Untethered Page 6

  “I can just take them to her,” Allie said, approaching the doorway. “We wanted to tell her about—”

  “Allie,” Char hissed, again unintentionally. She jiggled her hand for the clothes, not trusting herself with more words. Allie drew her head back, questioning, and Char shook her hand again.

  “Ooookaaaaay,” Allie said. She handed over the outfits and looked from Char to the bedroom doorway and back to Char, waiting for an explanation.

  Char pointed down the stairs. Allie opened her mouth, but Sydney tugged her shirt and said, “Let’s go put away all the crap we left on the basement floor.”

  Allie shot Char a final confused look before turning back to the staircase, and Char, shaking now with a mixture of shock and rage and desperation, stepped into the bedroom to face the badly abused little girl.

  Eight

  Morgan was still in the bathroom, with the door closed.

  “Morgan?” Char said. “Can we talk?”

  “I can’t,” Morgan said.

  Char looked at the handful of clothes in her hand. “Oh, of course. You need something to change into. I have some things here for you. Could you open the door, so I can hand them—”

  “Can you just leave them on the floor?” Morgan asked.

  “But sweetie, I wanted to ask you about—”

  “Please? Can you leave them?”

  “I just want to understand, so I can be sure you’re safe at home. I can’t let you go back today if I don’t know—”

  “Can you please leave the clothes?” Morgan asked.

  “Yes,” Char said. “I can.”

  She set the clothes on the floor and backed all the way out of the bedroom, loudly pulling the door closed behind her, to let Morgan know the room was empty. Char eyed the staircase and wondered how she could rejoin the others and chat about nothing while inside, her blood reached its boiling point and then bubbled over; how she would be able, when Sarah Crew came back, to keep from reaching through the doorway and strangling the woman.

  She considered calling the police, so they could greet Sarah and leave Char out of it. Stevie would be with his mother, though, and Char didn’t want to put him through that. Who knew what else he had already witnessed—or suffered himself? She thought about having Colleen take all three girls to her house and ushering Lindy back to her hotel via cab, so Char could be at the house alone when Sarah returned.

  Again, though, she came back to Stevie. He would be worried when he didn’t see his sister. And what could she do, ask him to stay in Bradley’s study with the door closed while Char interrogated his mother? There was no good plan, she decided, other than acting like nothing was wrong now, greeting Sarah nicely when she reappeared, and having the girls entertain Stevie while Char took Sarah aside and let her know she had been discovered. Or her husband had been. Char took a deep breath and started down the stairs.

  In the family room, Lindy and Colleen were chatting nicely, so Char allowed herself a few more minutes to regain her composure. Stealing into the kitchen, she poured a glass of water and sipped it, while silently she rehearsed the questions she would ask Sarah Crew. How could you do this, or allow your husband to do this, to a child? Is Stevie a victim, too, or is it only your daughter? How long has this been going on?

  Hasn’t the little girl already been through enough trauma for one lifetime?

  • • •

  Months earlier, in late October, Sarah told Char about an all-day Saturday assessment the Crews had with Stevie’s specialists in Ann Arbor. They had been waiting for months to get in, and because of a cancellation, it was finally their turn. They would drive down early that morning, spend a long day in a number of different waiting rooms, and drive back late that night. Sarah was thinking up ways to keep her daughter occupied for what would be a long, boring day.

  By then, almost ten weeks into the tutoring program, Allie and Morgan had pledged their undying devotion to each other, and Char and Bradley had been completely taken in by the raspy-voiced ten-year-old whom Allie couldn’t stop talking about. Char and Sarah had become friendly, and Sarah had made it clear how worried she and her husband were about the development of the lovely little boy who always greeted Char with his version of a bone-splitting high five.

  When Char told Sarah that if it would help, the Hawthorns could keep Morgan for the weekend, Sarah seemed to almost melt with relief. With no parents nearby and no room in their budget for sitters, they had been dragging their daughter along to more of Stevie’s appointments than they should have. Despite how much Morgan adored her brother, she was losing her patience with it all.

