Three Little Words

by Ashley Rhodes-Courter

  I kept asking for my mother, but nobody ever explained why she did not come for me. Once, I handed Mrs. Hines the phone. “Call my mama and tell her to pick me up!” I demanded.

  “I don’t have her number.” She sighed. “But I’ll see what I can do.”

  A few days later they dressed Luke and me in our best clothes and Mr. Hines took us to the Department of Children and Families building.

  My mother hugged me, then examined my arms and legs. “How did you get all those red spots?” she asked with an accusing tone.

  “Bug bites.”

  “What do they do, leave you out in the woods?” My mother directed her question to the worker who was standing in the doorway.

  “I don’t like it there! Take me home with you.”

  “Sunshine, not today, but soon.”

  “When, Mama, when?”

  She looked to the waiting worker and back to me. “As soon as I have a better apartment and a job.”

  When we went for the next visit, we waited for a long time; but my mother never arrived.

  “Where is she?” I asked every few minutes, getting whinier each time.

  “Doesn’t look like the M-O-M is going to show,” the worker said.

  “How can she do this to her children?” Mr. Hines fumed. Switching to a cheerful voice, he said, “Time to go.”

  “But Mama—”

  “We can’t wait any longer. Mrs. Hines will wonder what happened to us.”

  “Please!” I begged. “She’s coming! She’s coming!”

  He pushed Luke and me into the corridor. “I’m not putting these children through this again,” Mr. Hines said to the worker.

  I wanted to tell them that they were making a mistake, that they had the time wrong, because my mother would never miss a chance to see us. I pulled away from Mr. Hines and rushed back into the visitation room.

  “Let’s go,” Mr. Hines said in exasperation.

  I ducked under a worker’s desk to stall the departure. My mother could be running late—she sometimes had problems with her car or not finding her way. Mr. Hines let go of Luke and lunged toward me. “Ashley! Enough of this nonsense. We aren’t waiting any longer.” He reached under the desk, but I kicked his arm away. They had the time wrong; they weren’t patient enough; they weren’t giving her a chance. Eventually, they dragged me out flailing and crying and took me back to what they called “home.”

  They couldn’t keep me from thinking about my mother all the time—her smiles, her songs in the shower, the way she painted her eyes and lips with colors. I would say, “Mama, you look so beautiful,” and then she would kiss my cheek to blot her lipstick. I loved the mark it left. I was jealous that she had so many hugs and kisses for Dusty, and I often spied on them when I was supposed to be asleep in a motel room or the small space of one of our trailers.

  I was playing with two teddy bears from the Hineses’ toy chest. “Want to see all the ways my mommy and daddy have fun?” I asked the other girls. I pressed the bears’ fronts together. They squealed with laughter. “And they can do it this way, too.” I had one hump the other’s back. Their giggles encouraged me, so I put one’s head between the other’s legs. I added the grunting noises I had heard in the dark.

  “What’s going on here?” Mrs. Hines chided when she checked on us.

  The other children dispersed, but I gave Mrs. Hines the same demonstration. “Why don’t you put the bears back and go out to play?” she said in a voice that left no room to disagree.

  I stormed outside, slamming the screen door behind me. “It’s my turn!” I shouted to Ashlee, who ignored me and pedaled off on the tricycle. Enraged, I caught up, reached around her neck, and choked her. Luke came over to join the fray. He grasped my leg and tried to pull me down. To shake him off, I kicked him. When he screeched, Mrs. Hines came running. She gripped my arm, steered me in the house, and gave me a stern time-out on a stool.

  A while later I heard her complaining about me on the phone. “I do believe this child is hyper. She breaks all her toys, is really mean to the little ones—even her brother—and isn’t still for a minute.” Her voice changed to a whisper as she recounted how I had played with the bears. When she mentioned that I had started wetting the bed, I went to where the others were watching TV and started to mimic what was on the screen.

  One of the older children shooed me away, but I did not listen. “Hey, Ashley, we can’t see through you,” he said.

