It was true to say that their children had been easy to parent, which was partly why Sarah Anne had come up with the idea that she and Jameson could foster a child, surely a single child. But fostering was something else. Every decision seemed in need of approval, every move watched over as if the state had put cameras in the house. It wasn’t true, it wasn’t like that, the caseworker didn’t come around that much, but the shadow of a higher power seemed cast, at least for Jameson. Ever since the boy arrived, Jameson worried that one wrong move could take him away, especially from Sarah Anne, have him packed up like a parcel and delivered to another couple where the father figure had a solid laugh and a grade-A frame of mind that everyone had reason to depend on. The child hadn’t eaten since breakfast. And why was his breakfast always nothing more than a few bites of Cheerios and vanilla yogurt? That wasn’t right by anyone’s standard.
He only ever ate small bites—pecking, Sarah Anne called it, throughout the day—and yet he wanted food nearby, just in case. Especially at night, even if it meant only a single swallow of applesauce. Sarah Anne said why not. She said we’re looking at the big picture here. You can’t ruin a child raised on violence and starvation by setting a jar of applesauce near his bed.
Too many things had gone wrong today, beginning with Ernest’s forced visit with Melinda at her court-mandated rehabilitation center. Afterward, Ernest walked out holding hands with the caseworker, the laces of his bright white sneakers double-knotted by Sarah Anne, and the sight of the child’s faltering steps caused Jameson’s heart to clench. He flashed on the video he and Sarah Anne had been required to watch on neonatal abstinence syndrome—the shuddering newborns, fish mouths gasping for air, wails of agony that Jameson had to excuse himself from and get to the bathroom, where he let go of the vomit rising to his throat.
When Ernest saw Sarah Anne, he darted and dove upward into her arms. She lifted him to her hip, mouthing, What happened? to the caseworker. Before the woman could answer, Sarah Anne felt Ernest’s diaper and whisked him off to change it. The caseworker took Jameson aside and explained how Melinda had checked her phone nonstop while Ernest stared at her. Neither of them touched or even moved within two feet of each other. Their only real interaction had been Melinda’s waving a plastic truck in his direction as an invitation to play.
“It’s not as if anyone ever played with her as a child, you understand,” the caseworker said. “She’s a product of the system too, and it failed her in unspeakable ways.”
Unspeakable ways.
Jameson wondered why she insisted on talking like this. He found it distracting, a performance of some kind.
They’d understood that Melinda wanted to hold on to Ernest, however threadbare the tie would turn out to be. It was her way of gaining control over a system that had abused her, and she’d said as much in the court filings. You can take him, but you can’t have him. Even so, they’d hoped that as time went by she would change her mind and let them adopt, something Sarah Anne began suggesting within weeks of bringing the boy home. Two months earlier, on the night they heard that Ernest’s father had died from an overdose, Sarah Anne woke from a dream in which Melinda had died too—at Sarah Anne’s feet—clawing her ankles, convulsing across the floor. “It was horrible, Jay,” Sarah Anne said. She called him Jay when she was saying one thing and meaning another. “It was too real.”
He’d held her hand in the dark while she held a fist to her heart, but he couldn’t find a single set of words to comfort her. He couldn’t find an honest way around the fact that Melinda’s death would be the most straightforward solution to adoption, and he knew Sarah Anne was thinking the same. In three months the state could force Melinda to give up her rights. Ernest would have been living with Jameson and Sarah Anne for well over a year by then. But what if the state didn’t enforce it? What if Melinda convinced them she was rehabilitated and prepared to be a mother? What if she truly was?
Jameson worried daily about Sarah Anne and Ernest in equal measure. He also liked to imagine a happy ending to this story. But which story would that turn out to be? The one where a child returns to his mother after more than a year away? He would give his own life if it meant Nate and Piper would be returned to their mother.
