“Ma’am, it’s below freezing out here,” the backup officer said to Shaffer. “Why don’t you sit in my squad car to warm your baby up?” I wonder, were Destiny’s eyes sticky with pulp and did she cry from the cold wind, or was she still warm, a bun pulled not so many months before from Shaffer’s oven? Our Fern still seemed to radiate four hundred degrees Fahrenheit from hot coils deep down inside her small belly. A receipt later created when a Walmart manager scanned in Green and Shaffer’s loot proved nearly everything in the cart was for Destiny. Though she was only six months old, nearly $1,000 worth of goods had been stolen on her behalf.
Succumbing to the temptation to steal new baby accoutrements is easy to imagine. I’ve been drawn, without warning or reason, to new baby things in magazines and stores, much prettier than the secondhand vestments in which we usually dressed our children. The siren call of baby garb was surely composed in some mystic enclave, on some secret clef unknown even to musicians, thousands of years ago. The lure of something brand-new—the baby and her swaddling clothes—is irresistible. Babies are the blank slate, the second chance, the rewind button in life, as Allison Shaffer must have known. Babies—new life, new blood—are known to cancel out shitstorms and snowstorms and all manner of stress, at least temporarily.
For me, the natural hormones of pregnancy, childbirth, and breastfeeding proved the only effective antidote—the only reset toggle—for my long-term depression. Since my elementary years, sadness, trapped inside my body, had traveled to my heart, my lungs, my brain, even my limbs, like water in a blister that sloshed around but wouldn’t drain. Motherhood siphoned the intense malaise from my body in ways I’d never fathomed, and I wonder, was it the same for Destiny’s mother? Footie pajamas and itty-bitty socks, soft, delicate, and as yet unsullied, are really just the second coming of our babies; it’s no wonder we are tugged unwittingly toward Baby & Toddler at Walmart.
But I was not there to lobby for Derek Green and Allison Shaffer, not that meditations on motherhood have any real place in a court of law, anyway. Police officers mandated that Green and Shaffer sign the Temporary Physical Custody Request paperwork for Destiny, to guarantee her a safe haven while they awaited court proceedings behind bars. No chance Destiny might wear those new fleece pants and that hollyhock LOVE bib on Christmas two weeks later, wherever Child Protective Services delivered her for the holiday. Even when certain stories were fun to tell, punch lines fell flat. For Ryan, this story was about a father trying to provide. For me, it was about a mother losing her baby into a tangled maze known as Child Protective Services. I grew light-headed imagining any small infraction leading to the loss of my own.
From the refuge of our home, I snuggled and read with my kids. One of our favorite picture books was Good Night, Gorilla, and I’d envision Ryan as the ape, knuckling the zookeeper’s keys, liberating the animals, everyone from the elephant to the armadillo. In my version, they followed him from the courthouse to the iconic bank building and slept on the faux-leather hand-me-down sofas. I studied Green’s mug shot and imagined him there, the gorilla’s sidekick, towing the banana on a string. If Green was the keeper of Ryan’s livelihood, meager though a single piece of fruit might be, who was the keeper of his?
Second only to our house on Hazel Street, our son Leo was our most expensive commodity. During my second pregnancy, we had guilelessly ignored red flags from our new health insurance company about delivering him at the Madison Birth Center. In a phone call we failed to document, a representative of our new provider of student-spouse health insurance, purchased through UW–Madison while Ryan was in law school, promised to match benefits available to us previously. Throughout my first trimester, in 2005, our provider covered my prenatal care at the birth center; and we assumed, based on vague reassurances, this coverage would continue in 2006. We were young, Ryan not yet a lawyer. We should have confirmed the company would match providers, not just benefits, but we didn’t, and they ultimately refused to cover Leo’s birth at the Madison Birth Center with the only midwife I’d ever known. We later learned, when the center went out of business, that insurance companies made a habit of not footing their bills, preferring instead to fund major hospitals.
Eventually our midwife sued us for $8,000, hiring a collection agency called Stark, as in stark reality, or if I were to buy another vowel, as in stork looming. We might have expected such a bird to deliver our children, delicately balanced inside the knotted hammock of a clean diaper. Instead this “Stork” Agency was the yawp of a ringtone, a carefully trained heartless voice. I worried irrationally that a phalanx of winged creatures would scoop up our baby and carry him into some unknown pattern of migration.
I worried that the universe, if not our midwife, would reclaim Leo, some version of “removable property” I could not safeguard with breast milk or love. Leo had emerged on Mother’s Day. Mothers everywhere celebrated as I pushed him triumphantly into existence. Irie, kneeling at my bed, clamored to catch her brother, in the same room at the birth center where she was born. He was still attached to my insides, a fish on the line. Unable to pull his slippery limbs into her own, she cried.
No Mother’s Day gift could compare to this naked boy serving knuckle sandwiches on my chest, but months and years later, when the Stork Agency came knocking, my memory of Leo’s arrival became fraught with worry. In a small claims supplementary exam, under the supervision of a Winnebago County judge, one of Ryan’s colleagues, another attorney, embarrassingly grilled us about our income, debts, and spending: used furniture, one
