To the End of June : The Intimate Life of American Foster Care (9780547999531) (38 page)

 

And still. As Kecia Pittman lamented from prison, the most important thing a family can do for a foster child is “stay.” That's what the Greens were doing—with Tonya, with Fatimah, and when she wants it, with Chanel.

Several months after I met with Fatimah to pick up the art, Fatimah's mom relapsed. Fatimah's sister, whom Fatimah had tried so valiantly to protect, was sent into foster care. So Fatimah reluctantly moved back to the Greens'; she had nowhere else to go.

“The way I see it now, I'm a major breadwinner there,” Fatimah told me, proudly jutting out her chin. We were walking around Times Square in the sticky summer heat, searching for some lotion; she was wearing jean shorts and wedge heels, and she worried that her calves looked ashy. “I just go there to sleep. I don't talk to anyone; I don't even eat their food. And they're getting money for me until I'm twenty-one.”

Unlike Dominique, Fatimah knew that if she needed it, she'd always have a place to sleep even after her twenty-first birthday—even if she didn't particularly like it. The house on DeKalb, if not a haven, had become a reset button. It was a familiar, steady place where one could still the chaos from the outside world a bit, and then move on.

That's the way Tonya saw it too. When Tonya was released from the jail in Pennsylvania, she called the Greens.

“I only got to make one call from jail, and I got the voice mail,” Tonya said. “I didn't know if they'd take me back, but I had no one else to call.”

I met Tonya outside of Mercy College on 35th Street where she was taking classes; remarkably, once Tonya had readjusted to life on DeKalb after her release, she finished up her final credits in high school and enrolled in college. The eleven universities that had accepted her the prior year (including the two that had dangled scholarships) had rescinded their offers when she didn't complete high school on time. So Tonya was restricted to a more local, and less prestigious, school.

Like Fatimah, Tonya now viewed the Greens' place as somewhere to rest her head; she said she went there now only to study and to sleep, and she planned to get out as soon as she could. She was waiting for her agency to set her up with Section 8 housing.

“I'll be like my mom,” she told me, her eyes sparkling. “My mom's lived in the Bronx for twenty, thirty years and she only pays $150 a month for a two-bedroom; welfare pays the rest. The same thing will happen to me because I'm a foster kid and I'm at the top of the waiting list.”

Tonya said she was thankful she was never granted the free SILP apartment that she had once wanted so desperately. In retrospect, she felt such freedom would have provided her with even more poor choices than those she made from the Greens'. “I'm glad I didn't go to SILP because that totally messed Chanel up,” Tonya said. “She's twenty-one and she doesn't have a high school diploma. She doesn't have a job. She doesn't have nothing.”

I talked with Chanel on the phone early in 2010; she was living in a studio apartment in Red Hook, Brooklyn, and working full-time stocking clothes in the basement of an H&M. She said she moved out of SILP because the place was too hectic; her roommates were always partying and bringing in strangers. She felt safer on her own without any agency supervision. As for the Greens, Chanel would only say, “I don't talk to them anymore.” We made a few plans to meet up, but one time she was too hung-over, and once she simply didn't show. Eventually, she stopped returning my calls.

Tonya held up her right hand to show me the chipped nail on her forefinger. “That's from me slamming Chanel's head to the wall,” Tonya said, grinning. Apparently, Chanel had been coming by the Greens' every now and then, when she got lonely at her studio apartment. And, according to Tonya, she was “borrowing” clothes. So Tonya beat her up.

I was startled; I remembered Tonya talking about her addiction to fighting, and about how she never felt remorse. But she and Chanel had been so close; her Facebook page was crammed with pictures of the two of them at parties, riding in cars, hamming it up in front of the bathroom mirror.

Not anymore, Tonya said. She hated Chanel. She hated Fatimah too. The sisters may have been floating back into each other's physical orbit, but they were intentionally spinning out of sync. Four thousand square feet wasn't enough space to absorb all the resentment and rage; they looked at one another and saw themselves. The reflection that was once a comfort was now too predictive and frightening.

“Fatimah's not in college,” Tonya said with disdain. “She's nineteen and she didn't even finish high school.”

