At Theda Clark Medical Center, in the waiting room, Agnes allowed Wyatt to use her cell phone to send text messages. He barely talked to his mother, but he was active. His finger pads tapping the screen appeared to energize him. He was a young adult connecting with friends. When they left the cardiology appointment, Agnes should have known she was instructed to bring her son straight back to the jail, but two hours remained on the furlough time clock. Like a mother assigned joint custody in a divorce proceeding, she intended to keep her son until 2:59 PM. She drove him the long way to their house on the outskirts of Winnebago County, where she parked in the driveway and shepherded him inside.
When mother and son reemerged, Wyatt had changed his clothing, as if freshening up, and instead of turning, finally, in the direction of the Winnebago County Jail, Agnes drove toward Waupaca County. Agnes and Wyatt’s father were planning to purchase a lot and build a home there. She was taking Wyatt to see the plot of land where he might get clean—new house, clean slate. It never occurred to Agnes that the subdivision was across the county line. As soon as Agnes accelerated into Waupaca County, two unmarked squad cars synchronized their strobes, their red lights pale in the afternoon sun. The furlough instructions stipulated that Wyatt was not allowed, under any circumstances, to leave the jurisdiction of Winnebago County.
“It’s amazing what becomes of an afternoon joyride,” Ryan said.
A failure to comply with the terms of his bond gave the officers the right to cuff Wyatt as soon as he emerged from his mom’s vehicle. Having planned this surveillance operation days in advance, officers were equipped with a search warrant, and their K-9 unit was on call, prepared to forage Agnes’s car for contraband. Neither Agnes nor Wyatt had any inkling they were being trailed since leaving the Winnebago County Jail. The officers began to interrogate Agnes, irritated that she was oblivious.
“Ma’am, at any point did you allow Wyatt to use your cell phone?” one of the officers asked.
“No, sir.”
“Don’t you recognize me from the waiting room at Theda Clark?” he said to Agnes, as if she were playing dumb. “We observed Wyatt using your cell phone in the waiting room.”
“Well, yes,” she said. “He contacted a few of his friends. That was all.”
Perhaps most incriminating in the minds of law enforcement was Agnes and Wyatt’s fifteen-minute layover at home, sufficient time for Wyatt either to use heroin, to hide drugs (enough for himself and a few jailbirds) in a body cavity, or both. Or was it possible that Agnes Jacobson actually intended to drive into Waupaca County and then right on through to Marathon County, toward Lake Superior and Canada? What wouldn’t a mother do for her only son?
When officers took Wyatt into custody well before 2:59 PM, they likewise headed away from the Winnebago County Jail. With a second warrant in hand to search Wyatt Jacobson’s body cavities, they drove him to Aurora Medical Center, where they intended to learn for certain, using a CT scan, whether Wyatt was more than just an addict. He might also be a drug mule with plans to pass a balloon of heroin he’d swallowed, and Agnes Jacobson, the young man’s mother, might be his accomplice.
Irie was once entered as “deceased” in her pediatrician’s database. At her first checkup, three days postpartum, a receptionist stared into our bassinet, trying to reconcile pink vernix-caked ears with the dead baby listed on her computer screen. “What a strange clerical error,” she said, mesmerized more by our baby than a woman accustomed to newborns should be. “I’m really sorry,” she said. We laughed but secretly prayed against omens, prophecies, and the sloppy typist we’d never met.
“Does it hurt right here?” my midwife had asked when I was new to pregnancy, unaware implantation ached. A metal button seemed stitched too tight against my innards. Everything inside my abdomen felt tender and inflamed. In later pregnancies, I’d feel exactly the same button pinching my uterus, and I’d remember Irie like trial by fire.
“I’m thinking this could be an ectopic pregnancy,” my midwife said.
Ryan and I called my mom in Oshkosh and asked her to meet us at the hospital. The midwifery clinic was not equipped with a sonogram machine, so we drove across town and waited for our first ultrasound. I imagined this misguided egg bursting inside me like a baby chick born into a fun house maze with no exit. My mom consoled me on the phone, reminding me of her own miscarriage, which had compelled my parents to conceive me, the second child they still wanted to make the family complete.
But at long last, when the radiologist called us into the blinking, cavernous room, and the technician slathered my still-flat tummy with goo, the grouchy ob-gyn on call said, “That baby looks just fine.” She’d been up all day and night. Everything about her was dry—her skin, her humor, and her voice—but inside of me, my baby was apparently moist and healthy and sewn posteriorly into the back wall of my uterus.
“Where’s the baby?” I asked. “I don’t see it.”
“That little bean right there,” the technician said. Irie was smaller than the tip of my pinky finger. In just one afternoon, I imagined my first baby dead and then alive. I felt lucky and greedy all at once. Lost and found was a metaphor for life.
The first time Leo died before my eyes, he was two months old. I dropped him on a sidewalk in downtown Milwaukee as I exited a restaurant, the first consequential faltering of
