Upcoming releases
The Invaluable Emma Doe​
Is Emma's dad erasing her from existence because she's not the child he wanted, or is it her step-mom's long-con to insert herself and her own daughter into a newly tech-wealthy family? Based on a true story, Emma's mom learns to fight back and digs up the truth in their increasingly dangerous scheme.​
Perennial​
Perennial begins where James Michener's Centennial ends, in Weld County in 1975. Descendants and newcomers cross paths as sugar beet fields make way for oil and gas fields, and as ranching and farming make way for development and technology, while other things never change throughout generations.
The Cursivist​
Avery is one of the last remaining people who can read cursive. When a friend inherits a box of recipes written in longhand and asks her to translate them, Avery stumbles across a family secret that compels them to dig deeper. Her side gig soon turns into full-time detective work as her translation and sleuthing skills go viral. Everyone, it seems, has a mystery in a box in their basement.
Preview 1, The Invaluable Emma Doe
Maya’s eye caught the down-shuffle of emails on the side of her laptop screen as a new one arrived. The County Sheriff’s Office. She felt giddy.
Ms. Doe Goodman,
Please find attached the Statement of Service for the Citation for Contempt of Court for Reeve Gerard Doe. Be sure to turn this into the court.
Sincerely,
Melissa
Civil Process Specialist
“Ha ha!” Maya shifted back and forth in glee at her standing desk. If she were more comfortably extroverted, she would have danced around the room and pumped her fist. She hoped Reeve’s neighbors were watching; she hoped Covette was at home, mortified by a second police visit and stressing over damage control. She hoped it blew up their day.
​
She wanted to call and tell Abe and get the puppy-wiggles out of her system, but he was in meetings all day. She re-read the email and service statement, gratefully noting that Reeve was served at 9:30 a.m. after his son had gone to school, and now feeling relieved that she wasn’t able to reach Abe and gloat. She quietly chastised herself for being happy; that wasn’t cool. She didn’t want this – any of this, ever.
​
Maya’s seasoned ears detected a faint cough – not a short, airy cough, but an ever-so-slightly-longer and juicier cough. She sprinted down the hall into Emma’s room, flipped on the lights, and dropped the bed side rails as Emma projectile vomited across the wall and bedcovers. Emma dropped her head back, gurgled, pitched forward and hurled again.
Maya lifted Emma’s head with one hand while pushing the “Head – UP” hospital bed button with the other, then snatched away the soaked pillow and rolled it up with the top blankets to the end of the bed. Emma threw up again and Maya rolled up another layer.
“It’s okay, babykins, it’s okay. You’re gonna be okay. You’re such a good girl, you’re doing so great.”
​
---
​
“You were right, Reeve lawyered up with that attorney again.”
​
“I told you! I told you! What did I tell you? Hand it over!” Abe dropped his messenger bag on the couch and held out a hand for his payout.
​
“I don’t think I actually made that bet,” Maya said, refilling Emma’s food pump pouch at the kitchen counter, to the tune of “The Farmer in the Dell” in the background. Still not fully recovered from that morning, but wanting to follow her usual routine and stand in her stander, Emma laid her head on the Mickey Mouse piano toy and moved just enough to play the song again and again.
​
Abe nuzzled Emma’s cheek and kissed her. “Emmmmma. Emma, Emma, Emma. Papa’s home.” Emma cooed. “I think he got mad and dropped the attorney last year, she didn’t drop him.”
​
Beeeeeeep. Maya turned on the food pump and begrudgingly considered that Reeve’s attorney had no soul whatsoever after all, that she didn’t dump Reeve after the first police involvement.
​
“I guess,” she replied. “I just thought that maybe Reeve had gone too low even for her.”
Abe groaned. “These people don’t care. He’s just a checkbook to her. As long as Reeve has money and you’re still around, she’s going to be happy to keep taking it. The woman wrote a paper that fathers have zero obligation ever!”
​
“I know. Aargh.” Distracted, Maya forgot to re-cap the secondary port on Emma’ feeding tube, letting formula pump onto the carpet. She grabbed a diaper and blotted it up. They had googled Reeve’s attorney when he retained her a few years ago and served them with papers on Emma’s 18th birthday, that he was stopping child support and removing Emma from his will and life insurance. Carolyn Biczbozski’s law school thesis paper was online in a legal journal – “The Father’s Rights and Obligations After Baby X: A Constitutional Retreat” – which sounded like a progressive analysis, but was actually a 20-page manifesto on her “broken connection theory” that a dad was off the hook for child support if he offered to pay for an abortion or adoption, or gas money to the nearest baby drop box:
“This decision allows mothers to unilaterally bear children while not waiving child support from the fathers. The availability of legal abortions, “safe havens,” and adoption options disrupt the connection between intercourse and twenty-one years of financial obligation.
​
The court’s dismissal of the father’s argument is flawed. Baby X represents the decline of fathers’ rights and a giant leap backward for fathers’ rights to due process.”
It floored Maya every time she thought about that paper. It didn’t fit into a religious philosophy, or any philosophy. Maya was very much about women’s rights, freedoms, and choices, but this paper espoused a cold, emotionless view of children as disposable objects that mothers irrationally wanted to keep and waste resources on. Every man for himself, literally.
​
Emma was content with her toy and Abe puttered into his office, so Maya opened up Biczbozski’s emailed “Entry of Appearance” and clicked reply-all to her and her paralegals.
​
Well hello again Ms. Biczbozski, et al,
​
Back to fight the fight against little special needs girls dying of cancer, I see. A bummer your extortion attempt ended in police involvement last August. I didn’t think we’d have the pleasure of working together again in the hallowed Zoom-rooms of justice after that. What a great way to spend time instead of with my dying daughter.
