Chapter 23: Ashes, Part One
Author's Notes: This chapter was too long so I divided into three parts. These three chapters are very heavy on exposition but I wanted to clearly establish the parameters of Buffy's new life after-Faith, and so have been very detailed regarding this section, more so than some may care for, but it's my party and I'll cry if I want to. Or something. Anyway, hope you enjoy this, and sorry it's in three sections.
She was so bored. It was ten am Sunday morning and she was once again sitting in the cold grey interrogation room at the Sunnydale Police Department. This time she wasn't there as a suspect but as a prisoner, waiting to meet with her social worker. Since she was being housed temporarily in the local police department jail, the social worker had asked to use the interrogation room for the meeting as it was the most convenient place to speak privately and uninterrupted.
Buffy yawned and put her head down on her arms on the table. She had slept only by fits and starts the previous night. Hyper from the events of the day, bedded down in a strange and uncomfortable jail cell, and surrounded by the constant and unfamiliar noises of the small facility, sleep had not come easily. Add to that the fact that some drunken woman was screaming profanities for almost two straight hours before she finally quieted and fell asleep herself, and it was a wonder that Buffy had managed an hour or two of sleep at all.
She had asked if Lindsey were going to be there, and the officer who escorted her to the interrogation room said he doubted it as she was merely meeting with her social worker and there would be no interrogation that day. Buffy was distressed about seeing Pat again, as she did not trust that woman and didn't know whether she'd be able to contain herself should she be left in a room alone with the weasely little woman with the insincere smile and false concern. She thought that physically attacking her social worker might not help her cause.
At ten-fifteen, a stocky middle-aged African American woman in an attractive blue dress and heels barreled into the room with a thick folder, a bag of donuts, and two cups of take-out coffee. She had a commanding presence, the look and feel of someone who didn't walk around obstacles as much as push them out of her way. She was an imposing figure, impossible to ignore. Intimidated, Buffy shrank back into her chair in the older woman's presence.
"Buffy Summers?"
"Yes."
"Tanya Fillion," she placed one of the coffees in front of Buffy. "I'm with the Dept of Children and Family Services, and am assigned to be your case worker." She opened the bag and placed it between them. "Help yourself."
"Thank you." With a puzzled frown, Buffy took the coffee and snagged a donut. "What happened to Pat?"
"Oh, she's not your worker, she was just in the office last night so she handled your situation for the evenin'." Tanya assured Buffy. "I'm assigned to you permanently."
"Good. I don't ever want to see that woman again." Buffy declared decisively.
"Well, that might be a problem. Pat Winslow is assigned to your daughter's case."
Buffy sighed dramatically. "Why can't we have the same worker?"
"Because," Tanya started adding sugar and little creamers to her coffee as she spoke, "what is in your daughter's best interests might not be in yours. That is why she'll have her own attorney, too. And also, because while Pat is an excellent social worker where young dependent children are concerned, she does not have special expertise with pregnant and parenting teenagers. I do."
Buffy frowned and pulled her coffee closer to her, adding a sugar and cream packet. "This is like a nightmare."
Tanya nodded. "Mmmhmm. I imagine it seems like that now. But this is hardly the first time you've dealt with social services."
"Um, yeah it is."
Tanya paused stirring her coffee and lifted an eyebrow in surprise. "Really? How'd you manage that, with the baby and your age and not living at home and all?"
"I don't know," Buffy shrugged. "My mom just packed me up and sent me to a maternity home, and everything was just taken care of. I never saw any social workers and judges and attorneys before Katie was born."
"But after?"
"I left."
"Left? What do you mean, you left?"
"I took my baby and left the hospital, and then took a train out to California to live with my cousin."
"And your parents were okay with that?"
"Not exactly," Buffy stared at the table where she was tearing her donut into little pieces. "I kinda just took off. They didn't know until I was gone. And they still don't know where I am."
Tanya put her cup down and stared at Buffy a moment. "Let's start from the beginning here. You found out you were pregnant, at what? Fifteen?"
"Uh-huh."
"So how did that go for you?"
