Fall from Grace

by Wayne Arthurson

  The look on Janet Lewis’s face was friendly, yet worried. She had already received the bad news about her former foster child, so there was also a touch of grief. I had to be very careful because while tears made for a good story, I didn’t want her to become a mess of weepiness. I turned down her offer of milk and cookies but she insisted and disappeared into the kitchen.

  There was nervous energy in her walk, but it was nothing unexpected. She had nothing to hide, no skeletons in the closet, no abused children chained to a post in the basement, but she probably had had too many visits by police and social workers in the past few days because of Grace. No doubt this was the nightmare that all parents, even foster parents, worried about.

  While she was gone, I wondered if my parents ever had the same nightmare. Not that I would ask them. Mom would dismiss my queries with a wave of her hand and change the subject to talk of the weather. Dad would grunt and tell me not to be stupid.

  I took in the place, looking for any photos of Grace or any clues about whether she had been still living here. There were too many photos for me to determine whether Grace was in any of them, but I knew I would have to ask; couldn’t have this kind of story without one or two of those. There was also a black address book in the middle of the table. I was about to pick it up and start flipping through when Mrs. Lewis came back into the room.

  She was carrying a tray of cookies and started saying, “I’m sorry, my husband is at work,” but a couple of kids, seven or eight years old, came barreling into the room, screaming up a storm. One of them clutched a toy, holding it in the air while the other chased him, grabbing for it. “Gimme, gimme,” the kid shouted while the other laughed manically. They did a couple of circuits of the room, ignorant of our presence, until Mrs. Lewis reached out to stop the one with the toy. The other kid banged into his back and took the opportunity to grab the toy. They tugged back and forth for a few seconds until Mrs. Lewis grabbed the toy herself. “Jason, Vincent. Please be quiet. We have a guest.”

  The kids froze as soon as they realized I was there. Even at this young age, these products of the Children Services system knew that I could be a person of authority, possibly someone who had the power to change their lives in the blink of an eye. I didn’t, but the way they shrank back reminded me of how I used to act when Dad came home after a long assignment. They clung to Mrs. Lewis, looking to her for protection and at the same time also offering her some.

  The one who’d first had the toy, Jason, I guessed, was brave enough to speak. “Are we in trouble?” He didn’t look to be native, although I could have been wrong. The look on Janet Lewis’s face was loving yet heartbreaking. While she was trying to reassure the children, she knew how the system worked. While I wasn’t here to take these children away, one day someone could. “No. No,” she said. “Everything’s all right.”

  “It’s Jennifer, right, she’s in trouble again,” whispered the other kid. This was probably Vincent, who with his dark skin, wide nose, and straight black hair was obviously native. Odds were that more than half of the kids who had come through this home were native.

  “Shut up,” hissed Jason.

  Vincent reddened but his foster mother gave him a squeeze. “Nobody in this house is in trouble and nobody is going anywhere,” she said. The firm tone of her voice seemed to help the kids relax. She took two cookies from our plate and gave each kid one. “But this gentleman is here about an important matter, so please go back to your room and play there. And be a little quiet.”

  Vincent and Jason grabbed the cookies but left the room reluctantly. They walked out slowly, looking at the floor, but still stole a few looks at me. Once they reached the threshold of the hallway, they gave me one last look and dashed away, screaming the way kids do when they’re having fun.

  Mrs. Lewis offered me an apologetic smile and the plate of cookies. I refused with a polite wave of my hands. “I’m sorry to do this at such a difficult time but I’m hoping to get as much information about Grace as I can. At the paper, we’re trying to move past her being a victim and to show she was a human being who had a life prior…”

  Mrs. Lewis, who had been holding in her grief ever since I walked through the door, started to cry. Her sobs were deep and soul crushing. Vincent and Jason, and another foster child, a teenage girl about fourteen, must have heard the noise and appeared in the doorway. After a second, the girl stepped in and placed an arm around Janet but the two boys stayed back, shocked into immobility by the unexpected collapse of their foster mother. Vincent, the native boy, gave me a look of hatred and fear because he knew that I was the one who had caused this pain.

  One of the more interesting features I had written in the past was a story about the employees of funeral homes, and how they dealt with death on a daily basis. Sure, I had seen death more often than the average person but it wasn’t a daily occurrence. In that short day or so I spent at the funeral home interviewing the workers as they prepared bodies and worked with their grieving clients, I learned that while it was human nature to try to make those suffering feel better, it was not the best thing to do. Grief was a natural process, not something you have to fix. So those funeral home employees taught me that it was best to be professional, but compassionate. Compassionate, but not cold. And silence, I learned, was the key. In times like this, it was best not to speak until spoken to. In order to get the full story on Grace’s life, I would have to wait.

  13

  Once Mrs. Lewis got herself together and again sent all the kids out of the room, she started to tell me Grace’s story. It was good for Grace in the beginning. Although her mother was a teenaged native girl, Grace was adopted by a loving couple. They raised her for several years, giving her the home that normal kids like me got. However, the relationship soured, and the couple split up. Instead of one of them taking custody of their little girl or at least sharing it, they sent her back into the system.

