The Cradle Robbers

by Ayelet Waldman

  And that’s what we did. Our lives were about Mommy & Me and the playground and story hour and crayons and building blocks. We went to the library, to the park, to the zoo, to the art museum. We made necklaces out of Cheerios and ate banana and almond butter sandwiches. Three days of that and I was ready to be institutionalized. In the years since then, I have gone on to prove that it is possible to be both so busy that you realize only at dinner time that you’ve eaten nothing all day but eleven frozen frappucinos and half a rice cake you found under the baby’s car seat and, at the same time, to be so bored that a radio news segment on blind trout fishermen strikes you as the most provocative thing you’ve heard since college.

  When I was pregnant with Isaac I began, accidentally at first, to do some investigation work. My husband says I was drawn to the work because I am nosy; he thinks that I have an unhealthy need to know what is going on in the lives of people around me. I think my natural curiosity is part of my charm. I’m nowhere near as bad as my grandmother, who stole Alice Roosevelt Longworth’s famous line, “If you have nothing nice to say, come sit by me.” I’m at least interested in finding out both the good and the bad about people. Is it my fault that the latter seems so much more prevalent and easier to discern?

  Not quite two years ago, my old colleague Al Hockey convinced me to go into business with him. Al’s not a lawyer. He’s an ex-cop who retired from the force when the health consequences of the bullet he took made it difficult for him to function in uniform. He wasn’t going to sit behind a desk and push a pen; that’s just not the kind of guy he is. But the department wasn’t about to let him back on the street with a crumpled colon and a chip on his shoulder. To be fair, the chip’s been there all his life, and they shouldn’t have hired him if they weren’t interested in a cop who was constitutionally incapable of sucking up to the brass. After he quit the force, Al became a defense investigator with the federal defender’s office, and then he went out on his own. Al and I are unlikely friends, but friends we are, and partners, too, although every so often I wonder if my excessive fertility isn’t going to drive him to dissolve the partnership and throw me out on my ass. But I’m done having kids. Even if I wanted more, back then I wasn’t letting Peter close enough to bring another Applebaum-Wyeth into the world.

  “Any rats today?” I asked as I walked into Al’s garage.

  I’d tried to convince Al to shift our offices to one of the many bedrooms in my new house, but after glaring at the gargoyle chandeliers and homoerotic murals, Al had hopped back into his SUV and rolled on home to Westminster. I don’t mean to imply that my partner is an intolerant man. Sure, he’s a neoconservative nut, but his militia unit is the only racially integrated one in the United States. His wife is African American, and he is a card-carrying Libertarian and thus adamantly in favor of things like gay marriage. As far as he’s concerned, people can sleep with whomever and whatever they like, so long as the object of their desire is either a consenting adult or an inanimate object. He is, however, an old-school kind of guy, and certain things make him uncomfortable. Like the fact that my husband would be working underneath us in a dungeon with real handcuffs dangling from the walls and his storyboards propped up against an antique vaulting horse that none of us is naïve enough to think was ever really used for gymnastics. So it was the garage for Al and me, rats and all. Al insisted that the vermin infesting our makeshift office were tree rats, as if the fact that they normally made their homes in tall and gracious California palms made them any less disgusting.

  “They’ve been quiet today,” Julio, our office assistant, said.

  “Please tell me you’re not working on the computer.”

