A Chance in the World

“After seeing my physical condition, the department shut down the Andrade home, removing the other boy chosen over me, and forbidding them from taking any more children.” 

Even before the horrors of the Robinson house, Steve foreshadows the harsh, often indifferent realities of the foster care system. The Andrades don’t beat Steve, but they neglect him to the point that they are deemed unsuitable candidates to care for children in need.

“I was too busy enjoying my cookie to figure out what their looks meant. Climbing into Patti’s car, holding my precious cargo, I felt certain of something: This was the place. I had found a home.”

Betty and Willie treat Steve kindly when they meet him. That is all it takes for Steve to identify them and their house as a potential home. Their duplicitous initial meeting provides a stark contrast to the cruelty they will exert over Steve later, making his confusion and suffering more acute when he realizes that they deceived him. 

“Thought I hadn’t seen a look like his before, I understood it immediately. He’s making sure I know my place. Then I felt another emotion, arresting and frightful. There is something not quite right here.” 

Steve’s relief at being at the Robinsons changes quickly when Reggie shoves him. Although Steve is young, his instincts and fears are correct. Willie and Betty have created an abusive home environment that has influenced Reggie to become cruel and abusive as well. 

“Robinson Rule # 7: We can beat you at any moment, in any place, at any time, with whatever is in arm’s reach. We don’t need a reason.” 

The Robinsons have many rules for Steve, but #7 is the clearest example of their cruelty. By acknowledging that they don’t need a reason to beat him, he knows that they will beat him sometimes no matter what he does. Willie and Betty take a sadistic pleasure in their ability to control Steve with violence. 

“Children rarely ask where monsters come from or how they came to be; children simply accept them as a fact of life, something to be dealt with, the way you deal with any other childhood fear.” 

Steve thinks of Betty and Willie as boogeymen to be outsmarted. He has had so little good in his life that he equates the abuse from his caretakers as a reality that he must manage, like a fear of the dark. He will later come to identify with the rabbits in the novel Watership Down, in which the rabbits must survive by their wits in a hostile environment.

“Books for me were what the ocean is to the fearless explorer—deep and mysterious, boundless and soothing. I loved the smell of books, the feel of their weight in my hands, the rustle of the pages as I turned them, the magnificent illustrations on the covers that promised hidden treasures within.”

Steve has no freedom to grow or explore in the Robinson house. They discourage his curiosity, and Willie’s illiteracy is a great source of insecurity. In Steve’s early descriptions of his love for books, he does not focus on the stories as much as he does on the exploratory aspects of reading. The freedom to read represents the opposite of his confined, constricted life with Betty and Willie. 

“I didn’t want to go. This hospital was the nicest place I had been, and the people were the kindest I had ever known.” 

Even though he is in the hospital because of how badly Betty beat him, Steve doesn’t want to leave because it is a relief for him to be cared for: He has enough to eat, people speak kindly to him, and he is not afraid. That a child would long for the safety of a hospital, rather than his foster home, is another example of how distorted Steve’s childhood experience is. 

“Down in the dank basement, amid my moldy, hoarded food and worm-eaten books, sat another precious possession: the idea that my real home, the place where my story had begun, was out there somewhere and one day I was going to find it.”

During his suffering at the Robinsons’, Steve’s questions about his family sustain him. No matter what the Robinsons do to him, he has a mission. He refers to the question of his history as a possession because it is one of the only things in his life that belongs only to him.

“I briefly felt a kindred connection to the man in the bow, whose piercing eyes were so keenly focused on something off in the distance. He was searching—and so was I.” 

Steve feels a bond with the man in the Whaleman’s Memorial statue. Whalers, particularly in the early days of the industry, underwent perilous voyages for great potential rewards. Steve knows that his search for the truth might take him to more dangerous places and cause more trouble with the Robinsons, but he cannot stop himself. His single-minded focus keeps him going when he has many reasons to give up. 

“A new realization came to me: I am going to die here, at the hands of these people. And no one will know.” 

When Willie implies that he’s going to kill Steve during a hunting accident unless he tells him where he was after school, Steve realizes that he is in even more danger than he thought. He lies to Willie to save his own life. He knows that Willie could get away with murdering him and that there would be no justice for his death. 

“God is going to take care of you.”

These are Steve’s last words to Betty when he leaves the Robinson house for the last time. Years later, he will remember these words when a dying Betty calls him from the hospital. As a child, he speaks the words with a vengeful God in mind. Later, as he ponders the nature of forgiveness and of people shaped by abuse, the words will give him new opportunities to reflect on what God’s care could look like in the case of someone like Betty. 

“A fleeting thought entered my mind, one I had first learned from the pages of Mrs. Levin’s books: There are other ways that people live in this world. And I would now get a chance to discover them for myself.” 

Steve is a curious person who loves to learn and explore. One of the worst things about life at the Robinson home was that he had no options. He was so limited that there were times when, other than his escape into books, he forgot that there was a world outside the Robinson house. As he goes to Westport with John, he has options that previously existed only in books. 

