Something hit me, almost physically from the feel of it. It felt like a fastball connecting hard at the pit of my throat.
The “prayers” I had said out on the roof. Except they were not prayers, because they were not to any deity. They were to whoever had Etta. My silent pleas that the person comfort her. Help her not to be so afraid.
Molly had been the answer to those prayers. Even as I was pushing them out into the night. And I had all but snubbed her. Because I didn’t understand why she took so long to call. Because I hadn’t waited to hear her side of the story.
I figured Grace would be off shift by now, so I didn’t try to call her at the station. I texted her in return.
I wrote:
I’ve been a fool. Please set up a meeting with the girl when you think she’s ready. I need a do-over.
It was more than an hour before she texted me back this:
Thought you might feel that way. We’ll give her a couple of days. New foster homes are hard.
I knew it would be a tough couple of days. For both of us.
Della was an older woman. Old enough that one would think she’d be retired from her career as a marital, family, and child counselor. Her hair was gray. Not white, but a rich mixture of tones of vibrant gray. It was piled up on her head in a careful style. She had a quick and unselfconscious smile, despite a jumble of teeth that looked both too large and too numerous for her mouth.
“The first thing I want to say,” she told me, looking up from the questionnaire I had filled out, “is that it’s very soon. You say here this all happened two nights ago. I can’t tell you for a fact that any trauma symptoms you’re not seeing won’t be coming along shortly. But let’s be optimistic for now. Why do you think your daughter is doing so well?”
It was a question that caught me off guard.
Etta was sitting quietly in a corner of the office, playing with a teddy bear and a doll. She had been playing for most of the session. I had been doing the work. Except for Etta listening to a series of words and looking at some pictures, I was the one conducting the evaluation with Della. I guess it made sense, given that Etta was so young. For all intents and purposes almost preverbal.
“I’m not sure I understand the question,” I said.
“All right. Let me try to make it clearer. You say your daughter is extra clingy and cries when you get out of her sight. That’s to be expected, of course. But in a situation as dramatic as hers, frankly, I expected far worse damage. As I say, it’s early. But she’s doing very well, considering the experience she had to go through. I was just wondering if you had any thoughts on why that might be.”
“I was hoping you would,” I said. “Being the therapist and all.”
It was a little bit of a snarky comment. I expected her to react to it that way. She didn’t. She smiled. Spoke calmly and evenly.
“But you must appreciate how removed I am from the situation.”
“That’s true. I’m sorry.”
“So . . . any thoughts?”
“Well . . . ,” I began. I took a deep breath. Sighed it out. “She did have somebody with her during that time.”
“Oh?” Out of the corner of my eye I saw her scribbling on her pad. “You didn’t mention that.”
Right. I hadn’t. And I had been aware that I hadn’t. I had felt myself skirting around the issue every time I hadn’t brought it up. The only thing I didn’t know was why.
I wasn’t saying anything. So she added, “Tell me more.”
“It was a teenage girl. Living on the street, apparently. She found Etta strapped into her car seat on the sidewalk. And she stayed with her and took care of her until she could get her back to the police.”
“I see,” she said.
“Molly,” Etta said, without looking up from her toys.
Which I found a bit startling. I suppose it’s possible that it was coincidental. But I think it makes more sense to believe that she understood a lot of what was being discussed.
“Yes,” I said to her. “Molly.”
Then Della just wrote and wrote. For a long time. I was quite sure she was writing about me. About how odd it was that I hadn’t mentioned Molly sooner. To this day I have no idea what she actually wrote. But it was a bit of a psychological mystery that I’d left Molly out of the story for so long. I couldn’t imagine Della not wondering. I was wondering myself.
She looked up from her pad. But not at me. She looked over at Etta, who had her back turned to us. Playing with the doll and the bear. Making them look like they were hugging.
“Etta,” she said. “Will you please come here and talk with me for just a minute or two?”
Etta looked around at her. But she didn’t move. She seemed reluctant to put down the toys.
“Bring them with you if you like,” Della said.
Etta dutifully climbed to her feet. She walked to Della and stood a baby step or two away. She looked shy and a little bit cowed. The bear hung from one hand, looking limp and dejected. The doll from the other.
She was so beautiful I thought my chest was going to split open. Maybe to accommodate the swelling of my heart.
“I want to ask you about Molly,” Della said.
“Molly,” Etta said in return.
“Did you like Molly?”
Etta nodded.
“Did it help that Molly was there with you?”
Etta nodded again.
“Were you still scared, even though she was there?”
Etta stood perfectly quiet and still for a couple of beats. Then she shrugged.
“Okay,” I said, aimed at Della. “I feel like I’ve been holding out on you. Which is pointless if I want to get us both through this.”
I took out my phone. Opened the message app. Opened the attachment that Grace Beatty had sent me. Handed the phone over to our new therapist.
