at the safe house for about a week with my kids, and Stephanie brought me in to fold clothes with you. You weren’t the boss yet, just volunteering your time.”
“I remember.” I pictured Tanya the first time I saw her. She was barely a shadow of the bright woman sitting before me now. Her face bore the evidence of a man’s fury in a mottled mess of purple and black bruises against her dark skin. Her brown eyes were lifeless; she looked at me, bewildered, like a prisoner who had suddenly been set free and didn’t know what to do with her newfound liberty.
“Well,” she said now, “then you’ll remember how you sat with me for hours, just listening and letting me cry. I think we managed to fold about three shirts. You were so calm and collected. You held my hand and you told me over and over again that I didn’t have to live the way I’d been living anymore. You told me I was stronger than I knew. You said I could be anything I wanted to be, and the way that you said it with such conviction, I believed it might be true.” Her full bottom lip trembled as she spoke. “You may not get all gushy about your feelings, but if I’ve learned anything over the past couple of years, it’s that any fool can learn to talk a good game about how they feel. It takes real strength to show up and prove it.” She paused. “You hear me? You understand what I’m saying? Love is a verb.”
My own lip trembled then, and I nodded, too afraid that if I spoke I’d burst into tears. “Thank you,” I finally whispered.
Tanya smiled and picked up the file next to her. “You’re welcome. Now, let’s get you to work!”
“Yes, ma’am,” I said with a smile, and she went back to her desk, quietly closing my door behind her. For the next few hours, I poured myself into writing the proposal that, if approved by the state, would bring Second Chances almost half its operating funds for the next fiscal year. I described the women we helped, their desperation and fear; how our counselors worked with them to build their confidence and a support system that would keep them from ever going back to their abusive partners. Putting the words on the page, I felt better than I had in a month. This I was good at. This was where my talents were—helping these women. Running this organization in a way that made me proud.
As I was typing up a list of all the different services we provide for our clients, I went into great detail about how many of the women who came to Second Chances were without family in the immediate area—how their abusers isolated them both emotionally and physically. Oftentimes we’d have to do a nationwide search to locate relatives our clients could connect with for support, and it suddenly struck me that I could utilize those resources to confirm if Kelli actually did have a baby in high school. In fact, we’d even had a few women who’d given up babies for adoption and asked our assistance in finding them. But before I could do this for Kelli, I needed to make sure I wasn’t headed down the completely wrong path.
I opened my Internet browser and did a quick search to bring up the California census website. Our staff had access to databases that included all births and deaths for every state so we could find out if the women had surviving family members. I could run a search for California and see if any babies were born under Kelli’s maiden name during 1993 or 1994. That would at least be a place to start. “Hey, Tanya?” I called out through my open office door. “Can you help me with something for a minute?”
She appeared a moment later, notepad and pen in hand. “What’s up?”
I turned the monitor of my computer so she could see it. “I need to log in to Vitalsearch for California and I can’t remember my password.”
She strode across the room and came around behind my desk, then leaned over and typed in the right combination of keystrokes. The site opened up and she straightened, smiling at me. “Do we have a client looking for family there? The counselors usually tell me before you.”
“This is a little more personal,” I said, then explained to her about the doctor’s letter