Closer Than You Know

by Brad Parks

  “Mrs. Ferncliff, why did Social Services take Alex? I have no idea what’s going on.”

  “Good,” she spat. “They told me all about you. I hope they get that child as far away from you as possible.”

  “What are you talking about?”

  “I’m calling 911 now.”

  “Would you please just have a . . . a rational conversation with me?”

  No answer.

  “Please, Mrs. Ferncliff, please.”

  But she had stopped answering. I could hear her on the other side of the door—because she wanted to be heard—loudly telling the Staunton Police she had an intruder banging on her door and was very afraid for her safety.

  Feeling like I had no choice, and knowing the ever-unyielding Mrs. Ferncliff was unlikely to change her mind, I departed from her porch and returned to my car.

  As I sat in the driver’s seat, I knew I had to find Alex, but I was too dazed to order my thoughts as to how I’d do it.

  They told me all about you. I hope they get that child as far away from you as possible.

  What did that even mean? Alex wasn’t malnourished. He didn’t have bruises. He wasn’t abused in any way.

  The only thing I could think was that someone had called Social Services on me. When you grow up in foster care, as I did, you learn there is a certain type of person—a mean, nasty, vindictive subspecies of subhuman—who will use Social Services as a weapon, calling in anonymous tips out of spite against neighbors, coworkers, or anyone they truly hate.

  I didn’t think I had anyone like that in my life. Warren Plotz was too busy oversleeping for that kind of treachery. I didn’t have a feud with any of my neighbors. I didn’t have enemies.

  At least not that I knew of.

  I made myself back down the driveway and pull out on the street, just so Mrs. Ferncliff couldn’t sic a police officer on me.

  As I did so, a panic lashed into me.

  Alex is gone.

  Social Services has him.

  For as much as I tried to tell myself this was a misunderstanding, I knew better. Social Services didn’t just swoop in and tear someone’s baby away because a childcare provider was angry about tardiness. It did so only when it had a reason, or at least when it thought it had a reason.

  And it didn’t turn the baby back over without a reason either.

  That’s one of the things I learned during my time as a ward of the state. But the bigger lesson of my childhood—one that was now bouncing back at me like some ancient echo—was something one of my foster sisters once told me. I had been fuming about being ripped away from a solid, comfortable placement so I could be sent, for no apparent reason, to a group home.

  “This is a disaster,” I moaned.

  “Honey, this is the foster care system,” she replied. “Disaster is always closer than you know.”

  THREE

  As I drove away, a thin sweat had broken out on my body. I was relying on muscle memory to steer the car. I had no sensation of being in control of my own limbs.

  I turned on the avenue outside Mrs. Ferncliff’s street. The double yellow line appeared blurred, either by perspiration or tears. I wanted to call Ben. Desperately. But in addition to his research and the two classes where he worked as a teaching assistant, he also had a part-time job tutoring in the Learning Skills Center at James Madison University. He never picked up when he was with his students.

  There was also the matter of my missing phone. No amount of rooting around in the usual spots—the table by the front door, the diaper bag, the couch cushions, and so on—had unearthed it.

  The only other person I could bother at a time like this was Marcus Peterson. He had been my manager at Starbucks and was now just a dear friend, the kind of guy who would drop everything to help me. The only problem was, his contact info was stored in my phone. Really, who knew their friends’ phone numbers off the top of their head anymore?

  There was no one else. The rest of my friends were either too far away or I wasn’t in touch with them on a regular basis. As for our parents, Ben’s lived in Alabama, and mine were nonexistent. That’s one of the harsh facts of growing up in foster care: When things go sideways, you don’t have a family you can rely on to keep you upright.

  With no real plan, I drove toward Social Services, desperately hoping Alex was still there, or that someone working late might know his whereabouts.

  The nearest office was just up the road in Verona, at the government center complex. Shenandoah Valley Social Services was one of two agencies I had come to know during my youth. It was, as Social Services offices tended to be, an austere box of a building with no windows, sort of like a warehouse. Which fit. There are a lot of times when, as a child being shuttled around between placements, you really do feel like you’re being warehoused.

  At quarter to seven o’clock on a Tuesday night, the parking lot had just one vehicle in it, a small Chevy. Maybe its driver would still be inside and could tell me something.

  The employee entrance was on the left side of the building. There was a small light, housed in a protective cage, above the door. It had no buzzer or intercom.

  Not knowing what else to do, I pounded on the door with the side of my fist.

  At first, this didn’t accomplish much more than giving me a sore hand. I am five foot five and a twiggy 120 pounds, hardly a threat to a solid steel door. Still, I was giving it all I had, turning that boxy building into one big bass drum. That Chevy driver had to hear me.

  I thumped the door in a steady rhythm: four hits, a rest, then four more hits.

  Boom, boom, boom, boom. Wait. Boom, boom, boom, boom. Wait.

  Finally: “Can I help you?”

  It was a woman, just on the other side of the door.

  “Yes, thank you, thank you,” I said, aware I sounded overwrought. “Someone from Social Services came and took my son out of day care today and . . . I just . . . I wanted to talk to someone and straighten this whole thing out.”

