Rachel
2001
I tucked my subway map into my bag, pulled out my notebook, and squinted at what I’d written, making sure I had the address right. It was early, just after seven on a gorgeous fall morning, and I was way uptown, doing drop-ins on families who had open cases with the Office of Children and Family Services. My master of social work program at NYU required a twenty-one-week internship, and I was doing mine with the Family Aid Society, which helped families dealing with housing issues, and all of the concerns that went along with that—unemployment, absences from school, the inability to buy and store nutritious food, and not knowing how to cook it when you had it.
Some days, my boss had told me, my job would be nothing but paperwork, filling out forms and faxing them to the appropriate agencies, and then refaxing them when they got lost . . . but most of the time my work was on the ground, meeting with families—mostly single mothers and their kids—helping them get what they needed, whether it was an impromptu lesson in what to do with the kale from the farmers’ market, or taking little kids off a mom’s hands while she filled out a job application or spent a few hours at a community college.
I looked up at the door, then down at my notebook, then back to the door again. I was in the right place, even if I’d gotten slightly lost on my way here. I banged again. “Flora?” I yelled. No answer.
“She ain’ here,” called a lanky guy reclining on the stoop next to where Flora and her two daughters lived. He wore a white ribbed cotton tank top, loose-fitting jeans that he’d belted below his hips, and the newest Air Jordans (in my time as an intern, I’d learned to recognize brand-name sneakers—lots of my clients either wanted them or spent way too much money to get them).
I put my notebook in my pocket and smoothed my skirt. “Do you know where she is?”
Lanky gave a lazy grin, exposing a gold tooth, and adjusted the angle of his baseball cap. “She left up outta here with her man.”
“Which man is that?” Flora had gotten on FAS’s radar—and eventually mine—because she’d brought her three-year-old daughter Ariel to the ER with a greenstick wrist fracture, the kind frequently caused by the twisting of large adult hands. When the social worker on call had interviewed her, she’d admitted that her boyfriend could “get a little rough,” especially when the kids interrupted his appointment with televised professional wrestling on Monday nights. We’d gotten Flora’s boyfriend into anger management counseling, signed them both up for a parenting class that neither one was attending with any degree of regularity, and planned visits, both scheduled and unscheduled, to check in on the girls. If Flora had found a new fellow, that was good news. If she’d pulled her daughters out of school to run off with him, that was less than ideal.
The guy on the stoop shrugged. “Don’t know his name. He hit the numbers. Took ’em all back to the DR.”
“Got it.” I knocked one last time, more for show than anything else, then stuck one of my new business cards into the crack between the door and the jamb, and then, trying to look purposeful in my stride, with my unruly hair pulled back into a bun, I walked toward my next appointment, enjoying the sunshine. It was a gorgeous day, clear and sunny without being savagely hot; and a light breeze seemed to have scoured the sky. Fall was coming—there was a crisp edge to the wind that let you know it was September and not May. A perfect morning, I thought, and pulled out my newly issued cell phone to call my boss, Amy Ung, to tell her that Flora was gone.
“Back to the motherland, huh?” Amy was tiny, with glossy, blunt-cut black hair that fell to her shoulders and in bangs across her forehead. She was in her thirties, always impeccably dressed in crisp pinstriped pants and a man’s-style white cotton button-down that she’d probably purchased in the boys’ section of some upscale department store.
Amy and her sisters were all native New Yorkers, raised by parents who had emigrated from China and ran a restaurant in Queens. (When I’d asked what kind, Amy had stared at me in silence, then said, “Chinese.”) Despite thirty-eight years in America, her parents still barely spoke English, although they understood it, which meant that, from a young age, Amy, their eldest, had been their liaison to the white-people world. Watching the way her parents had been treated by the officials from the health board who inspected their kitchen to the principal at Amy’s school had left her with a desire to keep other families from being mistreated. Amy was married to a Jewish guy named Leonard, a surgeon doing his internship at Lenox Hill, and she and I had become friends in part, I think, because she had so many of her nights free while Leonard worked thirty-six-hour shifts and napped in a bunkroom in the hospital.