Four in the Morning
At 4 a.m., someone pounded on my mother’s front door.
Not a knock. A pounding. A fist, flat and heavy, three times, then three more. The kind of sound that comes up through the floor and into your bones before you’re even awake.
Arlo started screaming in the bassinet beside me.
I sat up in the dark of my mother’s guest room. My chest ached. My stitches pulled. For a second I didn’t know where I was.
Then I heard a man’s voice through the door. Muffled but clear.
“Peoria Police. Open the door, please.”
My name is Marisa Dunleavy. I’m thirty years old. I’m a payroll specialist for a heavy equipment dealer in Peoria, Illinois. I spend my days making sure four hundred and twelve people get paid the right amount, on the right day, with the right deductions.
I’m good at it. I’m careful. I write everything down.
That night, I was three weeks postpartum. I had a son named Arlo, nineteen days old, seven pounds and four ounces, with my husband’s ears and my father’s chin.
And I hadn’t slept more than two hours in a row since he was born.
I picked Arlo up out of the bassinet. He was red-faced and furious, his tiny fists balled up. I held him against my shoulder and bounced him and walked out into the hallway in my nursing tank top and a pair of my mother’s old pajama pants.
The hall light was on. My mother was already at the bottom of the stairs, tying the belt of her pink terrycloth robe.
Behind her, half-hidden in the kitchen doorway, was my sister.
Kenzie’s hair was wet.
That’s the first thing I noticed. Her long blonde hair was dripping down the back of her sweatshirt, dark and stringy, like she’d just stepped out of the shower.
At four in the morning.
She saw me at the top of the stairs. She looked away.
My mother opened the door.
Two police officers stood on the porch under the yellow porch light. A tall man in his forties with a gray mustache. A younger woman with her hair pulled back tight. Their patrol car was parked at the curb with its light bar going, red and blue sweeping across my mother’s lawn and the neighbor’s houses.
“Good morning, ma’am,” the older officer said. “Sorry to wake you. Is there a Marisa Dunleavy at this address?”
My mother turned around and looked up the stairs at me.
I came down slowly, holding the railing with one hand and Arlo with the other. Every step pulled at my stitches.
“I’m Marisa,” I said.
The officer looked at the baby on my shoulder. Something moved across his face. Just for a second.
“Is your name Marisa Dunleavy?” he asked me. Like he had to be sure.
“Yes.”
“Ma’am, are you the owner of a 2019 Honda CR-V, silver, Illinois plate ending in four-seven-two?”
“Yes.”
“Ma’am,” he said, “your vehicle was involved in a hit-and-run on Knoxville Avenue at approximately 2:15 a.m. It struck a mailbox and a parked car, then left the scene. We located it two blocks from here, on Glen Oak, with the airbag deployed and the front end heavily damaged.”
I stood there in my mother’s front hall holding my screaming son.
I looked at Kenzie.
She looked at the floor.
“I’ve been asleep,” I said. “With my baby. In the guest room. All night.”
The officer nodded slowly. He wrote something in a little notebook.
“Your keys, ma’am,” he said. “Where do you keep them?”
“In my purse. On the kitchen counter.”
He looked past my mother into the kitchen. At my purse, sitting on the counter by the coffee maker, open.
“Is anyone else in the household authorized to drive your vehicle?”
I opened my mouth.
Then my mother spoke up.
“Marisa was driving, officer,” she said.
The whole hallway went still. Even Arlo stopped crying for a second, the way babies do when something changes in the room.
“I heard her leave around two,” my mother said. “I saw her car pull out of the driveway. From my bedroom window.”
I stared at her.
“Mom.”
“She’s been so sleep-deprived,” my mother went on. In her sweet, worried voice. The voice she uses on the phone with the insurance company. The voice she used at church when people asked how we were holding up after Dad died. “She hasn’t been herself since the baby. She’s been crying all the time. She told me yesterday she needed to get out of the house. That she felt trapped.”
I had said that. To her. In her kitchen. At seven in the morning, after a night where Arlo screamed for four hours straight.
I didn’t mean get in my car and drive drunk down Knoxville Avenue.
The officer looked at me. Then at my mother. Then at the young woman officer, who was writing everything down.
Then he turned to my sister.
“Ma’am,” he said. “Did you see anything?”
Kenzie lifted her head. She looked right at him. Her face was very calm. Her voice was steady.
“She took the car,” Kenzie said. “Not me. I was in bed.”
Chapter Two: The Porch
The officer asked me to step outside.
I handed Arlo to my mother. I didn’t want to. Everything in my body screamed not to. But I couldn’t hold him on the porch, not with the cold and the lights and whatever was about to happen.
My mother took him. She held him against her pink robe. He started screaming again.
I walked out the front door in my bare feet onto the cold concrete.
It was October. Thirty-eight degrees. The cold came right up through the soles of my feet. I was wearing a nursing tank top and pajama pants and nothing else. My chest was leaking through the tank top. I crossed my arms over it.
“Ma’am,” the older officer said. His name tag said SGT. WARD. “I’m going to ask you to take a preliminary breath test. Do you consent?”
“Yes,” I said. “Absolutely.”
He took out a little handheld device. A plastic tube sticking out of the top. He held it in front of my mouth.
“Blow steady until I tell you to stop.”
I blew. Steady. For what felt like a long time.
The device beeped. He looked at the little screen.
He was quiet for a second. Then he turned it around so I could see.
0.00.
“Doesn’t mean much,” the second officer muttered. The young woman. Her name tag said OFC. PRESTON. “It’s been two hours. She could’ve burned it off. Or she could’ve been on something else.”
“I’m breastfeeding,” I said. “I don’t drink. I haven’t had a drink in ten months.”
Officer Preston didn’t look at me. She wrote something down.
Sergeant Ward looked at me for a long moment. Then he looked back through the open front door. At my mother in the hallway, holding Arlo. At Kenzie in the kitchen doorway with her wet hair.
“Ma’am,” he said to me, quietly. “Here’s where we are. Your car was in a hit-and-run with property damage and possibly more. You’re the registered owner. Your mother says she saw you leave at two. Your sister says you took the car. That’s two witnesses.” He paused. “I have to take you in.”
