Appeared in The Opiate,  Vol. 38, Summer  2024

“You’ve got to keep him talking,” the detective said. “You were the only two there that night. Make him comfortable. Make him think you are in this together.”

“Are we?” Carolanne asked.

“Just keep him talking. He only has to say it once.”

Maybe you’ll get lucky, the detective thought. Maybe my Aunt Sally will fly out my ass and make chicken and dumplings for supper. What the detective had not said was that if the fathers did not make the admissions in their first statements, if the words I picked him up did not get into the doctor’s notes or the first patrolman’s report, the case was blown. This was a bad one. The kid was on his phone getting advice from his shit bag ex-cop father while the girl thought he was getting the car to go to the hospital.  The detective was juggling five cases today. She seemed like a nice kid, too bad she got mixed up with that particular piece of shit. He dialed the next number on his list.

Carolanne always picked cities that had rivers flowing through them. She would rent a cheap room, find a job at the first place that said yes, and work out a walking path that took her along the water. She had lived beside sewage plants and trash barges and oh so many old warehouses not yet reborn as arty condominiums. One furnished room had overlooked a county dog pound. She soon discovered that Tuesdays and Thursdays were dog burning days and took a long walk in the other direction.

By repetition she had gained the skills of a barista and carried with her a handful of phone numbers that could be called to prove that yes, she was reliable, she was truthful as far as anyone needed to know. You could count on her for a while. She spent nights reading novels on couches that she bought at second hand stores or even found on the street. When it was time to leave, she left quietly. The occasional lover was dismissed, the cheap furniture put out in an alley or along a curb.  She would give notice at her job and sometimes even stick around a week or two extra if she was needed.

This morning after packing the car she checked under the seat out of habit and had a quick laugh at her own expense. The gun was long gone. It had kept her company for twelve years but now lay beneath the mud beneath the great river. On the way out of town she chewed her lip and tightened her shoulders before pulling a U turn to stop at the coffee shop where she had been working. The new girl was the only one on duty. She rang up a coffee and bagel and offered Carolanne her change.

“There you go.” Her voice was pleasantly determined, as if she were daring Carolanne a hint at some connection between them. They had not met. Not really. While the new girl had waited for her interview Carolanne served her a tea then listened to her murmured phone monologue recounting the misdeeds of some guy, a Dave or maybe it was a Tony. Apparently he had crossed the last line for the last time. Carolanne often listened in secret to conversations around her. She liked deceptive intimacy with people who did not know she existed. Don’t let him come back, Carolanne thought as she waved off her change and  handed the girl an extra dollar.

Before the coffee cooled Carolanne had left the city behind. She followed the river north. She would stop just before the mountains and find a place to sleep. Tomorrow she would cross the ridges covered in sawtooth pines down into the long sweep of plains until this river fell into the great river that led all the way, well, home was not the word. Not when you have not lived there for so many years. Eighteen. She had her notebooks and her clothes and a cooler with sandwiches and everything else she needed. She was on the road! She reached for her phone to turn on music and the vise crushed her heart again. She rolled the car onto the shoulder and turned off the ignition. “I’m so sorry” she chanted through the blur of her tears, her voice choking on itself until it was nothing but the sobs and moans of a woman alone and curled in on herself, laying across the front seat of her blue car with one green fender, a dent in the rear passenger side door and a broken headlight.

After the worst passed, when she came back to her body, Carolanne sat up.  “Who do you think you are?” She asked herself. She turned the key and the car started right up.

She had named him Braden. He had thick black hair that the nurses brushed off his calm round face when they checked his ports and catheter. His eyes were always closed. That hair and his dark tan skin showed he was Jayz’ son. His arms and legs lay still and flat on top of the bed. He could not have a blanket. He had a ventilator tube down his throat and an IV in his right leg. A nurse wearing gloves and a mask gently massaged the skin and slack muscles of his legs and shifted his body to a new position. The nurse left the baby and carefully avoided looking at the weeping women on her way out the door.

