Chapter 15
Sunday, Sharon’s surveillance of the Brewster home proved fruitless. The curtains had been drawn and even with binoculars, she had been unable to see anything from her car.
She filled that day with worries of Laif. Normally, she would be angry that he had abandoned her, and it confused her that she was worrying instead. She had no idea what happened to him, and she wanted him to be all right.
That night, her sleep was restless, and she woke up several times to find herself standing in the living room and staring at the print of Johnny Cash holding June Carter. Their love made her shiver. She folded her arms. After a while, she would go to the kitchen sink, sip some water, and go back to bed.
Monday morning at 10:00 a.m., she waited sleepy-eyed on the first floor of the child empathy project beside the Department of Children and Family Services office in Pomona, feeling as though she were Alice, having fallen down the rabbit hole into Wonderland.
Pat Yomogusta, Cindy’s county social worker, was having the Brewster family come in for a session of child empathy. The parents—if they showed up—would be on the second floor. Sharon had convinced Pat last Friday to allow her to see Cindy again to give her two stuffed animals and the stuffed frog left behind in Jenny Myer’s foster home.
Sharon set the pink teddy bear, the purple rabbit, and the green frog on the humongous couch, twenty feet in length and seven feet tall at the back. Because the couch seat was so high, she had to pull herself into it, which was difficult in her blue jeans because they kept making her slide off. Once sitting, she took the two stuffed animals into her arms, mostly for security.
But she pushed the frog further away from her. Even though it was only stuffed, she didn’t like carrying it, being around it, or looking at it.
If it were a live amphibian, she wouldn’t have been able to carry it at all. Frogs were green. Of all colors to be, they had to be a slimy, disgusting, puke green. And they leaped, possibly straight at you! You never saw any green mammals. In fact, frequent representations of aliens were little, green humanoid creatures.
Her eyes traveled the enormous living room. The ceiling rose thirty feet. Gigantic paintings of nature clung to the walls with nails as thick as thumbs. She had to crane her neck up to see them. Across the room, forty feet away, rested a television the size of a movie screen. It probably didn’t work, but it gave the right impression.
Two fully dressed mannequins stood twelve feet high in the middle of the room, frozen in an intense argument, fingers pointed at each other like guns.
This room was constructed for parents to feel the way a child experiences a violent home.
Being adults, we forget how insignificant children may feel and how much more threatening for children violence perpetrated by adults can appear. A lot of money was spent just to offer this perspective for abusive parents, but if it could get a percentage of them to a greater understanding, it was considered well spent. Keeping a single child in foster care for a year costs taxpayers an average of about 8400 dollars. There are over sixty-thousand children in foster care in California alone. So, in general, we pay around 500 million dollars a year in California.
A life-like statue of a German Shepherd dog stood beside the couch, five feet tall, looking more like a small horse, petrified in a sniff of Sharon’s right leg. Its white teeth were the length of her fingers.
This room really worked.
Being here made Sharon feel like she did as a child, small and insignificant. She could picture her parents—the size of giants in that room—yelling, throwing things, and having parties all night long, as they had done on many occasions. A single adult foot stepping on her hand could break it. Imagining ten giants hopping around on drugs, she connected back with her childhood anxiety.
She snapped out of it when the front door—a garage-size door—opened with a great creaking, and Pat Yomogusta guided Cindy inside.
Slipping off the couch, literally falling to the floor in her sandals, she then walked through shaggy green carpet that came up to her ankles. She saw, waiting in between the fibers, a cockroach the size of her hand. It moved its legs spastically and made her jump. Inspecting it more closely, she saw it was not real, but mechanical.
Cindy was utterly dwarfed by the room.
When Sharon finally reached them, Pat told the girl, “I’ll come get you in fifteen minutes.” Pat appeared half Asian and half Caucasian, standing several inches shorter than Sharon, probably five feet and two inches. “Sorry to have to use this room,” she told Sharon, “but it’s the most convenient one right now.”
Before Pat could turn to leave, Sharon pointed and informed, “Look at these dark circles under Cindy’s eyes. Her face looks pale. She looks as if she hasn’t slept in days. What do the grandparents say about this?”
“Just that,” she answered matter-of-factly. “That Cindy’s been having trouble sleeping. They say they’re going to enroll her in therapy to deal with it as soon as they can.”
“Why are the parents allowed unmonitored time with her?”
