maurico

There are days I still can't get the picture out of my mind, even more than 15 years later: Maurico, on his knees in the cold damp of a drainage ditch, on his knees with a gun to his head, on his knees as the trigger is pulled. And then Maurico, face down in the water, three bullets in his head, dying alone in the cold, lying in that ditch for three days. I can't see the picture without thinking how afraid he must have been, how desperately he must have wished to go back. I wonder what he thought of in those last seconds and then I can't think about it anymore, it's hurts too much to imagine his last moments, the terror he must have felt.

His brother identified him, hearing a news report of an unidentified body found in a ditch on Gilcrease. Demond recognized the ring Rico was wearing, knew it was his brother out there, thrown away as if he were trash.

The day after Rico's funeral, the juvenile court judge called me to say "that boy was never going to make it." Liar. Four months before, that same judge had come down off the bench to shake Rico's hand, to congratulate him on his success in a 90 day treatment program. When I took him home from that successful 90 days in confinement, the only lockup he'd ever experienced, his grandmother was gone and once more, Rico was alone, nowhere to go. Nothing I could say helped. His grandmother knew he was coming home and she left.

I can't write this in a way that makes sense. There's too much to the story, too much I still feel guilty about. Like the main thing: the system ~ what used to be my system ~ failed this young man from his first year of life. Abandoned repeatedly by his mother after birth, left with this dope dealer and that addict boyfriend while she ran off to chase her own cocaine high, it was still 18 months before Rico was taken into custody. Child welfare took him and gave him back over and over ~ four times total ~ before they took him for real.

And then he went to live with his grandmother, who didn't want another child, who'd done a pretty poor job with her own daughter, Rico's mother. She didn't want her own kid, and she ended up trying to raise three grandsons. It was a mistake, but what are you going to do with a three sibling group of boys?

Some people say harsh is good and grandmother was harsh as hell. A lot of people tell me that kids today are messed up because they don't get spankings like kids of yesterday. I think it's bullshit. I think what kids today are lacking is parent time. Spankings were one indication parents were paying attention when I was a kid. But spankings weren't the only thing. We got parents who were awake and alert, working, and functional. We weren't brought up by adult-sized kids too narcissistic to recognize that we couldn't raise ourselves.

But I'm way off track, and this is Rico's story. I have to tell it through my experience, and I have got to get rid of it this time, this Memorial Day, my fourth try at getting Maurico out of my head.

I met him when he was 15. He was an angry, hostile young man, sitting in a Sapulpa shelter, waiting on his worker to appear. He'd been adjudicated on yet another misdemeanor-reduced-from-a-felony and was awaiting placement. Rico had a long trail of felony-level property crimes running behind him, dismissed over and over and over again.

He was my second assignment fresh out of college on my first real job as a social worker. I was convinced I could make a difference. I was convinced I could make a connection. Maybe I thought I could save him, or at least help him save himself. I was right on the first two, wrong on the last.

Over the next two years I tried everything to get him the help he needed. He had a hurt inside big as a house, and it spurred his fuckups and placement failures. He'd get things going his way and life would smooth out, get calm and quiet and something would come alive inside this child. He'd get irritable, then critical, then angry, and once he was angry, it was all over, a matter of days before he'd run.

So many tries at so many placements, and so many failures. I was desperate to get him what I still believe would have helped him: locked up in Rader long term so he couldn't run and could start to excavate that hurt, dig it out, expose it to the light and to the air and let it heal.

This is where I get pissed off thinking about what he needed and couldn't have. He was a property offender. My rapists and child molesters and armed robbers, hard core criminals all, were easy to get into lockup kid prison. Their crimes were so big there was no bargaining them down.

Rico, though, he stole cars, and he shoplifted. He did a couple of burglaries, and he wasn't scary, not at first. He had a slick public defender for whom it seemed a game to get Rico free. It was a back and forth between the public defenders and the assistant district attorney, who's going to prevail, who's going to lose. The kid too often seemed like an afterthought.

Most of the time the PD won. Rico "won" but in winning, he lost. He lost the felony adjudication that would have allowed me to get him where he needed to be, so he could have a shot at saving himself. I understand the theory behind community based treatment, I do. But our treatment efforts at the time were also supposed to be needs-based. Rico needed to be safe, to be secure, to have the option to run removed. Instead, because of some numbers on a page, because of some game playing at the court, he couldn't have that.

Some kids will not stay in a place if they can run. No one wants to hurt, and no one really wants to work through their shit. We kept putting Rico in unlocked facilities, trying to force him to dig deep, down there where it really hurts, where the wound's been festering for a lifetime. What was he going to do? It was madness.

Twice I begged his PD to let the felony stand. He told me he couldn't, that he had to do what Rico wanted, act in his "best interests." The PD's at the Juvenile Bureau were old hands and they wiped the floor with the rotating fresh faces staffing the ADA's office most of the time. The PD would bargain to win, and Rico would lose.

So I'd place him in unlocked facilities and he'd run, again and again. I tried for Rader again and again. I wrote pages and pages of justification for why Rico needed lockup, how he couldn't make it in any facility with an open door. It never worked, and with every placement failure, Rico got worse. He got more involved in street life. He hooked up with a gang. He finally started using, just like his mama, like his grandpa, who'd died of alcoholism before Rico was born.