​
I attached Emma’s picture for the new paralegals involved – except that since this was taken, she’s turned yellow, lost weight, lost hair, and gotten skin pustules. Then there’s the vomiting. And the pain – she has incredible, heartbreaking pain. I thought you’d want to know. I’m sure Mr. Doe mentioned that the only potential treatment for Emma is a sibling bone marrow transplant, though he’s not allowing her brother to even do the cheek swab test. Imagine having the power to end a beautiful, vibrant child’s life. Sure tidies up his new life with the new wife if Emma’s gone. And simplifies the math if his $100 million is divided by 2 heirs instead of 3. No one likes an endlessly repeating number.
​
But I digress. I’m writing as a professional courtesy to let you know that I’ll be setting up an e-file account and – spoiler alert – filing a request for an immediate hearing due to the urgency and medical ramifications of Emma’s situation. Thanks for showing me last year how attorneys have this dark jocularity going on outside the courtroom with each other, so that I can represent Emma effectively. I mean, I’m not a pro and can’t take it to the level that you do – like making my newbie attorney cry when you called and told her to get off the #$%& porch with the big dogs or you’ll get her disbarred (put some aloe on that burn!) – but it’s good to know that there’s an avenue for the deets that don’t fit onto the sheets.
​
Thank you,
Maya (Doe) Goodman
​
P.S. It made me sad when Mr. Doe told the police last August that his attorney didn’t communicate with him, or share correspondence or documents, so here’s hoping for an improved 2024!
​
P.P.S. Dog analogies are pawesome.
​
​
Abe rolled his eyes half-way and repressed a smile. “She’s probably not even going to read this,” he said. “At most she’ll read the first paragraph before sending it on to her paralegals. You’re just an annoying ankle-biter to her.” He laughed. “There’s another dog analogy for you.”
​
“Fine by me,” replied Maya. “I don’t care if she doesn’t, I’m writing for the paralegals. Maybe we don’t win, but maybe I can sow doubt and discontent in her office by making them have feelings and question what they’re doing. These are two new paralegals on there. I googled the one that was there last year, and she quit in September – right after everything in August. I don’t think that’s a coincidence.”
​
Abe bobbed his head and munched on a saltine. He knew the correct thing to do was advise Maya to take her emotional pleas and snarkiness down several notches, or better yet, not email at all, but he liked living vicariously through her too much, liked being able to say anything without fear of maintaining flawless professionalism and control.
​
Maya knew she was pushing the limits of acceptability too, but she figured Biczbozski was unlikely to go crying to the court in order to maintain her ruthless street cred. Maya also didn’t care anymore. She wasn’t a lawyer, she couldn’t be disbarred. Maybe the judge would reprimand her, or order her to have representation, but so what? Those were just words, she finally realized. Whatevs. She knew – she had to believe – that no matter how polished their veneer of impartiality, judges hated rich pricks who abandoned their kids. Maybe even vicious lawyers, too.
​
And Maya didn’t have anything to lose; she was already losing everything.
​
Preview 2, The Invaluable Emma Doe
“Tell me about Emma’s birth,” Bethany said as she placed her laptop on Maya’s small, square kitchen table and sat down.
​
Maya sat down across from the palliative care nurse and inwardly groaned. She was so done with talking about Emma’s birth. For the past year, ever since Reeve canceled Emma’s private health insurance, Emma had been switching to new doctors that accepted Medicaid, whose first question was always about how Emma was born and came to be physically and cognitively disabled. Then the new doctors would question why X or Y was or wasn’t done, failing to factor in that, given the medical advances and new understandings of the past 22 years, Emma might as well have been birthed by a dinosaur.
​
But even in the short time that the palliative care nurse had been in their home to conduct Emma’s intake, Maya knew that she would like Bethany – that she would be someone genuinely invested in Emma’s well-being – so she tried to muster up as much graciousness and forthcoming-ness as she could. Emma needed pain meds, and palliative care was their last hope. Pragmatically, Maya needed to become best friends with Bethany.
​
“Well, she was born by emergency c-section,” Maya said.
​
“And then?”
​
“And then she spent ten days at a children’s hospital.”
​
“Did you have a typical pregnancy? Were there complications? Did she have a birth
injury?”
​
Maya hesitated and took a deep breath, exhaling through fluttering lips like a horse.
“I’m sorry to be starting from scratch,” Bethany apologized, “But I don’t have any records from anyone yet.”
​
“It’s okay,” Maya replied, “It’s just that it’s been a long time.”
​
She smiled to show Bethany that she wasn’t irritated. She was irritated, though – at Emma’s father and a court system that allowed a parent worth hundreds of millions to drop her coverage and child support, at a medical system that made her subject Emma to near-daily appointments and interrogations in order to receive another few days of pain medicine, at doctors that were too good to accept a public benefits patient or too uncomfortable to see a drooling one – but that wasn’t Bethany’s fault.
​
“I had a textbook perfect pregnancy. No problems at all.”
​
“But yet she was born by c-section?”
​
“Yeah, on her due date. She didn’t have a heartbeat at her checkup. I had called the doctor the day before to say that I couldn’t feel her moving, and she said that that was usual before going into labor.”
​
“Oh goodness,” Bethany looked up from her laptop to acknowledge Maya, her voice tinged with sympathy and alarm, then returned to typing. Maya appreciated her brevity and understanding that, over two decades later, this was old news and she did not need a hug and kum-bah-yah.
​
“Do you remember what her Apgars were?” Bethany continued.
​
“Yeah, they were zero, zero, one, and three.”
​
Bethany continued typing. “Oh no, stillborn. And so, she went to children’s hospital?”
