“Seriously though, brother,” Hank said, as he placed a hand on my shoulder and turned me to face him, “we’re gonna get this shit worked out. I love you, man, and I hope that nothing comes between us and hurts our friendship.”
This was a classic Hank Simmons tactic. He had also felt the tension that was building between the two of us. To some degree, I was sure that he did fear losing my friendship. His biggest concern, however, was losing control over a disciple who he’d invested so much time and energy into. He had, therefore, decided to placate me by declaring his loyalty and devotion to the cause of maintaining our friendship.
It was during this conversation with him that I experienced an epiphany of doubt that led me to question my importance in his life. Was I his best friend or was I merely there to prop him up and give him affirmations about how cool and successful he was. I was no longer sure, but I figured it was best to accept the olive branch he was offering and continue to act as if we would be lifelong buddies ...for the time being, anyway.
“I agree. I’ve got nothing but love and respect for you, bro!” I said. I had to force myself to maintain eye contact with him in order to keep him from picking up on the insincerity of my statement. I had suddenly realized that it wasn’t just Hank’s devotion to me that was in doubt, it was also my allegiance to him. I did love him more than any friend I’d ever had, and I certainly respected the hell out of him in most ways. However, there’s no doubt that I was feeling something new as well. I wasn’t sure if it was fear or distrust, or something else. What I did know is that something had changed in my friend and I was becoming much more worried that he was like a ship steaming ahead full throttle toward a hurricane—with no intention of changing course. Worse yet, I was increasingly convinced that he was willing to put those closest to him on that ship as well, so that we could bear witness to his bravery and his indestructibility. I, on the other hand, had no interest in allowing him to make a foolish decision that put both of us in harm’s way. If he wanted to gamble with his own life, that was up to him. I couldn’t, however, let him choose to jeopardize mine.
Chapter 49
“Hey Brenda”, I said, to the middle-aged African-American woman standing at the nurses’ station in Labor and Delivery. “What’s up? You got another meth-head momma to investigate?”
Brenda was a social worker employed by Child Protective Services. She and her colleagues were all too familiar to us due to the frequent CPS notifications made by the nurses who, by law, were required to report risks to newborns regarding potentially unsafe home conditions. One of the leading risk factors in our area was, unfortunately, maternal drug abuse. It was shocking to see how prevalent drug use by pregnant women was, especially when it involved habitual use of cocaine and methamphetamine.
I had been practicing in Rockwall for over ten years at this point and I was on a first name basis with the CPS workers in the area. Some of them, like Brenda, were my patients. Others, I’d met when they had come to the hospital to update their investigations on some of my patients who were well-known to their agency, most often due to the previous protective interventions which had occurred on behalf of their older children.
“Hey doc!” she said, as she looked up from her stack of paper files. “Good to see you! It almost makes it worth it to get called in for a consultation when I run into my favorite OB/GYN!”
“Oh, I’ll bet you say that to all the guys!” I replied. “I hope you’re not just bullshitting me though. You know I have a fragile ego and I probably couldn’t take it if I knew you were just teasing.”
“Well, come around this counter and I’ll show you!” she demanded.
As I walked around the cream-colored counter and approached her, she shot out her arms and gave me an enthusiastic hug. I hugged her back, then leaned away and looked her in the eyes.
“Well,” I said, “no one gives me better hugs than you, so I’ll just have to take you at your word. How is my favorite protector of the weak today? You look lovely, as usual, but when I first saw you as I came out of my patient’s room, you were shaking your head and looking rather sad. Is everything alright? I know you have to deal with some pretty grim circumstances, so I hope one of these wayward-but-prolific mothers staying with us isn’t making you wonder if there are any strong families left in the world.”
“Yeah,” she replied, “I do have to hear about some pretty awful stuff as I look into the home lives of these girls who are getting pregnant left and right with no ability to care for themselves, much less an infant. That’s not what has got me down today, though.”
“Let’s get some coffee and talk for a bit. My patient OB is pushing and it’s probably gonna take a little while,” I said.
*****
Brenda plopped her generous backside onto the hard-plastic surface of a well-used, generic-looking, stackable breakroom chair and scooted herself up to a round table with a chipped and stained white formica surface. I grabbed a couple of 16-ounce styrofoam cups and walked to the coffee dispenser with its internally lit sign which proudly proclaimed that it dispensed only Community brand coffee, which happened to be a favorite of mine. I’d gotten a lot of use out of this life-saving appliance over the years as I had patiently awaited the arrival of thousands of bouncing baby bundles of joy. Believe it or not, they didn’t always arrive at a convenient hour, or seem to even consider my schedule or convenience. A soothing cuppa’ Joe always made my time spent waiting for the little brats, I mean the sweet little cuties, a little more bearable.
As Brenda got comfortable, I asked all of the appropriate questions regarding her coffee preferences. Creamer? Sugar? Artificial sweetener? If so, Splenda, Stevia, or aspartame? A chunk of ice to cool it down, similar to my pansy-ass preference? Milk? If so, skim, 2%, whole, or chocolate?
