I Speak For This Child: True Stories of a Child Advocate

by Gay Courter

  “Not too bad,” she said nervously, “except their church is really strict.” She told me about the ultraconservative denomination and how all the Lambs “spoke in tongues” and believed there was a biblical response to every issue. “They don’t approve of me seeing Simone because the Baldwins allow her to go to parties and to the movies. She even got to go away with her boyfriend’s family for a weekend to Disney World, which Fay said was sinful.”

  “Disney World?”

  “No, going to a hotel with her boyfriend, even though she had her own room and the boy slept with his parents.”

  “Do you ever see Julie?”

  “No, Mom thinks I might corrupt her.”

  “Sounds like you’ve had a hard time during the last few years.” Nicole’s eyes darted from side to side but she said nothing. “What’s the worst thing that ever happened to you?”

  “Standing in a corner for a month, I guess.”

  “When was that?”

  “When Mom was living with Jeb Delancy, the one who beat me later on.”

  “Why did he punish you?”

  “For throwing my vegetables in the garbage without eating them.”

  “How can you stand in a corner for a month?”

  “He’d let me have two bathroom trips a day, sleep five hours a night, and go to school, but if I even leaned against the wall or complained, he’d whip me.”

  “What did your mother do?”

  “She said that somebody had to control me, and anyway, she knew better than to interfere, or he’d smack her around too.”

  “Did he ever hurt your sisters?”

  “Sometimes, but mostly he had it in for me.” She lowered her eyes and whispered, “Because I was the only one who’d stand up to him.”

  Since Nicole had known her previous guardian and Lillian, she understood the program. I gave Nicole information on how to reach me and told her that I lived nearby and would come over often. I asked how I could help in the future and she said she wanted to see both her sisters. I promised to arrange a lunch together soon.

  When I arrived at Lottie Hunt’s home the following afternoon, Julie was “off somewhere on her bike.” The blue stucco house had a window box planted with plastic flowers and a manicured lawn. Mrs. Hunt explained that she had moved there a few months earlier when she had married Mr. Hunt. Then she launched into complaints about Julie’s unruly behavior, her tendency to talk back, and the fact that she was “turning out like her sisters” and it wouldn’t be long before she became belligerent “just like Nicole” and would have to leave too.

  “Would you like to be reunited with all three of your daughters?” I asked.

  “No, it wouldn’t work. Simone is better off where she is and I’m afraid of Nicole.”

  “In what way?”

  “Do you know about the gun?”

  “No …,” I admitted. “Tell me about it.”

  “I was having this discussion with Nicole about modeling school. She wanted to go and I told her I couldn’t afford it. We worked out a plan. She went from door to door getting friends and neighbors to help pay her tuition, and when she had enough, she enrolled. But the day before she was to have her first class, she back-talked me, and I wouldn’t allow her to go. Well, she became furious and her face got purple and she was screaming at me. She backed up to the cabinet where she knows we have guns and she pulled one out and pointed it at me.”

  “Was it loaded?”

  “I don’t know, but I managed to grab her arm and she dropped it. That’s when I told her to leave.”

  “And then she went to live with the Lambs?”

  “Right.”

  The front door opened and Julie came in. She was a slender, waiflike child with straight straw-colored bangs and a Prince Valiant haircut. With her huge green eyes and pink pointed bow lips, she looked ready to be cast as Cinderella.

  “Hi,” she whispered.

  I told her that I was her new guardian.

  “Tell the lady why you didn’t bring home that form for me to sign,” Lottie Hunt said with a snarl.

  “I forgot, Mom,” Julie replied with a slight whine.

  “She’s always forgetting everything. If her nose wasn’t attached, she’d leave it in the bathroom. Is it so much to ask a child to take care of the few responsibilities she has?” Lottie asked me, then turned to her daughter. “What are you going to do about it?” she added in a much meaner voice.

  “How can I go back to school now?”