​
Maya silently thanked her for being matter-of-fact. It was always awkward to console strangers that teared up over Emma, patting them on the arm and wondering if it would be in poor form to check a text that just beeped.
​
“Yeah, she kept seizing.”
​
“And she still has seizures, correct?”
​
“Yeah, about once a month. I actually have epilepsy, too, but they didn’t figure that out until a few years ago.”
​
“Oh, wow,” Bethany said. Clickety-clickety-click went her fingers over the keyboard, a little faster to get in the extra information. “And so she’s at children’s hospital, and then what?”
​
“She didn’t improve and so she came home on hospice after ten days,” Maya said.
​
“She was on that for six months, then she graduated to palliative care, and then she eventually moved off that and lived life. And now we’re here.”
​
“Oh okay, so you’re already familiar with what we do,” Bethany looked up and nodded, and Maya nodded back.
​
Bethany understood that the birth story had come to an end, as it so often did sooner than she would like with the parents of adult disabled children, who had their spiel pared down to the minimum after decades of repetition and were not interested in revisiting the past. Occasionally there would be a parent who hadn’t moved on, who rued that they were robbed of a typical birth and a typical child and needed grand reassurances that they were robbed, but in general the fastest way to torpedo a nurse-parent relationship was to serve up pity.
​
“And what did they decide her diagnosis was?”
​
“She has a variant of Rett Syndrome, though you’ll see Lennox-Gastaut on some of her records before she had whole genome sequencing,” Maya said as she picked up a pen and fiddled with it. “But when she was born and their testing came back clear they put down hypoxic ischemic encephalopathy, because they couldn’t figure out what happened, so you’ll see that, too.”
​
Clickety...clack went the laptop keys a little slower as Bethany carefully entered the verbose diagnoses. Maya waited patiently because she was polite and because she was accustomed to waiting: waiting in waiting rooms, waiting during therapies, waiting for doctors to type. She waited for Bethany to ask her how to spell Lennox-Gastaut or to repeat hypoxic ischemic encephalopathy, but the nurse didn’t.
​
Finally, Bethany closed her laptop. “Leukemia is common in special needs children that survive to adulthood,” she said gently.
​
Maya understood. It’s not your fault.
​
“I know.” Maya studied the imprint on the free bank pen as she blinked away her suddenly watery eyes. In the microsecond it took to set the pen down she regrouped, then looked up and smiled broadly at Bethany.
​
“Sorry. Should we go wake up Emma now?”
May 2002
​
“Get undressed!” The nurse barked at Maya and threw a hospital gown onto the bed.
​
Another nurse talked on the phone nearby. Yet another took Maya’s blood pressure as she sat on the edge of the bed in the maternity monitoring room at St. Caligula’s Hospital. Half-curtains divided eight stalls with beds filled with women in various stages of pregnancy, four on each side, facing each other.
​
“Baby’s full-term, nonresponsive, we’re not sure if it’s drugs or what. Mom’s oh-neg.”
​
Maya couldn’t breathe, couldn’t see through the crying that convulsed her.
​
“Shhhhh, you’re going to upset the other moms!” Reeve said as he stood in front of her, nervously looking around. “You need to be quiet!”
​
Maya gasped as she cried harder, everyone seemed so angry. What happened? What was happening? She killed the baby? She lurched forward and spewed her drive-thru lunch onto the floor, splashing Reeve’s shoes.
​
“Oh geez, she threw up. Get a clean-up!” shouted a nurse.
​
“Maya.” Reeve seemed angry.
​
A nurse shoved a clipboard at Reeve. “Dad, we need you sign consents!”
​
“Watch out for the barf!” the phone nurse cried out as she pointed her finger.
​
Maya’s hands and arms jerked uncontrollably as she tried to grasp the top of her stretchy maternity pants. Every choke between sobs tightened her chest a little bit more. Her legs made little kicks.
​
The gown nurse came back and clapped her hands inches from Maya’s face.
​
“Let’s go! You need to get undressed!”
​
Maya wailed louder as her arms twitched by her sides. The nurse sighed loudly and, with pursed lips and two brusque swoops, pulled Maya’s shirt over her head and her stretchy maternity pants down her legs. Maya looked across the monitoring room at the other women in their beds, silently and solemnly watching her.
​
“Come on! We need to go!” It was all becoming buzzing background noise now. The baby died. The baby is dead. The gown nurse threaded Maya’s uncooperative arms through the gown holes and gave her little push to lie down.
​
Two nurses jogged Maya’s bed down the hall and into a silver operating room, already full of yellow and green scrubs and gowns and masks and face shields and caps. The overhead operating lights blinded Maya. She closed her eyes and felt a wave roll through her body. The nurses maneuvered her alongside a stainless steel table and dropped the side rail.
​
“Scooch over! You need to get on the table!”
​
Maya strained every muscle, but all she could do was lift her head and grunt.
​
“Let’s move it!” shouted one of the nurses standing over her. The bright white lights formed angelic halos behind the nurses’ heads.
​
Maya dropped her head back down onto the table and bawled. What did it matter? She killed the baby. The anguish pressed her down into the bed, her belly a concrete ball void of life.
​
“Lift your bottom up and scooch!” a nurse ordered.
​
“She’s not gonna do it!”
​
Maya’s chest undulated as if she had gentle hiccups. “She’s tweaking!” someone shouted.
​
“Everyone on three – one, two, three!”
​
Whump, Maya was on the cold table. Nurses grabbed both her arms and started I.V. lines; another wave of nausea hit Maya as she looked down and saw blood spurt into both tubes simultaneously.
​
“STOP!!” A plain-clothes woman with a clipboard ran into the room. “EVERYONE STOP!”
​
The frenzy halted and gloved hands flew up across the room. “She’s allergic to latex!”
