Small Animals

by Kim Brooks

  “Where are we?” I asked my dad. “I keep looking for a Gap Outlet.” There was an empty drive with a wide, manicured median, oak trees planted at equal intervals, a roundabout separating off four large parking lots filled with SUVs, silver and black. “It looks like a strip mall.”

  “Better than it looking like a jail.”

  We were early, so we went to a Starbucks, got cups of coffee, sat in his car, futzed with our phones. I texted Pete that we were there, waiting.

  Are you in handcuffs? he texted back.

  Not yet. How are the babies?

  Violet says she won’t poop until you get home. Other than that, fine.

  I tried to respond with something snarky, but didn’t have the heart.

  I’m sorry about all this. I’m so sorry.

  Stop.

  I still can’t believe this is happening. I feel so ridiculous.

  You’re not ridiculous. The State of Virginia is ridiculous.

  I love you, I texted back. Then I looked up and saw my lawyer standing on the sidewalk, waving for us to come over.

  * * *

  I soon learned that if you are going to be arrested for child endangerment or child neglect or contributing to the delinquency of a minor or any other crime against your own child, or really if you’re going to engage with the criminal justice system period, it is very beneficial to be like me: white, educated, professional, and middle class. It is very beneficial to look like a person with resources, a person of privilege.

  We walked up to the front of the jail. There was a steel-reinforced door with a number-code lock, high bulletproof windows. In front of the door, a fence wrapped around the building, so to approach it, you had to first use an intercom, announce your visit, and be buzzed in. My lawyer pushed on the intercom. “Hello?” No one answered.

  The parking lot was perfectly quiet. So many cars. No people. The building was a box of gray cement and cast wide shadows. I stood in the shade, my back to the heat. As the lawyer buzzed again, another family approached, a man, woman, and girl who looked to be eleven or twelve years old. All three were morbidly obese, their expressions pained. They didn’t speak as they approached. I tried to guess what had brought them here. Were they visiting a prisoner? Had one of the parents come to self-report like me? The man sat down on a low, stone bench a few feet away from where I stood. He sat with his legs parted and leaned his head over, letting it hang between his knees. A few moments passed before I realized he was crying. “What do you want to do?” the woman was saying to him, leaning over him. “What do you want to do?”

  He answered without looking up. “I don’t know. I don’t want to go to jail.”

  I turned to my father. We were both listening and trying not to listen. The man continued to sob. The girl kept her distance, looked at the ground. Whatever this man had done, whatever had happened, could this place possibly be the answer to this family’s problems? Could this place possibly be the answer to anything? The sun beat down on the pale cement, reflected off the coils of razor wire surrounding the building.

  The lawyer buzzed again. “I have a client who’s here to self-report. I called ahead and spoke to Janet. She said it might be possible to take care of this quickly.”

  Yes, I thought, let’s please take care of this quickly. Even as this idea took shape, I recognized it as code, shorthand for: There is a person here with paid legal representation, a person in an expensive lavender blouse, holding a Starbucks latte; a person who often goes through the expedited security line in airports and is accustomed to things moving smoothly. This is not a black person or a poor person or a morbidly obese redneck with a string of DUIs waiting here. Can we move things along?

  I saw what was happening, the way my privilege was shielding me from the more unpleasant elements of the process, and a part of me recognized that it was wrong to quietly and gratefully accept this protection. Another, stronger part of me was fine with this. I was too scared to choose fairness over my being able to avoid being fingerprinted or having to wait for hours alone in a cell while my case was processed.

  “Hold on one sec,” a voice answered.

  While we waited, the lawyer turned to me. “Now, they won’t let us go in with you. But don’t worry, we’ll be here waiting. There shouldn’t be any problem. You’ll go in, hand them the warrant. They’ll get you registered, fingerprinted, assigned a court date—which should be tomorrow ’cause of the calls I made—then they should release you without bail. Shouldn’t be any problem.”

  “And what if there is a problem?” I asked, somehow only now truly understanding that I was walking into a jail, alone, to be arrested.

  The intercom buzzed again. “Send her in.”

  “There won’t be,” he said.

  And then the fence opened and I walked inside.

  So here is jail, I thought when I entered the waiting room. It looked like a post office or DMV but without the frills. It was just a space. A cement floor. Cinder-block walls. A few vents along the ceiling blowing cold air. Across the room, a black desk sat behind a pane of bulletproof glass with a small, round, metal intercom in the center. There was an empty chair before the desk. “Hello?” I said.

  No one answered. After a moment, the door beside the glass opened and a young, male officer came toward me. “You Kim Brooks?” he asked.

  I nodded, held out my warrant. “I’m here to—”

  “Got it,” he said.

  He couldn’t have been much older than twenty-two. He had short-cropped hair, a boyish blush to his cheeks. He looked like one of the kids I’d known in high school, and for a moment I considered asking which one he’d gone to, then thought better of it. We were standing beside a narrow desk against the wall, the kind with pens attached on chains, plastic bins of forms. I handed him the creased sheet of paper. He looked at it, jotted something down, pulled up a schedule on his phone. “All righty. What do we got here? Wow, you came all the way from Illinois? You work up there?”

