Closer Than You Know

by Brad Parks

  Or, at least it was until I learned I was pregnant. That was an extra kick in the uterus I really wasn’t ready for. In a life where there had already been so many things outside of my control, I couldn’t even decide when I got to reproduce.

  I seriously considered an abortion, if only because there was no chance—and I mean no chance at all—I was going to consider adoption. Not after my own experience in the system, to say nothing of Teddy’s.

  A few things stopped me from ending the pregnancy. One, I wasn’t actually sure whose child it was. Ben and I had a condom break a few days before the rape. There was always the spermicide to act as backup. But we couldn’t be sure.

  Two—and this was probably the larger factor—I felt this overwhelming love for the thing growing inside me. I was seven or eight weeks along by the time I went to the OB/GYN. She did an ultrasound and then asked me if I wanted to hear the baby’s heart.

  The question caught me by surprise. I’m not sure I had even considered that it had a heartbeat yet. I nodded, and the OB/GYN reached for a knob on her machine and turned up the volume.

  At that moment, any ambivalence I had about the pregnancy disappeared. That miraculous sound—ca-chunk, ca-chunk, ca-chunk doing a vigorous double-time—filled the examining room. I can honestly say I had never heard anything so remarkable, so beautiful.

  It already didn’t matter whether the pregnancy started with an act of love or an act of violence. That baby was mine, not my rapist’s.

  Just because he owned the episode didn’t mean he got to own the result.

  * * *

  • • •

  Ben asked me to marry him not long after. We still didn’t know who the father was. He said he loved me and the baby so much already, it didn’t really matter.

  When the baby came out, blond and pale and quite apparently not his, Ben never acted like anything but an excited new father.

  That was just Ben. Steady. Reliable. Ready to roll with whatever happened.

  Ben had begun wooing me while I worked at Starbucks, not long after I had finally scraped up enough money to move out of my car. He was a good-looking guy, a little younger than me, with flawless dark skin and a wiry body that tapered to a V at the waist. Every time he came into the shop, he found a way to make me laugh, whether it was with a sly, offhand observation about how a customer had acted or a self-deprecating joke. He was obviously very bright.

  But it was his empathy that most attracted me to him. In each comment he made, I could tell how good he was at seeing the world from other people’s perspectives.

  It was a rare trait in a guy. In anyone.

  He later admitted he frequently drove by Starbucks, but only came into the store when he saw my car. It took him three months to gin up the courage to ask me out on a date. By then it felt easy to say yes.

  Marcus, who had watched this slow courtship up close, gently asked me if I knew what I was getting myself into, dating a black guy. It wasn’t because he had any personal objection to it. He just understood that while Staunton was a progressive town, it was still in the South, located roughly in the middle of a state that only surrendered its anti-miscegenation laws in 1967, and only after the US Supreme Court ordered it.

  In truth, Ben got more resistance from his side than I got from mine. His friends back home teased him about how he was just another black guy who wanted to get with a white woman. Some of his older family members asked why he couldn’t just stick with his own kind.

  But really, it was pretty much a nonissue. I got used to the occasional stares—mostly from old white people—when we got close to each other on dates. I met his parents, who were lovely from the start and didn’t seem to have any concern about the color of my skin. We certainly didn’t have to worry about introducing him to my family.

  As things progressed, Ben’s devotion to me only got more flattering, something I wasn’t sure I was even worthy of after so many years of having my self-esteem battered. I had stopped thinking of myself as intelligent—I mean, how smart could I be? I worked at Starbucks, right?—until Ben came along and reminded me of it. Because, make no mistake, he was brilliant; enough to overcome the not-inconsiderable obstacles of race, poverty, and growing up in a family where no one had gone to college. He had earned a full academic scholarship at Middlebury College, then graduated Phi Beta Kappa.

  If someone that smart loved me, it must have meant I wasn’t as dumb as I thought, right?

  Ben’s thesis adviser at James Madison, Richard Kremer, was one of the nation’s foremost scholars in post–Reconstruction era US history. Ben was his star student. With Kremer’s guidance, Benjamin J. Barrick had already published a few journal articles. Kremer even thought Ben might be able to get his dissertation published as a book, which would really put him in the stratosphere of young historians.

  Every now and then, we’d permit ourselves to daydream about when he completed his PhD and slid into the job that would, we hoped, open up at JMU at just the right time. It was tenure-track, and Kremer had said he would throw around his weight for Ben to get it. We’d never have to worry about money again.

  Beyond that, Ben was just exceptionally well grounded. He didn’t have a lot growing up either—his parents worked jobs that paid low hourly wages, and every generation before that picked cotton—but his family was supersolid, churchgoing, pillar-of-the-community types.

  Our dynamic, which somehow established itself pretty quickly, was that I had a troubled present and a screwed-up past. He didn’t. So he helped me overcome mine.

  The downside to this arrangement was that he wasn’t always the best communicator when it came to his own issues. If anything, the bigger they were, the less likely he was to say anything at all.

