Parenting was rife with inconsistencies. I was protective but permissive, vigilant but lax. Sometimes I wondered if oxytocin had over-tranquilized my brain. All doped up, I’d react to crisis in a daze like a kid on weed. On one occasion, Irie was chasing Leo around the backyard. The kitchen window did not afford me a view. Ryan was loading up the car for the Experimental Aircraft Association fireworks display, much to his annoyance, when a yowl, followed by a short whistle, exploded in the backyard.
Leo cried out, “Help!” From my blind spot in the kitchen, I stood still, huffing the hot air, calm to the point of fecklessness. Many seconds passed as he called out again. The other children chimed in: “Oh my God, oh my God!” As if playing a child’s game of Statue, numb to his calling, I did not rush to his rescue as a mother should. Instead, I waited for Ryan’s voice, deep and reassuring. After four babies and nearly a decade of hormonal overload, I was useless.
“Laura,” Ryan called out. “I need to take Leo to the emergency room.”
I edged around the corner toward the back door, squinting, as if trying to spot some faraway bird. Leo’s knee looked like it had taken the sharp end of an axe. A wide gash cut to the bone. Apparently in running from Irie, he had tripped on a shepherd’s hook and launched into the tree stump near the sandbox. Who knew the remains of our maple tree were so dangerous?
Ryan carried Leo to the van, loaded him like delicate freight, and left me flanked by my remaining children, who would make Leo get-well cards and insist on buying him chocolate before we met him for the fireworks, an event to which he’d arrive with eight stitches right where his knee was supposed to bend. Two years later Frank would fall face-first into our front door. When our babysitter, Gabby, called us at our favorite restaurant, Ryan looked at me and said into the phone, “I’m sure he’s fine.”
We both remained calm, but maybe too calm. Gabby consulted our neighbor Betty, who worked for years in pediatrics, then called us again, insisting this might require stitches. Sure enough, our little Frankenstein was slashed deep on his forehead, right between his eyebrows.
On another occasion, Ryan and I squabbled over taking the children to an event sponsored by the Fox Valley Herp Club. Snakes made him uneasy, but in my characteristic fashion, I encouraged him to live a little. “This is the kind of thing I do in the summer while you’re busy working,” I said. “The kids love it.”
And at first, they did. The red-eared slider turtles and painter turtles were fun to examine, but most impressive were the ball pythons of varying colors and sizes, from babies to big mamas. Volunteers permitted the children to wear the constrictors around their necks or to brandish them as bracelets. On several instances, Ryan excused himself from the room, feeling nervous.
“They’re typically pretty docile,” one of the Herp Club members told us.
“See,” I told Ryan. “Everyone is doing it.”
And then, after nearly an hour of parading around with snakes as jewelry, Fern walked toward me, caramel skin gone white. “This one bit me,” she said.
“What do you mean?” I asked. “Are you sure?” Fern began to weep, and looked faint. A volunteer grappled the python from Fern’s cradle hold, and stuffed her into a potato sack “to calm her down.”
“Maybe she’s getting ready to lay her eggs,” one of the other snake experts said before she rushed into the nature center lobby to collect first-aid provisions.
Little pinpricks of blood on Fern’s forearm showed where the snake had punctured our daughter’s skin. Although the snake was not venomous, scabs from Fern’s snakebite lasted a week. We kept the wound sterilized, but a bandage was not necessary. As we walked to the van in the July heat, Fern’s entire body blanched to the bone, I realized that Ryan’s professional life had helped to fine-tune his intuition. On the other hand, I’d not felt the rush of adrenaline in a dangerously long time.
Lucy Vasquez and Agnes Jacobson felt longing I hate to imagine, both separated from their sons by police intervention, forced to look at their sons through plate glass. Was Wyatt’s image, ever so slightly, refracted or bent, as police chauffeured him away, back into the breadbasket of Winnebago County? Did he lift his hand against the light and wave to his mother? The only photograph of Wyatt Jacobson in his ever-expanding case file was a disembodied image of his forearms, palms up, junkie scar tissue fastened to his skin like pink metal clasps.
Aurora Medical Center was Jacobson’s second hospital of the day, fair excitement for a guy otherwise stuck awaiting sentencing in the Winnebago County Jail. He’d been struggling with heroin addiction for several years now, and every crime he’d committed was a quick fix. He was originally charged with theft of movable property. He seemed always to know somebody with guns, be it a .22 caliber handgun or a Winchester .30-30 rifle. He smuggled these from a friend’s home and pawned them for dope.
Derek Green never needed a middleman. If he stole tornado rolls, he ate them. If he stole