A counselor had come to keep her company while she watched Jayz’ family say goodbye. The counselor turned the pages of a book every few minutes like he was reading it. As soon as the hour was over he would go to the cafeteria for a black coffee and write down all his notes. He  had explained that he wanted to capture some comment, to get something that might help  Carolanne out with the cops. Jayz had come by with a couple of his crew. He  stood in the doorway and watched his son laying on the bed, his wailing aunts and weeping mother and Carolanne and the counselor sitting by the window. Jayz did not make a minute before he turned around and left.

Carolanne had been strung out that night. When Jayz came back with the tight wrapped baggie her heart lurched with joy. She tucked Braden in his crib and went out to the living room where of course Jayz had on his headphones to play some game on the TV.  Making her wait. It was one of his tricks. He could be such a jerk when he was holding. Still, it was a nice apartment. There was a living room and a couch and the big TV Jayz had brought that home in the middle of the night. Don’t ask, she had told herself. He was working for his dad. Construction, he said. She and Jayz were going to have a life together. All to themselves. He had a gun and three thousand dollars in a shoebox in the closet.

She had made a good day’s drive and found a spot to park along  the river, just past one of those middle of anywhere towns where everyone wants only to have the same day, the same year. Carolanne had lived in a bunch of them. Suspicion, tolerance, friendship, goodbye. “Maybe it's you that is always the same.” She had written in her journal.

She had adorned her right wrist with eighteen bracelets that she had woven by hand, one a year, on breaks from various jobs, watching sluggish rivers trudge downstream. When she was calm, or wistful or anxious or excited, really any time she was alone, she liked to run her fingers over them, to look at them and let her thoughts go. The tiny weave created a blur of colors that could vary with the light. Now, at twilight, her wrist seemed swathed in gray, green and blue. She looked up from the bracelets and studied her reflection in her car’s mirror. The wrinkles at the corners of her eyes had settled in to stay. The strands of gray among her black hair were old friends. Her forehead was strangely unwrinkled. That’s because you never worry, she thought. You just keep living.

The river was brown and wide here, surging through its channel and tearing away chunks of bank and whole trees. The orange and yellow of the sky bled out and faded to violet and charcoal. The first stars winked awake. By then the river had turned black. When the moon broke free from a line of distant hills the tiny waves glinted and swirled like a dragon’s hoard of jewels. She remembered being young, the lights and lies and all that came with pretending the night could last forever and mean something in the end. It had been so fun to always make the wrong choice. No one had been there to tell her that heeding the anger that had choked her heart since she was a little girl, since her mother first said she was no damn good and never would be, was a really bad plan for living life, that it led you places like the dark that waited in Jayz’ eyes.

“Not that you would have listened,” she said to the empty car. It was not the first time that day, almost every day, that she wished she had someone, or something, maybe just a dog, to listen to her.

She used her phone’s flashlight to write about the river in her notebook, along with a  page and a half description of the taste of the bagel she had for breakfast and the look on the face of the old man who took her money when she stopped for gas. Pesto crust and cream cheese filling and a hopeless emptiness that told you that nothing on earth could ever matter.

“Lick yourself. You want it so bad.” Carolanne was sick of Jayz and the stuff was weak, at least it was taking its time to really hit. They were both frustrated. Probably why he made the suggestion. He grabbed her wrists but she looked him in the eyes. You want to start something? She thought. She did not even have to say it. He was a scrawny little bastard and used to his dad throwing him around. Carolanne did sports in school and felt the strength in her shoulders. He let go of her wrists and stomped his feet like a pissed off little kid as he left the living room.

Sometimes she held Braden and thought this was it. The last time. She would take her baby, get clean and leave that asshole. She would have to move in with her mother for a while. That would be alright. Better than this.  She could do it. She had stayed clean after she learned Braden was inside her. Not even a beer.  After the baby was born Jayz showed up with a gram to celebrate.

Jayz came back into the room with a beer bottle already half empty. He stomped around the living room yelling the way he did when he got like this. He had hooked up with an ignorant little junkie bitch and now he was stuck. Why didn’t he listen to his dad and use her ass and move on?

“Why do I always have to be the nice guy?” That was his cue to send the beer bottle spinning through the air splashing foam in a wild circle.

“I’m going out. I’ll be back.”  Braden’s crying erupted in the back room.