  I nodded again, mystified but also grateful that the person arresting me should be so friendly, so polite.

  “What sort of work you do up there?”

  “I’m a writer,” I told him, and then instantly wondered if that was the wrong thing to say, if I should have stuck with teacher or stay-at-home mom. But before I could backtrack, he was nodding, saying, “Very cool. Don’t know many writers. What kind of things you write?”

  “Oh, this and that. Mostly I stay at home with the kids.”

  He smiled as he filled in the form. “All right, looks like I got you on the court schedule for tomorrow at 8:30 A.M. The address is written here at the bottom.”

  He handed me back the paper, smiled in a way that told me we were finished.

  “That’s it?” I said. “No fingerprints?”

  He made a dismissive gesture with his hand. “I don’t think that’s necessary, do you? You’re not gonna flee the country, are you?”

  “No,” I said. “Definitely not. I have two little kids. No fleeing for me.”

  “Just make sure to get there on time tomorrow. It’s the juvenile courthouse. Show up when you’re supposed to. Bring your lawyer. Smile. And wear something nice.” He pointed to my blouse. “Like that.”

  I think he winked at me. Maybe he was only blinking. Maybe it was the light. Yes, it would be okay. I realized for the first time that I’d been shaking, but now I felt calm. It wasn’t such a big deal after all. A momentary lapse in judgment. A misunderstanding.

  When I left the building, my lawyer was gone; only my father remained, waiting. The lawyer had another appointment and had to run, apparently. So did my father, for that matter, but he would never leave me in a moment like this.

  “How was it?” he said, his usual ironic smile creeping up.

  “Brutal,” I said. “Full-body cavity search.”

  “Another Starbucks, then?” he asked.

  We were walking toward the parking lot when I said, “Hey, what happened to that other family, the
crying guy?”

  “Eh, not so good.”

  I thought he was going to say more, but he didn’t. I was in my thirties and my father hadn’t yet lost the impulse to protect me from all the unpleasantness of the world.

  * * *

  The next day, both my parents accompanied me to the juvenile courthouse for my arraignment. My mother found the ordeal too upsetting to endure without sedation. She popped a Xanax and rode in the back seat, half sleeping. The courthouse, again, was not what I was expecting. There were kids there, first of all. Lots of them. Somehow, I hadn’t seen that coming—juveniles in a juvenile courthouse—but there they were, teenagers, tweens, toddlers, and infants in their portable car seats, and every age and stage in between. Most of them seemed bored or oblivious. They looked the way kids looked in waiting rooms. Only the parents seemed different, more anxious, pacing, whispering to one another, staring at the sheets of paper that told them when and where they were supposed to be. There was a long hallway and at least a dozen different courtrooms, numbered and lettered above the door. 7D was my room. My time to appear, 8:30. At 9:00, the bailiff still hadn’t called my name, which was fine with me, because to my horror and amazement, my lawyer was running late.

  “Where the hell is he?” my mother asked, opening her eyes for a moment. “For the money you’re spending, he couldn’t be on time?”

  I took a deep breath. I tried to think of what I would say to the judge if the lawyer didn’t show up. A lapse in judgment. A temporary lapse in judgment. Regret. Remorse. Never again! No, that was the Holocaust. Never before. I had never done this before. A terrible mistake.

  We were called into the courtroom along with thirty other people. Again, they weren’t what I was expecting. This was juvenile court, and I was expecting juvenile delinquents and the parents of juvenile delinquents—these people surrounding me were just parents. Tired, nervous, flustered, struggling parents. What were they all doing here? What was I doing here?

  The judge entered the courtroom. I’d been hoping for a wise and magnanimous-looking woman, an older woman with a mane of silver hair and compassionate hands and searching eyes. I’d been hoping for Marilynne Robinson with a robe and gavel. Instead, a wan middle-aged man came into the room, small and bald and moving quickly, like a squirrel. His hands were not compassionate and his eyes were not searching. At first, his goal seemed to be to move through his list of defendants as quickly as possible, calling names, assigning public defenders, scheduling arraignments. He spoke with a thick Chesapeake drawl that reminded me of a sixth-grade social studies teacher I hadn’t thought of in twenty years, a man who’d yelled at a classroom full of twelve-year-olds that “the Civil War was fought over secession, not slavery, and don’t let any damn Yankee ever tell you different.” I remembered this, and then suddenly the judge was yelling in exactly the same tone, chiding a young black man for having shown up in his courtroom—his courtroom—in improper attire. The man was wearing long shorts and a T-shirt. “There are certain judges who will not even hear a case when the defendant is dressed in improper attire,” he lectured. “I don’t happen to be one of those judges, but you should know that there are many, sir, in case you find yourself in this situation again.”

  My father turned to me. We exchanged a look. I glanced back at the door, and at that moment, my lawyer appeared. When my name was called, a few minutes later, he stood and explained to the judge what had happened, that I’d self-reported all the way from the state of Illinois, that he had discussed my case with the prosecutor involved and that the prosecutor had agreed to a continuance, a period of nine months during which I’d be allowed to complete one hundred hours of community service and parenting education. I’d agreed to these conditions. I had no record, no strikes against me. I had a husband who worked at a university, a father who was a physician in the community. I’d attended the University of Virginia. I was a good mother who’d had a temporary lapse in judgment.

