The fire hissed next to us, as if sensing the mood unfolding in the room.
“Please tell me.” I repeated.
“Do you know that there are almost a half million children in foster care in the United States?” She began.
My brows popped. I didn’t, and that number was staggering.
“When my mom died, I was put into the system because my dad was in jail. He died shortly after, by the way. I had no living grandparents, aunts, uncles, brothers, sisters, nothing. I was told I’d be adopted quickly. Didn’t happen. The first seven years of my life were spent being shipped from home to home, stranger to stranger, school to school, waiting to be adopted by someone who thought I was worthy enough. It’s funny,” she stared listlessly into the fire, “I don’t remember too much of most of the homes I was in. Repressed memories, I learned later while in college.”
“Unconsciously blocking something that had a high level of stress. That’s a lot for a child.”
“Yes, it is. But it’s not only that. It was the lack of structure, the lack of genuine relationships, role models. The only constant I had was the feeling of abandonment. I spent every day anticipating that knock at the door where mycaseworker would take me to my next set of ‘fill-in parents.’ I was at the mercy of the system. Instead of a human, a system was in control of my welfare.” A sharp gaze cut to me. “That’s pretty screwed up.”
“What about your caseworker?”
She slid her coffee on the table. “I had three, total. The last one I rarely saw, and I found out years later, he was arrested for possessing child pornography, by the way. He had no clue about the conditions I was living in. He didn’t care. That’s why I got myself out.”
I grabbed the wine she’d been drinking earlier that evening and handed it to her.
“Tell me what happened at the last house.” Without even hearing the story, my protective streak was raging.
Little did I know then what I was about to hear.
She sipped, took a deep breath, and began.
“I was placed with a man and woman who said they couldn’t conceive and wanted to be foster parents to fill the void. Little did everyone know, the cause of the infertility was from a life of excessive drug use. But they hid it well. The man, Earl, worked for a manufacturing company and was gone all the time on sales trips. The woman, Cheryl, was a stay at home wife with nothing to do. The first time I saw him hit her was after she’d tried to serve him a cold dinner a week after I moved in. The first time he hit me was when he tripped over a shoe that I’d left in the hallway.”
White hot anger surged through my system. I curled both my fists, and my toes in my boots, in an effort to dispel the rush of adrenaline.
Her steely gaze pinned me. “Yes, I was physically abused, Phoenix. They were two screwed up individuals who had no business being foster parents. But that’sthe system,”she emphasized.“They’re desperate for foster homes. Anyway, itdidn’t take long for me, even at eight years old, to realize Cheryl was not only cheating on her abusive husband, but was a drug addict who also sold drugs on the side.” She paused. “Have you ever been to a drug dealer’s house?”
It was a rhetorical question, but back in my door-kicking days, I’d been to plenty. And my stomach was rolling.
“It’s a revolving door of strangers,” she continued. “Day and night, people in and out of the house. One after the other. Lights are always on. No sleeping. It’s a madhouse. I’d hide. Every second I wasn’t in school, I’d hide under the kitchen table because they never ate there. That was my spot.”
She began turning the wine glass around in her hands.
“One day, I was hiding in the kitchen after school, my usual routine. I remember being so hungry that day. Abnormally so. Anyway, in the living room—the next room over…” Her voice cracked. “Cheryl died of a heroin overdose. Right there, twenty feet from me. She died with a purple ligature around her bicep and a needle in her arm. I had no idea.” Her voice wavered and tears filled her eyes. She looked at me, a childlike desperation pulling at her face. “I didn’t know, Phoenix. I didn’t know. I would have tried to save her, I promise. I hated that woman, but I wouldn’t have let her die. I would have tried to save her.”
I slid off the couch, pried the wine glass from her clutch and set it aside. I kneeled at her feet. She gripped onto my hands as her eyes glazed over in a memory so haunting she was no longer in the present. When she began again, it was a whisper.
“Earl came home and found her. He screamed my name; I think he thought I actually did it. Or, he blamed me for it.” Tears rolled down her cheeks. “I remember thinking I wasgoing to be taken to jail charged for murder. An eight year old thinking that. Can you imagine that?”
I wiped the tears. “It wasn’t your fault, Rose. It wasn’t your fault. Release the guilt, just like you’ve told me to.”
“It’s tough, isn’t it?”
“Yeah. I get it.”
“I still blame myself. To this day, I blame myself for her death.”
“You can’t. It wasn’t your fault. You didn’t put the needle in her arm and pull the trigger, so to speak. Itwasn’tyour fault.”
My heart broke for her. And also, in a weird twist of fate, I heard my own words in response to what I was going through, too.
Fate. Funny thing.
“Tell me the rest of the story. Because I know you’re not done.”
