I want to tell you about the specific quality of waiting that you learn in foster care.
Not the ordinary waiting.
Not the waiting of someone who knows the thing is coming and who is simply anticipating its arrival.
The other waiting.
The waiting of someone who does not know if the thing is coming at all, who has been told it might come and has been told this before and who has learned, by repetition, that the telling and the coming are not the same thing.
You learn to hold yourself at a particular angle to hope.
Not toward it.
Not away from it.
Sideways.
So that if it arrives, you can turn to receive it, and if it does not, you have not fallen toward the absence.
I learned this when I was seven.
The Hendersons were the fourth family.
They had a dog named Biscuit and a backyard with a trampoline and a daughter named Sophie who was nine and who was kind to me in the distracted way of children who are kind when it is convenient and who are not unkind when it is not, which is actually quite a lot of kindness for a nine-year-old.
I had been there for four months.
I had started to believe it might be the place.
I had started to sleep through the night.
Then they sent me back.
Not because of anything I had done.
They were moving.
The case worker said: it’s not about you, Claire.
I understood what that meant.
It meant it was partly about me, just not in a way anyone could name.
I went back to the group home on a Tuesday.
I sat on the bed in the room I shared with three other girls and I looked at the ceiling and I thought: I am not going to do this anymore.
I meant the hoping.
I meant the turning toward things.
I meant the letting them become something that felt real before I knew they were real.
I was seven years old.
I learned a very adult thing at seven.
It kept me functional.
It also cost me, over the years, in ways I am still accounting for.
My name is Claire Sullivan.
I am forty years old.
I want to tell you the whole story.
Not just the end of it.
The whole thing.
Because the whole thing is what the end means.
I met Daniel Sullivan at the group home when I was sixteen and he was seventeen.
He had come from a different county, different system, but the specific experience of the system had produced in him the same quality it had produced in me.
The sideways angle.
The particular economy of hope.
He recognized it in me the way people who have learned the same language recognize each other.
Not by what we said.
By how we held ourselves.
He sat across from me at dinner the third night he was there and he said: you’ve been here a while.
I said: three years.
He said: how is it.
I said: it’s fine.
He said: fine.
I said: yes.
He said: that’s a very small word for a place like this.
I said: it fits.
He said: I’m Daniel.
I said: Claire.
He said: okay, Claire.
He smiled.
He had a smile that was more specific than most smiles.
Not the performed one.
The one that said: I see what I’m looking at and I find it interesting.
He found me interesting.
I found that interesting.
We were friends for two years before we were anything else.
Then we were something else for a year before he said: Claire.
He said: I think we should stay together.
I said: we are together.
He said: permanently.
I said: that’s a long time to plan for.
He said: for people like us.
He said: it’s the only way to plan.
He said: we make our own family.
He said: because the other way hasn’t worked very well.
He was twenty.
I was nineteen.
We were not naive about what it would cost.
We were, in fact, better equipped than most twenty-year-olds to understand what it cost to build something out of nothing.
We built.
He became a mechanic.
I worked as a store clerk at a grocery store where the manager was fair and where the hours were consistent.
We rented a one-bedroom apartment on the third floor of a building that smelled like other people’s cooking and that had a window in the living room that got good morning light.
We were happy.
I want to say that without qualification.
We were genuinely happy.
Not the happiness of people who have everything.
The happiness of people who have each other and who understand what it cost to get here.
That specific happiness is different from the other kind.
It has more weight to it.
It knows its own value.
Emily was born in the spring of the year we were twenty-nine.
She was seven pounds and two ounces.
She had Daniel’s mouth and my eyes and the specific combination of stubbornness and curiosity that I hoped she had gotten from both of us.
She was the thing we had been building toward without knowing we were building toward it.
She was the family we had decided to make.
We were a family.
That lasted until Emily’s first birthday.
Daniel was diagnosed in March.
The cancer was specific and aggressive and the doctors were honest about what the odds were.
We are fighters, Daniel said.
We are, I said.
We fought.
We tried everything the doctors recommended.
We tried the clinical trial that required us to drive four hours each way.
We tried the treatment that cost more than we had and that we paid for with debt that accumulated faster than I could track.
We tried.
He tried.
He was very tired by August.
He died in November.
Emily was fourteen months old.
I want to tell you about the grief.
Not to make you feel it.
But because it is part of the story and the story requires it.
The grief was the largest thing I had ever been inside.
Larger than the group home.
Larger than the individual losses of the individual families who had not kept me.
Those losses had been the loss of something hoped for.
This was the loss of something real.
Something that had existed and that was now absent.
The absence had a texture.
A weight.
Every room in the apartment had Daniel in it in the way that a room has furniture.
He was everywhere and nowhere.
Emily did not understand.
She was fourteen months old.
She understood that something was different.
She did not understand what.
She would look at the door when she heard footsteps in the hallway and she would say something that was not quite a word but that meant: is that him?
And I would say: no, baby.
And she would go back to what she had been doing.
The debt was real.
The medical debt.
The credit that we had extended past its limits.
The loan from the credit union.
The back payments on the treatment.
All of it was real.
I went back to work six weeks after Daniel died because going back to work was the only thing I could do that did not require me to look directly at the grief.
I worked the morning shift.
Emily went to the neighbor downstairs, Mrs. Petrova, who was seventy and who had never had children and who loved Emily in the specific way of someone who has a great deal of love and nowhere to put it.
Mrs. Petrova was a gift.
But she could not keep Emily every day.
And the job at the grocery store paid enough to cover some of the debt and some of the rent and not quite enough of either.
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