Voice with No Echo

by Suzanne Chazin

  “If you were a civilian? Maybe,” said Yvonne. “But you’re a cop—”

  “I’m not carrying official paperwork or a court order,” said Vega.

  “And you think Officer Candy Crush downstairs is going to notice?” She laughed. “You can’t remove anything from the files. But you can certainly look.”

  Vega felt like he was stepping into a research library. There were rows upon rows of black metal shelves filled with Pendaflex folders separated out by decades.

  “So many abused and neglected children,” said Vega.

  “And these are the ones we know about,” said Yvonne.

  “There are so many more we don’t. Still, you gotta thank the Lord that some of ’em survive and turn out okay.” She gave Vega an approving once-over. He wanted to insist that he was never an abused or neglected child. But he couldn’t say that anymore. Not with any certainty.

  She walked over to a computer by the door and switched it on. “I need your full name as it appears on your birth certificate, your Social Security number, and your date of birth,” said Yvonne.

  “James Orlando Vega-Rosario.” Vega spelled it for her. “We dropped my mom’s maiden name, ‘Rosario,’ later, to make me sound more American. But I think it would be this way in the computer.” He gave Yvonne his date of birth and Social Security number.

  Yvonne typed it in.

  “So, I’ll be in the computer if I was in foster care?” asked Vega.

  “No, honey,” she explained, forgetting once again, it seemed, that he wasn’t one of her charges. “Your name will show up here if you ever came to the attention of ACS. Or rather, the Child Welfare Administration as it was known back then. It doesn’t necessarily mean you were placed in foster care. Social workers could have decided to close out the case with no action. That’s the most common route.”

  “But all of that will be in the computer, right?”

  “Files from the 1980s are kept on paper,” she explained.

  “But your name, birth date, and case number would be registered here. That will give us a starting point to see if you’re in the system.”

  Yvonne made humming sounds as she clicked between screens. “Here we go,” she said cheerfully. “J-16. Case CWA 6282.”

  He was here. He felt the shame and anguish in those numbers.

  Yvonne fished a pad out of a desk drawer and copied down the case number. Then she walked Vega and Michelle down a long, tiled hallway past rows and rows of files, all representing other long-ago children. The ones in this section would be Vega’s age now. Had they grown into responsible adults? Had they married? Did they have families of their own? Vega felt sad that a certain percentage—the ones far less lucky than he’d been—had not. He wondered how many files in one row begot files in another. He shuddered at the thought.

  “Here we are.” Yvonne pulled out a thick folder.

  “That much?” Vega felt queasy.

  “This is nothing,” said Yvonne. “I got kids whose folders take up half a shelf.”

  She carried it over to a table in the back and opened it. “I’d love to tell you that you could look at it uninterrupted, but I have to stay. I’m responsible for making sure everything goes back in the file.”

  “I understand,” said Vega. He gave Michelle points for hanging back.

  The first few pages were basic information Vega already knew. His name. His mother’s and father’s names. His birth date. His mother’s address and phone number. The name of his grandmother who also lived in the home. The name of the medical clinic his mother took him to. His record of vaccinations. The forms filled him with dread, not because of what they said, but because they confirmed that this was really and truly him.

  He turned several pages of basic information until he came to a familiar form. Familiar to him, at least. He used a version of the form all the time. It was a police incident report. This one was NYPD, but the county police forms were so similar, Vega knew just which box to scan to find out what incident was being reported. And there it was, on the upper left, in the black-pen chicken scratch of an NYPD officer’s handwriting: Suspicion of child abuse.

  Vega knew this was coming. He knew it the moment his name showed up in the system. But it was different somehow reading those words. It was different seeing the date and doing the math. Realizing he was barely six years old, just finished with kindergarten, when it happened. Vega searched the box with the officer’s name and badge number. Dennis Walsh. He was long retired now, if he was even still alive.