“I didn’t do it.”
“Then that’ll come out,” he said. “But right now I have to take you in.”
They put me in handcuffs on my mother’s front porch.
In front of the whole street. With the red and blue lights going. The Hendersons across the road had their porch light on. I saw Mrs. Henderson’s face in her front window.
The cuffs were cold. Officer Preston put them on. Not tight. In front of me, not behind, because I told her I’d had a C-section and couldn’t put my arms behind my back.
Arlo was screaming inside.
I could hear him through the open door. That high, thin, desperate newborn cry. The one that makes your milk let down whether you want it to or not. I felt it happen. Right there on the porch, in handcuffs. Both sides. Soaking through my tank top.
I stood there in the cold and let it.
They walked me to the patrol car. Officer Preston opened the back door and put her hand on my head so I wouldn’t hit it getting in.
I sat down on the hard plastic seat. The cage between me and the front. The smell of old coffee and disinfectant.
Sergeant Ward went back to the house to talk to my mother and Kenzie. Officer Preston went with him. I could see them in the hallway, through the open front door. Kenzie talking, her hands moving. My mother nodding, holding Arlo.
While the officers were on the radio, my mother came out to the car.
She walked down the porch steps in her pink robe and her slippers. She’d handed Arlo to Kenzie. She came across the lawn to the patrol car and leaned down close to the window. The back window was cracked an inch, for air.
“Just take it, Marisa,” she whispered.
I stared at her through the glass.
“You have a baby,” she whispered. Fast. Urgent. “Judges go easy on new moms. Postpartum depression. Sleep deprivation. You’ll get supervision, probably. Maybe community service. They’ll feel sorry for you.”
“Mom…”
“Kenzie has her nursing boards in March,” my mother said. “The NCLEX. One DUI and her career is over before it starts. They won’t let her sit for the boards. They’ll never give her a license. You know that.”
I looked at my mother’s face. In the red and blue light. Her eyes wide. Her lips tight.
“You want me to take a DUI for her,” I said.
“I want you to be her big sister,” my mother said. “For once in your life.”
“Mom. She hit a car. She left the scene.”
“Don’t ruin your sister’s life,” she hissed. Her face changed. Twisted. “You’ve always been jealous of her. Ever since she was born. Don’t do this now. Not to her.”
I didn’t scream.
I didn’t cry, either. I was too tired to cry. I’d been crying for nineteen days. Over Arlo’s latch. Over my stitches. Over the way the house was so quiet with Wes gone. Over nothing.
I didn’t have anything left.
What I had instead was something else. Something cold and clear. The same feeling I get at work on the last day of a pay period, when the numbers don’t match and I have four hundred and twelve people waiting and I have to find the mistake.
You don’t panic. You look at the records.
My mother stepped back from the car. Sergeant Ward was coming down the porch steps.
I leaned forward toward the cage.
“Sergeant,” I called through the gap in the window. Very politely. “Excuse me. Can I show you something on my phone?”
Chapter Three: 1:58 A.M.
Here’s what my mother didn’t know.
My breast pump connects to an app.
It’s a Spectra, the kind my insurance covered. The lactation consultant at Methodist Hospital told me to download the companion app the day before I left the hospital. It tracks every session. The time it starts. The time it stops. How many ounces. Which side.
“Log everything,” she said. “We need to know if your supply is coming in. If you’re pumping enough. Every single session.”
So I did. Every session. I’m a payroll specialist. I log things.
Sergeant Ward opened the back door of the patrol car.
“What is it, ma’am?”
“My phone,” I said. “It’s in my pajama pocket. Can I take it out?”
He looked at me for a second. Then he nodded.
I reached into my pocket with my hands still cuffed in front of me. I took out my phone. I unlocked it with my thumb.
I opened the app.
The screen came up white and blue. A little cartoon picture of a bottle. A list of sessions, newest at the top.
I turned the screen around and held it up to him with both cuffed hands.
The most recent entry:
Session started 1:58 a.m. Ended 2:24 a.m. Left: 2.0 oz. Right: 2.5 oz. Total: 4.5 oz.
He leaned down and looked at it.
“Tap it,” I said. “Tap the session. It shows the location.”
He tapped it. A little map came up. A blue dot. On my mother’s house on Glenwood Avenue. With a time stamp and a note: Recorded via phone GPS.
From the guest room. The app uses my phone’s location.
The crash was at 2:15.
At 2:15, I was sitting on my mother’s guest bed with a pump attached to my chest. In the dark. With the little night light on. Watching Arlo sleep in his bassinet. Listening to the motor go whirr-click, whirr-click.
I remember that session. Arlo had fed at midnight and fallen asleep, and I was full and aching, so I got up at two to pump so I could leave a bottle for my mother for the morning feed. So I could sleep.
I didn’t hear the car leave. The pump is loud.
Sergeant Ward looked at the screen for a long time.
He scrolled up. He looked at the session before it. Ten-forty p.m. Same location. He scrolled down. The next one. Five-thirty the evening before. Same location. Every session for nineteen days. All logged. All timed. All located.
Then he looked up from the phone.
He looked at my mother, standing on the lawn in her pink robe.
And at Kenzie, on the porch, holding my son.
“Ma’am,” he said to Kenzie. Loud enough to carry across the yard. “Would you mind if we checked the driver’s seat position in the car? And swabbed the airbag for DNA?”
Kenzie went pale.
She’s five foot two. I’m five foot ten.
When I drive my CR-V, I have the seat pushed all the way back. When Kenzie drives it, she has to pull it all the way forward to reach the pedals. Every time she borrowed it that week, I had to readjust it.
And an airbag that deploys in your face leaves your skin cells on it. Your sweat. Your breath. Your makeup. Sometimes your blood.
My mother grabbed Kenzie’s arm.
She went up the porch steps fast, in her slippers, and grabbed her by the arm above the elbow. Hard. I saw Kenzie flinch.
“Don’t say anything,” my mother said. Loud enough that I heard it from the car. “Kenzie, don’t say anything without a lawyer.”
Arlo was still screaming in Kenzie’s arms.
Sergeant Ward’s radio crackled.
He turned his head. He pressed the button on his shoulder.
