The Things I Want Most (2 page)

Sue had sat there stunned for a long moment, read and reread the advertisement, and then finally folded the page over and tore it out.

Yet later, at bedtime, she didn't explain any of this. All she did say was, “I saw an advertisement in the paper I want us to answer.”

“What kind of advertisement?”

“There's a special kind of foster-care program that needs help. It's called Harbour.”

“What? Why?”

Harbour is a small, new division of the Mental Health Association in Ulster County, which places difficult-to-manage, often emotionally disturbed children into local families which could, with an intensive system of training and support, provide a therapeutic setting for them. The idea is to introduce these children to a normal family routine and then, working with the biological parents, perhaps safely reunite them with their own families. When Sue called the phone number in the advertisement, the social worker who answered listened to a synopsis of our background and invited us up for a chat.

“No.”

“Rich,” Sue said, tapping her foot, “an hour of your time.”

“No.”

“Rich, I'm not going to come back here and try to repeat everything I've heard. I want your reading on this, too.”

“No”

Sue gritted her teeth; the word she was trying to get out never came that easily for her. “Please.”

“Rats,”

The next day we went up to Kingston, had coffee with a nice lady named Debi, and were introduced around. Despite misgivings, I found I liked most of the people we met. I appreciate people with a clear vision or mission, and these people seemed to have one. And it wasn't sewn together out of odd parts, either. What was conveyed to us that day was lucid, simple, and understandable: they wanted to break the dreary loop of abuse, removal, return, and then more abuse, followed by more removals, that all too often seemed to prevail in the current child-care system. They would recruit experienced parents, place a single child with them long-term, and then follow up with a comprehensive system of support.

So, modeling itself on other “therapeutic foster care” programs elsewhere, Harbour was sorting out those children and families in the mid-Hudson region who would benefit most
from an intensive system of support from seven-day-a-week, twenty-four-hour-a-day availability of staff, from family specialists with very small caseloads, weekly and intensive visits, a comprehensive system of reporting, a strong and daily emphasis on the positive reinforcement of both parents and children, and perhaps most of all, the example furnished to both parents and children by the long-term placement of the children with stable families. The example of, as The Harbour Program termed them, “professional parents.”

Us.

Harbour wasn't a broad-based program. The families selected were few and very carefully chosen, as were the children involved. Harbour was determined that it too would provide a model for further programs and could do that only if it was successful in turning the lives of many of its children around.

In learning all of this, I couldn't avoid feeling complimented when, during that first informal visit, Debi seemed to consider us very impressive parents and suggested we consider joining. Of course there was still a universe of doubt on my part. This first brief introduction to Harbour seemed to confirm Sue's determination to help some new child somewhere, and the visit dampened much of the instinctive aversion I had to mucking about in somebody else's life and, of course, to unsettling my own. Yet I was still deeply suspicious of getting involved in something so very different from anything we had ever done before. Professional parent? Me?

But then I began a very private line of thought. A leafless little thing at first, it started to sprout and flower in my imagination as we made the quiet forty-five-minute drive home. “What if such a child was a girl?” I was sick of boys. In one dimension I thought I was tough. I had been a Marine Corps NCO, a chief of police, had made a living for a lot of years in a rugged field, but raising any one of my five sons was like mining gold in the midst of a rock slide. When it's all over there might be a
nugget or two in your pouch, but you're a long way downhill, awfully bruised and broken up. I hadn't, I thought, the stamina for another go. But a girl? I remembered how marvelous my daughter Susanne was when she was growing up. Girls you can buy pretty little dresses for, they have nice friends, their room smells nice, they smell nice, and they always remember your birthday.

So I had a secret agenda operating when Sue suggested we “at least go through the training” and complete Harbour's multi-page application. Then, after a preliminary acceptance, we were scheduled for training classes. We completed them in the evenings, met a “family specialist” we would be working with if we accepted a child, interviewed several other parents in the program, and had our background intensively investigated.

And now, several months later, we were inspecting a child's file. A child The Harbour Program thought we might consider a match.

The Harbour staff hadn't seemed to hold much back in training. The children selected for this special program had emotional, psychological, and/or physical problems. Typically they'd been exposed to family violence, drug use, prostitution; they'd been starved, kept out of school, left alone for long periods. Many of them had failed over and over in earlier placement attempts with standard foster-care programs.

Yet at the same time the Harbour people assured us that a panel of professionals had reviewed the children's case histories and determined they would and could benefit from therapeutic foster care. The general picture Harbour painted of these children was one of withdrawal and hurt—
vulnerable, bruised, torn
were the words used most often, and so Sue and I, particularly Sue, started the file with more than some empathy for this unknown child.

But all that changed very fast as we read. The children we had learned about in training now seemed abstract and theoretical,
almost laughably passive. This thing we were getting a picture of was something very different.

It was all there in a very thick stack of densely typed reports: eight years of evaluations, family court orders, social service summaries. The boy was borderline retarded, unmanageably violent, and had to be continually medicated. I counted the number of foster families and institutions that had tried to do something with him, and it summed up to a nice round dozen. When he was young he had been severely neglected—not fed regularly, not bathed, not dressed. He was removed from his mother when he was fifteen months old, then returned at the age of three, whereupon he was beaten into a coma. Now, according to the psychiatric reports, the boy had an extremely low IQ, erratic small-motor coordination, and would not take any direction. He regularly assaulted the staff, wet his bed, and refused to climb out of it in the morning. When he did finally get to his feet, he couldn't walk very well and was suicidal.