Shortly after that 90 day program he'd aced, when he'd returned home to find his grandmother gone, there were rumors of a new dope charge coming up in Osage County. He was on the run again, knowing there could be a warrant out for his arrest. Two Osage County cops came to my office to tell me he was in trouble, that they believed he was salvageable, to ask me if I couldn't do something, put him back in Rader for real this time. Two cops.

Could I do something? I thought maybe, and I tried. I put the word out with my other kids that if they saw him, I wanted him to call me. Just call. Two days later, he did. We met at Williams Center downtown. He was late, waiting by the door for 15 minutes to see if I'd brought the police with me.

When he sat down next to me, the first thing he said was "I can't do what you think I can do, I can't stay in those places." I knew that. It had been my fight with my agency for 18 months. We talked about what he was doing. He showed me where he'd broken his hand in a fight. We talked about people we both knew and about the possibility of a charge in Osage County.

I convinced Rico to come in, one more time. I think about that now and it seems impossible. But it's further proof of what I believed then: He wanted to get better, he wanted to have a good life, he just didn't know how to get past the emotional turmoil that would come up when he sat still. He wanted to get better and he trusted me. It breaks my heart to write that, but there it is: the unloved child who believed in nothing, trusted no one, trusted me.

We stayed in my office all that night, him sleeping on the sofa, me doing paperwork, because there was no place for him to go while awaiting sanctions. But he was there, knowing some serious shit was coming down, he was there.

I was convinced he still had a little bit of hope left. He looked like hell from being on the streets. Thin, with dirty clothes, hair a mess. He was tired, I think, worn down from trying to make it on his own, worn down from too many failures. I don't know, but seeing him curled up on that couch, I thought this might be his moment.

We did sanctions, and my plan was to do a parole revocation while he was away for seven days. It was an obscure process that no one ever used anymore. I could bypass the Juvenile Bureau and get what amounted to a felony adjudication because Rico had violated his discharge plan. I'd be able to get him back into Rader long-term if I could make it work. He had to go away for seven days to an unlocked facility ~ sanctions ~ but it was tightly controlled and I could get the revocation set up while he was safe there. He agreed to go and I took him there, dropping him off by the lake, my sense of hope for this kid growing as I worked on volumes of paperwork necessary to skirt both the Juvenile Bureau and my agency's placement unit.

But he didn't make it. Three days into sanctions, the director called to say he was uncooperative and staff were restraining him. Four hours later she called again, saying she didn't have the staff to continue that kind of one-on-one attention. What? She should have said "I don't want to pay anyone to stay because that cuts into my profits." We were supposed to be doing individualized treatment at that time, getting kids what they needed, no matter what. I know it was a joke on a lot of levels, but I never thought a shift's worth of overtime could cost a child his life.

It did. I needed two more days for the parole revocation process and yet my supervisor gave the okay for them to stop the restraint. Rico was gone in an instant, hitchhiking into town in his pink sweatsuit. I don't know what happened between the Thursday he ran and the Thursday his body was found. It was one week of Rico on the streets. I imagine he was scared. I imagine he didn't think he had any outs left. He'd promised me and let me down. Osage County was after him. He couldn't face himself long enough to stay anywhere.

And then he was dead. Shot three times in the head. Lying for days in a ditch before a school bus driver saw his body and called the police; another day before his little brother recognized the ring from a news report about an unidentified body.

The funeral was a dreadful. His mother came in shackles from prison, arriving as we were all leaving after the service. Late. Always late. Never there for her son, even in death. His grandmother was raging and refused to buy a headstone. We made and sold teddybears to buy a marker for his grave.

It's too much to tell. The details don't mean anything unless you were there. I know only this: I loved Maurico. I did. I loved his heart and his spirit and his smart little brain. I loved that he recognized how unjust his life had been and was pissed off about it. I loved that he kept trying, that he would cry and rage and disappear, but then he'd come back. I loved that he wanted to be different. He was a good kid, a good guy, so terribly wounded. And I couldn't help him. I let him down.

I still believe locking him up would have helped. He might have still ended up in prison or dead, too many young black men do. But it might also have kept him alive long enough until something clicked, until he could see that throwing his life away over the past was a waste.

I always hoped he'd get to where he could see that the best way to focus all that mad inside would be to do well. It's the ultimate fuck you to the abusers: you hurt me so bad and still you couldn't stop me. But without security, without the basic safety of something to hold him in, he just couldn't do it. As an infant, as a small child, he was hurt over and over and over again and he was powerless to do anything about it. When he got old enough to run instead of taking the pain, he did. I don't blame him. The way he grew up, running equaled survival.

A couple of weeks ago, I got an email from a man named Eddie. I worked with Eddie at the same time I had Rico. They were in that 90 day program together and they were a lot alike, except that Eddie had a mom who wouldn't quit on him. I think that's 90% of what got him through. His note was sweet and it made me think maybe all that time in the trenches of juvenile justice wasn't a complete waste.

But unlike Eddie, everybody quit on Rico, even the agency charged with helping him. We let go of his hand the day we wouldn't cover another shift to keep him in sanctions. One more letting go, one more bit of proof that he wasn't worth the expense or the effort or the time.