“You woke the baby!” Carolanne called, hearing the screech of selfishness in her voice as she played this scene in memory. “You take care of him.”

Jayz mumbled and turned away from her. As his white t-shirt was swallowed by the dark of the hall she reached for the drugs balled up in the plastic bag.

For years Carolanne parked outside Jayz’s house the evening before Braden’s birthday. She would watch through the night. She saw the wife of  Jayz, probably he went by James now, hauling two boys in and out of a surprisingly sensible Subaru Forester. Jayz had a new truck every other year. Then the wife, the boys and the Forester were gone and there was a little red car and a new woman, younger and walking on heels even when she was hauling bags of groceries. She lasted two years and then it was just the truck. The nights when the house was empty except for Jayz never seemed to end. Sometimes Carolanne took the pistol out from under the seat and loaded, unloaded and cleaned it to keep her hands busy until all the lights were out in the house and she was sure Jayz was asleep. It had been so easy to buy that gun. Just counting out money and a counter and letting the clerk give her a quick lesson at the range out back. It was a relief the year that Jayz was gone and a family piled out of a minivan, the dad carrying a pizza box and a boy and a girl running for the door while a pregnant mom trudged after her family with a giant bottle of soda in one hand. That night Carolanne dropped the gun in the river before she drove off to her next life.

When the needle finds the vein, when the cloud of blood bursts up, it’s like coming home, Carolanne thought. She lingered in that thought and  fought off a glimpse of the stupid little girl who had not known a thing, who had waited all her stupid life for Jayz to open the car door for her, to take her to the place by the river where they found each other and everything else. “You want to try something?” He had asked.

Braden wailed from the bedroom. Goddammit. I have to get up and get him back to sleep. I’ll have to hold him while I make formula. He’s getting grabby.  She let her weight settle into the couch cushions. Her eyes closed. There would never be anything like that first time she shot up. Nothing mattered. Nothing could ever matter. Just thinking about it was better than most of life. She let a great river of peace carry her away. It was alright. Everything was alright.

Quiet filled the apartment like a sigh. She found the strength to lift an arm but had to let it flop back onto the couch before she tried the other one. Hey! It worked too. Now both at once. Just rest a bit. Savor the warm dark. Braden had stopped crying. Soon she would be ready to try her legs.

The sound of someone walking into the room made her open her eyes. Jayz stood there with an odd flat expression on his face, not a smile or a frown, maybe just a hint of fear in the way his eyes were wide and staying wide.

“You better check on that baby. I think there is something wrong with it.”

Carolanne got in a good sleep in the car beside the river. She opened a window half of a finger’s thickness to let in air. The soft gurgling sound of the water lulled her into her dream world. Soon enough she was riding a horse through a field. Her favorite dream! Green everywhere. Beneath her and ahead of her. She thought about looking behind her. Where was that sound coming from? Something tapping and tapping.

Why do they always use the butt end of their flashlight? The sun was pretty much up anyway. Carolanne pretended not to see the Deputy Sheriff’s other hand. The one that rested on the butt of her pistol.

“Honey. You can’t sleep here.” The deputy had auburn hair pulled back tight under her wide brimmed patrol hat and held her mouth in a soft but tight professional smile.

“Thanks. I just needed a nap. I have to cover a lot of miles today. Do you mind if I pee real quick in those bushes?”

“Sure honey. I’ll be back this way in a half an hour. Just make sure you’re gone by then.” The Deputy had finished scanning the car. Just everything some girl owned. Nothing worth any paperwork going on here.

Carolanne was glad for the break. Sometimes people could be nice. That counselor in the hospital. She told him she liked to read and once thought about being an English Teacher. What a job! Your own apartment and car and a room to talk about books every day for the rest of her life. Go on with your life. For him, the counselor had said. You hold him and then go have your life. People were be nice sometimes. Did that mean anything? Carolanne postponed thinking that one through till after she found a place to pee.