“Fuckin’-A!” I said. “I just realized how we have made something as simple as a cup of coffee into a freakin’ phD dissertation!”
Brenda laughed, then scolded me, “Now, Doctor Bishop, you watch that language! You are talkin’ to a lady, here!”
“Oh, sorry. I thought I was talking to my home girl! You know I would never disrespec’ you, girlfren’!”
“Nah yo briggin’ race intwit!” she scolded, intentionally speaking in the relaxed vernacular known as ebonics. “Sholy yo’ gonna pay nah!”
We both laughed for a good minute, while each of us reflected on the people that we encountered on a daily basis. We also considered the ignorance that led to prejudice and racism, as well as the realities that affirmed that certain prejudices were merely the logical conclusions of individuals observing human behavior in a cultural and racial perspective. A perfect example was this parody that we had just acted out. We both knew that certain members of society, despite their own ignorance and lack of sophistication, felt superior to others based solely on their race. We also both knew that other members of society embraced ignorance and nonconformity merely as a means to define their own, distinct culture. What a fucked-up world we live in! I thought to myself.
“Seriously though,” I said, as I broke the introspective silence, “what’s on your mind, my friend? I can see that you’re down.”
“Actually,” she replied, as she released a prolonged gust of air from her weary chest, “it’s exactly the opposite of something you’d expect to hear from a CPS worker. You’d think that the cases that eat away at our capacity to see good in the world would always have to do with the parent or guardian who abuses or neglects their child, but covers their tracks enough so that we are powerless, as an agency, to prosecute their cases.”
“Of course,” I agreed. “I can’t imagine going home at night and trying to forget about the shitty, uhh, sorry, rotten circumstances involving a particular case that you are working.”
“That’s just it!” she cried out. “Those are the cases you’d think would trouble our souls and make us wonder if we were having any impact on these children we are working to protect.”
“Okay,” I said, “
then what is it? If it’s not some asshole who got away with abusing his child, what is it that has you down?”
“Well,” she said, “sometimes it’s the families that you investigate and exonerate that bring you down the most. They are the ones that initially give you hope that society is actually doing okay. You think to yourself ‘that little girl or boy is gonna be just fine’. Then you hear about something terrible happening to the family which makes you wonder if the child will actually be worse off than if you had proven that some type of abuse or neglect was actually occurring.”
“Okay,” I replied. “So, can you give me some specifics?”
“Well, you know that I cover all of Northeast Texas, right?” she went on.
“Right,” I said.
“Well, there is this case in Paris that I haven’t been able to get off of my mind lately.”
I suddenly had a premonition that her story was going to impact me even worse than it had affected her.
“There is a little girl, an Arab girl, who had a bad accident. She was brought to the hospital and had to have surgery on her—well—girly parts,” Brenda said, looking a bit embarrassed.
“It’s okay, Brenda,” I said, “I’m a gynecologist, remember. I can handle the grown-up words like vagina and labia. I promise I won’t even giggle.”
She slapped my shoulder and said, “I know you can handle all of the proper terms, it’s just that a lady doesn’t always feel comfortable using them in a public setting when talking to a good-looking man, so don’t sass me! Besides, you know what I mean without me pulling out an anatomy book and listing all of the structures involved.”
“Alright, alright,” I said, “I didn’t mean to embarrass you. Please go on with your story, although I think I know where it’s going. Did someone in this girl’s family do something to damage her girly parts?”
“Well, that’s what everyone thought. Of course, in this day and age, that’s always gonna be the first assumption, since there are so many sickos out there going after these young girls. The doctors there even thought that the girl had implicated the father verbally. She was saying things like, ’No Daddy, no’ and whatnot, when they were putting her out for surgery. Naturally, this made everyone very suspicious of her father.”
I didn’t let on that I had heard about this case through Hank. I wanted to hear what she had to say and didn’t want her to present the case from a skewed perspective knowing that my best friend was among those involved that brought the case to the attention of CPS in the first place. I was getting the feeling that, somehow, Hank’s conclusions about the guilt of the father were somewhat premature.
“So, after the little girl got through surgery, I was called to do an investigation of the family and the circumstances surrounding the little girl’s injury,” she said.
“Wow,” I said, “I didn’t know that you covered Paris as well as Rockwall and Greenville. How big of an area does your office cover?”
“Well, we are fortunate enough to get to cover everything east to west from Highway 75 to Highway 19, and everything north of Highway 20 to the Oklahoma border,” she said sarcastically. Having one office cover such a large area was clearly a heavy burden for one CPS office to bear. “Trust me, there are a lot of messed up families in that area. Personally, I don’t usually cover Paris, but we’ve had a few social workers out due to illness, so I had to cover for this case.”
“Gotcha. Sorry to interrupt, by the way,” I said. “I just didn’t know you had to go that far out. I know some medical folks in Paris, but I’ll tell you about that some other time. So, what did you determine about this case? Did you have to remove the girl from the home?”