For a long time she just stared at the screen, scrolling with her finger. Three or four minutes, maybe. It was a long document. Etta got bored and wandered back into the corner. She dropped the doll and bear and got involved with some interlocking blocks.
“This is quite remarkable,” Della said after a time.
“In what way?”
“The various types of support she provided for your daughter. Singing to her and chanting comforting words. Keeping her busy with clapping games. It’s very maternal. She seems like a very maternal young woman.”
“Okay,” I said.
I wasn’t sure what this all added up to. And I wasn’t sure I wanted to ask.
“I think you can count yourself fortunate,” she said. Then, before I could open my mouth to object, she continued. “Oh, I’m sorry, I didn’t mean that the way it sounded at all. You both had a terrible experience, and of course there’s nothing fortunate about that at all. I just mean . . . given that the experience took place, I think Etta was fortunate to have this kind of support until you could get her back. This girl was clearly trying to mother her, and of course it was no substitute for having her own mother, but it provides a sort of consistency that could prove quite crucial. So I just think it’s fortunate that this girl was there to care for Etta.”
“Except somebody else might have had a cell phone and gotten her home to me in twenty minutes or less.”
“True. Still, I think time is perhaps a less important factor than Etta’s fear. Not unimportant, but perhaps less important. If the person who found her had been scary and not very welcoming, well . . . it doesn’t take a lot of time to traumatize a child. It can happen in the blink of an eye.”
I felt myself getting a little bristly. I wasn’t entirely sure why. But I did know that I was tired of feeling it.
“So you’re saying that Molly is part of why she’s doing fairly well under the circumstances.”
“All I can say at this point is that it’s too soon to say. I’m hoping you’ll come back for at least several more sessions, until we really get a good sense of how she’s adjusting after this experience. If you’re wo
rried about the cost, I can offer a diagnosis that should satisfy your insurance company.”
“Thank you,” I said.
“But I’m sorry to say that our time is up for today. Take your daughter home. Hold her close. Talk to her a lot. She seems intelligent and resilient. If I were you, I’d just keep breathing deeply and try to know that you’ll both be okay. Given time.”
Chapter Twelve
Molly: Denver Patterson
For about a minute and a half the foster home looked good enough, but then my new social worker left, and the whole thing changed out from under me. The cot that had been set up for me in the corner of this lady’s real daughter’s bedroom got pushed into the closet, so I said, “What, I get it out right before bed?”
She said no, that was my real bedroom—the closet—and my social worker was never supposed to know. She said her real daughter, who was pretty little, needed more privacy and protection, and she wasn’t going to force her to share a room with a stranger. Like I was some kind of serial killer or something.
It was a big closet, so that wasn’t the deal breaker all by itself, but it was a sign of how things were going to go around that place, if I’d been paying attention.
And it’s not that I wasn’t bothering to pay attention or anything like that. I mean, this was my life we were talking about. More that the scariness of the whole thing was distracting to me, and I kind of felt like I was floating around that place in a dream.
It was a big apartment in the San Fernando Valley with three bedrooms and walls that were painted this sort of weird lavender color, and it was so close to Ventura Boulevard that you could hear the traffic every minute.
I sat on my cot in that closet for a little bit, but I wasn’t sure what to do. I didn’t have any books or music like I had at home in Utah, and even when I was out on the street with nothing I could keep busy by walking all over the neighborhood picking up recycling, which stays interesting because recycling is money. I mean, not much of it, but still. It’s like a reward built in—find enough of it and you get to eat.
I found the lady in the kitchen, because I didn’t know what else to do.
She had on a gray sweat suit with an apron over it, and her hair was up in curlers. There was a man living there, too, lying all sprawled out on the couch in the living room, but I didn’t know if he was her boyfriend or her husband. I’d just been introduced to him as Roger, and she’d told me he was on disability for some kind of work accident, which I guess is why he was just lying in front of the TV with no shirt on and with part of one hand shoved down on the diagonal into the waistband of his jeans.
“Can I walk down to Ventura Boulevard?” I asked her, because if I’d had anything at all to do, that would’ve helped.
“Absolutely not,” she said. “I’m responsible for you and I have to know where you are at all times.”
She was smoking one of those electronic cigarettes, and it was hanging at the corner of her mouth—no hands—and now and then she puffed out this big cloud of steam that didn’t smell like cigarette smoke. It didn’t smell like much of anything.
“So what do I do?” I asked.
She said, “Anything you want, as long as I know where you are,” which was so not helpful I could hardly stand it.
I walked away to see if I could find the other two girls, because the social worker had told me there were two other foster girls, but I hadn’t seen them with my own eyes.
I started to go through the living room but then Roger raised his head and looked at me and I stopped, because I wasn’t too sure about him. You know, what kind of a guy he was. So I just looked at him and he looked at me and then I looked over and the lady was standing next to me, staring.
“Come back in the kitchen,” she said. “There’s something I need to give you.”