  “Why didn’t you think of that while you were there? But no, the problem is you never think, do you?”

  Julie noticed a black cat with white paws walking by and scooped it up. Burying her face in its fur, she said, “I’m sorry, Mom.” Tears from Julie’s face slipped onto the cat’s shiny back.

  “See, she loves that cat more than she does me. Don’t you?” Julie shook her head in agreement. “What’s the matter with her?” she shouted at me.

  “Sounds like a typical twelve-year-old,” I said to let Julie off the hook.

  “Everyone always takes the side of the kids; nobody ever listens to me. Do they think I don’t have feelings? I try my best. It’s been hard. Their father was a no-good drunken slob who’d get repentant and religious in the morning, but by dinnertime would be ready to haul off and hit anyone who looked at him crosswise. Now I have to put myself first and settle my own issues. That’s what I’ve learned from being a counselor at the spouse abuse center.”

  I did a double take. “You mean you counsel other people?”

  “Yes, I’m a peer counselor. I work with other abused spouses. By doing so, I also help myself.”

  “What about the children? Do they see therapists?”

  “They sometimes see my therapist, Wanda, too.”

  “I hate that lady!” Julie seethed. “She never listens to us.”

  “Wanda thinks you need some discipline. Like yesterday. I came home from fishing and you weren’t here, were you?”

  “I was at Donna’s.”

  “Who’s that?” I asked.

  “A neighbor’s brat,” Lottie replied.

  “Why were you there?” I questioned Julie gently.

  “I heard some noises in the bushes and got scared, so I called Donna’s mother—their house is over the back fence—and asked her if she knew what was out there. She came over to see if I was okay and invited me for dinner. I left a note for Mom, but she was angry about it.”

  “What time did you get home?” I asked Lottie.

  “Around nine.”

  “What would Julie have done about dinner?”

  “There were leftovers and frozen pizza here.”

  “Maybe she was lonely.”

  “The point is she defied me. She is not supposed to be wandering around the neighborhood.”

  “I was scared,” Julie moaned, her tears flowing more freely. The cat jumped off her lap and she pulled her knees up and hugged them to her chest.

  I realized that it was almost six. My husband expected me home, but I made a sudden decision. “Could Julie have dinner with me tonight?”

  “I guess,” Lottie said, shrugging.

  “Do you want to?” I asked Julie. She wiped her eyes and nodded.

  In the car Julie brightened. “How come I get to go out with you?”

  “Because you looked so sad, I wanted to do something to cheer you up.”

  I used my car phone to call Phil and explain I wouldn’t be home for dinner and directed him to some leftovers. Then I asked Julie where she would like to eat.

  “McDonald’s is the cheapest.”

  “Actually, I’d prefer Italian, Chinese, or seafood.”

  “I love fish!”

  I headed for the Waterside Inn. Julie knew people who worked there as waiters, but had never eaten there. She ordered a fried grouper dinner, a salad with blue cheese dressing, and was surprised I allowed her to have a large Coke.

  “Thank you for taking me here,” she said with a solemn politen
ess unusual for guardian children.

  While waiting for the meal to arrive, her whole demeanor changed and she became chatty, telling me about movies she liked to watch. “I love R-rated movies like Friday, the 13th. Jason is so cool, don’t you think?”

  I admitted I didn’t care for that sort of violence.

  “I liked to be scared.”

  “You were scared the other night when you went to the neighbor’s house. That didn’t sound like fun.”

  “I hate being alone all the time. We only have a hot meal on Saturdays when my stepfather has his kids over for visitation. My mother eats sandwiches and drinks beer all day when she is fishing, so she doesn’t feel like cooking at night.”

  As Julie spoke, she was attacking her salad. I watched as she lathered the dressing over the top like a blanket, then gobbled the onions, tomatoes, and every leaf of lettuce with gusto. She used the crackers in the bowl on the table to finish the last vestige of salad dressing.

