Chapter 2: Abandoned
Many nights, Esther felt all alone despite her mother’s presence in the house. At night, she would often hear her mother plodding to the bathroom of their small apartment and then the squeak of the medicine cabinet opening and closing. By the time she was six years old, she understood that her mother was taking pills to “make a sad feeling go away,” as she explained it. She said the pills helped, but she never seemed to get any better despite taking them more and more frequently.
That sad feeling was everywhere in their home. Esther could even taste it in the food that came out of the cans at dinnertime and in the way her mother slept most of the time, except when she was sewing.
One night, her mother put her to bed and said she was going out to the store. Esther hated it when her mother left her alone in the house, especially at night. To calm herself, she would get into her mother’s bed and curl up under the blankets until she came back. This time, when she went into her mother’s room, she saw that the drawers to the chest were pulled way out and the closet door was wide open, and it looked like a lot of her mother’s clothing was gone.
Esther waited in the bed for two hours, terrified by every little sound in the apartment, until she finally cried herself to sleep.
She was awakened by the doorbell and the harsh sound of someone knocking loudly on the front door. She didn’t move. Her mother had told her to never open the door to anyone when she was home alone. The ringing and knocking continued for a few terrifying minutes until she heard a sharp crack, the door open, and several voices coming from the living room.
An unfamiliar woman’s voice said loudly, “Hello. Hello? Esther, are you here? It’s okay. We’re here to help.”
Then she heard a male voice say, “Is this for sure the right address? She said the little girl would definitely be here.”
“She’s probably asleep in one of the bedrooms,” the woman said.
Esther was so scared she began to whimper.
“I hear her. This room here,” the man said.
The man entered her mother’s bedroom and switched on the light, and Esther saw he was wearing a policeman’s uniform. Following him was an elderly nun in a black habit and a pretty lady with curly brown hair wearing a pink pantsuit. The pretty lady spoke to Esther in a soft, kind voice. “Honey, your mom has gone away on some sort of, er, emergency. She can’t come back to get you, so we’re going to take you someplace nice with lots of friends to play with.”
Esther got out of the bed, and the kind lady helped her pack a bag with a few of her favorite items of clothing and dolls. As she was passing through the living room to the front door, her gaze fell on her mother’s sewing basket, and she grabbed it. The nun shook her head and said that she had too many things already, but Esther held the basket tight to her chest and refused to surrender it.
She had sat for many hours on her mother’s lap as her arms reached around her to work on the repairs she made to other people’s garments. “We need the money, baby girl,” she’d say. Esther loved the rich textures and colors of the pieces she worked on as compared to the denim, flannel, and polyester that dominated their own wardrobes. Her mother would sometimes stay up all night sewing. She had this feeling that her mother would need to come back for that basket, and she wanted to have it in her possession.
The pink pantsuit lady convinced the nun to let her take the basket.
Esther was taken in a police car to a big brick building on a hill where there were ten other children of different ages, most of them younger than her. During the first week, she slept in a room with five other girls, three of whom sobbed almost every night. She later learned the place was a resident group home for children in the foster care system in California. She was told that if she was lucky, she would get into a foster home until her mother was able to take care of her.
After a few weeks, the pink pantsuit lady sat her down and tried to explain what happened to her mother. She had called the police station saying she had to leave town right away and had left her little girl in the apartment alone. She had mumbled the address, and the police had had to try several apartments before finding the right one. The lady explained that her mother probably needed help of some kind and could no longer care for Esther.
“Will she come back to get me?” Esther asked.
“I think she probably will. Let’s be patient. In the meantime, we’ll try to find a good family for you.”
“Why can’t I just stay here and wait for her?”
“Because the psychologists and social workers all feel that children are best off with a caring family.”
The other children rotated in and out, as they were placed in foster homes or permanently adopted by families. For the first two months, Esther sat by the window where she could see the parking lot. Every time she saw a red sedan similar to the one her mother had driven, she felt a surge of hope. But her mother never came.
The adults around her suggested that she smile more when foster parents were around. “Don’t you want them to see how nice you are so they’ll take you home?” But Esther couldn’t make herself smile and didn’t want any of these strangers to take her home. She was sure her mother would come back.
If there was a bright side to the home, it was the abundance of dogs that were kept there. It was one of the few things that children could rely on, especially whenever they needed a cuddle or a friend. They too had been abandoned, and it had become a tradition in the community to leave unwanted dogs at the home, some of which were taken to the local animal shelter and some of which--the gentlest ones--were kept as pets for the children. There was one dog in particular that was special, a golden retriever named Marshmallow. Whenever Esther was feeling sad, which was often, she would snuggle up with him. Marshmallow was especially comforting because he was calm and sweet and his fur felt so good against her skin, a tenderness Esther had experienced only when she had sat on her mother’s lap when she was sewing. He was also a good listener. She felt she could tell him things she couldn’t tell the adults, such as how much she didn’t want to go home with strangers.
One day, she got up in the morning to discover that Marshmallow was gone. When she asked where he was, she was told that he had gotten very sick in the night and was “at the vet’s.”
“What is the vetz?” she asked. “And when is Marshmallow coming back?”
“Vet is short for veterinarian. That’s the doctor for dogs. We hope Marshmallow will be back in a few days.”
When Marshmallow did return, he had stitches on his belly that he wasn’t supposed to lick, so he had to wear a weird funnel around his head. The usual happy expression on the dog’s face had been replaced by a worried look, and he whimpered often. Esther made it her mission to spend all of her time soothing and distracting him so he wouldn’t be upset. Even when a middle-aged couple came to the residence to see about fostering a child, and Esther was told they preferred a girl, she refused to leave Marshmallow’s side and wouldn’t even look at the couple when they came over to meet her. She had finally gotten Marshmallow to allow her to see and even gently touch the stitches on his belly. The stitches were neat and precise and reminded her of her mother’s sewing. She was in awe of the idea of sewing not just to repair clothes but to repair an animal’s body as part of a healing process.
She started using the needles and thread in her mother’s sewing basket to repair her clothes. Threading the needle by herself for the first time was tricky—it took her about twenty tries. But she was patient. And she was amazed at how much she had learned just by watching her mother work. When the staff noticed her sewing, they told her she would have to stop because children in the residence were not allowed to have any sharp objects—someone could get hurt. But when one member of the staff found a rip in her favorite jacket, she took Esther into a room away from everyone else and asked her if she could mend the garment for her. When Esther was finished, the woman let her have the sewing basket back and told her to keep it out of sight as much as possible. Eventually, everyone got used to her having it.
As Esther got older and better at sewing, she hoped that when her mother returned she would let her be a partner in her sewing business. They could earn twice as much money, and then possibly have enough for Esther to go to veterinary school. This was the dream that kept her going through the many ups and downs of the next few years.