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This was hard. Talking about it brought a lump to Carly’s throat and made her voice husky. “I missed out on a lot because my dad was gone so much when I was little, but once he came home... I was the luckiest kid in the world when it came to my parents. My mom was sweet and kind, and she had this subtle sense of humor that always caught you by surprise. My dad was strict, but he was very loving, and he made sure I understood why we had the rules we did. I’m not going to say I was always obedient, and there were a few times during my teenage years that I caused my parents some grief, but they always loved me. When I was nineteen, I decided to get my own apartment on the third floor. I think, in a way, it was like college. Moving out and putting a toe in the waters of adulthood in a safe environment. I had my independence, but I knew they were right downstairs if I needed something.”
“Tell me about the DVD you have in your bag. Tell me what it means to you.”
Carly tried not to cry, but the tears spilled out anyway. She wasn’t a confident enough bicyclist to let go of the handlebars long enough to wipe them away. She told him about watching the world die on cable news and how her father had poured her a drink. As she spoke, she realized it was the first time her father had ever talked to her as an equal, not as his little girl. Had he somehow known? Or had he seen these events as the true dividing line between childhood and adulthood for her?
Carly described watching the movies with him and how it had been a temporary respite from the horror and fear, a few last stolen moments with her father and one last happy memory. She scrubbed her wet cheeks against her shoulders. “What about your parents, Justin? What happened to them?”
“I don’t know. I don’t have any memories of them. From my social services file, I know I was abandoned at about the age of three at a fire station. They caught my mother and me on video from the bank across the street. She brought me up to the front of the station and sat me down on the retaining wall of a flower bed near the door. She gave me a toy, an Incredible Hulk action figure, and then just walked away. They found a note pinned to my shirt that gave my first name and date of birth, and that was all.”
It was hard to speak around the lump in her throat. Her voice was unsteady. “She must have been in desperate circumstances to give you up like that.”
“Or she was just sick of having to take care of a baby.” There was bitterness in his tone.
Carly’s heart ached for him and she wished there was something she could do to banish the ghost of that pain. “Justin, think about it, she took you somewhere she knew you would be safe, where you would be found quickly. If she didn’t care about you, she would have abandoned you in an alley somewhere, or sold you, or even killed you.”
“Yeah.” Justin didn’t look at her.
“What happened next? Did you go straight into foster care?”
“No, the records say I stayed with one of the firefighters for a few years while they searched for my mother. That’s how I got my last name. The Thatchers wanted to adopt me, but the authorities wouldn’t allow it unless they located my mother and secured her permission. They never found her, so I went into the system.”
“Do you have any memories of them?”
“I have an early memory of a woman singing to me. That’s all. I don’t know if it’s my real mother or the firefighter’s wife, Martha.”
“Why did they take you away from the Thatchers?”
“Age, and probably the fact that they’d never had children of their own. When they took me in, Jack Thatcher was a few months from retirement. The authorities decided they were too old and inexperienced to care for an active toddler and wouldn’t approve them to be my foster parents, either.”
“That’s terrible!” What sort of system would think it was better for a baby to be taken away from people who loved him and given to strangers?
“That’s bureaucracy.” That hint of bitterness was back in his tone.
Carly was quiet for a long moment as she wondered what it must have been like for a little boy to lose his mother and then the people who had lovingly cared for him for several years. That had to leave some scars. “How many families did you live with?”
“Eleven.” He hid behind that impassive expression again.
“Wow, Justin, that’s almost one a year.” Carly had always known she was a lucky girl to have such wonderful parents and such a happy home life. Half of her friends had divorced parents and some of them were tugged back and forth in their parents’ bitter squabbling. But Justin’s story was far, far worse than that.
“I wasn’t the easiest kid to take care of. I was rebellious, always getting into fights.”
“Were any of your foster families good to you?” She hoped for at least some bright spot in what seemed like a very bleak and unhappy childhood.
His jaw tightened. “Generally, indifferent. I had one family who...” He cursed under his breath. “They were the Altons—Steve and Cindy. That was the biggest mistake of my life, and I always wonder how things might have turned out if I had accepted what they offered me. But I wasn’t used to someone trying to reach out to me. Cindy tried. God how she tried, but I rejected every overture. I was cruel to her.”
“After all you’d been through ...”
That muscle in his cheek was twitching again. “My psychology classes later taught me it was a trust issue. I was testing the limits, trying to determine her sincerity by being as awful as I could be to see if she’d still treat me the same, if she’d still care about me. Eventually, I wore her down. I was fighting with her other foster kids, always getting into trouble, and lashing out at everyone. One day a social worker showed up, and I was taken to a group home for troubled kids. I never saw the Altons again.”
Carly bit the inside of her lip so hard she tasted the metallic tang of blood.
“I always thought of tracking them down, to say I was sorry for everything I put them and their family through, but I never did it, and now I’ll never be able to.”
“It’s not your fault, you know.”
Justin chuckled. “Oh, Carly, you’re so sweet. But it was my fault. I have to own my actions. I was old enough to know right from wrong, and I chose wrong.”
“You were just a kid. A kid who’d had a horribly hard life.” Has he been carrying this burden all these years? Has he been hating himself for something he did when he was a child, a lonely, scared little boy who’d never had anyone in his life that didn’t abandon him?
