by Eric Smith
Jacqui took a chance then, and stuck his head around the wall. Frank was looking at Kelly imploringly.
Kelly walked slowly up to him and touched his right arm. That woman. She will break him. Break us. She has no regard.
“No, it wasn’t a lie,” Kelly said. “God’s call to me wasn’t wrong. I’ve prayed about this, believe me. His call was for us to bring Jac here. That is his salvation. And we’ve done that. We’ve taken him out of that cesspool and brought him somewhere where he really has a shot.”
Jacqui wanted to laugh. It was absurd, really, her notion that she knew anything about his home. The streets, teeming with people, buying, selling, moving, laughing, fighting amidst the broken-down buildings and dilapidated kiosks. The easy comfort of his mother’s cornmeal with herring. Tears came to his eyes, as he realized he would probably never taste it again.
Frank again: “Will he, though? Will he really have a shot without us?”
Jacqui wiped at a tear with the back of his hand. He was really crying now. Yes, they are really considering letting me go! Who are these people, again, that I should ever have called them Mother, Father?
Kelly cradled Frank’s chin in her hand. “Yes,” she said, but it came out crooked, unsure. “Yes,” she said again “these are good people, Frank. They love children, and desperately want one of their own. Mrs. Webster sent me a copy of the home study that DHS did, and it was glowing, positively glowing. Said that they could provide any child with a stable, clean, healthy home. Said that she and Mr. Webster are also phenomenal with special-needs kids. They’re an older black couple, so they’ll be able to provide for his cultural needs better. He needs to be with people who are like him. People who understand him. We can’t provide that.”
Jacqui ducked his head back around the wall, worried that they would discover his indiscretion soon enough. He needed to creep carefully back to where they had last seen him sitting in the living room and pretend he was thoroughly engrossed in the Angry Birds comic the school librarian had checked out for him. But who were these Websters the Boldens intended to dump him with? And how had Kelly even found them? He sucked on his teeth. Probably through one of those adoption Facebook groups she was always on. Posting and reading and responding at all hours.
Jacqui could hear Frank crying openly now. Jacqui hung his head. It was done, then. “I know we can’t go on like this, but I just . . . wish there was another way, Kel. It doesn’t seem right, you know?”
“It’ll be okay, you’ll see. You just have to trust me, honey. It will all work out,” said Kelly.
V.
Frank had made him memorize his cell phone number before he left, and told him to call if anything looked shady or if there were any problems, but Jacqui still felt adrift in this strange place, with these strange people. Mr. and Mrs. Webster were nice enough, and they led him to what would be his new room in their small apartment right before the Boldens left. It had a modest double bed in the center and what looked like a fresh set of sheets across the mattress. They had even gone to the trouble of installing a twenty-inch television in the room, as well as an Xbox game console. That was more than the Boldens had ever given him. Sure, they had fed him, clothed him, and even bought him a few toys, but there was always the sense of withholding with them. As if they were carefully measuring how many objects, how much affection they could afford to give him. Jacqui didn’t feel that way with the Websters at all. After a week of contemplating using the Xbox, a week of awkward exchanges between him and the old couple, he finally sat down on the worn carpeting and began loading Call of Duty. After Jacqui had lost to the Xbox four times, Mr. Webster called him out to the living room.
“You ever been to a dogfight, boy?” the old man asked him. He was sweaty and he smelled funny. Jacqui didn’t know why, but his instinct was to stay as far away from him as possible. It was something about the way the whiskers around his pale brown mouth twitched when he looked at him. As if Jacqui was a delicious peppermint stick he wanted to lick.
Jacqui shook his head and looked at the floor. He wished Kelly had not taken away his cell phone. He wanted to call Frank now, but it didn’t look as if the Websters had a landline or cell phones of their own.
“Speak up, boy!” Mr. Webster barked.
Jacqui jumped at the sound, and then said “No,” weakly. He glanced sideways and saw that Mrs. Webster, who had donned a dirty The Heart of Louisiana apron in preparation for cooking dinner, had come out of the kitchen to watch the exchange. A dopey grin was plastered across her face, and he wondered what she was thinking.
Mr. Webster stood up from the couch and clapped his hands. “We going, then. Right now. Get your jacket, boy.”
“Right now?” Jacqui asked. “But I’m in the middle of a game.”
Mr. Webster laughed, but it wasn’t a funny laugh. “Yeah, and now we going somewhere. Let’s get to it.” He ambled over to the small table by the front door and grabbed his keys. Jacqui noted that his jeans were too large and landed about halfway down his butt.
Jacqui shook his head. This wasn’t the way it was supposed to go—any of it. The Boldens were supposed to keep him, love him forever. You will have a new life and a new family on the other side, and you will make something of yourself, his mother had said. That was the way it was going to be. Not this drop-off with these strange and probably perverted people, who wanted to take him God knows where.
“Boy, you better get a move on!” Mr. Webster yelled. His face became clouded with anger, and there was meanness there, something that frightened him. Like the few memories he had of his father, grabbing his arm to take him away from his mother right after Nico was born, under the pretense of helping to provide for the family, when really, all his father had wanted him to do was beg the expats for money that he would end up using to get drunk.