It's Memorial Day, and a time for remembering our loved ones who've died. I remember Maurico and I loved him. I failed him. We all did.

in honor of Dr. George Tiller

For every desperate woman he helped, for every child not consigned to a life of hell on earth, for every Kayla who didn't have to suffer, for every potential Adrian who didn't live in misery and kill another in the process, for every infant tortured to death by her parents, for every starved and ruined baby on this earth, Dr. Tiller was an angel of mercy. There will always be abortions, always, whether legal or not. Dr. Tiller saved lives and he terminated pregnancies and he was courageous enough to continue to help women, no matter the hatred directed his way.

kayla

Kayla is blind and paralyzed on one side. She is lying in her bed in pediatric ICU, slowly turning her head to the left, where she grimaces, shivers and then repeats. Over and over she does this, a pained writhing, the sole outward manifestation of her swelling brain and spinal cord trauma.

Head injury. Blunt force trauma. These dreadful things would seem mysterious ~ what happened to this little girl? ~ were she not also covered with bruises, bite marks, pinches, red scrapes and abrasions. The injuries are technicolor shades of yellow, green, blue, purple. They span days and days, but the worst, the most recent, are near black.

Enormous brown eyes, wide open eyes, she looks and sees nothing. She cannot respond to my voice. I tell her she is safe, that no one can hurt her and I will keep her safe from those who did this. But who, who did this? I desperately need her to tell me who did this. She cannot talk and it's too early to tell what's permanent, if she will recover at all. Six years old, a Native American child from near where I grew up. She is very thin, so pale, her long black hair missing in patches where it was ripped out from the roots.

The detective beckons me from the hall. We huddle with the doctor, with the uniformed cops who were first to the hospital after the ambulance brought her in. Who did this? Which one of them, stepmother? father? Who could do this to her, this systematic destruction of a tiny little girl's body, of her mind?

We have no answers, any of us, and so they leave and I return to my task. My job is to keep her safe, to determine if she goes home again, what happens to her if she does not. That Kayla can't talk is driving me mad. I don't know who to protect her from. Who did this to her? Who could have hurt this little girl so terribly?

I talk to stepmom who denies ever seeing anything amiss, no bruises, nothing. She was gone from Saturday evening to Sunday noon, at work. It was 2:00 a.m. Monday morning when the ambulance was called because Kayla was struggling to breathe. Stepmom says that Kayla was sleepy and stayed in her room all of Sunday evening. Didn't eat. Never came out. No, she did not think that odd. No, she did not think to check on her. No, she did not see any injuries. No. No. No. I hate her.

I talk to dad who denies ever seeing anything amiss, no bruises, nothing. He was home from Saturday evening to Sunday noon, caring for Kayla and her half siblings. Dad says that Kayla was sleepy and stayed in her room all of Sunday evening. Didn't eat. Never came out. No, he did not think that odd. No, he did not think to check on her. No, he did not see any injuries. No. No. No. I hate him too.

Both clamor to see Kayla. They are concerned, so very concerned. One at a time, I tell them, and I take stepmom to the room. I tell Kayla who is here to see her and there is no response. Stepmom's voice sounds wrong to me. Her comforting words seem stiff and they don't ring true. She leaves quickly and I follow her out, asking her how she could not see these injuries. She tells me Kayla falls a lot. I despise her.

I take Dad to the room. I tell Kayla he is here and he says Kayla, baby? Her agitation is immediate and extreme. He says how are you, baby? and she thrashes like a wild thing, pulling the IV from her arm, moaning. Sudden tears unlike any I've ever seen, she is soaked, instantly soaked, and still she can't talk and she's moaning with her mouth in an agonized grimace and the phrase rictus of fear comes from nowhere and runs through my mind and the moaning, the tortured moaning, is a godforsaken, dreadful sound.

She needs to get away, away from that voice, but half her body won't work and she can't see, she doesn't know where to go, she is trapped in her blindness and her terror and this is happening in moments, between his Kayla, baby? and how are you? In an instant I am moving toward him but it feels like slow motion and I can see in his eyes a sheen of pleasure and I know that he is a monster and I am at last across the room shoving him out the door, get out get out get out of here get the fuck out, go now, get out.

Kayla has spoken in the only way she can. It is hours before she stabilizes. Every footstep in the hallway spikes her heart rate. I whisper over and over you are safe, he cannot come back, I will not let him, you are safe, safe, safe, really, believe me this time even though I have let you down, I am so, so sorry.

Grandmother is here and when Kayla is better, I let her in the room. Grandmother is crying, but trying to be brave. She whispers to Kayla of grandpa and the chickens on the farm and Kayla's dog, the one Dad would not allow her to keep when he took her from grandmother's home. Kayla's heart rate drops even more and it steadies. Her writhing is less intense, though it continues at the same appallingly rhythmic pace, a wretched harbinger of a brain ruined by clotting and pressure and brute force.

I walk grandmother out and she tells me that Kayla was not abused. I am stunned and enraged, my head hot with an explosion of disbelief and a high voltage urge to slap her senseless, how could she? We argue and I know I am on the line, too close to losing control as I did with dad, but I get it, finally, of course, I know this stuff but everything I know has vanished in the face of my horror that I let the monster into Kayla's room.