  If my mother had been there, she would have applauded my antics; but here, I was nobody’s special Sunshine.

  Then, after only four months, Mrs. Hines announced that Luke and I were going to live with my grandfather. “Won’t that be nice?” she said as she packed my clothes.

  I went around the house piling up Luke’s toys and bottles, but they kept ending up back in their original places. I was oblivious to the fact that Mrs. Hines was packing only my possessions.

  When the worker arrived, Luke was napping. I was bundled into the car. “What about my brother?”

  “He has to take his nap,” the worker said. “You’ll see him later.”

  It took several days before I realized Luke was not coming to my new foster home, which was nowhere near my grandfather’s house. I wondered what was so horrible about me and why I had been rejected again. Then there was my perpetual question: What had I done that was so terrible that I had to be taken from my mother? I had no idea why she hadn’t been able to get me back. You would think someone would have explained it in words a child could understand. Yet nobody did. I believed they were keeping secrets from me—but supposedly, they thought they were protecting me.

  Now I know that—in the beginning at least—my mother never did anything seriously wrong. She never hurt us. She loved us and I adored her. Originally, the police had arrested my mother for writing a bad check; but Dusty admitted he had stolen the checks, and she was released six days later. When my mother returned home, she found our duplex padlocked. Three weeks after Dusty was let out of jail, they arrested him again for attempting to steal cigarettes from a food store. My mother moved to a new apartment but had lost most of our possessions. Although she submitted applications for food stamps and aid for dependent children, the welfare officials told her that she was ineligible because her children were no longer living with her. When she tried to get us back, the caseworker said she had to be able to provide food for us.

  Two months after we were placed in temporary shelter care, Judge Vincent E. Giglio officially ordered us into foster care. We were now state property. Our legal guardian was the executive branch of the Florida government, an entity that would rather pay strangers to care for us than offer any economic help to my mother to care for her own children.

  My fourth mother was Yolanda Schott. Other than running around in some orange groves, I have no memory of my time with her. I would still like to know why the Schotts took me in—and why they let me go after such a short time. Maybe it was a temporary placement until the state could find something better; or maybe the Schotts did not like me either. The blankness bothers me, as does the fact that there is not a single person who can fill in that part of my story.

  Next, I moved to the home of Julio and Rosa Ortiz and stayed with them for thirteen months. They lived in a Tampa neighborhood where the houses were only a few feet apart. Their small backyard included an aboveground pool as well as a chicken coop. The Ortizes had three teenage birth daughters and four adopted children, plus a constant stream of foster children. Some were there for only a few days; some came before me and stayed longer. At least twenty children cycled in and out of the home while I was with them. There were so many of us that we ate in shifts. It was hard to feel alone, but still I missed Luke.

  “Can you go get my brother?” I asked Mrs. Ortiz, who looked like a Hispanic Mrs. Claus, one day during dinner.

  “Okay,” she said to hush me.

  “When?” I demanded, and kicked the table leg.

  “Ashley, go to your ro
om until you can calm down,” she said.

  I turned my back to her and stormed down the hallway to the bedrooms. As I got closer to the babies’ room, I smelled something putrid. Peering in, I could see that a toddler had smeared poop all over the wall. I slammed the door to the room, which caused the baby to wail.

  Hearing the baby’s piercing screams, Mrs. Ortiz came rushing. “Ashley, what did you do to the baby?”

  “I shut the door because he stinks.”

  Mrs. Ortiz opened it and rushed to comfort the child. Her shoe slipped on something soft, and she wheeled around and gave me an accusing look. “Ashley, how could you do something so disgusting?”

  “I didn’t do anything!” I screamed, which only got me a longer time-out in my room.

  Since I had been blamed for the mess, a few of the other children came to check on me as if I were a sideshow. I stuck my middle finger up—the way Dusty did when he was mad at someone. Some of the others copied me and went around the house showing everyone what I had just taught them.

  Mrs. Ortiz barreled into my room. “Why are you teaching the little ones to shoot birds?”

  “I did not!” I retorted.

