Excerpt 8, Part 1
Passage from my true crime novel, based on an appalling crime that happened in my own immediate family:
With false labor occurring every few days in the time following her most recent escape attempt, the increasingly alarming pain of which paralyzing Jenny and terrifying Jacob, the former resolved that no better opportunity would come along, and that she would simply have to go it again, come what may.
Early the next morning, sleepy eyed and still drooping from the night’s fitful sleep, David found Jeannie serving mashed banana bites to her son on his high chair box, and she was wrapped in a blanket. The blanket was far oversized for her small frame, soft and fluffy in texture, and patterned in black and white. It also appeared to be stifling her. She didn’t appear cold by any definition, at least, not cold enough to warrant going about the daily routine wrapped in thick bedding.
“Why are you…” David began to inquire with genuine curiosity, but stopped, shrugging it off, evidently deciding that finding out the answer was not worth the effort it took to ask.
With the click of the bolt behind David’s departure, Jennifer had dropped the thick blanket, releasing a superabundance of pent up heat that had been choking her inside its wrap, making her sweat. She took Jacob’s hand in hers and scooted him forward off the box, down onto the floor. With her left hand, she scooped up the uneaten banana, all squishy yellow mass of it making a regrettable sticky mess on her cupped palm. And this was all she now grabbed, nothing but herself and her children, and her son’s leftover mush breakfast.
Outside, the dawn was only breaking, a hazy gray midnight sky giving way to a peach and pink sunrise. The air smelled crisp and new, the cool air chilling the sweat from Jennifer’s skin. The mother and son stomped down the broken wooden steps once again, and made the familiar right turn. They veritably ran. Jenny waddled with her baby as she marched down that run down street, Jacob tripping at her heels to keep up, utterly confused as to what strange adventure was happening around him this time.
Passing by the front door stoop of 729 Trinity Street, Jenny yielded to another false contraction. Though familiar with it now, that didn’t make them any less painful, or any less shattering. Each time, her baby girl’s life flashed before her eyes; each time, she conjured an image of the ultimate consequence, with no access to medical care to save her life if something really had gone wrong this time. But this contraction didn’t stop her. She merely slowed her pace, bent down forward, hands on her knees, accidentally jerking Jacob down, whose wrist she always grasped, and let it pass, standing back up and hurrying forward to make up for lost time.
When the baby was done pretending she was being born, the worst imaginable sight came into focus in front of Jennifer. A long, blue, convertible Buick Skylark was just turning the corner, with none other than David Lancey at the wheel. Somewhere, a miscalculation had been committed, or she’d just plum screwed up. She had no way of knowing his route to work, or knowing any semblance of schedule, or knowing whether he’d forgotten something and what it was. She’d just gotten very very unlucky.