Finding Me (8 page)

S
EVERAL
DAYS
LATER
I walked for nearly three hours to get to a court hearing. I was willing to walk any distance to see about getting Joey back. The judge yelled at me when I arrived fifteen minutes behind schedule. “It counts against you every time you’re late,” she barked.

I could tell there wasn’t much use in explaining that I had no car. No support. No money. No job. No desire to even keep breathing if I couldn’t get my son back. For the most part I felt numb, like someone had sliced me directly through the heart.

In that hearing and over the next several appointments with social service workers I learned what I would have to do to again be considered a “fit mother”: I’d have to show that I could provide a safe and secure home for my son on my own. I’d also have visitation rights, for which I’d need to show up promptly. A case worker would need to be present at all these visits, which were scheduled for once every couple of weeks.

I moved out of my mother’s house and into one of the bedrooms at my cousin Lisa’s place. When I was small, I didn’t even know Lisa; my parents never introduced us. But when I was around sixteen, she finally came over to our house one day, and I thought she was cool and very sweet. She lived on Walton Avenue in Tremont, and she was willing to let me rent one of her rooms for just $300 a month. Her place was pretty close to where my mother and Carlos lived, but as far as I was concerned, it was worlds apart. At least I was safe. I didn’t really even have the money to pay Lisa for the place: I still wasn’t working. But I knew I had to do whatever it took to get away from the violent surroundings that had led to me losing Joey.
I’ll take the place with Lisa and worry later about how to pay for it
, I thought. So I moved in.

Lisa, who is about ten years older than me, did her best to make me feel at home. After I’d return from job searching, she’d sometimes cook me up one of those packets of ramen noodles. She knew how depressed and alone I felt, so she asked some of our other relatives who lived nearby to introduce me around the neighborhood. One of our much younger cousins, Deanna, lived within a few blocks. On an afternoon in late June of 2002, when Deanna and I were chilling out on my front stoop, she introduced me to one of her classmates.

“Michelle, this is my girl, Emily—Emily Castro,” she said. Emily nodded at me in acknowledgment. Like Deanna, Emily was around fourteen. She had dark hair and a pretty smile, and over the next several weeks she came by our place a lot. She lived just a couple of blocks away with her mother, she told me. She was seven years younger than me (although most people thought I was twelve, though I was now twenty-one), but that didn’t bug me at all. She was such a friendly kid. Plus, back when I was in school, I’d gotten used to being around kids who were much younger than me because I’d fallen so far behind. And especially on those afternoons when I came home feeling very discouraged about my job search, kicking it with Emily and Deanna was one way to take my mind off of everything.

A little at a time, I got to know Emily. She told me that her parents weren’t together but that she still saw her father at his house on Seymour.

“That’s cool,” I said.

Emily then pulled her cell from her pocket and showed me a photo of him. She mentioned that he was named Ariel, and he had a job as a bus driver. In the photo Emily’s father wore a smile, one I thought was similar to hers. He had thick, dark, wavy hair, a moustache, and a goatee. He did look a little disheveled in the photo—his hair kind of stuck out from his head—but I thought that was okay.

“That’s great that you still get to hang out with him,” I said. Emily nodded and slipped the phone back into her purse.

Another time when Emily was with me and my cousin, she called her father on her cell and put him on speaker phone. She told him she would be ready at six. The plan was for her dad to swing by her mother’s and pick her up in his truck.

“Okay,” her father said in a relaxed tone of voice. “I’ll be there at six.”

Emily never actually introduced me to “AC,” as she called him, in person, yet I felt like I kind of knew him. Several times that summer I heard the two chatting on the cell. They’d goof around with each other on loudspeaker. Her dad would talk to her in this silly hillbilly voice that he knew how to put on. He seemed like a pretty nice guy.

M
Y
FIRST
VISIT
with Joey was around Fourth of July weekend, 2002, about a month after he was placed with a foster care family. The social worker had arranged to meet at a park for our one-hour visit.

“Mommy, Mommy!” he called out when I walked across the field. I swept Joey into my arms and hugged him so hard, I almost squeezed out all his breath.

“Oh, baby!” I said. I knew my visit with Joey would be too short, so for every single minute of our time together, I didn’t take my eyes off of him.

On the little playground Joey and I slid down together on the kiddie slide—me in the back, with him in the front. “Wheee!” I said, holding up Joey’s arms as we went down. In between our laughter, we talked.

“Are you okay, huggy bear?” I asked, a lump in my throat.

“I miss you!” Joey said. A moment later I looked up to notice the social services worker observing us closely from the other side of the playground. It felt weird to have someone watching me play with my own child, but I was determined to ignore her and just focus on my son.