Breath in short soft bursts. Get air into Braden’s tiny lungs. Carolanne remembered that from the CPR class that summer she held a job as a lifeguard. Braden was in her lap. Jayz drove fast and Carolanne kept hoping a cop would stop them, then they would get an ambulance. Of course Jayz had not let them call one to the apartment. When Jayz ran out to get the car she had gathered a blanket and the diaper bag before she understood that nothing mattered except her baby breathing. She latched her mouth over her baby’s tiny lips and filled his little lungs with air. Two breaths then push the soft ribs, feel the cartilage give way under her fingers.

Carolanne ran into the hospital crying and screaming. She found a nurse and screamed at her that her baby had stopped breathing. The nurse took Braden. Everyone rushed away from her. Carolanne stood alone in the crowded emergency room. She had made it. She had saved her baby! Soon enough a young man with a clipboard full of forms approached her.

“Are you the mother?”

He wore blue scrubs with short sleeves that showed off a tattoo of a black cat. When he moved his arm the cat arched its back and she imagined it  hissing and spitting.  She took the papers and the pen and set to work. Parents: Carolanne Louise Wannamaker and James Zachariah Conor. Address. Phone Number. Patient Braden Conor. Date of Birth. Now lots of questions with boxes for yes and no. No, he did not have arthritis or glaucoma. No, he did not take non-prescription drugs.

She was halfway down the page when she felt a surge of power, a mysterious energy through her hands and up her arms into her head. She was electric! She was alive! She had saved her baby! She heard her name being called. When she looked up a doctor followed by a large orderly and a larger police officer were coming for her.

Carolanne always made the calls from the parking structure at the hospital. She walked   concrete steps that stunk from urine to the top level where nobody parked. She stood at the corner where she could see a park with a gold roofed gazebo tucked under a circle of wide oak trees covered with dark green leaves. After a few breaths, after making sure her feet were under her knees, she pressed call. Jayz answered on the third ring.

“Hey.”

“Hey.”

“How’s it going?”

“Yeah… Okay.” The detective had told her Jayz would take her calls. He would not hang up or avoid her. That’s not how it was done.

“Did you do anything today?”

“Played some Call of Eagles. Hung out. I might be going to rehab. Dad says I need it before I go to work full time.”

“Remember when we brought Braden home?”

“Pretty well.”

“You didn’t have a car seat. You had to call your aunt. Then you nodded out waiting for her to show up.”

“I don’t think so.”

“I couldn’t wake you up. I was afraid the nurse would see. But after a while I slapped you to wake you up.”

“I remember you were mad cause you could not get high.”

“You said you would bust my ass if I pulled that stunt again. Like you could bust anybody’s ass.”

“I don’t remember that. He looked cute when we got him in the car. We had to make that stuff. You shake it in the bottle with water.”

“Formula.”

“Yeah. Cause right after he was born you had me bring you stuff to get high. Remember? You had me sneak it into the hospital. Then you couldn’t nurse him. You used to squeeze out your tits and pretend they were dry.”

“That last night. Remember? We were fighting and you woke him up. You were going to settle him back down. Did something happen when you picked him up? You were high. You could have forgotten.”

“I think you got it mixed up. That last day you took a big dose. Maybe too big. You were mad cause I had been out all day looking for work. You said I needed to pay more attention to you. You insisted on changing the baby. I tried to stop you. You kept mumbling my baby. My baby. I left you there. I should not have done that. I went to make some formula and then I heard a loud noise like you dropped something and you came in and said we had to go to the hospital.”

“That never happened.”

“I’m not surprised you don’t remember. You had a lot that night.”

“Can’t you bring in an expert?” Carolanne asked. “The doctor at the hospital said there was only one way to cause these injuries. Extreme blunt force trauma. Probably slamming Braden’s head on the floor.”

The detective held his phone away from his ear to check the time. Victims watch too much TV. They think we gather in teams to discuss the latest case, to plan our next trick and wrap it all up. He thought of the pile of uncleared files on his desk. Sure she was a little junkie, but she did not deserve this. Nobody deserved this. Deserved was never the issue but people have a tendency to think it ought to be, that way they can tell themselves this world means something.

“Sorry. If we bring in an expert they will bring in two to say there are a thousand other ways those injuries could happen. The wire is the only way this case happens. You have to at least get him to admit he picked him up. That he was upset and picked up the baby. It’s the only way.”

