By Ryan’s estimation, Bob and Linda Duffy’s poor health was the core of their problems, and he became determined, thereafter, to get healthy. His efforts started with a diet and more exercise, of course. He reiterated, time and again, often in a joking manner, that he had “a real nice life insurance policy” set aside in case he died of stress, but he was actually serious, secretly worried he’d give up the ghost and traumatize the children. “Time to get healthy” was naturally one of the strongest arguments he’d make against conceiving a fifth child.
Throughout the intervening months, though, I had become legitimately obsessed with the number five. Five little ducks went out one day. Five little monkeys jumped on the bed. Over in the meadow, in a snug beehive, lived a mother honeybee and her little honeys five. According to the Scottish folk song, there was “always room for one more.” Somebody was missing, and Irie was leading the pack, getting older every year. As a birthday gift for Irie, my dad and stepmom bought her star number Gemini RA 6h 27m 23s D 20° 54’ from the International Star Registry and named it Irelyn Ulrich. Framed on her wall, the certificate is a constant reminder of the way she glistens in our sky. Don’t they all?
Stellar nurseries are the special portions of interstellar space where baby stars are born. Especially in the Orion Nebula, the region of star formation closest to Earth, molecular clouds collapse frequently, leaving behind hot, blinking orbs that shimmer, light-years away but seeming to dangle within reach. Like people, stars are born, grow old—if they’re healthy enough—and die, leaving a new generation of stars, luminescent marbles tossed against the sky, many of which I wished upon.
But maybe wishing would not, or could not, alter our predestination, whatever fate was written for us in the stars. My dad had told me that motherhood would either make me or break me, but being only a psychiatrist, and neither a physicist nor a psychic, he’d failed to give me numbers, leaving many questions unanswered—like, was there a tipping point? Would a fifth baby make or break my husband, my marriage, or whatever delicate energy had sustained us this far?
CHAPTER 7:
On the Lam
Although Ryan’s give-a-shit meter was busted by now, finagled, even psychologically engineered, to work only on certain days, he still worried over his defendants, and so did I, asking him all the questions he didn’t want to think about or answer.
“It looks like Linda Duffy ran away to Harbor House when the boys were little,” I said after reading more discoverable evidence in Kevin Duffy’s case. “Do you suppose Bob was abusing them back then?” It remained nearly impossible for me to imagine Kevin’s mother exploiting the sanctuaries and shelters meant to save women from domestic violence, even if she later turned out to be a liar.
“Who knows?” Ryan said.
As for Kevin Duffy, after the bunk beds, a resounding space-saving success, he also helped us to score new living room furniture, rooting for us to feather our nest when he’d been permanently booted from his own.
What disheartened me more, I wondered: mothers exploiting criminal justice or mothers exploited by the system? Were police over- or underreacting to women’s reports, or, worse yet, both, to the detriment of all families? The nuances of lawyering, smack-dab in the middle of the criminal justice system, were variegated, paradoxical, and altogether impenetrable at times, so far removed from good-guy-bad-guy simplicities that I finally understood what Aristotle seemed to suggest in Metaphysics: the more you know, the more you know you don’t know. Add gender, social class, family status, and race to the muddy waters, and Ryan’s work was impossible to describe definitively.
If I were to have witnessed Lucy Vasquez, for example, on the day California police materialized on her parents’ doorstep and handcuffed her dainty wrists, rattling off her Miranda rights with stern grimaces, I might have assumed, based on their attitudes, she was guilty as charged with kidnapping her own son. But upon noticing Callum, peeking out at officers, tucked knee-high behind his nana’s skirt, I would have begun to ask questions. If Callum was unscathed and intact, corn bread crumbs and salsa sticky on his chin, a boy fed to his heart’s content, had he really been kidnapped? Callum and Lucy had left Wisconsin almost a full year earlier, and nobody ever sounded the Amber Alert or deployed a search party then.
It was just as easy to argue that the state of California was guilty of kidnapping Callum’s mother right before his eyes at naptime, a shocking turn of events. When the arresting officer shepherded Callum’s mom away, lowering her into the squad car by pushing on the crown of her black, braided hair, I can only imagine, based on my children’s way of seeing, that Lucy reminded Callum of a jack-in-the-box. He reached out his hand instinctively, beginning to weep, as if grasping for the crank to release his mother from the dark compartment with its tinted windows. Much to his further traumatic surprise, after officers taxied Lucy to the county jail, Callum was the next to be snatched away from the sunny, piquant warmth of Nana’s home, temporarily placed with a foster family. His future placement would be
