To the End of June : The Intimate Life of American Foster Care (9780547999531) (36 page)

Combined criminal and foster services would have helped Tonya over at the Greens' as well. The next time Tonya ran away to her mother's house, she hooked up with an old friend from the Bronx, took a road trip through a few eastern states, and ended up in jail.

When Tonya stood before a criminal court judge in Pennsylvania, she wasn't the Tonya with a thick child welfare file, longtime foster daughter of Bruce and Allyson Green, former star student, and first-time offender. She was a more anonymous adult black female, caught on a ShopRite videotape stealing powdery white toiletries with which a drug dealer could cut cocaine. This Tonya spent one month in a women's penitentiary. Had the judge been privy to a fuller story and to her resources as a ward of New York, Tonya may have been able to avoid this fate altogether.

Then again, Tonya committed her crime across state lines; I don't know that a Pennsylvania court would care that in New York, foster care could handle her. And even now that the system has merged its foster and juvenile justice divisions, it will likely still miss the obvious opportunities to help kids before they stumble into trouble. I wonder, if someone in Tonya's life had caught on to her bed-wetting, her stealing, her fights, as signs of trauma and unmet needs rather than inconveniences and misbehavior, whether she would have faced that judge.

Oneida was also in foster care for many years before she went to Staten Island to be adopted, and she wasn't given enough help. And it was foster care's lack of services that Glenn and Mindy now blame for the entire disaster.

 

To get to Manhattan's leafiest and least-populated borough without a car, you have to take a ferry. Then there's one subway line, timed with the ferry's landing, which runs tip to tip along Staten Island. If you're a kid, you take a bus to get to a strip mall or the movies. If you want to get to Brooklyn, it takes about two hours.

This was Oneida's first big beef with the place, Glenn told me as he picked me up from the train station in his white Toyota. “Oneida used to call it
carajo
-land,” he said, waving his hand toward the white houses with trim lawns tucked along the quiet streets. “She missed the bodegas in Brooklyn.”

Mindy understood this stance, at first. She grew up in Bensonhurst in Brooklyn, and her accent still betrayed her roots. The kitchen and living room were festooned with Saint Patrick's Day decorations when I came to visit; green garland chains hung from the ceiling and leprechauns peeped from the cupboards. Mindy said these were a throwback to her childhood. “My mom died when I was ten, and my dad thought that holidays were a way to bring the family together,” she explained, but even without the decorations, the 1,500-square-foot house was packed with sentiment. Pictures of the family covered walls and tabletops, but there were none of Oneida. When Mindy pulled out her bulging floral scrapbook so she could trace back the whole arduous demise, she found one, of Oneida curled up on the couch. “Well, she looked cute when she was sleeping,” she said hopefully. Glenn shuddered; he wouldn't even look at the photo. “Brings back too many terrible memories,” he said.

When Oneida first came to the house, there was a short honeymoon phase, they both told me, finishing each other's sentences. Right at the beginning, they'd splurged on a weekend at Disney World for Oneida, the foster daughter, Nayelly, and the biological daughter, Kristine; Oneida had screamed dramatically and clutched Mindy's hand on the plane, as she'd never flown before. They both admitted that the trip was fun; aside from Oneida wanting to parade herself at the hotel pool, Mindy said, everyone was on good behavior.

When they got home, Glenn said, the agency was frantic: Oneida was classified as “therapeutic” and Glenn and Mindy weren't certified to house a child with therapeutic needs. (Because Oneida had shifted from the state's jurisdiction and back to a city agency, she fell back under her old foster requirements. Doris worked for the state and likely hadn't noticed this stipulation; besides, Doris had landed the much larger prize—a married couple willing to adopt.) The agency argued that Glenn and Mindy had to drop everything for the next three weekends and attend the requisite classes up in the Bronx if they wanted to keep her. So they took the classes.