  The judge nodded slowly as my lawyer presented this information. His lips turned up slightly in an expression that seemed to indicate approval. He seemed to particularly approve of the fact that I’d self-reported from Illinois. “Very well,” he said, signing the paper, moving on to the next case.

  PART II

  THE COST OF FEAR

  6

  WHAT A HORRIBLE MOTHER

  Sometimes I think about how the story might have ended here. I came home from Virginia more than a little embarrassed, more than a little ashamed, but basically grateful that there would be no more waiting and wondering; that in nine months, if I completed my one hundred hours of community service and twenty hours of parenting education, it would all be over and I could put what had happened behind me. Maybe in a few years, Pete and I would even joke about it. Most parents have their own examples of parenting-fail family folklore, stupid mistakes that could have ended really badly but didn’t, and so over time, they become funny.

  Don’t get me wrong. One hundred hours of community service seemed like a lot, especially since I’d been struggling to squeeze writing into the limited hours my children were at school. But it wasn’t as though I was going to jail. It wasn’t as though I was losing custody of my kids or being placed on a registry. In the grand scheme of things, I told myself, it was closer to annoyance than tragedy, so the best thing was probably to get it over with and then move on. As my lawyer had pointed out, I wasn’t being forced to pick up litter along the side of the road—although in retrospect that might have made me feel more useful than what I ended up doing. Picking up litter is something that needs to be done. It benefits everyone, beautifies a shared public space. What I ended up doing instead was more of the things I’d already been doing, more of what it seemed every parent I knew was doing. I volunteered for the organizations from which my own kids benefited—their soccer leagues and schools. I attended bake sales and fundraisers, supervised practices and organized snack assignments. My lawyer assured me that these were perfectly acceptable activities for fulfilling my volunteer hours, since they involved giving time to nonprofit organizations, and that the judge would find them appropriate, since, after all, my crime was not against the larger community but against my own “endangered” children. If my failing had been inattention to my kids, then hyper-attention seemed a suitable punishment. And so as I put in my time and logged my hours, it occurred to me that I was finally becoming the thing I’d never wanted to be: a housewife.

  On a few occasions, I did wonder aloud to friends or family if perhaps the ordeal might be something I should consider writing about (I’d been writing essays about domestic life and motherhood for a few years), but they were quick to point out all the ways that might backfire. People went nuts when it came to these kinds of parenting issues, one friend told me. The discussions were always so black and white, so combative. I had no desire to become some kind of parenting-rights advocate, so what could be gained by writing about my experience? Also, my lawyer had made it clear that under no circumstances was I to publish anything about the case until it had officially concluded. “Hell hath no fury like an embarrassed prosecutor” was how he put it.

  Also, even beyond legal constraints, there was the simple matter of stigma. I was beginning to understand that it didn’t matter if what I’d done was dangerous or wrong; it only mattered if other parents felt it was dangerous and wrong. When it comes to kids’ safety, feelings were facts, and such “facts” often led to disapproval and judgment. If all this wasn’t enough reason to keep what had happened to myself, there was the additional issue that, well … the whole thing was just so weird. Surely, I thought to myself in the weeks after my court appearance, it took a rare and special kind of fuckup to allow this kind of thing to happen.

  It reminded me of how, during my freshman year of college, I’d kept a Costco-sized jar of dill pickles on top of my bureau, and one day, opening the bureau to find a pair of jeans, it crashed down right beside me, an inch shy of falling on my head. I still remember how my dorm room r
eeked of garlic and dill for most of the semester, and also how my roommate had said at the time as I stood there amid the shards of glass, “Only you, Kim. Only you could come that close to being killed by a falling jar of pickles.” What had happened in Virginia felt like the emotional equivalent of a falling jar of pickles. Best to try to forget about it or pretend it never happened. I well might have, if it weren’t for one conversation.

  A few years earlier, a friend introduced me to a woman named Sarah Ahlm, a clinical social worker who worked with many families around the city. She had three kids of her own, and often we’d chat about parenthood and family life. I liked Sarah. Also, I trusted her. And so one day when she asked if I had any fun plans for the weekend, I told her that I was going to be spending it baking cookies for my daughter’s preschool fundraiser. “Look at you,” she said. And then, because, as Pete had so astutely put it, I’ve never not told anyone anything, I found myself explaining to her that it was not exactly something I was doing out of the goodness of my heart.

  I summarized the whole ordeal for her as succinctly as I could, then braced myself for whatever reaction might follow. But instead of judging, Sarah said simply, almost offhandedly, that almost the exact same thing had happened to a friend of hers, and that after a year, her friend was just finally getting off of Illinois’s DCFS child neglect registry.

  I was taken aback by the coincidence and told her so.

  “I know,” she said, but then she added, “To tell you the truth, though, I’m not sure that it is a coincidence. I think this kind of thing is happening more than anyone knows.”

  I told Sarah I’d read about a few cases that year, heard about a number of them from Lenore Skenazy, but not enough to suggest any real frequency or pattern.