She and Fatimah had gotten into an argument some months back, Tonya said, about a lie and a boy, and they hadn't spoken since. Tonya didn't care about Fatimah anymore, and that was it. We had left the college and were strolling around Times Square at night, where Fatimah also liked to hang out. Tonya's bravado seemed thin to me, so I asked her what, if anything, she was afraid of.

“That I'll backslide,” she answered, her silver eye shadow glittering from the bright lights overhead. Tourists with backpacks and cameras shoved past us but Tonya stood still. “That I'll stop doing what I have to do. That I'll just decide one day to stop going to school.”

Fatimah planned to go back to school, but like Tonya and Chanel and even Dominique, she had downsized her dreams. Part of this was the slow creep of realism that came with growing up, but depression played a role too. Fatimah acknowledged that living with the Greens made returning to school seem more attainable, but living there was also hard: the place represented so many hopes gone wrong. Fatimah had given up on writing her book. She had also decided to abandon the idea of journalism, and her magazine about families all over the world.

“I used to want to be a journalist, but why, what's the point? What's the point now of anything? I just want to get out of here,” Fatimah said, gesturing around at the rush-hour taxis and crowded sidewalk. “Maybe I'll move to Philly. Besides, why do something where I can leave my mark on the world? That used to be important to me. But now, if I can just get some kind of job, take care of me, take care of my kid, then die, that's enough.”

Only Tonya, who had had her college circumscribed but not her vision, held tight to her original plan of becoming a psychiatrist. But there was a parallel reality living alongside the girl with the Dora the Explorer pillows and the college schedule and the house she could live in even past her graduation from foster care. There was still a girl who lived online, who went by the name of “Chocolate Princess.” This Tonya was tough: she posted clip after clip of people beating each other up at parties and in parks, followed by her own LMAOs and biting remarks. I asked Tonya if she'd ever go back to jail, and she wouldn't meet my eyes. “Not right away,” she said. “Who knows what the future holds?”

15

O
NLY DOMINIQUE, THE GREEN
girl who had stayed the shortest and severed her ties most acutely, couldn't go back. Dominique believed her biological mother was dead, she had crossed adoption off her list of goals, and she had turned twenty years old in 2010. Dominique had one year left of free meals, a weekly allowance, and a social worker to call upon before she would be set free to her dreams of a Connecticut wedding on the beach with no husband. She had her part-time job at the Walk Shop, which would never cover rent and living expenses in New York City, and she had a few very good friends—mostly kids like her, in similar predicaments. That summer, Dominique had added a new tattoo to her wrist, opposite the butterfly. It read, simply, “Have faith.”

I was waiting for Dominique at an iHop in Queens when I heard the sirens. We had planned to have a late breakfast on a hot summer day; Dominique had been craving pancakes. She was still living with the elderly foster mom, and her house was on the last stop on the F line, where apartment buildings give way to single-family homes. The iHop is on a busy boulevard across the street from Trinidad Rotis and Disha Fashion, where you can buy saris and bridal
lenghas
, but inside the pancake chain where Dominique kept me waiting, I could have been in Detroit or Oakland or any city anywhere. All iHops look the same.

Some of the diners had rushed out the front door when the sirens got louder, and since Dominique still hadn't shown up, I followed them outside. A crowd had gathered in the middle of Hillside Avenue, where a silver Toyota was angled in the wrong direction. A woman was lying still in the street, and paramedics were pushing people aside to get to her. A brown moccasin was flung about a hundred feet away. I recognized that moccasin.

“Dominique!?” I shouted, as the paramedics strapped her to the orange board destined for the ambulance. She moaned; she was conscious. I didn't see any blood, but as the medics lifted her carefully aboard, she mumbled about the pain in her arm.

Apparently, the driver of the Toyota had made an illegal left turn across a double yellow line, when she hit Dominique crossing the street. A few pedestrians had seen the accident and were eagerly explaining the details to a cop, who was also trying to extract Dominique's age and address from her at the back of the ambulance. Dominique could only whisper, and her voice was muffled by an oxygen mask. She reached for my hand with her good arm, the one with the faith tattoo.

