In some instances, they are the result of clear-cut neglect, but more often, they occur because of a change in routine - usually the father drops off at daycare but today it's the mom and she is tired or harried and forgets the kid is with her and leaves him there for hours. Their deaths (usually by suffocation), are slow, torturous, unspeakably tragic. When she'd arrived home from driving us to the airport, there was a police car in her driveway.Įvery year, 30 to 40 children, usually under the age of 6, die after being left alone in cars. My husband was waiting for us beside the baggage claim with this terrible look on his face. Sometimes I feel like I can hear something. I replay it, trying to uncover something in the recollection I hadn't noticed at the time. Over the past two years, I've replayed this moment in my mind again and again, approaching the car, getting in, looking in the rearview mirror, pulling away. I tossed the headphones onto the passenger seat and put the keys in the ignition. When I returned to the car, he was still playing his game, smiling, or more likely smirking at having gotten what he wanted from his spineless mama. He wasn't kidnapped or assaulted or forgotten or dragged across state lines by a carjacker. And then I left him in the car for about five minutes. I cracked the windows and child-locked the doors and double-clicked my keys so that the car alarm was set. And then I did something I'd never done before. I visualized how quickly, unencumbered by a tantrumming 4-year-old, I would be, running into the store, grabbing a pair of child headphones. I noted how close the parking spot was to the front door, and that there were a few other cars nearby. I noted that it was a mild, overcast, 50-degree day. For the next four or five seconds, I did what it sometimes seems I've been doing every minute of every day since having children, a constant, never-ending risk-benefit analysis. He glanced up at me, his eyes alight with what I'd come to recognize as a sort of pre-tantrum agitation. "No, no, no, no, no! I don't want to go in," he repeated, and turned back to his game. If you can't watch a movie on the flight you're going to be a very, very, very unhappy boy. "If we don't get your headphones, you won't be able to watch a movie on the flight. "Simon," I said (not his real name but the name I'll use here). I tried to make my voice both calm and firm. He was tapping animated animals on a screen, dragging them from one side to the other. "What do you mean you don't want to go in? You wanted to come." "I don't want to go in," my son said as I opened the door. I had two hours to get the headphones, get home, get my 1-year-old daughter up from her nap and fed and changed, get everyone to the airport, through security, and onto a plane. We got in my mother's minivan and drove a mile up the road, through the sleepy subdivision where I'd grown up, the sort of subdivision where kids ride bikes in cul-de-sacs and plenty of people don't bother to lock their doors, then we parked in the recently erected, nearly empty strip mall. I should have seen what was going on - my parents had been letting him play with the iPad in the car and he was trying to score the extra screen time. "You hate going to the store," I reminded him. I asked him if he was sure he didn't want to stay home with Grandma. I called across the house to my mother that I was going to run to the store to replace them. My 1-year-old daughter had just gone down for a nap when, in the process of packing, I realized that my son's headphones, the ones he used to watch a movie on the plane, had broken. We were visiting my family and I was eager to get home to my husband. I was running late because, like many parents of small children, I often find there just aren't enough hours in the day. I was worried because in a few hours' time I was going to be enduring a two-and-a-half hour flight with my kids, ages 1 and 4. The day it happened was no different from most I was worried, and I was running late.
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