  Sarah was the one who did the drop-off at Char and Bradley’s house on Friday night. Inside the front door, she tried to gather her daughter in a good-bye hug, but Morgan jumped out of reach, kicked off her shoes, and went tearing upstairs with Allie. Char offered to go up and fetch the girls for a do-over, but Sarah waved her off. Morgan wouldn’t hug her mother if someone paid her, Sarah told Char. And anyway, she had to get going, and there was something she needed to let Char and Bradley know before she left. Could they step outside with her, so their conversation wouldn’t be overheard?

  She wasn’t sure if Morgan had already revealed this to Allie, she told them, but this seemed like a good time to let them know that Morgan and Stevie weren’t actually biological siblings. Stevie was the Crews’ biological son, but they had adopted Morgan a year and a half earlier, when she was a little over eight.

  “I wouldn’t normally say more than that,” Sarah said, “but I noticed that Morgan packed her Lifebook, and I’m guessing she’s going to ask you all to look through it with her.”

  “Lifebook?” Bradley asked.

  It was a foster care system tradition, Sarah explained. Each child was given a scrapbook of sorts to fill with pictures and drawings and anything else they wanted to add, to help them keep track of their personal story. Sarah didn’t want the Hawthorns to be shocked when they saw the contents of Morgan’s Lifebook, or heard her talk about the people whose pictures were in it.

  “She has a single photograph of her mother,” Sarah told them. “But a thousand stories about her. It’s hard to know which ones are true. Honestly, that’s the case for everything else in the book, too. I think some of the people from her past, some of the foster families she’s stayed with, have started to blend together in her memory. Add her overactive imagination, and the stories she can come up with when she looks through that book are . . . unreal. Literally.”

  She didn’t want them to be disturbed by anything Morgan might say. And she wanted to give them a quick recap of the true story, or at least the bits of it that had made it into Morgan’s file and been shared with the Crews, so the Hawthorns wouldn’t be led too far astray by whatever history Morgan might recite. Not that the true history wasn’t dramatic enough.

  As far as Sarah knew, Morgan’s mother had issues with substance abuse and couldn’t take care of her daughter. There was a neighbor, an older woman, who moved into the house next to Morgan’s apartment building when Morgan was three. The woman noticed the little girl spending a lot of time outside, alone, so she started inviting her in.

  After a while, the woman was basically serving as a surrogate parent—she even bought a kitten for Morgan and taught her how to take care of it. When she figured out what was going on with the young girl’s mother, and that it wasn’t likely to change, she decided she had no choice but to call the Department of Human Services.

  Among other things, the neighbor told DHS that the little girl regularly walked several blocks on her own to a gas station, from which she stole small items that her mother might need: coffee, lighters, Tylenol. She would hide it all in the back of a closet in their apartment, so her mom wouldn’t sell any of it, and when they ran out of something and her mother wasn’t up for shopping, Morgan would produce it from her hidden stash.

  Bradley cl
apped his hands together once. “She was stockpiling supplies!” he said. “At the age of three! That’s incredible. What a resourceful little thing!”

  Char looked at him sideways.

  “Well, of course it’s also terribly sad,” he said. “But you’ve got to look at it from all angles, not just the morose ones. So many people—and I’m talking about adults here—shut down when things are dire. And here’s a child, barely out of diapers, doing the opposite—taking charge, taking initiative. It’s beyond impressive.”

  Char flashed an apologetic expression at Sarah. “Forgive my husband, Eternal Optimist, Finder of Silver Linings. And most of all, Champion of Initiative and Innovation. Next, he’s going to tell you she’d make a great engineer.”

  “She’d make a great anything, with an attitude like that,” he said. “Initiative is a key indicator of—”

  “Okay,” Char said, patting his arm. If she didn’t stop him, Sarah would be subject to the kind of minilecture Char and Allie had heard hundreds of times, about how “the key to success in any field, not to mention in life, is having a can-do attitude. Don’t look at a problem and say, ‘I can’t.’ Look at it and ask, ‘How can I?’”

