POSSESSION WITH INTENT TO DELIVER by Laura Jean Baker
Rob McNally’s old lady, owned by Hells Angels, ferried him to the amusement park once annually, but nothing compared to McNally’s first joyride when his mom “gave him wings.” She spiked his arm with birdie powder, and McNally, just fourteen years old, rose to the sky, leaving their nest for brown-sugar skies. What did she say, as she pushed the plunger, heroin filling his veins? “Baby, it feels good,” was a proverb she repeated from the day he could name his colors: blood-red and skull-white. When McNally was five, she finagled a prescription for Ritalin from the pediatrician. When he was ten, she revealed the truth: Pixy Stix were little straws of cocaine. He swallowed the granules like sugar, then played video games, all jacked‑up. When he was thirteen, she taught him to manufacture meth in the bathroom where gangsters pissed in the sink, and together they indulged. One time, McNally recalls, sadness like phlegm in his throat, he found his mother at the clubhouse strapped with jump ropes to an old kitchen chair, bruised and damaged like an old shoe box, begging to die. Drugs caused, and then alleviated her problems, because, as every parent knows, pleasure is the opposite of pain.
“What’s the latest on McNally,” I asked my husband, Ryan, a criminal defense attorney.
“Fuck, I don’t know,” he said. “The guy’s probably dead.” After five years defending felons and other outlaws, he had developed a habit of cursing at home, all manner of four-letter words, including D‑E-A-D. One of our four small children was attempting to smuggle chocolate chips from the pantry and piped in, “Who’s probably dead?”
“Mind your own business,” Ryan snapped.
Since beginning his criminal-defense practice, one client per year had ceased to exist – a fatal car accident, complications from alcohol and obesity, and a couple of drug overdoses. Winnebago County, where we were born and raised, high-school sweethearts, had become a labyrinth of drugs. In its customary fashion, Wisconsin law enforcement blamed the problem on Chicago, the central hub for heroin in the Midwest. Heroin deaths in Winnebago County had reached fifty in 2013. Statewide, users were dying from drug overdoses by the hundreds. Paramedics across the state drained dosage units of Narcan, the antidote to heroin overdose, by the thousands. Arrests for heroin-related offenses spiked more than fifty percent between 2010 and 2012, and dozens of those users became Ryan’s clients. His job was to mitigate charges against his habitués while keeping face with district attorneys, which meant convincing people like Rob McNally and another woman named Darlene Eaves to become Confidential Informants, or CIs, in an effort to keep them in their self-described normal lives as Wisconsin citizens.
Unlike McNally, Darlene Eaves, facing felony charges for Possession with Intent to Deliver heroin, appeared on the road to recovery. She would admit, “I shot heroin,” always in the past tense, unlike McNally who described the ritual as if shooting up before your eyes. The safest option for the sanctity of Eaves’s health was to help build a conspiracy against three known drug kingpins, by re-creating on paper a trail of purchases, and submitting it to Lake Winnebago Area Metropolitan Enforcement Group or “MEG” officers. Eaves worked with drug agents from within the refuge of Ryan’s office. Rob McNally, however, would need to complete so‑called field work. Facing six years in prison and six years parole for three counts Delivery of Cocaine and two counts Delivery of Heroin, McNally would need to hit the streets, seedy back-alley apartments, and bars like Tony’s Deluxe where haggard patrons stood smoking over their graves. “We could drop him into any social circle in the valley, and he would produce a dealer immediately,” MEG officers said. “I just don’t know if we could control him.”
McNally is tattooed from earlobes to knuckles. He looks like a guy whose inky scar tissue in the folds of his arms is old Chickenpox, the same bumps all pre-vaccine kids scratched into reality. When balling his fists, they read B‑O-R‑N, R‑E-A-L. Drugs are emblems on his skin – Xanax, Oxycontin, Adderall, marijuana leaves. His baby face remains untouched by sun. He spent fourteen of thirty-two years behind bars, according to the calendars above his pectoral muscles, etched like ancient scrolls. My only markings are moles, a scar where I carved a boy’s initials onto my thigh with a razor blade, and stretch marks from my pregnancies. McNally himself is father to five children, by four different mothers, none of whom he sees on a regular basis. I lean toward his body, as an inquisitive child might, studying his skin with unexpected reverence. His torso is labeled like an illustration in a textbook of anatomy: CARNEY, ANARCHIST, 100% FELON. In fine print the Bible speaks: For the wages of sin is death, but the gift of God is eternal life. Smack dab in the middle, where paramedics would perform CPR compressions, if necessary, is a tattoo of Eeyore from Winnie the Pooh, whimsical yet despondent, fallen under the weight of his woes.