“I’ll have supper on by the time you all get back,” Mrs. Webster said from the kitchen. “Burgers, Mr. Webster’s favorite!”
Jacqui grabbed his jacket from the hook where he had hung it barely two hours before and stumbled toward the door. God, please. Be with me now. Keep me safe. It was a prayer he had made up and said to himself at least once a day since the earthquakes, and he had been saying it all the time since arriving at the Websters’.
“You gonna love it, I promise,” said Mr. Webster. Then he pulled on Jacqui’s arm, his thick, greasy fingers grasping at his shirt. He finally got hold of its side, and it ripped, just as the front door closed behind them.
VI.
The boy and the desgraciado exited the motel reception area and began to walk down the sidewalk, presumably toward a room. Sully’s grip on the gun shaft tightened, and he felt a kind of rage bubble up from his stomach as he watched Webster gesture for the boy to follow him. Motherfuckers. They always get the children. Always from the places no one gives a shit about. His mind went back to the small village in Guatemala he could barely remember, to his mother handing him off to the middleman, to his adoptive family in Cleveland who had never stopped beating him for speaking Spanish. He had read Jacqui Dabrezil’s file, knew all about Kelly and Frank Bolden and their despicable rejection of their Haitian son to a child molester and convicted felon. “Yeah, well, the tables are turned now, aren’t they, hijo de puta?” Sully released the trigger guard, moving his index finger into position on the trigger. He saw the shiny expanse of Webster’s forehead beyond the front sight, and he began to pull back the trigger.
“Sully!” someone yelled from across the parking lot.
The desgraciado and the boy both stopped and turned to look at the commotion.
“Fuck!” Sully yelled, as Webster moved out of his sights. He almost had him.
“Recruit Ricardo Sully, I am ordering you to stand down,” a voice boomed from beside him. Then someone knocked the rifle out of his hands.
Sully recognized the voice as Lisa’s. He turned toward his friend-in-training
, who had had his back these past ten months when no one else had, who was a regular addition to dinners with his family and one of the only Latino higher-ups in their department. “Lisa, what the fuck?”
Lisa pointed her gun at Sully. “I could ask you the same thing, Sully. What. The. Fuck.”
Lisa was one of the few people in the world who knew his full history. She had sat through his diatribes on the rampant corruption of the international adoption system, had, over many beers, stomached his obsession with following stories in the news of adoption disruptions. But looking into her tired, disappointed face now, he could see he had broken through to some other untouchable space with this act, and that she would no longer try to talk sense into him, to bring him back to the world of “positive solutions,” rather than tragedy and revenge. Yes, Sully knew what he had almost done. And he knew it would be an abrupt end to his budding career and get him kicked off the force at twenty-one. The worst part was that he couldn’t even bring himself to care enough to stop it. It would have just felt so good to kill that predator, to make sure he didn’t destroy even one more life.
“That desgraciado was about to violate that innocent—”
“Shut up, Sully,” Lisa said evenly. “Shut up now.”
“Evans, cuff the man, then put each one in a car,” she said into her com. Then she lowered her gun.
Sully turned and watched Evans lock a set of handcuffs on a shocked Mr. Webster and then walked each of them to a different squad car.
“Get up,” Lisa told him. “Take the rifle, and put it away. We’ll take it back to the station and sneak it back into the weapons locker. Evans will agree that it’s not worth it to tell anyone about this little incident. And you’re taking the rest of the week off and getting some help.”
Sully blinked. She understood. Of course she understood. She was his friend, almost family, and would protect him.
Sully got up and grabbed the rifle. “I’m not talking to a goddamn headshrinker.”
Lisa got up in his face. He couldn’t remember another time he had seen her like this. But then, he had never been on the verge of executing someone before. “Those are my terms. Either take them or leave them. I’m so done with this shit, Sully. Don’t test me.” Then she turned and walked to Evans, helping him process Webster and the boy.
Sully walked slowly back to the car with the rifle. His hands started to shake as he imagined the boy staring at the dead man beside him, slowly engulfed in a pool of blood. Yes, he had really almost done it. He half screamed at the air, the sound both feral and muted. Then he walked back to Lisa and Evans.
“Okay,” he said evenly. “I’ll do it.”
Lisa smiled. “So glad to see you can be reasonable.” Then she pointed to Webster. “You. We’re taking you in on child pornography charges.”
“What?” he asked, incredulously.
Sully resisted the urge to punch him then and there.
“And you,” Lisa said, pointing to Jacqui. “You’re going back to your family.”
A wide smile spread across Jacqui’s face, and then disappeared just as quickly. Sully surmised he was thinking of his Haitian family, his real family back home, until he realized what Lisa truly meant.
“No, I can’t,” he said, in a small voice. “They . . . they . . . they gave me up.”
Lisa opened the car door and motioned for him to sit down. “Yes, I know. But they’re gonna take you back.” Jacqui frowned, but he got into the backseat of the car. Sully tried to make eye contact with him on the drive back to the precinct, but the boy just stared blankly out the window, his right knee bouncing relentlessly the whole way there.
