Page 3 of Without You, Scotch and Sammy 2

I look up at the knock on my door, and I study my overworked and underpaid coworker as his white dress shirt wilts and wrinkles in the August heat. We both work for the state, and I guess amenities such as air conditioning just aren’t important to them.

I throw my pen down on my desk and sigh. “Do you know her status?”

“Nope, only that she was just brought in and they flagged it for you.”

I drop my head into my hands and my hair falls to curtain me in. This whole fucking thing sucks. Why must Shari Lytto be a drug addicted pregnant woman? Why must she continue to be found in dark alleys and behind filthy liquor stores or gas stations, shooting up and floating into the abyss? Why can’t she be strong enough for her baby?

Shari’s a first-time mother. She’s so early in her pregnancy that she shouldn’t even be known to us yet, but she’s known to the authorities, and the last time she was found out back of Skeeter’s Diner with a needle in her arm, the police officer also found her smuggling a teeny tiny basketball under her ratty and stained shirt. If she were a larger woman, he’d probably never have noticed, but when you’re all skin and bones already because you’d sooner spend your money on heroin than you would a sandwich, even the smallest baby bump is noticeable.

“Lapress or Swanson?”

“She’s at Swanson,” he answers on a low rumble. “They want you there in the next hour or so.”

“Is she conscious?” I don’t know why I continue to ask Ed for answers. He’s not my assistant. In fact, he’s my superior. Having my answers isn’t his job, and I’d bet my left leg he’s just as busy and tired of the system as I am, but I keep asking because it grants me another minute before I have to pick up my phone or walk out my office door and face reality.

I don’t want to see Shari. I don’t want to face the woman who treats her body that way, who treats her unborn baby that way. Some of us, millions of women all over the globe, wish every single day to know the feeling of carrying a baby, to feel that baby boy or girl kick and roll from within. Some women will never know that feeling, yet others take it for granted.

I’m sympathetic to Shari’s situation in life, it’s my job to help her, to help her baby, but more than I feel sorry for Shari, I feel angrier for her baby.

That poor sweet baby inside of her is already, no doubt, drug addicted. He or she may not even make it to the outside of his mother’s womb alive, and if he does, he’s in for a hell of a ride to overcome addiction. Even if he’s strong enough for that, he’ll probably stay in Shari’s care, and I already know how that’s going to go.

It’s not my job to judge, and I’ve spent years following the rules and staying objective. But not this time. This time I’m tired and I’m angry. I probably should go home and take my bitch pills.

“I don’t know,” Ed answers, bringing me back to reality, back to my office, back to the ratty and banged up filing cabinets lining every single wall from floor to ceiling; back to my single squeaky office chair pulled up behind my chipped and dented desk made of laminate wood that has a billion half-peeled away stickers from children who’ve spent time in my office for one reason or another over the years. I set out to jump into the system, to try and fix it, to try and speed up the clogs of the wheel and attempt to help children. And sometimes, in the short term, I think I’m helping, even if it’s only a little bit. But so often, children are returned to unsafe homes, to uncaring parents, and I’m left holding the pieces as each child passes through my home.

Not only do I work with children for the state, but when I can, when I’m allowed, I also give them a home. A temporary home, a safe haven to rest in between their first hell and the next one.

Just like I always planned. But not at all like the dream I envisioned.

I have a nursery set up in my home that babies and small children have slept in for a night, a week, a couple months, but that’s all I get them for, then they’re moved on, whether back to their birth parents, or into adoptive homes.

I take these children for the time I’m given, then I kiss them on their sweet-smelling hair, and send them to their new home. If nothing else, hopefully my heartbreak at letting them go won’t be in vain. Hopefully the safety they found with me, if only for a short time, was enough to show them that the world can love them and that they’re worthy.

I rub my palms over my eyes one last time, then close the windows on my computer screen, shut down, grab my phone and purse, and stand up. “Alright. Thanks Ed.” I step out from behind my desk and move toward the door. “I’ll go check it out.”

Ed might be my closest friend in the whole world now. We work together. We sometimes – that is, maybe twice a year – eat lunch together. But we don’t know each other.

I know he’s married. I know his wife’s name is Henriette and she’s a short and stocky woman who enjoys bonbons and wine. I know he has three children, all of whom are now grown. I know he drives a ‘smart car’ to work to save gas, and that Henriette drove a gas guzzling SUV to soccer practice to fit in with all the other fancy moms.

But I don’t know his favorite food or color. I don’t know who his ex is that he probably hates, or if his children made good grades at school.

And he sure as shit doesn’t know anything about me. He has no clue about my life. He doesn’t know that I fell in love and married a boy in a small town barely an hour south of here, and he doesn’t know that the love of my life, the man who’s probably moved on and has a new family by now, lives only an hour from here.

One of my very own conditions I had when agreeing to keep my folks and Sam Turner separate, was that they’d leave town. Immediately. And they’d never return. No exceptions.

They would get what they wanted; I would leave town too. I would not stay with the man they claimed not good enough, and in my martyrdom and in return, he would not be arrested for allegations I later realized were bullshit.

I walk through the hive of busy workers in my poorly kept, state funded, multi-story workplace, as we all sweat and feel the beginning effects of heat stroke – at ten a.m. I head to the elevators that I’m ninety-nine percent certain I’ll probably get trapped and die in one day – such is their terrible upkeep. The elevator lets me out in the dark and dingy underground parking garage, and I walk to my shitty little car that was built before I even graduated middle school.

I have a trust fund the size some small countries could live on, but I don’t want their money. I refuse it. The second I touch that account, they’ll know, and they’ll start calling me thinking my acceptance buys them forgiveness.

Not in this life, and not in the next one either.

I jump into my car, and although it looks like it’s going to die at any given second, given it’s billion dents and squeaky doors, it actually runs perfectly. Routine tune ups keep this car running like a dream.

If I cared about such things as music, then the broken stereo might bother me, but I don’t and it doesn’t. I don’t listen to much music these days. It tends to bring me down the way music builds a lot of other people up.

I sat in Sam’s garage and listened to them play far too often in my seventeenth year. I don’t know if I’ll ever truly be able to appreciate music again without wondering if Sam would sing this song, and if he did, how he would sing it. I’d think about whether the guys would amp it up, making it louder and more energetic, where Luc beats the shit out of it and Sam rips the lyrics up through his chest, or if they’d slow it down and Sam would turn it into a soft acoustic version.

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