“My mom used to call me Eeyore because my eyes were always red. I was always like boo,” McNally tells me, voice languid and faintly Southern, as if heroin is a song he sings. With nothing but an army bag full of clothes to his name, McNally flexes his forearm, laments the serious stuff – “I seen a lot of dirty stuff” – but he refuses to boohoo himself. “We’re all dealt a hand,” he says. McNally is a guy who opted out of a G.E.D. in juvey but is proud of his street smarts. He gives me a detailed lesson in the alchemy of prison tattoos: “You take an electric shaver, the spring from an ink pen, and the pen. You cut the heel off the state boots, catch the black soot in a bag, scrape it out and combine it with an ounce of water and a half ounce of alcohol. Ink is a powder before it becomes a liquid form. It’s redefined soot.”
“You sound like you could mix up anything,” I tell him. “You sound like a magician.”
* * *
When sex turned to hocus-pocus for Ryan and me, we conjured up four healthy babies in six years, but four babies were not enough. Ryan also earned a law degree, snagging his lowest grade in “Introduction to Criminal Procedure,” because he dreamed of civil litigation, not a life defending addicts: his clients and me. Just as the state charged McNally and Eaves with drug offenses, female colleagues accused me of delivering babies to sell women down the river. Pursuing maternity and a professional identity was considered a crime, witchcraft, or both. Facing neither prison nor execution, I was fighting my own demons. The natural hormones of pregnancy, childbirth, and breastfeeding were addictive. A Drug Enforcement Officer might argue, if babies were converted into bindles of dope, I’d delivered 15 kilos or 60,000 dosage units in little more than half a decade, serious drug-trafficking, more heroin than Rob McNally could jack up in a lifetime without dying. I’d either need to cluck my habit or get more cunning about my grind. I was just as addicted to the birdie powder as McNally was.
Sex was my gateway drug. In high school, when we were seventeen-year-old kids, I unfastened Ryan’s jeans and pulled them to his knees. Over the next eight years, we’d make love wherever we could: a parking lot between Oshkosh and Madison on a summer day; beneath the foothills on campus at the University of Colorado; eight times one weekend to the televised soundtrack of a Cardinals-Braves playoff series at an Estes Park hotel, paid for with a buy-one-night-get-one-night-free coupon from the back of a Boulder phonebook; in my Wisconsin Avenue apartment with a view of the state capitol; in Madrid, where daytime and nighttime are transposed; at Niagara Falls to the onslaught of hydro power; and in Prague, in the Communist-style dormitory, where we copulated passionately and quietly behind heavy iron curtains.
We didn’t know yet that by the time we’d accumulate more than our replacement value in children, we’d need to pay babysitters just to make love, clandestinely, in his office, on the eighth floor of the First National Bank building, where portions of the John Dillinger crime drama Public Enemies was filmed the year Ryan began renting an office there. After Johnny Depp shot the Sioux Falls robbery scene in the lobby, the building remained, in everybody’s mind, a movie set. Sneaking in beneath the vaulted cerulean ceilings, we’d glide across the floor, the voluminous bank vault beneath us, pulsing but hollow like a vacant human heart.
When Ryan was appointed by the state to defend Eaves, an indigent defendant, she traversed this lobby, past murals of Depp-as‑Dillinger, to meet with Ryan and MEG agents, who were building a conspiracy to bring down the head of the largest ever heroin-delivery drug ring in Winnebago County: 18,000 dosage units of crack cocaine and 90,000 dosage units of heroin, a multi-million-dollar venture worth more than fifty arrests. MEG guys, working undercover, craggy and weathered as real users, layered Ryan’s desk with eight-by-ten mug shots of suspects. They matched numbers to faces, dates to purchases, dirty deals to previous criminal records. Jabbing her fingers like darts popping balloons, she burst one after another until the MEG agents decided her statement was substantial enough to help win the big prize – a conspiracy case against Lazarus Jackson. If she agreed to testify, consistent with her statement, in the slim chance of trial, the state agreed to amend her charges to Possession of Drug Paraphernalia.