  It was hard to imagine, being four years old and having the people you call Mom and Dad tell you that you are no longer important enough for them to take care of you, and you are now going to live with strangers.

  For a few years, until she was about ten, it was a lot of strangers. Grace, not surprisingly, wasn’t the perfect child after this, and since there was a strong likelihood that her birth mother drank and took drugs during the pregnancy, it was also likely that Grace suffered from fetal alcohol syndrome, which meant she couldn’t really think about the consequences of her actions.

  While most foster parents were decent enough folks who did their best for the kids they were given care of, it was a tough job, and some foster homes don’t always provide the best environment for these kids. There were the odd assholes who were only in it for the money or for the chance to exercise some weird psycho power over a bunch of vulnerable kids. Still, despite the problems, the system worked as well as it could and it was better than sticking kids in a bunch of run-down orphanages like they used to do in the old days.

  Grace came into the Lewis home just before her eleventh birthday. “She was a tough kid to get to know, she had a skin thicker than concrete, but she was still a sweetie. So lost, so lonely,” said Lewis. “All she needed was a lot of love and bit of structure and that’s what we tried to give her.”

  “How was she in school?”

  “The first few months were tough but the important thing with FAS kids is to give them structure. You’ve got to get them up at the same time, give them a schedule of their day, which class is where, what time is lunch, all that. And it took Grace time to get used to that, but once she did, she flourished. The teachers who first thought she was just another foster kid on the way to being a dropout were shocked at her transformation. She wasn’t the brightest student in the bunch, she was never on the honor roll, but she got her work done on time, never skipped class.”

  “Pretty much a normal kid, you’re saying?”

  “You could say that. I mean, once she settled in, knew where she stood, and realized that she w
as going to be here for a while, she was great. It took longer to break through her thick skin, but these kids, you can’t blame them for being who they are. Especially her.” Tears came to Lewis’s eyes. “I can’t understand why her adoptive parents could have given her up so easily, she was just a sweetheart.”

  I shook my head to show sympathy, but I personally knew it was actually very simple to leave your kids behind. You just had to walk out the door, completely convinced that their life would be better without you in it. Sure, there were piercing and intense stabs of pain when I thought about my own, but at least they (and I) were lucky enough to have my ex-wife, who loved and took care of them. I shuddered to think what would have happened to Eileen and Peter if Joan was not there and they were put into the hands of the Children Services branch of the government. Would Eileen have ended up dead in a farmer’s field and would Peter be found languishing in some drug den, his body shut down by an overdose? But then again, I was lucky I didn’t have to worry about that because Joan would never fail them, never let them fall. In her hands they were safe and didn’t miss me at all. At least that’s what I kept telling myself.

  To keep my emotions in check, I focused on the interview and continued to ask Mrs. Lewis questions to get the rest of Grace’s story. She was in many ways a typical teenager. She listened to loud, oppressive music, experimented with various hair and clothing styles, even smoked pot and got drunk a few times, but nothing that couldn’t be fixed. In the end, she graduated high school, an incredible feat for someone who came through the foster-kid system the way she did, and she was considering a career in social work or something with kids. She even applied to attend one of the community colleges to upgrade some of her high school classes so she could get into a program.

  “Did she attend?”

  Lewis said nothing. Only shook her head.

  “Why not? What happened?”

  “She turned eighteen,” she said with a shrug. And that pretty much said it all. One day she was a child, someone the province was required by strong legislation to protect and support, and then the next day, she wasn’t. There were a few programs to help such kids with the transition, but since the province wasn’t required to support those young “adults,” they weren’t given a high priority with funding.

  “My husband and I talked about letting her live here after she turned eighteen,” Lewis said, answering what would have been my next question, “and we figured we could do it. It would be a bit difficult, we would have to cut something somewhere, but in the end, missing a few luxuries is nothing compared to helping someone you love as if she was your own. But Children Services was so desperate for us to take in another couple of kids or so. They kept hounding us, ‘you got to take so-and-so, he’s got no place to go, you have to take this other little guy because his mother can’t take care of him,’ and what do you say to something like that? You can’t say no.”

  Many people did say no, I thought. In fact, most of us say no most of the time because there are thousands of these kids everywhere, and the number of foster parents willing to take in at least one kid is tiny compared to the number of kids out there. You couldn’t blame Children Services for pressuring the Lewises and you couldn’t blame the Lewises for letting Grace go. Without people like Janet Lewis, the lives of kids like Grace, Jennifer, Jason, and Vincent would be too horrible to imagine.

  Of course, a good number of kids like them don’t make it and end up in difficult circumstances like drug addiction, prostitution, or violent crime, and are dead by the time they turn thirty. But at least sometime somewhere in their lives, they were lucky enough to have someone like Mrs. Lewis to love and take care of them. In the end, it may not seem like anything was done, especially since Grace was now dead, but there was a time when she got to be a kid without worrying about where her next meal was coming from or where she would sleep at night. And there was someone who not only remembered her but also would always love her. Not much, one might say, but it was something.