Pat sighed and rolled her eyes. “They’ve been doing everything they’re supposed to, taking parenting classes, going to psychotherapy. We need to give them a chance, Sharon. They are her parents.”
She remembered telling Cindy something similar after the first monitored visit with Mary and Joe Brewster. Sharon had made a mistake then, which she hadn’t been aware of. She wouldn’t be able to convince Pat to place the girl back into foster care. Pat wouldn’t see her own mistake until it was too late.
When the county social worker reached the tiled foyer, her heeled footsteps echoed off the walls. The front door closed with an immense weight, which ended in an ear-breaking clap. Something about the construction of the room amplified sound. Sharon didn’t doubt that they actually had installed hidden microphones along with amplifiers and speakers to heighten sound.
She searched for chairs, but all of them were unreachable for Cindy. She led the girl to some steps to the dining room that adults would need to crawl up, but the first step was a comfortable size for sitting.
“You brought Billy, Jilly, and Hermit,” the girl said with only a trace of excitement.
“Yep. Which one is Hermit?”
“He’s the frog.”
Figures, she thought. People even name frogs odd names. They must sense the difference, even though not repulsed by it as I am.
As she handed the pink bear, purple rabbit, and lastly, the green frog to Cindy, Sharon leaned close and scanned the girl’s arms and hands for bruises or burns. Her skin was clean though. The parents had dressed her to impress the county social worker. She had on a clean white blouse, and a brown plaid skirt with shiny black shoes and white socks. Her blond hair smelled of fruity shampoo and was neatly combed.
Sharon waited for conversation to begin, but the girl just sat quietly.
Cindy held the stuffed animals and frog tightly in her left arm. She grasped a wooden box in her right hand. Sharon remembered it from Sycamore Park. It was small and carved with exquisite decorations. As Cindy spun it in her hand, Sharon was struck by its beauty. It looked like something that should be in a museum or an antique store, not in the hands of a nine-year-old girl.
Cindy set it down on her lap. It had no imperfections.
Trying to make light conversation, she asked, “What do you got there?”
Cindy crammed the box into her skirt pocket and used both arms to hold the stuffed animals and frog.
Evidently, the box was not good conversation. Maybe no conversation would be comfortable. The girl probably felt bad about herself. It was sickening that just two nights ago, Cindy believed she deserved to be maltreated.
Sharon wondered what the Brewsters had done to silence their daughter. Talking about things helped. Keeping things inside hurt. Something must be eating the girl up inside. Sharon was going to find out what that was.
She combed her fingers through Cindy’s hair, surreptitiously scanning her scalp, neck, and shoulders for burns, bruises, or scrapes. “How’ve you been?”
She wouldn’t look into Sharon’s eyes. “Okay.”
Sharon didn’t believe that for a second. If abusive parents didn’t get better psychologically, they got better at hiding their abuse.
She wanted to check the girl’s feet and ankles for marks. “Let’s play hop-scotch.” She began taking off her sandals as a cue for Cindy to take her shoes off as well.
“I don’t feel like it right now.”
She slipped her sandals back on and tapped her ear with her index finger, racking her brain for a way to unobtrusively check the girl’s body. She could inspect Cindy’s stomach if the girl’s blouse was loose enough. “How about you show me if you can do a hand-stand?”
“I’m kind of tired,” she answered softly.
“Tired? Why? Haven’t you been getting enough sleep?”
Cindy turned her head away and shivered.
“What’s wrong?”
The two stuffed animals slipped from her arms onto the floor, only the frog remained.
Sharon worried about the father's sexual assault record. If he really was a sexual deviant, it’s rare to grow out of those demented desires. “Is something bad happening at night? Is someone coming into your room?”
She didn’t answer.
“What’s going on?”
Cindy drew her legs up and curled her arms around them, rocking forward and backward.
She felt defeated. “What’re they doing to you, Cindy? Are they touching you inappropriately?”
The girl seemed to be crawling deeper into a shell of her own making. Laif was right. They did need the girl’s help to get her to a safe place. But how could you turn a child against her parents? Even if a part of her wants to tattle on them, it’s difficult because she will always love her parents, no matter what kind of horrors they commit.
A mechanical flea the size of a quarter jumped high over her legs, startling Sharon, and it continued hopping towards the dining room.
She put her arm around Cindy. The girl continued to squeeze her knees into her chest. Her back was tight and hot. “Please Cindy … please … tell me if something is wrong. I can only help if you talk.”