The Risk of Us, page 2
God, Max, forgive me.
“I was baffled,” my ex-husband once told me, “but I had to try to help you, you were just a pup.” Condescending, yes. He was seven years older, after all. And I: I was twenty-three when we met, but inside I was ten.
Max has a scar on his shoulder. From the night I clawed him.
The sting of small fingernails. Bright liquid red in a thin line across middle-aged skin.
I am not baffled by this screaming girl but my comprehension is no help. She is retching, she is shaking, she is spitting up bile. Gasping between dry heaves.
You fetch the Band-Aids. Say to me, “Are you okay?” Say weakly to the girl, “It’s okay, you’re safe.” As her voice echoes past the dead garden, down the dark streets, through the woods.
Two
AND JUST LIKE THAT, there’s a new you. With a history we hardly know. A you we hope will become part of us.
You: daughter. Little and fierce. You come with scars. Broken nose, broken chin, broken arm, all acquired before age five. And mysterious marks on your thighs, lines thin as razor blades. In your pajamas, as I trace them with my finger, you say you got them in some kind of fall, but I don’t see how that could be. The lines are so precise.
Right away, we add to the record of injury. “Pre-placement,” they call this overnight visit, a test run before move-in.
Which was going pretty well until Daddy took you along to feed the neighbors’ cats. The neighbors’ gas heater left on high, the fireplace ablaze as you dashed across the room. “Daddy, come warm your hands by the fire!” you called.
And I’m not there to keep your hands safe. I’m home waiting on the back porch. I just see you running across freshly fallen snow, as the man I once knew as Sebastian but will now forever think of as “Daddy” runs after. As he shouts, “Sorry, Mommy, we’ve had a little accident!”
At the clinic, we’re all a sobbing mess. You’ve been howling for two hours, you’ve been trying so hard to be brave, and we’ve been babbling, “We’re sorry, so sorry, it’s breaking our hearts to see you in pain, it’s all our fault, we’re so sorry.”
The nurse practitioner wrapping up second-degree burns.
“We’ve just met, we’re adopting her,” we explain, because we must look like the most sham parents on the planet.
The nurse practitioner is wet-eyed, too. “It’s beautiful,” she says.
We’re on alert for beauty. Searching for signs. A double rainbow on Christmas Eve Day as we drive you back to the foster home you’ll soon leave. Then a bald eagle soaring as we drive back again, drive you home forever, or so we’ve promised, leaving Auntie and your foster sisters in the Krispy Kreme parking lot. All your belongings stuffed in two duffel bags and a blue Rubbermaid bin.
I’m the first to spot him, the black wings, white head, passing above the windshield and gliding toward the buttes. We crane our necks, gasp. “That’s very rare, to see a bald eagle,” Daddy says. “A good omen.”
Only you never actually saw it, no matter how hard we tried to direct your eyes. You just have to believe us.
And there are some signs I never share with you, Little One. Signs I wouldn’t want you to hear about until the time is right, if ever that day comes. Dark signs that hold out the hope, to me at least, of light. The week after I tacked your name to the prayer board, when you were still just a name and a picture, I drove with Daddy down to the bay again, saw him off to his classes again, climbed the hill to the cathedral for morning prayer. And, we pray, give us such an awareness of your mercies, that with truly thankful hearts we may show forth your praise, not only with our lips but in our lives, by giving up our selves to your service . . . Ambling the south of the nave on my way out, wanting to pause beneath the philosophers’ window, pay my respects to the stained-glass Kierkegaard high above, my eye snagged on a display case at ground level. Beneath the glass: whips, chains, condoms. Many children in the foster care system become victims of sexual slavery, the placard read.
Directly above: life-size photos in black and white. Children. Teenagers. Not smiling, like the faces in the binder. Faces limp. And in the flesh, beneath the philosophers’ window, a boy—a young man—balanced on a ladder, drilling holes to install more photographs.
