Thousands of splintered little lives now hidden away, snug, recuperating quietly behind spreading yews and English lawn gardens.
I shuddered.
No. I’m out of here. I’ll just tell Sue right now that I want to go home and forget about all of this.
“Rich!” I looked over at the wide carved doors of the main entrance. Sue was standing at one of them, her back to it, angrily holding it open. “Get in here,” she hissed. “Kevin’s bringing him down.”
Thin. My first impression of Mike was that he was thin. He was sitting at the conference table with his back to the door. Jeans and sneakers, tie-dyed shirt, maybe five feet tall with lanky blond hair badly in need of a trim. Through the back of the shirt I could see the outline of his shoulder blades. I could even count the hard, knobby little knuckles of his backbone.
And rigid. The child was sitting up straight, tense, with his gaze fixed on Sue, not shading away a millimeter when I walked around the table and sat. He had blue eyes and the wan face of a street urchin with a severe facial tic. Every ten seconds his face would snap away ninety degrees and then back again as if he were being slapped by an unseen hand. He was both fighting it and trying to pretend it wasn’t happening at the same time.
Still feeling dragooned, I had an unkind and selfish thought: This boy wants the placement, too. Now I’m really outnumbered.
We had been cautioned about the blind determination of these children. Perhaps because in trying to keep them safe and set them on a new course the system gave them very little latitude within which to make choices, they often seemed to develop very strong character traits. These children could be unbelievably stubborn and single-minded. Since their only means of control was an intractable personality, they became capable of a ferocious resolve.
Then I had a second unkind thought: I wonder if he has enough basic intelligence even to understand what it is he’s determined to get.
But after I sourly slouched down in the chair, my ear started to twitch in interest. The boy’s diction was actually very good. Some of his syntax was awkward and his voice way too loud, but he was generally pronouncing and using words properly.
What had happened to that 70 IQ?
I straightened up a bit and started to listen.
Sue had quietly taken over from Joanne and Kevin. She prefaced with a description of our family and our home. Then in a gentle and low voice she began to ask a long series of questions.
“We have two dogs and two cats. Do you like animals?”
“I always like animals. I like cats and dogs all the time.” He licked his lips, concentrating, keeping eye contact.
“We have five sons and a daughter. But they’re older. Have you ever thought about how you get along with older children?”
“I always get along with older children. Sometimes I even get along with younger children. But I always get along with older children.”
“We live in the country. Do you like the country?”
“I always like the country I was born in the country I love the country”
“Would you come to lunch at our home?”
“I always like lunch. I eat lunch here every day.”
“What else do you like to do?”
Silence. The eyes flickered away for the first time and then back again. Mike’s tongue came out and quickly licked his lips. You could see his mind working frantically—what answer did this woman want to hear?
Sue prompted him with a smile. “I hear you’re very artistic. Do you like to paint?”
The boy let out his breath. “I always like to paint. I painted a turtle. Here—” Mike pushed across to Sue a small jigsaw puzzle that he had been holding in his lap, waiting for the right moment. It was cut out of thick cardboard and then watercolored.
Sue later said she could vividly picture the boy upstairs in his room, desperately casting around for something, anything, that would impress these people who were coming to see him.
Now, head lowered, she spread the fingers of one hand and put it gently down on the puzzle. “This is lovely, Mike.”
Their eyes met and locked.
“What else, Mike? I think I heard you like to fish?”
And so it went. The careful measured back-and-forth between Sue and Mike gradually mesmerizing everyone at the table, the crackle of raw energy involved magnetizing us, gathering us all in. Sue wasn’t blind to how tense or blindly determined Mike was. Several times she smilingly told him to relax. “There aren’t any wrong answers, Mike. We just want to get to know you.” Once she put out her hand and took his, and you could follow the process going on in his mind—she took my hand, so I should squeeze hers—then he did so with a jerky little lurch.
“Hey, that’s quite a grip you’ve got there.”
Frightened, calculating eyes. “Too hard?”
I remembered one of the cutting little descriptions of Mike—“He can only hold it together for a little while”—and I wondered if in fact he would lose it before Sue finished. But he did stay together. As the large wall clock on the far side of the room ticked off the long seconds like a metronome marking down an endless summer afternoon, he doggedly kept his head up, answered each and every question, then braced himself for the next.
Sue finally sat back. “Is there anything you would like to ask us, Mike?”
At first he shook his head no, but then he changed his mind. There was something—something he was afraid of. He took a big breath, blinked, and for the first time stuttered. “Are you picking Petey?” he asked in a rush.
Sue looked puzzled, and Kevin spoke up. “Peter is another child in his unit.”
Sue shook her head at Mike. “No, honey, we’re not.”
“Petey said you were looking at him, too. That he already knew you.”
“No, honey. I’m sure Petey is a very nice boy. But we read about you. We wanted to come meet you, only you, and see if you’d like to visit us.”