Grandmother feels responsible for letting Kayla live with her dad and this gives me hope, so we agree to meet at my office next day because this one may be workable if that is why she denies. If she is guilt stricken and hating herself for her failure and so cannot admit the truth, there is hope. If she denies to protect the adults, Kayla has no one.

It is late and this endless day is at a close because I can't stand anymore of it and everyone is gone but the nurses and Kayla, who lies wide-eyed in her bed, writhing, turning, listening to the soft plop of the IV fluids and the mechanical beat of her six year old heart on the monitor next to her bed.

On the dot next morning, grandmother arrives and I bring her coffee and we discuss what happened to Kayla. Grandmother thinks she must have fallen. She's been on the phone all night with dad's local kin and there are vague reports circulating among family members that Kayla fell off a bike, or the curb, maybe the porch, oops, yeah, she was climbing on the dresser and fell, another kid hit her and it's bullshit and I know and they know and now this grandmother, the good grandmother, is saying the same thing.

I have pictures. I have doctor's reports, exam results, tests. I have seen every inch of this tiny little girl's body and the harm that has been done her, the hideous violence of slapping and pinching and pounding and kicking and the inconceivable atrocity of bite marks on her inner thighs and her labia and her buttocks and breasts and this woman tells me she must have fallen. I feel the electric hum of rage in my muscles and my head is hot with it again and I can't detach from this one, can't do it.

I slide a picture of torn flesh across the table and I ask is that from falling? Another picture of deep bruises, falling? Another, and another, and then I'm around the table and next to her, fanning every photo of this child's living hell in front of her, the brutality of it evident in every shot and then the last image of Kayla, the blank stare of this baby girl now blind and paralyzed, did she fall? Did she fall?? Is that FROM FALLING????

I've made her cry. I've hurt another human being while trying to protect a little girl. She is weeping, doubled over with her head in her hands, saying no, no, no, she did not fall, I know it and it is my fault I should have kept her, I should have kept her, why did I let him take her.

Now we are sisters, this grandmother and I, because I am not over, will not get over, having taken the architect of this nightmare into the room where Kayla lay blind and paralyzed, infinitely vulnerable, safe for the first time in months.
And this grandmother will never get over having let him take Kayla away from her. We are sisters in guilt.

We are bit players in the wretched script of Kayla's life of torment, but our shared guilt is the foundation of our commitment that she will never return to him. Never. And in that we succeed and I am able at last to say to this violated child, now you are safe. Now you are safe.

little monkey

The baby lying in the crib in the darkened room can't be the child I'm here to see. This is a baby, not a 14 month old child. My referral says 14 month old child. This baby, this very, very thin baby is not who I'm looking for, but this baby looks like she's in trouble.

Mom picks her up and we take her to the light in the living room. She hands me the baby, only she's not a baby, she is a 14 month old child, wasted and shrunken, skin hanging in folds from her thighs, her backbone rigid through the thin urine-stained t-shirt she's wearing.

Her eyes are sunken and there's no spark there. Her gaze is dull and unfocused. I hold her and she does not move, she is limp in my arms. She does not make eye contact, I cannot engage her. My finger placed in her hand does not elicit the typical baby grasp. She is alive, but barely.

I am shaking as I hold her. I am terrified she's going to die in my arms. I ask mom about her feeding, when does she eat. "Not very often, she sleeps a lot and she's getting weaned." She's on formula only, about twice a day, 6-8 ounces, according to this mother creature sitting across from me.

I tell mom I'm taking the baby with me to the Justice Center. I get on the phone with the judge to make it happen. We go. She weighs 10 pounds and some ounces. She weighed 6.5 at birth. Babies triple their weight in the first year. This one is grossly underweight, on the verge of dying, with dried out skin, wisps of hair, slow heart rate, low body temp.

I hold her at the Center, try to get her to drink formula from a bottle. She is too weak to suck and the milk dribbles from her mouth. She is in such bad shape she's admitted to the hospital, put on IV fluids. With hydration, she regains some ability to eat and begins taking bottles. The nurse tells me this by phone before I go to bed.

I'm at the hospital next day. The change is dramatic. She is still emaciated, with drooping skin, bones everywhere, still sick, still in danger. But she sees me. She makes eye contact, she's still in there. I pray she is not brain damaged from too little protein. I pick her up and she clings to me like a little monkey, her tiny wrinkled hands grasping my hair, her head wobbling on her scrawny neck. I breathe in her little baby scent and I kiss her cheek and she coos. It is the first sound she has made throughout this ordeal.

I think of what might have happened had I not found the family that day, if mom had not come to the door, a more typical behavior for families in trouble. I think this baby is supposed to live, was supposed to be rescued and I am grateful that this one is saved. I curse parents who harm their children, but I am enraged by parents who intentionally do not feed them, who starve them on purpose. I don't know how they can do it: the chronic crying of a starving child must surely get on their nerves. Ultimately there is silence, but it takes a while. Once the baby is too weak to cry, there is nothing but quiet and lots of sleep and then death. This one was saved. She does not haunt my dreams, but I can sometimes still feel her clinging to me, her little monkey hands, her small husk of a body, cool next to my own. This one was saved.

circle of love

Michael won't look at me. His dark eyes scrunch shut above the white mask and he tenses as I approach. A few minutes and a slit of eye, then a turning of the head. He's furious with me, still, two weeks after I rescued him from certain death and confined him to this lonely room where he must stay until the tuberculosis wracking his lungs is no longer contagious, while he's pumped full of drugs to combat the virus that's destroying him. He hates the mask, he hates the gown, he hates me and this room and he wants his mother and she doesn't want him.