“That's the way the agencies are. When they need you to do something, they need it done tomorrow. When you need something for the kid, you get nothing,” Glenn said, shaking his head. What Glenn and Mindy needed, for the therapeutically classified teenager, was therapy. Within a few weeks of her arrival, Oneida started acting out. At first, she just lied: she'd say she was going to Brooklyn, but she'd end up in the Bronx. Or she'd promise to be home at a certain time and trot in hours later. But then she started disappearing for nights at a time, which later morphed into weeks. Glenn and Mindy would talk to her, ground her, take away her privileges, but they wanted some backup from the agency. They felt that some of this behavior was rooted in Oneida's early traumas and her years in foster care; she was authorized for free therapy, but for the entire summer she lived with them, no one returned Glenn's phone calls to set it up.

“We'd call and they wouldn't call back. When Oneida was in the RTC, she was in therapy all the time. What changed? Just because she's in Staten Island, she doesn't need therapy anymore?” Glenn fumed. He also said they didn't receive an agency check for Oneida's care until August, though she moved in with them in June, and their water and electric bills doubled due to her hour-long showers and her inattention to lights. Arguments in the home escalated; Oneida believed Glenn and Mindy were hoarding her allowance money, and she disappeared for longer and longer stretches. “Even when she was AWOL and she ran away, we'd call the agency and they wouldn't follow up on it. They're useless, totally useless.”

The crisis peaked in September, three months after Oneida's arrival. Glenn got a call from someone who knew Oneida, who also made Glenn promise never to reveal his or her identity. Glenn agreed, and the person told Glenn that Oneida wanted out of the house, but she was afraid the agency wouldn't allow it without cause. So Oneida had hatched a plan: she was going to peg Glenn with an accusation of sexual abuse.

“I panicked,” Glenn said. “The postmaster is the second most powerful governmental official, and in the little towns like where we are, everybody knows you. If this would have gotten back to my job, I would have been fired, like that.” Glenn snapped his fingers. “Once the allegation's been made, even if it's disproved, there are still people who'll believe it. I didn't work twenty-three years to get fired, just because I'm trying to help a kid.”

This time, when Glenn called the agency, he got a response. He located a director and said, “When I go home today, I'm packing up all her stuff and leaving it in front of my house. You need to come pick it up, because she's never coming back. We're done with her.”

Suddenly, Glenn and Mindy were the terrible stereotype: foster parents who hurl a foster kid's belongings to the curb, in garbage bags.

“We were petrified,” Mindy said. “This was our life.”

But the agency fought back. Glenn said they told him, “You're not done with her; she's in your house and she's staying there. Otherwise, we will shut down your house as a foster home.”

Glenn relented; after all, they had Nayelly, and Nayelly was still a foster child. They couldn't, and wouldn't, lose her. They agreed to have a meeting—with Oneida, with the agency, and with ACS.

Mindy interrupted, her dark eyes blazing: “We had to say we were going to have Oneida removed before they would even think about helping us. And we'd been asking for help all along!”

It was clear at the meeting, both Glenn and Mindy asserted, that Oneida was happy to leave Staten Island. They believe she originally wanted any escape from the residential treatment center, and once Glenn and Mindy had provided that, Oneida could think only of Brooklyn.

“She uses people,” Glenn said bitterly.

Mindy nodded, watching her husband carefully. “She uses people, but that's how she's gotten through her life.”

At the meeting, despite Glenn's impatience, the agency said Oneida had to stay one more night; then they'd find her another placement.

Oneida stayed, but once everyone was sleeping she used a knife to cut all the cords to the house computer. In the morning she left for Brooklyn.

 

It took me several months to track down Oneida, so I could get her side of the story. I finally found her online, promoting some dance at a club in the Bronx.

“Ya this is me,” Oneida texted when I landed her phone number. “How r u?”

We met on a sunny afternoon in the Bronx, on the corner of 180th and Morris Park, across from the transit police station. She was about half an hour late, giving me plenty of time to peruse the real estate listings tacked onto a sandwich board, offering Section 8 apartments. Little kids bought popsicles from the bodega, and a drug dealer eyed me suspiciously; I was standing there too long.

Oneida looked the same as she had the day of her adoption meeting with Glenn and Mindy some eighteen months before, though she was missing her glasses and squinted a bit to see. Her curly hair was crimped with gel, her bangs crispy straight lines down her forehead. Her puffy upper lip makes her look as if she's been either crying or kissing, though that day it was neither; Oneida had just been relaxing at home—her fifth since she'd left Staten Island.

