I want to tell you about the specific quality of waiting that you learn in foster care.

Not the ordinary waiting.

Not the waiting of someone who knows the thing is coming and who is simply anticipating its arrival.

The other waiting.

The waiting of someone who does not know if the thing is coming at all, who has been told it might come and has been told this before and who has learned, by repetition, that the telling and the coming are not the same thing.

You learn to hold yourself at a particular angle to hope.

Not toward it.

Not away from it.

Sideways.

So that if it arrives, you can turn to receive it, and if it does not, you have not fallen toward the absence.

I learned this when I was seven.

The Hendersons were the fourth family.

They had a dog named Biscuit and a backyard with a trampoline and a daughter named Sophie who was nine and who was kind to me in the distracted way of children who are kind when it is convenient and who are not unkind when it is not, which is actually quite a lot of kindness for a nine-year-old.I had been there for four months.

I had started to believe it might be the place.

I had started to sleep through the night.

Then they sent me back.

Not because of anything I had done.

They were moving.

The case worker said: it’s not about you, Claire.

I understood what that meant.

It meant it was partly about me, just not in a way anyone could name.She said it without knowing she had said something large.

She set up the board.

I played.

I was not as good as Richard.

I tried.

That was the whole thing.

And it was enough.

And it was everything.