“Well, actually,” she said, “it was a very interesting situation. I don’t remember another case like it in my twelve years with CPS. You see, this young girl is mentally challenged, and she has a speech impediment. It turns out that she wasn’t saying ‘Daddy’ at all. She was trying to say Danny.”
“Really?” I asked. “Well, who the heck is Danny? An older brother?” I inquired. This was definitely not where I thought the story was going.
“This family is Arab, doc,” she said. “They have names like Abdul and Hamza. There aren’t any Davie’s, Mikey’s, or Danny’s in her family.”
“Okay, then who is Danny?” I repeated my question. “The suspense is killing me here! All I know is that some guy named Danny needs to get his ass kicked. Better yet, he needs to be taken out into the woods, shot in the head, and buried in an unmarked grave.”
“Geez, doc!” she said. “You sure got worked up in a hurry! Have you had to take care of someone like this little girl? Is this bringing up some bad memories for you?”
“I just can’t stand hearing about little girls getting mutilated by their fucked-up fathers or uncles or neighbors. Pardon my French, by the way. As you know, I have three daughters of my own and I can’t even imagine how awful it would be to see any of them being harmed by some monster. I’ll tell you what though,” I said, “if any piece-of-crap sicko ever went after one of my girls, well, they’d never find the body! You know what I mean?”
“I understand,” she said. “Well, I think you will appreciate what we found in this case, then. Danny wasn’t an uncle or a neighbor. Well, that’s not quite true. He was technically a neighbor. And he was responsible for her injury, but I am quite sure that what happened was unintentional. He does have a reputation for being rough at times and has even been involved in a few other people getting hurt, so I guess he could be faulted for that.”
“Is he some kind of mentally handicapped dude, or what?” I asked. “It almost sounds like you are describing Lennie in the book Of Mice and Men.”
“Actually,” she said, “Danny is a golden retriever who lives next door. He’s very enthusiastic and has a bad habit of jumping up on people with his front paws. He even tried jumping up on me a few times during our investigation, and I had to knee him in the chest. It turns out that he and the little girl who got hurt are besties, and her family has made a habit of letting Danny come over into their yard for visits.”
“A dog named Danny?” I asked. “Oh, that’s rich!”
“Huh?” she said. “It is kind of a weird name for a dog. It’s certainly understandable that it would confuse people. Then, when you take into consideration the little girl’s faulty pronunciation of his name, it totally makes sense that the folks at the hospital thought that she was implicating her father. When she says Danny, it sounds more like Daddy, so they definitely were not in the wrong for suspecting him initially.”
“But how,” I inquired, “did Danny the dog cause an injury like that to her genitalia?”
I was guessing at this point that the answer to this question would involve a sprinkler, but I had to ask.
“Well,” Brenda answered, “when Danny saw his best friend running around as she played in her yard, he wanted to join in the fun, so he took off after her. This got him riled up and when she stopped to pet him, he jumped up on her and knocked her backwards. She stumbled and fell on her bottom, landing right on a lawn sprinkler. That sprinkler ripped right through her sundress and panties and really did a number on her girly par—I mean her vagina and everything around it. Danny’s owner was talking to the girl’s mother at the time and they both saw what happened. Poor little thing bled like crazy, so they scooped her up and drove her straight to the emergency room.”
“Wow. That is awful! That poor girl must have been in so much pain,” I said. “Is she healing up alright?”
“Oh yeah, she’s doing just fine,” Brenda happily reported. “Her mother told me that she’s back to normal. She didn’t even hold a grudge against Danny, although she scolds him sump’m fierce if he tries to jump up on her now.”
“Well,” I said, “that sounds like a happy ending overall. At least you didn’t find out that her father—or anyone else for that matter—was abusing her. Doesn’t that make you relieved?”
“Of course, it does. I wish
all of our investigations would end up showing that no actual abuse was occurring, but unfortunately there isn’t usually such an innocent explanation for what these kids go through,” she remorsefully remarked.
“Okay, then,” I questioned, “what has got you so down today? The girl had a bad accident, but she’s recovering well, and the family is innocent of any wrongdoing. What am I missing?”
I was very happy to hear how the story had turned out, and I was anxious to tell Hank that I had happened upon information that exonerated the man who he believed to be a vile creature in need of harsh punishment. I was already feeling better, as Hank would no longer have a need to deliver the vigilante justice he was considering. I hoped that I would be able to help Hank see the light before he found another evildoer whose actions would motivate him to start planning his next violent intervention.
“It’s just that sometimes,” Brenda answered, “when you do what I do, you really get to know a family. Sure, most of the time you find out how neglectful, or abusive, the parents are and all you can think about is getting that scared little child out of such a terrible environment. Other times, though, are like this case. You start out thinking that you are going to need to save a child from her mother or father, or both. Then you end up finding out that the parents have been falsely- implicated and they are not only innocent of wrongdoing, but that they are actually wonderful parents. I love it when I come across a set of parents who are doing everything they can to provide for their kids and who show their children just as much love as I showed my own kids as I raised them.”
“You mentioned before that something had happened to the family,” I said. “What happened?”
Fatal Flaws Page 31