  “Of course not.” He tapped a few keys and the screen went dark. One of the conditions of Julio Rodriguez’s supervised release from federal prison was that he have absolutely no contact with computers. That’s what happens when you’ve been convicted of immigration fraud through computer hacking. If being banned from the keyboard effectively means that you’re barred from all employment other than the most menial, well, that’s not the Probation Department’s problem, is it? Al and I had been on a protracted and so far unsuccessful campaign to convince Julio’s probation officer that society as a whole would be better served by harnessing this kid’s significant technological talent than by forcing him to flip burgers or stand on a street corner waiting for day-laborer work. We were hoping that the fact that Julio never personally benefited from his hacking would count for something. The system he had manipulated belonged to the old Immigration and Naturalization Service, and he had been giving away Social Security cards, not selling them. But so far our pleas had fallen on deaf ears. The probation officer was of the opinion that whatever his motives, Julio was an incorrigible criminal with an addiction to Internet havoc and, like an alcoholic from booze, he needed to be kept away from the computer at all costs. While I thought the guy was overreacting, and I knew Julio wasn’t about to commit another crime, I had to admit that there was a certain truth to the fact that our assistant could not, no matter how hard he tried, keep his fingers from dancing on the keyboard. In the couple of months since he’d started working for us, our network had already magically reconfigured itself and was now working at about four times the capacity and twice the speed. My hard drive had been restructured, too. I wasn’t asking, but I knew it wasn’t Al who had renamed and reorganized the database.

  “Where’s the boss?” I asked.

  “Coffee.”

  “Ah.” My partner is not much of a morning person and is as addicted to caffeine as Julio is to digital technology.

  I sat down in my chair, pulled a baby blanket over my shoulder, and lifted Sadie out of her car seat. She wasn’t crying yet, but she was making the snuffling noise that was a prelude to the frantic rooting for the breast that heralded the hysterical weeping. If I could cut her off at the pass, I might be able to get her to sleep for another hour. If so, it was possible that I would actually accomplish something this morning. That would be an event so unusual that it might cause my partner to fall to the floor in a dead faint.

  “Anything new come in?” I asked.

  “No,” Julio said. “But Al is helping me with a personal problem.”

  My heart sank. It is so rare for a public defender to see clients turning their lives around. Julio, who had served his time and left prison with the fortitude and confidence to rewrite the story of his life, was the exception, not the rule. I couldn’t bear the idea that his tale was going to be one with an unhappy ending.

  “What happened?” I said.

  “Don’t sound so tragic,” Al snarled from the doorway. His eyes were puffy from lack of sleep and he held a giant coffee mug in his hand. “It’s not Chiki. It’s his cousin.” Chiki. Right. I reminded myself that Julio had recently, with an uncharacteristic blush and stammer, invited us to call him by his nickname.

  “My cousin’s bunkie.”

  “What’s a bunkie?”

  “That’s what the ladies in prison call their cellmates. My cousin Fidelia is up at Dartmore. She called last night looking for help for her bunkie. The lady just had a baby, and someone stole the kid.”

  “Apparently,” Al said, his old desk chair squeaking under his weight, “the girl signed the baby over to a foster family, thinking it was just supposed to be for a few days or weeks, and she’s now afraid they’ve absconded with the child.”

  I shook my head. “Okay, hold on gentlemen. Back up here. Tell me what’s going on slowly enough for my nursing-addled mind to comprehend it. Who are we talking about?”

  “Her name is Sandra Lorgeree. She was just a couple months pregnant when she got busted, and she had the baby in prison,” Chiki said. “She’s doing five years.”

  “And her baby got put into foster care?”

  “Not exactly,” Chiki said. “California Department of Corrections regulations allow moms to spend just twenty-four to forty-eight hours with their newborns in the hospital after they give birth. T
hen the ladies get sent back to the prison. The babies got to be turned over to the custody of a blood relative. If the lady has no blood relative, then she has to find someone who is a foster parent licensed by the state of California. Otherwise the baby goes to the Department of Social Services and they put the baby in foster care.”

  “What’s the difference who puts the baby in foster care?”

  “This whole licensed foster parent thing has made things really complicated. It used to be that when a prisoner who had no blood relatives would have a baby, she could ask a friend to come up and get the baby and bring it back home. But now, the Department of Corrections won’t release the babies to anyone who isn’t a licensed foster care provider, even if that person is who the mom wants her baby to be with.”

  “But I still don’t understand why this is ‘baby stealing.’ I mean, yes, it’s awful and all that, but when the woman gets out she can just go get her kid, right?”