“It was like being in the Dillinger movie,” Ryan said to me later that day. The sun was shining in the Southern windows like tactical gun beams. “I could feel the lights on my face.” This is what I’d think about every time we’d retreat to his office building late at night, after a few drinks and a good meal, the babysitter’s clock ticking. I felt a little exhilarated and a little filthy about love-making there, as if the couch in his office were part of a Hollywood set. And much like the purity of a drug supply, sex, for us, was always changing. When we were twenty-five and stopped using birth control, we expected many more months of uninhibited sex. We drank sidecars and made love, tucked inside the red walls of our third-story apartment. It was like mating inside Georgia O’Keeffe’s red canna lily. But within three weeks our first baby was growing inside me, and upon her arrival, I discovered something more pleasurable than sex – the hedonistic ritual of motherhood: latching her mouth to my breasts, incubating her nakedness on mine. The real high had begun, thanks to oxytocin, Mother Nature’s liquid bliss.
“How would you describe the feeling you get from shooting heroin?”
“I’m free,” McNally says. “Take a nap for five minutes, wake up to no worries. It’s a buzz I would want to keep forever.” Better than pot, better than meth, better than Oxy. Oxycontin was a popular choice for McNally and other addicts between 1995, when the FDA approved it, and 2010, when Purdue Pharma LP reformulated the opiate so it could no longer be crushed to powder and snorted. Efforts to re-codify Oxycontin as abuse-resistant were so successful that, according to a study in the New England Journal of Medicine, the majority of users picked up a heroin habit instead. It was suddenly cheaper, more available, and more efficient to use.
“Oxy” from Greek means “sharp, pointed, acidic, intense.” Perhaps “oxy” as in “oxymoron” might also mean “smooth” because oxytocin furbished the edge off my depression, a feat traditional anti-depressants – Prozac, Zoloft, Celexa, Wellbutrin – had failed to accomplish. In heroin overdoses, opiates cause bodies to relax so profoundly, the body forgets to breathe, just as I’d feel loose and placid upon breastfeeding, the glorious “pleasure” hormone released in generous but modulated shots by my pituitary gland, as it had been during orgasm and childbirth, only stronger. At my breasts, my babies – fuzzy, eyes dilated like pain-relief tablets, fingers clenched into little heartbeats – sucked hard enough to pull euphoria from the dark chasm inside me. Breastfeeding was my version of self-medication. My dad, a psychiatrist, had always told patients, “Having children will either make you or break you.”
“Mental illness” was a household catchphrase when I was growing up, on the highest point, topographically, of Winnebago County, where my childhood house sprawled like a fat, stoned cat. Sunkist Road was absurdly named. Strangers from other states might have expected orange groves, but this was Wisconsin. My mom cultivated a crop of purple crown vetch, a plant that flourished in the elastic wastelands along Interstate highways, the national flower of transient and godforsaken lives. On our dead-end road, bicycles spit gravel at our ankles and knees; strange men parked their beat‑up cars to light up or masturbate; parachutes from Adventure Skydiving dilated against the landscape, hallucinations, fleeting dots of beauty we’d remember later when half of us were hopped up on drugs.
Everything there seemed to die. We dug shallow graves throughout the yard for birds that choked on paint fumes; hamsters that perished from neglect; a cat my mom flattened beneath the tires of our car; and a pet rabbit that blindly convulsed under the willow tree. An anthropologist from the university would visit in summers to dig in the fields for arrowheads left by Winnebago Indians, our county’s namesake. Did relics of loss and grief stretch downward through centuries of soil? Did the natives for whom our land was name imbibe peyote, commune with holy spirits, and if so, were they healed?
When McNally was not in jail or prison, he was a gamer with Tip Top Rides and Attractions in Wisconsin and Florida, migrating between North and South along some invisible groove. There is no lifestyle in America more transient, more unstable, or more unsightly than the life of a carnival game operator. Step right up to the Ferris wheel, bumper cars, the Sizzler, corn dogs, fried heartburn on a stick. The guy with the smooth clothes and nice shoes, sweet-talking customers at the balloon-and-dart game, is McNally. The rules: shoot a needle at the vein and watch it pop. “We’ll set you right up here! Come on now, don’t be a cheap date. Go for the big prizes,” he calls out, inside Ryan’s office, voice fast and clipped like an auctioneer’s. “The faster you talk, the more money you make. I could play them till they were broke and I was taking the chains off from around their necks.” Most important: he always had drugs in his pockets.
