Like a Plastic Bag

TW: Mental health and child endangerment

**Contains sensitive and insulting language**

The storm was almost over. It had to be. Was I supposed to have counted the seconds between thunder cracks or lightning strikes? Or both? I couldn’t remember under the pressure of staying on the road. Other cars were pulled over under the bridges that bisected above the highway. Parked against the storm like assholes, refusing to get within half a car length of one another to make room for the rest of us stragglers, forcing us to keep going, to hope there would be space under the next bridge. There wasn’t.

I pushed a reckless 40mph with the wind bullying my small electric car to the shoulder, urging me, perhaps, to pull over as the others had done. Didn’t it know there wasn’t any room? The rain slapped against the windshield hard enough that I could hardly hear the baby crying from her carseat in the back.

Electric cars, I scoffed, manhandling the wheel to drift back into the lane after a particularly angry gust, they were supposed to be heavier than a standard car, sturdier. The baby wailed louder as thunder broke open the sky, silencing fat raindrops and the relentless crying of MAMA MAMA MAMA for long moments before dissolving back into the clouds.

That’s okay, that’s okay, the storm was almost over, we were driving straight through to the other side. My eyes stayed fixed on the horizon, noting the stark difference in clouds at the end of the highway. Dark gray, damn-near black, soupy clouds bled over top of me, but on the horizon, the gray clouds were torn like a piece of construction paper ripped right down the middle to reveal the bulbous white fluff of better weather if I could have just gotten us there.

I know, baby. I called over the rain again and again and again. We’re almost there.

I’m not sure why I tried, her crying only grew louder, louder as though she knew it was a lie as much as I did. But the end of the storm was right there.

“Hmm,” the woman with her spindly legs and oddly short arms sitting in the chair in front of me now replied, in a typically condescending tone, “and what happened next?”

I blinked away my eye roll. It would be easier to recount the details she so obviously wanted without the pedantic therapeutic phrases interrupting my memory, but I supposed that’s why I was paying her wasn’t it? To be asked, and what happened next? and how does that make you feel? Because asking myself those questions was getting me a one-way ticket to white walls.

Where was I? Right. What happened next? What happened next? Everything happened next. My senses overloaded.

The soft, symphonic lullabies playing through the stereo that were useless in calming the baby were abruptly interrupted by the harsh, unforgiving BEEP BEEP BEEP of a tornado watch. BEEP BEEP BEEP. Warning? BEEP BEEP BEEP. I didn’t pick up on the exact phrasing of the advisory because I’ve never known the difference to begin with. The stiff robotic voice mimicking that of a poorly disguised woman urged people to take cover. Her artificiality must not have been intelligent because she clearly didn’t know I was on the highway with the baby and no available underpass to park in. Thanks assholes.

I tried to turn the volume down. Every midwesterner knew what that neurotic BEEP BEEP BEEP meant, the female robot perfunctory that this point, but the warning (watch?) wouldn’t let you evade it. The volume dial was futile against the noise building pressure in the small sedan alongside the rain pummeling the windshield so hard I found myself scanning it for cracks, the drops falling like small rocks. The baby screamed louder at the strange inhuman voice speaking to her through the back speakers.

Through the briefest pockets of the visibility, I could see the trees toppling, crashing against the guardrails. Large branches cracked under the duress of the wind and tumbled, broken into the standing water that flooded parts of the highway, water that forced my tires to drift. My knuckles were white on the steering wheel, small pinpricks danced under the tight skin alerting me gently of blood draining from my clenched hands.

“What else?” The top-heavy woman with skinny legs asked me that stupid question. Interrupted again. What else? What else? What else? She did that when I got off track. Off target of whatever she wanted me to talk about. She wanted the big details not the small ones. She didn’t care about my hands or the trees or the way the rain drops assaulted my windshield. She only cared about the baby. I took a steadying breath, breathing in through my nose, down into my stomach, and pushed it back out my mouth. A better trick to relaxing your body than counting to ten. This forced not just your mind to focus but your body to respond. Of course it didn’t always work because I found myself snapping…

Like Katy fucking Perry, I saw a plastic bag floating through the wind. It was bright yellow with a black smiley face on it, like a cheap one you’d get from a dollar store guaranteed to tear before you could ever get it home no matter how carefully you handled it or how close you lived. The bag flew in zigzags, up and down and around, in every direction but not getting anywhere. It was shoved around in the air, forced to dance with the decapitated leaves from the broken tree branches.