  Chiki clucked his tongue in frustration. “It’s real bad when DSS takes a baby, because as soon as they do, the clock starts ticking for termination of parental rights.”

  “What do you mean, ‘termination’? Just because the woman’s in prison? What if she’s only serving like a year or something?”

  Chiki gave me a look like I was the most ignorant person he’d ever seen. “If DSS get their hands on a baby, they only give the mom six months. That’s all. I know one lady, she got a three-month extension, but that’s it. After that, the baby is gone.”

  I’m ashamed to say I didn’t believe Chiki. I made a few murmurs of doubt, settled a sleeping Sadie in her car seat, and turned to my computer. With a few clicks of the mouse, I was reading a state statute that confirmed what Chiki had said. When a child up to age three is taken by the state, for whatever reason, the mother has, indeed, only six months to get it back. If she can’t take the child back, she loses parental rights altogether. The idea behind this is a good one—infants should not languish in foster care, but instead should be adopted. But for women who are in prison, this requirement has devastating consequences. Once the children of a woman who is serving a sentence longer than six months enter the foster care system, she loses them forever, even if her sentence is only a year.

  “This is awful,” I said.

  “No kidding,” Al said.

  “You’re opposed to this?” I was surprised. Al was usually in favor of people sleeping in the beds they’d made, no matter how full of nails.

  “You’re damn right I am. The government has no right to take someone’s child!”

  “So what happened to Sandra?” I said.

  Chiki said, “She didn’t have no relative to take her baby, and no friend who was licensed.”

  Sandra had been at her wit’s end, like many other women whose families lived too far away to make the trip to Dartmore prison, about sixty miles southeast of San Jose. All pregnant women in the state of California are automatically transferred to this isolated facility, as it’s close to a maternity hospital. The fact that it’s a maximum-security prison seems not to bother the California Department of Corrections overmuch. The social worker at Dartmore presented Sandra and other pregnant prisoners with what appeared to be their salvation. The Lambs of the Lord, a church-based foster care agency located in Pleasanton, a small city not too far from San Francisco, would send a family to take custody of their babies for as long as it took for the women to arrange alternative care. As soon as the prisoner’s family or friends were available to pick up the baby, the agency would arrange transfer of custody. In the meantime, the baby would be safe, well cared for, and most importantly, out of the dangerous hands of the State.

  Women immediately began signing on the dotted line. At any given moment, somewhere between one and two hundred prisoners in California are in the advanced stages of pregnancy, and they’re all shipping to Dartmore as they approach their due dates. Within weeks, the Lambs had dozens of grateful recruits, including Sandra Lorgeree. She turned her baby boy over to a sweet-faced young couple from the Lambs of the Lord a mere eight hours after he was born, and no one had seen the baby since.

  “What does that mean, ‘no one has seen him’?” I said. “Of course she hasn’t seen him. She’s in jail. Has someone else gone looking for him?”

  “She’s had people on the outside try calling the telephone number the foster parents gave her. They call at all different times of day and night, but no one ever picks up the phone.”

  “And that’s why she thinks her baby’s been stolen? Because the foster parents don’t have an answering machine?”

  Al said, “Jesus, Juliet.” He heaved his feet onto his desk. “Since when do you have so much faith in the system? Usually you’re the first person willing to believe that a prisoner is being victimized by the State.”

  I shook my head. “I just have a hard time believing that there is some elaborate baby-stealing conspiracy going on. I think it’s much more likely that the foster family is a little overwhelmed with a brand-new baby and isn’t answering their telephone. It doesn’t seem that suspicious to me. How long has it been since Sandra had her baby?”

  “Three weeks.”

  “Has she been in touch with the foster care agency? With the Lambs of the Lord people?”

  “No, they don’t accept collect calls. She’s had friends call them from the outside, but they won’t give any information out to anyone but the mother.”