He couldn’t remember the caseworker’s name, and didn’t feel right about asking so long after the fact, especially when she kept calling him Jameson. She smiled often, had certainly worn braces as a kid, though her appearance was plain, so nondescript that the pink, satiny gloss on her lips came across as a poorly chosen add-on that didn’t go with her coloring and clothes. He thought of her as a house he was hired to renovate. It wasn’t right, and he knew it wasn’t right. But his life’s work was to return things to the way they were meant to be, to the original state in which they’d shined, and this girl, this young woman, was simply out of sorts. She couldn’t have graduated from college more than a year ago, and spoke like a pedagogue, her exaggerated manner like someone who’d recently become acquainted with the jargon and big ideas of her field. New concepts were still unfolding in her brain, and Jameson thought how far removed he was from such a thing, how nothing could surprise him, nothing could take a sudden turn toward discovery, ever again.
This caseworker was the third assigned to Ernest in less than a year, and she explained to Jameson how things got a little hairy when Ernest showed no interest in the truck. Melinda had tossed it back into the toy box, and the startling crack of plastic hitting plastic made his bottom lip quiver, and for the final few minutes he chewed the blue satin edge of his blanket. Melinda didn’t look at him after that. She got up to leave, saying “OK, kid. OK, little dude. You keep being cute,” and Ernest didn’t exactly cry. “He roared,” the caseworker said. “Like some vicious howl of a protest.”
Jameson glanced toward the bathroom door. Ernest didn’t like trucks. He liked a Wiffle ball he could wear on his fingers. He liked to stand back and cover his ears while Jameson ran his tools, smiling through his fear of loud noises. The only thing he ever threw were rocks in the creek behind their house.
“Could you hear it in the waiting room?” she asked.
Jameson crossed his arms. “No,” he said. “No, we couldn’t,” though his ears were not what they used to be after years of using power tools. The way she was describing the scene, he imagined an unleashing, a child possessed, curtains sucked outward through windows, a water glass shattered on a table. She demonstrated how Melinda had cupped her ears against the screaming, saying “Jesus!” on her way out the door.
The image of that small boy in that room under those circumstances, without Jameson or Sarah Anne to comfort him, caused a helplessness to rise and snag in Jameson’s throat. They were the only true caretakers Ernest had ever known, and they had brought him here for this. Left him in there while his lip quivered and he cried like the day he was born, a cry so awful they should have been able to hear it in the waiting room but did not.
Jameson filled his chest with air, drawing as hard as he could manage without appearing troubled. It was important to appear untroubled. Their fate rested in the hands of this young woman who could not have been much older than Melinda, and their lives already so fragile and dangling, held together as loosely as a mobile shifting at the slightest touch. This person, with the scratch of a pen, had the power to send the entirety of their days swinging.
“I think she’s been calling us and hanging up,” he said.
The caseworker narrowed her eyes. “Melinda?”
Jameson nodded at his feet.
“How do you know it’s her?”
“We don’t.”
“OK.”
Jameson should have kept his mouth shut.
“I can ask her about it if you like,” the woman said.
“No. Forget it. We’ve got enough . . . we just want to focus on Ernest.”
After a moment she went on to tell him she would not recommend returning Ernest to his mother’s custody. Not yet. Then she reminded him that the courts do shoot for that, for rehabilitating the birth parents. The state’s objective was to safely extract the children from the system and return them to their homes. She made air quotes around the word homes. It was impossible to tell whose side she was on, if anyone’s. Extract, like ticks, Jameson thought, like parasites, though he tried to cut her some slack. Maybe she was just trying out the word.
Sarah Anne exited the bathroom looking as stunned and voiceless as Ernest. The caseworker walked them out. She took hold of Jameson’s arm in the parking lot and faced him. “This is a great thing you two are doing here,” she said. “I mean, after all you’ve been through.” She sighed. “I really admire you.”
“Thank you for your time today,” Jameson said, hoping she was trying to be kind. Surely her heart was in the right place. He stepped away to open the car door for Sarah Anne, then he took Ernest and strapped him into his seat in the back.
When Jameson started the engine, the boy’s eyes appeared larger than usual in the rearview mirror, vacant and ancient, his body limp as if resigned to some terrible, inevitable fate.
“Why so serious, Ernest?” Jameson whispered to Sarah Anne, and his attempt at humor was met with a shake of her head at her window. By the time they pulled out onto the road, Sarah Anne blindly reached for Jameson’s hand and gave it a squeeze.