This travelling exhibition is drawn from the holdings of the Foster Youth Museum, said the sign near him. The scream of the drill bit echoing, dying. The young man looked at me cautiously. “I’m glad you’re here,” I said. He smiled. Had he been a foster child? He looked healthy. Whole. Yes, I took it as a sign.
You move in on New Year’s Day. Your first day at your new school will be January 3rd. The fourth school you’ll have attended within two years.
On January 2nd, you stay in bed. Vomiting. For hours. Then dry heaves. We hold open plastic bags for your bile, place a thermometer shaped like a bunny in your mouth. Normal temperature. “I just don’t see how it could be food poisoning,” Daddy says. We all ate that meatloaf.
Once upon a time, I vomited for no reason, too. Or: too many reasons to face. Panic blazes strange fire-trails through the body.
“Help, Mommy,” you say.
I’m not sure how I feel about that word. I didn’t want you to have to use it. I wanted you to call me whatever felt right. I thought what you called me could evolve. But the third time we met, the foster mom with the red Durango crouched near your ear and said, not sotto voce enough, “Go hug your new mommy.” And a bit later, when you said, “Bye, Mommy,” she gasped in blessing.
Auntie gasped a lot that day, that day that was like a marriage proposal. An old pro in the system, she had served as “the bridge” for dozens of girls, and we were dependent on her coaching. The day before, Daddy and I had spent an hour in the toy store, debating between the brown bunny and the black bunny, stroking one and then the other, seeking ultimate soft. “Transitional object,” the social workers called it. Something you could carry back and forth between your old life and your new. A stuffed polyester symbol of us. Which you were supposed to cling to while we were still strangers.
“Mr. Fluffy Stuffy Puff Ball!” you christened him over chicken tenders at Denny’s. Then rubbed him against your dimpled face as though prepped by the social workers’ script.
Back at Auntie’s house that day, we knelt on the carpet. Showed you photos of your new bedroom, staged with model horses and vintage teddy bears. There was no popping the question per se. You don’t ask a child that young, the social workers advised. You just tell her. And say that whatever she feels is okay. Daddy had designated me for the job. I had practiced.
“The tone, the body language was just perfect!” Auntie said later.
You, Little One: speechless.
The sheets I bought for your mattress have pictures of bunnies dressed in ski clothes. You hold Fluffy Stuffy Puff Ball. We read silly kid-poems about boogers and boa constrictors. We turn on night-lights.
Back at Auntie’s, after we’d returned you from a “pre-placement visit,” you’d taught me how to kiss. Leaning over the rail of the bunk bed in the dark. “Mommy, hold your hands up like this.” Making a heart with your fingers and thumb. Our lips touching in the middle of the heart-hand.
I was honored. I was disturbed. The social workers had shown me a picture of you with your birth mom, her hands held like a heart as your lips touched.
Now you roll out a dozen new kisses. It goes on for half an hour, the bedtime kissing, all three of us speaking too brightly. Butterfly kiss! Eskimo kiss! Bunny ears kiss! Shooting star kiss! More kisses, Daddy! More kisses, Mommy!
“We love you!” we say.
“I love you more!”
“That can’t be true! Because we love you soooooooo much!” We’ve talked about this, Daddy and I. We want to walk you away from this idea of love as a contest, logic that can come to no good.
You look at us with the bitter disillusionment of a girl whose boyfriend was too cheap to buy Valentine’s roses. “You’re supposed to say I love you more plus infinity.”
One night you put your thumbs and forefingers together and then you fan the rest of your fingers as you bring your lips between your hands. “Bald eagle kiss!” you announce. And as Daddy and I draw back in astonishment, you make a shape with your hands that no one would guess was a bird. “See, these are the wings, and in the middle, this is the bald head.”
“Oh, we see it!” we say. A dozen bald eagle kisses.
“That was a good omen,” Daddy confirms.
Another new kiss. No warning. My lips are pressed to yours, and then I feel your wet tongue probing, and I spring backward.
“I don’t like that kiss,” I say. Reminding myself not to scowl. Speaking with the fake brightness. As you giggle.
