not Dad’s, as it turned out: he despised Benny, the new boyfriend, but Luke hated DSS more and wanted the kids taken out of foster care and returned to one parent, that is, to their mom.
At first this ruling had meant an unexpected gift of time—instead of having the children returned to her after just three months, Jessica first would have to get a home of her own, apart from her boyfriend. This meant a long process of qualifying for a federally subsidized housing voucher, then finding one of the scarce rentals that would accept the government payments, then furnishing it using Goodwill coupons and somebody’s borrowed pickup truck, and so on. Even with the constant hurried help of her social worker, it would take months. It was a huge reprieve for Will and me. Not only would we have more days with Michael and further opportunity for him to grow and learn but, less charitably—as many foster parents know—such a delay also would mean time for the birth parent to screw up—or more time for old screwups to come to light.
JESSICA WAS always sweet and complimentary to me when she carried Michael down the stairs and buckled him into my car after the weekly supervised visits at DSS. His siblings would be rocketing around, and Jessica would talk to them sternly, calling the kids ma’am and sir as the social worker looked on approvingly. Jessica’s hair was often a completely different color from visit to visit, but she always looked like she’d made an effort to think about how she’d be seen, as I did myself.
I glimpsed small lapses, though, once the family progressed to unsupervised visits. To me, this new stage of the case plan was awkward and unwelcome, as no social workers were even in the vicinity; the agency was short-staffed that summer and I was asked to meet Jessica and Benny alone for the weekly rendezvous to drop off and pick up Michael and his siblings for full Saturday visits. Suddenly Jessica was wearing tiny halters or tube tops instead of Coke-branded sweatshirts, with her hair pulled up in a streaky knot instead of clean and brushed. She and Benny would drive off with the children to a vaguely located lake—and come back with balled-up wet clothes turned inside out, half belonging to kids unknown and half of Michael’s missing. Brother Ryan would be talking in fragmented riddles and sister Isabelle would be in a speechless huff. The swimming diapers Michael had been wearing that morning would be gone, of course, and so would all the extras; when Jessica returned him to us, he’d be shirtless and in a wet swimsuit. By the time we’d get back to our home, the padding of his car seat would be soaked in urine.
I PICKED up all three kids from these daylong unsupervised visits, because Isabelle’s foster mom ran her florist business out of her house and was minding a baby, while Ryan’s had four or five other kids to juggle. But much more unnerving than the extra driving and messy car was being all alone to hear Benny’s recountings of jet-skiing and of how toddler Michael had gone underwater, but—no problem—Benny had scooped him out of the water and held him aloft overhead in triumph, like a football at the goal line. No mention of life jackets for any of the kids; clearly no use of sunscreen, even though I’d put it in the diaper bag and tried to coat Michael with it before leaving. Ryan, always, would come back exhausted, with a shirtless red blaze that often covered his torso.
Jessica and Benny must have thought my mania about sun exposure was a middle-class phobia and a predictable failure to realize that sunburns, spankings, and all-day soda were just part of growing up. Of toughening up. I said something about the jet skis and seeming lack of life jackets to the kids’ by-then third social worker, who was just out of college and substituting in to cover staff vacation time. Basically I got the message that this was Mom’s time, not mine, and it was up to Jessica to determine what was safe. But thanks for “transporting” them.
WHEN I was consumed with the imperfect details, the big picture was elusive, but even at the time I realized there was no greater blessing for us than the motion made by Luke’s lawyer and the judge’s requiring Jessica to secure housing separate from Benny’s. The extra months we gained with Michael as a result were an irreplaceable gift, giving our hearts more time to knit, allowing Michael more time to live free of cigarette smoke and learn to take asthma meds through a tube, and permitting us to go to the beach with Michael and his sister. Ryan too was able to go on the first vacation of his life with his foster family, traveling to the World of Coca-Cola and Stone Mountain, Georgia; the colored lasers that illuminated the cliff carvings at night impressed him more than anything he’d yet seen.
Then, in late summer, we heard that Jessica indeed had found a trailer that qualified for a rent subsidy. Like Benny’s place, it was also in the next county—not only remote but out of the jurisdiction of our DSS, which gave Jessica and the kids a clean slate and, if a crisis should come, different foster homes. And as slow to react as we thought our DSS was, this neighboring one was rumored to be slower. But at least our own DSS would have to monitor Jessica’s family for what we hoped and believed would be six months after reunification—in fact, it turned out to be two months, barely—before their case was closed.
Early on, Jessica had wrinkled her nose and mentioned that the rental was in a pretty crummy small trailer court, but that was it. (Well, at least there’ll be people around, I remember thinking.) Yet once the kids started going for weekend visits, the penultimate step of the whole reunification process, we heard nothing, oddly, about the new trailer. Jessica and Benny now brought the children all the way back to us, which cost them significant gas money but was no doubt worth it to keep us out of their lives and their business. The kids said little—even the older two, who could speak. What these visits were like was perplexing to piece together, and surely they’d been told not to say anything for fear of never getting their family back—but I remember sitting with their paternal grandmother, Irene, and looking at the patterned walls of her trailer, while she tried to find out what they’d eaten that day, and if they’d had lunch, because she said they’d never had lunch in the past. (Yes, we learned, they’d had box macaroni and lettuce, which I hated myself for thinking sounded suspiciously balanced to impress DSS.) I was also trying to decipher what Ryan, who always spoke cryptically, even when he wasn’t covering for adults, meant by “the new Hardee’s, you know, the new one,” in an unnameable county or town.
Ryan’s more experienced foster mom, Mona, was equally disgusted at the vagueness and confusion of the whole transition, even though she had pressed for a plan for Ryan to leave as her twin nieces had just moved in to stay while both of their parents were deployed overseas. Since he had started spending weekends with Benny, Ryan had come back to her house saying things like “I don’t eat with brown people,” and he was refusing to sit at the dinner table with Mona’s nieces. So Mona was well ready for him to be gone, but not like this.
As for Michael, he would walk around the day care on Monday mornings, saying, “Belt, belt, spank, spank,” while the director and I looked at each other with big eyes and pressed lips.
Somehow, we learned that the kids had been in the new trailer once and found a nail to hang a backpack on but that it had no furniture. (“Sweet Home in a Trailer,” the boys always loved to screech—the 8 Mile version of the classic—oblivious to Eminem’s bitterness.) I think perhaps the new trailer became their storage space, because I remember some commotion when the year’s lease was up, their vehicle was down, and the landlord wanted their stuff the hell out of it.
We never understood how this arrangement could go undetected—and by we, I mean the children’s Grandma Irene, Ryan’s foster mom, and me. Clearly the kids were spending all their visiting time at Benny’s place, cruising around bareheaded on dirt bikes and four-wheelers with Benny’s grandson. Yes, I shuddered to think that Jessica’s boyfriend had grandchildren who were older than Michael. This was pre-reunification, so surely all we had to do was to somehow get DSS to see this, to realize that the judge’s order was being violated and that Jessica and the kids were not staying in that new place at all! Mom was still married, albeit to an inmate, yet she wanted the kids to spend their nights with a man they vividly remembered watching fight with their dad? Just a quick, pointed disclosure and DSS would realize that the whole housing situation was a scam, and then surely the reunification would