Shannon Gibney was born in 1975, in Ann Arbor, Michigan. She was adopted by Jim and Sue Gibney about five months later and grew up with her two (biological) brothers, Jon and Ben. Shannon is currently at work on her second YA novel, Dream Country (Dutton, 2018), about more than five generations of an African-descended family crisscrossing the Atlantic both voluntarily and involuntarily.
“We need to talk about adoption, family-building, and dissolution. We need to see it on the page and wrestle with both its joys and its difficulties so we have a clearer lens through which to look at what’s happening to us and our loved ones. Adoption is everywhere.”
Twenty-Seven Days
by Jenny Kaczorowski
When I was ten, my gramma took me to Arizona. The roads there were smooth, like gliding on glass. That’s how I know we’re still close to home. These roads rattle my bones.
The social worker’s car hits another rut in the gnarled, pitted streets of Los Angeles, slamming my shoulder against the door of her busted-up Honda. It smells like stale cigarettes and grease.
I stretch my shoulders back. I don’t slump. Gramma didn’t teach me much, but she taught me to hold my head high.
The social worker slows and puts on her blinker. I wiggle my toes, as if I can carve out more room in my cramped boots. Eighteen months ago, on one of her clean streaks, Mama held them out for me—a priceless gift to memorialize my first day of high school.
She never made it past eighth grade.
But that day, when the August sun burned my brown shoulders and the reek of the dumpsters behind our apartment burned my nose, I was as proud of her as she was of me. She clutched my shoebox in one hand and a bright purple nine-month sobriety chip in the other.
Doc Martens. Genuine, authentic, oxblood leather Doc Martens.
These boots cost her an entire paycheck, but my mama is a good worker. At least when she’s straight. Those boots were supposed to be the start of something.
Then Gramma died.
The car lurches to a stop. I pull off my headphones while I wait for the social worker—I think this one is named Jessica—to wrench herself free from the worn grooves in her seat and shuffle onto the street.
“Are you ready, Aprillia?” she asks with a smile.
At least she didn’t have to check my case file to remember my name.
I grab the trash bag from the seat beside me and slide it across. I feel safer clutching it to my chest as I follow her up the front path.
A scream rips through the neighborhood, and I jump.
The social worker places a cool hand on my shoulder.
It’s just kids playing. My brain knows that, but my body doesn’t and I can’t stop it from reacting. Where I come from, screaming means something bad. Every time.
The front door opens and a middle-aged Latina steps out. Her face is creased with laugh lines, and her forehead is knotted in concern. “Oh.” Her worry morphs into a soft smile. “You must be Aprillia.”
The social worker nudges me forward, and I stumble, holding my bag up like a shield. I force a smile for the strange woman who is supposed to be better at taking care of me than my own mother.
Not that the bar is set very high.
I try to follow what she’s saying, but she’s trying to welcome me while she handles the business of foster parenting with the social worker.
I’m something between a person and a case number, wherever I am.
The house is big, and everything echoes. I don’t know where to look, where to turn my attention. What can hurt me. I’m clinging to this stupid plastic bag as if it can keep me afloat.
This is it. This is my home. Unless they can find a relative in the next thirty days, I’m here until my mama can pull herself together. Again.
Except I don’t know if she’ll make it back this time.
“Aprillia.” The foster mom—Mrs. Beckett—tentatively puts both of her hands on my shoulders and I allow it. It helps me bring my eyes to hers. “Would you like something to eat? Or would you rather see where you’re going to stay?”
“I need . . .” I hold up my bag, not quite able to get the words out. I need to move. I need to hide. Anything to get out of this space and somewhere I can
maybe think again.
But my stomach grumbles, and no matter how much I want to hide, I need to eat. There isn’t always another chance. “Dinner.” As if Gramma is slapping me upside my head from beyond the grave, I tack on “please.”
She nods and steers me toward the kitchen. She’s a pro. I’m not her first rodeo, and she’s not mine. That should make it easier.
“I’ll take your things to your room,” she says. “I didn’t have a lot of time to put it together. . .” She trails off, but we both know what she’s talking about.
Emergency Placement.
It might as well be stamped across my forehead. Each time CPS has pulled me, it’s been without warning. I’m old enough now to know when Mama is losing it. I know it will be only a matter of time before a neighbor or friend or the security guard at the mini-mart calls to report that she’s using again. I try to keep things together, to cover for her, but there’s only so much I can hide.
She’s the adult, after all.
“We can pick up anything else you need,” the foster mom says, reaching for my trash bag.
I relinquish all my worldly goods—a hoodie, a couple of books, a pair of jeans that are too big. But I hold on to my phone. Mama stopped paying the bill, so it’s useless for making calls. But I have my music.
The front door flies open, and a handful of kids tumble inside.
I stagger back, straight into Jessica.
My eyes catch on a girl about my age. She doesn’t look like me—with dark skin and her hair twisted into dozens of tiny braids—but there’s something about her. Something about the way she looks at me. A flicker of recognition that tells me we’re alike in some way.
Or at least that’s what my heart dares to hope before my brain shuts it down.
Her mouth twitches into a smile and she manages a “hi!” before the other kids bundle her off into the kitchen.