Somewhere Out There(41)

I saw the red and blue flash of police lights as we exited the woods. The woman and her daughter were already with the paramedics, and when the officers saw the two men holding me, they marched in our direction. When they reached us, the two men finally let go, only to have one of the officers tell me to put my hands behind my back.

“Wait, please,” I begged. “Let me explain.”

The officer took my arms and forced them behind my back, securing my wrists together with handcuffs. “There’s nothing for you to explain,” he said. He was a muscular black man with a strong jaw and a bald head. “We have multiple eyewitness accounts that describe how you grabbed the child from the playground and ran into the woods.”

“I didn’t mean to,” I said, choking on my tears. “It was a mistake. I thought she was my daughter. I didn’t realize what I was doing.”

“Tell it to your lawyer,” said the other officer, a stocky woman with pale skin and black hair, shorn short against her head. “Right now, you’re being placed under arrest for attempted kidnapping.”

“You have the right to remain silent,” the male officer began, and as he continued reading me my rights, my mind went blank, and I didn’t hear anything else. I couldn’t take my eyes away from the mother as she stood next to her little girl, who the paramedics had now placed on a gurney. The mother had her hand on top of her daughter’s head as she also held one of her small hands. She only glanced up at me once, and it was with so much bitterness, so much hate in her eyes, I looked at the ground. I wondered if there was something really wrong with me. There had to be, for me to do something so unthinkable. Why else would I have grabbed that little girl and run? Why else would I have thought I was holding Brooke?

After the officer finished speaking, he asked if I had any identification. “In my back pocket,” I said, and he reached for my wallet, pulling out my driver’s license, which had expired two years before. He took it and walked over to his vehicle, then climbed inside the driver’s seat. A couple of minutes later he returned and spoke to the female officer as though I wasn’t standing right there.

“Jennifer Walker,” he said. “Just out last week from Skagit Correctional.”

“Really,” the female officer replied. “What was she in for?”

“Several counts of petty theft and child endangerment and neglect.” The officer looked at me and frowned. “Guess they let you go too soon.”

I didn’t respond. To him, I was just a criminal. A repeat offender. Nothing else. Maybe that’s the truth, I thought. Maybe I’ll be better off in jail. I’ll never get my daughters back anyway, so what does it matter?

The female officer held me by my elbow and led me to the police car. I was still limping— my ankle felt like it was on fire—but I didn’t care. I deserved whatever pain I was in. The officer opened the back door and helped me turn so I could get inside. She kept her hand on top of my head so I wouldn’t knock it into the roof as I sat down.

Once the door was closed, I looked over one final time and saw the little girl sit up and hug her mother. She had finally stopped crying and had a clean white bandage on her forehead. I leaned my own head against the window, trying not to be sick again, hoping she would be okay. I hoped I hadn’t traumatized her too much.

I waited a long while for the officers to finish taking more statements from the other people in the park, and when they both finally climbed into the seats in front of me, I was more than ready to leave. At least I know where I’m going, I thought as we drove out of the parking lot and onto the street. At least now, I have a place to stay.

? ? ?

The next day, after hearing my side of what happened, my public defender, a short, heavy man with dark pouches of skin under his brown eyes and a thick, Tom Selleck–style mustache, suggested I enter a not-guilty plea. “You had just found out you can’t get your children back,” he said, as we sat together in a small room in the King County jail. “The judge might feel sorry for you.”

“No,” I said. I’d picked up the girl and run away with her into the woods. I was guilty. There was no point in trying to make excuses.

“Suit yourself,” he said with a shrug.

Later that afternoon at my hearing, I pleaded guilty to attempted kidnapping and reckless endangerment of a child, for which the judge issued me a sentence of ten years. It could have been much worse, he told me, if I’d used a weapon or tried to put the little girl in a car and drive away. He cited my past offenses of theft and neglecting my children as adding weight to his decision to put me away for as long as he did. I didn’t argue. I simply stood in the courtroom and listened to the litany of things I’d done wrong. Each word was like a jagged nail pounded into my body, confirmation of how broken and useless I was.

After the sentencing, I spent four weeks in King County jail, waiting to be assigned to a prison. It was only dumb luck that returned me to the women’s facility in Mt. Vernon and the regimented life to which I’d become accustomed over the previous year.

“Well, well, look who’s back!” O’Brien said as she walked into the small space on the cellblock that held my bed and one other. “What happened, Walker? You miss us or something?”

“Something like that,” I said, not wanting to relive what I’d done in the park. I’d tried several times to write my daughters another note after the few sentences I’d written my last morning in the motel, but was only able to get down two words: I’m sorry. I wrote them over and over again, filling page after page, knowing that tiny sentence would never be enough to express just how deeply the roots of my regret were planted inside my heart.