​
Maya flinched as a nurse ripped off the I.V. line she had just taped down to her arm. The other nurse tilted her head and looked at Maya. “Are you allergic to latex?” Maya shook her head no. “Are you sure?”
​
Maya froze. Was she allergic to latex? She couldn’t think, she didn’t know what the right answer was. She didn’t want to make them angrier. Her body twitched as she tried to answer. She shook her head no again.
​
The plain-clothes woman stepped toward Maya and jabbed the clipboard with her finger. ““Then why did you check it off on the form? Why would you do that? You gave me a heart attack!” Maya burst into tears. Did she check it off? Did she fill out a form?
​
“Are we clear?” someone asked.
​
The plain-clothes considered Maya for a moment. “Yes, we’re clear!” she snapped. The frenzy resumed. The nurse smacked another sheet of clear adhesive on Maya’s I.V. port.
​
“Roll onto your side!” someone ordered.
​
Maya sniffled and gulped for air. Where was Reeve?
​
“You need to roll onto your side!”
​
Maya wondered if she was having a sideways delivery. Hands rolled her over, and other hands took hers, wrapped them around the bed rail bars, and held them there.
“Okay, I need you to curl up into a ball and stay very still,” a deep male voice slowly enunciated from behind her.
​
Her lower back felt cool and wet. Was she getting an epidural? She didn’t want an epidural. But so many hands were holding her down.
​
“Don’t move!” a voice above her snipped. “You have to get it together! You need to be perfectly still!”
​
Maya squeezed her eyes shut and tried to stop crying, tried to stop moving. She couldn’t breathe fast enough to hold it all in, in-out-in-out-in-out-in-out like she learned in birthing class. Everyone would be so angry if she messed up the epidural and became paralyzed and caused them more work.
​
“Okay, I’m in,” the man said.
​
Hands rolled Maya back over, pulled up her gown, cut off her underwear, and slathered her in orange liquid. A man at the head of the bed looked directly down at her as he placed an oxygen mask on her face.
​
“I’m Dr. Powers. Have you had anesthesia before?”
​
Maya locked eyes with him, the only dark face in the hospital. She shook her head no.
“Have you had any procedures before?” She shook her head no again. He paused, his voice softened. “Have you ever had an I.V. before?” She shook her head.
​
“Sixty-two percent!”
​
“You’re hyperventilating,” Dr. Powers said calmly. “I need you to take slow, deep breaths for me or I’ll need to give you a sedative, okay?”
​
Maya breathed even faster with the stress wanting to please him: in-out-in-out-in-out. She wanted so badly to be a good patient and show that she was a good person, a good mom, but she couldn’t control it. She couldn’t control anything.
​
Dr. Powers turned to the mass of gowns and caps and masks. “Dad, can you talk to mom and help her settle down?”
​
Reeve was there! A tiny iota of weight lifted off Maya’s chest as his billowing yellow-scrubs figure turned around. She reached out a trembling hand, but he put his on the bed rail and leaned over.
​
“Maya, you have to stop hyperventilating!”
​
Stunned for a moment, Maya began to sob. She sobbed because she couldn’t do anything right. She sobbed because everyone hated her. She sobbed because she was a bad mom and killed the baby. She sobbed because the pain was unbearable.
​
But then – she noticed the royal blue curtain-barrier erected just below her chest. So blue. She took a deep breath. Why is it there? She wanted to watch. Can you take it down so I can watch? No one seemed to hear her. Maybe she could move it aside. Tools clattered on the floor, everyone was talking at everyone and oblivious to her and the fact that she was attached to the stomach of such great interest. She didn’t feel anything. Have they started yet? When will they start? If they were going to slice her open it was going to hurt, she thought. But she was so tired now, too tired to worry about that.
​
“Zero!”
​
Maya startled. Did she fall asleep? All the gowns and scrubs were in the back of the room while a lone doctor worked on her. He lifted up a roundish, brownish-reddish thing from her abdomen, inspected it all around, and tucked it back into Maya. She felt tugging as he re-organized her abdomen. Maya’s mind pondered and tried to make sense of it. They took all of her organs out? Set them aside, then washed and returned them? Huh. That seems reasonable.
​
“Zero.”
​
The room fell silent. She heard sniffling. The lone doctor continued his work, carefully organizing Maya’s innards. He was calm; Maya felt calm. Just her and a doctor who, for whatever reason that Maya was not concerned about, was cleaning and sorting her internal organs today.
​
“One.” The sea of blue and yellow gowns in the back of the room tittered.
​
The doctor was tugging harder now. Did everything not fit back in? That’s not good. Why was she having this done anyway, she wondered. The baby! Tears rolled down Maya’s face as she remembered that the baby didn’t have a heartbeat. The baby died. They said she killed it.
​
“Sutures.” A nurse came over to help the doctor. Oh the pain, the pain was too much. It was everywhere and nowhere. Her soul was being eviscerated. She didn’t want them to finish putting her organs back in, she wanted to die.
​
“Three!”
​
“Easy there.” Dr. Powers’ face re-appeared above her as she fought the mask, fought the restraints that she didn’t realize were on her hands until now. “Let’s take this off for a minute, okay?” he was almost whispering as he lifted the mask a couple inches away from her face. Maya looked up at the doctor and panted as he dabbed her cheeks with a piece of gauze. He put the oxygen mask back on, then took it off entirely a few minutes later when a nurse came over with a swaddle.
​
“Look, mom, you have a baby girl! Look at all that hair!”
​
Maya turned her head and stared. Her baby died. It looked like a real baby, though. A sleeping baby with curly hair like in her own baby pictures, she thought. Her mind swirled and struggled to comprehend. She wanted to believe.
