Chapter Twenty-Two
“There’s nothing to do about it,” Roz said.
I was in my car in the Hollis lot at ten of eight on Monday morning with the heat running.
“He introduced my six-year-old to his pregnant girlfriend.”
“He did.”
“During his first weekend. Court-ordered. Forty-eight hours in.”
“Yes.”
“And there’s nothing.”
“There is no order restricting who’s present during his parenting time, because nobody’s asked for one and nobody’s going to get one on this record.
” She had something in her mouth. Toast, I think.
“Mrs. Kessler, I understand this is the part where I’m supposed to be outraged with you.
I’ve got a hearing at nine. Do you want outrage or do you want the answer? ”
“The answer.”
“The answer is that it goes in the notebook and it goes in the file and it does not go into a motion, because a motion that says he let my daughter touch his girlfriend’s stomach makes you look exactly like what Calloway is already saying you are.”
“Which is.”
“A woman who can’t tolerate her husband having a life.
” She swallowed. “Write it down. Date, what Ruby said, word for word, no commentary. When Dr. Pruitt asks Ruby about her weekends in six weeks, and she will, that entry is going to be worth something. Right now it’s worth nothing and you’re going to be late for work. ”
The Hollis Center at eight in the morning is bins.
That was my job. Bins.
Room by room, I put out what the day’s schedule needed.
Mirrors wiped, mats sprayed and wiped down, the weighted blankets folded, the sensory gym reset because whatever happened in it Friday afternoon had left it looking like a garage sale.
The good markers counted, because there are eleven of the smelly ones and there were nine.
I did that from eight to ten and then I sat at the front desk and made calls.
Bernie had not been exaggerating about the shoebox. It is an actual shoebox. It has INTAKE written on the end of it in marker and it lives on the shelf under the printer, and it had forty-three slips in it, some of them from August.
Forty-three families who had called that number, told a stranger the worst thing about their child, and then heard nothing back for four months because there was nobody with an hour free to call them.
I called every one of them.
I want to say that I found this humiliating, and for about the first ninety minutes I did. I had run a caseload in that building. Families used to wait until March for me. Now I was a woman with no license taking a bin out of a closet and reading a phone number off a slip.
And then a woman named Tanya Voss picked up on the third ring, and I said the sentence I’d said to two hundred people in my life, which is I’m calling about Wyatt, and she started talking, and inside of forty seconds I knew four things about that kid that were not on the slip.
You can hear it. That’s the whole thing. You can hear whether a mother has been up at night reading, or has been told by two doctors to wait and see, or has a husband who thinks she’s making it up. You can hear it in the first sentence and a half.
I could still do that.
Three years of putting away somebody else’s laundry and the thing had not gone anywhere. It was sitting right where I left it, like a tool in a drawer in a house you moved out of.
That was the first afternoon since October when I thought about something other than a courtroom for two hours at a stretch.
Three days, forty-three slips, and I got eleven of them onto Bernie’s evaluation schedule and I got four of them to the developmental pediatrician in Medina who takes their insurance and I got two of them, gently, off the list entirely, because both of those kids were fine and their mothers needed somebody to say so out loud.
Bernie stood behind me on Wednesday and read the schedule board for a while.
“Huh,” she said, and went back to her office.
That’s the entire commendation. That’s all there is at the Hollis Center. I got more out of it than I got out of eleven years of dinners.
There was one bad afternoon in there.
A mother I used to work with came in on Tuesday with a younger sibling, and she looked at me and got about half of a smile started and then saw the bin under my arm and the badge that says the word AIDE on it, and I watched her put it together and decide not to ask.
“Nora,” she said. “Hi.”
“Hi, Dana.”
“You’re back.”
“I’m back.”
“That’s great,” she said, and then, because there is nowhere to go from there: “Is Marcus doing all right? I mean your Marcus. The boy.”
“He’s eleven. He’s fine. He hasn’t needed anybody since 2022.”
