What I Carry

by Jennifer Longo

  Most kids in care are understandably sick of always moving, and conventional wisdom among us says that when you find a place and people that feel okay, you stay as long as you can. But that’s for kids with their own families or parents, kids who had a true home and miss it. When I start to feel okay, when it’s too comfortable or when it’s bad—that’s when I get out. I’ve never attended an entire academic year at one school. Every Seattle neighborhood seems to be a different district with its own schools, and I’ve been to nearly all of them.

  This is a good time to say that I understand, and so should you: I am definitely not representative of all kids in foster care. I am an anomaly. Mine is not a typical life in care; which is not to say there even is a standard, because every kid’s situation is our own; every birth family and foster family and CPS and social worker situation is its own universe, and laws change all the time. I am only one of a half million kids in foster care in America, one of twenty-five thousand who will age out—but I am a cradle-to-age-outer, which is kind of rare. It’s given me time to accumulate the uniquely high twenty placements I’ve lived in. And I have unfair advantages that other kids do not; as a foundling, I am not in perpetual mourning for a family I remember losing or being taken from, and I am not escaping abuse or neglect at the hands of a relative.

  Lucky.

  I’ve also been fortunate with foster placements, never hit by a kid or a parent. And despite what you see in pretty much every TV show or movie about kids in foster care—and maybe this seems like a total fantasy—I am here to tell you it’s possible to live a life in foster care and never get molested. Also, I am white, and I know that buys me a definite amount of privileged safety, because I’ve seen kids who aren’t white get unfairly blamed and accused of all kinds of shit that never gets thrown at white kids. I have advantages in place for when I’m on my own: thanks to my flossing obsession, my teeth are healthy (so is the rest of me—oral hygiene is the key to good health); I’m not dependent on any expensive medications or booze or drugs; despite the meth-birth debacle, I can keep my head above water with acceptable grades (not exceptionally good or dismal, nothing worth drawing attention); and most fortunate of all, I have had one social worker, only Joellen, almost my whole life. These things increase my odds of survival when I’m out.

  I’ve watched kids without my good fortune get dropped out of care on their eighteenth birthdays and become one of five thousand every year who are instantly homeless. Alone in the world with a Hefty garbage bag of clothes and no family. No job, no experience or education to get one, no home, no health insurance, and a file full of justifiably angry behavior with repercussions that follow them and make it impossible to live. They carry the blame for every mistake the adults in their lives made to put them in the situation in the first place. Not their fault, but they suffer for it all.

  And listen, do not #NotAllAdults me. First of all, way to get defensive and yet again prioritize the bruised egos of grown-ass people who should know better over the lives of kids just trying to survive. Also, we aren’t stupid; obviously we know there are adults trying to do the right thing. The system is mostly broken, but a ton of the people working in it aren’t. I personally know really nice, dedicated foster parents, including kinship-care parents who are blood relatives (grandparents, uncles and aunts) taking care of kids. There have been social workers with huge caseloads who still made me feel safe, and I’ve met loving bio parents who just need some help. All of them are overworked and underpaid. Their existence does not change the fact that adults, and only adults, lawmakers definitely included, are the reason kids end up in foster care. No kid is in foster care because of something we did. That’s not how it works. And adults are solely responsible for the sorry state foster care is in. Until everyone understands and admits this, nothing will ever change for us.

  Aging out is terrifying.

  Still…I can’t wait.

  I can’t help believing I will be okay. Maybe I’m setting myself up for spectacular failure, but all this time I’ve been so lucky; if I am as perfect as I can be, I bet I can stave off the likely possibility of being homeless within a year, or pregnant, or dead. Outcomes for kids who age out with no family are mostly a nightmare, and it makes me furious. I refuse to let the stupid circumstance of my birth ruin me. I am a Muir, for Christ’s sake! Not in meaningless blood, but in what truly matters. I believe that the nurses who held me and named me could tell John Muir’s singular life force is in me and in our shared name, and I will end my childhood the way it began: alone. Finally free to live and take care of myself in the wilderness of the wide world.

  I hope.

  When I was little and still thought I wanted parents, I used to ask Joellen all the time why she couldn’t adopt me. She had no husband or kids of her own. I’d been with her since before I could remember, she always showed up, she kept her promises, she was never late, she never got mad at me, and she always had gum in her purse.

  That was before I understood she stayed with me because she was paid to.

  “If I adopted every kid I wanted to, I would have eleven baseball teams,” she always said, combing my little-kid hair with her fingers. “I can’t, Muir. Not kosher with my job; I would probably have to quit. And then who would I be helping?”

  “Me,” I said. It was the only time I ever saw her cry.

  Joellen has never asked me for anything, ever. Until today.

  The thought of staying all year in one house, in one school, on an island, was giving me hives. John Muir would never camp in one spot for so long, not with unexplored wonders waiting over the next horizon.

  The ferry engine went silent, and the boat floated still in the middle of the Sound. A voice came from deck speakers.

  “Passengers, please offer a moment of silence for a memorial at sea.”