“Ward. Go ahead.”
A dispatcher’s voice. Crackly, hard to hear from the back of the car. I only caught pieces. Knoxville. Parked vehicle. Second occupant. St. Francis. Trauma.
He listened. His face changed.
I watched it happen. It went still and hard, like water freezing.
He reached into the back of the patrol car. He took the little key off his belt.
He took off my handcuffs.
“Go get your baby, ma’am,” he said quietly.
I got out of the car. My legs were shaking. My feet were numb from the cold.
He didn’t look at me. He was looking at the porch.
Then he turned back to my sister, and his voice was different now. Cold.
“Ms. Dunleavy,” he said. “The parked car that was hit tonight wasn’t empty.”
Kenzie froze.
The whole yard froze. My mother. Officer Preston. Mrs. Henderson in her front window across the street.
“There was a seventeen-year-old girl asleep in the back seat,” Sergeant Ward said. “Waiting for her mother to finish a night shift.”
He paused.
“She’s in surgery right now,” he said. “At St. Francis. They don’t know if she’s going to make it.”
Chapter Four: The Favorite
Kenzie dropped my son.
Not all the way. Her arms went slack. Arlo started to slide. I was already running up the porch steps. I caught him before he slipped. I pulled him against my chest. He was screaming so hard he couldn’t breathe.
I held him. I bounced him. I put my face against his hot little head.
Behind me, I heard Kenzie make a sound. A sound I’d never heard a human being make. Like something tearing.
“Oh my God,” she said. “Oh my God. Oh my God. There was nobody in it. There was nobody in it. I looked. I looked.”
My mother was still holding her arm.
“Kenzie,” she said sharply. “Stop talking. Right now.”
Kenzie didn’t stop.
“I looked,” she said to Sergeant Ward. Crying now. Shaking. “I got out and I looked. It was dark. There was nobody in the front seat. I swear to God, I didn’t see anybody.”
“Ms. Dunleavy,” Sergeant Ward said. “I’m going to read you your rights now.”
I need to tell you about my sister.
So you understand. Not so you forgive her. I’m not asking anybody to forgive her. I’m still not sure I have.
But so you understand how a twenty-four-year-old nursing student ends up crashing her sister’s car into a parked Corolla at two in the morning and driving away. And how our mother ends up standing on her own front lawn in a pink bathrobe, telling the police her postpartum daughter did it.
Kenzie was born when I was six.
I remember the day she came home from the hospital. My father carried her in from the car in a pink car seat. My mother walked behind him, slow and sore. They set the car seat down on the living room rug and I knelt beside it and looked at her.
She was the most beautiful thing I’d ever seen. Tiny and pink and perfect, with a little tuft of blonde hair.
“This is your sister,” my father said. “You’re going to take care of her.”
I took that seriously. I was six. I took everything seriously.
My father died when I was fourteen.
A heart attack. At forty-four. At his desk at the Caterpillar plant, where he’d worked as an engineer for twenty years. A coworker found him slumped over his keyboard.
Kenzie was eight.
After that, everything changed.
My mother didn’t get out of bed for two months. I made Kenzie’s breakfast and walked her to school and helped her with her homework and put her to bed at night. I paid the electric bill out of my father’s checkbook, forging my mother’s signature, because she wouldn’t open the mail. I was fourteen.
When my mother finally got up, she clung to Kenzie. Like Kenzie was the last piece of my father she had left. Kenzie had his blonde hair and his blue eyes and his laugh.
I had his chin. That was all.
After that, Kenzie could do no wrong.
When she broke my mother’s crystal vase at twelve, playing indoor softball, my mother said I should have been watching her. When she failed algebra at fifteen, my mother said the teacher had it out for her. When she got caught with vodka in her water bottle at sixteen, at a football game, my mother said it was a friend’s, and drove to the school and yelled at the principal until he dropped the suspension.
I was at the University of Illinois by then. My mother called me to complain about the principal. She didn’t mention the vodka until I asked.
“Everybody makes mistakes, Marisa,” she said. “You’ve always been so hard on her.”
And me?
I was always fine. I was the responsible one. The one who didn’t need anything. I got scholarships. I worked two jobs through college. I got my degree in accounting. I got a good job. I married a good man. I paid my own bills.
When I got married, my mother cried at the wedding and told everybody how proud she was. Then she spent the reception talking about how Kenzie was going to be a nurse.
When I told her I was pregnant, she said, “Oh, that’s nice. Did you hear Kenzie got into the BSN program at Bradley?”
I’m not telling you this to make my mother sound like a monster. She isn’t. She’s a widow who lost her husband at forty and spent the next twenty years terrified of losing anything else.
I’m telling you so you understand what I saw on that front lawn at four in the morning.
My mother, holding my sister’s arm. Telling her not to talk. Telling her to get a lawyer.
Not one word to me. Not one word about the girl in surgery at St. Francis.
Chapter Five: Three Weeks
I wasn’t supposed to be at my mother’s house that night.
I was supposed to be at my own house. A little brick ranch in the Peoria Heights neighborhood, with a crib my husband built himself in the nursery and a rocking chair we bought at an estate sale.
But eleven days after Arlo was born, my husband got called away.
Wes is a sergeant in the Illinois Army National Guard. A combat engineer. He’s been in for eleven years. Most of the time it’s one weekend a month and two weeks in the summer.
But the week Arlo came home, his unit got orders for a three-week training exercise at Fort McCoy in Wisconsin. Mandatory. No exceptions.
He tried to get out of it. He talked to his commander. He talked to the chaplain. They said there was nothing they could do. Training dates were set by the state. He’d have to go.
He cried in our driveway the morning he left. Holding Arlo. Then he handed him to me and got in his truck and drove away.
My mother offered to let me stay with her so I’d have help.
That’s what she said. On the phone, the day Wes left. “Come stay with me, honey. You can’t do this alone. You just had surgery. Let me help.”
I didn’t want to. I knew how it would be. But I’d had a C-section. I couldn’t lift anything heavier than Arlo for six weeks. I couldn’t drive for two. I could barely get out of bed by myself.
So I packed a bag and a bassinet and the breast pump and moved into my mother’s guest room.
My younger sister, Kenzie, lives there too.
