I remember my fourth-birthday cake from Baskin-Robbins (mint chocolate chip ice cream and chocolate cake), and I remember the next day we ate leftover cake while the woman and man whom I called Mom and Dad explained to me that Joellen was coming to get me for our weekly visit, but that this time, Joellen was taking me to a new house, where I would meet lots of new siblings and new parents. They helped me pack a duffel bag of clothes, and the woman said, “Look, I got you a present. This is called a toiletry kit. It has all your soap and shampoo and your toothbrush right here all together with a nice handle—a place for everything, and everything in its place.”

Joellen tells me in retrospect it made her nervous, the way they kept putting off my adoption. But they were so good to me, she says. I was so happy; I was so comfortable. She let me call them Mom and Dad because they insisted they were going to adopt me. But still they just kept…waiting. For something.

In my file, Joellen’s notes say simply, Foster mom pregnant.

I was a last resort they put off committing to while there was still hope they could have a real kid, brand-new, in the original packaging—theirs. One who shared their perfect DNA and so, therefore, deserved a family more than me. They kept me long enough to decimate my best, only chance to ever have a family, just in time for me to become “unadoptable,” and then they put me back in. They did not love me. They set me adrift.

Joellen says when she came and got me that last day, she took me to a park by the water and that it took her nearly forty-five minutes to get me to stop crying.

I don’t remember that part.

“They put you back in after you turned three?”

Francine understood.

Well past my prime. I was four years old. In the often mind-bendingly insane world of foster care, three is not a magic number. Three is a dismal number; it is the age after which a foster kid’s chance of finding parents plummets statistically to unadoptable. Not that it’s illegal to adopt a kid that age—it’s just incredibly unlikely after that. Mathematically. I was more good evidence.

“They told Joellen adoption was their last resort, but now they didn’t need to, and even if they did, they wouldn’t have time to take care of me once their own baby was born.”

“You were their own baby.”

“I was a placeholder.”

“The purpose of adoption is not for parents to ‘find a kid.’ It is for children to find parents. If they didn’t understand that, they shouldn’t have been allowed anywhere near you.”

Amen.

Terry Johnson looked at us then, from his hiding place in a patch of tall grass and daffodils. He made his careful way to us and looked up expectantly, asking to be lifted.