It was horrible. This wasn't what Harbour had been talking about all these months. Was it? Besides, Harbour knew what we wanted in a child—they had certainly asked us enough times. We wanted, certainly Sue wanted, a child who could be gently coached into something like a normal life. And it certainly wasn't, I thought sadly, a girl.

“Sue, why would they even show us something like this?”

To my immense relief Sue seemed to throw up her hands, too. “Joanne said he was an attractive boy, and I know these kids need help, but there are limits—we can't deal with something like this. No. Not this—I don't want this.” She sighed. “I might feel different if there was even one tiny shred of evidence to suggest this kid wants to be helped. But it's just not there.”

I took off my glasses, rubbed my face, and stood up. The file was scattered around the room in odd piles. We had pulled it apart and divided sections of it up between us.

“Okay,” I said, “let's put the stuff back.”

Sue nodded and stood up to help.

“Rich, what's this?”

Sue was holding a single sheet of blue paper I hadn't seen. Apparently it had slipped out of the file when we took it apart and dropped to the floor. The paper was a sloppily photocopied form labeled across the top, “The Things I Want Most.” There were three lines below it numbered one, two, and three. Over and around those lines was a child's sprawling, smudgy handwriting.

With a very uncomfortable feeling I remembered that in the entire file there had been nothing from the boy himself—no direct quotes, no transcripts, no letters—and I was grateful for the lack, glad that I hadn't that sort of connection with this child, even in a thirdhand way. So when I realized what Sue was holding, I said quickly, “Forget about it, put it back. You don't want to read that.”

Sue almost did slip it back into the stacks of reports, but then shook her head.

Instead she walked over to the desk lamp and, after a moment or two of hesitation, I joined her.

Sue got it first, with the look of dismay caught in amber pushing aside the piqued curiosity on her face, and then she slowly, raggedly caught her breath. But it was more difficult for me to puzzle out. I had to trace my fingertips again and again over the ragged pencil marks before I realized it said:

Just then Joanne Dalbo, the family specialist assigned to work with us, opened the door balancing two cups of coffee in one hand.

“Hey, how did you guys make out?”

Then she saw the strained look on our faces and asked, “What's wrong? Are you okay?”

Sue just turned away and walked over to the window with her arms crossed over her chest.

When Joanne raised her eyebrows in question, I looked back over at Sue. I could tell from the set of her shoulders that she was making up her mind, and a single word popped out of my mouth.

Curiously, I then recalled an odd fact. Whenever a black box is retrieved from the scene of an airplane wreck, the last bit of speech recorded by the pilot before he hits the ground is often that very same word.

Joanne put the coffee down on the desk and then placed her hands on her hips. Attractive, slim, with dark hair and eyes, she was a bright, soft-spoken family specialist working for Harbour while she studied in her spare time for an advanced degree in English literature, and she had a profound interest in careful and precise speech. Now she seemed puzzled and a little bit hurt. “
Shit”
she repeated. “What does
shit
mean?”

It took us weeks to get to meet Mike. It was Joanne's job to schedule an initial meeting, but she was put off by the Catholic Children's Home, where he was living.

Programs like Harbour have to struggle with all the complexities of child-care placement, including the issue of access to children in a complicated, multilayered system that involves many organizations with variable, often arbitrary, and constantly changing rules and procedures. The Catholic Children's Home was no exception. And, of course, it's difficult to have a good working relationship with an agency or institution you have never encountered before.

In Mike's case, he had been referred to Harbour by the very children's home that had him now, but two issues, one very human and one quite frightening, were complicating access. The first was that, despite having referred many children to Harbour, the children's home was now somewhat doubtful of the program because Harbour had accepted none of them. But the other was the fact that in the time that had elapsed between their referral and Harbours contact, Mike had tried to hang himself.

The act was labeled as “not a serious suicide attempt,” I suppose because he didn't succeed, but the home had decided it was better to hold Harbour at arm's length while he “restabilized.”

Meanwhile, we learned some additional facts. We learned that unlike most children in The Harbour Program, integration back into his biological family wasn't an option. He had been freed for adoption, and family court was determined there be no further parental contact.

We also found out that he did have a visiting “resource.” It seems an older brother and sister were adopted by a local family three years earlier and that this family had taken Mike into their home as well. Unfortunately, the results were fairly horrific—uncontrollable tantrums, violent behavior, sleeplessness—and eventually he was removed for psychiatric evaluation to Rock-land State Hospital. Following that admittance he was placed in the Catholic Children's Home in Rhinebeck and the family's application for adoption denied. But they still visited him from time to time, taking him for weekends and some holidays.

This last point only seemed to stiffen Sue's now-iron resolve to meet the author of that pathetic note. In her mind's eye, or perhaps her mother's heart, she could picture the despair of this child as he watched his brother and sister get on with their lives while he was routinely rejected in the most profound way.

“How can they pick him up and then just cart him back?
How many times has he stood there in the parking lot of the children's home and waved good-bye to his brother and sister?”

In the days that followed, Sue developed a long list of other sad images. I'd see them emerge at mealtimes, while driving in the car, or when visiting friends. In the middle of talking about something completely different she'd suddenly declare, “Mike isn't sleeping, I just know it.” “They haven't told him anything about us yet, and he's just as upset and hopeless as he ever was.” “He isn't eating. What kind of food do they have there, anyway?” “Who's talking to the doctor about his medication?”

“Sue,” I'd protest, “we haven't even met this child, and anyway, the children's home is top drawer, everybody says that. They're not neglecting him. Calm down. Things will sort themselves out.”