“I had never been woven into the fabric of a family, and it now felt odd. The moment of confusion barely registered before I was overcome by the Sykeses’ kindness. I stared at it long and hard, still not completely sure that I had been so unequivocally accepted.” 

1.        When Steve visits John’s parents’ house, he is touched to see his picture on their wall. This gesture shows that they are treating Steve as a part of their family, and it is the first time that Steve has seen a picture of himself hung on someone’s wall. However, he realizes that living with the Sykes is only temporary, and he has not yet found his home.

“Any of us would change places with ya in a minute.” 

Jimmy, one of the men on the custodial crew at the college, encourages Steve not to quit school. Given his history, Steve is surprised to hear that anyone would envy his position. Steve might not have a home or a family yet, but excuses based on his past should not limit his future. 

“I recalled my last conversation with her when I told her that God was going to take care of her for what she and her family had taken from me. But the intervening years and my own deepening faith had given me a different perspective; her judgment, be it reprieve or forgiveness, was to be left in God’s hands, not mine.” 

When Betty calls Steve from the hospital, he rethinks the last words he spoke to her when leaving their house. Back then, he viewed God as an instrument of vengeance who would punish Betty and her family for his mistreatment. His faith now frees him from the need to see the Robinsons punished. Steve believes in God’s will, and it is no longer his responsibility.

“Kenny had bestowed on me a lesson: an entire universe of difference existed between a father and a dad. He had lived for the first five years of my childhood, plenty of time to intervene, to do something, anything. But he had not. To hear how great a boxer he was, how much people worshipped him, and most of all how he loved children only made me angrier.” 

After learning about his father from Russell, Steve experiences conflicting emotions. He hoped that finding his father would give him a sense of identity. In Steve’s view, Kenny only acted as a biological father—only in the act of conception—instead of a father figure, therefore Steve still does not feel anchored by identifying himself as a son. 

“In the relentless pursuit of my roots, I had naively believed that my presence could erase their pain. I had been so insensitive to their pain, so heedless of the great chasm left by Kenny’s death—all that could never be replaced.” 

While listening to Warren mourn Kenny, Steve realizes that he is not the only one who lost Kenny. He lost the idea of the man who conceived him but was never there for him. Warren lost a brother who he knew and was close with. Steve’s appearance reminds Warren of his loss, which is more acute than any happiness he might eventually feel about knowing Steve. 

“It’s a good thing we met this way, I thought, because I could have passed you a thousand times on the street and never known we were brothers.” 

When Steve meets Marc for the first time, he is stunned at their complete lack of familial resemblance. Marc is white and had a different father than Steve. Steve has spent a great deal of time imagining what his brothers and sister might look like, but he is unprepared for them to look so unlike him. The difference initially makes it hard for him to identify with them as family members. 

“You’re not black. You can’t be.” 

Joni reacts badly when she learns that Steve’s father was African American. Racism is not new to Steve, but he did not expect it to come with his family. He wants to be accepted as he is, and that is part of why he has wanted a family. He believes that their shared tragedy can overcome any differences they might have. In Joni’s case, he is wrong. She will later sever their relationship, although she also reveals that she was molested by an African American man when she was six.

“I was forced to see psychologists when I was younger. They always questioned me as if I were the one with the problem. Not one of them identified what was going on in my foster home. All I really needed was just one person to intervene. Maybe it was the times—people just didn’t get involved.” 

The depths of Steve’s loneliness extended even to the mental health professional assigned to care for him. He never felt that they were on his side, even though part of their job was to listen to him and improve his well being. Part of Steve’s faith comes from the fact that he believed God was the only one who always listened to him. 

“I knew my first glance had not deceived me. Like my father, my mother, too, had written me right out of her life, this time literally.”

When Steve reads one of the letters his mother wrote to her father, he experiences another great disappointment. When she writes that she wants to get her children back, she lists their names, except for Steve. The more he learns about his parents, the more he learns that their abandonment was more total and overt than he imagined. 

“‘In truth,’ he said, ‘I don’t really know what I am because I don’t know who my father is.” 

In the absence of knowing about Kenny, Bernard—whose name is now Steven—lacks a sense of clear identity. His emotional experience mirrors Steve’s, who can provide the answers his brother doesn’t have. Bernard cannot talk about who he is with precision because he doesn’t know where he came from, or the people who created him. Steve can provide answers for him, but can also tell him that the answers did not give him the exact closure he hoped for. 

“I think we both realized that families are not always made up of faultless parents, magnificent homes, perfectly manicured lawns, and white picket fences. Behind these idealized pictures of American life are often other stories of hardship and loss, pain and suffering. That, too, is part of every family’s history.” 

At Marian’s tombstone, some of Steve’s past ideas about families change. Despite being a stable and kind family, the Murphys did not have an idyllic life, even though there was little on par with the Robinson household. A family that appears superficially happy will still have its share of suffering. Steve begins to understand that all honest family histories have dark parts.