Cami agrees. She’s an eighteen-year-old college student who hit the foster care system at the age of four. She came to my bookstore to talk about the journey she and her younger sister, Debbie, began when Deb’s biological father overdosed in front of them.
The girls, their mother, Bonnie, and Deb’s dad, Al, lived in Troutdale, a town of one thousand residents that can really only be described as “dying.” Their small cinderblock apartment sat in the middle of a row of three jutting over a flowing mountain stream, with upmarket fishing cabins dotting the hill on the other side. Troutdale hoped to save itself with sport tourism, but the cabins are owned mostly by local lawyers or bank managers.
Bonnie and her husband were frequent drug users. One day, Al fell without warning onto the kitchen floor. Cami’s mother dropped to her knees and shook him, shouting, “Wake up. Al, wake up!”
Likely, these shouts-turned-to-screams alerted neighbors to phone the police; Cami doesn’t remember anyone in their apartment making the call that brought sirens. Two or three ambulance people rushed into the room, while a large policeman grabbed Deb and Cami, one under each arm, hauling them outside.
Did that frighten her, you wonder?
“No, I was used to policemen coming to our apartment. They’d always been nice to us, just yelled at Mom and Dad a bit. What scared me was, I looked over his shoulder and saw them giving Al mouth-to-mouth resuscitation. I don’t think I knew what it was then, but it scared me. I could tell it was something awful. Final.”
The girls rode in the ambulance beside comatose Al and their sobbing mother. The mask on Al’s face in the ambulance (one assumes it was for oxygen) had impressed both girls, so while they sat in the waiting room, they tried to make one from magazine pages.
Without warning, the police stormed in, heading straight for Bonnie with an unequivocal (and loud) message: she wasn’t fit to be a mother; they were taking her children; she deserved to lose them. Bonnie cried, the hospital staff stared, and the police yelled. Cami and Deb forgot their paper masks and sat down, making no noise or movement. Experience had taught them that when adults were screaming, invisibility worked best.
But the instant the cops turned toward the girls, Deb went from wide-eyed silence to the kind of shriek only a toddler can produce. She ran from the officer, toward her family. (Cami is certain that no social worker was there, and she doesn’t know why; that’s not how these things are meant to go, according to social workers.) The police reassured both girls that it was okay, that they were taking them to a safe place. The officer tried to hold Debbie safely yet securely as he carried her out of the hospital, but the three-year-old, sensing rather than understanding that the world as she knew it had tilted into chaos, slid into a full-fledged flailing, kicking, terror-fueled meltdown.
“They had bruises. I guarantee it.” Cami pauses, sitting on the green couch in the bookstore’s classics room, and stares at the titles on the shelf across from her. She is a quiet, think-before-speaking girl, her brown hair cut in a no-nonsense bowl. Working summers as a lifeguard has left her skin almost as brown as her hair. “I think people watching would have described it as dramatic. I remember being embarrassed because everybody was staring at us.”
It wasn’t until another officer picked her up and headed toward the door that Cami realized—with a child’s swift and certain clarity—what Deb had already grasped.
This time was different.
“And I think Bonnie did too, because she started crying even more and acting crazy like I’d never seen before, and then I don’t remember anything until we pulled into a parking lot and an old lady met us and said we should get in her car.”
Within a day or so, Cami and Deb had figured out that they were in some kind of temporary shelter, going back to their mother’s “soon, but not today,” and that the little old lady was “kinda nuts but in a sweet way.” The rules were simple: be good, and on Saturday you got a new toy. Other kids came and went; the sisters stayed.
Time flows differently when you’re four; Cami doesn’t know how many months they were there, just that she started school and joined Deb in calling the lady “Mom”—which really upset Bonnie when she phoned. Cami and Debbie didn’t know that she was trying to get clean and get her daughters back; when their weekly news report included, “Mom made us brownies,” Bonnie shouted back down the line, “She’s not your mom!”
Sometime in the spring, the girls went back to Bonnie’s apartment overlooking the stream. That became the pattern; she sobered up and got a job; they returned; she’d get high or in trouble with the law; and they’d be taken away from her and go to a foster home until she got them back again.
A kid doesn’t necessarily notice patterns. Each move is just what’s happening then. Cami thinks it might have been six placements over the course of three years, but by the time she was seven, it had dawned on her that she and her sister would never live at home for any length of time again. Looking back on those bounces, Cami wonders, “Why didn’t all those judges giving her custody have a lick of common sense between them?”
Cami describes with something between disgust and sorrow how her mother once went to the courthouse bathroom, took a pill, passed out, and hit her head on the sink. A few minutes later, Bonnie walked into family court with a paper towel stuck to her bleeding head, said she had slipped on wet tile in the bathroom, and swore she was drug-free and able to look after “my girls that I love more than life.”
Cami doesn’t know why a drug test wasn’t involved. Protocol dictated it should have been. Hearing the story later, Cody suggests a couple of possibilities. “I wasn’t there, I don’t know, but it could have been the ad litem was sick, or late. The judge was in a hurry. They’re not into returning kids to drugged-up parents, so something sure went wrong. It happens. It’s not supposed to, but supposing it does, how’s a little kid gonna tell the judge, ‘Excuse me, Your Honor, you’re supposed to check her hair and her pee’?”
Reflecting on that moment, Cami has one wish. “As an adult now I want to go back and ask the judge what was on his mind that day. Lunch?”
Bonnie was trying to get it together. But as any who have suffered it personally or by proxy know, the illness of addiction overpowers instinct and reason alike. It also cripples love, but who wants to admit that? Addicted people tend to be incapable of looking after anybody, themselves included, so court-ordered removals are less about who loves whom than about a child’s safety. Lots of people loved Debbie and Cami, including their bio mom and extended-family members on both sides, but the task of providing them with a safe, warm place to grow up would fall to a succession of foster homes—some up to the job, some not.
Cami and Deb had maternal family in the region who declined to take custody, and the only comment Cami offers on this was that she and her sister would have liked to have avoided a few of the homes that fostered them. She does not talk about most of her foster homes. It is embarrassing to be a victim.
“Any way you slice it, by the time a child enters foster care, they’ve been rejected more than some adults are their whole lives,” Cody told me once. “They should all be in therapeutic care. What they’ve had to endure wouldn’t leave some grown-ups standing.”
He could have been describing Cami and Deb. Stability for the sisters was out of the question in the bouncy castle of foster care that followed. Sometimes safety was too. Working hard to create their own security as much as possible, they tried to play by the rules—whenever they could figure them out.
“We tried to be good,” Cami says, straight-cut bangs flopping into her dark eyes as she shakes her head and shrugs. Each place had a different set of rules; what was fine, even expected in one place might be forbidden in the next. Things like using the stove unsupervised, choosing which television shows to watch, being expected to complete chores that you hadn’t done before and thus didn’t know how to handle.
In