“Please, have a seat.” I gesture broadly to the couch, which is plush and overstuffed, and large enough to hold four active teens at the same time. It will swallow him and make him small. Small enough, I hope, that this goes painlessly and without any of the problems that have historically attended such visits.
He stays where he is, not accepting my admittedly grudging hospitality. I try again. “Can I get you anything? A cup of tea or coffee? If that’s not to your liking, Andrea made lemonade this morning, and the boys haven’t had time to drink it all yet.”
“Before school?” His tone is suddenly sharp. “Shouldn’t she have been worried about getting ready?”
So that’s how this is going to be. I abandon the idea of things going gently. “The bus comes at seven thirty,” I said. “Andrea shares her room with Brittany and Kim. Kim has nightmares from a previous foster home, and wakes up screaming by five most mornings. Andrea got up when Kim woke her, and wanted to make lemonade so that she could have some when she got home from school. She prefers it after it’s had time to settle a little.”
“These nightmares. Have you reported them?”
“I assure you that the agency is fully aware. Kim sees a psychiatrist every other Wednesday afternoon, and we hope she’ll eventually be able to sleep through the night.” I look along my nose at him, frowning. “If you check her file, you’ll see that this condition was documented well before she came to me.” Seventeen years old and thin as a rail, shivering on my porch, with everything she owned in a busted suitcase that looked like Goodwill would refuse to accept it. It took six months before she stopped cowering every time one of her foster brothers came into the room, and another three before she was able to speak to one of them in anything above a whisper. I don’t know what happened to her before she came to me, and I don’t press. That’s what her psychiatrist is for. If I had answers for my unspoken questions, quite a few people might have to die, and again, the human justice system frowns on that sort of behavior.
“I see.” The man—who has yet to give me his name, and best believe I’ve noticed; it’s a small slap to the face, not the large one I’m sure he’s gearing up to, but it still stings—finally sits. As I had hoped, the couch all but swallows him, boiling him down to one of the children in my care.
Jasmine was probably the last straw for some bureaucrat somewhere, sitting in a windowless office and making choices about the future of their own kin and kind. She’s only twelve, four years below my usual cutoff. I watch for children on the verge of aging out of the system, the ones most likely to be angry at the world thanks to their treatment, the ones losing hope. Foster care will keep them with me until they turn nineteen, if I’m willing to accept responsibility for legal adults, and some of them stay on longer than that. My eldest was Angelo, who stayed until shortly after his twenty-fifth birthday, finishing community college and finding the girl who would be his wife before he struck out on his own. A few more would have stayed that long, if they hadn’t felt a vague obligation to clear out and make room for kids like they’d been, kids who really needed the space.
Jazzy, though . . . she’s young enough that someone probably flagged her file as a candidate for adoption, and thought it strange when I inquired about her. Never mind that she’s been in foster care since she was five, or that humans have strange ideas about what they look for in children. Glasses and gapped teeth and a formal diagnosis of both dyslexia and ADHD tends to move kids into the “someone else’s problem” bucket. But all those things were why I’d known she was meant to be my problem from the moment I saw her picture. There was no reason to leave her in a series of unsuitable and potentially dangerous homes until she was old enough to have a room with me. Not when we had the space.
Even if I’d known, for sure, that bringing her home would bring this man’s shadow to my door, I would have done it. This is where she belongs. Even before she came here, this was home.
He looks at me, eyes sharp, and says, “You’ve fostered quite a few older children, Ms. Dracan. An almost unrealistic number.”
“Is there a question there?”
“Why?” He shakes his head. “You don’t adopt until they’re legally adults, and even then, not always. Why do you do this?”
“I offer to adopt all my children, when they reach legal age,” I say. “Before that, they might feel trapped, like saying no would put them on the street. I don’t want any of them to feel obligated to stay with me, and they don’t all. Some of them pack their things and leave the day the law says that they’re allowed, because they don’t want to steal resources from kids they assume must need them more.”
And I cry every single time, because for a while, they were mine. They were my children, and this is where they will always, always belong. Here. With me. With their brothers and sisters and me. This is their home.
“I see,” says the man from social services. He adjusts his glasses again. “Ms. Dracan, surely you understand that what you’ve been doing here is highly irregular, and not normally tolerated by the people in charge of the foster care system. Children are not cats, to be hoarded by unmarried women with houses that feel too big for them.”
“Have there been any complaints about the way I care for my children?” I ask. “Or is the absence of complaint the cause of your suspicion?”
“Ms. Dracan, this isn’t personal.” He stands. “We simply think it might be better if the children were temporarily removed from your care, to ensure their safety.”
This isn’t about their safety. This is about a flawed system that has never worked the way it was intended, running up against the unyielding stone of my commitment. I smile at him, slowly, and hear the clicks echoing through the house as every door and window locks itself.
“Did you ever wonder,” I ask, “where the dragons have gone?”
He doesn’t have the common sense to look alarmed. “Flights of fancy will not change the situation.”
“They were everywhere, once, blackening the sky, and then they disappeared. Oh, human heroes slew a certain number of them. It took time to learn to handle swords and armor. But the dragons were so vast, and so strong, that there’s no way a handful of knights could have stolen the sky from them.”
“Ms. Dracan—”
“The gold thing was a bit of a red herring, I’ll admit. You see, dragons hoard. Every dragon collects something. Gold and jewels were easy before humans developed a concept of money. Most went for more ephemeral things. Spring breezes. Butterflies. Sunsets. Tattered innocence in need of a place to recover.” This time my smile shows my teeth, which are sharper and whiter than they were a few minutes ago. The smell of sulfur is starting to seep into the air. My uninvited guest is beginning to look nervous. Good. He should look nervous.
“We learned to hide. We learned to build our collections through legitimate means. We learned to be better. We never gave up our wings.”
He has time to scream exactly once before he is devoured.
After, curled around the living room, careful not to crush the couch, I use one claw to delicately flip through the papers in his briefcase, the ones he didn’t bother showing me. As I had suspected, he came on his own, sure that he had discovered some terrible predation upon the children I care for. No one will tie his disappearance to me. It will take several days to get the smell of sulfur out of the curtains, but it’s not as if this is the first time.