“That’s so great,” she said again, and went into room three.
I stood in that hallway holding a bin of magnetic letters and I let myself have about eight seconds of it and then I went and reset the sensory gym.
Here is the part I did not expect. It wasn’t the badge. I could carry the badge.
It was that Dana Ferris had known me for four years and had sat across a small table from me every Tuesday for eleven months while I got her son from nine words to four hundred, and in that entire time she had never learned one single fact about my life. Not that I was married. Not to who. Nothing.
I had been so completely professional for eight years that when the floor came out from under me there was not one person in that building who had any idea, and that was not modesty and it was not discretion.
That was practice.
I caught Dean Alvarez on Thursday between his eleven and his eleven forty.
“Can I ask you something clinical.”
“Sure.”
“My son. What happened in the waiting room. That’s not the first time and it’s not the last time.” I had the words lined up because I’d practiced them in the car. “I’d like you to see him.”
He set the bin down on the counter.
“No.”
Just that. No preamble, no apology in it.
“Okay.”
“Two reasons and the second one’s the real one.
” He crossed his arms. “First, I’m not the right clinician.
What you’re describing isn’t a regulation problem I can fix with a swing and a weighted vest. It’s trauma, it’s specific, it has a shape, and there are people who do that and I’m not one of them.
“Second. You work here now.”
“That doesn’t have to matter.”
“It matters.” He said it without any heat. “I’m not going to be your kid’s provider and your coworker at the same time. That’s a line, and I like lines, and I’ve watched what happens in this field when people decide a line doesn’t apply to them because everybody involved has good intentions.”
He picked up a pen off the counter and wrote a name on the back of an appointment card.
“Anne Whitcomb. Medina, forty minutes. She does trauma-focused work with kids and she’s been doing it twenty years and she’s the one I’d send my own to. Tell her I gave you the card, she’ll get you in faster.”
I looked at the card.
“What does she take?”
“Most things. She takes the state plan.”
“And if I don’t have insurance after January first.”
He didn’t ask me why not. That’s the thing about that man that I noticed in the first week and have never once stopped noticing.
“Then you call her office and you tell them that, in exactly those words, before you make the appointment,” he said. “She has a sliding scale and she doesn’t advertise it and it is real. Don’t be proud about it. She’d rather have the kid.”
He picked the bin back up.
“He’s not going to want to go,” he said. “The first three times he’s going to tell you it’s stupid and he’s fine.”
“I know.”
“You take him anyway.”
“I know.”
“Okay,” Dean said, and went to his eleven forty.
The Wednesday dinner was the same evening as the bins and the shoebox.
Four to eight, four hours, and I stood on my landing at four and watched the truck take them and I stood on my landing at eight and watched it bring them back, and Ruby had a milkshake cup and Jonah had nothing.
I wrote it in the notebook. Nov 20, 4:00 p.m. out, 8:04 p.m. in. No incident.
Four words. It took me longer to not write the other things than it took to write those.
Roz called me at four fifty on Friday.
I was in the supply closet counting fluoride rinse.
“Calloway filed.”
“Filed what.”
“A motion to modify the temporary order, plus a request that the court expand the evaluation.” Papers going over.
“He’s alleging you’re interfering with the father’s relationship with the children.
Alienation. He wants Pruitt specifically instructed to assess for it, and he wants Wednesday dinners moved to overnights. ”
“Interfering. He’s had them every day the order says.”
“That’s not what alienation means and he knows it doesn’t. It means you’re influencing how they feel about him. It’s the one accusation in family law that gets stronger the more upset you get about it, which is why they use it.” A drawer shut. “Nine pages. Two affidavits attached.”
“Two?”
“His. And one more.”
I put the box of rinse down on the shelf.
“Whose.”
“A Vivian A. Kessler,” Roz said. “Says she’s the paternal grandmother. Says she’s watched you turn those children against her son for three years, and that in her opinion they were never bonded to this family, and she’d be prepared to say so in front of the magistrate.”