  Vega tried to pretend he was viewing the report as a cop, not a former victim. He tried to take a dispassionate look at the information. According to Officer Walsh’s notes, someone had called the child welfare hotline to anonymously report that Vega was being physically abused. When Walsh responded to Vega’s mother’s apartment, the officer noted “visible swelling” on Vega’s left cheek and “bruising and discoloration” on his side.

  Mother insists child’s injuries came from playing baseball, the officer wrote. Child questioned whether mother ever hits him. Child said yes.

  Ay, puñeta! Did he really say that? It was true, of course. Everybody’s mother and grandmother in the neighborhood gave them a swat now and then. But Vega never recalled either of them hitting him in the face or leaving bruises on his body.

  “My mother . . .” Vega felt the words bunch up in his chest. “She never . . .”

  “Damn straight, she never,” said Michelle. She looked over Vega’s shoulder at the report. “Your mother was telling the truth. I’m sure of it. That’s not child abuse. That’s a sports injury. You played a lot of ball—with boys older than you. Those games were rough. Kids got bruised by balls and bats, bloodied over disputed scores. And if that wasn’t enough, the trash in those lots could finish you off.”

  “But . . . somebody called this in,” said Vega. “Somebody thought I was getting beat up. And the cop—he certainly did.”

  “He could have been a rookie,” Yvonne mused. “We had a case not long ago. A young cop arrested a mother because a teacher reported bruise marks on the child. Turns out, the child had leukemia. It wasn’t diagnosed until after the mother’s arrest.”

  “I didn’t have cancer,” said Vega.

  “Still, the officer could have overreacted,” said Yvonne. “Back then, there wasn’t as much training as there is now. Cops and case workers don’t just look for injuries anymore. They look for patterns. Is there food in the house? Is the child clean and well fed? Do other children in the house have similar poorly explained injuries? It looks here like none of that took place.”

  “But who would make such a charge?” asked Vega. “They must have thought I was in danger.”

  “They probably did,” said Yvonne. “But there’s no way to find them and ask them. We keep hotline calls anonymous for a reason. You call in a report on a violent parent, that parent could come after you next.”

  Vega flipped through the pages. It was like reading someone else’s story. He remembered none of what followed. His mother’s arrest and subsequent posting of bail. A family court judge’s decision to place Vega in foster care.

  Why foster care? Where was his grandmother? For that matter, where was his father?

  The pages provided the answers in bloodless detail. His grandmother was visiting her sons—his mother’s brothers—in Puerto Rico. She couldn’t get back in time. Nor did she understand the legal issues involved. She didn’t speak English. And his father?

  There was no mention. No mention at all.

  “Why didn’t they call Orlando?” Vega asked Michelle. He didn’t say “my father.” This was one more reason why he never would.

  “I wish I could tell you,” said Michelle. “But my mother and Pop won’t talk about it.”

  “Of course they won’t talk about it,” said Vega. “Because they refused to take me in.”

  Carmen Rodriguez would have been about twenty-two at the time, an unwed mother with a three-year-old and a baby, being
asked to take on a third child—the son of her lover’s angry, jilted wife. With zero support from her lover. As always.

  Vega had asked and answered his own question.

  Vega thumbed ahead, anxious to be through with this hateful exercise. It raised more questions than it answered. Another piece of paper showed that he’d been placed with a foster family on Melrose Avenue. Joel and Miriam Bonilla. The dates of Vega’s time in their home corresponded to the summer of his year between kindergarten and first grade. Eight weeks.

  Eight weeks. That was a lifetime to a six-year-old.

  “Do you remember them?” asked Yvonne.

  “No,” said Vega. “Nothing. Not the place or what they looked like. Nothing.”

  Vega searched for other information about the foster couple. There was nothing in the file. Only a thin piece of paper showing the charges dropped against his mother and that she’d retained a lawyer and had to sue the family courts to get Vega back. The court delays and paperwork took eight weeks. That explained the time period. There was one follow-up report from a social worker after that. Then the case was closed.

  Vega shut the folder and turned to Yvonne. “Can you tell me anything about Joel and Miriam Bonilla? The file doesn’t contain much information.”

