Author's Note: My biggest complain about this episode was the brief moment out on the sidewalk in front of their suspect's house where Erin tells Jay that parents like the ones they just interviewed make her want to send a greeting card to Bunny. His reply about there being a whole section called "Glad You Weren't As Bad of a Mom As I Thought" took me by surprise because Bunny is pretty high up on the bad list to me, and I thought Jay, at least, would be in agreement on that. So, I tried to explore why both he and Erin might feel that way given what we know about Bunny and yet don't know about Jay's parents as well as explain why they were missing from so many full unit scenes in this episode. This addendum is set immediately before they give Tana Meyer's parents a visit during "In a Duffel Bag" (3x20).
The long, skinny French fry falls back onto the red, plastic tray as she pushes the small bite she managed to take into her cheek and tries to suppress a distasteful look from flicking across her face. She's barely managed to pick at her food this afternoon, to swallow small bites of the burger and fries set out on the table before her because she should be out there. Should be chasing leads and tracking down each person in their new suspect's sexual history in order to check alibis and run DNA tests.
But Hank had told them to sit tight, to use the brief lull in the case to grab something to eat while he went at their suspect. Tried to ascertain why a guy from Rockford would care for a baby - his daughter - for two weeks only to dump her out by the Chicago lakefront; tried to ascertain why a guy from Rockford would deny knowing about the existence of his child.
"He may not have known," her partner replies. His words startle her slightly because she hadn't meant to utter her musings out loud, and her gaze darts up from the red, plastic tray in front of her to look at him. To take in the fact that Jay has barely touched the hamburger he ordered because, like her, he's been too busy mulling over the few facts they have about this case.
Or, more likely, too busy mulling over how much this case has her on edge. The look that passed between Voight and him when she returned from talking to Platt about the Wisconsin Dells and the status of their victim, the decision that she and Halstead would be the first to grab lunch today while Al and Ruzek brought in their suspect was pretty much a dead giveaway about the two of them being in cahoots.
And that fact would normally piss her off, would have her insisting that she was fine and needed to stick around for when their suspect came in, but she decided to adopt Platt's attitude of stopping while she's ahead and take a break from sitting in a chair with photos of duffle bags and pink blankets tapped up over her left shoulder. A break from reminders that a child can be loved and well-cared for and tenderly wrapped up in a blanket one day and end up clinging to life at Chicago Med the next.
"You'd know if you had a baby," she retorts knowing how ridiculous her words sound the moment they leave her mouth. But it's too late for her to take them back, and Jay's already raising one eyebrow at her and drawing out a long 'o' in the first word of his rebuttal.
"No, you'd know," he pointedly reminds her with a shake of his head and a hand reaching out to pick up the fork on the right-hand side of his tray. "There's no sign that would tell him, hey, that girl you hooked up with, she's pregnant."
"There is if you don't use a condom," she bites back - her tone far harsher than she intended for this conversation - as she watches her almond milk drinking partner stab at the pitiful pieces of lettuce he ordered instead of fries.
His eyes flicker upward to meet hers at her words, and the way he looks at her is a nonverbally reminder of how he knows that. How they've been monogamous for months now but each still keeps condoms on their shopping list because neither one of them is ready to add a baby into this partnership. Not right now. Not when they both know Daniel will run her ragged after just a few hours when Justin and Olive bring the baby up to visit Hank later this week.
"He'd still need her to tell him," Jay replies before popping the fork and the lettuce attached to it into his mouth. He takes a moment to chew, to let her mull over his words before forcing himself to swallow and racing to elaborate on what he means. To cut her off before this conversation - one centered on the case, but quickly becoming more abstract - can turn into an argument that attracts the attention of those few patrons who aren't already openly staring at the star badges clipped to their belts. "And maybe she had a reason not to. Wanted to protect her baby from him."
