to pour into Michael.
That summer, he came for more weekends and another beach vacation week, but for much of it I was consumed with jealousy as Jessica worked sporadically at a fast-food job and sent him over to Destinee, one of Benny’s grown daughters who lived a few miles away with her son and husband, Denver. Long-limbed and pretty, with Snow White’s heart-shaped face and raven hair, she wore thick eyeliner and mascara that gave her eyes a harsh cast; in conversation she moved up close and entertained whoever was present with rowdy charisma and a frequent smoker’s laugh. For no visible cost, she kept Michael and Ryan every day with her own son and some neighboring kids who seemed to wander in. She fed them hot dogs on forks, obsessively cleaned their ears with bobby pins, and toilet trained Michael (after all my tedious race car potty sticker charts and praise) by having him spend the day naked and going like a dog outside. This method worked great, his mom and others agreed—it was how everyone potty-trained in summer, diapers cost too damn much. And now, in Jessica and Benny’s car, he wore big kids’ underwear beneath gigantic T-shirts.
Destinee’s home on Raccoon Ridge sat atop a series of sharp switchbacks flanked by dizzying drop-offs that seemed as effective as a medieval moat for keeping strangers away. A three-sided deck was built onto the house, and although it was then early in the super-electronics age, their living/dining room had the largest-screen TV I’ve still ever seen—no doubt salvaged from one of Denver’s commercial jobs—with gigantic soap opera faces talking desperately, their stereo-amplified dialogue dogging every real-life conversation.
Relentlessly competitive, Destinee was either Jessica’s best friend or treacherous enemy, depending on the week. From what I gathered, she hadn’t actually lived with Benny during her childhood, but her uncanny knack for reading people’s vulnerabilities, drawing them in and getting them to meet her needs, and lying convincingly about the plain truth even when the stakes were nonexistent—all this seemed to signal that wherever she’d grown up, it had been in round-the-clock survival mode, having to struggle for every scrap. Such survival tactics are hard enough to accept compassionately in a child; when they’ve hardened into adult behavior, they are near-impossible to respond to with anything but outrage. With Destinee you never knew if she knew she was purposely pushing your buttons or if it had long become second nature—but she was so good at it that I’d always blame myself and bite back a reaction. In her party-girl rasp, Destinee would talk about Michael possessively—“you just love hot dogs the way I fix ’em, don’t you, honey?”—then laugh about how he’d suddenly disappeared and was found outside, pooping in the yard. She was planning to fix him a Thomas the Tank Engine birthday cake because he adored trains—how could I fault her for that? How could she have known I wanted to buy him the perfect Thomas sheet cake, tracks and all, from the grocery store bakery? I just wanted to either cry or scream.
Why, if Michael wasn’t staying home with his mom—why, if he was spending the days at Destinee’s—could he not just come to me? Clutching the steering wheel around the bends, I drove up Raccoon Ridge twice to pick him up and felt my stomach curl with resentment. I tried to drop hints to Jessica, because I knew that if I asked outright to keep him on these summer days, she would refuse in some utterly confusing way to avoid the discomfort of having to say no directly. I would appreciate Michael, teach him, love him (spoil him, I could guarantee Benny would say—and I knew they said that among themselves all the time, meaning the normal, unextravagant things I did for Michael, such as taking him to a swimming pool or library magic show). I’d happily drive him back and forth twice a day, whatever. Ryan too, gladly. But Jessica’s job seemed to vaporize, and then she and the kids were hanging out all day and evening with Destinee while Benny and Denver were out working. I took what time I could get, drawing comfort from Michael’s carrying around in his pocket a tiny plastic farm wife figurine that he thought was modeled on me—he called it “my Debbie,” and he also had one he called “Will” that perched, cowless, on a milking stool. But Michael’s face still looked narrow and pinched, like that of an aging elf, as it had since he’d first gone back home. Now only when he was asleep did I see his nose, his cheeks, his lips regain their soft, round shape. How long before he would forget about me?
IT WAS hard to get a read on Destinee, for she always seemed always to be “on” and poised for action. I wondered how she’d come to live in this state, when Benny was from elsewhere, but I knew that asking would be rude if not disastrous. She was an indoor chain smoker; crewcut her son’s and Ryan’s hair for summer, as most local families did; and thought nothing of “popping” children on the wrist or behind if they “needed it.” Her voice was always a little too loud, as if she had grown used to speaking over blasting metal music or TV, and her thickly lined eyes were always brimming with energy. And consciously or otherwise, she could pack more subtext and landmines into a sentence than any playwright I’d ever read.
The second time I picked Michael and Ryan up on Raccoon’s Ridge, Destinee cornered me—although it was not in a corner but in the middle of her living room. I felt cornered anyway.
“So Ryan says you’re a Jewish.” No noun.
True to Destinee’s instincts, this was something I had tried to keep unstated. I didn’t need anything to differentiate me even further—it was quite enough to be the strait-laced foster parent among the family’s four-wheeling Don’t-Tread-on-Me crowd.
I steeled my smile for some hostile comment or, worse, some request for financial advice. She stood two inches from me, her large blue eyes paling. I could tell from her tone that she was not going to issue the usual invitation to come to church—and even though Destinee wore a cross, I’d never heard any mention of their actually going to one of the fundamentalist churches around them.
Yet this turned out to be the most human interchange we’d ever have. “I loved The Passion of the Christ,” Destinee told me. Mel Gibson’s movie, with its infamously sadistic gore, had just come out on video, and she and all the kids had watched it three times on the enormous living room screen. “I’ve been looking for someone to ask—what was that language they were speaking? When Ryan told me what you were, I thought you would know.”
So of all the terrible accusations that she might have made about Jews, especially after seeing that movie, hers was just a simple, burning fan question about Aramaic. And somehow I knew the answer. I learned then that she had been raised Catholic, which both surprised and reassured me a little, though I’m not sure of what. I’d definitely gotten off easy.
“You and Will should come to our four-wheeler parties,” Destinee told me another time, in front of Benny and a garage full of his friends who were assembling for Michael a ride-in plastic car I’d bought him. I was hoping they’d help him do it, as I was unable to, but these grown men were having too much fun solving the tricolor plastic puzzle themselves. “We go for, like, three days,” Destinee continued. “Y’all should come.” I cringed, hoping no specific dates would follow. Whatever went on in those parties, I didn’t want to be trapped in complicity.
Four-wheelers were the enemy, in my predictable view, bringing a daily roulette of death, paralysis, or brain damage for these kids. I was hugely relieved every time they had to pawn one of the ATVs. Although Benny often promised to take us on one of the unreliable four-wheelers when it was running, Destinee