  The captain stood with a family at the bow of the ferry, a woman and two men and three little kids. Seagulls cried, and the family tossed ashes into the cold wind, and rose petals, which scattered and floated, pink confetti on the glassy dark water.

  “I’ll try,” I said to Joellen.

  She smiled.

  Three blasts of the ferry horn and we were sailing again.

  In my pocket, I worked the knots in the necklace chain.

  * * *

  I carry this tangled chain from a house in third grade. I was nearly eight years old, and Joellen says that house is the one I stayed in the longest, almost the whole school year. Back when parents decided how long I could stay, and I remember these parents liked me a lot. I remember I liked them.

  Memory is a fascinating thing. Months and years can pass, uneventful and lost, but then certain tiny moments, pieces of conversation or feelings within the thousands of blank days stay sharp, clear like yesterday. I remember the dad worked at an office, the mom was home with us kids, who came and went in this house in the University District, except for me—I stayed and stayed. The parents were youngish, white; they took us kayaking on Lake Union, to matinee movies on weekends, to see the cherry blossoms at the university fountain, and to the library, and once, between kids, when it was just me, the three of us rode the fast elevator to the top of the Space Needle, and we sat in the restaurant for lunch.

  “Are you happy here?” the dad asked.

  “Yes!” I said, and put my hands on the glass wall and watched the mist move in a slow circle. “We’re in the clouds.”

  “Are you happy with us?” the mom said. “Living in our house? Do you think you’d like to stay?”

  I remember getting off my chair to climb in her lap—too big but she let me—and I put my head on her shoulder beside the wall of glass, all of Seattle beneath our feet, tiny and beautiful and home.

  Alone in the top bunk at night without the sleeping sounds of other kids, I tossed for hours. I dragged a blanket from the bed and made a nest on the hallway floor outside the open door to
their big bedroom, and that worked, until the morning the dad tripped and fell over me, banging his shoulder into the wall so loud he cursed. I stayed in the bunk after that, glad when other kids were in the house for a few days, sometimes a week or two. Joellen asked again and again if I was happy, and I told her I was. Because it was true.

  At the park one afternoon two boys beside me on the swings saw me wave to the mom, sitting on a bench with some other moms, and she waved back. She did not look like me, and one said, “Is that your nanny?”

  “She’s my foster mom.”

  The kid frowned. “What is that?”

  “It’s when you steal something, your parents send you to someone else,” the other boy said, swinging high with authority, and turned to me. “What did you steal?”

  “I didn’t,” I said. I wished Joellen was there. The swing chain was rusty, my hands were turning orange.

  The first boy jumped from his swing and landed hard in the sand. “What do you call her?” he asked.

  “I call her Linda.”

  “Right. So she’s not your mom.”

  “She didn’t have me from her body,” I recited. “I live with her, and she takes care of me.”

  “Oh.” The kid nodded. “She’s pretending to be your mom.”

  “Sort of,” I said. Wasn’t she?

  I dragged my toes in the dirt to slow myself and got off the swing.

  More weeks passed in their house, which smelled perfectly neutral and was always a comfortable temperature. Other kids stopped coming, and one Saturday the mom and dad moved the bunk beds out of the bedroom and brought in one big bed, just for me. Brand-new white sheets and a comforter printed with flowers and leaves, with a pillowcase to match. I helped them make the bed, and we stood together, admiring our work.

  “Are you going to adopt me?” I asked.

  “Yes,” the mom said. “That’s the plan.”

  I jumped on the bed like a trampoline, and they didn’t get mad.

  My own big bed. We all thought it would help me sleep alone. Instead, I woke repeatedly every night, crying until one of them came in to turn on the light and begged me to try again, to please just lie down and close my eyes. They plugged a night-light into a low wall socket, and I played with toys in its pool of yellow light on the floor until the sun rose. I was tired, and so were they. I listened to them argue about how maybe I should sleep in their room with them—She has to learn boundaries! The book says she’ll get used to it; she is not in charge.

  I fell asleep on the school bus, in class, everywhere but in the bed in the room meant for me. I became, according to their side of phone conversations, angry, demanding, unmanageable.

  I only remember being exhausted. And scared.

  But when Joellen came each week, we all pretended we were fine.

  “Yes,” we said. “We’re happy!”

  Joellen smiled and smiled, scribbled her notes, and hugged me goodbye.

  The mom was nearly always in tears, neither of them patient when I spilled my milk or missed the bus to school. It was probably weeks since any of us had slept a night through. We didn’t go to the lake or to the library anymore. The mom slept in late on weekends, the bedroom door closed sometimes until lunch.

  The mom’s mom came to visit on a Sunday afternoon—an older white woman with a short, sensible haircut and perfume I could smell down the hallway. She shook my hand in greeting, and we ate the Subway sandwiches she’d brought for lunch. Afterward, they thought I was napping at last, but I lay in the bed and listened to them talking in the kitchen, the mom’s mom’s voice not at all modulated.