I am angry too. I am angry with this child's mother, a woman dying of AIDS and tuberculosis who refused to give her son the meds he needed to survive. When I took him from her care, it had been 14 months since he'd seen a doctor. His TB was active and he coughed constantly and his T-cells were nonexistent and his viral count sky high. He is five years old and he has AIDS. She says the meds make him feel bad and they do. That's clear in this tiny tiled room on the second floor of a crappy hospital, the only place in the state that would have anything to do with this little boy. Now that he's dosed up, he's lethargic and his tummy hurts and he sleeps all the time.

He doesn't know it, but his mother's in the hospital too. She is refusing treatment and hospice is giving her comfort and care and attention. It's more than her son is getting. I can't be with him all day and the hospital staff can't spare anyone to sit with him all day and this little boy's soul, it seems, is shriveling while his physical health improves and he's watched, but not touched, by the camera in the corner of his room.

I am at my office late that same afternoon when the call comes in from Lisa. That's not her real name; her real name's unique enough that I won't share it here and unique enough that that I am reminded, when I hear it, of a 17 year old permanent foster care child I met in 1989. She was losing her care, her foster parent booting her the day she turned 18. She was an A student, a soft-spoken child who wanted to go to college, to learn to help people as she'd been helped. I spent half a summer with her as I did my practicum in child welfare. We tried to find pre-college housing so she'd have someplace to go. We got her terrible underbite fixed and more work done on her cleft palate. She told me that her mother never wanted her and abandoned her over and over until the state finally kept her. The foster mother's abandonment was just another verse in the tragic song of her life.

I ask this woman on the phone if she's the Lisa I knew from 1989 and she laughs and says yes. She's a social worker now, just finished with her MSW and back from a trip to Africa where she spent two months trying to trace her ancestors. She is full of joy and pride and deservedly so. She tells me she heard about Michael and then she utters words I never imagined hearing: I want him, I want to keep him. I love that child.

Lisa told me that she had provided respite care for Michael through a local agency, then directly, while his mother was in the hospital or was tired of caring for him. She knows about the AIDS, about the TB, and she wants him. Adding to this impossibly good news, she assures me she is an approved foster parent, another gift, as the process of approval takes months. She wants, immediately, to be allowed to see him. I immediately arrange that.

A week later, I am back in Michael's room. Lisa is there. He looks directly at me and smiles. I can see his lips turning up behind the mask and I can see the sparkle in his eyes, the lifting of their corners as the invisible grin rearranges his face. We all look at one another in our hospital gowns with our white masks and we smile and our eyes connect and I feel as if I can exhale for the first time since I met this tiny little boy.

He's working a puzzle with Lisa and I watch them, seeing two children and a miracle in progress. One is a grown up child, a fine young woman, and the other a little boy, desperately ill, but smiling. One is evidence of what hard work and intelligence and resiliency and a little help and a boatload of compassion from a host of social workers can do, and the other is evidence of the immeasurably powerful effect of love.

It's a little trite and certainly a cliche, but that doesn't take away the truth of it: love given freely to others can expand in a huge ever-widening circle, like concentric rings surrounding a single drop of rain in the center of an ocean. One tiny act of love happens and then the waves of it expand and go on and on and on touching others in ways we'll never know. A drop of love, of kindness, compassion, it seems like nothing; yet it was enough to carry one child through a tragic life and into adulthood, buoyed on the tiny waves of love from this social worker and that one, from a teacher, a minister, a therapist, a doctor, even from a summer practicum student. With nothing but rejection from her family, from the pseudo-parent hired by the state, she still thrived on drops, on waves, on the buoyancy and solidity of caring and compassion. In doing so, she preserved her own goodness and the hope that exists in all of us unless it's stamped out by indifference.

She saved herself and turned right around and saved this little boy. Michael is 10 now and he's got T-cells and the TB's gone. He goes to school and he has friends and he has the kind of life every child should have. Five years of neglect and lack and now five years of love and the kind of cherishing that heals and nourishes body and soul. I don't know if one can entirely make up for the other, but looking at Michael's eyes, at his strong young body, at the way he is with Lisa, I can believe.

death on pittsburg

Please note: this post includes a graphic description of child abuse in paragraphs 2-4.

Several years ago when I was still doing child abuse investigations and Mike was trying to die on me, I arrived home late after a particularly difficult day spent watching a tortured baby succumb to her injuries.

She was a tiny, ethereal thing only four months old, an amalgam of palest cream and red and deep purple, the combination of her fair and perfect skin and her hideous injuries. She lay in the pediatric ICU absolutely still, incapable of movement as the result of a fractured skull and a massive intracranial bleed. The unrelenting pressure in her head would have been enough to kill her, but she had a ruptured liver and fractures, a battered doll-sized human being.

She died at 4:30 that Friday afternoon. Her wounds were uncountable and included tiny pearl-like toes nearly bitten in two, contusions and bruises covering almost every inch of her tiny body and, of course, the catastrophic internal injuries. Her mother had been "unable to revive her this time" ~ a direct quote I will never forget, implying as it does that there had been many other times.

