To the End of June

by Cris Beam

And then, as soon as Fatimah went back to school after getting adopted, she promptly lost the first twenty-five pages of her book: everything she’d written so far. That day in the kitchen, she told me she planned on rewriting it all, but not right away. The loss of all she’d created had been a hard, and disorienting, blow.

  And there had been other losses too. For example, her friendship with Chanel had taken a sour turn. When Fatimah got home from court, she tried to show Chanel her name change documents. “She was just like ‘Oh, OK,’” Fatimah said, shrugging her shoulders and imitating Chanel’s indifference. “I was like wow. You see people’s true sides when something good happens to you, basically. It’s like when a person becomes rich after they was poor. After they was in a struggle. And then they want to shun on you.”

  Tonya, too, seemed to have reacted to Fatimah’s adoption. Shortly after the papers were signed, Tonya ran away, though neither Fatimah nor Allyson saw the link. They both thought she was merely sowing the seeds of her recent adulthood; Tonya took off just before her eighteenth birthday, and she hadn’t yet returned. And although Allyson dutifully phoned the police and the agency, she wasn’t about to chase her. Increasingly, it seemed to me, Allyson’s strategy was to surrender to her faith. “I pray for every last one of my children and I pray for the world’s children. I pray for everybody. But that’s all I can do,” Allyson said.

  The one person in the family Fatimah didn’t talk about that day was Dominique. Maybe she was mad at her; I would later learn that Dominique had betrayed Fatimah’s confidence. Or maybe she was ashamed. At the last minute, Dominique’s own adoption—the adoption that she had so happily plotted from that very same kitchen just a few months before—fell apart. Dominique was gone.

  At the end of that summer of 2008, I met Dominique on the boardwalk at Coney Island. I had heard from the other kids that she’d carved “I hate the Greens” into one of their wooden bureaus, and then her social worker showed up to drive her away for good.

  “What happened?” I asked her, offering her lemonade from Nathan’s, the famous hot dog stand at the boardwalk’s entrance. She wouldn’t take it. Dominique drinks only from cans, because she worries about the germs that can fester in soda fountains, and whenever she takes a sip, she has to drink the whole thing straight without letting it touch the table—part of a long list of obsessive-compulsive rituals that began long ago. We sat on a bench and watched the water.

  “They wanted me to change,” Dominique said, her voice steely and her gaze focused on the horizon. She was more dressed up than I had ever seen her at the Greens’—possibly because we were out in public, and she had tentative plans to meet a boy later that afternoon. She was wearing bright pink jean shorts and a white T-shirt covered by a black lace vest, which protected her large breasts from too much scrutiny. Dominique hated being so curvy. A baseball cap shielded her eyes, and she sealed her lips tight over her protruding top teeth before she spoke. “Bruce told me if I didn’t change in two weeks he would just call the adoption off.”

  Apparently, that slipped out in one of their arguments; despite Dominique having stabilized and adjusted to the Greens’ rules over the seven months she lived with them, she still regularly fought with Bruce. And as soon as they planned to adopt her, the tension escalated.

  Allyson sensed a kind of ambivalence about the adoption, Dominique said, and tried to talk to her about it. “She said, ‘I just want you to be sure this is right for you,’ and I felt rejected.” They had been driving in the car, and Dominique had broached the topic by informing Allyson that it was Fatimah who didn’t want to be adopted—she was just going through with it because she didn’t have any better options. Fatimah was later furious about this admission, but Dominique needed any ally she could find. “I was doing so much questioning in my mind—like I didn’t want to rush into adoption, because once you’re adopted you can’t turn back.”

  She had wanted Allyson to rally for her, to meet her ambivalence, and her attitude, with unconditional love. She wanted, perhaps, for the Greens to chase her just a little. The day after Allyson signed her adoption papers (but before they went into court to make it official) Dominique got some things off her chest. She told Allyson how unfair it was that she aired everybody’s business during the church lessons on Sunday afternoons. Except for Sekina. When Sekina had a problem, Dominique argued, she was whisked into private talks with Bruce and Allyson. Nobody else in the house received such preferential treatment. “I told her, because of Sunday church, Sekina still feels like the real daughter and we’re the foster kids. And without her even trying to see the positive in me telling her that, she saw it as a negative!” Dominique shook her head. “She said, ‘Since you feel this way, you have to question whether or not this is the best place for you.’ From then on, I was like, I don’t care no more.”