Inside my own pockets were candy wrappers and pennies for the Moon water, our wishing well in Oshkosh, where I’d pat the fire in my belly and imagine more children, an endless supply of my own vice, each baby a talisman for happiness, fresh human life the antidote to a family history of mental illness. What great disparity distinguished me from Ryan’s clients, addicts and users who became informants on the witness stand to sell out Lazarus Jackson? Younger than me by traditional calculations, their faces were taut and used as old rope. A processional of informants filed to the witness stand. They were clean now, “so help them God.” Each testified to buying forty-dollar bindles of heroin, three times per week.
Darlene Eaves would testify three times, in spite of MEG agents’ predictions that chances of trials were slim. Each time she was subpoenaed over the course of three years, she’d call Ryan, wringing her voice like a rag over the kitchen sink. “This is getting ridiculous,” she’d say. “I feel like the state owns me. When will it stop?” Blue eye shadow and dusty rose lipstick applied thick, as if she’d emerged from the 1980s, Eaves was otherwise a seemingly innocuous woman, a smoker and a drinker, a truck-stop waitress type, but by all appearances, not a serious addict. She seemed to have gotten her life together, enough, calling Ryan for advice on mundane legal issues such as landlord-tenant and personal injury casework. But she also worried about testifying in front of an audience. The deal was not worth dying for.
As a child on Sunkist Road, I’d often dream of death. I’d wake from nightmares, traverse the empty hallway to my parents’ room, where I’d wake my father, never my mother, who needed sleep as the antidote to melancholia. We’d walk together in the dark, toward the kitchen cupboard, from which my dad would produce Children’s Triaminic Syrup – the “orange medicine.” Twisting open the child-proof cap, he poured a generous dose into a cereal spoon perfectly sized for my mouth, opened wide like a baby bird’s. The sticky goodness of antihistamines would lull me drowsy enough to sleep in my own bed, where I’d crash hard and dream I could fly.
I would never raise lonely children, or so I believed. Every time I got my fix, so did my babies, nursing on demand. When my first daughter whimpered or groused, even a little, I’d pull her to my breast, soothe her with a shot of milk. The World Health Organization recommends breastmilk as the perfect food for babies. Who would disagree? We co‑slept and co‑bathed, my nipple in her mouth, like a stent or an IV needle, a second umbilical cord that kept us connected. She was perfectly Gerber-baby plump but has remained so, still eating voraciously, drawing the attention of extended family for the way she forages at family gatherings. At Bay Beach Amusement Park, when she spilled ice cream, she cried until she blushed, like she too needed a fix, and we soothed her with the promise of an extra ticket for the Zippin Pippin. “I just love to eat, Mom,” she said. “I can’t help it.”
Like Ryan’s newest client, a mother with no previous criminal record, charged with smuggling marijuana to her son in prison, I would do anything to make my daughter happy, at the risk of over-indulgence. Is this, perhaps, the most dangerous boundary a parent might cross? I recall fondly my own father’s medicine closet, which housed free trials, boxed up and shipped to Mental Health Consultants, thanks to the benevolence of pharmaceutical companies. My dad stockpiled medicine against the nuclear threat of depression and despair. I sought solace by opening the medicine closet and sniffing the nest egg of tonics and cures. It smelled of licorice, aspirin powder, and spirit tinctures. The room was cool and dry, and I liked to hide there, basking in the pleasure of aromatic content.
When my older brother needed to swallow prescription pills, he was fearful, so my dad bought M&Ms, and taught him to swallow those first. Depression at our house was governed by a God-like force. Although we shared genetics, my brother became truly and wholly possessed by what poet Jane Kenyon calls the “unholy ghost.” In high school, the counselor pulled me from Spanish class and drove me to Sunkist Road because she’d heard rumors my brother was poisoning himself in our garage. Shortly thereafter he overdosed and ended up in the psychiatric ward at St. Elizabeth’s Hospital. I was never invited to visit him, though I was summoned years later by his wife to help with childcare because my brother was in rehab for an opiate addiction. He had been stealing Fentanyl from an ICU. Drugs were readily available wherever he turned.
