A new foster arrived today. Her name is Loni. We were told in advance that she does not speak, but has good receptive skills and would understand us when we were speaking to her. Her caseworker, Mariah, drove her from the city, and Missy and I stood outside waving as the van came up our driveway. Loni stepped out of the vehicle and looked around at the Ponderosa Pines and rock outcroppings that surrounded our cabin. She held a green, stuffed turtle tight to her chest.
We crouched to her level to introduce ourselves, telling her how happy we were to have her stay with us. She watched the shapes our mouths made, then turned her gaze back to the cabin, the forest, the lake. When she saw the dock and the small sandy beach at the end of the path, she immediately began toward them. Mariah took her by the hand and told her we would look inside the house first, then ask Missy and Paul if she could play in the water. Loni fidgeted but allowed herself to be led inside.
We showed her every room in the house, paying special attention to her bedroom. A committee of stuffed animals sat perched on her pillow. The closet fort was stocked with blankets, construction paper and every shade of crayon. In the living room, Mariah asked her what she thought. Loni pulled Mariah’s hand toward the front door, and Mariah explained that she wanted to go swimming. We said that it was fine, and Mariah helped Loni change into her bathing suit.
From the porch, Loni charged through the front gate to the lakeshore. Missy looked nervous and made to go after her, but Mariah said, “Don’t worry. Just watch.” Loni paused knee deep in the water for a mere second, then threw herself in with a splash. In the blink of an eye, she had swum meters from the shore, moving more like a frog than a child, her arms and legs rowing in unison. “My word,” Missy whispered. I caught her eye and laughed.
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Day 2.
It was between us and a behavioral institute for children. We are one of the longest standing foster homes in San Bernardino County and we have a good track record with the tough cases. Loni’s child psychologist, Nathan, instructed us to watch for changes in her communication patterns and in her “behavioral inhibition problems.” Apparently Loni is prone to doing unexpected things. At the hospital, she had been discovered climbing a drainpipe, sleeping in a windowsill, wandering the corridors, and running faucets until sinks overflowed. Nathan noted her preoccupation with water and took her to a public pool to see if it was an attraction or a phobia. That was when her remarkable swimming abilities were discovered.
No one knows for sure if ‘Loni’ is her real name. She washed ashore wearing a bracelet with the name ‘Loni’ on it, so that is what she is called. When I say washed ashore, I am not speaking in euphemism. She was found walking along Ventura beach alone, sun-burned, chafed and severely dehydrated. She spent three weeks at the children’s hospital in Pasadena receiving medical attention and undergoing psychiatric evaluation. They estimated that she was five years old. Her diagnosis was elective mutism, presumably due to trauma. An extensive search for her parents had begun.
After twenty-four hours of housing Loni, Missy is responding to her in a way I have never seen with any of our other fosters. Missy loves unordinary things. When we shop for antiques, she searches for oddities and misprints. When we visit animal shelters, she bonds with the three-legged dogs. She was diagnosed with an ovarian condition in her twenties that predicted she would always have fertility problems. She decided to leave her child-bearing destiny up to fate rather than receive any treatments. Fate had it that she would not become pregnant.
So we became foster parents, opening our lakeside cabin in the San Bernardino mountains to displaced children. Some have stayed for days, others for months, and a few for years. Occasionally, we find ourselves with an empty nest and take to the road in our Volkswagen bus, with a goal to see as many national parks as possible. At the end of last summer, as we were leaving Big Bend National Park beneath a glowing Texas sunset, Missy looked at me with the light behind her hair and told me she wanted to adopt a child.
We keep thinking Loni is about to speak to us. Just turn her head toward us and start babbling stories the way children do. But her attention is always pulled back to whatever came before us. She takes her stuffed turtle with her everywhere, giving it a seat at the table, trying to include it in bath time, holding it until she falls asleep. She wants to be in the lake morning, noon and night, kicking and gliding and floating on her back, watching swallows catch damselflies.
Missy is going to want to adopt this child. I can feel it in my bones.
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Day 6.
We had a visit from Nathan today. Loni responded beautifully to the therapy dog he brought with him. She caressed its golden ears and neck, and chased it in barefoot circles around the pine trees. Her body language has become less guarded, and she has been pointing to things to indicate them to us.
Nathan spent time alone with her in the living room, and reemerged saying that her progress was subtle but promising. He recommended activities that would encourage her to communicate, like obstacle courses and picture storytelling. We were to assure her that anything she wanted to say was fine. And it would be good if we could get her to wear shoes.
After Nathan left, she pawed at the door handle to ask to go swimming. I said we were going to stay inside and read a book together. She squeezed the door handle and squirmed, so I took her by the hand and led her to the coffee table with a book about a rabbit family. I showed her the mom rabbit and the dad rabbit, the brother rabbit and the sister rabbit, and I told her that Missy and I were like the mom rabbit and the dad rabbit, so it was safe for her to use her voice around us. She avoided my gaze, punishing me for not letting her swim.