His comment causes her to pause because she knows what he's trying to get at, knows from the sort of teasing and sort of serious look on his face that he's thinking of the hot date she blew him off for two nights ago. Although, sitting in the stands with only watery hot chocolate and Annie's body pressed up against her while they watched Travis' team get their asses handed to them by a wealthier team from the other side of town doesn't exactly count as hot in her book.
And Annie had kept Travis' existence a secret for years in order to protect herself, her best friend, and her son from his father. A secret that Erin, in hindsight, should have kept as well for all the interest and good Charlie has taken or done in Travis' life.
But, if that was their mystery mother's aim here, then she was clearly keeping the wrong person in the dark because their suspect was adamant that he didn't know and that tiny, two-week-old baby - his daughter - still ended up in a duffle bag with no signs of life.
"Some people just aren't meant to be parents," Jay adds after a long pause, and she finds herself nodding along in agreement almost immediately because he's not wrong.
Because there are parents like Annie and Olive who rise to the occasion and get themselves and their children out of bad situations. Parents like Hank and Camille who see their children - biological or not - as something worth sacrificing for and are brave and kind and unselfish in all the years it takes to raise them. And then are also parents like Bunny who are sober and then aren't, who run thorough men and lose track of their kids in the wake of an unstable home life.
Parents who, she finds herself conceding, are shitty and selfish and weak, but don't purposefully leave their two-week-old baby out in the cold to die. And she opens her mouth to vocalize that, to let Jay know that for all the shit her mother put her and Teddy through as they were growing about, Bunny wasn't as bad as Baby Doe's mother.
But the rebuttal dies on her lips because Jay's eyes have narrowed, because he's looking at her with that mixture of pity and frustration and concern that she sees every time Bunny comes up. A look that she has grown to loathe because she knows it means he has adopted Hank's view about Bunny being a cancer in her, knows this conversation will end with her reminding Jay that Bunny is her mom and Jay reminding her that Bunny will never change. That the best thing she can do is cut Bunny out of her life, which is, apparently, the position he's taken with his dad.
Not that she's learned that information from Jay. Rather, all she's had to go on is hints and clues and overheard chastisements from Will that are cut off mid-sentence when she approaches his and Jay's table at Molly's leaving her with little understanding as to the whys and the whens as they pertain to Jay's relationship with his father.
The whys and the whens that clearly serve as the foundation of his belief that people cannot change despite the evidence they see in this job - rarely, but enough - showing otherwise. Despite the fact that he rides around with her - an addict, a woman who was once a fifteen-year-old headed down a path where she was likely to end up dead or with a kid or two calling her mom before she turned eighteen - all day and sleeps next to her at night and relies on her to have his back twenty-four seven.
"I doubt your mom and dad would have dumped a baby out by the Lake," Erin retorts. She allows herself to push against a topic that's been off-limits, to use today's nightmare scenario in defense of both a parent she knows and parents she doesn't.
There's a long pause while she waits for his answer. One that leaves her wondering if she's pressed on a nerve she didn't know existed, if it's possible that things in Canaryville were worse than those on her side of town. But Jay eventually hums out his agreement telling her that his parents would never have been as bad as their current suspect or Baby Doe's unidentified mother. Words that she barely catches over the sound of the ringing phone in her pocket.
The flash of Dawson's name on the screen causes her to sigh because maybe that was an opening with Jay, but the way his features smooth out and then harden as she answers the call and the way he begins to gather up their trays without waiting for to answer the phone tells her that door or window or whatever she wants to call it into Jay's past wasn't really open.
And so, instead, she focuses on the update - that Baby Does' mother has been identified as an eighteen-year-old named Tana Meyer - and the instructions to check in with the baby's grandparents that Dawson is giving her. Gathers up the car keys and prepares to confront the kind of parents who helped their daughter care for her infant for two weeks yet turned a blind eye when - or worse, helped - their daughter put their granddaughter in a duffel bag and dumped that baby like a piece of garbage. The kind of parents who are than Bunny and Jay's parents; the kind of parents that don't deserve to walk free while their granddaughter clings to life.