​
“Congratulations!” a voice chimed in from somewhere.
​
Maya choked up and laughed. It was all a very, very bad dream? Drunk on the instant release from pain, she cried and laughed until she passed out and Dr. Powers put the oxygen mask back on her face.
​
- - - - -
​
Maya woke up to the riiiip of velcro and a blood pressure cuff squeezing her arm.
​
“The choppers are all busy so they’re going to take the baby by ambulance,” said the nurse.
​
“So sad,” said another.
​
“They’ll get divorced. Happens every time,” a third stated.
​
“Mm-hm, he’ll leave her.”
​
“Just so sad.”
​
The nurses tsk’ed and shook their heads as they checked Maya’s vital signs and set up saline bags in the recovery room. Her heart pounded in panic and shame as they discussed her marriage worthiness. Why would Reeve leave her? Why? Everything was okay, the baby was fine, she didn’t kill the baby after all.
​
Their tasks done, the nurses lingered around her bed a moment – each slightly scowling while making eye contact with Maya – then walked out. She was alone. She couldn’t let herself worry about their comments or seeming residual anger, she thought. Everything is okay. She’d go home soon with Reeve and their new baby and they would have a wonderful life, she told herself.
​
- - - - -
​
A burst of people into the room woke Maya up. Reeve! Nurses. And a giant incubator on a tall, rolling cabinet. Reeve came over to her bedside. He looked like he’d been crying.
​
“They’re taking the baby to children’s hospital,” he said.
​
“Wh-what?” Maya rasped. Had she lost her voice? “Wh-why?”
​
“She keeps seizing, they don’t know what to do.”
​
A nurse rolled the incubator up to Maya’s bed, but Maya was eye-level with the cabinet base. “You need to get up if you want to see your baby!” ordered the nurse pushing the incubator.
​
Maya tried to sit up, but nothing. Nothing worked. Oh no, I’m paralyzed.
​
“If you want to see you baby, get up! You’ll never be able to see her again.”
​
The nurses and Reeve watched as Maya grunted and strained, crying with each effort of her head to propel her whole body forward. She looked down at her useless hands in confusion, her fingers stuck together to form a rigid C-shape at the end of each arm. “I can’t,” she gasped, “I can’t.”
​
“Don’t you want to see your baby? This is your only chance!” the nurse bellowed.
Maya cried harder. She did want to see her baby, so badly.
​
Finally, Reeve put his hand behind her back and gave her an assist.
​
“AHHHHHHHGGGHH.” The room was topsy-turvy; Maya swallowed down the vomit the lurched up in her throat. He swung her legs off the edge of the bed and a nurse put a walker in front of her. I.V. lines and monitoring lines followed Maya and pulled on her skin as she put a pirate-hook hand over each walker grip and, with an underarm lift from Reeve and the most strength she had mustered in her life, held herself up and peered into the incubator.
Oh! There she was under the oxygen mask and pulse oximeter and tiny I.V. lines and leads attached to stickers all over her body. Her baby. She was alive, and she was just sleeping.
​
“Let’s go!” shouted a nurse as she began to wheel away the incubator.
​
“Dad, are you riding or driving?” another asked as they held the door open.
​
“I – I gotta go,” said Reeve. He let go of Maya and darted out with the nurses and incubator. She fell to the floor.
​
- - - - -
​
A knock at the door woke up Maya again, and she tried to gather her bearings as a man in a white coat pulled a chair up to her bedside.
​
“I’m Dr. Johnson, the on-call doctor from children’s hospital,” he said.
Maya nodded.
​
“We’re trying to determine what caused your baby’s injury,” he continued. Injury? The baby wasn’t hurt, she thought. “While we wait for the test results, I have a few questions for you.”
​
She nodded again.
​
“Are you into kinky sexual positions?” Maya’s heart thumped with shock and embarrassment. She opened her mouth and then closed it when no words came out, and shook head no.
​
“What sexual positions did you and your husband use while you were pregnant?” Dr. Johnson leaned forward and stared intently through his glasses at Maya.
​
Maya had never talked with a stranger about sex before, she wasn’t sure if she should. “I... I... I don’t know,” she whispered.
​
“It’s important for you to tell me exactly what you did during sex, because you might have injured the baby.” Maya blinked back tears. She couldn’t bear to go down that road again, that she hurt the baby.
​
“Now, did you do it like this... or like this... or like that?” The doctor made a series of demonstrative gestures with his arms and upper body, as if he were holding an invisible person, that Maya tried to follow but overwhelmed her brain.
​
“No.”
​
“Were you into blah blah blah or blah blah blah?” he asked, continuing to gesticulate.
Maya slowly shook her head no; she didn’t comprehend the words, didn’t understand the gestures, didn’t know what it all meant.
​
“Did your husband ever really – ” the doctor made two fists and rammed them together with grunts “ – or did he really,” he pumped his first upward, grunting again. “Do you think he was too big for you and injured the baby?”
​
“No.” She could barely hear herself.
​
The doctor leaned back, tilted his head slightly and stared at Maya.
​
She stared back, her mind blank and numb and unable to process anything more. The room was quiet, save for their breathing. With an irritated sigh, the doctor got up and left. Maya closed her eyes.
​
- - - - -
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Another knock on the door. Maya slowly opened her eyes as a woman in slacks and a blouse, with a messenger bag over her shoulder, came in and stood at the foot of her bed, hands in her pockets.
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“I’m Jane Smith with County Child Protective Services. What drugs are you using?”
Did Maya hear her right? She couldn’t have heard her right, she was so tired, so very tired. She tried to lift her head to hear better. “What?”
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“I said: What. Drugs. Are. You. On?”
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The force of her words pushed Maya back. “None.”
