By Tracie Adams

“Someday I’ll write a book about us. But not until this is over, and there’s a happy ending.”

I said those words over a decade ago, and I still haven’t written that book. I sat across from my adopted son in the small sterile room designated for prisoners to visit with family. We smuggled a Bible in by leaving it under the sign-in sheet for his counselor to pick up later when the guards weren’t looking. He was 17 then and we were all doing time for the crime he had committed. The bars that held him were literal. The bars that held the rest of us were intangible but just as effective in punishing us, holding us captive in the shame and isolation that his jail sentence had imposed. 

When others left church on Sundays to enjoy family gatherings, meals around tables overflowing with happy banter and home cooked joy, my family walked through a metal detector to see him. They searched every one of us, even checking the diaper of my one-year old daughter for smuggled drugs and weapons. I didn’t make eye contact with the guards, my kids or my husband, because the humiliation of the search was just too raw to share. No one wanted to go, but we couldn’t not go. We all felt his captivity in the marrow of our bones, the despair now part of our DNA, and each family member shared in the mutated misery. The rest of us, my husband and three biological children, were technically free, but always bound together tethered to him in his cell no matter where we went. There was nowhere to run, nowhere to hide from the weight of it, so we carried it together. 

When he was just nine years old, his birth mother had terminated her parental rights in a small courtroom filled with empty chairs, a judge, and a social worker assigned to his case. 

Before she dropped him on the doorstep of Social Services, she had gathered his clothes and a few toys from their apartment and placed them in a lemon-scented trash bag to be sorted through at the orphanage. He rarely showed any emotion when he recounted the traumatic events of his life, but he would at times describe with tears in his eyes that day when his mother used a camcorder to video him one last time. He ran after her vehicle as she drove away, leaving him scared, scarred, and skeptical among strangers. 

Before we adopted him at the age of eleven, he had been rejected by several foster families and even his own maternal grandparents. The man he thought was his father turned out not to be, and so he got down to the business of survival and never looked back. It changed him. His growth was stunted, and he was saddled with more learning disabilities than any classroom could accommodate. He was hyper-vigilant, always scanning and planning, unable to sit still or trust anyone. They told us his diagnosis of Reactive Attachment Disorder made him “unadoptable,” and they made us sign papers attesting to our understanding of the psychiatrist’s report which plainly stated he was not worth the trouble. 

In the car ride home, I sat wide-eyed, holding my breath, wondering if I had made a mistake signing the papers, ushering this storm into our lives. In the days ahead, we would stare fear in the face and dare it to take another step toward us. We have been through therapy, in and out of courtrooms, jails, doctors’ offices, pharmacies, and have answered our phone many dark nights to hear desperate, angry tales from both him and his victims. He is almost 33 now, with more than fifty failed jobs, a divorce, two more jail sentences, and three kids of his own all testifying that this will never really be over. Still, I love the boy who came to us wounded, washed up in the raging storm waters, and I’m riding this out to the very end. He’s my son. If there was ever an indication of a happy ending, I haven’t laid hold of it yet. I won’t wait for it. I’ll just write what I know, and continue hoping for what I can’t yet see on the horizon. 

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Tracie Adams is a writer and teacher in rural Virginia. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in Oddball Magazine, The Write Launch, WOTL Magazine, The Dead Mule School of Southern Literature, and Sheepshead Review. Follow her on Twitter @1funnyfarmAdams.