She’s twenty-four. She’s in the final year of the nursing program at Bradley University. She does her clinicals at St. Francis Medical Center, three days a week. She’s supposed to graduate in December and sit for her NCLEX boards in March.
She’s my mother’s favorite. She has always been my mother’s favorite.
She doesn’t pay rent. She doesn’t buy groceries. My mother pays her tuition with the life insurance money from my father. And she uses my mother’s car, which is a 2008 Buick with a transmission that slips.
Kenzie doesn’t have a car. She’d been “borrowing” mine all week.
She asked the first day. “Can I take your car to clinicals? Mom’s Buick is making that noise again.”
I said yes. I couldn’t drive it anyway. I was still two weeks out from being cleared.
So she took it. Monday. Tuesday. Wednesday. She’d take my keys out of my purse on the kitchen counter in the morning and bring them back at night.
On Thursday, she brought it back at eleven at night.
I was up feeding Arlo. I heard her come in. I heard her drop my keys on the counter. I heard her laugh at something on her phone.
The next morning, when I went out to the car to get Arlo’s diaper bag, it smelled like cigarettes. And something else. Sweet and sharp. Like fruit and alcohol.
There was an empty can of White Claw under the passenger seat.
I picked it up. I held it. I put it in the recycling bin in the garage.
I didn’t say anything. I was too tired. I told myself I’d talk to her about it later.
On Friday night, she went out.
She told my mother she was going to a study group. For her pharmacology final. At a friend’s apartment on the north side.
She didn’t ask to borrow my car that night. I remember that. She’d asked every other night. But that night, she just said, “I’ll get an Uber.”
I fed Arlo at midnight. I put him in the bassinet. I left my keys in my purse on the kitchen counter, the way I always did.
I went to sleep.
At 1:58, I woke up full and aching. Arlo was still asleep. I hooked up the pump. I sat on the edge of the guest bed in the dark with the little night light on.
Whirr-click. Whirr-click.
I didn’t hear the front door. I didn’t hear the garage. I didn’t hear my car start.
I just sat there in the dark, pumping, thinking about Wes in a barracks in Wisconsin, counting the days.
Nineteen more.
Chapter Six: Statements
They took Kenzie in the patrol car I’d just gotten out of.
In handcuffs. Behind her back. She didn’t have stitches to worry about. She was crying so hard she couldn’t walk straight. Officer Preston had to hold her up.
My mother stood on the lawn in her pink robe and screamed at them. “She’s a nursing student! She has her boards in March! You’re ruining her life! It was an accident!”
Sergeant Ward ignored her. He put Kenzie in the back of the car.
Then he came back up the porch steps to me.
“Ma’am,” he said. “I’m sorry about the cuffs.”
“You were doing your job.”
“I was,” he said. “But I’m sorry anyway.” He looked at Arlo, finally asleep against my shoulder, exhausted from screaming. “I’ve got two of my own. I know what three weeks looks like.”
He took out his notebook.
“I’m going to need a formal statement,” he said. “Not tonight. Tomorrow. Down at the station on Southwest Adams. And I’m going to need a copy of that app data. Can you export it?”
“Yes,” I said. “It’ll export to a spreadsheet. Every session for nineteen days. With timestamps and GPS coordinates.”
He almost smiled. “You do this for a living?”
“Payroll,” I said. “I do it for a living.”
Then he looked past me. At my mother. Standing on the lawn with her arms crossed and her robe pulled tight. Glaring at him.
“Mrs. Dunleavy,” he said. “I’m going to need a statement from you as well. A real one. And I want you to understand something before you give it.”
My mother lifted her chin.
“In Illinois,” Sergeant Ward said, “knowingly giving false information to a police officer to protect someone who committed a crime is obstructing justice. That’s a felony. Class 4. Up to three years.” He paused. “So I’d think very hard about what you saw from your bedroom window at two o’clock this morning.”
My mother’s face went white.
She opened her mouth. She closed it. She looked at the patrol car, where Kenzie was crying in the back seat with her forehead against the cage.
Then she looked at me.
I held Arlo against my shoulder. I didn’t look away.
“I need to call a lawyer,” my mother said finally. In a very small voice.
“That’s your right, ma’am,” Sergeant Ward said.
He went back down the porch steps. He got in the patrol car. He drove away with my sister in the back.
My mother and I stood in her front hallway.
Neither of us said anything for a long time. The front door was still open. Cold air coming in. The street dark again, now that the lights were gone. Mrs. Henderson’s porch light went off across the road.
Then my mother turned to me.
“I hope you’re happy,” she said.
I looked at her.
“There’s a seventeen-year-old girl in surgery,” I said. “At St. Francis. Where Kenzie does her clinicals.”
My mother flinched.
“And you told the police I did it,” I said. “You stood in this hallway and told them I was so crazy from having a baby that I took my car out at two in the morning and hit somebody and drove away.” My voice was shaking. “And then you came out to that police car and asked me to take it.”
“Marisa…”
“I’m going to pack my things,” I said. “And I’m going to call a friend to come get me. And I’m going to take my son home.”
I called Dana. My best friend from work. She answered on the second ring at four-forty in the morning.
“Marisa? What’s wrong? Is it Arlo?”
“I need you to come get me,” I said. “At my mom’s. Right now. Can you?”
She didn’t ask one question. “I’ll be there in fifteen minutes.”
I packed in the guest room. Diapers. Onesies. The breast pump. The little cooler of frozen milk bags. Arlo’s blankets.
When I came downstairs with the bag, my mother was sitting at the kitchen table. With my purse in front of her. With my car keys. No. My keys were gone. Kenzie had them. The police had them now.
My mother was just staring at my empty purse.
“I didn’t hear the car,” she said. Not to me. To the purse. “I didn’t hear it leave. I was asleep. I never saw anything from my window.”
I stopped in the kitchen doorway.
“I heard Kenzie come in at two-thirty,” my mother said. “I heard her crying in the shower. I went in and she told me. She said she hit something on Knoxville. She said nobody was hurt.” My mother put her face in her hands. “She said, Mom, if they find out, I’ll never be a nurse. And I thought, Marisa’s always fine. Marisa can handle it.”