“Them white people?” Oneida answered, when I asked her what happened with Glenn and Mindy. She made a face as if she had swallowed something bitter, and also as if she was remembering something very long ago. “They was racist.”

We were walking toward East Tremont, looking for someplace to eat. McDonald's was out, because Oneida had just been fired from there, for “getting into an altercation with a customer.” Oneida waved her hand vaguely down the block. “My biological dad lives not too far from here, just a couple blocks away,” she said. I asked if she had seen him. “Not for a long time, maybe a few weeks before the summer. I don't really like seeing him; he lives in this bummy basement apartment. He's a junkie. I mean, I don't mind if people ask me for money, but every time?”

We settled on a Chinese place, with a $6 all-you-can-eat buffet. “I'm a very picky eater,” Oneida said, piling her plate with bright red sweet-and-sour pork and cheesecake from the end of the table. She ate only meat and cheese and bread; no rice, no vegetables, no fruits. And cheesecake, when she could get it.

At the beginning, Oneida admitted while chewing thoughtfully on her pork, she liked being a part of the Staten Island family. But shortly after she moved in, Oneida said, Glenn and Mindy became “judgmental.” One time her boyfriend stopped by when she wasn't home, and Glenn wouldn't let him in, “not even to use the bathroom!” Oneida was outraged. “And then they were judgmental of my music. The guy was Catholic and the lady was Jewish. If you that way, why take me? I'm Hispanic, you know I'm going to listen to Hispanic music.”

The stated issue was one of noise control, but Oneida felt racism was underneath. “I'd only play my music on the computer, and you know that can't get that loud,” she explained. “And then one day I came home and they'd put Krazy Glue on the volume!”

Oneida agreed that she took off for Brooklyn a lot, but that was only to visit her best friend, and to get a break from Staten Island, which she described as “too much of a suburb. All you see is bushes and trees.” The high school, too, was a difficult adjustment. “The school was huge, like four thousand children, and it was nothing but Chinese and white. I didn't mind being at that school, but it was how the kids looked at me—like I was some ghetto Spanish girl.”

Glenn, she told me, was more troubling than Mindy because he had a temper. They had their biggest argument right before their final meeting with the agency. “I wanted to go into my room and he was in there watching TV,” Oneida said. Oneida's bedroom was in the basement, where the sixty-four-inch flat-screen TV was mounted to the wall and where Glenn had always watched sports—long before any kids arrived. I saw this room when I visited Staten Island; despite the girly bedspread it still looked like a sports fan's room: team pennants were pegged all over the walls. “I was like, ‘Can you get out? I want to get my things for a shower.'”

Glenn told her to wait; he was at an important part of the game. Or she could simply get her clothes and go. Oneida was horrified, and furious. “I said, ‘You want to watch me get my bra and panties? Have some type of respect—I'm a female, I sleep here!' I called him a pervert.”

Oneida knew from past experience that she had to be extra-vigilant to protect herself. She told me she'd been raped twice, in her teens, by two different men, and she was molested repeatedly as a young child. She never confessed to these early incidents, but she was examined at three different hospitals and the doctors figured it out; she remembers these exams distinctly. Oneida knows these experiences have sometimes made it difficult for her to assess true danger. “Like one night, Glenn stood in my room while I was sleeping because somebody called the house at three in the morning,” she said, by way of example. “I was scared. I didn't know what that was about. I didn't know if he was being inappropriate.”

So were these incidents the reason that Glenn got a phone call about Oneida's idea of charging him with sexual misconduct? I told her that in Glenn's version of events, she was planning to file an accusation of abuse.

Oneida didn't blink. “Not at all. I guess they just felt like that.”

In Oneida's memory, the reason she was removed from Staten Island was that Glenn believed she was going to set fire to the house. It was an apt metaphor, but one I'd never heard from Glenn. In the end it didn't matter much to Oneida what anyone thought she was plotting; all she wanted at that time was out.