Everybody's Son
Thrity Umrigar
EPIGRAPH
God have mercy on the man
Who doubts what he’s sure of
—BRUCE SPRINGSTEEN
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
Thank you, Rachel Dissell, for your generous help in explaining the family court and foster care systems to me. Thanks, Subodh Chandra, for your prompt reply to my query about the U.S. Attorneys system.
Thank you, Pat D’Sousa and Peggy Veasey, for your friendship, and profound gratitude to your parents for welcoming me into their home during those long-ago Christmas trips to Georgia that had such an impact on my life.
I am lucky to work with the finest of colleagues at Case Western Reserve University. Special thanks, Cyrus Taylor, for your enthusiastic encouragement and support.
I am beyond grateful to my brilliant and alarmingly hardworking agent, Daniel Greenberg, and to my wise and wonderful editor, Gail Winston. Thank you, Gail, for your sensitive and thoughtful edits.
To my extended HarperCollins family—thank you for the attention and care you bring to my books. Michael Morrison and Jonathan Burnham, so proud to know you.
To my readers: You are the ones who breathe life into my books. I am more grateful than you can know.
Thanks to my friends, too numerous to mention by name. You sustain, nourish, and challenge me.
As always, thank you, Eust, Gulshan, and Homai, for being my forever people.
And Dad, missing you still. Always will.
PROLOGUE
On the seventh day, the boy broke the window.
It had been sealed shut by a coat of paint applied years earlier, and after several futile attempts to open it, he picked up the nearest dining room chair and heaved it against the glass.
Even though it happened during the quiet of a Saturday afternoon in May, no one appeared to have heard. No heads stuck out from their own window to examine the source of the shattering, no feet hurried to the apartment where the boy had stayed alone for seven days.
It was a miracle, really, that he had survived. Outside, the worst heat wave in a decade was raging, and when the police got there, they reported indoor temperatures of ninety-five degrees. The electricity had been cut off four days earlier. If there had been food in the refrigerator, it surely would have turned moldy. As it was, he had finished eating whatever little was in the fridge—a few slices of pizza and two hot dogs. The rest of the time he had survived on bags of potato chips, crackers, and candy bars.
Still, he had not sought help. Nobody could understand why not. When the police asked if he hadn’t wondered whether his mother was dead, struck by a car, maybe, or worse, he had simply stared back at them with those big amber eyes. The officer suspected that this was not the first time he had been left alone while his mother went scouring for drugs, but the boy was noncommittal. “She told me she’d be back” was all he said. And so he had waited.
Waited. In the tiny one-bedroom apartment that had no air-conditioning and only one ceiling fan that could not operate with the power off. Waited in the apartment with the dead fridge and food running out and no television to watch.
Even when he smashed the window of the first-floor apartment and tumbled out onto the tiny patch of lawn outside, what greeted him was the indifferent world. No middle-aged woman walked over to see what the commotion was. No elderly neighbor appeared curious about the shards of glass sprinkled on the grass and the cement walkway. The young punks hanging around the housing project didn’t look up from their self-absorbed jousting to see the young boy dripping blood from where the broken window had sliced his left leg.
In the end, it was the blood that saved him. The cop in the cruiser who patrolled the Roosevelt projects was used to spilled blood in this neighborhood. But even from a distance, he could see how fragile and vulnerable the young boy looked. And yet he was walking, walking away from the desolate brick buildings, as if searching for something, dragging his left leg along. Something about the boy’s posture, frail but resolute, made the officer leave the air-conditioned comfort of his cruiser and step out into the blistering heat. “You okay, sonny?” he asked, but he knew the answer even before he finished the question.
It all happened quickly after that. The call for the ambulance. The call to Children’s Services. A short hunt for the mother. Turned out she was in a crack house less than three blocks away. When they found her, she was passed out and half-naked, semen caked on her thighs. A pipe lay on her chest. They arrested the other two women and four guys in the house and confiscated multiple drug paraphernalia, along with two thousand dollars’ worth of crack cocaine.
When she came to, she asked repeatedly for her baby boy. Swore that she’d intended to go out only for a hit and return home straight away, but Victor, her drug dealer, had raped her and kept her doped up. She’d locked the apartment door from the outside because the housing project wasn’t a safe place for a young boy to be alone. Hell, she did that even if she went to the food pantry. All the mothers did this to keep their babies safe, ask any of her neighbors. The cops ignored her mewing. There was nothing here that they hadn’t heard or seen before. It was 1991. There was a crack epidemic raging across the country. A few towns over, the rich white kids were snorting cocaine. But here, in the inner city, it was a goddamn jungle. Filled with animals like this disheveled, wild-eyed woman who had left her son to bake in a locked apartment in the middle of a heat wave.
If they had their way, if they had any goddamn power, which they didn’t, of course, they’d lock up the bitch forever. Make sure she never got to hurt that poor kid again. But as it was, they knew she’d walk free in a couple of months. And so they shook their heads and drank their beer and shot some pool until they could forget about her, her and her ilk, people who seemed to exist only to make their goddamn jobs even goddamn harder.
BOOK ONE
June 1991
CHAPTER ONE
The room where he was to meet the boy was painted a cheery blue, its walls covered with posters promoting the county’s foster care program, but David Coleman barely noticed any of it as he walked in, escorted by the social worker. He was too nervous. The two men made their way to the maroon couch, and David eased his lanky frame onto it. They made small talk for a few seconds, and then the social worker looked at his watch and stated the obvious: The boy was late.