  “I think Sarah wants to finish and get going,” Char told him. “But I promise you can deliver the rest of your speech to me, after she leaves.” She slid her hand into the back pocket of his jeans and angled her body to lean into his. He laughed at himself, pulled his wife closer, and motioned to Sarah that she should continue.

  As Sarah filled in the rest of the story, it was difficult for Char to see it from any angle other than “morose,” despite her husband’s admonition. The state gave Morgan’s mother a list of goals—sober up, find a job, attend parenting classes—and a one-year deadline to meet them. In the meantime, Morgan was removed from her mother’s apartment and placed into emergency foster care.

  Soon she was sent to a longer-term placement, but there were problems in that home, so she was moved again. And again. By the time her mother’s deadline was up, Morgan had lived with four different foster families. Sarah didn’t know why Morgan had been moved so many times. “There can be gaps in the files,” she said.

  Morgan’s mother failed to meet her goals by the deadline. In fact, Sarah said, there was some indication she didn’t really try. She didn’t show up to any scheduled meetings with Morgan’s case workers, and based on notes in the file, she didn’t appear to be particularly concerned about their threats that she might lose her daughter permanently.

  The state sought, and won, termination of her rights, and since no other family could be found, Morgan became available for adoption. For four years, there were no takers, and she was moved to still more foster homes, never staying at one for very long.

  Finally, the Crews, having been moved by a sermon in church about James 1:27 and the call to adopt, found their way to Morgan and offered to be her “forever family.” By then, she was eight, and hadn’t seen her mother in four and a half years. She had changed families so many times she could no longer keep them straight, and had switched schools so often she was two years behind her peers in reading and math.

  It was now eighteen months after her adoption was finalized, and she was still asking Sarah and Dave on a regular basis if they were going to keep her. Though they always said yes, the message hadn’t gotten through. Several times, after she had gotten in trouble, they had found her sitting on her bed, weeping soundlessly, clutching a garbage bag in which she had packed her Lifebook and some clothes.

  “When do I have to go to my new family?” she would ask.

  It wasn’t only the question that broke the Crews’ hearts, Sarah told Char and Bradley, but the fact that Morgan asked it with such resignation, as though she had learned there was no point in arguing about it.

  After Sarah left that Friday night, Morgan, as predicted, offered to show her Lifebook to the Hawthorns. They all squeezed onto the family room couch, Morgan between Allie and Bradley, Char on Bradley’s right. Morgan laid the book on the coffee table, checking first to ensure there was nothing on the glass surface that could hurt the cover.

  “You sure take good care of it,” Allie said. It was an understatement. The child handled the book like it was an ancient scroll.

  Morgan lifted the cover, revealing the first page. “My Story—by Morgan,” someone had printed, and underneath was a photograph of a very young, very underweight Morgan. “Morgan—3” was printed neatly in pen under the picture.

  “My first social worker took that,” Morgan said. “Her name was Cathy. No . . . Cindy.”

  “Wow,” Allie said quietly. She turned away for a moment, inhaled deeply, and turned back. Char reached behind Bradley and patted the teen’s back.

  “I know! I used to be so skinny!” Morgan said, as though it were an amusing thing, and not an indication she hadn’t been properly taken care of. She poked her belly with a finger, making a show of how far in it went. “Now I’m not.”

  “Now you’re perfect,” Allie said.

  “Cindy gave me this book,” Morgan said. “The very first day I met her.” She turned the page. “This is my mom.”

  The photograph, wrinkled and small, showed a young woman reclining in a lawn chair, a cigarette in one hand and a glass in the other. She wore a come-hither expression and a sleeveless dress with a hemline that reached only inches below her hips. Her long, dark hair was twisted into a high, haphazard ponytail. In the bottom right corner was a child of about two, standing, naked except for a diaper.

  The child clutched the metal arm of the chair with one hand while her other reached up toward the woman, whose face was angled away from the baby and toward the photographer. Underneath the picture, someone had printed, “Morgan—2, with mom (Nancy).” Morgan touched the woman’s face, adding another fingerprint to the collection on the photo.