  But we were on familiar turf here: This was another time when my troubles became his troubles. After Ben got home, we spent the night talking things through. He concurred with me that whatever the Sheriff’s Office found in our house must have belonged to my brother. I had called and texted Teddy but got no response. Ben went over to his place, but his roommates said they hadn’t seen him.

  Long-term, we had to get Teddy to admit the drugs were his. If that meant he got in trouble with the law, so be it. There was exactly one thing I wouldn’t sacrifice to save Teddy, and that was Alex.

  More immediately, we had to plead our case to Social Services, trying to make them realize we weren’t drug addicts or child abusers.

  Ben went online to figure out how we might do that. He soon found a handbook for parents in child dependency cases, which we began poring over. Within twenty-four hours of taking a child, Social Services had to file a petition with the Juvenile and Domestic Relations Court for an emergency removal order.

  As far as I could tell, there wasn’t a thing we could do to fight an emergency removal order in court. It was just an attorney for Social Services telling a judge what horrible parents we were.

  If the judge agreed, we would have an attorney appointed to us. Within five business days, there would be a preliminary removal hearing, where the judge would make an initial finding of abuse and neglect. Thirty days later, there would be an adjudicatory hearing, where that initial finding would be confirmed. Then there would be a dispositional hearing, where the judge would approve Social Services’ foster care plan.

  And on. And on.

  The document finished with an admonishment in bold type, framed in its own box.

  “Unless you do what the Court requires, you could lose custody of your child forever,” it read. “Start working now on the things you need to do.”

  I knew we had to stop the system from latching its teeth into us in the first place, and the only way to do that was to convince Social Services not to file that emergency removal order.

  That was what had inspired us to spend three hours that morning feverishly putting the house together, shoving things back into place
without bothering to organize them, just in case someone wanted to do a home visit.

  All the while, I could practically hear the system’s drumbeats. A tribe of cannibals was massing. And it was hungry.

  NINE

  We arrived at Shenandoah Valley Social Services a few minutes before its scheduled 8:30 a.m. opening time. It wasn’t much more inviting in daytime than it had been the night before.

  Though exhausted, we had made a game attempt to clean ourselves up. I had put on a dress with cap sleeves and a prim neckline. There wasn’t much I could do with my hair, because I didn’t have time for a shower. So I pulled it back and anchored it with a barrette. I only hoped a fresh dusting of makeup stopped me from looking like a total zombie.

  Ben nailed the part of a young academic. He wore slacks and a blazer that was two elbow patches away from being promoted to full professor. His thick-framed glasses—he jokingly called them his Malcolm X glasses—gave him an even more studious air. His shirt was well ironed and neatly tucked. He once explained his fastidiousness came from not wanting to give the white world an excuse to tag him with any of the labels it liked to pin to young African American men.

  Taken in sum, I thought we looked like responsible parents.

  “We ready to do this?” I asked.

  He crossed his hand over mine and gave it a reassuring pat. “We’ll be fine,” he said. “All we have to do is tell the truth, right?”

  He said this with the assuredness of someone who had never been made to understand that disaster was always closer than you know. He believed he had some control over the situation; that because we were morally in the right, the system would respond accordingly.

  I knew better. The moment that emergency removal order was granted, our family would become another small pebble in a rushing stream swollen by a spring flood.

  But I smiled nervously. “Yeah, for sure. Let’s go.”

  We got out of the car and crossed the parking lot. Once we reached the waiting area inside the building, we slipped our drivers’ licenses under a thick piece of glass. The woman barely looked at us before she told us to have a seat in some blue pleather chairs.

  What she didn’t tell us is how long we’d be sitting there. I was not unfamiliar with this particular aspect of Social Services. It’s one of the subtle ways in which the system makes you feel less human: with constant reminders of how little your time matters to anyone.

  After a while, even Ben was knitting his brows and looking at the time on his phone, which was about as demonstrative a display of impatience as he ever made.

  I was mostly just numb, reliving the dozens of times I had sat in this office—the furniture had changed, but I swear the toys in the corner were the same—utterly terrified about what awaited me once the bureaucrats were done consulting their Magic 8 Ball.

  An hour and a half later, the door to the side of the glass windows opened. A woman with square-framed glasses, whose hair was pulled back into a severe ponytail, said, “Ms. Barrick?”

  I leapt up, every nerve ending in my body jangling at once. “Yes?”

  “I’m Tina Anderson. I’m the family services specialist assigned to your son’s case. Come with me, please.”

  Tina Anderson’s face was devoid of expression as she led us through a warren of hallways. I had expected her to turn into one of the tiny offices along the way. Instead, she led us all the way to the back of the building, to a door labeled DIRECTOR.

  As she knocked, my stomach flopped about. The director? Why would the director need to be involved? I had never interacted with one in all my years of dealing with Social Services.

  “Come in,” a female voice said.

  The woman sitting behind the desk inside the room was older, with permed, bottle-blond hair. She had a fleshy face with too much makeup. Loose skin hung off her neck, which was covered in skin tags. Her suit was many seasons out of date and ill fitting.