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“We know you’re using drugs. You almost killed your daughter. They had to put her in an induced coma to stop her seizing from the drug withdrawal.”
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Maya gasped. No, that’s not true. That’s not true at all, I just saw the baby sleeping.
“I used...” Maya tried to think of the word, her mind was so slow, “... Tylenol... once.”
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“Oooookay, I guess we’ll wait for the blood results then. You realize you’re not taking the baby home,” Jane Smith said curtly.
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Of course not, Maya thought, the baby had to stay at the hospital. She just had the baby a few hours ago.
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“Yes.”
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The woman crossed her arms. “You don’t seem too upset about this.”
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Maya studied Jane Smith. Should she be upset that the baby was at the hospital, she wondered? They were going to make the baby better and then they’d all go home sometime soon. Everything was going to be fine.
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The woman reached into her bag and pulled out a business card and, still standing at the end of the bed, held it out to Maya. She watched Maya struggle to raise her pirate-hook arms for a few moments, then laid the card by her feet. “We’ll be in touch.”
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Maya looked out the window. It was a glorious, sun-shiny day. A clear-blue-sky with lush tree greenery day. An extra-long day approaching the equinox. A seemingly endless day.
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- - - - -
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“Maya.” A nurse gave her arm a shake.
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It was dark outside now. Is it still today? “Maya, your husband is on the phone.” She handed Maya the corded punch-button phone and cupped her stiff hand around it.
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Reeve was crying. “Maya? There’s something really wrong with the baby and they don’t know what it is.” Maya started to cry, too.
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“Can you call your aunt and uncle and ask them to come to the house? I don’t want to be alone tonight.”
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Maya sniffled. “You... you’re not staying with the baby?”
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“Maya, I can’t stay here! I just can’t!” he bawled. “I want to go home and I can’t be alone.”
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“Can you come here?” she tentatively whispered, “And be with me?”
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“I need to go home, Maya! I can’t deal with all of this!”
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Maya wasn’t sure how to feel. She really wanted to see Reeve, maybe be held, but more than that she didn’t want him to be upset.
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“Susan’s number is, um—”
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“Maya! Just call them! I can’t deal with this, I can’t do this! You don’t know how stressful it’s been today!”
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Tears rolled down her face and she nodded to no one.
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“Okay? Just call them.” Reeve hung up.
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Maya stared at the phone in her lap. Her body shuddered as she quietly cried, until she remembered that Reeve would be angrier if she dallied too long. She picked up the phone and called her aunt.
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Preview 3, The Invaluable Emma Doe
Maya came inside and pulled the newspaper out of its protective blue sheath, stuffing the plastic bag into an overflowing basket of blue baggies next to the dog leashes by the front door. She skimmed the headlines as she meandered into the kitchen, set the paper on the counter, and flipped to the next section, Business.
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“NO WAY!” she burst out.
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“What? What’s going on?” Abe whipped around from the coffee maker, hands up in a partial defensive position, looking left and right.
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“EnVidious is on the front page of the Business section! They’re one of the “Magnificent 7” stocks driving the whole U.S. economy!” Maya replied in amazement. She whispered as she sped-read through the article to herself. “It’s doubled in value since last summer! Depending on the day and the stock market, it’s the third, fourth, or fifth largest company in the world now!”
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Abe relaxed and topped off his coffee with chocolate milk. “Reeve is an original employee, right?”
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“Yeah, he’s employee number 200 or something. Last I saw they have, like, 30,000 employees now,” Maya said. “When we were in Seattle, enVidious got a contract with Microsoft to work on their new gaming system and they needed to hire a couple hundred coders in a couple weeks. Reeve was unhappy being Intel's liaison at Microsoft, and someone from enVidious approached him, so I told him to go for it. That was before we decided to have kids, so it didn’t matter if he took a pay cut or if this new little company went bust.”
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Abe smiled and said teasingly, “Remind me again how much enVidious stock you have?”
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Maya gave him a look. Abe knew that Reeve had insisted on keeping all his enVidious stock in their divorce, knew about his screaming fits at Maya that she was a gold-digger if she took so much as one share, and knew that she received their house instead – the house that she used her college savings to put a down payment on, taking out school loans instead so that they could have a head start on homeownership. Reeve held most of his salary in enVidious stock while Maya’s salary was used to pay for everything, including the school loans. She didn’t even have a 401(k).
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Maya laughed. “Ha! I can’t believe this came out in the news two days after Reeve was served for contempt of court. This is awesome. It’s not going to look good in court for a multi-multi-millionaire to drop his sick kid from his health insurance. And not pay child support or anything.”
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Abe nodded. “You gonna send that to his attorney?”
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“You bet I am! Right now!” Maya flung open her laptop on the kitchen island and... waited. And waited. And waited. She tapped her fingers on the keyboard and stared at the blank screen, her mojo dissipating as slowly as it booted up. Her laptop was 10 years old, felt like it weighed 10 pounds, had a broken hinge, and used big wi-fi receiver attachment. “Not worth stealing! Take the Apple Air in the office instead” was written in Sharpie on the top.
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“Real smooth,” Abe chuckled. “When are you going to get a new one? Costco has them for $500.”
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“Never,” said Maya. “It’s the principle.”
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Finally, her laptop screen materialized and Maya clicked open her email.
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Dear Ms. Biczboszski, et al,
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What timing that the New York Times has a spread today on how enVidious's sky-high stock is propping up the entire S&P 500! (attached) How great that Mr. Doe has been there almost 25 years and receives quarterly below-market-price stock distributions and outright stock grants! Gosh, it looks like my $100 million estimate of his stock holdings is now around $200 million. Yowzers!! Good thing he insisted on keeping all of his stock options when we got divorced. (And, as you’re aware, doesn’t pay any more child support.) He’s been saving up to buy a whole entire mountain, retire early, and become a ski bum, you know.
