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Ayelish covered her mouth. “Oh no.”
“The whole block lit up with first responders. The cops caught a few junkies stealing from Mama, and the medics wheeled her out and hauled her off. Overdose. Mr. Hanks stood outside the diner and saw me in the window and came in to sit with me. He let me watch what was goin’ on. I guess he figured I’d seen much worse at this point and understood better than anyone what was goin’ on.”
“What happened to you three?”
“The Hanks took us in. I don’t even think they told the authorities.” He chuckled. “They just sort of hid us and took care of us. It was temporary. Mr. Hanks went to the hospital the next day when Mama was awake. Told her that she had two choices. Go to rehab and get cleaned up while he and Mrs. Hanks looked out for us, or he’d tell the police everything he knew about us, and we would end up in the system.”
“Quite the ultimatum,” she said.
“Sure was. He was quite the man. I respect the hell out of what he did. That was the first time I’d witnessed true kindness and knew what it was. Sure, I knew he was a good man. He let me work for food and kept an eye out, but takin’ in some junkie’s kids to give not just us a chance but also our mama was… big. Real big. I didn’t know people like the Hanks existed until then. We stayed with them, went to school, had three square meals a day and dessert as long as we drank our milk…” They both chuckled. “We bathed regularly and had clean clothes. Felt…safe.”
“And your mom?”
“She cleaned up. I have trouble rememberin’ what she looks like, but I remember seein’ her like I was meeting her for the first time when she finally came home. I guess it really was the first time meetin’ her –– at her best, anyway.”
“That’s…great.”
“Yeah, until it wasn’t. She worked for the Hanks for a bit, and we kept going to school. Mrs. Hanks helped Mama out a lot –– like a mentor maybe. But old habits die hard and kept tryin’ to come around. Mama fought it hard at first, even moved us away to avoid falling back into it. The new place was too far away from the diner, so she quit her job. I don’t think she ever found one that allowed her to work around three young kids, and eventually, her old life found her again. There wasn’t a diner across the street this time when familiar faces started showing up again. I took the kids with me on the bus to the diner one night when it was real bad. The Hanks weren’t there anymore. It was one of those gamblin’ machines in the back, food and booze in the front kinda places. I guess they retired or somethin’.”
“I’m so sorry,” she said. “Wh-What happened? How’d you get home?”
“I called the police from a pay phone. Remembered seeing how you can call 911 on TV, and I tried it.” He smirked. “I thought the police would help us get home, maybe get the assholes out of our house, but man, that one backfired on me. They helped, but it didn’t get better. That was the last time I remember seein’ my mama. We went into the system after that. And if livin’ in that house was hell, I don’t know how to describe what it was like in foster care. There weren’t a lot of options in the way of homes that could take three kids. They say they want to keep families together, but with slim pickin’s, we found ourselves in more of the same. Drugs, assaults, abuse of every kind, neglect.”
“I’m so sorry.”
“It ain’t your fault. It’s a broken system’s fault and why I continue to work in that field every chance I get to make it safer for kids like us, ya know?” he said. “It was bad growing up in Mama’s house, but at least we knew what to expect. Once we went in the system, it was always a fuckin’ gamble. Every day was different and usually worse than the day before. Then it all fell apart when my sister was adopted.”
“She was adopted. That’s good, right?”
He shook his head. “I don’t think she was adopted. I think she was sold. I have no proof and never could find evidence of anything. Just a hunch. As soon as she was gone, so were me and my brother. Only the girls were left. Tell me that ain’t weird to you.”
“It is.”
“I got lucky after that. So lucky it was almost my undoin’, if that makes any sense. I went to a good home with my own room, all the food I wanted, school, sports, you name it. It was normal, and that was hard to get used to. I could sleep with both eyes closed. Nobody was trying to hurt me, but I did worry about my brother and sister,” he went on. “My foster brother became my best friend. We were inseparable. Did everything together…real buddies. He’d been with the family since he was a baby, and they’d adopted him when he was small. He didn’t know any other way than the way it was in that house. He was lucky, and I always envied him for that. Don’t get me wrong, I was glad he didn’t know the kinda life we did, but what a lucky son of a bitch, ya know? Weird how we both had the same circumstances but opposite journeys. Life’s weird like that.”
“It sure can be. I’m glad you had a family who cared for you and took care of you. That must’ve been a relief,” she said.
“Oh, it sure was. They didn’t just care for me. They loved me. Told me so every day, several times a day. That word became my favorite thing and favorite feeling. They wanted to adopt me.” Wit leaned back and crossed his arms, closing himself off as his story continued. “Again, the system is broken. It wasn’t easy, so many hoops to jump through to make me official, ya know? At the time, we weren’t worried about it. I wasn’t going anywhere; I was theirs, and they were mine. It was just paperwork at that point and lots of red tape. Until my foster dad was transferred for work. They couldn’t take me with them because of state jurisdiction and all that fuss. The adoption hadn’t gone through because Mama hadn’t relinquished her rights –– they couldn’t find her –– and the courts are slow and have their own set of rules to follow.”
Wit sat for a moment and stroked his chin, lost in thought. A deep sigh escaped him, and emotion filled his eyes.
Ayelish grew concerned. “Wit?”
“Sorry. Uh, that’s how I knew for sure my sister couldn’t have been adopted. If they couldn’t let my adoption go through because of parental rights and all that, how was she adopted? With all three of us in the system, surely they’d have her relinquish all three to the state.”
“Oh my God,” Ayelish whispered.
Wit’s head bobbed in agreement. “Anyhow, my family moved, and I stayed behind and spent my last couple of years in the system bouncing from one boys’ home to another. They tried to stay in touch at first and continued to fight for me, but I gave up and quit responding. Those homes were like prisons, and everything horrific you can imagine happening there did. Just a handful of months before my eighteenth birthday, I became a ward of the state–– officially –– and adoptable. Didn’t really matter at that point. My, uh, mama died of an overdose, and I wasofficiallyan orphan. The paperwork said,father unknown.”
“That’s when you enlisted,” Ayelish added.
“Yeah. I scored real high on all those tests you do in high school for the military –– not sure how –– and I was scooped right up. The longer I was in, the deeper my training went… I started to realize that my experience wasn’t typical. I went a much different direction than most with my career enlisted.”
Ayelish smiled. “It doesn’t surprise me. Your instincts to protect are incredible, and you’re a survivor. You don’t give up. You fight and fight hard. It’s like you were born to do this work. You’re a seeker of justice, and I can understand better why it’s all second nature to you.”
“It’s all I know to do,” Wit admitted. “I survive.”
“You know how to do a lot more than that,” she corrected. “You also know how to love and love hard.”