  When the fish platter came, she was equally aggressive, which seemed surprising in a skinny and pale child who seemed more the type to have a picky appetite.

  “Do you remember Jeb Delancy?” I asked.

  “I would prefer to forget him,” she said between bites.

  “Did he ever hurt you?”

  “Not really … well, I guess he spanked me.”

  “Did you stand in the corner?”

  “No, he only did that to Nicole.”

  “Not Simone either?”

  “No. Our father is the one who smacked Simone around, but she did whatever Jeb said. Nicole is the one who would talk back, and then she’d really get it.”

  “What did you think of Jeb?”

  “I hated him, but what could I do? I mean, even Mom let him do whatever he wanted, and she even made Nicole lie in court so he wouldn’t go to jail.”

  My appetite was gone. I put my fork down.

  “In what way?”

  “One time Nicole was so bruised a teacher asked her what happened, and she said Jeb hit her with a board, which was the truth. By the time she had to go to court, Mom convinced her to say it was only this yardstick and that she bruised easily. Which isn’t true. I’m the one with the sensitive skin.”

  While Julie was working on her French fries, I took out a pencil and paper and said, “I am making a wish list for Julie. If you could have anything you want, what would it be?”

  Julie put down her fork and tilted her head to check whether I was serious. I showed her that my pen was poised. “Okay!” she beamed. “Number one … I want to go live with Mary Lee. She’s my best friend.”

  “If that wasn’t possible, where would you like to live?”

  “Anywhere but with my mother.”

  “Would you want to live with your sisters?”

  “Of course, but that will never happen. I mean there are lots of things I want, but will never have.”

  “Like what?”

  “My own TV and my own phone and lots of clothes in purples and greens, and a little dog with a wrinkled face.”

  “You mean a sharpei.”

  “Yeah! How did you know?”

  I diligently wrote this all down. “Now, let’s go back and you tell me which to work on for you first.”

  “You mean some of this could come true?”

  “I don’t know, but if I don’t try, nothing will happen. What are the most important things to change?”

  “I want to see my dad,” she said suddenly. “I know he’s in jail, but they said I could visit if I proved I was his child. That means I need my birth certificate, but Mom won’t give it to me.”

  “I can help with that. Next?”

  Julie looked at me soberly. “Really, I need another place to live. Any home where they are nice and fair and where there is dinner every night.”

  Julie was a hungry child. Not only was she hungry for affection and company, she was not getting enough to eat. Every time I visited she showed an unusual interest in food. Something as simple as pizza topping choices could become a topic for a dissertation on extra cheese and thicker crusts. She qualified for free lunches but had moved so many times that year, she had not been placed in the program.

  There seemed to be enough money for Lottie Hunt to live in a pleasant neighborhood and to spend her days in leisure activities, so the lack of plentiful food fell into the category of neglect. I was even more disturbed by the mother’s behavior toward her daughter in front of me. I had not only been a stranger in that home for the first time, but also a court-appointed visitor who would be reporting the conversation, and yet Lottie had launched into an unrelenting diatribe on Julie’s supposed sins in so ugly and angry a fashion, I could only wonder what went on when mother and daughter were by themselves. To me, this had been a clear demonstration of emotional abuse. I documented every word of the conversation I could recall. Then I phoned Lillian to ask if she had seen anything similar.

  “This is a very disturbed woman,” Lillian admitted, “but I didn’t want to prejudice you beforehand.”

  “Do you know anything more about the incident with Nicole and the gun?”

  “Yes, I have heard several versions of the story. Every time Lottie tells it, though, it becomes more exaggerated. The only part that appears to be true is that Nicole became enraged when her mother pulled the plug on her going to modeling school. She had been working for months to beg or borrow the tuition. Can you imagine sending that pretty young thing to knock on neighbors’ doors to ask for money? I was afraid someone might take advantage of her. Anyway, when she was yelling at her mother, she did back up until she was against the cabinet where the guns were kept. She admits to thinking about the guns in there, but she never opened the door, never took out a gun, never pointed it at anyone. That part is the mother’s paranoid fantasy.”