It was the boyfriend who killed her "out of boredom" ~ another monstrous statement which I have tried and failed to extricate from my memory. His nightly antics with this fragile infant included throwing her across the room, swinging her around his head by one foot, one arm, biting her feet, toes, fingers, ears, suffocating her and reviving her, over and over and over. The inhuman being who gave birth to this infant had found the baby unconscious several times upon arriving home from work. A cold water bath had previously revived the little girl and for the sake of a twisted love ~ of the man, not the child ~ she remained silent.

This was running around in my head, one of the most revolting episodes of child murder I ever encountered, when I pulled up and parked in my driveway at the end of what was a hideous day. Exiting my car, I noticed a pair of downy woodpeckers at the feeder. They were clearly companions, feeding each other suet and seeds, and I immediately decided they were in love which took my thoughts to my love, Michael, sick in bed and not getting better.

He and I have a history of comparing ourselves to birds: the mourning doves nesting on the windowsill one year, beautiful birds who mate for life, caring for one another with such solicitude, reminding us of ourselves. The swans at the lake across town ~ another pair, mating for life, constant companions, obviously devoted to each other. So these small black and white birds hanging out together, feeding each other, fluttering about and notably enjoying life made me think of us in happier times, when our life seemed enchanted, when happiness was a constant and joy a permanent resident in our home.

The birds took off as I approached the front door and I turned to watch their swooping low flight across Pittsburg Avenue. What a stunning thing, to be able to fly, and these two were graceful and lovely, virtually dancing through the air. One swung especially low and POW was smashed by a passing car. The car sped on and the companion bird fluttered to the street, standing by the still body on the concrete making a soft chirring sound, nudging his felled companion with his head.

Having had a close up of this disaster, I found myself sobbing so hard I could barely breathe. I flew up the walk, the stairs and into the house to tell Mike about the bird, to ask him to go and see if there was any hope for the stricken creature in the street. I could not do it, could not look at that small feathered body, and he could not either, being too sick and weak on that day to even get out of bed.

I wept and prayed and raged at God and demanded to know how shit like this can happen. The birds, that innocent little girl, and foremost in my heart, of course, the two of us. How can two people be so completely happy, so joyously content, doing good work, living a charmed life and POW out nowhere comes the speeding car of devastating illness, laying one low and breaking the heart of the other.

This is the eternal question, I suppose, but the universality of it in no way diminished my own heartbreak nor my own fury over the unfairness of it all. All illness is unfair and I'm not one to whine about it as a rule, but watching the love of my life dying every day was intolerable. It was more than I could bear and I don't know yet how he survived or how I got through it. I don't know how people do these things and I will whack the next person who says "God doesn't give us more than we can handle," because I know that He's confused me with some strong bitch, some backbone-of-steel disciplined rigid unemotional wench who can handle this sort of thing because I can't. I can not.

And yet Mike did survive and he thrives and I survived too. That is a gift and I am entirely grateful for it. At the end of another day spent in a good life with my soul mate, I give only a passing thought to those years of illness which are almost beginning to seem like ancient history. There's laughter in this house again, much love and that extravagant joy that sweeps in out of nowhere and lifts up my heart.

I am standing on the restored floor of a life I once thought was completely solid and unbreakable. It's easy to think that when things are so perfect and there's so much love and passion and kindness and affection. The floor is good and strong again, but it has been broken through and will never be 100% and I will never quite relax into this life and this love as I once did.

I don't think of the future much and I have moments when I think "how many more years do we have?" It's sad and it's life and it's okay. We're not guaranteed anything, I know that. We had a spectacular 10 years of heaven and some folks never get any heaven on earth. But then spring comes and the world feels so fresh and new and I imagine for just a moment that we are back in those first innocent years of our life together and I can actually feel my heart expand, physically feel it. I love this man. I love this life. We have this day, just like everyone else and I am grateful for it.

Broken

I wrote this about a year ago and am adding it here in honor of Adrian's birthday. Another dead child, a little graphic 3d paragraph, but not like the last one.

Adrian died just after he turned 13 years old, running from the cops in a stolen rusted out beater that topped out at 30 miles an hour. Had he not run a red light, he'd have been captured, taken to detention, lived another day. As it was, he forged ahead, ran the light, hit a truck in the intersection, flipped the behemoth of a car, igniting it. He killed one woman in his carelessness; paralyzed another.

He was dead for three days before we figured it out. I knew he was missing, but he'd been missing before. It was not until reading the paper the morning of the third day that I recognized the description of the sweater I'd just purchased for him, the two dangling silver strings he wore in his left earlobe.

The police came to the office to show me a photo of his body. He was almost unrecognizable and yet there was that pale fuzz on his upper lip, the softness of his face, grotesquely battered and torn, not yet even approaching manhood. He still wore the earring and the green cable-knit sweater, now drenched with blood, jazzy vinyl V's across the front stiff and rust-colored. It was Adrian, this child I'd worked with for two years, the young man who repeatedly asked to live with me, knowing I was his parole officer and it was purely insane for him to believe he could outrun himself, his history, in my home.

