Page 123 of Coast

“They can’t all be great stories.”

“Stories are ever-evolving,” she said, reaching for the paper with the orange tab. “This is Leonard.”

“Lenny,” I corrected, remembering his freckled face and mischievous pranks.

“Lenny, unfortunately, aged out of the system. But he now works at a nonprofit that advocates for foster children. Arty dug really deep and found an article once where he talked about a foster brother he once knew who used to meet him prank-for-prank when he was in his second foster home. He said it was one of his fondest memories. That was you, wasn’t it?”

“Yeah,” I agreed, feeling suddenly choked up.

“These,” she said, going back to the folder, “are Madison and Allison,” I told him, holding up their pictures. “The girls whose abuser you made sure could never hurt anyone again. They’re both married. This is Allison’s wife and their daughter. And Madison with her husband and two sons. Allison is a therapist. Madison is a teacher.”

She put the papers face down on the counter.

“Do you want me to stop?”

“No,” I said. “How many do you have?”

“All of them,” she said. “Every single kid—or teen—that passed through your house. But these are the ones I want to talk to you about most,” she said, pulling a few tabbed pages to the side. “These are three of the babies you did take care of at some point.”

I looked at the pictures, wishing I could see the babies in the faces of the teens or young adults, but too much time had passed.

“Why these ones?” I asked.

“Ryland,” she said, putting that image to the front, “is in juvie.”

I remembered Ryland well. He’d been an easy baby, always watching me with strangely intense dark green eyes.

“For what?”

“Assault. On his foster father.”

I took the paper, staring at the stats Arty had compiled.

“He gets out in a few months. Then this is Grayson. From what Arty gathered from online chatter, he is involved with a street crew over near Ama’s clinic. He’s working as a scout, he thinks.”

Grayson had been about four months old when I met him.

I got to see his first time rolling over, his first real belly laugh, his first bite of food.

“And this one, this is Amy. The one I am most worried about.”

Amy had been around five or six months when we’d met. She’d been a happy baby full of laughs and was always “talking back” to me in baby babble.

“Why?” I asked, dread filling my stomach.

“Because from what Arty can tell, Amy ran away from her foster home six months ago and is likely living on the street.”

“Fuck,” I said, taking the paper. There was nothing of the happy baby in the last picture snapped of her. She seemed intense, hard, angry at the world.

“I don’t want you to feel guilty about this,” Zoe said. “I could have had Arty leave these ones off.”

“Why didn’t you?”

“Because I thought… I thought you might want to help them. Since no one else seems to be.” She thumbed through the file. “I was really expecting to have only good—or neutral—news to tell you. I had a lot of faith in the system. Some of it was misplaced, I see now. The odds show that the outcomes of foster kids are worse than the general population, though. So I feel like your kids came out pretty well, all things considered.”

“Except for these three,” I said, staring at the faces that had once been babies who’d been completely dependent on me for their very survival.

“Ryland is getting out of juvie in a few weeks. He will likely be going to a group home at this rate. I feel like he could use a big brother kind of influence.

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