When the hour was up, I had to say good-bye. It took everything I had not to grab my baby up in my arms and run down the street with him. “I don’t wanna go back there. I wanna go home with you,” he said.

“I know, sweetie,” I said, stroking his hair, “but you can’t stay with me right now. We’ll get back together soon.”

He clung to my leg with all his might. “No! Don’t go!” he cried.

I felt like I was reliving that awful time in the hospital playroom. “I’ll see you again next time, baby,” I comforted him.

The social worker had to pull him off my leg and drag him, kicking and screaming, back to her car. As she put him into his car seat, I heard him wailing. Feeling like my heart was breaking in two, I stayed and watched until the car had disappeared down the street.

In mid-July I had to miss a scheduled visit with Joey. That hurt me, because I knew the court system would hold it against me. It would lengthen the time it would take for me to prove that I should have Joey returned to my care. But because I couldn’t always find a ride and I had no car or driver’s license, I had to walk. When Joey was first placed in the foster care system, he didn’t yet have a permanent family, so he was moved around from home to home. That meant a meeting spot would sometimes be hours away by foot. I did my best to get there and be on time, but on the day I had to miss, it just wasn’t possible.

T
HE
REST
OF
J
ULY
felt like one big, long, hot blur to me—a Sunday felt no different from a Tuesday, Wednesday, or Thursday. All I thought about was when I could next see Joey and how we could eventually be reunited. I spent every waking moment trying to do anything I could to make that possible.

For starters, I needed to find a job. In the mornings around eight I strapped on my sandals and set out on foot to put in more applications; in the late afternoons I hung out on the porch with Emily and Deanna. Sometimes Lisa and I would walk down to the convenience store and buy a beer to pass between us. Back indoors, when I could get a seat directly in front of the fan, I did. To make things even worse, my glasses fell off my face and got broken one day when I was walking on the street. Because I was very nearsighted, I was having to squint as I went around town applying for jobs. Combined with the searing heat, my blurry vision made me feel disoriented. And I definitely couldn’t afford to buy a new pair of glasses. I’d just have to make do.

8
______________

Vanished

A
UGUST
23, 2002, at 2:30—that’s the day I was scheduled for my next appointment with social services about the process of getting Joey back and preparing for the court hearing set for August 29. The case workers had sent me an address, but I had absolutely no clue how to get there. I was counting on someone in my family to take me, so I turned down the ride social services had offered to me. I was relieved I had a way to get there—until my family member called the following morning to tell me they couldn’t give me a lift after all. I automatically realized two things: I would probably get lost, and because I’d be walking, I was almost certain to be late.
Oh, God
.

I found out that I didn’t have a ride at 11 a.m., which at least left me with some time to pull together a plan. “I’m pretty sure that address is downtown,” she had told me. I’d need to give myself no less than one and a half to two hours to walk there from my neighborhood, plus time to find the place. I showered, threw on some knee-length jean shorts, a plain white T-shirt, and my most comfortable pair of sandals. I then shoveled down a toaster pastry.

“Will you come with me?” I asked Deanna. For whatever reason, she’d stayed home from school that day and then walked over to our place.

“Sure,” she said, pulling on her sneakers. I put my brown swing pack across my body and stuffed the paper with the appointment details into its front zip pocket. At noon we headed out.

Under the hot sun we walked for about an hour before we reached the downtown area, but we couldn’t locate the address. We asked everyone from a barber shop owner to a guy in a deli. Everyone just shrugged and said, “I have no idea where that is.”

A little after 1 p.m. I decided I’d better stop and call the social services office. I knew I needed to let someone know I might be late. I fished out the paper from my purse, squinted at a number at the bottom of it, and then slid a quarter into the pay phone. A gruff-sounding receptionist answered.

“I don’t know where the place is,” I told her, “and I’m walking …”

The woman cut me off. “Then you should’ve taken the ride we offered you!” she said.

“But I didn’t think I needed a ride. A family member was supposed to drive me there,” I explained. Then before I could ask her for detailed directions—
click
. I knew that being late would be held against me. At that point, though, I really didn’t know what else to try. I was already feeling dehydrated from the heat. Circles of sweat had formed on my white T-shirt beneath my armpits. I was hungry and wiped out. And I was also furious with myself that I’d probably have to miss another appointment.
I should’ve taken the ride offered by social services. I should’ve figured out where the address was the night before
.

“Let’s just turn back toward home,” I said to Deanna. Her face was red and dripping sweat.

“Are you sure?” she said. “Maybe we can still find it.”

“Let’s just start walking again and ask some more people along the way,” I suggested.

That’s exactly what we did, but along our route not a single person could even halfway tell us where we should go. As we were walking past a laundromat, I looked through the glass window and noticed a clock up on the wall. It read 1:18 p.m. There wasn’t much time left. I decided I should try calling the office again.