  “Your mom’s name is Nancy,” Allie said. “That’s pretty.”

  “And she’s real pretty,” Morgan said.

  “She sure is,” Allie said, and Char and Bradley murmured their agreement.

  “She tried really hard to get me back,” Morgan said. “She still wants to get me. She probably just needs to save a little more money, and then she can ask the court to send me. Or she might even come and pick me up. I think she should come, because then she could meet Stevie.”

  Allie looked over Morgan’s head to Char and Bradley. Bradley shook his head almost imperceptibly and Char put a finger over her lips. Allie squinted, and her top teeth took hold of her bottom lip. Turning back to Morgan and the book, she said, “Yeah, she’s really pretty, Morgan. Same as you.”

  “She doesn’t have the same voice as me, though,” Morgan said. “Hers isn’t so scratchy.”

  She closed her eyes briefly, and Char wondered if she could call up her mother’s voice. How many memories did you have of life before the age of four? Would Morgan remember being left alone? Walking blocks away from home on her own? Taking things from the gas station, hiding them from her mother, doling them out? Would she remember being taken away?

  Char remembered hearing friends say they would never take a child younger than five to Disney World, because no child that small would ever remember, and it wasn’t worth such an expense for a trip that would be forgotten. She hoped it was true, for Morgan’s sake.

  “I love your voice,” Allie said. “It’s unique.”

  “It’s fun to be a little different,” Bradley added.

  Morgan turned the page without answering, and Char whispered, “Okay,” to her husband and stepdaughter. Morgan’s physique made her seem younger than her actual age, and she had an unrealistic fantasy about a reunion with her mother, but nothing else about her indicated naïveté. They needed to scale down a little on the “You’re! So! Awesome!”

  “Did you draw that?” Char asked, pointing to the page Morgan was waiting to tell them about. It contained
not a photograph, but a child’s drawing of a woman and a cat. Underneath, someone had printed, “Morgan’s neighbor, Mrs. Eagen—and Sunshine, the kitten.”

  “This is Mrs. Eagen,” Morgan said. “And Sunshine,” and again, Char wondered about the memory of a child, and especially one who had gone through so much trauma. Did Morgan really remember the names of the neighbor and the cat, or was she simply reading the caption?

  “I got to feed her every day,” Morgan said. “This really smelly food, out of a can. And sometimes tuna on top. And I cleaned out her litter box. And once, I tried to give her a bath, but she didn’t like that, so I never did it again.”

  “Mrs. Eagen?” Bradley asked, feigning shock.

  Morgan let out a throaty chortle and fell across Bradley’s lap. “Nooooooo! Sunshine!”

  Bradley put a hand on the child’s back, which rose and fell with her laughter. “Ohhhhhh,” he said.

  Char and Allie exchanged pained glances at Bradley’s attempt to be funny while Morgan, still lying across his knees, barked, “Mrs. Eagen!” and broke into another fit of raspy giggles.

  “You two,” Char said.

  “You’re both nuts,” Allie added. “Can we see the rest, Morgan? Or are you going to be laughing for the rest of the night at the world’s lamest comedian?”

  “I like you, Morgan,” Bradley said, tapping her shoulder. “It’s nice to be around someone who appreciates my humor. You should come over every day.”

  Morgan managed to calm herself down, sit upright, and turn to the next page in the book. “This is me and my foster family.” She pointed to a photograph of a family of four, sitting at a picnic table. Morgan stood next to the dad, who had an arm around her. “They were my third family, actually. But I didn’t stay with the first two long enough to get a picture.”

  She told them a few things about the first three families, then turned eight more pages and pointed to eight more foster families—eleven in total, according to her count. She had tales to go with most of the groups of people, but there were a few pictures that didn’t seem to bring back any memories. Some of the pages gave the family members’ names under the photos, while some simply listed “Gray Family—Morgan, 5,” and others listed only a year. In pencil, Morgan had written names beside each person, but Char noticed eraser marks where the girl had corrected herself, sometimes once, sometimes more. Char tried to imagine the reality of not remembering the names of the people you shared a house with in second grade.