The detective was staying on task. Staying professional. Showing sympathy. His tone was that of a clerk in a government office telling her she needed a second ID. That was just the way it was. You had to give them something to do. This kid had no conscience and his dad was coaching him so they weren’t going to get him. The punk would not be saying the words that would send him away for fifteen years. The detective believed the girl. He prided himself on the cop’s skill of telling the shit bags from the citizens. She was just a sad unlucky citizen. The detective had already moved on. He was tending the victim on a waste of time file.

After the supervised visit for Jayz’s family, after all the court hearings and Jayz saying and then saying again that his baby should not be allowed to die and Carolanne thinking yes not until you get the last bit of your defense locked up you bastard, after that hate passed into her heart and she heard the calm explanations of the treating physicians and the final pronouncements of the hospital ethics committee, Braden was unhooked from all the machines and brought to Carolanne. For the first time in five weeks she was allowed to hold her baby. Apparently risk of infection was no longer the main concern. Everybody had promised not to sue the hospital when her baby died so now she got to hold him. The counselor led her to the room that had been set aside for her and Braden. A nurse and two orderlies followed them. Along the halls nurses and doctors talked to each other and looked at charts and avoided looking at her when she walked past.

Braden could not eat. The muscles of his arms and legs lay slack.  She swaddled him the way she had learned from YouTube. She held the tight little bundle in her arms and sat on the bed. The counselor waited outside the room. They had given her a corner suite on the tenth floor. The sun was setting over the West Hills. “Hell with this,” Carolanne said. She tucked Braden in her arms and headed out to walk the halls. One of the orderlies was holding a doll sized black plastic bag with a bright steel zipper. He tucked it behind his back when Carolanne caught him looking at her.

Then something happened that nobody expected. Braden breathed on his own.  She curled up in the bed with him and watched a few stars break through the city night. The city streets sparkled white and red as everyone drove to and fro on their urgent errands. She told Braden a story. Once there was a princess and her baby locked in the dark dungeon of a castle. She heard the key turn in the lock and the laughter of her captors. But she knew if she just waited long enough, if she just loved him enough, that the castle walls would fall away into nothing and they would be able to run off into wide green fields. It was not much of a story but she was in a hurry to get to the part where they just lay in bed and listened to each other's breath.

“Can you talk to the county for me? I’ve done everything you asked.”

The detective let a long empty breath pass over the phone. How to get this girl to understand that this was the last time they would speak? What the hell. Give her a little bit of truth.

“I’m sorry. There’s a protocol here. If we don’t file, if the case remains open, County Protective Services finds against both parents. If they don’t do that everybody gets sued. It’s how it works.”

“So because I didn’t get Jayz to confess I will be called a child abuser for the rest of my life?”

“It’s just a protocol.”

When Carolanne fell asleep the nurses would check on her and the baby and tuck the blankets to keep his head propped up. She would wake up and there he was, Her baby. She liked to imagine his ears worked, somewhere his soul was holding on, giving her this little bit of time. On the morning of the third day the aide brought her the menu to pick her breakfast. She checked every box. She ate it all too. Toast and eggs and bacon and corn grits with cheese and spinach and pancakes and a hamburger. Two Danish, one prune and one cheese and coffee with milk and hot chocolate and a dish of yellow jello with white fluffy stuff on top.

When the aide came to clear off the trays, it had taken two to hold all of it, Carolanne asked if they had miracles like this very often. The aide smiled and called her honey and said she would be back in an hour to help with the baby’s hand bath.

Later, as Carolanne drifted up from the dark depths of a nap, she heard the counselor talking to a doctor.

“Do you think she would be more comfortable somewhere else?” The doctor asked.

“Such as?”

“With family maybe?”

“I don’t think she has anywhere else.”

“I understand. I just have to include in my notes that we asked. For insurance purposes.”

That afternoon Carolanne was telling Braden about the insurance porpoises and how they can jump through flaming hoops and take a fish right out of your hand. “And they can flip backwards through the air! Three of them at the same time.” She paused to let that image hang in the air of their imaginary world. In that pause she noticed his little lips were turning blue. She held her hand in front of his face long enough to know he was not breathing any more. She cuddled him to her so her warmth could go right from her cheek to his cheek. She would keep him warm for a while. He had something to tell her. She just had to listen. They would let her hold him as long as she needed. It would be her decision when to hand the body that used to hold Braden to the nurse.