“You were focused on the plastic bag. That’s why you hit that other car.” She did that obnoxious thing characters in books do where they phrase a question like a statement. Like they already know the happily ever after, the end, fin, but they need you to admit it or else you won’t move on. I’m not entirely convinced that that’s why I’m here in the first place, to move on, but I suppose I wouldn’t be sitting here if that weren’t subconsciously the end goal.

No, but yes, I told her. Her eye twitched, obviously irritated. Irritated with me, but I couldn’t do anything about that because she wasn’t listening and I was paying her to listen. I couldn’t see fuck nothing through the windshield except for flashes of green leaves and that stupid bright yellow trash.

The rain was too dense. It was an opaque sheet sluicing waves onto my windshield. The incessant BEEP BEEP BEEP of that stupid warning (watch) and baby crying crying crying in the backseat yelling MAMA MAMA MAMA as if I wasn’t driving the fucking car. She didn’t know that though of course she didn’t know that she’s a baby, but I couldn’t see I couldn’t hear I couldn’t think. I couldn’t even feel my god damned hands on the steering wheel so of course I didn’t see the asshole parked halfway off the road under the bridge.

I hit the car. The bag blew away. The beeping ceased. The rain echoed from outside the mocked safety of the under-bridge. And the baby stopped crying. The end. Fin.

“And what happened after that, Angela?” The woman with the fat fingers put her pen down and looked directly at me after glancing a moment at the tape record on the desk between us, ensuring the accusing red light was still blinking its annoying blink blink blink.

What does she mean what happened next? What happened next what happened next what happened next, that’s all she ever asks. Pick a different fucking question. What about how it makes me feel.

“I’m going to ask you one last time, Angela Martin…” did her tone change? “...what did you do with the baby?”

I don’t appreciate her tone. I don’t appreciate her accusatory stare trying to pierce through a suit of armor that isn’t even there. What did she want from me? I told her everything already. Did she need to break me while she was at it? Maybe that’s how this whole process worked though. Have to demo the standing structure to make room for the new and improved, the bigger the better.

“For the last time, Angela, I’m not your fucking therapist. I don’t care how much you insult my appearance…” have I said that out loud? “...Yes. I don’t care about your feelings. I’m only here to find Mable Walkins and return her to her family.”

The blink blink blink of the recorder threatened me. You’re not safe here, it said. It told me. I couldn’t waste my time here recounting my accident over and over and over and over again to this shit-for-brains, yellow pages therapist. She wasn’t going to help me. She wasn’t going to tear me down to build me anew. She just wanted my baby.

“She’s not your baby.” A slap in the face. How dare she. Statement. How fucking dare she? Question.

“She was never your baby. For the last time, the forensic evidence found at the scene matched that of the missing child taken from her home six days ago. The family claims they do not know you. We have yet to uncover any evidence to suggest you’ve ever had a child medically or legally and yet you have a carseat, diaper bag, and all random accouterments that go with motherhood shoved into the backseat of your car.”

Pause. The bitch actually paused as though for dramatic effect.

“Not for drama, I’m simply trying to get the information into your brain because you seem to think that the insanity plea is going to be a better deal for you, but I can assure you it’s not the walk in the park you’re thinking.”

She’s not listening. She’s not fucking listening.

“I can assure you I’m listening, but I’m not hearing a whole lot. See, what I want to be hearing is what you did with Mable after the crash. Witnesses saw you exit the vehicle, take the child from the car, and flee the scene. What happened between then and when we picked you up four hours later with no child on the side of a different highway remains to be shared. If you don’t cooperate, that little girl--who I pray to God is still alive--has very limited time left for us to find her and return her to her real mother alive.”

BLINK BLINK BLINK. Fat-fingered bitch. BEEP BEEP BEEP. What right did she have, stupid ostrich-legged bird. MAMA MAMA MAMA. My baby has nothing to do with whoever they are so clearly worried about over me and my baby.

“Okay. We’re done here. Ms. Martin, I hope you like foam walls and a lifetime of guilt.”

She left. She actually fucking left. Right in the middle of our session. GET BACK IN HERE, STUPID FAT BITCH. I’M PAYING YOU TO--