“I see two people trying very hard, two people who are nearing the end of their resources.” Frank and Evelyn stare at her. “We’re going to offer you some support services. Ways to make this whole thing a bit easier, so you’re not”—she glances around at the debris of their house—“struggling so much. And we’ll do a follow-up home visit. Just to see how you’re getting on.”
“Do we have to?” Frank asks. “Do we have to use the services? Do you have to come back?”
“Don’t you want the help?” I ask, my eyes drilling into his.
He shrugs. So does his wife.
Minerva smiles like we’ve all just agreed on a fabulous business deal. “Great. So we’ll head out now, but we’ll be in touch soon, once we organize some supports. You’re doing very well. We’ll just help you do a bit of a cleanup of Buster and … your home. And no more leaving him alone in the car.”
“All right,” Evelyn says. “All right already.”
Minerva gets up. Is that it? She’s the senior worker here. Why is she not doing more of an inspection? Are we really going to leave the child in this filth?
Slowly I stand. “Could I just use the bathroom?” I ask. “You can lead me there. I won’t go poking around.”
Evelyn sighs. “I’ll take her.”
Buster grips her neck as she stands. He’s entirely devoid of language, a red flag in one-year-olds. We move down a skinny hallway toward the bathroom, Evelyn behind me. When I turn to look at her, her eyes are beady and granite black. In a flash, I’m back in my dream, those fingernails behind me, about to grab. Will she pull me to the ground like Ruth does? I swallow hard, and we pass a bedroom that must be Buster’s. Quickly I glance in. There’s no furniture at all in the room apart from a standing bassinet. One stuffy lies on the floor—a blue bunny, the ears so sucked and slimy with grime that the fur looks like it’s been pulled through an engine.
“Bathroom’s this one.” Evelyn tugs at my jacket, and I jump. “Push harder,” she says, doing so for me.
I go in and close the door behind me, moving a heavy black garbage bag away with my leg. There’s no shower curtain, no soap. I breathe deeply with my eyes closed for a few seconds because my sister is everywhere.
There’s a white bathroom cabinet over the sink, and I pull open the smudged front of it, rattling among lidless Tylenol bottles and brown-tinged Q-tips for some clear evidence of a drug habit. There’s nothing. They’re hiding it elsewhere. Goddamn it, I think.
I flush the toilet, or try to, my jacket sleeve low over my fingers. Back out in the corridor, Evelyn is waiting for me, bouncing her son. We walk in silence to the door, where Minerva is standing with Frank.
“All set?” Minerva asks. She’s working herself up to a chipper goodbye and makes another attempt to hand over her business card. “So we’ll be in touch. The future is bright. Don’t worry: we’ll work on all of this as a team.”
Neither of the Floyds take her card. She sets it on the counter.
“Please call if you need immediate help or assistance.” Minerva waves as she backs away down the porch steps.
We leave them both there in the doorway, Buster obscured by the sinewy arms of his mom.
In the car, Minerva turns to me. “That went well.” She snatches at levers on each side of the steering wheel, trying to find the left signal.
“What?”
“That whole visit. Didn’t you think? They’re doing so much better. I feel we can help them.”
She’s out of her mind. If she thinks Buster is safe in that environment, she’s nothing but another risk factor in his life. “Minerva, their house was awful. That smell?”
“What smell?” She turns the car around, making traffic slow as she swerves into the right-hand lane.
“Like old beer. Like grain at harvest.” I shudder.
“Haven’t you gotten used to that yet?” she asks.
“No, and I don’t want to. How are you okay with the situation that child is in? There were definite signs of neglect.”
“Be careful with that term,” she says quickly. “Just because the Floyds are struggling doesn’t mean they don’t love their son, or can’t look after him. They need some scaffolds around them.”
I find my fingers clenching and jam them under my thighs. Minerva might have more years on the job than I do, but in all that time she hasn’t figured out that child protection is an oxymoron. Even when we save kids or remove them, workers like her throw them back into the fray. Safe enough is her motto, but it isn’t mine. We drive too fast in silence.
After a while, I can’t help myself. “They don’t even change his diapers!” I say. “I bet he has welts all over his backside if we’d bothered to look.” I know I sound petulant, but I don’t care. Because I’m the one doing my job properly. I’m trying to protect a child.
“You know the rules. There were no grounds for removal, Alex. They weren’t high on drugs. Which, incidentally, I’m very proud about. And there were no signs of abuse. They just seem overwhelmed.” Her hands whiten at the knuckle where she grips the steering wheel. “Loving someone and protecting them aren’t always the same thing.”
Enabler. She wills herself to see the best in people because she can’t handle conflict. And she won’t admit the impotence that we real child protection workers feel when we have to obey the fucking “rules”—which serve no one, especially not the children whose needs aren’t being met. She sets the bar so low and refuses to see it. I stare out the window and say nothing.
The rest of day passes at the steady pace of paperwork and doleful phone calls. I have more than twenty files on my caseload, some of them reported incidents, others active investigations. That’s a whole crowd of children I’m desperately trying to save. As I sift through the voice mails left on my machine—most of them from bio parents, a lot of them incoherent or hateful—I think about all the gates I’m guarding for these kids and how none of them really know it’s me.
By four o’clock, I’m happy to start the walk home to the loft. When I step inside the apartment, I see Chase standing in boxers and a yellow shirt with the collar up, dicing tomatoes. He turns when he hears me.
“Hey, beautiful,” he says, the paring knife still in his hand. In the living room the baseball game is on, scores from around the league zooming across the ticker. “Everything okay?”
He always asks me that. But how can everything be okay? To be fair, he hasn’t seen what I’ve seen today. He doesn’t know what I know. The bulge of Buster’s diaper. The press of his small face into couch cushions. The utter apathy of his parents. Chase’s world is much brighter than that. It’s a good thing. And his brightness buoys me. It’s what I love most about him.
I smile. “Most things are fine.”
“Tough day?” He rinses his hands and then grabs me a wineglass from the cupboard, fetches a chilled bottle of white from the fridge. “I don’t know how you do it. You could have gotten a job in a coffee shop, you know. Just deal with caffeinating people all day.”
I laugh a little every time he makes suggestions like this, although I’m not sure he’s actually joking.