Buffy launched into her tale, leaving out the rape, and Tanya sat silently across the table listening to the somewhat convoluted sequence of events that ended with Buffy sitting in this room drinking bad coffee with a social worker.
"Well don't that beat all?"
"I guess." Buffy replied uncertainly. She had no idea what Tanya was thinking right now, and she was desperately looking for some clue as to how the social worker saw her situation with Katie.
Tanya shook her head as she brought the coffee to her mouth again. "What a crock o' shit."
Buffy wasn't sure she liked Tanya's blunt dismissal of her story as 'shit'. She looked angrily away from Tanya and tried to get hold of her tumultuous emotions.
Tanya noticed Buffy's reaction, and went on to explain. "Oh, I wasn't talkin' about you, honey. I meant the folks back in New York who were tryin' to get you to leave your daughter and go on like nothin' ever happened. I mean, either they were lyin' outright to you or were just ignorant of the law. But whatever the reason, you've been played."
Buffy gaped at Tanya's declaration. "Huh?"
"Mmmhmmm," she nodded. "Let me try to explain this. I wouldn't usually bother, but since you've got issues in two states that affect your entire life, I think it might be a good thing if you actually understood what happened to you and what is going to happen now. You with me?"
"Sure."
"Alright, then. Let me try to explain this in terms you can understand without havin' the high school political science course under your belt yet." Tanya thought a moment. "You see, there's the federal government - the President, Congress, that sort of thing - and the state government. There's local too, but we're not gonna touch that right now. Anyway, the laws that say how folks are supposed to handle teenagers who get pregnant, like you did, well they're federal laws. Mostly because that's who gives us the money to use. But the states get to decide what their specific programs are gonna look like, and that's what makes each state different. You following me?"
"Um..." Buffy was uncertain.
"Think of it this way. Let's say an elementary school is the federal government, and they've decided that the children in the school - the states - need to color a very specific picture. The school gives each kid a picture to color, the same picture, like you'd find in a coloring book. Each picture is an outline of a couple trees and some grass and a round thing in the sky that could be the sun if you wanted. And each kid gets the big box of crayons and they get to decide what each of their own pictures is gonna look like. They have to keep the two trees, the grass, and the round thing in the sky. But they can choose what color they'll be, and add new things to the picture if they want to.
"So, say Little Miss New York decides she's wants a night sky: she colors the round thing white, makes the sky dark blue, maybe adds some stars to the sky, a witch flying on a broomstick across the moon, that sort of thing. And Little Miss Wisconsin decides hers will be a bright blue sky with a big noonday yellow sun, adds some more trees, and some cows, and perhaps a fence there keeping the cows in. Those Wisconsin folks love their dairy. And Little Miss California colors a sunset, with a red and yellow sun, and maybe an ocean out there in the distance, and maybe some guy huggin' one of the trees. And Little Miss State of Confusion's got a green sky and red grass and purple trees - creative little thing, but a little off normal.
"You see how they all use the same picture, that the school requires them to color, but the pictures all are very different in how they look when the kids are done with 'em?"
"Yeah, I get that." Buffy chuckled at Tanya's examples.
"Well, that's what we're dealing with here. Only a lot more confusing than that. So some well-meaning folks get it wrong sometimes, make mistakes. And other folks don't like the picture the school wants em to draw - the federal government's rules - and they try to find a way around them and hope nobody notices. Turn the two trees into chickens or something, just really go off in the wrong direction entirely.
"So, Miss Buffy Summers, those folks in New York ripped you off there. They decided they didn't want to color trees and told you the picture had chickens in it and you were fifteen years old and had no way to know the difference. And they probably didn't want you to know, because they thought they knew best what you should do and it was easier to get you to do it their way if you didn't know you had any say in it.
"And so now you're here with me, in California, and I'm gonna try to help you get back on track again. But it's gonna be hard, I'm telling you, now that you've spent a year making some very poor choices. That's gonna make it much harder to get this straightened out for you."
Buffy thought she understood what Tanya was saying, but she didn't like being criticized for making 'bad choices' when she didn't feel like she had any good choices to make in the first place.
"I did the best I could. It's not my fault if people lied to me."