  “How did she get in touch with them in the first place, if they won’t accept collect calls from prison?” Prisoners can only call collect; they aren’t allowed to use calling cards, and they have no access to cash. Frustratingly, the telephone companies that have the prison contracts charge a huge markup for those collect calls. Having an incarcerated individual call you can cost a small fortune. Still, most of the criminal defense attorneys I know begin their voicemail greetings with a message to the operator, informing her that “this machine accepts collect calls from prisoners.” After I left the federal defender’s office and my home number was the only one my old clients could use to reach me, our friends, family members, and Peter’s business associates were greeted with the same salutation. It wasn’t long before Peter got his own line.

  Chiki, who had begun folding invoices into careful thirds and sliding them into pre-addressed envelopes, said, “She reached the Lambs of the Lord through the social worker at the prison.”

  “And has she talked to the social worker?”

  “The social worker told her to stop making trouble or she’d end up in the SHU.”

  Nice. Threatening a grieving mother with the segregated housing unit. In which year of the master’s program in therapy did they teach that?

  Chiki gathered the envelopes together and put them in the out basket. Bright red, clearly marked in and out baskets were one of our organized assistant’s many office innovations, and when Al wasn’t filling them with the crumpled, greasy wrappings of In-N-Out burgers, they worked great to simplify the chaos in the garage.

  Chiki said, “I told Fidelia you’d make a few calls, try to find out what happened to the baby.”

  “Oh Chiki, why did you tell her that?” I said.

  Al said, “You got something else to do?”

  “Man, you’re grumpy today,” I said as I glanced at my empty in basket. Our business was due to take a turn for the better any day, since we’d come under contract with Harvey Brodsky, flash lawyer to the stars. For a while Brodsky had circled around like a great white, sizing us up with a cold eye, stirring up the water with his churning tail, but not committing to the meal until he was absolutely sure we’d be a tasty enough morsel. Once we’d solved a high-profile murder and proved ourselves qualified to help get his clients out of trouble, he’d taken us on. So far all we’d done was a few routine checks on personal assistants and household staff, and one time Al had convinced his friends in the County Sheriff’s Department not to charge a young client of Brodsky’s for naked skateboarding at Papa Jack’s skateboard park in M
alibu. As Al had pointed out to the buddy of his who was on duty, the scrapes on the girl’s behind were sufficient punishment on their own, and she had been conscientious enough to wear a helmet. Brodsky had been happy with that save. A front-page spread on the arrest would have ruined the young ingénue’s credibility as this year’s darling of the Christian rock circuit. The retainer money was coming in from Brodsky on the first of every month, but there was not, at this very moment, much of anything for me to do.

  I pointed to Sadie. “I’ve got plenty to keep me busy.”

  “What’s your problem, Juliet?” Al grumbled. “Poor woman’s looking for her baby, and you won’t help? This isn’t the bleeding heart I know and love.”

  With Chiki around it was hard for me to admit to Al what was wrong. The truth was, I couldn’t help but wonder if the baby wasn’t better off, wherever he was. Don’t get me wrong, I hate the idea of the state taking babies away from prisoners. It’s terribly unjust, and the idea of a woman who is sentenced to a year in prison losing her baby because she can’t reclaim it within this arbitrary six-month window is horrifying to me. But this friend of Chiki’s cousin was going to be in jail for the next five years, and from what he was saying, she didn’t have any real plans for who should take her kid. I didn’t for one minute buy this paranoid baby-stealing fantasy of hers, but let’s say, for a moment, that it was true. Let’s say some childless couple fell in love with her baby and ran off with him. Sure, that’s terrible, but some part of me that I was almost ashamed of couldn’t help but wonder if the child wasn’t better off, if he wouldn’t be happier growing up in a family, ignorant of his birth mother serving out his early years in prison. The first five years of a child’s life are important years, maybe even the most important. He needed a mother in his life, and he needed the security of knowing that that mother wasn’t going to be taken away from him when his “real” mother was finally released from jail.