Adrian got loose after returning to Tulsa in shame over a disastrous placement I'd made with an aunt and uncle. These people, generous and kind souls, were the parents of a severely disabled child of eight. No one else in Adrian's family would have him. The State of Oklahoma was out of ideas and there were too many nights I sat at the office calling shelter after shelter, one foster home after another, trying to find someplace for him to be, just one night.

Too many times, Adrian would smile and say "I'm going to the bathroom," then disappear down the stairwell, his way of giving me the gift of going home to my life, the home I love, the relationships with people who care for me, love me, stick by me. He loved me and thus Adrian, a child who grew up in squalor and filth and violence, who never had anyone stick by him, care for him, love him, allowed me to return to my brick cottage with the old trees, stained glass, oak floors, piled up feather beds with antique linens, the warmth and love and safety of my home. He returned "home" as well, often spending the nights on the cold vinyl couches in the ICU waiting room of a downtown hospital.

Too many of these nights and then the aunt and uncle, saviors of this unwanted, unloved, abused, now-delinquent child. A going-through-the-motions approval of the saviors' home, then approval yet again for them to move with their son and Adrian to New Mexico. I am not ashamed to admit that I felt relief in the placement and subsequent departure of this difficult young man. I was exhausted, angry with the ridiculously limited resources of my state, sad about his losses and grieving the severe and likely permanent emotional damage he had suffered. I was regretting that I allowed myself to love this boy. It was easier with him gone. I had other boys to care for, other children whose problems were not so entirely hopeless, so unrelenting.

Two months, three months, good progress reports and then a middle-of-the-night hysterical call at home from the aunt. Adrian must go: he had threatened their son, he had been forcing the boy to fellate him, threatening to kill the child if he told. Adrian, my 13 year old charge, now a sex offender by virtue of the age and handicap of his cousin. Adrian was humiliated by the return trip to Oklahoma. He refused to talk about what had happened in New Mexico, he was as angry as I'd ever seen him, and as sad.

A local shelter, having had a reprieve, gave him another shot. By virtue of his recent experiences, he had moved into the arena of Offender where compassion ceases to exist. Thirteen years old, now and forever after an Offender, a Perpetrator. Friday afternoon, I left him at this shelter 30 miles away with his promise that he would get through the weekend, no matter what. Sunday morning early, the call to come get him. He had smoked a cigarette in the bathroom of a movie theatre, an unpardonable transgression made more firmly so by my protests about the idiocy of depriving fragile, vulnerable delinquent kids of cigarettes. A two hour trip to gather him up and place him in yet another shelter where he lasted not even long enough for me to make it home. Sunday afternoon and he was gone and I would not see him alive again.

Adrian was the last child in a string of five that I buried in a period of 26 months. That abysmal record earned me the nickname "Death Row" among my sensitive and loving coworkers. Although I was one of four social workers in "South Central," home of the worst of the worst delinquents in the county, this sorry record was stunning and evidence of the profound problems of the children in my care. Evidence, too, of this state agency's habit of rewarding good work with absurd numbers of the most complex and difficult assignments. Slackers got 14 cases, I often had more than 30. Adrian's death was the impetus for my move from the back end of the kid business to the front, from juvenile parole to child welfare investigations.

Adrian's history was one of despicable abuse: drunken parents, sexually abusive father, a sister dead under suspicious circumstances, another sister permanently brain damaged from near drowning in a mop bucket full of water while mom and dad drank at the bar, yet another sister turned to prostitution at age 12. The intervention should have happened in infancy; thirteen was just too late for this child. Knowing his history I could not work up a rage over his abuse of his cousin, it just made me sad, agonizingly so.

People told me that God killed Adrian, as if that was a comfort. God killed him, they assured, to prevent his harming other children. God rescued countless others ~ future victims ~ by sweeping down and flipping Adrian's car. But if that's the case, what about those two women he hit? One dead, one paralyzed. What did God want to prevent them from doing? Were they sex offenders? Is it worth three lives to God to save others from the potential for sexual abuse? There's sure a lot of abuse happening in the world if that's the case. Does He need to rev up the executions, flip some more cars, paralyze some people? Has He lost the pace? If it was death administered by the hand of God to prevent suffering, was the eight-year-old not worth Adrian's life? Why didn't He run the bus to New Mexico into a ditch. Did God not care as much about the profoundly disabled eight-year-old?

Others said his death prevented his becoming a monster. It was his life, though, which made him a monster if indeed he was. His death just gave him relief from a world he did not understand, from the aching need within his heart and soul that drove his rage and despair and his violence. I don't excuse it, it's not mine to excuse. I think God needs to step up to the plate here and explain this one. Adrian was broken before I ever met him. His brokenness led him to harm others and that's untenable. It's been 12 years. I still think of this child and my heart hurts.

Do you see them?

I went to the hospital on an icy, wintry day as a courtesy to Cherokee County. Everyone wanted the justice center to respond to the ugliest cases, high profile, deaths, hideous sexual abuse. No one wants those cases, they stay with you, can change you permanently. This was an easy one, just documentation of having seen the injuries, then a report to the referring county. Meet the state standard of seeing the child.

I took a detective from child crisis with me as backup to help document what we were told was a shaken baby. No parents in evidence, just one very pale, fragile four month old child lying on the bed hooked to machines which breathed for her, plumped her with fluids, drained urine.