After she left the hospital Carolanne walked north until she was out of roads then crossed a field full of those tall white weedy flowers that look like patches of lace. The field ended at a woods of tall trees with soapy green leaves. It was the time of year that white stuff like cotton drifted down like snow from the trees and collected in heaps and drifts along the path. The ground grew sandy and gradually the rocks replaced trees and shrubs and then she was sitting watching the river. It was so big she could not see it move.

She took all the creams and diapers and spare bottles out of the diaper bag and filled it with four good size rocks. One was a soft red stone with flecks of gray and black and green embedded through it. After she slipped the bag’s straps on her shoulders Carolanne stepped into the river, just a tiny step. She stopped and felt the water filtering through her high topped shoes to soak her socks. She saw herself standing there. A stupid girl with nowhere to go.  Her socks were filled with water. Cold crept up her legs.

The counselor handed in his report on time. He tried to be straight about the father but knowing the family had lawyered up the report ended up a dry list of inarguable facts devoid of telling details like Jayz never stepped into the room during the negotiated visit or that Carolanne willed Braden to live for three days. She seemed like a nice kid. He hoped she would not just OD.

The rock had been there for eighteen years. A soft red stone with flecks of gray and black and green embedded through it. That day long ago she had left the river and come to this clearing. Her shoes had squelched water out of the eyelets and over the high tops on the day she placed it at the foot of this tree. She had understood something then. She had heard it in the fluttering leaves and the cars swishing past on the freeway on the other side of the woods. Just keep going. That is the miracle. One little breath then another and if you are one of the lucky ones it adds up to a life.

She took out a fancy old fashioned jar from her knapsack. It had stars all around its sides. She twisted off the cap. He would have been bringing girlfriends around now. Carolanne liked to think she would have been the nice hip friendly mom who made room for her baby boy to be a young man out making his place in this wide wicked world. A friendly and happy mother who never saw this rock, never came to this woods beside the river except maybe to eat some sandwiches and play with her little boy. On a day when he was little. A day so long ago. She poured the last of the ashes into a hole she carved under the rock with her fingers. She put the empty jar in her knapsack.

She gathered sticks and piled them in a heap. Twigs, then bigger twigs then dried branches that she snapped and heaped until the wood piled over the rocks. Who cared if this little meadow and woods or the whole world burnt? She was never coming back. She tucked balls of notebook paper among the heap of dry wood. She lit a match and held it to one of the crumpled paper balls. She heard something in the brush behind her. Just a racoon or something. Ignore it, she thought, but the noise grew more frantic. Something whimpered. Tucked against the bush where it had been tethered, a brown puppy shivered.

“They just left you.” Carolanne said. The puppy had ears that could not decide whether to stand up or flop against its head. It cried louder. Fifty thousand years of puppy evolution told it Carolanne was its last chance at life.

“Sorry bud.”  A cloud of smoke drifted past her head.  Her fire had leapt into the grass and was gearing up to swarm the meadow. This was it. The final moment. She could lose at last.

The puppy smelled the smoke and cried louder.

“Fuck it.” Carolanne said.

She unhitched the puppy from his hopelessly tangled leash and tucked him under her arm. The puppy did not struggle while she stomped out the fire. He relaxed into her arm as if he were fine with the whole plan. As Carolanne realized she was going to save the meadow at the price of her converse she started to laugh. What a silly picture!

She chased the last thread of the fire towards a small thicket and just as she finished it off found she was facing a family out for a hike. A red haired father with a well-tended beard, a blonde mother, hair pulled back wearing running tights and bright yellow and blue shoes. A boy and a girl. The boy had blonde hair. The girl was taller than her brother for now. She had red hair her dad had given her to soar through life. The mother’s hands went around her children’s shoulders. She gathered them to her, keeping them safe while she studied the foliage to see if Carolanne had anybody else lurking about.

“Don’t worry. It’s only us.” Carolanne called. She held up her puppy to prove to the family that she was safe, just a woman in the woods.

William K. Burke