I stood there with my son on my shoulder and my bag in my hand.
“Mom,” I said. “I’m not fine.”
Then Dana’s headlights swept across the front window. And I went out the door.
Chapter Seven: Imani
Her name was Imani Brooks.
I found out from the news. Not from the police. From the WMBD morning broadcast, at six-thirty, on Dana’s couch, with Arlo asleep on my chest.
A seventeen-year-old Peoria High School senior was critically injured early this morning in a hit-and-run on Knoxville Avenue. Police say Imani Brooks was asleep in the back seat of her mother’s parked car outside the St. Francis Medical Center employee lot when it was struck by a vehicle that fled the scene.
They showed a picture. Her school picture. A pretty Black girl with long braids and big gold hoop earrings, smiling at the camera. Wearing a Peoria High Lions cheerleading jacket.
A twenty-four-year-old Peoria woman has been arrested in connection with the crash. Police have not released her name pending formal charges.
I turned off the TV.
Her mother was a CNA. A certified nursing assistant. She worked nights on the cardiac floor at St. Francis. Seven p.m. to seven a.m.
Imani didn’t have a license yet. Her mother didn’t want her alone in their apartment overnight on the East Bluff. There’d been break-ins on their street. So on nights when her mother worked, Imani came with her. She’d sleep in the back seat of her mother’s Toyota Corolla in the employee parking lot. With the doors locked and a blanket and a pillow.
She’d been doing it for two years. Her mother would come out on her break at two and check on her.
That night, her break got pushed back. A patient coded. She didn’t come out at two.
At 2:15, my silver Honda CR-V came down Knoxville Avenue too fast. Jumped the curb. Took out a mailbox. And hit the Corolla on the driver’s side rear door. Right where Imani was sleeping.
I didn’t sleep that day. I couldn’t.
I pumped at noon. I logged it. I pumped at three. I logged it. I held Arlo and stared at the wall of Dana’s living room.
At four o’clock, I asked Dana if she could watch him for an hour.
“Where are you going?” she asked.
“St. Francis,” I said.
I’d been there before. That’s where Arlo was supposed to be born, before my OB moved my C-section to Methodist.
The trauma surgery waiting room is on the third floor. Gray carpet. Blue vinyl chairs. A TV in the corner playing a cooking show with the sound off.
There was a woman sitting alone in the corner by the window.
She was maybe forty-five. Black. Heavy-set, with short gray hair. She was still in her scrubs. Blue scrubs, the kind the CNAs wear, with a badge clipped to the pocket. She had a cup of vending machine coffee in both hands. She wasn’t drinking it.
I knew who she was before I read the badge.
TANYA BROOKS, CNA. CARDIAC.
I stood in the doorway of that waiting room for a long time.
I didn’t know what I was going to say. I didn’t know if I should say anything. I didn’t know if she knew whose car it was. If she knew my name.
Then she looked up.
She looked at me. A tall white woman in yoga pants and a big sweatshirt, standing in the doorway of the trauma waiting room. Leaking through my bra.
“Can I help you, honey?” she asked. Her voice was tired. So tired.
I walked over. I sat down in the chair next to her. Not too close.
“My name is Marisa Dunleavy,” I said. “It was my car.”
She went very still.
“I wasn’t driving it,” I said quickly. “My sister was. She took it without asking. I was asleep. With my baby. I’m three weeks postpartum.”
Tanya Brooks didn’t say anything. She stared at me.
“The police arrested me first,” I said. “Because my mother and my sister told them I did it. And then I showed them my breast pump app. It had a timestamp. I was pumping in my mother’s guest room when it happened.”
I took a breath.
“I’m so sorry,” I said. “I don’t know what else to say. I’m so sorry.”
She looked at me for a long time.
Then she looked down at the coffee in her hands.
“Your sister,” she said slowly. “What’s her name?”
“Kenzie,” I said. “Mackenzie Dunleavy.”
Tanya Brooks closed her eyes.
“Nursing student,” she said. “Bradley. She does her clinicals on my floor. Third floor cardiac. Tuesdays and Thursdays.”
I couldn’t breathe.
“I’ve been training her,” Tanya said. “Since August. How to turn a patient. How to change a bed with somebody in it. How to talk to families when somebody’s dying.” She opened her eyes. They were wet. “She’s good. She’s real good with the old ones. Patient. Gentle. I told her she was going to be a great nurse.”
We sat there for a long time without saying anything.
The cooking show on the TV ended. Another one started.
“How is she?” I asked finally. “Imani?”
“Ruptured spleen,” Tanya said. “They took it out. Broken pelvis. Three places. Collapsed lung. Head injury. They had to drill a hole in her skull to let the pressure out.” Her voice cracked. “She’s been in surgery eleven hours. They said if she makes it through the night, she’s got a chance.”
“I’m so sorry.”
“She was asleep,” Tanya said. “In the back seat. With her pillow. I was supposed to check on her at two.” She put her coffee down on the floor. She put her face in her hands. “A patient coded. Mr. Haskins in 312. I was doing compressions. I didn’t get out to the car till two-forty.”
Chapter Eight: The Phone Calls
Imani made it through the night.
And the next one. And the next one. She was in the pediatric ICU at St. Francis for nine days. On a ventilator for four. Then off. Then awake. Then talking.
I didn’t go back. I didn’t think I had the right.
But Tanya Brooks texted me. On the fourth day. I’d given her my number in the waiting room, on the back of a vending machine receipt, in case she needed anything.
She’s awake. She asked for her phone.
I sat on my own couch in my own house in Peoria Heights and cried for an hour.
My mother called me every day.
The first few days, she screamed. That I’d betrayed my family. That I’d thrown my sister to the wolves. That a real sister would have kept her mouth shut. That I’d always been jealous.
I didn’t answer. I let it go to voicemail. I listened to every one, because I’m a payroll specialist and I keep records.
Then the calls changed.
The State’s Attorney’s Office charged Kenzie on day five.
Aggravated driving under the influence, causing great bodily harm. Leaving the scene of an accident involving personal injury. Both Class 4 felonies in Illinois. Plus a misdemeanor for giving false information to a police officer.