"No, it's not your fault and it's not fair that you get the fallout from it now. But life's not fair, Buffy. And we have to play the hand we're given. You just got a shitty hand." She reached over and patted Buffy's arm comfortingly. "But we're gonna work at making this better."
"Thank you," Buffy nodded quietly. She was almost afraid to ask, after having suffered so much the past year. The thought that all of this could have been avoided was disheartening, but she needed to know. "So... What was wrong with what happened when I had Katie? What should have happened?"
Tanya sighed. "Well, you were fifteen. You were a minor and your parents had complete control over your life and that's what you were used to. That's what was expected of you. But once that stick turned blue or pink or whatever - positive - you became something different than just a fifteen year old girl. You became someone
else's mother. And the law says that as a parent, you have rights that no one can take away from you without just cause, even if you are only fifteen years old.
"But the adults around you didn't tell you that. They wanted you to do what they told you to do, and as long as you believed they had all the power, you would be easier to control. It blew up in their faces when you did the cut and run with your baby, and ever since then you've been makin' decisions based on that old misinformation they fed you back home. That's why you're here in this room today, because you made poor choices that you thought were your best choices. And it's a damn shame." She shook her head as she let her words sink in to the young girl in front of her.
"What kind of choices did I have?" Buffy was trying to understand this, but it was so far outside her experience and knowledge that she simply couldn't fathom it.
"First of all, the law does not say that you have to live with your
parents in order to keep your baby. The law says that you have to live in a supervised environment or be emancipated. Emancipation wasn't really an option for you then, you were too young and couldn't support yourself. So we won't go into that. But once your parents told you that you could not come home to them with your baby, you should have been offered other alternatives. There are group homes for teenage mothers who have no home. In fact, I happen to know that in New York, for instance, that if you are in foster care yourself, and give birth in a hospital as an underage mother, social services is
required to find a placement for you that includes your baby, and the hospital has to keep both you and your baby until something is found for you. Other arrangements can be made, other relatives contacted who can take you in.
"Now, again, there are people won't tell you that, they'll tell you you have to be discharged right then, and then get you some papers to sign so your baby can go into foster care while they try to find a joint placement for you. And once you sign those papers you've given up custody of your baby and God help you to find a placement with your baby once that happens. They probably won't even try any more, because they got you out of the hospital. But as long as you don't sign those papers, they're stuck with you and you better believe they're gonna work real hard to find a place for you to live to get you both out of that hospital. So that's one thing you could have done right there, if anyone had bothered to tell you. But they didn't tell you that.
"Your parents wanted the baby gone like nothing ever happened. The people in the maternity home wanted to give your baby to another family they had lined up to adopt. They all probably thought you were too young to be a good mother anyway, so they just let you think that you didn't have any other choices. And now here you are."
Overwhelmed with the enormity of what she'd just been told, Buffy closed her eyes and laid her head on her arms. How could this be true? How could they have done this to her, when she had made it so clear to them that she wanted to keep Katie? They
knew how she felt, but they did this to her anyway. It was just too hard to take it all in.
She raised her head and looked at Tanya with tears in her eyes. "So what do I do now?"
"Well, you've been arrested on some very serious charges. You are a very fortunate girl because the detectives who arrested you have convinced the district attorney to drop the most serious of those charges. They don't believe you were actually dealing drugs or knew about the drugs and weapon found in your apartment. But you still have a charge of child endangerment hanging over your head, and you had an illegal false California ID Card, and are officially a runaway minor. Those're serious charges, too, although not as bad as drug dealing and weapon possession.
"We can't just leave you and your daughter in limbo here, so you are going to be brought before a juvenile court judge tomorrow for an initial disposition and temporary placement hearng. We're a small county so we can be more flexible on these things than a larger county might be, so you're fortunate there. But the same judge that is deciding on the child endangerment charges is also going to be determining the custody arrangement for your daughter and where you are going to live. And where your daughter goes has a lot to do with what the judge determines on the charges brought against you. The juvenile judges are pretty good folks, and you should be fine before any one of them. You need one who will be sympathetic and understand the circumstances you were in when you made the decisions you did.