You do it again the next night. You say, “Mommy, take a shower with me.”
You twirl around the living room with no panties on, stop in front of where I sit on the sofa, bend over and spread your little naked crotch inches from my face.
There’s a new social worker from the far-off county. He’s Chinese American, all Californian: flip-flops in February, slouchy hoodies, “yeahs” and “heys.” “Do you think he surfs?” I joke with Daddy. I like him.
He drives up and down the state visiting the kids on his caseload. Apparently he met you the day you were taken from your birth mom, though it’s unclear whether you remember. He’ll visit once a month until we finalize. Which, since your mother’s parental rights are all but officially terminated, we expect will happen as soon as the minimum six months of foster placement pass.
He slouches in his hoodie as you dash to your bedroom to don your too-tight old dance costumes and grab your pink plastic microphone. He speaks low as you ready yourself, offstage, for the elaborate, manic performance you rally for all our visitors.
“So the crotch stuff, yeah . . . in cases like this, you just can’t know everything that happened. But uh, so I went to a conference on sexual abuse last week. And the presenter was saying . . . conservative estimate for foster kids and sexual abuse? Probably sixty percent.”
You’re equal opportunity with your daytime tauntings, Little One: You’ll get on all fours and wave your rectum at me and Daddy both. Giggle and beg us to get your booty. But bedtime is different. You’ll let me lie down in your bed to help you fall asleep, but Daddy? No. You don’t slip Daddy the tongue. And already you’ve said to me twice: “Mommy, why do I feel weird snuggling Daddy? Is it because he’s a boy?”
You don’t tell us about your mom’s boyfriends, don’t talk about the nights in the hotels. You tell us about the afternoon with the frying pan, how your grandmother dragged your mom into the back room and slammed the door and then you heard the whack. How your mom came out covered in blood. We hear about other kitchen implements. “One time, my birth mom? She took a spatula, and she was so angry, and she pulled down my pants and she hit me, over and over. Hard.” You say this apropos of nothing one night, between bites of macaroni while Daddy is staying overnight in San Francisco to teach his art classes. I’m fumbling for a script: Do I press you for more? The only lines I feel sure of: I’m so sorry, sweetie; that shouldn’t have happened.
“Oh. It was nothing.” Artificial cheese glaring orange on your plate.
We hear again and again about the spatula. And about the magic forest.
We made a house with branches because we had nowhere to stay. It was raining but the leaves covered us. We drank raindrops out of the flowers. The flowers were our cups. We had no money for food but the trees had tiny purple apples and we ate them and they were sweet. I was happy because we had raindrops to drink from the flowers. I slept with my mom and my sister in the magic forest.
At midnight, this is what you tell me to write, because you can’t go back to sleep. We are sitting on the floor in a circle of lamplight. Your therapist taught me about “life books,” how I could offer to write down your memories, a directive I was happy to run with, as someone who credits writing for ending those years of stabbing knives into boxes. A life book will help you “externalize,” the therapist said. I should go ahead and help you name your emotions if you’re not able. And so I lift the purple-inked pen from the construction paper.
“Honey, was it cold in the house made of branches? It sounds kind of scary to have no money for food.”
“Oh no, it wasn’t scary. We were happy. There were fairies!”
We’re driving home from gymnastics when I spot highway patrol in the rearview mirror. Daddy’s away for work again and night is thickening between the pines.
When the cop car passes you say, “Why did the policeman push my mom on the ground?”
I catch your eye in the mirror, but my gaze contains more question than reply.
“She was crying and they pushed her on the ground! Policemen are mean!”
Over that night’s macaroni, I ask if you know what drugs are.
“Like the stuff a doctor gives you when you’re sick and then you feel better?”
Yes, I say, and change the subject to your cartwheels.
Daddy returns when you’re asleep and tells me the words to type into the search box. “I couldn’t help myself,” he says.