Her blood alcohol, from the blood draw they did at the station at 5:30 a.m., was 0.06. Three hours and fifteen minutes after the crash. The State’s toxicologist calculated it back. At 2:15 a.m., she was somewhere between 0.11 and 0.13.
The legal limit is 0.08.
My mother was charged on day eight. Obstructing justice. For telling Sergeant Ward she saw me leave.
She wasn’t arrested. They sent her a summons in the mail. She called me that night, crying.
“Marisa,” she said. “Please. You have to tell them I was confused. That I was half asleep. That I thought it was you.”
“You weren’t confused, Mom.”
“I’m sixty-one years old,” she said. “I’ve never even had a parking ticket. They’re going to put me in prison.”
“They’re not going to put you in prison.”
“How do you know?”
“Because I called a lawyer,” I said. “For myself. To ask what happens to you. She said first offense, no record, they’ll offer you supervision. A year. Maybe community service.”
My mother was quiet on the line.
“You called a lawyer,” she said. “About me.”
“Yes.”
“Why?”
I didn’t answer for a long time.
“Because you’re my mother,” I said finally.
Then there was the insurance.
A man named Greg from State Farm called me on day six. My car insurance company. He was very polite. He’d been doing this for twenty-two years.
“Ms. Dunleavy,” he said. “I need to ask you some questions about your sister’s use of the vehicle.”
I told him everything. That she’d borrowed it Monday through Thursday with my permission, to go to clinicals. That she didn’t ask on Friday. That she took the keys out of my purse while I was asleep.
“That matters,” Greg said carefully. “Here’s the thing. In Illinois, your policy covers anybody driving your car with your permission. Express or implied. Your sister had permission to use the car all week. A court might find she had implied permission on Friday too.”
“She took it while I was asleep.”
“I know,” Greg said. “And that might mean she didn’t. We’ll have to investigate.” He paused. “If she was a permissive driver, your liability coverage pays the Brooks family. Up to your limits. A hundred thousand per person.”
I closed my eyes.
“Imani’s medical bills are already over two hundred thousand,” I said. “Tanya told me. Before the rehab even starts.”
“Yes, ma’am,” Greg said quietly. “That’s why your sister’s going to need a lawyer for more than the criminal case.”
Chapter Nine: Kenzie
Kenzie called me on day twelve.
From my mother’s house. She’d been released on bond the second day. My mother put up the ten percent. Five thousand dollars, out of my father’s life insurance.
I almost didn’t answer. I looked at her name on my phone for a long time. Then I picked up.
“Marisa,” she said. Her voice was hoarse. Like she’d been crying for twelve days. “Can I come see you? Please. Just for a minute. I need to tell you something.”
She came to my house that afternoon. Our house. In Peoria Heights.
My mother drove her. She didn’t get out of the car. She sat at the curb in her old Buick with the engine running.
Kenzie came up my front walk alone. She was wearing sweatpants and an old Bradley sweatshirt. No makeup. Her blonde hair in a messy bun. She looked like she’d lost ten pounds in twelve days.
She stood on my porch. She didn’t knock. I opened the door before she could.
We sat in my living room. Me on the couch with Arlo asleep on my chest. Her in Wes’s recliner, perched on the very edge of it, like she might have to run.
She didn’t say anything for a long time. She looked at Arlo.
“He’s gotten bigger,” she said.
“Eight pounds, eleven ounces,” I said. “Yesterday.”
She nodded. Her chin was shaking.
“I didn’t look,” she said finally.
I waited.
“I told the cop I looked,” she said. “In the back seat. I told him I got out and looked and there was nobody there.” She shook her head. “I didn’t. I didn’t get out of the car. I hit it and I felt it and I heard it and I backed up and I drove away. I didn’t even look.”
She put her face in her hands.
“There was a girl in the back seat,” she said through her fingers. “Asleep. With a pillow. And I didn’t even look.”
I didn’t say anything. I held Arlo. I let her cry.
“I failed my pharmacology final,” she said, after a while. “On Thursday. The day before. I needed an eighty to pass the course. I got a sixty-two. I’m going to have to retake it. In the spring. I won’t graduate in December. I won’t sit for boards in March.”
“Kenzie…”
“I didn’t tell Mom,” she said. “I couldn’t. She’s spent all of Dad’s life insurance on my school. Every semester. She tells everybody at church I’m going to be a nurse. And I failed.”
She looked up at me.
“So I went to a party,” she said. “On the north side. Not a study group. A party. And I drank four White Claws and two shots of Fireball. And then everybody was leaving and my Uber was going to be forty dollars and I had eleven dollars in my bank account.” She wiped her face. “So I walked home. And I took your keys out of your purse. And I went back to the party in your car.”
“I was driving home on Knoxville,” she said. “And I looked at my phone. Just for a second. I was texting Mom that I’d be home soon. That study group ran late.”
She was sobbing now.
“I was lying to her,” she said. “At the exact second I hit that car. I was typing a lie to Mom.”
I held my son and watched my little sister cry in my husband’s recliner.
The baby I knelt beside on the living room rug when I was six. This is your sister. You’re going to take care of her.
“Kenzie,” I said quietly. “Why did you say it was me? When the police came?”
She didn’t answer for a long time.
“Because Mom told me to,” she said finally. “In the bathroom. At two-thirty. When I came home and got in the shower to get the smell off.” She looked at me. “She came in and I told her. And she said, Don’t say anything. Let me handle it. And then the cops came. And she said, Marisa was driving. And she looked at me. And I just…” She stopped. “I said what she wanted. Like I always do.”
“That’s not an excuse,” she said. “I know it’s not. I’m twenty-four. I’m a grown woman.”
“No,” I said. “It’s not an excuse.”
“I’m going to plead guilty,” she said. “My lawyer says I can go to trial. Say the app’s not reliable. Say Mom’s testimony is confusing. Fight it.” She shook her head. “I’m not going to fight it. I did it.”
“What does that mean? For you?”
“Probation, probably. First offense. Maybe some jail time. Thirty days. Maybe more because of the injury.” Her voice cracked. “And no nursing license. Ever, probably. The Illinois board won’t license somebody with a felony DUI causing injury. Not for years. Maybe not ever.”
