Fall from Grace by Wayne Arthurson Page A

actually very simple to leave your kids behind. You just had to walk out the door, completely convinced that their life would be better without you in it. Sure, there were piercing and intense stabs of pain when I thought about my own, but at least they (and I) were lucky enough to have my ex-wife, who loved and took care of them. I shuddered to think what would have happened to Eileen and Peter if Joan was not there and they were put into the hands of the Children Services branch of the government. Would Eileen have ended up dead in a farmer’s field and would Peter be found languishing in some drug den, his body shut down by an overdose? But then again, I was lucky I didn’t have to worry about that because Joan would never fail them, never let them fall. In her hands they were safe and didn’t miss me at all. At least that’s what I kept telling myself.
    To keep my emotions in check, I focused on the interview and continued to ask Mrs. Lewis questions to get the rest of Grace’s story. She was in many ways a typical teenager. She listened to loud, oppressive music, experimented with various hair and clothing styles, even smoked pot and got drunk a few times, but nothing that couldn’t be fixed. In the end, she graduated high school, an incredible feat for someone who came through the foster-kid system the way she did, and she was considering a career in social work or something with kids. She even applied to attend one of the community colleges to upgrade some of her high school classes so she could get into a program.
    “Did she attend?”
    Lewis said nothing. Only shook her head.
    “Why not? What happened?”
    “She turned eighteen,” she said with a shrug. And that pretty much said it all. One day she was a child, someone the province was required by strong legislation to protect and support, and then the next day, she wasn’t. There were a few programs to help such kids with the transition, but since the province wasn’t required to support those young “adults,” they weren’t given a high priority with funding.
    “My husband and I talked about letting her live here after she turned eighteen,” Lewis said, answering what would have been my next question, “and we figured we could do it. It would be a bit difficult, we would have to cut something somewhere, but in the end, missing a few luxuries is nothing compared to helping someone you love as if she was your own. But Children Services was so desperate for us to take in another couple of kids or so. They kept hounding us, ‘you got to take so-and-so, he’s got no place to go, you have to take this other little guy because his mother can’t take care of him,’ and what do you say to something like that? You can’t say no.”
    Many people did say no, I thought. In fact, most of us say no most of the time because there are thousands of these kids everywhere, and the number of foster parents willing to take in at least one kid is tiny compared to the number of kids out there. You couldn’t blame Children Services for pressuring the Lewises and you couldn’t blame the Lewises for letting Grace go. Without people like Janet Lewis, the lives of kids like Grace, Jennifer, Jason, and Vincent would be too horrible to imagine.
    Of course, a good number of kids like them don’t make it and end up in difficult circumstances like drug addiction, prostitution, or violent crime, and are dead by the time they turn thirty. But at least sometime somewhere in their lives, they were lucky enough to have someone like Mrs. Lewis to love and take care of them. In the end, it may not seem like anything was done, especially since Grace was now dead, but there was a time when she got to be a kid without worrying about where her next meal was coming from or where she would sleep at night. And there was someone who not only remembered her but also would always love her. Not much, one might say, but it was something.
    I didn’t want to ask the next question, but I had