I’ve drawn my hand to my mouth. Nausea reflex. The room darkens, though the screen is too bright. The unmistakable fluorescent pallor of a mug shot. Her face is blue-green-grey, purple below the eyes, a stripe of electric red hair above. This is not the same mother I saw in the disclosure photos the day I worried about the pansies. This woman is the walking dead.
A second face. His head is bald. Tattoo around his neck. And on his scalp, more markings—devil’s horns.
A gun was involved. The man with the devil horns used it. Assault. Robbery.
And then the last line of the newspaper report: Two children of the female accomplice, ages four and six, were taken by Child Welfare Services at the time of arrest.
The room dimming as though a dark spell has been cast, and we’re frozen, trying to identify an antidote. “I don’t think we should show this to anyone,” Daddy says. “Okay? We’ll just keep what we’ve seen between us.”
You tend to bring up your birth mom when Daddy’s not around. Which is every Tuesday through Thursday, when he takes the train down to the Bay Area and stays two nights, to teach his art classes.
I’ve expanded my kid food repertoire to include pizza poppers. “Oh! I think I remember what my birth mom looked like,” you say as you watch the red sauce ooze. “Her hair was red. Like, a stripe.”
“Really?” I say, fake bright. “You mean, like a streak she dyed?”
“Oh, no.” You’re nodding stridently. “Her hair was naturally red. She never dyed it.”
We say that you can always love your birth mom. That you don’t have to choose. That the way love works, you can always have more of it.
I had two moms, I explain, my birth mom (your new grandma) and my dad’s second wife, the one he left right before he died, the one who still sends me birthday cards. I love them both and that’s okay. “In fact, if you want,” I tell you, “we can write a letter to your birth mom.”
Your eyes wide. “And then we could go visit?”
So I don’t go back to the idea of letter writing for a while. Until one night when I insist that we clean your room, that night when just asking you to put the Play-Doh back in the canisters starts you screaming, and then you run to the living room and carry on there.
Daddy is frying chicken in the kitchen, the grease hissing as you wail. We’re both on the living room floor, you writhing as though on fire, and then you’re shouting, “MOMMY! MY MOMMY! I MISS MY MOMMY!”
“I’m so sorry,” I say. “I’m so sorry you can’t see her.” Grab pen and paper. “Let’s write to her,” I say. And you sit up, suddenly focused, eyes wet and glaring. “There’s a string between our hearts. Write that. Write: Dear Mommy, there’s a string between our hearts no matter how far away we go. Write: Dear Mommy, I love you. Absolutely.”
Where did you learn that word? Daddy and I will marvel over that later. Absolutely: the perfect word for the truth of the matter.
“Absolutely,” you repeat.
I meet alone with your therapist and ask for a script. She was the first therapist offered by the county, and I feel lucky that I like her. She’s about my age, on or just past the brink of forty, and though she’s blonde, she looks like me, in a way—we could fill the same stock character role in a movie. She dresses like me, too, or at least the way I used to dress until my last day childless: tailored jeans, dangly earrings. She even moved from the Bay Area to the foothills about the same time I did, so she could take this job working with foster kids. She has a cyst-like bump on her left cheek, too pale for a mole. I once saw her tell you it’s her “bimple.”
She operates under the auspices of the foster services agency that matched us with you and has an office in their cinderblock building. The discreet kneeling movement she makes to click on the whirring white-noise machine before closing the door impresses me.
“We recommend that your explanations stay age-appropriate,” she says. “You can just say: Your birth mother is safe but she can’t take care of children right now. She’s glad that you’re safe.”
The next night on the futon, I follow this word-for-word, one arm around your shoulder.
“But why can’t we visit her?”
I’m alone in the car in the gymnastics parking lot when the surfer dude social worker from the far-off county calls. I’m not quite sure what to explain about the birth mom, I tell him. Do you tell a seven-year-old that her mom is in jail?
“Yeah, well, actually, right now her mom’s back out,” surfer dude says as though to amuse. “You know, actually, she came into our office last week asking about the girls, but I wasn’t there. She didn’t leave a message.”
