Photograph: Paul Sumner/Veer

On my first morning as a caseworker for the Brockton, Massachusetts, Department of Social Services, I sat in my supervisor’s office to receive my cases. I was 26 years old, newly married. I would last at DSS for less than a year.

My job was to monitor parents’ progress in fulfilling agreements put in place to assure their children a safe home. The Sanchez case was the second case handed to me. Six-year-old Santos and his older sister, nine-year-old Luisa, had been acting out in school. Santos had been touching his genitals and bothering his classmates by trying to touch theirs. His teacher reported the incidents to DSS, who sent Santos to see a sexual abuse counselor.

After a meeting that lasted an hour and a half, the counselor stated that Santos had suffered extreme sexual abuse by his mother and father. Santos and his sister were removed from the family that same day. Although Luisa didn’t disclose sexual abuse to the child psychologist, she had unexplained bruises and displayed behaviors consistent with exposure to cruelty: fearfulness, sleep problems, complaints of stomachaches and headaches. It was clear that Santos and Luisa had been ill-treated. But a sexual abuse charge made by Santos in conversation with the counselor, specifically that he had oral sex with his mother, Dominia, was difficult to believe.

Dominia Sanchez was a short, stout woman who wore a small gold cross and dresses and suits with padded shoulders, which made her look small and overwhelmed. She had immigrated from the Dominican Republic 10 years earlier and almost immediately married Roberto. By the time I inherited the case, Dominia and Roberto were separated. Dominia had gone back to school, studied to become an executive secretary, and worked for an investment firm in Brockton. Though she spoke English well, she was careful in her word choice, studied and exacting to be sure she would be understood. When Dominia was upset, her eyes would well and she would look downward until she regained her composure.

When she understood that Santos had acted out oral sex, using mother and son dolls, Dominia turned red, looked down for a moment, then said to me, “But that is not anything I would do with my husband.” I believed her.

Roberto was a tall, handsome man who dressed well and wore strong cologne. He, too, spoke softly and carefully, constantly clenching and unclenching his hands and tapping his foot. He denied any abuse but said that Dominia might be lying about her relationship with the children. Dominia said that neither of them was capable of the behavior that Santos had described.

So much of the caseworker’s job is based on intuition. Many cases fell into shadowy territory: borderline neglect, rough punishment, perhaps edging toward abuse. But when did this conduct become abuse and warrant the breakup of a family?

Santos became more and more violent during his supervised visits with his mother. At one meeting, Dominia tried to engage him in conversation. “Do you miss me?” she asked. And, “You always tell the truth, right, Santo?” With each question, Santos became more frantic, running around the room, pulling a broken toy from a chest, looking at it for a minute and then moving on to the next.

As I pulled out of the DSS parking lot that day to take Santos back to his foster home, the boy unbuckled his seat belt, jumped out of my car, and flopped onto the hood, screaming. I reached for his legs as he crawled up the windshield. Another caseworker came to help, and Dominia appeared out of nowhere. “See what you people do?” Dominia wailed. “See what you do?” Santos stood on the roof of my car, his small body convulsing as he cried. With the help of my colleague I finally wrestled him down.

I came to dread the Sanchez visitations. One time, Santos threw a block at his mother, hitting her on the head; another time, he stabbed me with a plastic sword he took from an action figure. After each visit, I would meet with my supervisor, Ellie, to discuss new ways to make Santos feel safer: holding visits at other DSS office sites, trying different times of the day or on the weekends. Nights before visits I barely slept, imagining what Santos might do and mulling over whether we had been hasty in taking the kids from Dominia. When Santos’s foster mother called to say that the aftermath of the supervised visits was too disruptive for her to handle, Ellie suggested that we temporarily suspend them.

On the day I was to tell Dominia, Luisa’s school nurse called to tell me that Luisa had taken her foster mother’s matches and pressed the hot tips to her arms. “There may be scars,” the nurse said.

Dominia wept at the news that the visits were temporarily suspended. “He isn’t getting good care at his foster home. She doesn’t know what food he likes, the songs to sing at night. He needs his real mother. That is why he is upset.” Near the end of the visit, the therapist raised the subject of Christmas. “I know that Santos cannot come,” Dominia responded. “But could Luisa spend part of Christmas Day with me?” I told Dominia about Luisa’s burn marks and said that we’d have to wait to see how the girl behaved as the holiday drew closer. Dominia became silent, looked down, then up to stare directly into my eyes. “Sometimes, I just want to kill myself,” she said. “If it weren’t for the children, I’d kill myself.”

The case of Santos and Luisa is one that troubles me to this day. Sometimes I read about shoot-outs or abuse cases in Brockton and expect to see their names, Santos, now 23, Luisa, now 26. I’ve tried to think of them completing high school, moving toward college. But in the end, their images are frozen: Santos age six, on the roof of my car, Luisa age nine, match-tip scars on her arm, Dominia age 32, weighing suicide.

I did take Luisa to Dominia’s that Christmas. It was a cold day, the sky lit in white winter light. Luisa was nervous, trying to please me, anxious to see her mother. She played with the car radio, finding a station she imagined I would like and looking at me for approval. I watched as she reached for the dials, her sleeve inching up her arm, revealing the burn marks. When she found a reggae station, something loosened; she bounced up and down on the seat, drumming her hands on the dashboard. She drank a Coke, playing with the straw in her mouth as she reached over to adjust the volume. It was the first time she seemed to me like a nine-year-old girl.

While Luisa visited with her family, I applauded myself for sacrificing my own holiday. In training, I’d learned about the value of “going the extra mile” to build trust. I was confident things would change after this visit. Dominia would see me as an ally, Luisa would confide in me, and Santos’s visits would resume more peacefully. None of that, of course, would come to pass before I left DSS.

I returned to Dominia’s house five hours after dropping Luisa off and rang the bell. No one answered. Behind the door I could hear talking and laughing, the steady rhythm of salsa music. Through a window I could see people dancing. Luisa watched from her grandmother’s lap, and white lights on the Christmas tree swayed to the shaking floorboards. I wanted to suspend time in that moment, leave with that image: Luisa as carefree as she was in my car, lighthearted, laughing, surrounded by relatives. I rang the bell again. This time someone heard and a voice said, “Dominia, Dominia, es la mujer.” The music stopped, the voices quieted. A woman I didn’t recognize opened the door. Beyond her, Dominia, Luisa, and the other relatives turned and looked to where I stood in the doorway.

Do they see me still?

Carolyn Megan ’84 is a writer in Maine. Her work has recently appeared in the New York Times, Ms. Magazine, and the Bellevue Literary Review. The names in her essay are pseudonyms.