  “Ashley, you are going to have to stop your lying,” she said, and marched off. I had never seen her so furious and did not understand why I was blamed for hurting birds when there had not been any in the house.

  I soon realized that if Mrs. Ortiz yelled at me, I could stare just above her head and she would still think that I was looking directly at her, hanging on her every word. I would purposely let my mind wander to take me far away from the current confrontation.

  “Chicken pox!” I overheard Mrs. Ortiz on the phone. “Yeah, three of them—two of them foster.” I wished I could tell my mother that I had a chicken disease that made me itch all over.

  Mrs. Ortiz put me in a bathtub with her daughter Trina and a blond foster girl. The spots bloomed on each of us.

  “Don’t scratch,” Mrs. Ortiz said. “This special soap will help you feel better.”

  She pushed my hand away from a cluster of pox. “If you don’t stop, you’ll have ugly marks forever.”

  I sulked. “I don’t want ugly marks!”

  “Of course not—you’re too pretty for that,” Mrs. Ortiz said kindly.

  Her older daughters took turns picking out outfits for me that looked good with my red hair. I loved my aqua shorts and matching socks with lace trim and a yellow dress with a flounced skirt. I came out and twirled around to show it off.

  “Here comes my prissy girl,” Mrs. Ortiz complimented.

  Every day when the older children went off to school, I asked to go as well.

  “You have to be five,” Mr. Ortiz said in his slight Cuban accent.

  “I am five!” I insisted, although I was just about to turn four.

  Mrs. Ortiz tilted her head. “I don’t think so.”

  “Ask my real mother!”

  “Ashley is smart enough to go to kindergarten,” Mr. Ortiz admitted.

  “It would do her good to be in school,” Mrs. Ortiz agreed. “She’s the brainiest kid I ever had.”

  DeSoto, the neighborhood primary school, had a pre-K program, so they enrolled me. I was so overjoyed to leave the house with the older kids that I raced to beat the others to the school on the edge of the bay.

  My teacher called Mrs. Ortiz and asked her to come in because she had concerns about my adjustment. She said, “Ashley is a good student, but she does five times as many papers as the others.”

  “What’s the problem?” Mrs. Ortiz threw up her hands and shrugged. “Give her more papers.”

  While I liked school, I thought church was boring. They liked to dress Trina and me in matching frilly dresses and hats—hers were usually white and mine were pink. As Mrs. Ortiz dropped us off at Sunday school, she would say, “Ashley, if you don’t mind the teacher, you can’t watch Alice in Wonderland or any of your other movies later.”

  Mrs. Ortiz often fostered infants, so she spent many hours bottle-feeding them. This was a good time to snuggle against her; and as long as the baby was sucking, she did not mind. When I was comfy, I would ask, “When can I see my mama?”

  Mrs. Ortiz dodged the question as best she could because she probably knew that a few weeks after I came to live with her, my mother had been charged with possession of cocaine and drug paraphernalia as well as offering to commit prostitution.

  When Mr. Ortiz took me to a family visit, I asked, “Will Mama be there?”

  “I don’t think so,” he said. “You’ll see your daddy and your brother. Won’t that be nice?”

  “Are you sure my mother isn’t coming?” My birthday had been the previous week and I had been certain she would come with my gifts.

  “Well, you never know,” he said to appease me.

  Luke arrived with Mr. Hines, who called me “Pumpkin” and ruffled my hair. “His father is coming from South Carolina … out on bail …” were words I caught, but they did not mean much to me. When nobody else appeared, our worker took us back to our respective foster homes.

  There was at least one time while I lived with the Ortizes that my mother did show up. The moment I saw her, I felt my heart would leap out of my chest. She wrapped her arms around me and told me everything would be all right—and I believed every word. Luke had not made it to this visit, so I asked, “Is Luke at your house now?”

  “No, not yet,” she replied.

  “Oh.” I thought about my other brother. “What about Tommy?”

  My mother startled. “Who?”

  “The one in the box.”

  “You can’t ever tell anyone about him.”

  “Why?”