I followed her back in and I could smell something cooking, which was good, because my social worker had managed to get me over there just late enough that I missed lunch. I probably should’ve said something, but I’d let the moment go by. So far as I could tell, the only thing about the place that was better than the way I’d been living with Bodhi was the idea that they would feed me a little better here, so I thought it was too bad that I got off to such a lousy start with that.
She handed me a bus pass and a folded piece of paper. I opened the paper, and it was a hand-drawn map with street names and the numbers of the bus routes written along them.
“Tomorrow you go to school,” she said. “The day after that you stay home sick. You’re going to be sick on Wednesday and Thursday.”
“How do you know I’m going to be sick?” I asked, because I totally didn’t get what she was all about yet.
“Wow, you’re not very bright, are you? I mean we say you’re sick, and you stay home and take care of Lisa.” Lisa was her five-year-old who couldn’t be bothered to share a room with somebody as dangerous as she figured I must be. “The girls take turns. I have to go to work. I have to make a living, you know. And the social worker is not to know about that, either. If she asks, you’re having stomach trouble.”
“Okay, fine,” I said, because what did it really matter? I’d missed months of school, so what would a few more days hurt? But underneath all that I thought it was pretty crappy to take in foster kids and put them in closets just so you get more free babysitters. I mean, who does that?
“One more thing,” she said as I was trying to walk away again.
“What?” I said, and I stopped.
But stopping wasn’t good enough for her. She wanted me to walk right up to her and she wouldn’t say it until our noses were practically touching. She just kept motioning me in until there was no more closer to go.
“A warning about Roger,” she said, and it iced my stomach down, because I thought she was telling me he was dangerous. But it turned out that’s not where she was going with this warning at all. “Nothing gets by me in this house,” she said. “So don’t think for a minute I don’t see the way you look at him. You just watch your step, little missy.”
I took a step back without even meaning to.
“I didn’t—”
But she wouldn’t let me get a word in.
“Don’t you even lie to me. If there’s one thing I can’t stand, it’s when a girl looks me right in the eyes and lies to me.”
“But I’m not—”
“Don’t say another word. Just be careful of what I said and things will go fine around here.”
“Yes, ma’am,” I said, because I was figuring out that there was no way to really argue with her and besides, I just wanted to get out of the kitchen and get away.
I found the other two girls in the backyard. The grass was kind of overgrown, but I could hear them talking so I followed the sound. I found them lying on their backs in the grass with their hands behind their heads, looking up at the sky.
They looked surprised to see me.
“What are you doing?” I asked, because I wasn’t sure where to start with them, talking-wise.
They were a lot younger than me, eleven or twelve, maybe, which seemed a little young to babysit a five-year-old. I wondered why the five-year-old wasn’t in kindergarten already, and then I wondered why having Roger home wasn’t good enough, and then I wondered what these two little girls had done that was so terrible that they had to end up in a foster home. I didn’t know at the time that it’s usually the parents doing something wrong. I know it now.
“We’re looking at the clouds to see what kind of shapes they look like,” one of them said.
Nobody said anything for a weird length of time, me included, and then the other girl said, “Who are you?”
“I’m the new foster kid. Didn’t anybody tell you I was coming?”
“Nope,” they both said, almost exactly at the same time.
I didn’t know what to say about that, so I lay down on my back in the long grass—a little ways away because they didn’t know me yet—to see what was so great about those cl
ouds. They were kind of puffy, so I guess it didn’t seem impossible to make shapes out of them in your mind, but my mind didn’t really work that way anymore. Imagining wasn’t really something I still did, because nothing I imagined anymore was very good, so why dream it up?
Nobody was talking, and that got weird after a while, so I said, “This place seems kind of bad. Or is that just me?”
“I’ve had eight foster homes,” one of them said, “and this one takes the prize for the very worst.”
Then the other girl said, “I had one that was worse. But it’s bad enough. Why? Have all your other placements been good?”
“Placements” seemed like a weird word to hear such a young kid using, so I figured it was a language she learned from her social worker or her foster parents.
“This is my first,” I said. Then I said, “That one looks a little like an elephant. See? That’s his trunk, going off to the right there.”
I waited, but nobody said they saw the elephant, so I decided to keep talking. Sometimes when I get nervous I just keep talking.
“So she keeps telling me all these things that I’m not supposed to tell my social worker, but I’m thinking maybe I’ll just tell on her anyway. I mean, if she’s a bad foster mother, shouldn’t somebody know?”
“Don’t,” one girl said.
And the other one jumped in right away to back her up. “You really are new, aren’t you? You never do that. You never tell on them with your social worker. Especially not with this lady. Because they don’t really do anything about it. They just go to the foster parent and tell them to fix the problem, and then they walk away and go back to their office. And then you’re stuck home with the lady you just told on, and she knows you just told on her. So it gets a lot worse after that.”
I didn’t say anything for a long time, because I was letting it settle in, about how this lady who more or less owned me, who had total control over my life at that point, would make things worse for me on purpose, as punishment, if I tried to make anything better.
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