4 years previously
This morning, it was my husband Gunnar’s turn to take our two-year-old Peter to kindergarten. I had been rushing to get ready for my meeting with the police authorities regarding my excessive use of force while on duty. I feared they would take my badge and let me go, and I tried to prepare myself for that outcome. But I was nervous. They might even put me in jail.
It was hard getting such an intense spotlight on me for something I did that, according to the law, was wrong, but according to my inner compass was right.
The police normally don’t carry guns in Norway, or else I would have shot the murderer and child molester I was apprehending. Instead, I whacked him in the groin with my baton. He allegedly hadn’t offered enough resistance to warrant getting whacked.
But the vivid memory of the heart wrenching photos I had seen of his five underaged victims, all boys, had been haunting me for days and nights. Their tortured bodies told the horror story of a monster unlike any seen in Norway before. He had kept them alive for days, before he finally drowned them in his bathtub.
All this was on my mind as I climbed into my SUV. My son Peter and my husband Gunnar had walked me out this sunny morning, because they would leave right after me. Gunnar held Peter’s hand. They were in front of the car, and I had just said goodbye to them. My cell phone chimed, and I picked it up. It was my boss, telling me they postponed the meeting until later that day. I still needed to get to work, so I put the SUV in reverse.
I saw Gunnar in front of the car. He was speaking on his cell phone, laughing. I thought Peter had gone to play with his toys on the lawn next to the garage, since Gunnar looked so relaxed. I thought he had everything under control.
I backed up at my normal fast speed and immediately felt a bump. At first I thought it was a toy left in the driveway. I stood on the brake. Gunnar screamed and his cell phone fell to the ground. I jumped out of the car fearing the worse. Between the front and back tires, laying flat on his back, was Peter. He didn’t move. I felt for his pulse. There was none. His chest was oddly flat and didn’t move at all. His eyes were open, staring at me, as blood trickled out of his mouth. I had stopped breathing, and my heart was pounding. What had I done? How could this have happened? I was on the brink of getting a panic attack, so I forced myself to breathe. “No, no, no,” I cried, tears streaming down my cheeks.
I was waling as I lifted my son’s limp body up and held him to my chest. This wasn’t happening. It couldn’t be. Gunnar, who was also sobbing, yanked him away from me and carried him to the lawn, where he laid him down and checked for life.
One of our neighbors came running to see what all the wailing was about.
“Oh, my God, have you called the police?” He asked.
Neither Gunnar nor I responded. We were bent over our son, howling.
“I’ll call then,” the neighbor said.
My legs wouldn’t carry me. I collapsed to the ground, watching Gunnar shake Peter carefully. I stroked his forehead over and over while I whispered to him, asking him to wake up. Then Gunnar’s face contorted. Tears of anger and grief rolled down his cheeks.
“You killed him! You killed my son!”
“You were supposed to watch him. He is my son too!”
The police arrived at the same time the ambulance did. A medic pronounced Peter dead. Both Gunnar and I had to get tranquilizers because we were both acting hysterically, yelling at each other and carrying on.
Later, the police wanted to press charges for child neglect, since we were the direct cause of our son’s death. But at the hearing, the judge dismissed the case and deemed it an accident.
They fired me from the police force as I had expected, but they didn’t press criminal charges. I couldn’t care less. Grief consumed me, and I didn’t function enough to even hold a job. In fact, I hardly think I would have noticed it if they threw me in a dungeon and left me there as punishment. That’s what my life felt like, anyway. Nobody could punish me as well as I could punish myself. I was in a deep, black hole.
After a few months, I slowly crawled up from my hole just enough to get therapy. It took me another year to get some resemblance of my old self back and take a job in a sporting goods store. Of course, Gunnar and I got divorced as soon as we could arrange it. We both blamed each other for the death of our son, and couldn’t stand the sight of each other. Â