"I'm hoping for probation and an independent living arrangement for you and your daughter together. I think that is the best outcome we can hope for. The judge'll certainly order you to take a study course for the GED exam at a minimum. But you'd be eligible for TANF benefits, free child care while you're in school, and there's lot of teen parenting programs you would probably be ordered to attend, so that the state can be assured that you'll be able to take care of yourself and your daughter. There's a lot of services here for parenting teenagers, and a lot of rules too. But a program specifically for you would be set up with my office and with the probation department, and you'd be able to keep Katie with you while you do that. So it should work out fine for you."
"What is TANF?"
"Temporary Aid to Needy Families. Welfare benefits. In California, for teen parents, it's called CalLearn."
"Oh," Buffy was afraid to ask. "What about my parents? Will you be calling them too?"
"Yes, we need to let them know where you are and what is happening with you. We can ask them if they'd be willing to let you come home, but I'm not sure that you'd be permitted to leave the state as long as you're on probation here. That'd be up to the judge and he'd need to see at least one of your parents in his courtroom before he'd make such a decision to let you out of our jurisdiction, especially considering your history of runnin' off last year." Tanya took out a pen, "What is their number? I'm gonna need to call them since I need to report to the judge tomorrow on that."
Buffy gave Tanya her phone number and decided to ask one last thing.
"What about our things at the apartment? Our clothes, toys, pictures. Can we get that back?"
"Sure. You can pack one suitcase for each of you to bring along with you. Let me ask one of the officers to escort us to do that. Hopefully they're through with gathering evidence there by now."
Tanya returned a few minutes later with Detective Gunn, and they left together to pack up Buffy's and Katie's belongings from the only home they'd known for the last year.
~~~~~~~
At the apartment, Buffy waded through the chaos the police had left in their wake, and packed up as many clothes as possible for herself and Katie, and took as many favorite toys as she could for her daughter, as well as the Christmas presents, now unwrapped from Saturday's search. She got the baby book, and some pictures that were important to her, and some odds and ends. To her dismay, she saw the suitcases too quickly filled.
After they had located the drugs in the rocking horse, the police were more destructive of the things they searched, and cushions and toys were ripped open to examine their contents in search of contraband. There was a lot of general destruction and ruined furniture and belongings. After a frantic search, she found her stuffed pig, Mr Gordo, under a pile of bedding and was thankful that he, at least, remained intact. Buffy felt tears welling up again, and pushed them back ruthlessly, as she did not want these people to see her crying yet again.
As they were packing, Mr Kralik came by and asked what he was to do with the rest of the personal items in the apartment. Faith was gone, and Buffy couldn't even take all of her own things with her. She simply didn't know what to do about it. Tanya asked if Mr Kralik had a storage area in the building that Buffy could use to store some more personal items, and he said he would be willing to do that for her. He had always liked the two girls, and he didn't like to see what had happened to the young one and her daughter. Buffy thanked him and some tears did escape then. Tanya and Gunn assisted Buffy in selecting the items that would be kept and stored by Mr Kralik, including some important personal items belonging to Faith, and the landlord kindly agreed to pack them up in boxes and place them in a locker in the basement for them. Buffy promised to let him know her new phone and address as soon as she had it, so he could contact her if he found he could no longer keep the boxes. He told her to take her time, that he wasn't going anywhere.
Buffy gave him a big hug, and with that she left the little apartment for the last time. At least she still had her memories. No one could ever take those from her.
~~~~~~~
Monday
Bored again.
*Is this my life now? Long periods of boredom, punctuated with periods of dread and terror?*
She glanced around the room again.
*
Way too much wood paneling in this room.*
She laid her head on her arms on the table.
Buffy was waiting in a small secured conference room near the Family Court 'courtroom', waiting for Tanya and Lindsey to arrive. She had been there for what seemed like hours but was actually only fifteen minutes. Right now, her entire world seemed to have narrowed down into long periods of waiting for some adult or other to escort her from place to place, without any say about it on her part. This was only the third day and she was already going crazy from the sheer amount of control that she currently did not have. And from the boredom.
