or just window-shopping among the trendy shops and independent boutiques. West Hartford has a wonderful, historical feel to it, with a huge white spire of a Presbyterian church right in the middle, and a wide grassy verge bisecting Main Street. The sidewalks are wide, the shops often with friendly awnings, the cafés with tables outside, even in October, as it’s still warm.
Usually, when I walk into town with Dylan, we do our loop of the library, the supermarket, and then, if the weather is nice, the half-mile trek to Fernridge Park, to see the ducks and go on the swings.
But alone I’m not sure what to do. I wander up Main Street and turn left onto Farmington Avenue. Everything is familiar but without Dylan I feel lost, less than, as if I’m missing a limb or even a lung.
I decide to go into a café, simply because I can. Dylan won’t usually let me—they’re too small, with too many people, and the whole experience scares him. I order an iced coffee and take it outside to a little table. I sit and sip and watch the world go by, and I feel tense and unhappy the whole time.
It’s incredibly pleasant—the almost balmy air, the sunshine that spills onto the sidewalk like a stream of honey, the delicious coffee—I wouldn’t normally splurge four bucks on a cup of coffee in any circumstance—the leaves of the trees lining the street that are just starting to turn to russet and gold. It’s glorious and yet I can’t appreciate any of it. My stomach is churning and I still don’t know what to do.
Do I call Susan and tell her I wasn’t able to speak to a lawyer? Maybe she’ll offer to wait on the placement contract until I’ve been able to look it over. She’d have to, wouldn’t she? I mean, it’s voluntary, after all. But if she does, what happens to Dylan? Do we just stay in this wretched stasis until I finally bend to Susan’s will?
I can’t escape the sense of a bomb ticking away, of it being about to explode right on my lap. I’m afraid some unspoken deadline will pass and I’ll have missed my only opportunity. I can already picture Susan shaking her head sorrowfully.
I’m sorry, Beth, but you had to sign this paper by nine a.m. this morning, otherwise Dylan becomes a ward of the state. It’s too late.
I’m sure it wouldn’t happen like that, and yet maybe it would. I know so little, and everything online is so confusing, full of legal jargon, a thousand laws that seem only to sometimes apply.
I take my phone and pull up the search engine just in case I’m able to stumble upon some magical solution.
What I find is a website created by a family lawyer in Waterbury called CONNspiracy, and it doesn’t take me long to realize it’s a website made for people like me. It offers advice—tons of advice—for parents whose children have been taken by the state of Connecticut’s DCF, or who are being threatened with an investigation.
As I read, I am filled with both hope and fury. I learn that I didn’t have to agree to anything. I didn’t have to accompany the police yesterday from CVS, and I’ve never even had to let Susan into my apartment, not once—something she never mentioned to me during her impromptu visits.
In any state in America, you have to have a search warrant to enter a person’s home. DCF, the website tells me, gets around this with their so-called emergency orders, but you should always request to see the actual order before you allow anyone inside. I haven’t seen anything.
The website goes on to say how caseworkers wheedle and trick and basically lie to get you to do what they want. They’ll worm their way into your home and ask your kids condemning questions and all the while state that they are trying to be helpful. Just as Susan did. But what they really want is to take your kids away from you, to be in control.
I’m not so naïve that I don’t realize this guy has a serious axe to grind, but still. There’s a lot Susan should have done that she didn’t, and that fires me with purpose. Forget the lawyers, I have a case. I have a right.
Reckless yet filled with determination, I call Susan’s cell right then and there. She answers on the second ring.
“Beth?”
“Susan.” My voice comes out as hostile as it was this