  I didn’t want to ask the next question, but I had to. “When did she start working the streets?”

  Lewis looked up at me as if had slapped her in the face. And in a way, I had. In the space of one question, I had told her she was a terrible parent and failed Grace. “Grace was a good girl,” she hissed at me. “She was.”

  “I know that, Mrs. Lewis, and you did the best you could. No one could ask for better, but sometimes even the best isn’t enough for some kids. And according to the police she was working the streets. They have evidence to that effect.”

  In truth, I had no idea if Whitford had any such evidence, but her body having been found in a farmer’s field outside of the city was enough for me. In this city, the only women found in such circumstances were murdered prostitutes. Facts didn’t lie. “Whatever you can tell me won’t get her in trouble because it’s too late for that. The only way you can help her now is to tell her story, and maybe some of the information you give me, the same information you probably gave the police, will help find her killer. To tell me the truth, that’s the only thing you can do for Grace now, except for loving her and remembering her.”

  I knew I was full of shit, but I felt a need to know more about Grace, to get more of her story. I wanted to find out how she went from a loving home to end up in a field, and I needed to do this to Mrs. Lewis so she would show me and those who read my story the deep pain she was feeling.

  Despite what people continually proclaim, they aren’t looking for good and happy events in the news. Sure, everyone likes the bit about the kid being saved after falling in a well, or the dog rescued after being trapped on the spring ice of the North Saskatchewan River. But if a newspaper had only those kinds of stories, people would stop reading it.

  People want to read about other people’s pain and suffering, and they also like to talk about these stories to their friends, family, and coworkers. Many, many years ago, I wrote a story about a horrific murder/suicide in which a father and husband slaughtered his family, also killing the girl who rented the basement suite downstairs before cutting his own throat. Because of the number of people killed and the horror of the story, it ran on the front page.

  I did my best to forget it, but when I visited my parents that week, one of the first things my mother asked me was if I had heard about this story, describing the details of the crime and the speculations about who he’d killed first, and so on. I told her that of course I heard about the story because I wrote the damn thing myself, didn’t she see my byline on the front page. But she kept going, kept talking about how sad it was, and how this family died and wasn’t it horrible and so on. The only way to get her to stop talking about it was to threaten to leave. Even then she managed to slip it into the conversation while we were eating.

  So it’s true that newspapers cover the “bad” stories in order to sell newspapers because they do sell newspapers. It’s the kind of thing people read and talk about. But that never made it easier to cover these stories. Lewis had fallen into a fit of weepiness and I just sat there watching her, hating myself for creating such pain and hoping that whatever information she had would help me.

  “She would call every month or so and I would try to get her to come home and stop doing all that stupidity and get a real job,” she said, blubbering through the words.

  “But she said I didn’t understand, that I didn’t understand who she was, what she needed. The money was too easy and it was kind of fun, which I didn’t understand. How could that be fun? But she was FAS, and with no more structure in her life, she had no conception of the consequences of her actions. I tried to tell her that, tell she should come home or at least get help, but she would always laugh at me, like I was some sort of old lady who didn’t know what life was about. Jesus, I raised over a hundred kids, I know what life is like, I know what it can do, but she was a kid, they always think they know better. Always. And she was no different. So the last time I talked to her was a month ago, and even though we argued as per us
ual I told I loved her and to be careful.”

  “What did she say to that?”

  She shrugged, defeated, but strong again. Strong enough to go on because there were other kids in the house who needed her. “She said she loved me and told me not to worry because the girls had it all worked out, they protected each other and they knew to stay away from the yellow pickup.”

  I sat up with a start. “Yellow pickup? What’s that mean? Did she say?”

  “I don’t know. From what I got from her, it was just an expression her roommate used when she used to go out to work. I don’t know what it means.”

  “This roommate, she have a name?”

  “Jackie.”

  “You have a last name?”

  “All I got was Jackie.”

  “Address?”

  She looked at her address book, hesitated for a second, but then decided to give it to me. I wrote it down in my notebook, and after a pause it hit me. “That’s only a couple blocks…” was all I got to say before Lewis started crying again.

  “You don’t think I don’t know that?” she said through her sobs. “You think I don’t know that I could have just walked over and helped her out but I didn’t? You don’t think I didn’t think about doing that but kept making excuses and now she’s dead?”

  “It wasn’t your fault she died. There’s wasn’t anything you could have done,” I said, trying to make her feel better. But she wasn’t buying it. Why should she? Like the rest of us, she had forgotten about Grace, maybe not forgotten about her but was too busy with her own life to find the time to help. And now Grace was dead, there was nothing more to be done. She would just become another one added to a long list that nobody was compiling.

  Mrs. Lewis waved me away. “I’m sorry, but will you please leave? You got what you need so why don’t you just get the hell out of here?” There was nothing mean-spirited in her voice, just a desire for me to leave.