She stood up. She came over to the couch. She knelt down in front of me. On the rug.
“Marisa,” she said. “I’m sorry. For saying it was you. For taking your car. For all of it. For my whole life.”
She reached out and touched Arlo’s foot. Very gently. With one finger.
“And I’m sorry for Imani,” she said. “I’m going to be sorry for Imani for the rest of my life.”
Chapter Ten: Court
The plea hearing was in January. Peoria County Courthouse. Courtroom 403. On a gray Tuesday morning with snow coming down outside the tall windows.
I went. Wes came with me. He’d been home from Fort McCoy for two months.
He held my hand the whole time.
Kenzie stood at the defense table in a navy blue dress my mother bought her at Kohl’s. Her hair was pulled back. No makeup. She looked about fifteen.
She pleaded guilty to aggravated DUI causing great bodily harm and leaving the scene of an accident involving personal injury. The State dropped the false information charge as part of the deal.
The judge was a woman named Patricia Okonkwo. She’d been on the bench for nineteen years. She read the presentence report for a long time before she said anything.
Then she asked if the victim’s family wanted to make a statement.
Tanya Brooks stood up in the second row.
She was wearing her church clothes. A purple dress and a black coat. She walked to the podium slowly. She held a piece of paper in her hand. She didn’t look at it.
“Your Honor,” she said. “My name is Tanya Brooks. I’m Imani’s mother.”
She talked for six minutes.
About the night of the crash. About Mr. Haskins coding in Room 312 and her doing compressions while her daughter lay bleeding in a parking lot. About getting to the car at two-forty and finding it crushed and her daughter gone, already in the ER, already on the table.
About nine days in pediatric ICU. Four on a ventilator. About Imani waking up and asking for her phone.
About the rehab. Three months at OSF’s inpatient rehabilitation unit, learning to walk again with a broken pelvis. About the scar on Imani’s head where they drilled the hole. About cheerleading tryouts in the spring that she wouldn’t be able to do.
Then she looked at Kenzie.
“I trained you,” she said. “Since August. Third floor cardiac. Tuesdays and Thursdays. I taught you how to turn a patient so they don’t get bedsores. I taught you how to talk to a family when their mama’s dying.”
Kenzie was crying silently at the defense table.
“I told you you were going to be a great nurse,” Tanya said. Her voice broke. “And I meant it. I still do.”
The courtroom was silent.
“I don’t want you to go to prison,” Tanya said. “Imani doesn’t either. We talked about it. Prison won’t fix her pelvis. It won’t fix her head.” She took a breath. “But I want you to know her name. I want you to say it every day. Imani Brooks. I want you to never, ever forget it.”
Then she went back to her seat.
Judge Okonkwo looked at Kenzie for a long time.
“Ms. Dunleavy,” she said. “Do you have anything to say before I sentence you?”
Kenzie stood up. She turned around. She looked at Tanya Brooks in the second row.
“Imani Brooks,” she said. Her voice was shaking. “Imani Brooks. Imani Brooks.”
She turned back to the judge.
“I’ll say it every day,” she said. “For the rest of my life.”
Judge Okonkwo sentenced her to thirty months of probation. Ninety days in the Peoria County Jail, to be served on weekends, so she could keep working. A thousand hours of community service. Alcohol treatment. And restitution to the Brooks family, in an amount to be set by the court, to cover what insurance didn’t.
Then she did something else.
“And Ms. Dunleavy,” she said. “I’m ordering that your community service be completed at OSF St. Francis Medical Center. In any capacity the hospital deems appropriate. Not as a nursing student. As a volunteer.”
Kenzie looked up.
“You wanted to take care of patients,” the judge said. “Go take care of them. Without the license. Without the title. Without anybody telling you you’re going to be great.” She paused. “Just take care of them. And see if that’s still what you want.”
My mother’s case was resolved the next week.
She pleaded guilty to obstructing justice. The State’s Attorney agreed to court supervision. Twelve months. If she stayed out of trouble, the conviction would be dismissed and wouldn’t go on her record. Two hundred hours of community service.
She did hers at the Peoria Rescue Mission. Serving lunch.
She hasn’t missed a shift.
Chapter Eleven: After
State Farm paid the Brooks family a hundred thousand dollars. My liability limit. Greg called me the week after Kenzie’s plea.
“We determined your sister was a permissive driver,” he said. “Implied permission. Because she’d been using the car all week and you’d never told her she couldn’t.” He paused. “I’m sorry, Ms. Dunleavy. Your rates are going to go up. Probably for five years.”
“That’s okay,” I said.
“The Brooks family’s medical bills are about three hundred and forty thousand,” he said. “Their own health insurance through St. Francis covered most of it. But there’s a big gap. And the rehab, and the lost wages, and the pain and suffering.” He paused. “Your sister’s going to be paying restitution for a long time.”
“I know.”
Kenzie got a job in February. At the Hy-Vee on War Memorial Drive. Stocking shelves, nights. She gives forty percent of every paycheck to the Brooks family through the court clerk.
She does her community service at St. Francis three days a week. They put her in the patient transport department. Pushing wheelchairs. Moving gurneys. Taking people from their rooms to X-ray and back.
She told me once she likes it.
“Nobody knows who I am,” she said. “They just see the scrubs. And I push them down the hall and I talk to them. And sometimes they hold my hand.”
She serves her jail time on weekends. Friday at six p.m. to Sunday at six p.m. At the Peoria County Jail on Main Street.
My mother drives her there every Friday. And picks her up every Sunday.
She sits in the parking lot for a few minutes after Kenzie goes in. In the Buick. With the engine running.
I know because I drove past once. On my way home from Target. I saw the Buick in the jail parking lot. I saw my mother behind the wheel.
She had her hands over her face.
My mother and I don’t talk much.
She calls on Sundays. After she picks up Kenzie. She asks about Arlo. She asks about Wes. She doesn’t ask about me.
I don’t push her.
At Christmas, she gave Arlo a stuffed bear. And she gave me a card. Inside, in her handwriting, it said:
I’m sorry I said you were always fine. You never were. You just never asked. That was my fault, not yours. Love, Mom.
I put it in my desk drawer at work. With my records.