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I remember when we got married and Mr. Doe de-bugged toddler games for low pay, making sure that the Care Bears and Smurfs didn’t freeze up. When they offered him a new position as their liaison at Microsoft, I pushed Mr. Doe to take it. Boy, was he scared to leave the cuddly familiarity of the Care Bears and Smurfs! I had finally landed an amazing new job in Austin, and would have to turn it down, but the future was in Seattle. A few years later he got an offer he couldn’t refuse from Intel to be their liaison, and that led to the enVidious introduction and, well, you know the sordid rest from there. (Or do you? Sometimes it’s as if Mr. Doe tells you a very one-sided story.)
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But I digress. Did Mr. Doe already share with you the email from the head of enVidious H.R.? It stated that – as his biological child, regardless of her status (child, adult, adopted, abandoned, or otherwise) – Emma is welcome to be included on Mr. Doe’s medical insurance coverage. EnVidious H.R. also pointed out some of the many amazing programs they’ve added on for dependents enrolled in their medical insurance, like a cancer program and no-cost in-home doctor visits and in-home aides! Emma would sure love that, it’s hard on her to leave the house. EnVidious really takes care of their families. The H.R. folks and I don’t understand why Mr. Doe wouldn’t want his own lovely little girl to not have the best care in the world, at zero cost to himself.
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Anyhoo, let me know if Mr. Doe’s Ebenezer Scrooge phase has run its course now and he’d like to get Emma enrolled onto health insurance. Perhaps he’d even like to do the full Christmas Story transformation and resume child support! Oh gosh, I didn’t think that through – Mr. Doe has been a real cash cow for you. If he stopped fighting every little thing in court, you might have to start driving for Lyft or UberEats. (How cool would that be if I ordered Chick-Fil-A and you delivered it? I’d tip you well and share my nuggies, no hard feelings.) But don’t stress, I’m sure Mr. Doe will keep you on retainer to keep us in line and you won’t have to give us a ride to the airport in your Beamer.
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There I go digressing again. All-righty, here’s what I needed to email you about: Given that it is in Emma’s best interests to have her health insurance re-instated ASAP – and my attention not taken away during her remaining time – I’d like to find a mutually agreeable court date for his hearing sooner. Emma tends to have appointments in the afternoons, so how about a morning next week? LMK!
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Thank you,
Maya (Doe) Goodman
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P.S. It’s so cool to be part of the out-of-court-info-swapping. Remember when my attorney sat in her car all afternoon, reconsidering her career, after she pulled over for a stern out-of-court dressing-down by you? Priceless. I mean, I didn’t particularly care for being billed for 30 minutes of pep-talking her into not quitting, but someone’s gotta toughen up these snowflakes.
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Abe repressed a smile and shook his head. “Did she reply to your last email?”
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“No,” said Maya, “but that doesn’t matter. I’m sowing seeds of discontent in her office.”
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“I know! You should ask her how Reeve’s ass surgery went,” Abe said with a laugh.
“Bwah ha ha ha! Yeah!” Maya typed some more:
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P.P.S. I trust Mr. Doe is doing well and fully recovered? He said that he had “ass surgery” one of the last times we talked, but I haven’t been able to get an update from him since. Like, surgery to loosen it up? Or remove something?
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Maya and Abe laughed, as they did whenever they thought about Reeve having ass surgery. They chalked up Reeve’s tendency to overshare personal information to old habits, he and Maya having known each other since they were 14. While the thought of Reeve having ass surgery was amusing, the real source of its humor was the contradiction it represented: Reeve was simultaneously pushing them out of his life while spilling a teapot full of disclosures that would surely make Covette livid.
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Abe became serious. “EnVidious isn’t going to be happy if they’re known as the company that ditches kids with cancer.”
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“EnVidious is great,” Maya said. “It’s not their fault one of their employees is a deadbeat dad. I told you about enVidious and Emma’s first stander, right?” Abe nodded.
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Maya glanced up at the clock. “Oh shoot! I need to get Emma up.”
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“What does she have today?”
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“Blood draw for oncology next week.”
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Abe scrunched his shoulders and grimaced. Emma’s little veins were getting over-used and becoming increasingly difficult to find. She was a great sport and never cried or complained no matter how many phlebotomists and pokes and ultrasound techs she went through over the course of an hour. Sometimes more than an hour. Every now and then Emma would have a really great phlebotomist – one without preconceived notions of what would, or wouldn’t, happen when drawing from an atypical patient, who believed in themselves when they thought they felt a vein and gave it a go, drawing blood on the first poke. A confident phlebotomist had perhaps the most impact on Emma’s quality of life.
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- - - - -
As Maya waited with Emma in the blood lab, the possibility that Reeve and his actions would give enVidious a bad rap bothered her. Odds were that enVidious and its founder would never find out, and they likely had dealt with lots of tarnishing employees over the course of tens of thousands of hires, but Maya couldn’t shake it off. EnVidious, Reeve, and Maya more or less grew up and matured together – each helping the other to flourish – and now band was breaking up for good now. She needed to let enVidious know how much she appreciated them.
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To: Hensen Wong, CEO <henson.wong@envidious.com>
Subject: Thank you
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Dear Mr. Wong,
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My daughter, Emma, was born with cerebral palsy and suspected Rett Syndrome in 2002. When she was almost 1 year old, her providers said that she needed to start using a piece of equipment called a stander, to keep up proper bone development. They selected one for her, but enVidious's health insurance at the time denied it. We appealed and her providers wrote letters of necessity, but it was denied again. Emma’s providers were adamant that she get this stander ASAP during the critical growth period for proper bone development and alignment, but it would have been a formidable expense for a young software engineer making $50,000 in a high cost of living place like Seattle. So, we appealed the second decision and the health insurance company tossed it to enVidious management... and you personally approved it yourself.
