Handle With Care Read online

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  t's funny, isn't it, how you can be 100 percent sure of your opinion on something until it happens to you. Like arresting someone - people who aren't in law enforcement think it's appalling to know that, even with probable cause, mistakes are made. If that's the case, you unarrest the person and tell him you were just doing what you had to. Better that than take the risk of letting a criminal walk free, I've always said, and to hell with civil libertarians who wouldn't know a perp if he spit in their faces. This was what I believed, heart and soul, until I was carted down to the Lake Buena Vista PD on suspicion of child abuse. One look at your X-rays, at the dozens of healing fractures, at the curvature of your lower right arm where it should have been straight - and the doctors went ballistic and called DCF. Dr Rosenblad had given us a note years ago that should have served as a Get Out of Jail Free card, because lots of parents with OI kids are accused of child abuse when the case history isn't known - and Charlotte's always carried it around in the minivan, just in case. But today, with everything we had to remember to pack for the trip, the letter was forgotten, and what we got instead was a trip to the police station for interrogation.

  'This is bullshit,' I yelled. 'My daughter fell down in public. There were at least ten witnesses. Why aren't you dragging them in? Don't you guys have real cases to keep you busy around here?'

  I'd been alternating between playing good cop and bad cop, but as it turned out, neither worked when you were up against another officer from an unfamiliar jurisdiction. It was nearly midnight on Saturday - which meant that it could be Monday before this was sorted out with Dr Rosenblad. I hadn't seen Charlotte since they'd brought us to the station to be questioned - in cases like this, we'd separate the parents so that they had less of a chance to fabricate a story. The problem was, even the truth sounded crazy. A kid slips on a napkin and winds up with compound fractures in both femurs? You don't need nineteen years on the job, like I have, to be suspicious of that one.

  I imagined Charlotte was falling apart at the seams - being away from you while you were hurting would rip her to pieces, and then knowing that Amelia was God knows where was even more devastating. I kept thinking of how Amelia used to hate to sleep with the lights off, how I'd have to creep into her room in the middle of the night and turn them off when she'd fallen asleep. Are you scared? I'd asked her once, and she'd said she wasn't. I just don't want to miss anything. We lived in Bankton, New Hampshire - a small town where you could actually drive down the street and have people honk when they recognized your car; a place where if you forgot your credit card at the grocery store, the checkout girl would just let you take your food and come back to pay later. That's not to say that we didn't have our share of the seedy underbelly of life - cops get to see behind the white picket fences and polished doors, where there are all kinds of hidden nightmares: esteemed local bigwigs who beat their wives, honors students with drug addictions, schoolteachers with kiddie porn on their computers. But part of my goal, as a police officer, was to leave all that crap at the station and make sure you and Amelia grew up blissfully naive. And what happens instead? You watch the Florida police come into the emergency room to take your parents away. Amelia gets carted off to a foster-care facility. How much would this lousy attempt at a vacation scar you both?

  The detective had left me alone after two rounds of interrogation. This was his way, I knew, of hanging me out to dry - assuming that the information he was gathering between our little sessions would be enough to scare me into confessing that I'd broken your legs.

  I wondered if Charlotte was in this building somewhere, in another interrogation room, or a lockup. If they wanted to keep us here overnight, they had to arrest us - and they had grounds for that. A new injury had occurred here in Florida - that, coupled with the old injuries on the X-ray, was probable cause, until someone could corroborate our explanations. But the hell with it - I was tired of waiting. You and your sister needed me.

  I stood up and banged on the glass mirror that I knew the detective was watching me through.

  He came back into the room. Skinny, redheaded, pimples - he couldn't have been thirty yet. I weighed 225 - all muscle - and stood six-three; for the past three years I'd won our department's unofficial weight-lifting challenge during annual fitness testing. I could have snapped him in half if I wanted to. Which made me remember why he was questioning me in the first place.

  'Mr O'Keefe,' the detective said. 'Let's go through this again.'

  'I want to see my wife.'

  'That's not possible right now.'

  'Will you at least tell me if she's okay?'

  My voice cracked on that last word, and it was enough to soften the detective. 'She's fine,' he said. 'She's with another detective right now.'

  'I want to make a phone call.'

  'You're not under arrest,' the detective said.

  I laughed. 'Yeah, right.'

  He gestured toward the phone in the middle of the desk. 'Dial nine for an outside line,' he said, and he leaned back in his chair and folded his arms, as if to make it clear that he wasn't giving me any privacy.

  'You know the number for the hospital where my daughter's being kept?'

  'You can't call her.'

  'Why not? I'm not under arrest,' I repeated.

  'It's late. No good parent would want to wake his kid up. But then you're not a good parent, are you, Sean?'

  'No good parent would leave his kid alone at a hospital when she's scared and hurt,' I countered.

  'Let's get through what we need to here, and then maybe you'll be able to catch your daughter before she goes to bed.'

  'I'm not saying another word until I talk to her,' I bargained. 'Give me that number, and I'll tell you what really happened today.'

  He stared at me for a minute - I knew that technique, too. When you have been doing this as long as I have, you can ferret out truth by reading someone's eyes. I wonder what he saw in mine. Disappointment, maybe. Here I was, a police officer, and I hadn't even been able to keep you safe.

  The detective picked up the phone and dialed. He asked for your room and talked quietly to a nurse who answered. Then he handed the receiver to me. 'You have one minute,' he said.

  You were groggy, shaken awake by that nurse. Your voice sounded small enough for me to carry around in my back pocket. 'Willow,' I said. 'It's Daddy.'

  'Where are you? Where's Mommy?'

  'We're coming back for you, honey. We're going to see you tomorrow, first thing.' I didn't know that this was true, but I wasn't going to let you think we'd abandoned you. 'One to ten?' I asked.

  It was a game we played whenever there was a break - I offered you a pain scale, you showed me how brave you were. 'Zero,' you whispered, and it felt like a punch.

  Here's something you should know about me: I don't cry. I haven't cried since my father passed away, when I was ten. I've come close, let me tell you. Like when you were born, and almost died right afterward. Or when I saw the look on your face when, as a two-year-old, you had to learn how to walk again after being casted for five months with a hip fracture. Or today, when I saw Amelia being pulled away. It's not that I don't feel like breaking down - it's that someone's got to be the strong one, so that you all don't have to be.

  So I pulled it together and cleared my throat. 'Tell me something I don't know, baby.'

  It was another game between us: I'd come home, and you'd recite something you'd learned that day - honestly, I'd never seen a kid absorb information like you. Your body might betray you at every turn, but your brain picked up the slack.

  'A nurse told me that a giraffe's heart weighs twenty-five pounds,' you said.

  'That's huge,' I replied. How heavy was my own? 'Now, Wills, I want you to lie down and get a good night's rest, so that you're wide awake when I come get you in the morning.'

  'You promise?'

  I swallowed. 'You bet, baby. Sleep tight, okay?' I handed the phone back to the detective.

  'How touching,' he said