A tracery of blue veins outlined her swollen head and coalesced into immense bruises on her cheek, under her chin, left ear, the top of her tiny skull. Her eyes were surrounded with the darkest blue and red, contusions and blood pooling, a shock against that translucent skin. A bulge at the top of her head where her soft spot should have been spoke of a swollen brain and bad news for this infant.

I can't forget her skin, it was like silk, no pores, perfect, and exceedingly pale. Where it was not silk, it was scuffed and torn and reddened, but all of it softening in color even as we stayed with her, evidence of her slipping away, a tiny heart slowing, giving up. A huge purple bruise covered her belly and her right side, her belly button oddly white in the middle of that darkness, like the moon in a black night sky.

Her right leg was wrapped, all that could be done for the fracture there given her other injuries. Her arms, shoulders, back, belly, between her tiny thighs, all battered with bruises evident and still coming to the surface eight hours after she was found. Yellowing bruises and brown petechiae told us this massive trauma was not her first experience with pain and suffering.

I can't get the sight of her toes out of my brain, maybe never will. I see them right now as I'm writing this. The tips were like pearls, tiny and round; they were exquisite little toes with perfect pink nails and they were bitten nearly through.

It took us a few minutes to figure it out, lifting them one after the other, looking at the tops, at the undersides, then suddenly the line of imprints from an adult's teeth made sense and like an optical illusion, once in view could not be missed again, it was all we could see, all I ever see when I look at a child's feet. Tooth marks in a dying baby's skin.

I wonder if she felt any pain at that point. She never made a sound, never gave any indication of feeling our hands as we documented her injuries, putting black pen to white paper to make a word picture of the black bruises on that porcelain skin, such a futile effort and so hard because how can you write a scream?

How can you write "contusion 1.9 cm x 3 cm left knee" when the only conceivable response to this travesty is a moan of horror, a scream of grief, a murderous bellow of rage? There are no words for this beyond cliches. It's what cliches were made for, to put into words the unspeakable because the mind can't construct fresh sentences faced with something like this.

Mom said that she had always been able to revive the baby upon finding her unconscious at home after getting off work. Always had until tonight. A little cold water bath brought her around every time. She couldn't understand why this happened, her boyfriend was a good man.

Mom left this tiny and fragile infant in the care of her new boyfriend as punishment for his laziness. She was resentful at being the only one working, and figured he could babysit to help out. Each of the previous five times she had revived this child, she had exacted his promise never to hurt her again. She told no one, fearful her baby would be taken away, confident of his promises, having to work, feeling she had no other options but still, wanting to punish him for his failure.

As young men will, he got bored and restless. They were desperately poor and thus had no cable, no video games, he wasn't one to read. No money to go out, no real friends to come by with some beer. No car, nothing there besides a little meth and a little pot and a baby.

He was bored, frustrated, resentful. He amused himself with the baby. He threw her over his head and sometimes didn't catch her. He slammed her into the wall out of frustration. He held her under water to feel her struggle and fight. He choked her. He shook her in his rage, he violated her tiny vagina, he bit her labia and broke her leg, kicked her in the belly and ruptured her bowel, bruised her liver. He tickled her toes then nearly bit them off. He was bored, he said, a little angry being left with a child, but mainly bored.

I can only think that mom revived this baby five times, tried and failed this last time, but how many nights was this child left with a sadistic man and tortured in this way but not to the point of unconsciousness. She had been having "funny bruises" for about a month, mom said. Bruises in odd places, like her back, her thighs. "Kids bruise easy, everyone in my family does." Kids bruise easily on shins and elbows because they walk and run and play, but infants don't bruise unless someone hurts them.

He's locked up now, got eight years for murdering this infant. Mom did no time except what will stay forever in her head, doing time, seeing herself as a victim of a system that has no understanding for her complicity in the death of a child. Doing time somewhere in her heart and soul for allowing the murder of her baby. He's doing eight years. Eight years for murder. Eight.

And I am doing time in a way, living a good life now, free of the need to deal with shit like this. But I can't get them out of my head or my heart. These tortured children remain with me though I no longer wake with a start, wondering if this one or that one survived the night, if I did the right thing in sending her home, if it was necessary to remove that group of five siblings, was there another choice, could I have done more? Could any of us have saved this baby before that last fatal night with that monster?

It's too much to think about and so I don't most days. It's big drama and it feels selfish to revisit those small battered bodies, the agony of it all, the hopelessness, revisiting my pain, my memories, the visions in my head when the babies are long since buried. My my my my my. It wasn't about me, but they are dead now for years and I have the memories and the memories won't leave me.

I work in my warehouse, sell my antiques, live on the superficial and pleasant level of helping well off people find nice things for their homes. There is no drama, no life or death questions, just home furnishings and friendly encounters with people who just have to have a new desk or chair or table.

And then it snows and the pure white of the snow reminds me of a battered infant on a winter day, of the other children maimed and tortured and killed by those who are supposed to love them, and I think there's a stain on this world evident if we just look closely enough.

Look at the sad, worn out eyes of the children in the grocery store, at that angry mother with the pinpoint pupils, the little boy with bruises on his neck, the girl with stringy hair and dead eyes making herself small to keep anyone from seeing. Look, please. They are everywhere. Tell me I'm not going mad and that you see them too.