The Center of the World (29 page)

CHAPTER 3

D
elia sat in the parking lot of Southern Maine Foster Services. She was keenly aware that she hadn't filed her latest case notes, becoming lackadaisical as her job drew to an end. She pulled out her laptop and typed in furiously before meeting with Ira.

She hadn't typed her notes from yesterday yet. She imagined titles for her case notes, which would be frowned on by Ira, potentially viewed as minimizing a child's tragedy or mocking the disaster of parenting gone haywire by alcohol, drugs, mental illness, or general meanness.

She never kept the titles, at least not yet, although the titles remained in her head. Sometimes titles captured an entire life or just a single interview. “Transformer Joe” for a boy who changed from sweet to tyrannical in an instant. “Don't Take My Blankie Away” for a child who had traveled through the worst of times with a shredded blue blanket, now the size of a paperback. “We're Just Atoms Combining and Recombining,” a title for a family of four kids who were dispersed among three foster families until one foster home campaigned hard to take all four.

Imagining the titles was part of what helped Delia remember the most important details of a person's life, like labeling a photo in an album. But so few people still had photo albums. They had photos on their phones, or in the cloud. Although she was embarrassed to ask, she didn't really understand what the cloud was. And specifically, if you put something in the cloud like a photo or a kid's placement file, could you ever get it back? She'd ask one of the interns. One of the great things about graduate interns was that you could peel the latest technology right off them.

Her last intern said, “How old are you? You seem a lot older than you look.” Her comment could have been in reference to Delia's lack of cloud technology. She hoped it wasn't the way she looked, at thirty-two. But she felt older, sometimes decades older.

When Delia told her boss Ira that she was done, Ira had not accepted her resignation easily. “This is about Juniper, isn't it? You can't keep taking care of her forever.”

The truth was, resigning was about Delia and starting a new life without social services.

Ira, director of Southern Maine Foster Services, had worked his way up through the ranks. He had been a kid in the foster care system by the time he was eight years old, fresh out of the burn unit at Shriner's Hospital in Boston. She never asked him for details about the abuse; the burn scars visible along his arms were all she needed to know. He was one of the survivors. He had been in only two foster homes before he landed with a family who wanted to adopt him. His remaining biological parent, who was in prison, did the best thing he'd ever done for Ira by relinquishing all parental rights. But someone like Ira saw everything, every twitch, because he had to be vigilant when he was a kid. Now he was like one of the dogs who were trained to sniff out seizures moments before they felled their owner.

“It's the accumulation,” she had told him, avoiding the comment about Juniper.

Delia finished her notes and filed them, snapping her laptop shut, and headed for whatever waited for her with Ira. Even now, walking along the hallway, she could smell it, the fear and anger of children who have come through the foster care system. Sort of a steel-wool-meets-linseed-oil smell that children give off when they've been hurt by the ones they loved.

Delia did all the right things that she'd learned over the years at the professional development workshops. Most recently she had attended another workshop about establishing clear boundaries. Buzzwords for not getting traumatized by the pain of your young clients. Bystander trauma.

She exercised, had friends, took every bit of her vacation time, and listened to music on her drive to and from work rather than the news. Even so, with each child, a droplet of something had found its way into Delia, like acid rain eating up the paint on her car. The accumulation finally hit her personal high-water mark.

Delia saw this with other people in her profession who had missed the signs. She did not want to become the bitter, fatalistic curmudgeon that others had morphed into.

As of today, she had thirty-five days left. Time to sensibly close out her cases, transfer them to others, and withdraw from the world of uphill battles. But Ira had called her and she did not, absolutely did not, want to know what waited for her. The underside of her chin itched, as it always did with the worst cases. She had stopped trying to explain the telltale itch to others. It just was and she had learned to listen to it. Scritch, scratch, like little creatures rambling about along her jawbone. This meant the case was searing hot with abandoned kids and parents in a tailspin. Or worse.

She rubbed her chin, trying to rub out the familiar twitch. She paused at her desk long enough to read the new file. A gift from Ira.

She closed the file after reading it. The child was five years old and had been released from the hospital. Blood was found on the child, but it was not her own. The pediatrician noted symptoms of malnutrition, a good deal of dirt under her fingernails, and mosquito bites that had become infected. She came in at the 70th percentile for weight and about the same for height.

They had reason to believe that she lived in a house on Bakersfield Road. Because the house was a crime scene, the on-call caseworker had not been able to get into the house to check for something that might be special to the girl; a blanket or a stuffed animal.

There had been three adults at the house, all shot close range. One woman, two men. The woman had been identified by her driver's license as Emma Gilbert, twenty-six, from Virginia. The two men had no IDs on them, as if they had been stripped of IDs or maybe they never had them. There was no information about the child.

This wasn't the first time that children had arrived in emergency foster care without any records at all. Children could fly under the radar for years, never see a doctor or a dentist, and never go to daycare or preschool.

She had been found by a middle-aged couple who stayed with the child until the police arrived. They requested to be notified about the well-being of the child. When the first cop on the scene had asked the girl what her name was, she answered without hesitation. “Hayley.” When asked for her last name, she had shrugged.

 

Delia was glad that the job of locating relatives of the girl was up to Ira and not up to her. She looked at her job as surveyor of disaster, sort of a one-woman hazmat crew. Despite the media portrayal of foster care as the devil, foster care couldn't even enter the equation unless a true shit storm happened in a family where kids were in situations that looked like war zones. Or sometimes kids were just left with nobody, dangling, free-floating on their own.

No one wanted to be the kid who had to go to foster care, because that meant something cataclysmic happened, and one of those things might be that your parents didn't care enough about you, or weren't able to care about anyone, not even themselves. If kids at school knew you were in foster care, it was a neon sign on your forehead that said you weren't worth loving.

She paused in front of Ira's door, calming herself with several breaths. It wasn't working. Thirty-five days left. Delia slid the file across Ira's desk and said, “Were there really no family members for this child to stay with?” She looked down at the file again. The child's name was written on the file tab, not a nameless girl, but Hayley.

“What's going on here and why have you called me in? Why not someone else?”

“Because you're the best. Don't you think we should give this child the best that we have?”