driver’s licenses—but no substantiated child abuse. The same boyfriend taught the boys one of their favorite sayings—“It’s not a threat, it’s a promise”—and never went anywhere without a knife pouch on his belt. To this day, the teenage Michael hates walking in the dark, even if he is holding my hand, because he remembers running for his life from Benny’s shouted threats through the night, pulling his mom along as she stumbled. Benny’s white-blue eyes shock even now when called up on a computer image search; in a nonstop stream of talk, he’d enumerate for any stranger the elements of his swirling inner turmoil, an uproar that Michael came to believe only he could quell. And when Michael was a teen and at last in our custody, he would ask if our family could get into the witness protection program, although we were never part of any case against Benny.
Also unsettling was that Jessica was almost young enough to have been my daughter, while Benny and I were of the same generation, albeit worlds apart culturally and economically. And I eventually heard that before their removal, Michael’s siblings had seen Benny and their father fighting and supposedly trying to stab each other in a parking lot; for years the boys revisited this story, insisting it was “over a dog.” They later admitted seeing Benny choke their mother as well, but they knew to keep that a secret from us. From fear of Benny, but even more, I guessed, of betraying the family and losing the mother they had only recently regained. The idea that such violence might cause her to leave Benny and take the children with her was not the simple option it might appear, no matter how much help she was offered; the kids seemed to know that keeping their mom was a package deal, bound to the very force that might destroy her.
These children breathed fear on a daily basis—fear mingled with the ever-present cigarette smoke so its scent was no longer detectable, just part of the air. Unsurprisingly, that was how Benny said he had spent his childhood as well, trying to protect himself and his mother from alcohol-fueled violence, and never knowing safety or freedom until he’d grown big enough to fight back. That such cycles repeat is news to no one; the question of how to stop them in the next generation is what confounds parents of all kinds.
Back before reunification, I thought I understood why Michael needed to return to his mother and siblings—so long as Jessica fit my version of single-mom nobility. So long, I guess, as her choices of how and where to live and with whom were not hers to make. But, of course, those choices were all part of the basic American freedom package of having her life and kids back. And I shared the social worker’s muttered doubt that still-fragile Jessica could handle and financially support three spirited kids on her own.
IN THE PICTURE
At DSS you learn that every birth parent is called “Mom,” or, more rarely, “Dad,” as in “Mom was appropriate” or “Dad’s in jail” or “We’ve given Mom a month to get it together.” Maybe it’s shorthand that saves the trouble of remembering names; or maybe all clients have somehow blended into one dysfunctional parent. It’s this way as well, we learned, in school, mental health, and juvenile court counselors’ offices, where the kids always have first names, often infamous ones, and the parents don’t; where Mom and Dad get pronounced with practiced neutrality. “But Mom’s got to do her part,” social workers will warn, or, more charitably, “We can give Mom some vouchers.” Meaning she can get a couch she has no means of transporting to her home, and all the used blue jeans she can stuff into a grocery sack at the church-run thrift store. Given a month, wouldn’t that help anyone get it together?
INTO THE WOODS
The Path of Needles, The Path of Pins . . . this was the choice offered Red Riding Hood by the wolf in an early version of her story. Both were bad options for navigating the deep, dark woods on the way to the Grandmother’s house, where the wolf would famously wait, ready to spring his trap. Needles? Pins? I’ve seen explanations that range from sexual metaphors to evocation of a dressmaking apprenticeship—no one seems to know the original source; to me, these routes described the always painful, always hazardous paths I trod toward and around Michael’s family, with forks that offered only bad choices. I knew, too, that a stumble over the thinnest root can send you back to the starting place. You can never put your foot down securely, never even know if you are moving forward—or toward what.
There was no right way to walk this walk, so I picked my way through the dark wood from day to day, straining to spot breadcrumb clues, always fearing I’d never find my way back into Michael’s life again.
PATH OF NEEDLES
I had never fully believed we’d get to visit after Michael went back to his mother, especially after Jessica pulled the plug on the very first visit we’d planned. She had asked the confused DSS director to call at the last minute to inform me the visit was off—a call that had sent me cascading into grief and the certainty that the family would deliberately disappear into the cliffs and chasms of the next county. Then, a month after his return, Jessica offered to let Michael come visit us the weekend after Thanksgiving. Everything went perfectly until I took Michael back that Sunday evening: we met halfway in a Wendy’s parking lot, and as I handed Michael to his mother and Benny, Michael cried my name and he reached out to come back to me instead of going to Jessica. I saw Benny’s eyes flare—as the all but official stepdad, he clearly gave the orders now, and he pulled Michael sharply away. Michael reached for me again, wailing. I couldn’t reach back: I had to pin my arms to my sides and keep the dumb plastic grin glued to my mouth, the ultimate betrayal. I drove back home in despair, sure this was the end.
But thanks to their grandmother Irene, who continued to keep the children every other weekend as she had before and during foster care, I was able to spend many Sunday afternoons hugging and playing cars with two-year-old Michael. It was incredible good luck: simply getting to see him this way gave me the patience to hang on when I started to panic. I even got to experience an approximation of Christmas that first winter when Irene invited me to spend the Saturday afternoon before the holiday with all three kids at her home, sharing lunch and watching them go through the Christmas motions. Michael sat on my lap, playing with the antenna on his new remote control truck as Ryan and Isabelle leapt from couch to coffee table in new onesie leopard pajamas, tearing open presents and Precious Moments bibles, while I-Carly and Sam bickered from the TV.
After Christmas, I got my nerve up and asked Jessica to let Michael visit again for several days of our university break and for weekends now and then, to which she agreed as if nothing had happened. But I always feared this arrangement might suddenly end, simply because Benny had decided that Michael and I were too close. At the end of each visit, I begged Will to make the drive with me and be the one to pass Michael back, just in case.
SHORTLY AFTER New Year’s I found out the family’s case had been closed. DSS had released them, and months earlier than I’d expected. Full stop. So I was shocked, a few weeks into January, when Irene called and asked me to stop by her work. Breathless, she told me that the boys’ sister had raised alarms at her new school and that the guidance counselor had summoned their county’s DSS in response to her disclosure.
Isabelle? I was staggered. The first-grader who had cried and pined and begged through half a year of foster care to go back with her mother? I knew she hated Benny, who had usurped her beloved father’s place. But how terrible must things be if Isabelle was the one causing an alarm?
She had seen Mom’s new boyfriend smoking from a pipe, like her dad used to, the girl had said. “A pipe” could have meant marijuana; it could have meant crack or meth. Regardless, she must have hoped that telling the counselor would bring the ceiling crashing in. Maybe Isabelle pictured her mom, brothers, and estranged dad coming back together for a happily-ever-after ending.
“She doesn’t like my rules,” Jessica explained, “all because I wouldn’t let her eat potato chips for breakfast that day. Was I wrong not to let her?”
Was this what I’d been praying for? Didn’t