  After that, she said, the whole mood of the house changed. Fatimah was mad at her, Bruce was arguing with her, and she herself stopped answering to anyone. “I felt abandoned, and I was so angry, but I became like a robot—blunt and everything,” she said. Soon, Allyson called a meeting. “We all three agreed that it was the best choice for me to leave. I didn’t say, ‘Yes, I want to leave,’ I just said I didn’t care anymore. But I cared, you know?”

  Allyson tells the story differently. She and Bruce and Dominique did have the final meeting about adoption, but it was at the agency. And Dominique was professing she didn’t want it. “Right there at the meeting, she was saying, ‘I was just testing them—to see if they really want me.’ She was being defiant,” Allyson said to me in a phone call shortly after the adoption disintegrated. “And then no sooner did we walk out of there, she became disrespectful, disobedient, loudmouthing. I said it was time for us to go home. She said she wanted to stay at the agency; she starts showing off. They said: ‘That’s it for you’—they turn around and say she needs a therapeutic home.”

  Despite the different accounts, Allyson and Dominique agree that she tested the family on their love. “Once Allyson came to therapy with me, and I told my therapist how I test people in order to trust. And Bruce failed that test so many times,” Dominique said, tipping back her baseball cap and taking in the sun.

  But it wasn’t Bruce’s fault that Dominique was the way she was, I countered; he didn’t inflict any of the original damage. True, she said, but he was like everybody at the agency—who didn’t want to let her feel her rage. “I don’t have an anger problem,” she said, turning to me, her face getting red. “I’m supposed to be angry. I’m supposed to be mad at this situation, because it was not supposed to happen this way.”

  Dominique stared back out at the sea. “Every day of my life I wish I could die because of how angry I am,” she said. “And with foster parents, we’re not asking them to buy us anything, or do anything, just understand.”

  Allyson understands the anger, she says, but her loyalties are spread thin; she doesn’t have time to give someone like Dominique the innumerable nuanced responses she needs. “I told Dominique, ‘You’ve got to see what people are doing for you—you’ve got to change yourself.’ She’s not a baby,” Allyson explained to me on the phone. “I can’t stay focused on one person—I have so many other children in the house. And when you’re so stressed out over one person, you can’t focus on everybody else.”

  When I met with Dominique, she had been living with her new foster mom for a few months, and things weren’t looking so bright. Despite its being a therapeutic home, she said, the mom rarely talked to her. Unlike the house on DeKalb, this new place didn’t have many restrictions and Dominique could come and go as she pleased, but she was bored. School was out, and when we met on a Monday, she thought it was a Saturday. She said she fought with the one other foster child, a girl around her age, every morning—just because it made her feel better. Allyson told me the foster mom had already called her to say Dominique was defiant and was stealing the other girl’s clothes. “I was passionate about finding that family,” Dominique said glu
mly, meaning the family that would keep her, and love her, no matter what. She said she didn’t think she would last long at her new home. “Now, looking back, I would have changed it all. But I just wasn’t ready.”

  That year, Bruce and Allyson were the only foster family honored at their agency’s annual fundraiser—a black-tie affair where the other Green kids took the stage and praised their parents. Bruce told me about it afterward. “We were called Foster Family of the Year, and a very generous family out in California donated $10,000,” Bruce said, lamenting the fact that despite their best efforts, they were struggling with the older teenagers. Dominique’s placement had failed, Tonya had run away, and even Fatimah was acting more sullen since her adoption. Chanel was planning to move out early, into an apartment of her own. He was feeling sort of bitter and briefly considered keeping the award money for himself. “I could have spent that money any way I wanted—they didn’t specify. I could have bought things for me, for Allyson. But we decided to buy an entertainment center for the family, and then computers for all the teenagers, for them to do their homework.”

