But then—nothing.
Michael did not magically reappear in our crib, and Jessica and Benny’s TracFone was perennially out of minutes. All we heard was that Benny had been required to show up at the courthouse for a drug test. And that he’d been furious. And that then, when one of the new county’s social workers had come out to Benny’s trailer, Isabelle had run up into the woods and hidden until the worker had heard Jessica’s story and left again. There was a missing piece somewhere: Why didn’t the social worker go talk to Isabelle at school? Ask the child why she was afraid? With my usual trust in authority, I assumed something was going on behind the scenes with the new DSS, something we couldn’t see or know.
For two or three weeks, apparently, Isabelle was not allowed to eat with her brothers, and she had to sit apart at the Little Tikes table. With the whole family in the car, Benny drove her down the road in the dark and threatened to keep driving her right back to the foster home where she’d had to eat all her food and go off to her room if she wanted to cry. Then, abruptly, still attributing what Isabelle had said to revenge for being denied potato chips, Jessica and Benny sent Isabelle to live with Irene, where she remained, going back only for visits. And given the strange lifelong tension between Benny and Isabelle, Jessica must have sensed her daughter would be much safer growing up there.
Once Isabelle was gone, I held my breath, elated for her liberation despite the loss of her dream. Plus, she had been especially close to her father’s mother, so it seemed like a natural fit that could provide the family comfort she seemed to have been craving. “I think the kids are all coming out of there,” said a friend’s cousin who knew the family through a different service agency. Maybe it would all be over, just like that! Maybe my months of fearful longing since Michael had moved home and out of DSS custody had all been a necessary nightmare. Maybe we’d paid our dues karmically, and Michael—maybe even his brother—would be back with us for good!
It was February, and my hopes soared that things might go wrong enough that Michael would be removed and sent back to us. That was when I first started proposing all manner of bargains to God—a compulsion that would continue for years—for I was painfully aware it would take a catastrophe for Social Services to intervene to that degree. Whatever the possible disaster, I prayed ceaselessly that the children would escape unscathed physically and not die in the process. While that might sound like any parent’s daily irrational fear, the only irrational part was the conviction that my own constant panic kept him safe, in some strange, cosmic balance. If I relaxed my vigilance for a second or let myself get lost in an enjoyable moment, I felt the worst might befall Michael and his family. I kept thinking of the high-rise apartment block in an old Monty Python sketch, which collapses to rubble the minute its tenants forget to believe in it. But it was no joke to me. I was relieved eventually to learn there was an actual name for this—“vicarious trauma,” which caregivers, along with counselors, are prone to suffer.
AS MUCH as everyone had wanted Jessica to be the very model of the bootstrap Single Mom, keep her fast-food job, and strike out on her own with all three kids and their electronic welfare (EBT) card, clearly that was not ever going to be: sending Isabelle to live with her Grandma Irene was for the best. Jessica believed I was the only person who considered her a good parent, and not a bad one, for doing it, and I did. I still do. And yet I had secretly, selfishly hoped that having three kids to juggle would make everything break down more quickly and visibly. And I worried: What if having only two kids made life manageable or made the chaos more concealable, at least?
Isabelle’s departure made clear to both boys what happened when someone failed the basic loyalty test. Ryan, especially, never forgot this and made keeping family secrets his specialty. And like his elders, he often spoke of facts, arrangements, and events in a rushed, jumbled, confounding, broken way that, purposely or not, further obscured any truth and avoided confrontation while leaving the listener unsure of what he’d said and afraid or embarrassed to press for specifics. It was the perfect cloaking device.
DAY AND NIGHT
My acquaintance’s prophecy to the contrary, the boys did not “come out of there” as their sister did, but on and off, as Benny and Jessica gradually allowed Michael to visit with Will and me, we became more friendly and operated with the illusion of trust. We let that polite illusion settle over everything, but it seemed then as delicate as one of those foil emergency blankets that reflects body heat but seems likely to blow away or be crumpled up and thrown away in an instant. Even so, absolutely nothing required that Jessica allow Michael to see us, and at almost any point for the next decade she had the full right to cut our ties completely and at any moment.
No matter how illusory that veneer of trust was, I sincerely believed that anything I might do to help any close or extended family member, child or adult, find medical care or community opportunities or simply to get from one place to another would strengthen the whole in some small way and bond us through experience and goodwill.
Beyond that, I tried to use my letter-writing skills to help Benny resolve any number of bureaucratic issues. My reliable phone and computer gave me the ability and persistence to track down answers, while my convenient credit card too often made utility cutoffs and medical bills magically disappear. Will hired Jessica’s brother, father, and Benny to re-roof our garage; we shared Thanksgiving and Scout potlucks, where conservative Christian parents overlooked the long hair and alcohol-infused slurring, accepted Benny’s offers to assemble the pinewood derby track for the boys’ annual wooden car competition, and said nothing when he cussed out the judge for the regional race.
But Benny seemed never more purposeful than when it would fall to him to take Michael or Ryan up into the hills on his four-wheeler and comfort them about the most recent failings of their birth father, Luke—everything from a missed visit to another prison sentence. Benny was there for them, he wanted them to know: for good and bad, this understanding sank in. Certainly at times the boys loved Benny and felt sorry for him when he suffered days-long spells of silent sadness. The boys would creep around the house, watching videos or playing Guitar Hero on mute, or they messed around outside in the woods with scavenged car parts for hours, as Benny lay in the corner of a darkened room, haunted by old losses, a sheet draped over the window to mute the light. Often at these times, Jessica would call to ask if I wanted to come get the boys for a few days, knowing I’d jump at the chance. “Can’t Mom come with us, too?” the boys would often beg me, fearing they’d return to find her dead, not knowing I’d asked her myself, out of their hearing. Occasionally, she would allow me to drop her off somewhere, but usually she’d say that Benny was harmless at that point and that she was afraid to leave him alone in a depressed condition. Relieved as the boys seemed once they’d climbed into my car, I was sure they felt guilty to leave her behind.
Seeing Benny laid low, it was hard to picture his frightening rages, much less the usual brassy cheer and party spirit he brought to everything when he felt okay. In good times, Benny loved to work and seemed to feel most himself when working, whether work was crawling across a roof in blistering July heat, replacing spark plugs for a neighbor, or rolling paint down a wall in invisibly blended strokes. Work was his salvation, but there was never enough of it to last long.
As time went on, though, I noticed that Jessica began to arrange never to be alone with Benny, whether that was by babysitting cousins’ kids, offering a couch to semihomeless friends, or even allowing Michael to stay behind to soothe Benny through an extra-bad morning and saddle himself with the impossible burden of curing an adult’s grief.
Jessica watched the moon phases, as I began to, half-believing the full moon predicted the times of greatest danger. I worried Benny might die at his low times, but that they all might die at the peak ones. I tried hard never to be out of phone range. I didn’t travel out of state or overnight without them. And I knowingly missed the last years of my only grandmother’s life because she lived across the ocean. No one asked me to do this. I just knew I couldn’t leave them.
FOR
