A four-year-old girl crouches in the back of a dark blue van with a carpeted interior and only two seats in the cab. She’s crying. Sitting in the passenger seat, her mother looks back at her and says, “Don’t you want to be with your baby brother?” The little girl nods through tears as she stares at the baby carrier ahead of her, nestled between the two front seats and behind the center console. Her baby brother sits quietly inside. The little girl wants to be with her mom and her baby brother, but she also wants to go home.

Just a few hours earlier, she had been in her grandparents' backyard, the sun warming her damp skin and laughter echoing off the fence. The air smelled of charcoal and chlorine, and a radio played the top 100 while her aunts and uncles, all in their teens, splashed each other in the pool. The little girl wore a pink bathing suit with ruffles and paddled along the pool steps, laughing at their antics. It was a happy day. A hot and sunny day with music playing and good food to eat. Then, the doorbell must have rung. She didn’t hear it, but Grandma and Grandpa went inside while she remained in the pool with her aunts and uncles. Things started to feel uneasy. Grandma returned outside, brought the girl into the house, and dressed her. She didn’t want to get dressed; she wanted to return to the pool, but she listened because she had begun to feel scared.

Suddenly, she found herself being carried out to the front yard, where a van was parked in front of the driveway. She knows to whom the van belongs. Police cars were parked on the road in front of the house. Grandma and Grandpa were speaking frantically with the policemen. The police wanted to help. They kept asking desperate questions, but her grandparents didn’t have the correct answers. The little girl gripped whoever was holding her at that moment. Eventually, they inform her that she must go with her mom in the van, but they will come to get her soon. She doesn’t want to go. “No, no, no!” she cried, clinging to them as they passed her around to hug, kiss, and say goodbye. Each one was also crying while they tried to console her. “I don’t wanna go! Don’t make me go! Please, Grandma—please don’t make me go!”

But she must go. There are no custody papers or court orders to prevent it. Just a four-year history of abuse, neglect, and being tossed back and forth between her mother and her grandparents over and over. Her mother was just a teenager when she had the girl, and her father was absent. Her mother married a man who beat her. She would get fed up for a time and come back to the grandparents or run to a battered women’s shelter, but she always returned to the man. They took and sold drugs together and were often too involved in these things to take care of the little girl. When she was about a year old, her mother brought her to her grandparents, lethargic and burning with fever. She was hungry and had a bleeding rash from her diaper not being changed for a long time. The grandparents took her to the emergency room to be treated for her fever. They were furious with the mother.

The little girl witnessed her mother being beaten many times in her first few years. The mother would tell her to stay in her room, where she would curl up in her bed, crying and listening to the violence just outside her door. When her baby brother arrived, she became even more anxious, fearing for his safety too. When home life was peaceful, the little girl would lie beneath the table where her mother put white powder and dried grass inside baggies while the man cleaned his guns as she daydreamed and sang softly to herself.

This is what the little girl will return to after the longest period of stability and happiness she has ever known. The man was attempting to atone for a recent episode of violence against the mother. The girl’s mother told him that she missed the little girl, so he said they could go get her. They probably needed the money the state paid for the little girl’s care, too. The man drove them in his blue van, which was dark inside with only two small round-tinted windows in the very back. The little girl thinks the van is scary. She thinks everything about the man is scary.

After a while, the van drives away with her. She gazes at her baby brother in his carrier while curled up on the van floor, softly crying. She cries because she wants to go home and because that fills her with guilt. “Don’t you want to be with your baby brother?”