  So it turned out that Tonya did get a laptop for her eighteenth birthday, though it wasn’t from the agency and it wasn’t because she was a foster kid. Tonya just happened to land at the Greens’, and she happened to stay there, so she happened upon her laptop after all. She also happened to run away for thirty-three days during the time that Fatimah was adopted, though she hadn’t planned it and hadn’t considered the repercussions.

  “I went to the Bronx and I was having fun for two days, and those two days turned into two more days, and it was like, I don’t wanna be in trouble. I just didn’t want to go through that,” Tonya said to me after she returned. We were sitting in the bedroom she had once shared with Dominique, where one whole wall was neatly stacked with shoeboxes; she could wear a different pair every day of the month and then some. Like Fatimah with her SpongeBob toys, Tonya also favored a cartoon icon; hers was Dora the Explorer. There was a Dora pillow on the bed and Dora folders for her papers. “I thought, ‘I might as well have all my fun now.’”

  I suspected there was more to it. Adoption may be the explicit goal for foster kids with parents who have lost their rights, but it can also be a trigger. This is it, adoption says. You can never go home again. A pending adoption pushed Dominique right to the edge and out of the house. And Fatimah’s adoption may have made Chanel jealous and sent Tonya scurrying back to her mom and childhood neighborhood, just to make sure she still mattered somewhere else.

  In any case, Tonya went to visit her mother, who was drinking again, in the Bronx. She was about to check herself into a six-month rehab, and Tonya could have the apartment to herself. There, Tonya said, she had other people to look after her. “I didn’t have no clothes. Thank God I had the friends I had because you know they was lending me outfits and stuff like it’s nothing,” Tonya said, explaining that she hadn’t packed a bag because she hadn’t planned to stay. “We grew up together so it’s just like I’m a family member. And their moms is all looking out for me all the time, saying, ‘You can have money. Did you eat today?’”

  Tonya said that summer in the Bronx looked like this: “Get up at three in the afternoon, eat, take a shower, do my hair, get dressed, and leave. Then I wouldn’t come back ’til the next morning.” Her best friend bought her new clothes for her birthday party, which Tonya didn’t particularly remember. “It seems like when my mom relapses, I relapse too. Every single time she goes back into alcohol, I go back into drugs. And it’s not good, ’cause I feel like I’m dealing with her problems, and mine too.”

  Tonya’s drug of choice was marijuana; she said she used it to calm down, though she also got into four fights in her thirty-three days away. One time, she said, she almost got shot. Mostly, though, she just partied, and she was sleeping off a particularly late night when the cops finally banged on the door. “There was a guy with the police, a representative from the agency. He said, ‘Do you know how many times I’ve been here in this building, in this neighborhood, doing surveillance on this block?’ He started hugging me and stuff,” Tonya said. She told the cops that she was a legal adult; she didn’t have to go anywhere. “But the agency guy said, ‘Look, if you don’t want to be in foster care, there are ways of going about it. We can take you down to the agency and you can sign yourself out.’”

  At first, this is what Tonya planned to do. But then, at the agency, they showed her a photograph the Greens had provided them. “It was a picture of all three of us together: me, Chanel, and Fatimah. And I started crying, crying, crying, ’cause I hadn’t seen them in so long,” Tonya said. “And I realized it would have been stupid to sign myself out because I didn’t have nowhere to go, didn’t have no money, you know what I’m saying? I couldn’t live my life like I was living in the summertime.”

  To hear Tonya tell it, Allyson was all love and “How are you, baby?” when she called her from the agency. And Bruce yelled, “Don’t move!” into the phone and rushed to the Bronx in the family van.

  Allyson had a sterner version of things. “I told her that what she did was unacceptable,” Allyson told me on the phone, two days after Tonya returned, “and that our curfew was reinstated. She can’t have any more weekend visits with her mom, and if she breaks the rules, she can go back to the agency and find somewhere else to live.”

