Chapter 1 — The Call

The call came on a Tuesday, while I was sanding a cabinet door in my garage with the radio on, and I almost didn’t answer because the number was one I didn’t know, and I have thought since about how close I came to letting it ring — how the whole rest of my life was on the other end of a call I nearly sent to voicemail.

“Is this Calvin Renfro?” a woman’s voice said.

“Brother of Russell Renfro?” I said it was, and I felt the old flinch I always felt at my brother’s full name, three years dead and still capable of stopping my heart for a beat.

She introduced herself — Paulette Alcorn, from the county’s child welfare office — and she asked if I was sitting down, and I wasn’t, so I sat down on an overturned bucket in my own garage with the radio still playing, and she told me that my brother’s two children, Ollie and Josie, were in the county’s care, and that in a situation like this the state looks first to family, and that my name had come up as the only blood relative they could find, and she asked me a question I would have crawled over broken glass to answer yes to.

She asked if I would be willing to take them.

I did not ask what had happened.

That would come, in the careful, terrible, sparing way these things come.

In that first moment I asked only one thing, and my voice came out strange and cracked, because I already knew, before she answered, that whatever the answer was, it meant I had failed at something for three years without knowing.

“Are they okay?” I asked.

And Paulette Alcorn, who I would come to trust more than almost anyone, took a breath and said, gently, “They’re safe now.

That’s the important thing.

They’re safe now.”

I have never been able to explain to anyone what those words did to me, standing in my garage on a bucket with the radio still playing some song I will never remember. They’re safe now. Two things landed in me at the same instant, and they did not fit together, and I have carried both ever since.

The first was relief so total it nearly put me on the floor — the word safe, which meant that whatever had been wrong was over, that the thing I would learn the shape of in the coming weeks had a now on the far side of it, a now in which two children I loved were, at last, okay.

And the second, arriving in the very same breath, was the understanding folded inside that small word now — that if they were safe now, then they had not been safe before, and that the before was long, and that I had been alive and well and forty minutes away for the whole length of it, leaving gifts on a porch, waiting to be invited. Safe now is a mercy and an indictment in the same three syllables.

It told me the emergency was over and told me, underneath, that there had been an emergency at all, one that ran for years while I respected a closed door.

I said yes to Paulette before she could finish laying out what yes would mean.