We’d opened all our presents, which were now scattered about the living room along with the wrappings and the remains of our breakfast.
I stepped out the front door to the street. I got our old pickup truck started and backed it into the driveway. I opened the camper shell and stood there a while, thinking through how to pack everything we were taking on our family road trip: Suitcases and bedding. A camping stove. Pots and pans. Wet suits and boogie boards. Three bicycles.
I was fitting the first of these items into their spaces when I sensed someone standing behind me. I looked over my shoulder and saw a small lean girl. Hair worn natural. Cappuccino skin. She wanted something. I asked her to wait a minute.
I finished what I was doing and turned around to face her. I had guessed she was going door-to-door, and I was already braced to refuse another scam.
But it wasn’t that at all. This girl’s face was soft, and her lip was trembling. Her voice was a child’s voice, and it was so faint that I could barely make out what she was asking.
A ride. To get home. Where was home? Near Ashby Avenue. I knew that neighborhood well. Could I offer her BART fare? No, she didn’t want to get back on BART.
Then I saw she was shivering, and starting to cry. Her backpack, the kind kids take to school, looked like it would slip off her shoulders.
She wouldn’t come in, but I got her to sit on the porch steps, in the weak winter morning sun and away from the constant wind, while I grabbed a couple of energy bars from the kitchen. Inside, I told Melanie I was going to need some help. It was Christmas Day, and this kid needed a ride home, and I wasn’t going to get in a car with her alone.
I went back out on the porch and took a place next to the kid. She told me her name was Justice, and that she was 15 years old. She looked younger, in the way undernourished children do. I coaxed her into eating one of the bars. She put the other in her backpack.
I asked her what was wrong.
Here’s one thing about having PTSD: Other people’s experiences remind you of your own experience—that much is normal. Except that with PTSD, being reminded of a traumatic experience can cause you to relive it, and pretty soon you are not where you are at all. Instead, you’ve disappeared inside your own head, and then you aren’t of much use to yourself or to anyone else in the here and now.
And I wanted and needed to be present to hear what Justice was telling me.
Her story was sad; it was not entirely coherent, but held few surprises. She’d had trouble with her mom’s new boyfriend. She liked school but didn’t feel connected to it. Someone had promised to meet her today and didn’t show.
I told her that life was tough for me when I was her age, and it had got steadily better. I told her that if you hang on, in a few years you get old enough that you can get a job, and have some of your own money, and then maybe you can figure out how to find a place to live that’s safe, and next you can figure out who you want around you and who you don’t, and in time you can make a life for yourself.
Melanie came out of the house, car keys in hand. I said goodbye to Justice and went back inside the house—inside, to be with my own 8-year-old daughter.
The love I have for my daughter heals me and also scares me half to death. Each day I struggle to make her experience of childhood—and my experience of parenting—all about her, and about us, and about the here and now, and to make my own childhood experience a source of understanding and compassion for the present, and nothing more.
Melanie came back after a while. There’s a neighborhood in South Berkeley where the infant mortality is about four times what it is in the wealthy white areas of town, and the life expectancy about 20 years shorter. Justice asked to be dropped near a corner, and Melanie had waited in the car a few minutes as Justice walked up the block. Driving away, she maybe saw Justice approaching a disheveled middle-aged woman in a housecoat.
And that was all.
In the days that followed, I had a frustrating time when I told story to friends. I heard a lot of opinions about what Justice could or should have been doing differently, or could or should do next.
I imagine Justice was probably doing what made the most sense that Christmas morning, which was to leave the house and wander the cold streets for a while, and come back home a while later and try to duck back inside without being noticed too much, and to try to stay safe and out of the way, and hope some adult would put some food out, and hope that nobody got so mad or crazy that she had to leave again, and hope she could live from one day to the next like that, until things changed, and to hope that when things did change, that they would get better rather than worse.
I think it’s that way for quite a few kids trying to grow up. My own path was adventurous and fairly successful, in large part because white men like me have so many privileges in this society that you really have to screw up badly to go wrong. It was only much later in life that I came to appreciate what family can mean, and to learn to cope with everyday interactions without dissociating myself from my feelings.
I’m still learning. And there’s still part of me that remembers, and understands, why it would make sense to walk a cold unfamiliar street rather than going home. I hope this Christmas, a year later, Justice will be somewhere warm and safe, and feeling loved and protected. However, on the good chance she isn’t, I wish her the strength and resilience to find her own way, alone, in whatever way she can.
