The Pattersons are decent people, as foster parents go. They don't hit us, don't starve us, don't make us work like animals. They just don't have much to give—too many kids, too little money, too much exhaustion wearing them down.
I learn to take care of myself, which isn't hard because I've been taking care of myself since before I can remember. I do my homework, keep my grades up, stay out of trouble. I'm not doing it for me. I'm doing it because I need to age out of this system with something, some kind of foundation I can use to build a life that includes finding Ivan.
I get a part-time job at a garage down the street, sweeping floors and fetching tools and learning to change oil, and the owner is a guy named Carl who reminds me a little bit of what I imagine a father might be like if I'd ever had one worth remembering.
He teaches me things about engines, about motorcycles, about the satisfaction of fixing something with your own hands. I soak it up like a sponge because it gives me something to focus on besides the hole in my chest where Ivan used to be, besides the constant ache of missing him.
At night, when I can't sleep, when the other boys are snoring and the house is quiet, I recite his information in my head like the most important words I'll ever know. Ivan Allen Collins. September twenty-third, two thousand and six. Atlanta, Georgia. Birthmark on the right shoulder blade, shaped like a kidney bean—a blob, he'd say, and I can almost hear him correcting me. Safe place is the barn in his head, the one where I'm sitting next to him with my arm around his shoulders. What did I say to him the first night we met? You can breathe.
I wonder if he still remembers. I wonder if he's doing the same thing somewhere, lying awake in some strange bed, whispering my name into the darkness. Jason Michael Morrow. March fifteenth. Macon, Georgia. I wonder if he's given up on me yet, if he thinks I forgot about him, if he thinks I stopped looking.
I wouldn't blame him if he had. It's been a year, then two years, then three, and I'm no closer to finding him than I was that first day in the hospital. The system has swallowed him whole, and I don't know how to reach in and pull him out.
But I won't stop trying. I made a promise. I don't break promises, not the ones that matter. Not this one. Never this one.
***
I turn eighteen on March fifteenth, and the world doesn't care.
Mrs. Patterson sits me down a week before my birthday and explains that I'll need to find somewhere else to live once I age out. It's not personal, she says, her eyes apologetic. It's just how the system works.
The state stops paying for my care when I turn eighteen, and without that money, they can't afford to keep me. She gives me pamphlets about transitional housing programs and job training and educational opportunities, and I nod and take them.
I look into the transitional housing programs, fill out the applications with shaking hands. They all have requirements—you have to be enrolled in school full-time, or you have to be in job training, or you have to meet with a counselor every week and submit to random drug tests and follow a curfew.
I understand why the rules exist. I even understand that they help some kids. But I can barely afford to eat. The part-time job at Carl's garage pays minimum wage, and minimum wage doesn't cover rent and food and transportation and all the other costs of being alive.
It's a trap. The whole system is a trap designed to keep you down. You need money to survive, but you need stability to make money, but you need money to have stability. And if you're starting from nothing, with no family to fall back on and no safety net to catch you, then every wrong step can send you spiraling down into a hole you'll never climb out of.
I try anyway. I apply for the transitional housing, fill out all the forms, jump through all the hoops. A social worker named Mr. Davis helps me navigate the process, and for a few weeks I let myself hope that maybe this will work, maybe I'll land somewhere stable where I can keep searching for Ivan while I figure out the rest of my life.
The housing comes through three days after my birthday. It's an apartment complex on the outskirts of town, subsidized by some government program I don't fully understand, and I share a two-bedroom unit with three other guys who aged out around the same time I did. They're just as lost as I am, just as angry, just as determined to pretend they've got everything figured out when really none of us know what the hell we're doing.
We coexist more than we live together. Everyone keeps to themselves, everyone has their own struggles, everyone is too focused on survival to form real connections. I work at Carl's garage as many hours as he'll give me, and I pick up odd jobs on the side—moving furniture, cleaning gutters, whatever pays cash. I eat cheap ramen and day-old bread and Isave what I can and I spend every free moment at the public library, using their computers to search for Ivan.
Still nothing. It's like he's vanished off the face of the earth, like he never existed at all.
The other guys in the apartment start to scatter after a few months. One gets a job in Atlanta and moves away without saying goodbye. Another falls in with a bad crowd and stops coming home, and eventually the housing program kicks him out for violating the rules.
One by one they leave, and new people come to take their places, and I realize that this is my life now—a revolving door of strangers, a constant state of transition, nothing solid to hold onto, nothing that lasts.
I start drinking around this time even though I'm underage.
Not a lot, not at first. Just a beer after work to take the edge off, to quiet the thoughts that won't stop. A shot of whiskey to help me sleep, to make the nightmares less vivid. It becomes a habit before I realize it's happening, and by the time I do realize, I'm not sure I want to stop.
The alcohol dulls the ache in my chest, quiets the voice in my head that keeps asking where Ivan is and why I can't find him and what kind of person fails so completely at the one thing that matters.
Carl notices at work. He doesn't say anything directly, because that's not his style, but he starts keeping an eye on me, asking how I'm doing, making sure I eat lunch even when I say I'm not hungry. He's the closest thing I have to a friend in this new life I'm building out of scraps and desperation.
Sometimes I think about telling him everything—about Ivan, about the Hendersons, about the promise I made and can't seem to keep. But I never do. Some secrets are too heavy to share.
I keep searching. I try new strategies, new search terms, new databases. Ivan is out there somewhere. I know he is. And as long as there's a chance I can find him, I'm not going to give up.
Even if some nights, in the darkest hours, I wonder if giving up would be easier. Even if some mornings I wake up and can barely remember why I'm bothering to get out of bed. Even if the hole in my chest keeps getting bigger instead of smaller, and the whiskey stops working as well asit used to, and I start to wonder if this is all my life will ever be—working, searching, failing, drinking, repeating.
I won't give up. I can't.
Because somewhere out there, Ivan is waiting for me.
