My husband, Tom, and I fostered a little girl named Ivy when she was eight. She lived with us for eleven months.
The first night, she stood just inside our front door with a duffel bag on her shoulder and a grocery bag of clothes in her hand. She wouldn’t take her shoes off until I told her twice it was okay. When I showed her the bedroom we’d painted for her, she asked, very quietly, “Am I allowed to sleep in that bed?”
For weeks, she lived like a guest terrified of overstaying. She asked before opening the fridge. She apologized for spilling water. Every night she folded her clothes back into that same duffel bag.
“She’s Finally Being Annoying”
Then, slowly, things changed. A cereal bowl left in the sink. Crayons on the floor. Shoes in the hallway. Arguments about bedtime and vegetables. One night after she stormed upstairs, Tom grinned at me. “She’s finally being annoying.” It felt like the best news we’d ever had.
By spring, her clothes were in the dresser and her drawings covered the fridge. On Saturday mornings she climbed into our bed without asking and wedged herself between us for cartoons.
Then the call came. Relatives had been found. They wanted her.
“Was I Bad?”
Ivy didn’t cry when we told her. She stared at the kitchen table and asked, “When?” That last week, the toys disappeared, the clothes went back into the duffel bag and she stopped arguing about bedtime. That hurt more than anything.
Two nights before she left, I found her on her bedroom floor next to the packed bag. “Are you sending me away because I was bad? Because I broke the blue cup?”
I held her and said the only thing I could. “You didn’t do anything wrong.”
The morning she left, she hugged me so tight I couldn’t breathe. “I love you too,” she whispered. Then she was gone. The updates came less and less, then stopped. For eighteen years, around her birthday, one of us would say, “I wonder what Ivy’s doing now.”
The Doorbell
Last Sunday, the doorbell rang. A young woman in a dark coat stood on our porch, hands deep in her pockets. Then she gave a tiny, nervous smile, and I saw the eight-year-old again.
“Ivy?”
She burst into tears before she could answer.
Inside, she touched the back of one of our old dining chairs. “You still have this.” We talked for an hour. But every few minutes, she reached into her coat pocket, then stopped. Finally, she stood up and put a small wooden jewelry box on the table between us.
I knew that box. I hadn’t seen it in nearly twenty years.
“I took this the night before I left,” she whispered. “I thought if I had something from this house, part of it would still belong to me. I’ve felt guilty for eighteen years. I never even opened it. I think it belongs to you.”
I looked at Tom. He was staring at the box too. I slowly lifted the lid.