  I immediately despised her. And not because she was ugly or had bad clothes. Throughout my childhood, I developed a sixth sense about social workers. I could always tell which ones still had some decency left in them and which ones had it completely beaten out of them. It usually took me about five seconds to make up my mind.

  This lady flunked the five-second test after two. There was no humanity in her anywhere, as far as I could discern. She stood as we entered and pointed to a round table in the corner.

  “Hello, Ms. Barrick,” she said with this supercilious air and a voice that came from somewhere within her jowls. “Have a seat, please.”

  We sat. Ben remained composed and self-possessed. He still didn’t fundamentally understand how much we were at someone else’s mercy.

  Both women joined us and slid business cards across the table. The director’s name was Nancy Dement.

  “I know you were here last night looking for your son,” she said. “I’d like to begin by assuring you he’s safe and being well cared for in an approved foster-care setting.”

  “Thank you,” I said.

  “I trust you’ve had contact with the Sheriff’s Office?”

  “No. Not yet.”

  She looked like this surprised her a little. “Well, the first thing you should understand is that while our agencies cooperate with each other, we are completely separate. What you have happening with your drug charges is up to them and the Commonwealth’s Attorney’s Office. We have no bearing on any of that. Here, our only concern is your child.”

  “I understand.”

  “I also want you to know that our first goal is always to get children reunited with their biological family. Everyone here wants that for you, but there’s a lot that needs to happen before we reach that outcome. We have some reading material in here that will lay everything out for you.”

  She opened a plain folder with several printouts and some glossy pieces of paper. I immediately recognized the handbook Ben and I had already read. This gave me the perfect opening. Swallowing my nerves, I began a speech I had been rehearsing in the waiting room.

  “I’m familiar with your process,” I said. “That’s actually why we’re here. We’d like to convince you that there’s no need to file an emergency removal order. Alex is not abused in any way. Ms. Anderson, or anyone else who has examined him, can confirm that for you. He’s a healthy, happy baby boy who is well nourished and progressing along through all the appropriate developmental milestones. If you’d like, you can come out to our home and see it for yourself: Alex is in absolutely no danger there.”

  Nancy Dement looked like she was sucking rhubarb. She had obviously been at this for a number of years. She had probably never heard a mother talk about developmental milestones.

  I pressed on: “I haven’t heard from anyone in law enforcement yet, but when I do I’ll tell them what I’m about to tell you. I’m assuming they found drugs in my house and . . . Unfortunately, my brother has had a problem with addiction for years. He has access to our house and we think he and his girlfriend used it to stash their stuff. As soon as I find him, I’m going to drag him in here and he’s going to tell you that whatever the Sheriff’s Office took from our house belonged to him. In the meantime, you’re separating an infant from his mother for absolutely no reason. Please, I’m begging you, don’t file that emergency removal order.”

  As I finished, I thought my speech had an impact on Tina Anderson. She had fared better on the five-second test. There was a part of her, buried under that hard helmet of a ponytail, that still cared.

  Nancy Dement was another matter.

  “It’s not that simple,” she said. “As I understand it, you are about to have some very serious charges pressed against you. Do you have a lawyer yet? I think once you do, you’ll realize this a very serious matter. Very serious.”

  She was lecturing me like I was some teenage mother who was flunking not only her civics class but life in general
. I didn’t need to be told losing my baby was “very serious,” much less be told it three times.

  “I understand what you’re saying,” I said slowly. “I fully get that you have a job to do and you have your procedures to follow. I’m asking you to please pull yourself out of your rulebook for a second and look at us. Look at our baby. We’re not—”

  She held up her hand. “That’s not up to me.”

  “But it is up to you. Don’t you see that? Don’t just hide behind doing things the way you’ve always done them. You can decide not to file that order. You have that authority.”

  Nancy Dement was completely unmoved by my argument. I might as well have been talking to the table.

  “If you can get those charges cleared up, we can begin to move toward reunification,” she said. “But for right now, we have to let this play out.”

  I took in a deep breath, the kind that made it clear to all I was about to get too loud, but Ben reached out and squeezed my hand, silencing me with his eyes. Then he returned his gaze to the Social Services director.

  “Ms. Dement,” he said gently. “Are you a mother?”

  The question seemed to startle her, as did the softness of Ben’s voice. There was a quick glitch in her programming before she recovered with, “Yes, I have two sons.”

  “Then I’m sure you can understand why my wife is upset. She went to pick up our baby at day care yesterday only to learn he had been taken. She came back to our house to find the Sheriff’s Office had turned it upside down. We’re as legitimately confused by this as you would be if it happened to you. We’re law-abiding people. It’s been quite an ordeal. We barely slept last night.”

  Shockingly, Nancy Dement said, “I’m sorry.”

  I suddenly felt hopeful. Ben was working his way under this woman’s bulletproof shell. He adjusted his Malcolm X glasses in a way that made him seem even more professorial than usual.

  “And I appreciate that,” he said. “But of course, none of that matters right now. What matters is Alex. We’ve read a lot of your materials and I’ve also read the applicable laws. The phrase I seem to keep seeing is ‘best interest of the child.’ What is in Alex’s best interest? That’s what we’re all here for, aren’t we?”