Missy called me into the kitchen then to tell me about a phone call from Mariah. Loni’s case had been turned over to the Los Angeles Police Department. They were searching through missing children’s cases from port cities in California and Oregon. They were also sending copies of the police report to nationwide law enforcement networks. I said that meant there was a good chance Loni’s parents would be found. Missy said she had a feeling they wouldn’t.
When I came back to the living room, Loni was missing, and I heard the sound of running water coming from the bathroom. I sprinted down the hall and found her with her hands submerged in the sink, which was just beginning to overflow. I turned the tap off and pulled the plug from the drain. The water slurped and gurgled into oblivion. “Loni, running the water in the sink is not allowed,” I told her. “Please don’t do that again.” She watched me dry the floor with a look of satisfaction on her face.
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Day 8.
Missy awoke in the night to find Loni’s bed empty. She was seemingly nowhere in the house. A quick search revealed the front gate was open, the high latch somehow unlocked. We thundered onto the dock calling her name, our feet clattering against the boards like locomotives. We found her floating on her back in the dark water, having a night swim in her pajamas, resting her soaked turtle on her belly. She seemed unimpressed with our fearful faces, as if we should have known this was where she would be.
When we told her to come out of the lake, she submerged her ears. In a loud voice, I told her she needed to listen or she would be in trouble. She slipped under the water’s surface and disappeared. We could not tell where she had gone until she resurfaced closer to the shore and swam the rest of the way to the beach.
We took her inside to dry her off and put a fresh pair of pajamas on her. We told her how scared we had been and how she was never to go swimming alone. She seemed to be only half-listening. Her attention was drawn to the window, where a handful of stars glinted. The turtle spent the night in the bathtub. Neither Missy nor I slept much after that.
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Day 13.
After breakfast, I was washing dishes and looked out the kitchen window to see Loni hiding behind a rock outcropping at the edge of the forest, barefoot as always, waiting for Missy to find her. Missy was lumbering around, pretending she didn’t know where to look for Loni. When she finally rounded the outcropping, Loni went running in ecstatic circles, then quickly found a tree stump to hide behind, waiting for Missy to repeat the process.
The phone rang. It was Mariah calling to check in. I told her what I was seeing outside the window. Loni was raising a yellow flower to Missy, and Missy was making a fuss over it. I asked what the chances were of Missy and I adopting Loni. She said it wasn’t out of the realm of possibility, but not to get too attached to the idea. Even if the search for her parents turned up no leads, the decision rested entirely on Nathan’s recommendation of what was a suitable environment for Loni.
I hung up the phone, putzed around the kitchen for a moment, then went through the back gate to the forest trail, into a host of locust songs and sunbaked pines. I pictured Loni’s birth parents somewhere sick with worry, wearing vintage clothes for some reason, dabbing their eyes with handkerchiefs. Many thousands of generations of parents had lost sleep over children before me, especially those whose dreams had been revoked by the death of a child or a child gone missing. I’d had varying levels of attachment to our fosters over the years, but it was always an impermanent arrangement. Maybe that had served as a type of insulation.
I remembered waking up to my own father sitting around an early morning campfire in the Yosemite backcountry, coffee in hand, savoring the echoes of the valley. An ache went through my chest when I thought about all the things we hadn’t said to each other, despite the opportunities the infinite silence provided. It struck me that I had never sensed an ache for parents in Loni.
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Day 16.
I drove into Big Bear today for groceries and woodworking supplies, and I came home to Missy having a religious experience.
“It’s like the monks I met in Portugal who had taken a vow of silence!” she told me, speaking wildly with her hands. “When she touched me, I knew it was the same thing!”
Loni had disappeared again while Missy was gardening. This time, Missy found her halfway up the biggest Redwood on our property, standing on two thin branches, rocking with the wind. Missy called out to her in terror and started climbing the tree, hollering to hold on tight and stand still. It wasn’t until she was two thirds of the way up that she remembered her fear of heights. The ground was far below. Loni was unresponsive. Missy clung to the tree trunk and began to cry in fear.
When Loni heard Missy’s sobs, she looked down. Within seconds, she had climbed effortlessly to where Missy was, coming to rest on a neighboring branch. She touched Missy’s hand, and when Missy looked into her face, she felt like she was looking down an old path, a good path, where no harm would come to her. A calm spread from her core into her limbs, bringing her back into her body, enabling her to climb to the ground alongside Loni. She came to stand on the earth with a new understanding.
“It’s not trauma, Paul. It’s a child’s version of reverence. She’s honoring something. She’s listening to something.”
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Day 22.
Everything has changed. Loni follows us around the house now, imitating what we do, wanting to touch what we touch, bringing us caterpillars and quartz rocks and pinecones. Today, she fished the thermostat out of the kitchen drawer and set it on the patio table, which is something Missy does to track temperatures, but hasn’t done since Loni arrived. Two days ago, Loni dragged the kitchen trash can to the side of the refrigerator, just seconds before a small earthquake knocked a potted plant directly into it. Last week, she laid all her clothes onto her bed and turned them inside out, one by one. My mother used to eccentrically store my clothes this way, saying it would protect the fabric from moths. Loni smiled at me in delight when I asked what she was doing.
