Carol’s head shook from side to side as her black minivan drove over a pothole. Her files went flying from the passenger seat, where she had quickly placed them after walking away from what she had thought was her client’s front door. The car’s rattling shocks were useless. She had submitted the paperwork to have them fixed to the agency three weeks earlier, but a response any sooner than four weeks out was unprecedented. 

She had waited outside that front door for fifteen minutes before she called and found out that her client had moved. The napkin from the minivan’s glove compartment, where she had scribbled the new address, was resting on her thigh as she tried to copy it into the GPS mounted on the minivan’s windshield. 17 Kimball Farm Road. The machine kept suggesting other destinations—Kimball Street, Kimball Road, Kim Ave. She wanted to scream at it, but she was afraid that it had some sort of voice activation that would interpret any sound as another destination.

The struggle with the GPS was at least a distraction. From the minute her client had told her that she had moved, she couldn’t stop thinking about how audacious it was that she did not think to inform her social worker. This whole trip had been planned so that she could drive straight from her last appointment back home to her apartment one town over. Carol even called the day before to confirm the time. She couldn’t have said something about the move then? If Carol had known about the move back to Mill City, she would have scheduled it the day before so that she could visit when she had other appointments nearby. Now she would have to drive all the way back to Mill City and retrace her steps to get home. There weren’t any other options. She couldn’t reschedule. It was the last day for the required monthly visit and if she didn’t get it done that day, she’d spend the next morning filling out paperwork explaining what had happened. 

As she stopped at a red light, she was finally able to get the GPS to show her the way toward Kimball Farm Road. She began to think about the headline of the article on the Mill City Sun’s website that her supervisor had emailed to her that morning: Infant in Care of Social Service Dead from Overdose. 

She didn’t respond to the email. She assumed it was one of the regular articles that her supervisor would send out all the time whenever the work of the agency got any—almost always negative—press attention. She knew something was different when she noticed that the article had been sent only to her. When she read the name of the young victim and her mother, she knew why—it was her case. Or, really, it had been her case. Social Services had closed it based on a recommendation she had made months earlier.

The agency had been called in after the police reported that when they came to investigate a domestic incident at an apartment in Mill City, they had found an infant covered in bruises. The mother—Rose—said it was her boyfriend right away. She said he was addicted to heroin and when he couldn’t find any, he would take it out on her. That night he had started to hit her daughter, too. She said it was the first time he had ever done that. She said it was the final straw. She could handle him beating her, but not her daughter. That’s when she finally called the cops. He fled before they got there. They were both taken to an emergency room. The baby didn’t have any broken bones or signs of head trauma, but she was black and blue all over. 

The next day Carol met with Rose for the first time at the hospital. Everything she said sounded sincere. She repeated how this was the first time he had ever hit her daughter. She said that if she had ever thought he would do something like that she would never have let him anywhere near her child. 

Carol explained to her what it meant for the agency to have an open case about her child. When she was done, Rose begged her not to take her baby away. She looked so scared that Carol explained to her that it was unlikely that would happen. The agency was more concerned about keeping her and her daughter away from her boyfriend than anything else. 

Turning on the highway toward Mill City, Carol thought about how much she wished she hadn’t said that. 

Carol came to Rose’s apartment weekly at first. She was a young, single mom, and the baby was her only child. It was a difficult situation, but not much different from others she had seen. Carol thought that she was capable of taking care of everything as long as she had enough support. The first time she came, Rose was acting the same way she had in the hospital. She said that she never let her boyfriend near her daughter when he couldn’t get his fix.  Usually, she would sneak off and drive to her mother’s a town over. She promised that she was done with him and that she was going to take out a restraining order. 

Carol never even considered taking the baby away. None of the agency’s protocols suggested that a baby be taken away for something that a mother’s boyfriend had done, especially when that mother herself had been abused. There weren’t any other warning signs that she saw during the weekly visits. The house was clean, just a little disorganized. She clearly loved her daughter and hated all the time she had to leave her with her own mother when she worked. After she recovered from that night, the daughter didn’t have any marks showing abuse. So, after a few months, the weekly visits turned into visits two or three times a month, then monthly visits, and, finally, a year after the incident that started everything, she recommended that the case be closed, and it was. 