  Beautiful room all to herself; she doesn’t know how good she has it. This sleeping nonsense is only the beginning; it’s all genetic—these kids are unknown quantities. You have no idea the kinds of chaos she’ll bring into this house, into your life, into our family’s life. Why are you punishing yourself? Why do this to us? I understand you’re trying to do a nice thing and you feel sorry for her, I mean of course we all do, but she’s just not capable of gratitude. This isn’t your problem. Don’t you deserve to be happy?

  I lay still and listened hard, but the mom did not respond. She only sniffed and blew her nose again and again, and I wondered what new problems my “unknown quantity” would reveal. If my not sleeping was just the beginning, what kind of future was I in for? Was I a late-blooming werewolf? One more thing to worry about.

  The next Saturday the dad took me for a walk to a nearby jewelry store. He said we should bring the mom a present, that I could pick something out to give her and we could wrap it for her at home.

  In a glass case crowded with gaudy bracelets and diamond earrings was a necklace, a simple gold chain that looked like something a mom could wear all the time, even to the park or the pool or riding bikes.

  We wrapped the box in brown paper I colored with markers and crayons. We gave it to her after dinner, and the dad lifted her hair and clasped it around her neck, and she let me feel its delicate links.

  “So pretty,” I said. “You look like a mom. Real, not pretend.”

  She put her head on the table and cried.

  A week later, Joellen came to help me pack.

  The mom and dad waited in the kitchen, probably listening to Joellen tell me again and again as I rolled my shirts and socks, Yes, they did want to adopt you….No, you didn’t do anything wrong….They wish they could, but they can’t. It’s not because of you or anything you did. It’s not your fault, and I packed as slowly as I could, waiting for the mom and dad to come and say it was a mistake. I imagined a very dramatic rescue. The mom would rush in, maybe even pick me up or take my pajamas from Joellen’s hands: Stop packing! Don’t touch her suitcase; she’s staying here with us; this is her bedroom; she is our daughter.

  I folded and rolled and packed my pajama top.

  They did not come.

  I went to the bathroom to collect my toothbrush and washcloth but stopped first at their open bedroom door. The bed was unmade. Scared but curious, I stepped in. Quiet and dark. Her pillow smelled like shampoo, and on her bedside table, in a knotted pile, was the gold necklace.

  My throat burned. What had she done? It had no charm, no pendant, how easy it would have been to keep it untangled. Just a simple, perfect chain. Ruined.

  I did not think. I picked it up, slipped it into my pocket, walked fast down the hall and out the front door, my heart thumping, to cry on the porch and wait for Joellen to come out with my suitcase.

  “Don’t you want to say goodbye?” she said, trying to wipe my tears and also wrestle me into a jacket because it had begun to rain.

  Didn’t they want to? Still hiding in the kitchen. Cowards.

  “I need a new toothbrush,” I sobbed.

  She gave up on the jacket and knelt down beside me. “Okay,” she said.

  “And a washcloth. A blue one.”

  “Okay.”

  “No. Pink.”

  “All right.”

  I grabbed the handle and lifted my suitcase.

  “Muir,” Joellen said, “let me help you.”

  “No.” The bag was too heavy, but I dragged it to the car anyway, banging it against every single porch step. She stood, letting me struggle, and watched me heft it into the trunk of the Subaru, get in, and buckle my seat belt. I rolled down the window and let the rain in. “I’m ready,” I called to her.

  That was the last time a parent told me I had to leave.

  Hand in my pocket, I worked the knots in the chain. I could fix it, and then I would wear it. “Let’s go.”

  Ten years messing with this delicate thing, trying so hard to fix it, and it’s still tangled. But not broken.

  JOELLEN DROVE OFF THE FERRY and onto the island, past a harbor full of white-sailed boats. The sun broke through low clouds, and the dark water sparkled. Over hills o
f farms and barns and houses, Joellen kept taking her eyes off the road to look at me. Monitoring my reaction.

  “Beautiful, right?”

  It was. Worthy of public television voice-over reverie extolling the virtues of small-town life. A world away from Seattle, no sidewalks, all these trees. I wished I could calm down and not just see but truly appreciate the beauty. I wished I could stop thinking of Zola’s disappointed face.

  Joellen turned onto a dirt road beneath a canopy of cypress and Douglas firs, and then it opened to a field of tall grass and wildflowers and pines.

  “Ohhh…,” we breathed in unison.

  The house was white and small with a metal roof, in the middle of the field, rock-lined path to the front porch, and raised garden beds.

  She parked, and we got out and stood in the quiet. Wind in the trees.

  The winds will blow their own freshness into you, and the storms their energy, while cares will drop off like autumn leaves.

  Oh, John. If only.

  “Muir,” Joellen said, her face turned to the sky.

  Blackbirds, a moving shape of black wings racing silent circles above the house and field.

  Joellen smiled. “Good sign.”

  I nodded.

  “Okay,” she said, face still tilted up at the birds, “so it’s only a mom, and just in time. She was a month from letting her license expire, but I begged her. And as always, it was your file that convinced her.”

  “Just when she thought she was free,” I said. “Poor woman.”

  “No,” Joellen said. “She’s lucky to have you. You’re good company.”

  I looked down at the grass, tiny white flowers and a few weeds pushing up through it.