*If they decide to sentence me to prison, I am
so screwed. Cuz this? This waiting makes me wanna punch something... something...
woody!*
A deputy opened the door and admitted Lindsey, who was carrying two take-out containers of coffee. He greeted his client, and held one out as he plopped down in a chair across from her at the wooden table.
Having spent her entire life being told that coffee was for adults, not children, Buffy idly wondered if having a baby, no matter how young you were, suddenly made adults assume you needed coffee as much as they did. And then she considered that right now, she probably did. She took a sip and noted also that this was the good stuff.
"Thanks," she smiled appreciatively
"Sure thing," Lindsey nodded cheerily as he pulled out what she assumed was her file from his briefcase, and began explaining how the courtroom operated and what she could expect from this hearing today. As he was just getting started, Tanya came into the doorway and motioned for Lindsey to come outside. Lindsey frowned and followed her out. In a couple of minutes both adults came back in with somber looks on their faces.
*Uh-oh. This can't be good.*
"Good morning, Buffy," Tanya greeted her gently as she took a seat next to Lindsey. Then she looked at Lindsey, apparently giving him his cue to begin. He looked unhappy.
"What's with the dire?" Buffy asked slowly, with a growing sense of dread.
"Well, we've had a bit of bad luck this morning," Lindsey began. "The regular family court judge that was scheduled to hear your case this morning had a heart attack last night, and usually that means his hearings would be postponed and rescheduled until they could be placed on the docket again before another judge..."
"Oh God, does that mean I stay in jail?"
"No, that's not the problem. The cases haven't been postponed today, because The Judge has decided to hear them himself."
"The judge? What judge?"
"Not 'what judge'. '
The Judge. The Presiding Judge of the entire court system in this county. Now usually, in addition to his administrative duties, he hears superior court cases, adult cases, like murder, robbery, rape, that kind of thing. Big crimes, committed by adults, and he's rather fond of throwing the book at anyone convicted in his courtroom. This guy doesn't believe in 'coddling' the accused, especially after they're convicted." Lindsey paused a moment and let Buffy take this information in. "But sometimes he likes to appear in other courtrooms, see how things are going in other parts of the county, make sure all is orderly and proper, the way he likes things to be. And he has chosen today to make one of his little visits."
"This is really bad, isn't it?" Buffy whimpered.
"It could be," Tanya admitted. "We don't really know. He's a law and order judge, and he was elected on a big family values platform last year. He is not known to be soft on adolescent criminals, and he is not a big fan of unwed parentage."
Lindsey picked up the thread again. "Your case has a lot of problems that The Judge could find objectionable and his rulings might be harsh. We just don't know. I will tell you, though Buffy, when we go in there you
must look like a 'good kid', act calm and demure, and show The Judge the utmost respect. Always
always call him 'your honor' if he asks you to say something or answer a question. Never speak out of turn or make any outbursts, no matter what he or someone else might have said to upset you. It's very important that we show him that you are a good girl, a good mother, and that you are different than most of the kids he sees before him in his courtroom."
Tanya added, "And he sees some stupid, ignorant, just terrible kids, Buffy. He's more used to seeing gangbangers, drug addicts, kids out of their parents control and runnin' the streets, hurtin' people. That's what he expects to see when you go before him. What we have to do, in our presentation and by your demeanor, is show him that you are different, that you deserve leniency and assistance, not harsh penalties and punishment."
Lindsey continued, "And it really helps that Detectives Gunn and Krev-lorn-swath -- Lorne -- are both here to testify on your behalf as well as to lay out what really happened in the drug sting and in the search of your apartment. And the fact that Lorne knew you before the raid and had been in your home helps a great deal too. He has intimate knowledge of your lifestyle and whether you seemed to know anything about the drug and false document operations."
He let this information sit there for a minute, so Buffy could take it all in. It was such discouraging news.
Tanya turned to Lindsey and asked him if he would mind stepping out for a minute so that she could speak to Buffy alone. Lindsey balked, but Tanya let him know that if afterwards Buffy wished to share their conversation with him that would be fine, but she felt privacy was needed right now. Lindsey gathered up his briefcase and left the room.