  I was trying to present myself as something other than a woman who was rapidly becoming unhinged.

  There was a pause.

  “No one called you or visited you?” she said.

  She asked like this was unusual. Against protocol, even. And it was unusual, wasn’t it? You couldn’t just rip a child away from his mother without any kind of notice.

  “No. No one did,” I said, relieved, because even the question made me feel like this woman might be reasonable, or at least willing to talk with me.

  “Okay, hang on. What’s your name?”

  “Melanie Barrick. My son’s name is Alex. They took him from Ida Ferncliff’s house on Churchville Avenue and I don’t . . . I don’t even know why.”

  “Okay. Let me make a call. I’ll be right back.”

  “Thank you,” I said. “Thank you so much.”

  I stood there, staring at the door. The temperature was probably in the low forties and I hadn’t bothered grabbing my jacket before I left work. It didn’t matter. My heart was working so hard, I couldn’t feel the cold.

  My hope was that, right now, they were examining Alex, with his chubby knees, his ready smile, and his ever-alert blue-gray eyes. They were realizing he could not possibly have been abused.

  They had probably tried to call me, but we don’t have a landline; and my phone, missing and probably dead from lack of battery, had gone straight to voicemail.

  Right now, this was all being straightened out. It would take a little time, yes—everything with Social Services took time—but Alex would be back home with us for the evening. He would sleep in his own crib, wake up for his middle-of-the-night feeding, the whole thing. Our normal routine.

  From the other side of the door, I heard a tentative “Hello?”

  “Yes. Hi. I’m here,” I said, leaning toward the door like that was getting me clos
er to Alex.

  “I spoke to my supervisor about your case. She says you’ll have to come back in the morning.”

  Something in my head exploded.

  “What?!” I said. And not because I hadn’t heard her.

  “I’m sorry, that’s what she told me. She said they would be able to tell you about the procedure from there.”

  The procedure? We were now part of a procedure?

  “But where is he?” I asked.

  “I’m sorry, I can’t tell you that.”

  “No, wait,” I said desperately. “You can’t just take my son and then not tell me anything. I’m . . . I’m his mother. I have rights. This is . . . this is crazy. Can’t you at least open the door and talk to me?”

  “I’m sorry, ma’am,” she said, now more firm. “You’ll have to come back in the morning.”

  “No, no!” I screamed. “This isn’t right. You’ve made a mistake, a huge mistake. I know someone has made a complaint or something, but they’re lying. They’re lying to you. People do that, you know. They use you guys to get back at people. You have to know that.”

  I was no longer worried that I sounded like a lunatic.

  “Come back in the morning, ma’am,” the woman said. “I have to go now.”

  “Can I please talk to your supervisor myself? This is . . . I’m not a bad mother. I would never hurt my baby. Just look at him. He’s fine. Can’t you see that? Please!”

  There was no answer. I pounded the door again.

  “Please!” I said. “Please help me.”

  For the next five or ten minutes, I reiterated this plea and other versions of it, getting increasingly hysterical.

  I knew too much about the child welfare system, having experienced its shortcomings firsthand. I had seen how its best intentions could be twisted by the intransigence and senselessness of what was basically a broken bureaucracy. I had met too many shifty adults who took advantage of the lack of oversight, whether it was the chronically lazy caseworker doing as little work as possible to keep her job, or the foster family who saw only dollar signs when it took in a new child.

  And yes, they were the minority. But even the good people were being thrust into this thing that was too big, too clumsy, and too overstressed by having to deal with society’s collective dysfunction. It was almost inevitable something that unwieldy would create as many problems as it solved.

  People who were enmeshed in that world called it, simply, “the system.” And it was really the perfect term for something so cold, complex, and ultimately impersonal. Once you were in it, you lost some part of your humanity. Your family became a file to be passed around from one harried, underpaid, overworked civil servant to another.

  I had come too far from my own splintered childhood and worked too hard to be free of that madness to get caught up in it again.

  This wasn’t happening, couldn’t be happening.

  Not to Alex.

  Because I knew how it worked from here. Once you were in the system, there was no easy way out. Its collective machinery acted like a giant steel maw, trapping you between its sharpened incisors, tearing another chunk out of you every time you jerked or squirmed.

  No matter what the law said, every parent who got reported to Social Services was guilty until proven innocent. The caseworkers either came in thinking that way or they learned it in a hurry. I saw how it had been for my own parents. Every time someone from Social Services dealt with me, it would be with the quiet assumption I was basically scum.

  They would pretend to seek my input. They would talk with me about partnering and collaborating. All the while, they would be calling the shots, dealing cards off a deck that was far too short.

  Already, someone had made a decision about where Alex would spend the night. Someone else—some stranger, some foster parent or group-home administrator I had never met, someone who couldn’t possibly care about my child as much as I did—was now holding Alex.

  Or not. Maybe he was lying in a crib, screaming from hunger. Or stewing in a dirty diaper. Or worse.

  And I could cry about it, or rage against the heavens, or throw myself to the ground in agony, and it wouldn’t matter. I sagged against the door, bawling, then slumped down to the cold concrete beneath my feet.