  “Are you sure?”

  “I suggest you call Brigitte Rouelle, the therapist who counseled the family in their home.”

  “Is that the woman from the spouse abuse center?”

  “No, that’s Wanda, who has a degree in basket weaving or something, but she’s no psychologist. Mrs. Rouelle is from a special HRS intervention program designed for crisis counseling.”

  In the file I found Mrs. Rouelle’s report, which stated that she had spent six weeks working in the home to try to resolve family conflicts. At that time both Nicole and Julie had still been at home. The cover sheet for her notes was a checklist that indicated the family was in need of further treatment but no appropriate referral was available. As to the rate of improvement, Mrs. Rouelle had indicated that the Colby family was worse off after her visits than before, and stated that the family was at high risk for emotional and psychological neglect.

  After a few tries I reached Mrs. Rouelle on the phone. She gave me many other examples of Lottie Hunt’s barrages against her daughters.

  “At one point it was so destructive,” Mrs. Rouelle said in her French accent, “that I refused to leave the house until an HRS worker was summoned for the children’s protection.”

  “You mean you called HRS and said the situation was abusive?”

  “Absolutely. I knew that if I left the house, Mrs. Hunt would hurt one of the children, or one of the children would have hurt her, or worse.”

  “What is the mother’s problem?”

  “She’s a very immature, complicated woman. While I did not do private work with her, she is symptomatic of a person with borderline personality disorder. She has a very shaky sense of identity, has frequent violent outbursts—as you and I have both witnessed—is oversensitive to imagined rejections. She keeps blaming the children for not loving her enough.”

  “She told me that Julie loved the cat more than her.”

  “People with her syndrome often have many intense love affairs, which may explain why Mrs. Hunt has been married so many times in recent years and why she has stayed with men who have been abusive toward her and the children. Has Nicole told you about what she had to endure from Mr.
Delancy?”

  “She started to.”

  “It’s horrifying, isn’t it?”

  “Could they live with their father when he gets out?”

  “No, he’s too violent. Julie, who stayed with him the shortest time, still believes he might be there for her, but he’s only allowed supervised visitations and that won’t change for a long time.”

  As I typed up my extensive notes from the conversation with Mrs. Rouelle, I was pleased to have clinical confirmation for the upcoming hearing.

  By the end of my first week on the Colby case, I was able to get an appointment with the eldest sister, Simone, and her “adopted” family, the Baldwins. The Baldwins’ recently built house was by far the nicest of the Colby children’s residences. Carol Baldwin met with me in her husband’s home office. The sliding glass doors opened onto the fairway of a golf course and ducks from a nearby pond waddled across the lawn.

  “Although Nicole is fairly stable with the Lambs, I don’t think that is going to last,” I began. “But right now I’m more worried about Julie, who seems miserable, hungry, and her mother is out of control.”

  Carol gave me a strained smile. “We’ve made a commitment to Simone, but we can’t include the other girls. Ken adores Julie, too, but we can’t accept another child into our home.”

  “I was not asking you to.”

  “Well, maybe I was asking myself. Ken has allowed me to buy the three of them school clothes and Christmas presents, but that is the most I can ask, considering we have three of our own. I feel for those children, every one of them. It took a year before Simone trusted us to tell us some of what has gone on in her life, and it is more harrowing than you can believe. If I won the lottery, I’d adopt them in a minute.”

  “Do you think someone might step forward who would adopt all three?” I asked as the idea began to form in my mind.

  “It could happen, but when I asked Iris about legally adopting Simone, she said that neither parent would relinquish their rights.”

  “Even if adoption is out of the question, if some family were to offer the three of them a permanent home, how would you feel about losing Simone?”