Mike stiffly pushed his chair back, stood up, and then walked out the door. A moment later the door slammed back open and Mike said, “Good-bye.” Then the door closed again.
Sue slumped back in her chair. “Whew. I feel like I’ve run twenty miles. Now, what was that last bit about?”
Kevin shrugged. “There’s a lot of status on the floor if you have a family outside “he said, his voice choked up, “someone who visits you. Mike is very vulnerable in that way; he gets almost no visitors. Some of the other kids tease him and play jokes on him about it.”
“What about the Johnsons?” Sue asked, referring to the couple who had adopted Mike’s older brother and sister. “I thought they visited him.”
Kevin shrugged again, this time with his hands making a hapless gesture. “Not very often—maybe every three or four months—and the other kids know they’re not his real family.”
Sue puffed out her cheeks and thought about that for a long moment. The fingers of her right hand were drumming on the tabletop.
A full minute later Joanne quietly asked, “Does this mean you want to take the next step?”
Sue answered without looking up or thinking. “I invited him to lunch.”
Then Joanne looked over at me with her dark eyes questioning. “Rich?”
I looked back over at Sue, who was tense now, her back arching. To a great extent I had been swept along in her wake. But many of my doubts had collapsed in the face of the boy’s performance. In fact, toward the end of the interview I was squirming in my seat, angry at the brutal choreographic, at the image of four adults examining a frightened, anxious child in a closed room. We had just put too much pressure for far too long on this boy and I was repulsed at being a party to it. It might be necessary, but it wasn’t fair. Not fair by a wide margin, particularly since Mike didn’t seem anything at all like the sullen psychotic presence he could have been from that awful file. Instead he was skinny, almost emaciated, nervous, wanting to please, awfully alone, and somewhere in there you could see the kid who wanted a fishing pole. He
was also a fighter; I was still feeling the force of him in the room.
But what about that file? All those reports? On the other hand, what about Sue? None of this had gone the way I envisioned, not with the boy, not with her. Particularly not with her. Sues image of Mike as a sad, wan waif had not crumpled and she hadn’t been repelled or put off. In fact, the meeting seemed to reinforce her notions about him.
I had to give up. “Okay, lunch,” I said tersely.
Sue relaxed back into her chair, pleased but also wryly amused. “Don’t be so kind and expansive; it’s not like you.”
I came home from work early on a hot, humid July afternoon to attend the lunch for Mike, backed into a parking slot, and paused for a long moment behind the wheel looking out. The place should make a wonderful impression on the boy. I had just cut the large sloping rear lawn in back and the side lawn by the parking lot the day before, and the hundreds of flowers Sue had planted for Susanne’s wedding in August lined the walks, bordered the tiny, old stone gatehouse behind the main building, and then disappeared in pink and purple rows around the far side.
I got out of the car, dodged through our maze of sprinklers and, walking past the kitchen door, slipped in the bar entrance. The old barroom, built as a speakeasy during Prohibition, takes up most of the bottom or ground floor of the three-story country inn we were restoring. It opens onto the rear lawn, overlooking an abandoned hay meadow. Inside it was cool and shaded, the high summer sun outside streaming past the windows. The dark knotty pine of the walls glowed faintly in the one light Sue had on over the long pine table in the center of the room. One end of the table was set for four, with plates of hard rolls, cold cuts, macaroni salad, sliced tomatoes, potato chips, and a large chocolate layer cake waited at the other end.
“Hi,” Sue said, walking out of the kitchen with another plate of something in her hands. She looked preoccupied and edgy. “Rich, can you get four bar glasses, a bottle of Coke, and some ice?”
“Sure.”
Just as I finished, Joanne knocked at the kitchen door with Mike in tow. Then, while I made conversation with Joanne, Sue ushered Mike through the house, introduced him to the two dogs, Teddy Bear and Pupsy, walked him outside through the garden, and then, bringing him back into the barroom, made a big fuss over sitting him down, getting a sandwich together, and pouring his Coke.
Mike was better dressed than before, in dark pants and a neat pullover shirt. Still no haircut, but you could tell he’d been thoroughly soaped and shampooed that morning. He looked, of course, like he should pack away a couple hundred lunches, but he barely ate or spoke at first. Instead, all of his attention was focused on the dogs sprawled sleeping with the cat on the sunny grass outside the barroom windows.
“Are you worried about the dogs, Mike?”
He looked at Sue. “Are they all right? What do they eat? Do they have brothers and sisters? Do they sleep all the time? Do they have last names? Are they always outside? Do they come when you call them?”
“Whoa,” Sue said, laughing, “eat something and I’ll try to answer all your questions.”
No wonder this guy is so thin, I thought. Sue did find out that his favorite dessert was mint chocolate chip ice cream with whipped cream, that he liked to swim, do puzzles, and make models, and that he liked the house and the area.
But Joanne later said that on the long drive back he talked only about dogs.
