The mother next to Frida takes off her down jacket and drapes it over her torso. Frida takes the armrest. Her seatmate begins to snore. Frida looks at the patterns on the woman’s hands. It’s too early to ask questions or make enemies, but she wants to ask about the woman’s child. If she lost custody of one child, or more. She wants to ask the child’s age, find out if the child is in foster care or with a relative. She wants to know what the mother did, if she had a very bad day or a bad week or a bad month or a bad life, if what she’s accused of is true, or if the true things were twisted and exaggerated until they sounded like a pathology.
She wants to rant about her hearing, tell someone who’ll understand about the Honorable Sheila Rogers, who said, “We’re going to fix you, Ms. Liu.”
She’s surprised that she didn’t burst a blood vessel, that she didn’t faint, that Gust cried harder than she did.
“We’re giving you the opportunity to participate in a new rehabilitation program,” the judge said. “You’ll undergo a year of instruction and training. At a live-in facility. With women like yourself.”
The judge said it was her choice.
In order to get Harriet back, Frida must learn to be a better mother. She must demonstrate her capacity for genuine maternal feeling and attachment, hone her maternal instincts, show she can be trusted. Next November, the state will decide if she’s made sufficient progress. If she hasn’t, her parental rights will be terminated.
“You’ll need to pass our tests,” the judge said.
Judge Rogers’s hair was gray and frizzy, pulled back with a plastic headband. Frida thought the headband was unprofessional, insulting. She remembers the beauty mark next to the judge’s nose, her blue silk kerchief. She remembers watching the judge’s mouth move.
The judge barely let Renee get a word in. The lawyer for the state said Frida’s negligence was astounding. There was the damning police report, the fact that she’d decided her work was more important than her child’s safety. Anything could have happened. Someone could have taken Harriet, molested her, killed her.
The men from CPS produced a report on Frida’s character. They noted that she had no visitors in sixty days. Soon after the monitoring began, there was a sharp decrease in her nonwork-related emails and texts and phone calls. There were a few times when she seemed to leave her phone at home intentionally.
They expressed concern about her diet, weight loss, and sleep. They called her behavior erratic. The original claim of being overwhelmed was inconsistent with her conduct after the incident, when her house became spotless overnight. Analysis of her expressions suggested feelings of resentment and anger, a stunning lack of remorse, a tendency toward self-pity. Her emotional orientation was directed inward, rather than toward her child and the community.
“I didn’t appreciate Ms. Liu’s attitude,” the social worker said. “With me, she was difficult. Abrasive. With Harriet, she was needy.”
The social worker said Frida talked back. Frida couldn’t follow directions. Frida kept asking for special treatment. She couldn’t set boundaries. See the bite and the nosebleed and Harriet’s regression: crawling instead of walking, losing her speech, wanting to be held, climbing into her mother’s arms, acting more like a baby than a toddler. See also: the mother putting the child in an ExerSaucer on the day of the incident. Using developmentally inappropriate equipment to trap the child and keep her out of the way.
“I don’t think we can completely rule out physical, emotional, or verbal abuse,” the social worker said. “How do we know she never hit Harriet? Maybe she didn’t leave bruises. The neighbors told me they heard yelling.”
In his report, the court-appointed psychologist found Frida insufficiently contrite. She was hostile toward her co-parents. She was a narcissist with anger-management issues and had poor impulse control. They had her medical records: a diagnosis of clinical depression at age nineteen, over seventeen years on antidepressants. A history of panic attacks and anxiety and insomnia. The mother was unstable. The mother lied about her mental health. What else might she be lying about?
The bus turns onto a bridge. There’s traffic. The driver is tailgating. Frida looks down at the frozen river. It rarely gets this cold anymore. Last year, the cherry blossoms bloomed in January.
Next November, Harriet will be thirty-two months old. She’ll have all her teeth. She’ll be speaking in sentences. Frida will miss her second birthday, her first day of preschool. The judge said there would be weekly video calls, ten minutes every Sunday. “Believe me,” the judge said, “I’m a mother. I have two kids and four grandkids. I know exactly what you’re going through, Ms. Liu.”