Imagination & Horrible Realities
Today Chloe had decided she were a bunny rabbit. She hopped to the porch when she saw daddy's car pull into the driveway.
"Hi ya princesa,"he smiled, taking his satchel of his shoulder and putting it on floor and picking up his daughter. "Decided to go without socks today, did you?" feeling Chloe's bare feet that were slightly cold.
"Guess what?" Chloe said.
"You turned into a bunny rabbit after daddy left for work?" Eric asked her, smiling.
"No! Auntie is here!"
Ethan was warming up to "Auntie" very quickly, now laughing and smiling in her arms. He didn't even want to go to Eric when his dad and Chloe entered the room.
"Hey Roberta," Eric said, kissing the older woman's cheek and giving her a hug. "Great to see you again."
The couple got an expected break after dinner that evening when both children wanted to play with Roberta.
"Well, I never thought I'd see that!" Calleigh said, laughing while both of them lay on their bed, relaxing. "Both your children acting like you're invisible."
Eric stuck his lower lip out. "I'm sad and you're laughing at me."
By their bedtimes, both Ethan and Chloe wanted daddy again. Roberta thought it was so sweet how Eric had Spanish nicknames for both his children. She smiled, listening to the baby monitor. Eric was putting the baby to bed. In the room he had the boy in his arms, sitting with him in the rocking chair. Roberta didn't know if her nephew by marriage realized the piece of sound equipment was on but he probably didn't care, she thought. He was sitting, talking to his boy about his work day. It hadn't been a good one.
The autopsy of Jillian 'Jilly' Hogan, the 3-year-old who was strangled by her mother after drain cleaner failed to kill her showed what Alexx had suspected at the scene, the girl died choking on her own vomit as she was being strangled. Exactly which one were her cause of death was impossible to tell. Either way, her mother was being charged with first-degree murder.
Eric was baffled with how cold she had been during the interrogation. As the lead CSI on the case he ended up having to go to the jail with Frank. Eric had briefly thought that he may be excluded from interrogation because sometimes if the investigator had children similar in age to the victim, another would do the interrogation process.
"If you had children, young man," the woman spat at Eric, "you wouldn't be so quick to judge me."
Sliding the photos from the scene across the table Eric replied, "somehow I don't think being a parent is a requirement to find these images reprehensible."
"You're an educated woman. You knew you had options," Tripp said to her. "If you didn't want her, you could have easily given her to someone who did."
The woman replied with sarcastic laughter.
"I'm 43-years-old, detective. I've never been married and it didn't seem to be in the cards in the close enough future. I spent $40,00 on IVF to get pregnant. How would people have looked at me if after all that I gave her up for adoption? How would they have treated me?"
Eric kissed his son's head.
"Daddy and mommy love you and Chloe so much, Mijito. We see some horrible things every day, makes us want to keep you guys even closer, to keep you safe. And I want you to know that no matter what you do, we could never hurt either of you. We could never, ever raise a hand to you guys. I don't understand why some people get to be mommies and daddies.."
Roberta turned off the monitor in the kitchen. She knew that both Calleigh and Eric saw terrible cases of child abuse on the job, some of these cases resulting in a child's death. She didn't know how they coped day in and day out. She could definitely understand why some days made them hold tighter to their babies. Roberta knew that neither of the couple used physical punishment on the children and rarely ever raised their voices to their oldest unless they were totally out of patience. And even realizing that running out of patience was common as parents with two young children, they always felt guilty any time they yelled at Chloe.