When we broke up, I made motions of going back to work, but Sue stopped me with hands firmly on her hips and the set of a question on her face. I sat back down with a bump, the decision she wanted tugging at my shirttails. The next step with Harbour was a weeklong “preplacement” visit, so it looked like we were finally due for “The Talk.”
“The Talk” is a technique Sue and I have developed to resolve disagreement on important subjects. It’s something we’ve distilled from years of changing family circumstances and six smart, manipulative children. It’s our way of making firm decisions and then shutting down all further discussion.
The way “The Talk” works is that either Sue or I decide we have to or want to make an important decision about something and then we actually set a date and time at which we will do so. We might discuss the issue in advance and in the process feel out the other’s position, but we always agree not to arrive at any firm conclusion until the scheduled time of “The Talk.” Then, when we meet, it’s a no-holds-barred, take-no-prisoners sort of fight. Both of us muster up all of the points we’ve assembled and hack it out until just one or the other is left standing. Often, of course, we agree, and “The Talk” lasts just seconds, but often we don’t, and one or the other has to prevail over a period of hours. The ground rules state that this has to happen, that a decision must be forthcoming, but even more important, that the discussion must never be reopened afterward. The technique means we rarely hold something in that’s truly bothering us. But, perhaps most important, it has over the years proved to be a delightful and endless source of frustration to children who would otherwise play one parent against the other. On important issues the kids have always gotten one of two answers out of us, either,” We haven’t discussed that yet,” or “Sorry, no, we’ve already discussed that.”
Now Sue said the words:” want to have ‘The Talk.’ ”
“When?”
“As soon as possible—right this instant, if you can stay home.”
I could win a postponement. This wasn’t quite how it was done—we always asked for a “Talk” a few days or a week off in the future, never right on top of events. But we had been exhausting the preliminaries for months, and I knew how it would go because in all “The Talks” we’ve had, neither of us has ever denied the other what it was they truly wanted to do. We might have forced the other to defend it, but we’ve always conceded the point and then supported it. Always.
Sue seemed absolutely committed to taking Mike, and while I still had serious, sober questions about her initial motivation, the disruption of our lives, the effect of such a step on our children, and my own strength, I was also weary of the issue hanging fire between us, and a curious mix of emotions had begun banging around inside of me as well. Despite the immense reluctance I felt when I thought of taking on another boy, another part of me also missed having the excitement of young boys in the place, and while disappointed—almost bitterly disappointed when I thought that there was never going to be a little girl somewhere at the end of this process—I was stirred by Sue’s commitment, I liked the staff in the program, I felt awfully sorry for this kid, and we had the room (in fact, we had seventeen rooms). It wouldn’t even mean reducing our precarious cash flow—Harbour would compensate us at a rate that was substantially greater than the standard foster-care board. And again, I was impressed with the child himself—impressed by our first visit, and reassured at lunch.
So I got up and gave her a hug.
She pushed me back at arm’s, length. “So, is this ‘The Talk’?”
“Yeah,” I said, chuckling, “I guess so. I have to get back to work.”
“You don’t want to talk about it.”
“Sue, I’m all talked out.”
Once the children’s home understood Sue was actually serious about Mike, they started raising objections.
The Old English word for harbor or harbour was haven. The Germans still use it, although they pronounce it “hah-ven,” as in the famous port of Bremerhaven, which means Bremer or Bremen Harbor. A harbor, as everyone knows, is a place out of the weather where you can safely unload or refit, and The Harbour Program implied a place for children to tie up out of the storm, take on supplies, and refit their lives. A safe haven. But it’s still a version of foster care—a new version and, as a therapeutic version, one quite different from the standard pattern, but it’s still foster care.
And sadly, foster care isn’t 100 percent safe and has the reputation of not doing much in terms of mainstreaming children, especially difficult children. It’s not that foster care as a whole i
sn’t chock-full of warm and loving families who do the best they can for their charges. It’s just that an abundance of problems stem from its role as emergency or temporary shelter.
Even given the best of motives, child-care workers, who can each have sixty or seventy cases at one time, find it impossible to cope with the flood of children washed up into the system and to monitor foster parents closely Because the families they’re dealing with are often in “crisis,” as the terminology has it, children have to be whisked out of one environment and into foster care at all hours of the day or night. Then, once placed in foster care, the children immediately slide backward in priority as the heavy caseload spawns another crisis and yet another placement.
Who goes back and carefully evaluates the child’s stay in the foster home? The social workers bitterly complain about that. This situation and the lousy pay are the main reasons there are so many ex-social workers around.
Almost all of the family specialists at Harbour are ex-social workers. During our training each had reams to say about the frustration of the caseload they used to deal with and their continual anxiety over the children they had to shuffle around.
Many foster parents complain about it, too. Children placed in the middle of the night and left with no comprehensive medical records or school information. Older children who are sexual predators; younger children who are sexually vulnerable. Children with special medical needs, diets, routines that nobody can sort out until days or weeks later.
The Things I Want Most Page 3