Even McNally was astounded he could shop at Lifepoint, part of the North American Syringe Exchange Network, whose goal is to eliminate the epidemic transmission of diseases such as HIV and HCV, and walk out with a grocery bag, filled to the brim with all the amenities for pleasure: a hundred needles, cookers, powder to break down crack cocaine, and enough Narcan in case he “falls out.” As an experiment, he tried the antidote once. He shot up more heroin than he could handle, and as soon as his lips turned purple and tingly dots clouded his eyes, he injected the Narcan the way a paramedic would. “I came right out of it,” he said. “I got real sick – the shakes, diarrhea, you know, but I survived.”
After the birth of our fourth child, we conceived a fifth without trying, and learned we were pregnant on the Fourth of July, as Sawdust Days, operated by the city of Oshkosh and Tip Top Shows, blared music at the adjacent park. But within two weeks, I began to bleed the baby out. Ryan believed the miscarriage was a sign we should stop procreating. To say we’d been married eight years seemed a pittance because we’d known each other since sixth grade, and my depression had haunted at least half of those years. Curled into fetal position on a hot evening, I sobbed into my nightgown. “Having babies is the only thing that has ever made me happy,” I said. Looking back on it now, he says, “I took one look at you and knew this was some serious shit.” It was Possession with Intent to Deliver, all over again, in the sanctuary of our home. He cancelled plans for a vasectomy, promised he’d wait for my blessing, and against his better judgment, made love to me, giving me a quick but short-term fix.
Ryan worked his magic on the professional front as much as at home, striking a deal with the D.A., in exchange for McNally’s hand-to‑hand purchases for the MEG unit, taking down the group of dealers that emerged after Lazarus Jackson was locked up. He shot heroin between set‑ups, and Ryan kept expecting a call from agents to report an O.D. “They don’t care if you shoot dope on a set‑up,” McNally told me. “All they care about is getting convictions.”
When Ryan arranged McNally’s deal, he said to the D.A., “I thought Darlene Eaves and the other CIs already brought down the big dealers.”
The D.A. laughed, sarcasm a tone he tried to strike only after-hours. “What do you mean? Putting people in jail doesn’t solve the drug problem?” After a long pause, he continued, “Prices just double for a little while until new dealers take their place.”
Before reporting to jail, to serve six months, instead of six years, McNally stopped to see Ryan, cranked up on heroin. A buddy who came along picked up Ryan’s old guitar, from the corner of his office. Only our children had plucked the strings in the last five years. McNally was a walking cadaver, so gaunt in the face the outline of his teeth protruded through his sallow cheeks. His eye sockets were like a fun-house novelty. As McNally’s pal picked an elegant rendition of “Nutshell” by Alice in Chains, crooning, “If I can’t be my own, I’d feel better dead,” McNally nodded out, and back in, rhythmically, eyes rolling around, possessed. He’d been using smack with his latest in a string of girlfriends, and according to McNally, she had a nine-year-old daughter, same age as our oldest. Ryan imagined the girl locked in a bathroom or hanging out at the library, Burger King, a coffee shop – wherever children hide from parents who are users. “I’m an addict. She’s an addict,” McNally said. “This is no place for a kid.” As Ryan meditated in the wake of their absence, sober and depleted, he looked around his movie-set office and then picked up his phone, placing an anonymous tip to Child Protective Services, and even though this move seemed scripted, his call was moot. McNally’s girlfriend overdosed on heroin a few days later and ended up hospitalized.
* * *
“The allegations against me are just crazy. I can barely sleep at night thinking about this,” Lazarus Jackson wept to the judge before his sentencing. He firmly believed thirty months in jail was time served, but Winnebago County had suffered the seventh highest rate of heroin-related arrests out of seventy-two counties in Wisconsin that year, and the judge sentenced him to nineteen years in prison. Three years to the month that Darlene and MEG officers acted out their crime drama in Ryan’s office, she testified, as promised, against the third and final dealer charged in the conspiracy, but without hand-to‑hand buys as evidence, the jury was deadlocked and Lazarus’s accomplice was set free. When Ryan heard this news, he called the D.A. to ask about Darlene’s testimony, to ensure she had followed through on her promises, and was finally absolved of her troubled past.
“Yeah, she testified consistent with her statement, but you know what?” the D.A. said. “I heard she O.D.’ed this weekend.” Ryan’s lungs imploded. A message from Darlene’s cell was waiting inside his phone, from earlier in the day, along with dozens of other messages from former clients he never charged a dime for legal work beyond the scope of their criminal charges. He quickly hung up with the D.A. and listened to the message from Darlene’s number over and over again, convinced it was mistaken.