  “Let me see what I can find in the computer.”

  She refiled Vega’s paperwork, then typed in Joel and Miriam Bonilla’s names and address into the main computer.

  “Huh.” Yvonne frowned at the screen.

  “What?” asked Vega.

  “Their files have been removed from the system. There is a lock on the data.”

  “What does that mean?”

  “Usually, it means there has been some kind of legal action. Let me try another way.” She switched screens and typed their names and address again.

  “This is a list of homes certified as acceptable for foster placements. I’m trying to see if I can find anything here.”

  She let out a long breath of air. Vega read something defeated in the exhale. “It says here that the Bonillas had their foster care certifications revoked about two years after you were placed in their care.”

  “Revoked? Do you know why?”

  “Usually, it’s because social workers found something that rendered them unacceptable as foster parents. It could be anything from falsifying records, to a change in the adults living in the house, to neglect, to . . .” She hesitated.

  “To what?”

  “Abuse. Physical or sexual.”

  “Is there a way to find out more?”

  “Not unless criminal charges were filed,” said Yvonne. “But I’ll tell you now, that rarely happens.”

  “Why is that?” asked Vega.

  “Because DAs are reluctant to prosecute foster parents for anything less than very serious crimes. First, because it’s difficult compiling evidence. The kids move around so much, their memories are flawed. And second, the city doesn’t want to scare potential fosters away.”

  “So you’re saying that even if Joel and Miriam Bonilla abused the children in their care, they were never held accountable?” Vega felt tight with rage. Here he was, ripped from his mother over a baseball game, while these monsters got off scot-free.

  “It’s not that simple, Detective,” said Yvonne. “The Bonillas may not have been directly responsible for whatever happened. Sometimes, it’s an incident between two children in a foster parent’s care. Sometimes, it’s a relative who moves into the home. I can’t tell you. All I can say is that when foster parent names are removed, it’s usually an in-house decision and the paperwork on it is sealed.”

  “So I’ll never know what happened to me,” said Vega.

  “According to these records, you were in foster care for eight weeks,” said Yvonne. “The Bonillas weren’t removed from the system for another two years. My guess is, given the time frame, nothing terrible happened while you were there.”

  “Nothing terrible happened?” Vega felt a slow burn of fury building inside him. “Some person I will never know called in false information on my mom that got me sent to people deemed unsuitable to care for children two years after caring for me. You think that’s nothing terrible?”

  “Jimmy,” Michelle cautioned. He was overstepping his bounds and he knew it. But he was angry at what ACS or CSA or whatever the hell they called themselves did to him. To his mother and grandmother.

  “I’m sorry,” Vega told Yvonne. “I don’t mean to take it out on you. It’s not your fault. But I feel violated. I feel like my family was violated.”

  He rose from his chair. “Thank you for your time, Ms. Peters. Sorry to have troubled you.”

  He walked to the file room door, opened it, and kept walking. He bypassed the elevators for the fire stairs. He wanted out of this building. The walls felt like they were closing in. A vague image of a locked green door with no knob and dirty fingerprints came to him again. The same image he’d known all his life. It mixed with the memory of wet mildewed towels and the rich buttery scent of Coppertone.

  It wasn’t a dream or a random phobia. He knew that now. It belonged to that dark time in foster care.

  A place he never should have been but for an anonymous caller and an inexperienced cop.

  Chapter 27

  The rain had stopped by the time Adele pulled her pale green Toyota Prius into the parking lot of Beth Shalom. She parked near Rabbi Goldberg’s white minivan and got out. It took both arms to heft the accordion folder full of paperwork from her front passenger seat. It was crammed with copies of the Aviles family’s tax forms and medical records and doctors’ reports that Adele hoped would form the bulk of her appeal on Edgar Aviles’s behalf. She’d spent the whole morning with his wife, Maria, compiling them.

