I turned around, and the lady pulled over to the curb and stopped, and I could see the baby in the back seat, in a car seat sort of like the one I’d found her in, but newer. Then I wondered why I hadn’t seen her the first time I walked up to the car, but I hadn’t walked very close, and the light had been in my eyes from that direction.
I tried to open the door to jump into the back with her, but it was locked. I should’ve known. The lady was all paranoid about driving in a bad neighborhood with her kid, not that I blame her. When she saw I was trying to get in, I heard her unlock all the doors. It made this clunking sound, and I saw the lock button pop up.
I got in and started talking to the little girl, and I heard the clunk of the doors locking again. The baby had this big smile and her eyes were all wide to see me, and it was the best thing that’d happened to me in as long as I could remember, just that look on her face.
I played clapping games with her for a minute, and she was just as bad at them as she’d been that night when I taught her, but she always knew to clap against my hands when I held them out to her. It was hard, though, because her seat was strapped in backward, the way the safety people say your baby is supposed to ride. We had to sort of clap sideways. Out of the corner of my eye I saw her mom watching us in the rearview mirror.
“What did my social worker say?” I asked her, because I was still a little bit mad about that. “Does she just not care at all that somebody was beating me with a broom handle?”
“She wasn’t that bad,” Brooke said.
“How bad was she?”
“She just has a different perspective on the things that can go wrong in foster homes. She says she takes allegations of abuse very seriously. But she feels they have to be proven. She says it’s common to find there’s been corporal punishment in a placement. But it’s also common, if a teen doesn’t like a foster home, to make up something they think will be a deal breaker.”
“Got it,” I said, even madder now. “So she thinks I’m lying.”
“She just wants to investigate the situation. Try to prove who’s telling the truth.”
“How do you prove a thing like that? Nobody was there watching it happen.”
“I guess she wants to talk to the other foster kids in the home. About their experience.”
“They won’t tell her the truth.”
“How do you know that?”
“Because they know all about the system and how things go. They know if they tell on her they still might not get taken out of the home, and then that terrible lady knows they ratted her out, and things get even worse for them.”
I didn’t say anything for a minute and neither did she. And I wasn’t clapping with the baby and she wasn’t smiling anymore, because she knew we were talking about something dead serious, and she knew I was mad.
“You think I’m lying, too,” I said. “Don’t you?”
“Me? Me? I’m the one who told you right off the bat I thought she hit you. Before you ever said a word about it. I brought it up.”
“Oh,” I said. “That’s right. I forgot about that. How did you know, anyway?”
“It was something she said to me. But now I don’t remember her words exactly.”
I waited around without talking for a minute in case she wanted to say more, but she didn’t.
“So you know that’s not good enough,” I said to her. “The way my social worker wants to take care of it. Right?”
“Yeah,” she said. “I do know that’s not enough for you.”
“Then what are you even doing here? Aren’t you afraid to be driving around this neighborhood with your baby after what happened?”
My grandpa always taught me that it’s stupid to be that way, like leaving your front door unlocked because you think you’ll never get robbed, but then after you get robbed putting ten locks on the door. By then it’s too late, because you were robbed already, and you’re no more likely to get robbed again just because you were that one time. He said it was stupid but it was just part of how people’s brains were made. Like, if it never happened before, you think it never will, and that’s wrong, but if it just happened, you think it always will, and that’s wrong, too. He called it locking the barn door after the horse was stolen.
I looked up at her eyes in the rearview mirror.
“Why do you think I’m driving around with a can of pepper spray between my knees?” she asked me.
“Didn’t know you were,” I said.
So she held it up and showed me, and it was big. Not like those little cans you keep on your key chain or stick in your pocket. It was probably seven or eight inches long.
“Looks like something you’d use to scare off a grizzly bear,” I said.
In the mirror I saw her eyes get softer, and saw her do something like a smile, even though I couldn’t see her mouth. But it turns out you can see a smile on other parts of a person’s face and I just hadn’t known it.
“Let me drive you where you’re going,” she said.
“You can’t really.”
“Why can’t I?”
“It’s not just one single spot that you drive somebody to. It’s like a route I walk for most of the day, where I stop at all the trash bins and pick out bottles and cans to take to the recycling place.”
“I can drive from one trash container to the next,” she said.
And, like she needed to show me how that