“Hello, Ryan, sir. This is Darlene Eaves’s boyfriend. I’m afraid I have some bad news. Darlene is deceased, at the moment.” Ryan played the recording a dozen times. Her boyfriend seemed to believe Darlene would be forgiven her addictions and rise from the dead. At times like these, Ryan would dedicate what little energy remained, before compassion fatigue settled in, to lay out options for a guy like McNally: Nova in‑patient counseling services, serious detox, a good dose of will power. Ryan made personal visits to McNally in jail to ensure he had a plan for sobriety when he was released, and when he is, Ryan is the first person he visits.
“I want to help you, man,” Ryan says. “I’ll make it my mission.”
“The craving won’t ever go away,” McNally says. “I’ll be a sixty-year-old man, and I’ll crave the smack.” We both try to imagine McNally as an older man, still living, but we only see him in the moment, young, and either hopeful or hopeless, depending on the angle.
“You looked like dog shit the last time I saw you,” Ryan says. “Glad to see you fattened up in there.” On his last heroin bender, he stopped eating for weeks, but now he is thirty pounds heavier, having accomplished more efficient weight gain than any of my pregnancies. He tells us about the could-be turning point before he went to jail. Sitting outside a Kwik Trip, he crushed and shot up five Ritalin, and he couldn’t even get high. “I looked down at my bloody arms, and I realized I didn’t have nobody, I didn’t have nothing, except you,” McNally says, sorrow some inevitable force that wills him to speak. Ryan, who began as legal counsel, is now, at the very least, McNally’s only friend, and at best, his big brother.
I barely remember my own brother, who lives far away now. The last time I visited him, after rehab but before his divorce, he was pacing around his living room, agitated by the cacophony of his children and mine watching cartoons and banging the out-of‑tune piano. When he disappeared into the bathroom, locking the door, I figured he needed a moment of peace, but when he emerged, he had shaved his head bald. We all stopped in place and stared at him, unblinking like a flock of doves. In a picture of us as kids, we are standing in front of our cottage on a summer day. My mother must be there, snapping the image. She would do anything for my brother, in spite of his addictions. I am wearing a canary-yellow sundress without sleeves, but for some mysterious reason, he is wearing a red jacket, snapped to his chin, as if he feels a cold breeze. I am hugging him, but his arms are flat against his body, his face a grimace. What my dad said was true. Having children broke my brother, but it made me.
When I called Ryan to tell him I was pregnant, he said, “How do you feel?” and the only word I uttered was “satisfied.” When we had successfully endured the first trimester, an ultrasound revealed dilated kidneys, a condition known as pyelectasis. We wondered if kidney failure would be our punishment. In the blue-black hours of morning, I read voraciously about babies’ kidneys and analyzed his chances of being born healthy, predicting his resilience, as he floated in the preservative magic of my amniotic fluid. During the daytime, though, many women I worked with pretended not to notice I was pregnant, and one female colleague said, “Asking for more than three children just seems greedy.”
Our children themselves are always asking, “How many more babies will we have, Mama?” I smile sweetly, but Ryan whispers, dregs of exhaustion in his eyes, like he too is using the junk, “Our days of making babies are over.”
“You know, according to Chinese law, families can only have one child,” I say.
“Do mothers go to jail if they have more babies?” our son asks.
“They pay big fines,” I reply, stopping short of other harsh truths: birth tourism, abandonment, and infanticide. I’m just elated to have ours. When our fifth, a son, emerged healthy and hearty, we felt as relieved as addicts must when they get their fix and persevere. Ryan cried the first and only tears in five births. In an updraft of energy and relief, he turned away as midwives lifted our boy from between my legs, umbilicus stretched like a silver sash between us, braided and swaying.
“If you could change anything about your life, what would it be?” I ask McNally, yearning to possess something hard and real from his private war against addiction. He makes a fist as if coaxing out a vein, and I stand up to hug him, his body rigid and unaccustomed to affection. “I wish I had different parents,” he says, and like Eeyore, he finally begins to weep.
Laura Jean Baker’s nonfiction has appeared in The Gettysburg Review, The Connecticut Review, The Cream City Review, Confrontations, and War Literature and the Arts: An International Journal of the Humanities.