  She walked up the front steps of the synagogue and rang the bell with her elbow. She leaned her face close to the glass. Rabbi Goldberg looked relieved as he opened the door.

  “Thank you for coming,” he said as she stepped inside. He held out his arms. “Here. Let me help you.”

  Adele gratefully surrendered the heavy folder.

  “Edgar’s downstairs in the preschool, repainting one of the bookcases,” said the rabbi. “I told him he doesn’t have to do that. But I think work helps keep his mind off things.”

  “How is he doing?” she asked.

  Rabbi Goldberg seesawed his head. “He’s trying to stay hopeful. We all are. His family came last night to see him. I don’t know if that made him feel better—or worse.” Rabbi Goldberg gestured to a hallway off the sanctuary. “Would you like to work in the conference room?”

  “That would be great.”

  “Good. We’ll drop off all this stuff and then I’ll take you to Edgar.”

  Edgar Aviles was hunched over a small bookcase, painting the wood a vivid shade of turquoise, the color of the Caribbean Sea. He put the paintbrush down, wiped his hands on a rag, and forced the muscles of his face to look pleased at seeing Adele.

  “Thank you for all you are doing, señora,” he said.

  “Don’t thank me until I’m successful,” said Adele. She’d meant the words to be light and playful, but they came out dark instead.

  “Ms. Figueroa has all your materials in the conference room,” said Rabbi Goldberg. He turned to Adele. “Can I get you anything before I leave?”

  “No, thank you,” said Adele. “We’ll be fine.”

  “Then I guess I’ll go home.” The rabbi made a show of checking his watch. “Eve left you dinner in the refrigerator, Edgar.”

  “Thank you,” Aviles said shyly.

  “I’ll call you later,” Adele promised the rabbi. “And let you know where we stand.”

  “Yes. Good. Well—see you tomorrow.”

  * * *

  Aviles put his paintbrush into the sink to soak, then washed his hands and walked Adele back up the stairs and into the conference room. Bookcases along the walls held thick texts in English and Hebrew. A large colorful oil painting hung between them. It d
epicted a tree full of different kinds of fruit with Hebrew writing winding up the trunk.

  “That’s a beautiful painting,” said Adele.

  “I believe the quote says something about devotion to faith,” said Aviles. “At least, that’s what Rabbi Weiss once told me. He’s retired now.”

  “You’ve worked here a long time,” said Adele.

  “Over ten years, yes.” Aviles sighed. “They are good people. I feel terrible that I am putting them in this situation.”

  Adele took a seat at the conference table and gestured for Aviles to join her. “Then the sooner we can get this situation settled, the better for everyone. Would you be more comfortable if we did this in Spanish?”

  “That would be easier. Thank you.” Aviles pulled out a chair and sat catercorner to her. His eyes were bloodshot. Shadows pooled beneath the rims. He leaned on his elbows on the table and pushed his knuckles into his lips, biting down on the tender skin—a nervous habit, she supposed.

  She opened the folder to the top sheet. It was the printout of ICE form 246. Across the top it read, Application for a Stay of Deportation or Removal. Adele translated the words into Spanish for Aviles though she suspected she didn’t need to.

  “Your wife and I went through the form this morning to gather the paperwork for your application,” she explained, patting the folder. “I have your Salvadoran passport and a copy of your birth certificate here, as well as copies of medical records relating to Noah’s condition and your wife’s.”

  “That’s good, yes?”

  “We’re going to have to hope it’s good enough,” said Adele. “Ideally, I’d like to see letters from Noah’s oncologist and his pediatrician, attesting to how important it is that you remain here during his care. I’d want a similar letter from Maria’s doctor, explaining why her condition makes caring for Noah impossible without your help. Maria put in calls this morning to the doctors’ answering services to try to get those letters, but I fear they won’t come in time.”

  “We need to present everything tomorrow morning, I guess,” said Aviles.

  “Nine a.m.,” said Adele. “As soon as the ICE office opens in Broad Plains. I want to get in there before those two agents you saw yesterday get their removal order signed by a judge.”