I knew Luca for months before he ever mentioned his foster mom.
Over dinner once, telling a story about carving pumpkins for Halloween, he said, “My mom—foster mom—one year she got a pumpkin so big she couldn’t lift it herself, so we were trying to carry it together, but she tripped and we dropped it off the back porch. Splat!” He laughed hard, not self-conscious of the fact that it wasn’t as funny to someone who hadn’t been there.
I liked seeing him lost in a good memory. I was curious, but he didn’t explain further and I wasn’t sure if it was more polite to ask or take it in stride. I’d never met someone in foster care before. At least not that I knew of.
Months later, in bed—we’d had beers—he snuggled into me and shared the story of how his mother came across the border to give birth so he could be American. He didn’t call her his birth mother. She was still his mother. His foster mom was mom. “My mother, my mother, she came here to have me. Left her whole family for me, and she worked so hard. She scrubbed floors in office buildings at night while all the workers were home, and cleaned houses during the day while all the people were at work. She slept twice a day. Two short naps, and she made sure we always ate dinner together.” I could hear his heartbeat. Too loud. Too fast.
“When my mother worked,” he said, “I stayed with a lady in our building who took care of a couple of kids like me. We called her Titi, but she wasn’t really my aunt. She was okay. She wasn’t nice. She wasn’t mean. And then my mother would rush in with a flood of kisses and all her perfume and I’d feel so much better, you know? So much better.” He threaded his fingers between mine and pulled my arm across his body. “My mother had a broken taillight. She got stopped by a cop on her way home from cleaning offices.”
He told me like he was repeating a well-worn story, the same way I could calmly report the details of my father’s death if I had to. I squeezed his hand, desperately hoping something had saved her, even though I knew if it had, Luca wouldn’t have a foster mom.
“Her license was Mexican,” Luca said. “Expired. She was too scared to cross the border to renew it, worried she wouldn’t get us back here.” He took a deep breath, ragged. “She spent a month in a detention center. Titi said she couldn’t keep me, so a social worker picked me up at school and took me to my foster mom’s house. Carla had other kids like me. American kids who didn’t have American parents. She spent days on the phone trying to find my mother. They don’t tell you things. You have to fight for answers. I was eleven. I didn’t know how to fight.” His tears soaked through my sweater, pooling at my collarbone.
“Have you—Is your mother okay?” I asked, wrapping my arm around him tighter.
“They sent her to Mexico eventually. But we didn’t know if she was okay for months. I was so scared. At least when she got to Mexico, we could talk again. She sent phone cards in the mail. She’d sing me songs and tell stories and make me promise that I wouldn’t forget how to speak Spanish so I would always be able to call her on Sundays. I still call. Every week. But she can’t visit me. And she won’t let me go to Durango. She says if it was safe, we would have stayed there.”
“I’m so sorry,” I said. “I’m so sorry that happened to you.”
“I’m not like the other kids here,” he said. “It’s all so heavy in my heart.”
I hugged him hard. I felt like we belonged together.