sincerely—it was the greatest thing she had to offer—or whether it was just to laugh at us or rile Jessica. Destinee’s first impulse was always triangulation, I would soon learn—so automatic and perfectly executed that I couldn’t even tell if she knew she was doing it. Another hardwon survival skill, no doubt, but hard to appreciate when I was the one in the middle of it. Still, I was always mystified that they didn’t all always act like we were extensions of the DSS machinery. (Jessica claimed to like the social workers—and well she might, for all the practical help and encouragement they had given her.) Was it because they knew I had everything to lose or because they actually saw the sincere ally I often tried to be? Was I just overthinking everything, as usual? As for Destinee in particular, did the invitation come from her disruptive reflexes or did she simply see everyone as potential party material?
THROUGH THE few years I witnessed, Destinee sowed chaos and was fueled by it, provoking feuds and betrayals, building brief alliances, and even likely saving Jessica’s life by a well-timed call to the police, which went unappreciated, to say the least.
In truth, she was severely ill and addicted. The kids believed she had made her own young son smoke and then cough for the doctor so she could get codeine; and when a padlock was picked and half of Ryan’s huge bottle of tonsillectomy pain medication disappeared, the suspicion immediately fell on Destinee and her friends. Jessica would have to make a police report to replace it, I told her; seething as she was, she chose to gamble that Ryan wouldn’t really need it all—and he didn’t. My urging Jessica to report it, I see now, was typically naive—in Jessica’s world, suffering from the actions of others was always preferable to snitching. And although at that point they were not speaking, Destinee’s life had fallen apart and she was living on Jessica and Benny’s couch and eating their food—because she had nowhere else to go. Having “nowhere else to go” was a reason I came to realize trumped everything, on both sides of the family, no matter the difficult situations it led to. Was there a line between being Christian and enabling? Between protecting family members and being consumed by them? Who was I to say? Was it actually my family?
STEPPING STONES
Before he’d been home a year, we began getting Michael every other weekend. I was thrilled, and I lived by counting down to those days. Friday evenings I was filled with the joy of reunion and the need to make every little meal and activity perfect; I would lie down and sleep curled to him, just to absorb every possible moment through my skin. Sunday mornings my heart would fill with dread and I would be counting down hours in the other direction instead. Will and I took both boys back to Benny’s place on Sunday afternoons—Ryan had come to us from his grandmother’s—and Ryan would often have tantrums in our Subaru, kicking the seat and hammering the ceiling. Why didn’t I think that our destination might be the cause? Instead, I thought his incoherent tantrums were directed at us or stemmed from his inability to spend more than ten minutes in a car. Ryan didn’t really seem to notice us otherwise, so I was surprised when Jessica sent Ryan to us by himself for a weekend to distract him from a week of extreme distress after his father was in a serious accident. I was amazed but glad that Jessica thought we could be some comfort or provide some distraction.
I was always sweating over what would be too much to ask for and what would scare Michael’s family off. But Jessica said yes to almost everything I asked to do with Michael or Ryan. Once their school year started, I did anything I could think of to be with them, driving more than an hour each way to take Ryan home from an after-school Cub Scout meeting, both so he could have that all-American normalizing experience and so I could push Michael on the playground swings. That winter and spring I babysat them weekly at a horrible pizza joint (burned crust, dry pizza topping)—flipping the jukebox cards and giving up quarters to blast Lynyrd Skynyrd and Hank Williams Jr., pulling the boys down off the wooden booth dividers, chasing them, policing their squabbles, and finding new ways to waste time in a boring place when I didn’t want that time to end—all while Benny went to a required treatment group in the town hall basement. He couldn’t be seen illegally driving himself to the meeting, so he and Jessica would switch places in a shopping center parking lot.
I didn’t care if I was enabling, helping, whatever—I just hoarded the minutes and hours with Michael, wherever and whenever. As for my three classes, my sixty students—the upside was that I no longer obsessed so much about grading and teaching. Or at least I piled another, much heavier, obsession on top of my anxiety about work. I barely slept, except in two-hour spurts, and my goal was to plow through the grading of stacks of student stories. I was just doing what I could—at home, at school—to make it through to the next moment of relief when I’d see Michael’s face break into a smile—“It’s my Debba!” Wherever and whenever. Whatever it took, it was worth it.
PICNIC
For several years I supported Jessica in all the practical ways I could, including helping her attend community college and a workforce readiness program. Yes, I wanted more chances to see Michael and Ryan, but part of me also genuinely wanted to see justice done: Surely it was not too late for Jessica to get back some of the life she’d been robbed of as a teen? Against her wishes, she often told me, her parents had forced her to quit the school she loved in ninth grade so she could take care of her younger siblings. And these were not homesteading, haymaking farm days—this was the early 1990s, and her parents wanted their eldest girl at home so they could go out and party.
I continued to run into Jessica’s former teachers who, after seeing us together, would pull me aside and say, “Oh, I worried so about her every time she came to school” and “I was so sorry when she quit.” I would want to reward their sympathy with a glimpse of a happy ending and an Educating Rita optimism about the power of education, but if I mentioned she was in a community college class, their eyes would narrow nonetheless and they’d say, referring to Michael and Ryan, “I’m so glad those boys have you.” Unlike me, then, perhaps these grade-school teachers saw the big picture, sensing without knowing what lay ahead: that despite passing a semester, Jessica would not be able to go back to classes after receiving financial aid and disappearing mid-semester, once for serious health reasons but once coerced, in my opinion.
I never did know what to say when people I looked up to, like those retired teachers, would say they were glad the boys had Will and me or something similar. Usually, I’d unravel their comfort and set them straight, saying I was deeply grateful to Jessica for keeping the boys in my life but that I had no power to keep them safe. An abrupt way to repay a kind sentiment, but why should anyone rest easy if I didn’t? I am superstitious as well, so I often felt that a kind comment was a bad omen I had to undercut—don’t let down your guard, I wanted to say. My foster parent friends would have said, “Pray for us”—words I often wanted to say but, as a Jewish atheist, didn’t have the nerve to speak. “If you see something, say something” was more the gist of it—please go ahead and make the call about whatever it might be. (A Big Brother–type volunteer told me, almost offhand, ten months after he’d gone to pick up Michael at home for the first and only time, that he’d been shocked to find Michael’s mom unable even to get up to see them off—if only he’d told his mentoring supervisor right away, they’d have had to report it, and perhaps Michael’s whole house of cards might have folded. He could have avoided so much. Instead, the well-meaning mentor’s solution had been to have me bring Michael directly from school to meet him.)
I was so sure the last days were coming—it was just a matter of when and where the boys would be when the perfect storm of triggers hit, setting off Benny’s personal apocalypse. I didn’t mean to be rude or just shrug off any stranger’s kindness, but the more comfortable and complacent anyone felt about the boys’ fate, I believed, the more surely disaster was bound to come.
BUT IN the meantime all Jessica had had to say was that she wanted to go back to school and I snapped to it, concocting a plan that exhausts me to even think about now. For half of a fall semester and all of the following summer one, I drove from my county to the next, picked up Jessica, brought her back to the community college, turned around