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Emma’s father was so stressed out that, as one of the first couple hundred employees at this young company, he would get laid off for his kid causing extra overhead expenses. (Someone in H.R. told him that his family policy cost enVidious the most out of everyone.) Emma loved that stander and used it every single day for hours for over eight years, until she outgrew it. (We made sure to get one that would grow with her.) In turn, we passed it on to someone without insurance, who needed it as much as we did. Specialists marvel at Emma’s unexpectedly normal bone development and alignment, which has enabled her to walk and avoid bone/spasticity surgeries – highly unusual, given her disability. Ultimately, that stander saved insurance and enVidious probably 20-fold in other medical mitigation costs.
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I will forever be grateful to you and enVidious for approving that stander and enabling a little girl to succeed, and for providing amazing health benefits for the first 21.5 years of her life. I have always – and will always – speak highly of enVidious and how you care for your employees and their families.
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Thank you,
Maya (Doe) Goodman
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Preview 4, The Invaluable Emma Doe
It finally dawned on Maya that their old friends would never rebuke Reeve for abandoning his daughter because they didn’t want to burn a bridge with a gazillionaire. Sure, they were quick to shun economically disadvantaged parents who were deadbeats – the ones who might actually have the slimmest of arguments in not being able to provide for their kids – and to shun economically-disadvantaged parents that didn’t fit their norms of political-correctness and proper morals.
But no one would ever call out Reeve in the hope that maybe, just maybe, he might flip them a Bitcoin or look favorably upon their average lives. A new car for you! And you! And you! Such utterly ridiculous hopes, Maya knew, for a man who screamed at her whenever she had made a donation to charity. Poor people should be self-made like him! They should go to school, live in safer places, not be lazy! He shouldn’t have to fund their life choices! Nevermind that Reeve’s parents could afford to live in an excellent school district, that his grandma paid for his college education, that his fiancée – Maya – had the foresight to save her money for a down payment on their first home and take out school loans, and that Maya sacrificed her career and encouraged him to give the small, unknown tech startup a try.
Maybe it was enough for their old friends to be able to say that they knew a gazillionaire or to squeeze out an invitation to his mountain retreat. That they would trade a little disabled girl’s well-being for the chance to be in a gazillionaire’s very peripheral orbit and get a night of free lodging hurt and depressed Maya. Hurt because she would never do that to them. Depressed because these were people who had careers helping others as teachers, medical providers, church laymen, and law enforcers, and if they of all people were choosing a deadbeat gazillionaire over a sweet little girl that they knew, then what hope could Maya have for humanity.
So when Maya received an email from an old friend with the caps-screaming sentiment “F*** HIM!!!” she laughed out loud and felt her emotions swell up inside. Someone else got it and didn’t need aspirations of a gazillionaire buddy to complete them. She was no longer standing alone on a windy plateau, trying to stay on her feet as the gale force winds of wealth pushed her closer and closer to the edge.
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Preview 1, Perennial
Eight thousand feet below her pram and eighty million years before her mother's defining regret, Patty's condemnation and salvation were set not by the judgmental god that she devoted every Sunday and Wednesday to, but by the lowly and dusty earth mantle that she would grow up to curse with every breeze.
Had the rocky lithospheric layer of the mantle in northern Colorado been a geologically normal thickness of a only 60 miles, instead of the 180 miles that protruded down into the putty-like asthenospheric layer, or had the ancient Kula and Farallon tectonic plates subducted under the North American plate at a more typically steep angle instead of in near-parallel, Patty's fate might not have been sealed in the deep crease that formed when the western plates met the stubborn, rocky curb of the eastern plate.
Instead, the oceanic plates pushed unrelentingly on this precambrian brick wall until both plates gave way into a deep dive, creating a tectonic valley with earth's surface now an underground vale. Over the next thirty million years the weight of the mantle, which could condense a human into a marble, squeezed and heated the sludge of organic materials -- leftover dinosaurs and marine flora from what was once an inland sea -- into Patty's poison and lifeblood, seeping down into the 60 trillion gallon basin of porous rock at the bottom of the two-mile high crease, and settling into the millimeter-sized cracks of sandstone and shale.
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There, Patty's condemnation and salvation would have stayed and evolved over millions of more years into someone else's destiny, were it not for a Civil War colonel who noticed that, after setting off explosives in an old canal in Fredericksburg, Virginia, water flowed again from the fractured earth. He patented his "exploding torpedo" and soon enough the owners of abandoned oil wells got to thinking about their neighbors' rejuvenated water wells, making the colonel a wealthy man. After World War II an engineer in Kansas, tasked with increasing oil output, petitioned his managers to try a variation of the colonel’s torpedo, replacing dynamite with a less-destructive blast of gasoline and sand to shake out dribbles of oil.
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But everyone knew that the scattered droplets of natural gas that the fermenting T-rexes and ferns were releasing under northern Colorado were not possible to extract without extraordinary expense, except for a geologist named Pete, who liked Colorado and didn’t want to pack up and head home to Wisconsin as the industry began to shutter. Pete remembered the engineer in Kansas, who remembered the Civil War veteran in Virginia, and in 1970 he convinced his employer to give the stony sponge at the bottom of the geologic underground cliff -- now called the Wattenburg Basin -- one last Hail Mary pass of high-pressure water, sand, and chemicals.
And so Patty's destiny was set free.
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All works on this page © 2025 by Jessie Shaw Thompson are licensed under CC BY-NC-ND 4.0