by JB Dutton
Chapter 10
Dream #51: The kitchen cupboard is wide open. I crawl inside and open the flap. Inside is a smaller flap, so I push that one open too. Beyond that is another even smaller flap, and I open it. The next flap is so small I can only reach through with my hand, so I do. I feel another tiny flap and push it with my fingers. Then I touch the fingertips of another hand and recoil, terrified.
The cops drove us at high speed to the 33rd Precinct. The place was a zoo, already overflowing with beer-soaked, bloodied revelers, some protesting their arrests, several carrying on the altercations that got them there in the first place.
Cruz and I were each interviewed in different rooms by one cop and one female social worker. She calmed me down and explained that the police were only trying to help. I had no idea what to tell them. Did I want them to think I was crazy? The trouble was, I was so worried about Mom that I made a huge mistake. I told them that the Embodied had kidnapped her.
I still can’t believe I was so stupid. This opened a whole new can of worms. They asked if I had a photo of her and I pulled one up on Facebook. Two of the police cruisers had captured the whole bridge scene on their dashboard video cameras and of course it looked like Fake Mom and the woman in my photo were exactly the same person. My explanation failed miserably to convince them otherwise: my mother had been kidnapped by the woman on the bridge who looked exactly like her, but who was really a man. They thought I was traumatized and confused. And who could blame them? No, it wasn’t an identical twin, I told them. No, it wasn’t someone wearing a mask. Yes, she looks exactly like that but it wasn’t her.
Hey, even I didn’t believe me.
I pleaded with the social worker not to call my grandparents. I could only imagine how freaked out they would be. She said that it was the police department’s responsibility to notify Mom’s next-of-kin. I decided to change my tactics and stopped trying to convince them about Fake Mom, arguing that I was also Mom’s next-of-kin and that I’d been notified when I saw her jump off the bridge, meaning that they had fulfilled their responsibility. I asked the social worker if she could at least get the cops to wait 24 hours before calling Gran and Pops, hoping against hope that something miraculous would happen in the meantime to shield them from the truth. She finally relented and agreed to give me a day’s grace. The interview was over.
Cruz’s mother showed up at the station, a hysterical mess, just as Cruz was released from his interview room. In the space of a few seconds she veered from relief that her son was okay to anger that he’d gotten himself into such a dangerous situation in the first place. I found out later that he had simply clammed up when asked in his interview what had happened. He had been raised to distrust cops. Besides, he couldn’t make any sense of what he’d witnessed at the clinic and on the bridge that night.
The social worker agreed to let Dora take me to her place with Cruz. As I left the police station the cops reassured me that they would do everything they could to find my mother. But I knew that meant they would be looking for her body washed up on the Hudson shore.
