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Now I just want to get through this and go home with Dylan. I want to curl up on the sofa with him, his head on my shoulder, my arm around him, and read Dinosaurs Before Dark to him three times in a row. And the longer I wait here, the more I’m afraid that isn’t going to happen, at least not anytime soon.
I’ve been waiting in the room for about half an hour when Susan comes in, with her kindly smile and a cup of tea for me. She even remembers how I like it, milky and sweet. I tense automatically, because this all feels just a little too sympathetic, like she’s bringing bad news.
“So, Beth,” she says, and her voice is full of compassionate sorrow.
Oh, no.
I don’t reply, because I feel like anything I say could and would be used against me, but as it turns out, I don’t need to reply, because Susan just shakes her head and says, “As I’m sure you realize, this isn’t working.”
And I don’t ask what she means, because of course I know it already. She means me. Me and Dylan. We’re not working, and for the first time, it seems like DCF is going to actually do something, and I can’t stand the thought, even as I feel a treacherous little flicker of relief. Finally, finally someone is going to help me.
Little did I know.
2
ALLY
Three weeks after we finish our training to become foster parents, the checks and references finally complete, we get our first call.
I am standing at the kitchen island, gazing out at the backyard, which is full of burgeoning autumn color—russets and scarlets and gold. It is a beautiful, crisp fall day in mid-October, the kind of day where the air looks crystalline and feels drinkable. I spent the morning working from home, and then I had lunch with a friend, and in twenty minutes I am due to pick Josh up from cross-country practice. I’m feeling benevolent and contented, even though I am missing Emma, who started college in Boston just six weeks ago. Her absence continues to give me a certain, melancholy restlessness.
This is a similar feeling—in fact, I was standing in the exact same place—to when I first broached the idea of becoming foster parents to Nick, back in April. He was on the sofa, kicking back with a glass of wine, and Josh and Emma were upstairs in their rooms, working or socializing via their phones, probably both. They had the uncanny ability to simultaneously write an essay and take a Snapchat selfie approximately every three seconds. It boggled my mind, but I couldn’t complain, because they were both straight-A students and Emma had just been accepted to Harvard, something that Nick and I were absolutely thrilled about but felt we had to downplay. You can’t go running around to your neighbors boasting about your kid being accepted to the best college in the country, at least not in West Hartford, where everyone is politely cutthroat about college admissions. We’d been saying she was going to Boston for college instead, but weighing the word Boston with a mysteriously significant emphasis. Sometimes people asked, sometimes they just looked a bit miffed, because they already knew.
Perhaps it was because I knew Emma would be leaving soon, and at sixteen Josh didn’t seem to need us at all, except to drive him
places, that I thought of fostering in the first place. I’d seen a documentary on my laptop, a few minutes of a clip on Facebook about the foster care crisis in America, and I listened to how there are almost half a million children in care in the United States, many of them waiting for placements or adoption.
It was the kind of thing that was meant to tug at your heartstrings, with traumatized, teary-eyed children looking straight at the camera, and it worked. I looked around our house, with the gleaming granite kitchen we’d renovated and expanded a couple of years ago, a pottery jug of tulips unfurling their blossoms in the middle of the island, the photos on the walls of our happy family hiking in the Berkshires, taking the inevitable trip to Orlando, in front of the Eiffel Tower, the Grand Canyon, and of course the ubiquitous portrait of us all in white T-shirts and jeans, goofing around self-consciously for the camera.
We were so lucky. Hashtag blessed, and I didn’t even mean it ironically. I knew it, and I thanked something—God, maybe, or perhaps a more comfortably nebulous idea of fate—for how much we had. Wasn’t it time to pay it forward? Wouldn’t that be a good use of my extra time, now that Emma was leaving home, and I was only working twenty hours a week?
I was only forty-six, young for an almost empty-nester, at least in this part of Connecticut. Most of my friends with children Emma’s age were well into their fifties. I felt young, and Emma’s leaving felt like a new chapter not just for her, but for all of us. I wanted to do something different and meaningful with my life.
So I broached the idea to Nick, who looked startled and a bit nonplussed, which was understandable since I’d never once mentioned it before in our twenty-two years of marriage.
“Foster? But we’re finally getting our lives back.” He spoke jokingly, but I knew he was serious, at least somewhat.
“We’ve had our lives back for years,” I returned lightly. “It’s not as if Josh and Emma are toddlers.” They’d not been needing us since they were thirteen, more or less, except as a taxi service and a listening ear for the occasional emotional outburst from Emma.
“Yeah, but… with Emma gone, and Josh sixteen… we could go away on our own.” He waggled his eyebrows enticingly. “A romantic weekend in New York…”
“I can’t really see us leaving Josh at home.” I trusted him, but not quite that much. “And the placements don’t last forever.”
“I don’t know, Ally…” Nick’s gaze flickered towards the television, which he’d muted when I first spoke.
“All I’m asking is that you think about it, Nick. We have so much, and there are kids out there who are in desperate situations.” My throat closed a little at the memory of some of the harrowing stories I’d seen on that clip. Kids who had nothing but Twinkies for breakfast or wore clothes three sizes too small, never mind the truly horrific cases of abuse that I couldn’t bear to think about.
“Yes, but…” He paused, his wine glass halfway to his lips. “They’re all really difficult, aren’t they?”
I drew back a little at that; I didn’t think he meant to sound so selfish. “You’d be difficult too if you’d grown up the way those kids did.” Admittedly, it might have seemed as if I’d positioned myself as an expert after watching something on Facebook for five minutes, but actually I’d done some more research than that. The ad had led me to the website for Connecticut’s Department of Children and Families, and I’d read numerous articles on fostering, the training you did, the references you needed, how rewarding it all was. I didn’t know much, not yet, but I knew something.
“I know, I know,” Nick assured me. “That’s what I’m saying. They all have issues. And I don’t really think we’re equipped to deal with that sort of thing.”
“Equipped? How are we not equipped?” I looked pointedly around our spacious kitchen, the French windows we’d had put in a couple of years ago leading out to a cedarwood deck with a huge, gleaming grill. Our house wasn’t enormous, but it worked, and I loved it for all it represented, all the memories it had promised and then contained.
A couple of years ago, Nick had floated the idea of moving to one of those big brick monstrosities on Mountain Road, but I couldn’t stomach the idea. We’d bought our 1920s four-bedroom house off Farmington Avenue fifteen years ago, and then done it up slowly until we’d got it exactly the way we liked. We’d fallen in love with the street, which looked like something out of a Norman Rockwell painting or an episode of Leave it to Beaver—porches with window boxes and rocking chairs, kids riding bikes down the sidewalk or playing kick-the-can on summer nights as the fireflies come out like low-lying stars. It was exactly the sort of childhood I’d wanted for my kids, and we gave it to them. Why not offer it to someone else, even if just for a short time, if we could?
“We’re plenty equipped,” I said when Nick seemed as if he wasn’t going to answer me. “We’ve raised two children successfully”—Emma’s Harvard admission seemed to hover purposefully in the air—“and I work from home part-time. So do you, some of the time.” Last year, he’d redone the bonus room over the garage as a home office, complete with skylight and Nespresso machine. “We could do this.” But not if Nick wasn’t as committed as I was, although I was sure he could be, given time and a little carefully applied pressure.