  If that happened, I thought, Tonya would probably return to her mom’s place, despite the way she believed her mom’s substance use affected her own. She had lived there, after all, for about half of her eighteen years.

  Mike Arsham, the executive director of the Child Welfare Organizing Project in New York, told me that as foster kids gain their independence and thus run out of options, they often return to their birth parents. “ACS and the court seem oblivious to these persistent relationships because the case record says something different. Yet it is not uncommon at CWOP to see women raising the children of children to whom they lost their rights years prior,” Arsham said. “The system lives in denial of this reality.”

  I’ve certainly seen kids reconnect with their biological parents beneath the agency’s radar. For example, my foster daughter, Christina, to my ongoing dismay, would repeatedly visit her mother and return shipwrecked and furious, nicking her arms with a razor in self-contempt and confusion. And even though Dominique believed her mother had long since passed away, she’d still wander past her mom’s old apartment in Coney Island, “just to look.” I know another Domineque, in California, who’s serving twenty-four years in a maximum-security prison for armed robbery. It wasn’t the foster care that screwed her up, she thought, though that had delivered its share of traumas. It was the desire to understand her own mother, to really find her, on some primal level—and to do that, Domineque had to do the things her mother had done. She had to commit the same crimes, ingest the same drugs, feel the same terrible way about herself, to locate her mom inside. Just like Tonya, she had to go back to her mom.

  The agencies and the foster parents (myself included) don’t know how to manage what every single foster child seems to need—that need to go back. Because, whether physically or psychologically, they will go back to their parents and what hurt them, if only “just to look,” as Dominique says. We need to get better at this part of the foster care trajectory because that journey back is land-mined for self-destruction.

  The next time I really got to sit down and talk with Fatimah Green, a full year and a half had passed since her adoption. She wanted to meet me at the far corner of DeKalb, opposite the house, because she wasn’t living there anymore. She had moved in with her “whack” mom. The adoption—while technically finalized—had fallen apart. But she needed to go back to the Greens’ and pick up one last thing—her mom’s drawings, which still hung on the walls. She wanted me to go with her.

  I was happy enough to act as a buffer for Fatimah’s art heist. I didn’t understand what had happened in the adoption breakdown; I only knew she’d been missing
for the past six months and then turned up at her mom’s. In the year before she ran away, we had barely spoken; mostly, she just wasn’t around when I came by the house, and she never returned my calls. In that time, Allyson told me, her grades were slipping; Bruce told me she had become “more materialistic” and was picking fights with him. Once I spotted her on the way to the Laundromat wheeling a cart stuffed with clothes, her hair tied back with a bandanna. She gave a tired wave and pushed on but didn’t want to talk. Another time I caught a few minutes with her at the Baptist church that the family had recently joined, one Sunday that Allyson invited me along. Fatimah whispered that things had been “pretty bad.” In the past week, she said, she slept at three different friends’ houses for three different nights “as an experiment” to see how other people lived.

  Fatimah knew how other people lived. She was a foster kid, with twenty-one placements in her past. But I couldn’t remind her of this because we were in church and were supposed to be quiet. And we couldn’t talk about it later, because then Fatimah ran away for good.

  We met on the corner one morning in January. Fatimah had lost weight since the last time I’d seen her, and she was wearing a pink T-shirt and jeans, with a thin black trench coat, cinched at the waist. The SpongeBob necklace was gone. Her teeth chattered as she clacked up to the door in her low-heeled boots; it was freezing outside.

  Allyson was expecting us, and she barely glanced up from her place on the couch where she was busy stuffing Anthony into his baby snow parka. “We’re about to go out,” she said, leaning her face up for my greeting kiss on the cheek. “Happy New Year.” Fatimah disappeared, hunting for a bag in which to carry out her mother’s artwork.

  Anthony, looking like a puffy marshmallow doll, reached for Fatimah as she whizzed by. “Feemah!” he said.

  Fatimah paused. “How’s he know my name?” she asked, angling toward Allyson. “You been showing him my picture or something and saying that’s your sister?”