Wes came home from Fort McCoy nineteen days after the crash. I met him in the driveway with Arlo.
I told him everything. Standing in the driveway in the November cold. The pounding on the door. The handcuffs. My mother at the patrol car window. The app.
He listened without saying a word. When I was done, he stood there holding his son, looking at me.
“You were in handcuffs,” he said slowly. “On the porch. Three weeks after a C-section.”
“Yes.”
“And you didn’t scream. You didn’t cry.”
“I was too tired,” I said.
“And you showed a cop your breast pump app,” he said.
“Yes.”
He shook his head. Then he started laughing. And then crying. And then laughing again. He held Arlo against his chest and put his other arm around me and held on.
“I married a payroll specialist,” he said into my hair. “Best decision I ever made.”
Chapter Twelve: Commencement
In June, Imani Brooks graduated from Peoria High School.
Tanya texted me in May. Just a picture. The graduation invitation, cream-colored, with Imani’s senior picture on the front. Braids. Gold hoop earrings. A cane in her hand, held casually, like a prop.
Under the picture, Tanya wrote: She wants you there. And your sister.
I didn’t know what to do with that. I stared at it on my phone for a long time.
Then I called Kenzie.
She was quiet on the line for so long I thought the call dropped.
“She wants me there?” she said finally. “Me?”
“That’s what Tanya said.”
“Marisa, I can’t. I can’t show my face. Not after what I did.”
“She asked for you,” I said. “By name.”
The ceremony was at the Peoria Civic Center. Four hundred and twelve graduates. Same number as the people I pay every two weeks. I noticed that.
Wes and I sat in the upper bleachers with Arlo on my lap. He was eight months old. He’d just learned to clap. He clapped for everybody.
Kenzie sat next to me. In a plain black dress. She held her hands in her lap. They were shaking the whole time.
My mother sat on her other side.
She came. I didn’t ask her to. Kenzie did. My mother didn’t argue.
They called the names alphabetically. It took a long time.
Then: “Imani Danielle Brooks.”
The whole Civic Center stood up.
I mean that. I don’t know why. Maybe because everybody in Peoria had seen her face on the news in October. Maybe because her cheerleading squad started screaming. Maybe because of the cane.
She walked across that stage. Slowly. With her cane in her right hand. In a red cap and gown with a gold honor cord around her neck. Her braids hanging down her back.
She didn’t need the cane. Not really. Not anymore. You could tell. She was carrying it more than using it.
She shook the principal’s hand. She took her diploma. She turned to face the crowd.
And she held the cane up over her head. Like a trophy.
The Civic Center roared.
Next to me, Kenzie made a sound. She put both hands over her mouth. She was sobbing so hard her whole body shook.
My mother put her arm around her. Then, after a second, she reached over and put her other hand on my arm.
I let her.
Afterward, we found them outside. On the plaza in front of the Civic Center. In the June sun. Imani in her red gown, surrounded by cheerleaders and cousins and aunts and a grandmother in a big church hat.
Tanya saw us first. She came over. She hugged me. Then she hugged Arlo, who grabbed her earring.
Then she turned to Kenzie.
They looked at each other for a long time.
“You came,” Tanya said.
“You asked,” Kenzie whispered.
Imani came over. Slowly. Leaning on her cane a little more now, tired from the stage and the crowd.
She stopped in front of my sister.
She was taller than Kenzie. Five foot eight. She looked down at her.
Kenzie couldn’t look up. She stared at the ground. She was shaking.
“My mom says you push wheelchairs now,” Imani said. “At St. Francis.”
Kenzie nodded. She couldn’t talk.
“And she says you say my name,” Imani said. “Every day. When she sees you in the hallway. You walk past her and you say it under your breath.”
Kenzie nodded again.
Imani looked at her for a long moment.
Then she held out her diploma. The red leather folder. Peoria High School. Imani Danielle Brooks.
“Hold this,” she said. “I need both hands.”
Kenzie took it. Confused.
And Imani Brooks, seventeen years old, with a scar on her head and a cane in her hand and four pins in her pelvis, put both arms around my sister and held on.
I stood there on the Civic Center plaza with my son on my hip and my husband’s hand on my back and watched them.
My mother was crying beside me. Tanya was crying. Imani’s grandmother in the big church hat was crying.
Kenzie was crying so hard she couldn’t stand up straight. Imani held her up.
That night, after we got home, I fed Arlo and put him down in his crib. The one Wes built.
He doesn’t nurse anymore. He weaned himself in May, at eight months. Just stopped one day and reached for the sippy cup.
I packed up the breast pump the next week. The Spectra and all the tubes and flanges and bottles. I put it in a box in the basement.
But I didn’t delete the app.
I opened it that night, sitting on the edge of my bed in the dark. With the little night light on. Wes asleep beside me.
I scrolled all the way down. Past the last session in May. Past hundreds of entries. Morning, noon, night. Ounces and times and little blue dots on a map.
To October.
Session started 1:58 a.m. Ended 2:24 a.m. Total: 4.5 oz.
A little blue dot. On a guest room on Glenwood Avenue.
I looked at it for a long time.
Twenty-six minutes. Four and a half ounces. In the dark, alone, three weeks after surgery, with my husband in Wisconsin and my mother asleep down the hall and my sister on Knoxville Avenue looking at her phone.
Just a mother taking care of her baby. Logging it, because somebody told her to. Because that’s what she does.
Because the truth doesn’t need you to scream. It doesn’t need you to cry. It just needs you to write it down when it happens.
I took a screenshot of that entry. I saved it to a folder on my phone. I named the folder Arlo.
Someday, when he’s old enough, I’ll show him. I’ll tell him the whole thing. I’ll tell him about his aunt, and his grandmother, and a girl named Imani Brooks who held up a cane like a trophy.
And I’ll tell him the thing my father told me, kneeling beside a pink car seat on a living room rug when I was six.
This is your family. You’re going to take care of them.
Even when it means telling the truth about them. Especially then.
Ethan Blake is a skilled Creative Content Specialist with a talent for crafting engaging and thought-provoking narratives. With a strong background in storytelling and digital content creation, Ethan brings a unique perspective to his role at TheArchivists, where he curates and produces captivating content for a global audience.
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