The Whole Neighborhood Warned Us About the Single Dad of 7 Next Door — I Had CPS Dialed When I Looked Through the Fence
My thumb was over the call button.
The number was typed in. I’d looked it up three days earlier and saved it in my notes so I wouldn’t have to search for it when the moment came, which tells you something about where my head was.
Let me back up.
Kit and I signed the lease on the house on Marlowe Row in March. Three bedrooms, a garage, a real yard, on a street where nothing happens.
The rent was four hundred dollars a month under what that street should have cost and we congratulated ourselves the entire drive home.
We found out why on the first day.
We were unloading boxes out of a van and a woman came down her driveway across the road, folded her arms, and said, with a little laugh:
“Well. You’re brave.”
I said, “Sorry?”
And she nodded at the fence between our yard and the one on the left. “Renting next to them. That’s a decision.”
Her name is Perdita Krane and she has lived on that street for twenty-two years.
Then in the evening another one came over with cookies on a plate covered in cling film — Loretta Sloan, four houses down — and she got to it before the second sentence.
“Did nobody tell you? The man next door has seven kids. Seven. On his own.”
She said “on his own” the way you’d say a diagnosis.
That night we saw it ourselves.
We were eating off boxes in the kitchen and I looked out the window over the sink at about seven o’clock, and a man came out onto his back porch.
Tall. Forties. Grey T-shirt. He did not look at our house.
And he blew a silver whistle. One short note.
Seven children came out of that back door and lined up on the grass.
Tallest to smallest. A teenage girl at one end, down to a toddler at the other who was holding the hand of a girl of about five.
They lined up in about six seconds and then they stood still.
No talking. No shoving. Nobody sat down in the grass. Seven children in a row in the evening in complete silence.
And he walked down the line with a clipboard.
He checked something. He looked at their shoes — he actually crouched and looked at their shoes, one at a time, all seven of them.
And then he went to a thing on the side of the shed that I could only half see, a big wooden wheel about four feet across with pegs and cards on it, and he moved things around on it and made marks on the clipboard.
Then one more note on the whistle and they went inside.
I was standing at my kitchen window with a dish towel in my hands and I did not realize I was still holding it until Kit said my name.
It went on like that for eleven weeks.
Five in the morning. That’s when it started every weekday, and I know because I have terrible sleep and I was awake for most of them.
Whistle. Line-up. Clipboard. Then work — actual work, in a yard, at five in the morning. Buckets, rakes, a wheelbarrow, hoses. The teenager doing something with trays under a light in the open shed.
Then everybody inside by six-fifteen and his car gone by six-forty.
And in eleven weeks I never once saw that man hug one of those children.
Not once. Not the toddler. Not the five-year-old.
I never saw him smile either. Not in the yard, not at the mailbox, not in the driveway. His face did one thing and one thing only, which was nothing.
I started keeping notes on my phone in April.
I want to be honest about that because it sounds sinister now and at the time it felt responsible. Dates. Times. “5:02 – whistle. 7 kids out. 41 min yard work.” “Toddler crying 6:10, no one picked her up.” “Shoe inspection again.”
Twenty-two entries by the end of May.
Kit said, more than once, “Maybe that’s just how the guy runs things.”
And I said, “Kids don’t line up like soldiers because they want to.”
I said that sentence in my kitchen at least four times and I was very sure of it and I want it written down here in my own words because I said it and I have to own it.
On Thursday the fourth of June I made the decision.
I’d been up since four. At ten past eight in the evening it was still light and I took the trash out to the bin, which is by the shared fence, and I had my phone in my other hand with the number on the screen.
Thumb over the button.
And from the other side of the slats there was a heavy thump. Wood on wood. Loud.
Then a scramble. Then a girl’s voice, whispering, absolutely frantic:
“Quick — before Dad sees. You know what he’ll do.”
I put my eye to the gap in the fence.
Here is what I saw.
Two of them — the teenage girl and the boy who’s about fourteen — were carrying something across the grass toward the shed, half-crouched, moving fast.
It was a bench.
An unfinished wooden bench. Slatted seat, no back yet, one end still rough where it hadn’t been cut down. It was heavy enough that the boy had it braced against his thigh.
The twelve-year-old was holding the shed door open with her whole body.
The ten-year-old was standing at the corner of the house facing the back porch, watching the door. Lookout. Actual lookout, with his hand up ready to signal.
And the teenage girl had the toddler asleep on her back in a carrier the entire time.
They got it into the shed. The door shut. The ten-year-old dropped his hand.
And then the five-year-old, who I hadn’t even seen, came out from behind the wheelbarrow holding a paintbrush.
I stood there with my thumb still on the screen.
I lowered the phone.
I want to say that I understood everything in that moment, and I didn’t. I understood one thing, which was that four children had just executed a coordinated operation to hide something from that man, and that not one of them looked afraid.
They looked thrilled. The twelve-year-old had her hand over her mouth trying not to laugh.
That is not what fear looks like. I have never been so aware of not knowing something in my life.
I was still standing there when the teenage girl came around the side of the shed and saw my eye in the gap.
I have never been caught doing anything worse.
She stopped dead. She was sixteen and she had a two-year-old asleep on her back and she looked at me through a fence for about three seconds.
And then she said, very quietly, “Please don’t tell him.”
And I said, “I won’t.”
And then — and I don’t know where it came from — I said, “What is it?”
She looked at me a moment longer. Then she said, “It’s a bench. For the twelfth.”
“What’s the twelfth?”
And she said, “It’s our Gotcha Day.”
Her name is Mina. She’s sixteen.
We talked at that fence for about twenty minutes that night and about nine more times over the following week, and then I talked to her father, and then I sat in his kitchen, and what follows is what I learned in that order.
There are seven of them and they are all full biological siblings.
Mina, sixteen. Josiah, fourteen. Beatrix, twelve. Rennick, ten. Fable, seven. Ilsa, five. And Dot, who is two.
They were removed from a house two counties over in September of 2021. Six of them, at that point. Mina was twelve.
I am not going to describe the conditions in that house, partly because it isn’t mine to describe and partly because Mina told me two details at that fence and I have not been able to put either of them down since.
The county could not place six siblings together. Nobody can. The standard outcome is that they get split into threes and twos and ones across a region and see each other at a contact center once a month if they’re lucky.
Thaddeus Cormier and his wife Rosalind — everybody called her Linnie — had been licensed foster carers for nine years. They had no children of their own.
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