  “Because—” She checked to make sure we were alone. “He’s our secret. If anyone knew, they might not let you come to live with me again.”

  “Why?”

  “They might put me in jail.”

  “Why?”

  “Honey, you are too young to understand, but someday I’ll tell you all about it.” She gave me her sweetest smile. “Now, what shall I bring you on my next visit?”

  All too soon, we separated, both of us in tears.

  When I returned to the foster home, I started spinning to make myself dizzy. “My, aren’t you all wound up!” Mrs. Ortiz remarked. “Did you have a good visit with your mother?”

  I stopped twirling and said, “My mommy told me that I have to keep our secret or she’ll go to jail and I’ll never see her again.”

  “Oh, really?” Mrs. Ortiz arched her bushy eyebrows.

  A baby cried and she went to tend to her. When she was giving her a bottle, I cuddled against Mrs. Ortiz and laid my head on her bosom. “Do you want to know my secret?” I asked.

  “Only if you want to tell me.”

  “My mommy put my baby brother in a box, and if I tell anyone, she’ll get in trouble and go to jail and I’ll never see her again.”

  Mrs. Ortiz dropped the baby’s bottle. “Your little brother is in another foster home and he’s fine.”

  “No, another baby,” I tried to explain.

  She handed her husband the bottle to wash off the nipple. He brought it back and said, “I’ll call the worker and arrange a sibling visit,” he said.

  “And check whether they know about another one,” Mrs. Ortiz added.

  That summer I splashed in the pool and waited for more family visits—but none came. I was happier when I returned to the pre-K classroom with the fenced play yard and tubular slide.

  Mrs. Ortiz asked, “Do you remember your grandpa in South Carolina?”

  “Yep,” I said, even though I mostly remembered Aunt Leanne and Dusty.

  “Wouldn’t it be nice if you and your brother could visit him?”

  “Yep,” I agreed, and went back to coloring my school papers.

  A few days later Luke and I met at the Department of Children and Families, supposedly to see our mother and Dusty, but Dusty arrived alone. He whirled Luke in the air, and then he got do
wn on the floor and played with us both.

  Our caseworker, Dennis Benson, asked, “How do you feel about them going to their grandfather’s?” he asked.

  “You know my mother has put in for them too,” he said.

  “She also withdrew the papers once before,” the worker replied, “and she is only related to your son.”

  “If they’re with my wife’s father, my family can still visit them, can’t they?”

  “I don’t see why not,” Mr. Benson said. “They live close by, right?”

  “Yeah, but there’s been some bad blood, if you know what I mean.”

  “We can arrange regular visitations for you and them at the county offices,” the worker replied. He checked his watch. “Is their mother coming?”

  “Don’t you know?” Dusty asked with a lopsided grin. He pantomimed a key turning in a lock, which meant she was back in jail.

  A few days later Mrs. Ortiz gave me a bath and dressed me in clean school clothes instead of pajamas. “Aren’t I going to bed?” I asked.

  “Yes, but you’re getting up very early to go visit your grandfather.”

  Before dawn Mrs. Ortiz awakened me from a deep sleep, hugged me against her pillow-soft chest that had a lavender scent, and whispered, “Don’t forget us!” Dennis Benson carried me to the car and placed a plastic bag with all my belongings beside me. Luke was in a car seat sound asleep. The next thing I remember is a uniformed woman lifting me into an airline seat and cinching a belt over my lap. Someone handed me a little white pillow. As the plane whooshed up and away, I fell asleep trying to memorize Mrs. Ortiz’s face because I had already forgotten my first foster parents, and I feared I would not remember my grandfather, my aunt Leanne, or worse, my mother.

  3.

  papa fall down

  Daylight and strangers greeted us when I stumbled sleepily into the South Carolina airport terminal. A woman lifted Luke and a man took me by the hand, but I pulled it away. “Don’t you recognize your grandpa?” the woman asked. I shook my head. “I guess it’s been too long a time.” She bent close and explained that she was Adele and the man was my mama’s daddy.