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AFTER THE SOCIAL WORKERS STOPPED looking for us and left, we went back to the house one at a time. It was probably a couple of days before we were all sleeping there again. It was getting into summer break, so there was even less structure to our lives now that school was out.

I don't remember when my mother finally returned, but not long after that we moved again. My memory is a little bit hazy here as to the exact timeline, but I'm pretty sure it was at this point that we lived at the Salvation Army shelter near the bus station for about a month before we moved to a little place in northeast Memphis. The shelter is closed now, but I have a very clear memory of staying there for several weeks. I think the people in the Salvation Army might have even been the ones who helped my mother find the new house and make arrangements to move us there. Whatever the case, we lived in that house for most of the time I was in second grade.

During that time, John, Denise, and Tara were put into the foster care system. Rico was put into state custody, so he was kept in a more heavily controlled environment than just a foster home. He was always the one out on the streets more than the rest of us, so if someone was going to get picked up by the cops, it would be him. But we figured that they were going to get all of us sooner or later, and we were right.

About a year after they got the little ones, the DCS people caught up with the rest of us at school. Carlos and I were at Coleman Elementary, an old brick and cement building that was two stories tall and probably felt old from the first day it was built. It was getting toward the end of the school year and everyone was excited for summer vacation to get started. One of the school secretaries came on over the loudspeaker in our classroom: "Would Michael Oher please collect his things and come to the front office?"

I was excited. The only time anyone was called to the front office like that was when their mom had come to take them out of school for the rest of the day. That seemed like a pretty good deal to me. I was hoping that was the case, anyway--that my mother was doing well, maybe even cleaned up from drugs, and she was picking us up from school as a surprise. Deep down, though, I think I knew what was really going on. We were about to get evicted from our current house and my mother, it turned out, had checked herself into a drug treatment and rehabilitation program. She wasn't going to be home for a while, and there wasn't going to be a home to go back to anyway, since we were getting kicked out. We couldn't run and hide from the authorities forever. If they couldn't get us at the house, they'd just find us somewhere else.

Sure enough, when I got to the office, Ms. Spivey and the DCS people were waiting, and they walked Carlos and me out to the big car that was waiting for us. Grown-ups always got their way. We just had to make do with whatever decisions were made for us.

CHAPTER FOUR

Life in the System

After more than twenty-two years of working for the department and several hundred children, Ms. Bobbie Spivey still remembers dealing with my brothers and sisters more clearly than just about any other in her career. "Certain families just stay with you," she told me.

The questions she was able to answer for me were definitely proof of that statement. I was amazed by how much she remembered. But, of course, there were going to be a lot of things that she couldn't recall, couldn't share, or simply didn't know. For that reason, I wanted to do some research into my past. I accessed all the court records I could about my early life and time in foster care. Unfortunately, a lot of the records were missing--most of them, it seems. Just in the past couple of years, a federal lawsuit forced Tennessee to clean up its Child Welfare System. After years of bad management, disorganization, and out-of-date policies, they were forced to pretty much completely revamp the entire department.

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