  The woman was gone.

  And so was Alex.

  FOUR

  Everyone has a vice.

  For some people, it was cigarettes. Or booze. Or porn.

  For Amy Kaye, it was less destructive but also somehow more embarrassing.

  Dancing with the Stars. The reality television show—which paired eye-candy celebrities with hard-bodied professional dancers in competitions of exhilarating meaninglessness—was her drug, her comfort food, her obsession. Well, one of her obsessions, anyway.

  No one down at the Augusta County Courthouse would have guessed that the chief deputy commonwealth’s attorney, whose knowledge of the law even intimidated some of the judges, loved to spend her evenings curled up on the couch under a blanket watching this drivel; or that she sometimes wept when people lost (and always when they won); or that her dog, Butch, who was supposedly not allowed on the couch, could be reliably found tucked under the blanket with her.

  Amy just didn’t give up those kinds of details—or, really, any personal details—about herself. She had seen too many times when people used those kinds of things against a prosecutor.

  The image she worked hard to present was all about competence and efficiency. She kept her dark hair short. She didn’t wear makeup. She dressed conservatively. No one knew her exact age (forty-two), if she was married (she was, to a man), or if she had children (she didn’t, and didn’t particularly miss them). The most they knew about her was that she played a mean third base for the Sheriff’s Office’s team in the local co-ed softball rec league.

  This, naturally, led to rumors she was a lesbian. She didn’t care.

  What happened at the courthouse wasn’t supposed to be about personalities. It was about the law. And within the law, the individual who represented the People of the Commonwealth had a certain role to play. It was more than a job. It was a sworn duty. And she intended to execute it to her utmost ability.

  At least until Dancing with the Stars came on. Then the law could wait.

  The newest season featured an Olympian who had been semi-tarnished by a tabloid scandal that had boosted his Q-rating higher than any gold medal ever could have. He was the de facto bad boy. Amy was rooting for him, mostly because he was constantly taking off his shirt. His abs were sensational.

  He was now in the semifinals, and she was all set to cheer him to greater glory, with Butch at her side and a bowl of popcorn in her lap.

  Then, just as the title sequence began, her phone rang.

  She frowned at it, sitting on the coffee table in front of her. The caller ID showed the name Aaron Dansby.

  Dansby was the duly elected commonwealth’s attorney for Augusta County, which technically made him Amy’s boss—even if the reality was more complicated. To be sure, Dansby had graduated law school and passed the bar exam, but he was an attorney only in the titular sense.

  In every other way, he was a politician, from his carefully styled hair to his plastic grin, from his model-gorgeous wife—she was a former Estée Lauder saleswoman—to his distinguished pedigree. His father had been commonwealth’s attorney, then state senator, then gone back to being commonwealth’s attorney until Aaron was old enough to take the job. His grandfather had been a congressman. His great-grandfather had been governor.

  Aaron Dansby’s sights were said to be set at least that high. Only thirty-three, he had been identified by party elders as having a great future. He was just marking time as commonwealth’s attorney. The practice of law was little more than a means to an end.

  The phone rang again.

  She was tempted to
ignore it. Part of the recruiting pitch that lured her down to Augusta County from Fairfax County, where she had been a lower-level deputy in a large office, was that Dansby was a newbie prosecutor who would need time to knock off his training wheels; and that, in the meantime, she would get a lot of say-so as second-in-command in a small office.

  Three years later, she was still running the place on a day-to-day basis. Dansby was almost entirely indifferent to routine matters. Only the high-profile cases interested him. In those, he sat first chair—so he could get credit for the victory with the media, which heedlessly burnished his boy-wonder legend. Amy, sitting second chair, still did all the work.

  Another ring.

  The only issue with ignoring a call from Dansby is that he only phoned when a case had the potential to be a big one.

  The title sequence was ending. The show was about to begin. The DVR was recording it—some dances just had to be enjoyed a second or third time—but she liked to watch live.

  One more ring and Aaron Dansby would slip into the sweet vacuum of voicemail, which is exactly where he belonged. Except Amy had that sense of duty. And the knowledge that if she didn’t answer, Aaron Dansby might make a mess she’d just have to clean up.

  In one quick motion, she jabbed the Pause button on the DVR, then tapped her phone.

  “Amy Kaye.”

  “Amy, it’s Aaron.”

  “What’s up?”

  “Are you busy?” he asked.

  “A little, actually.”

  “This will just take a second,” he said, because he was congenitally incapable of taking a hint. “I wanted to give you a heads-up there was a big coke bust this afternoon out on Desper Hollow Road.”

  “Okay.”

  “Big, as in half a kilo.”

  “Wow,” Amy said, sitting up a little. In Fairfax County, which had DC right next door, five hundred grams of cocaine wouldn’t get as much notice. Here, in the sleepy Shenandoah valley, it was a startling number.

  “I know. I already leaked it to The News Leader. They’re putting it on the front page tomorrow. I’m going to leak it to TV next so they can get it on at eleven. Sheriff said he’ll lay out the bags for me. It’ll make for great visuals.”