“I got hit from the side, my hip,” she mumbled, the clear plastic mask fogging up with her breath. I squatted next to her and repeated her words for the cop. “I fell against the car, then on the ground, on my arm. My arm really hurts.”

Nobody asked who I was, but the medics assumed I was along for the ride, as one gently pressed me back into a seat in the ambulance and snapped a seat belt across my chest. The doors slammed shut and the sirens were surprisingly quiet from inside the cabin. I smiled at Dominique, who suddenly let out a loud scream and yanked the oxygen mask from her face. She saw the scissors before I did.

“We have to do this, ma'am,” the paramedic said, calmly snipping the seam to Dominique's jean shorts. “We're just looking to see if you're hurt.”

If Dominique hadn't been strapped down, she would have jumped right off the gurney. Another medic had replaced the mask to cover her mouth and nose, but Dominique's eyes were bulging and wild.

“It's OK, they're not going to hurt you,” I murmured, squeezing her hand as Dominique thrashed back and forth.

The medic with the scissors told her to stay calm as he sliced her T-shirt and cut through the center of her bra. My fingers buckled in Dominique's panicked grip, but she was quiet as both men palpated her belly, listened to her heart, and checked her skin for abrasions. “That was a $40 bra,” she finally whispered when it was over.

 

I had scooped up Dominique's cell phone, which had also been thrown to the far side of the street. After Dominique had been rushed through the back of Jamaica Hospital, I flipped through her contact list to call her foster mom.

I reached her on the third ring and told her, as evenly as I could and with a preface that Dominique was basically fine, that there had been an accident. Dominique had been hit by a car.

“Call the agency! Call the agency!” shouted the woman at the other end. This was not the answer I expected, so I explained the incident more thoroughly. I said the car had been going slowly, Dominique was conscious, and so on.

“Call the agency!”

“OK,” I answered. “But she'll need someone here with her. They cut her clothes and—”

“I can't come there!” the foster mom interrupted. “I'm in Manhattan. Call the agency.”

My stomach knotted and dropped as the subtext of her words hit me full on. She didn't care to know what had happened to Dominique. She just wanted to pass on the responsibility.

I spoke slowly, realizing I was going to have to start issuing commands. “We're at the emergency room of Jamaica Hospital in Queens. Dominique is going to need some clothes to leave here, so—”

Again, the woman interrupted. “I'm all the way in Manhattan. Call the agency. They should have some clothes.”

I said I would give her my number so she could call to find out how Dominique was.

“I don't have anything to write it down with. Call the agency.” And she hung up.

Sadness folded through my body and I slumped in my chair alongside all the other tired people in the waiting room. After Dominique's fifteen-year tenure in foster care, this is what it could offer her: a final stop with a “grandmotherly type” who wouldn't come to the hospital.

I called her caseworker. I'd called her before, several times actually, whenever Dominique had fallen off my radar or changed her phone number or lost her phone (which was fairly often), to find out where Dominique was living and how she was faring. I had gotten only the caseworker's voice mail, and she had never once returned my calls. This time, though, perhaps because there had been an accident, she called back in ten minutes.

But the caseworker couldn't come to the hospital either; she was working in Harlem and she didn't have time. She'd send a colleague who was in the neighborhood and who could bring Dominique some clothes. I knew Dominique wouldn't be happy in a gown that flapped open in the back, and the caseworker agreed; her colleague could arrive in ten minutes.

I waited four hours. I couldn't in good conscience leave Dominique alone, sad and scared in the ambulance drop-off area, where she lay sequestered in a bed next to eight other patients, one of whom was visibly pregnant with bandages wrapped around both wrists. It was crowded and chaotic in that room, with patients groaning in pain or yelling for water; every time I tried to get information about Dominique's case, someone in scrubs would tell me he wasn't her doctor and no, he didn't know who was. All Dominique and I could gather was the obvious physical evidence: she had been x-rayed and catheterized, and she had an IV dripping fluids into her arm. We figured nothing was broken or she would have been set up with a cast by now, but we couldn't tell for sure.