I’m aware that things like this happen, out of sight from the eyes of the world. It just doesn’t feel like other people’s stories now that it’s happening to me.
Missy is euphoric.
“I feel like an open book to her, like she is always reading me.”
“Every version of her future I can think of is terrifying.”
“We are having a supernatural experience, Paul! It’s transcendent! Aren’t you thankful?”
I said nothing. Missy muttered something about the spiritual sensitivity of a rock and left the room. I went through the back door to the forest trail to clear my head.
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Day 26.
I heard Loni speak tonight. She was sitting at the edge of the dock beneath the Milky Way belt, talking into the darkness. From the porch, I thought I was imagining things, but when I snuck beneath the dock to hide in the shadows, the sound was unmistakable.
First she talked about the stars. She said she saw the ones that looked like a “W” when she was in the water. She asked if all the stars were made at the same time or if some were mommy and daddy stars, and others were brother and sister stars. She paused, her bare feet dangling off the edge of the dock. Then, “Why do people walk around on the ground instead of swim? Swimming is more fun. My turtle thought so too. Can you tell him I love him?” Pause. “I’m going to bed. Good night.” She stood and her steps tapped across the boards above me.
At that moment, I imagined Loni being formed from molten coral and sand and kelp, floating to the ocean’s surface and inhaling her first breath, drifting ashore and staggering inland toward the sea of people, to be observed and handled and judged. What would they make of her? What would they want from her? What would they take from her?
Paul, a voice inside me said, what will she give to them?
I told Missy what I’d heard when I came inside, and that, yes, of course I was thankful. She wrapped her arms around my neck and rested her head on my shoulder. She asked if we should tell Nathan and Mariah. We stood and rocked together for a moment. I said it was not for us to break a sacred silence.
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Day 28.
We sat down with Loni as she colored and told her that the people who had brought her to the cabin were coming to talk to her. We asked if she liked living with us and she smiled.
“We would like it very much if you stayed here with us, Loni, but if you don’t tell Mariah and Nathan that you want to stay with us, they might take you back to the city with them,” I told her.
She stayed intent on her coloring.
“I think maybe you are ready to talk, but you are waiting for a very special moment,” Missy said. “Will today be your very special moment?”
Missy and I met Mariah and Nathan outside the gate, where they shared the latest details of her case with us. Nothing had surfaced about her identity. The case had been cross-referenced against every missing child report in the coastal states, and every promising lead had turned into a dead end. The case would remain open, but the court had ruled that it was time to place her into a more permanent living situation, according to Nathan’s recommendation. We shared with them all the positive behaviors she had been exhibiting, finding ways to connect, mirroring our behaviors, seeking our attention. We said that we had seen no high-risk behaviors since the tree incident.
Loni was in a strange mood when they came inside the house. Her eyes darted back and forth between their faces, revealing nothing. She held her stuffed turtle close. Nathan spent time alone with her in the living room while Missy and I made Mariah a cup of tea in the kitchen. She massaged her temples and admitted that coming to our property was a welcome break, though she didn’t say from what. We showed her around our garden and rain barrel system until Nathan invited us to join him in the living room.
“I think the best thing for Loni is placement in a behavioral institute for children,” he told us, out of earshot of her bedroom, where she had gone to hide. “Until we understand what’s causing her mutism, we can’t predict what kind of environment is genuinely safe for her. She needs to be watched closely by specialists. I’m really sorry. I know this is not what you wanted to hear.”
Missy looked at me in distress. “She’s not herself today. She’s been much more responsive than this lately.”
“When she’s ready to leave the behavioral institute, we will reconsider your home for her permanent placement.”
“If you could please just give us a little more time.”
“I want to stay with Missy and Paul.”
The four of us turned in amazement to Loni, who had appeared at the end of the hallway with her turtle.
“I don’t want to go. I want to stay here.”
The silence in the room was as thick as ebony until Nathan found his voice. “It’s wonderful to hear you talk, Loni. Do you want to tell us anything else about yourself?”
“I don’t know.”
“Is Loni what you like to be called?”
Loni walked with intentionality to Mariah and handed her the stuffed turtle. “You can keep him until Sam comes home. I don’t need him anymore. I have a real turtle now.” She went to the front door and let herself out, and we heard her feet patter away from the house.
Mariah stared into the turtle’s worn face and shiny black eyes, dumbfounded. “Sam is my eight-year-old. He’s autistic. He pushed another child into a ravine. He wasn’t trying to hurt anyone. He was just scared.”
I stepped onto the porch and watched Loni lay belly down in the sand with her chin in her hands. Walking toward her with gusto was a Blanding Lake turtle, leaving a trail of pock marks in the sand.
Stephanie Reimer is a writer and homemaker in Chilliwack, British Columbia. She has been recognized and awarded in the Okanagan Short Story contest, Arizona based magazine The Traveler, and as a journalist with the Ferndale Record in Washington. When she is not working on her forthcoming novel, she is chasing rivers and dreams of cabin building with her family.