Now that baby was dead. 

As she prepared to get off the exit for Mill City, she got a text from her next client: I’m sorry I didn’t tell you about the new address. 

This girl was another young mother—Lisa. She left her eight-month-old daughter in her minivan when she went to pick up some groceries. It ended up taking longer than she expected and that baby was sitting in the car for almost a half-hour when a customer noticed her. A crowd ended up growing around the minivan to try to figure out how to get her out. 

Someone recorded the incident on their phone and the video ended up online. She watched it a few times. Some of the bystanders smashed a back window to get the baby out. The video even shows Lisa coming out and the accusations being thrown at her by the bystanders. One woman, who was handed the baby after they pulled her out of the car, refused to even hand her back to her mother. It ends when the police arrive. 

Carol read through the comments on the video after she took the case. The anonymous posters called Lisa every derogatory name out there. Bitch. Whore. Slut. Some of them got into pretty graphic detail about what they would do to her. Ideas a lot worse than leaving a baby in a car. Some weren’t as violent. They said that she should have the baby taken away or that she should be charged with one felony or another. Internet prosecutors. Do-gooders who never had to deal with any situation like this in their lives. Carol couldn’t help but think about how nice it must be to attack someone from behind a computer screen with no responsibility to actually do anything about it. She wondered how many of them thought once about Lisa or her baby after their comment was published. 

During her first visit, Carol could tell that Lisa wanted to make a point that she wasn’t like the agency’s other cases. She kept mentioning how she was taking time off from graduate school so that she could raise her daughter. Casually brought up how her husband worked for IBM. She thought that stuff mattered to them, but some of the biggest deadbeats Carol had ever seen had been some of the most well-off. 

Despite her pretensions, Lisa was still nervous as hell every time Carol came over, but she never begged like Rose did. Carol didn’t know if the nerves were because she was afraid they would take her baby away or if she thought her neighbors might see her badge or notice that she had a state license plate. Sometimes, Carol wondered which of those options she feared the most. 

That first time, she was shaking so much that she could barely unlock the door for her and, after she did, she tripped over a pair of shoes on the doormat. Carol didn’t know which clients were more annoying, the high-strung ones like Lisa who wouldn’t stop talking, trying to explain every little thing and each detail of their lives, or the ones who didn’t give a damn and acted like she was just like any Jehovah’s Witness or political campaigner coming to their door. 

After stopping at a traffic light, Carol took her phone from the minivan’s cup holder and texted Lisa: Yeah… It might have been a good idea to tell me about that. Please be ready when I arrive. 

The names of the social workers who were assigned to different cases were supposed to be confidential, but the press had found out before. Carol didn’t want to get the blame for this dead baby. She knew that she had followed protocol and acted in her best judgment. She treated them with compassion and understanding. The agency’s director was always saying that their goal was to keep families together whenever possible, but that didn’t matter in the firing line of public opinion. All that they ever knew was that something had gone wrong and someone needed to be blamed. If that someone was a public worker who they could say was leeching taxpayer money—all the better. She imagined all the comments that must be piling up on the article about the death. She had seen them before. Although she had always had sympathy for the caseworker assigned to those cases that ended in tragedy, she was also always grateful it wasn’t her. One time, she could remember the comments getting so bad that she wanted to make a fake account and respond to each point, telling the keyboard warriors that they had no idea what it was like to deal with the situations social workers dealt with every day. She never did. 

By the time she pulled on to Kimball Farm Road, she had forgotten which house number Lisa had texted. As she slowly rolled the car down the quiet, suburban street, she reached down to scroll through her messages to find the number. Sometimes it pissed her off to see the houses these people could afford. It’s true most of the people she worked with were poor or at least working class, but a lot of them weren’t. In her less charitable moments, she would wonder why, if they had the money for an inground swimming pool, they could not afford a babysitter or a book about parenting.

When she found the house number, the minivan had already reached the end of the street. She had to do a three-point turn to get back. She parked along the sidewalk next to the house’s landscaped lawn. Her files, which had been placed on the passenger’s seat, had fallen to the floor. It took a few minutes to go through them and make sure that she had the right ones. The week before, she had gotten two files from two cases mixed up and spent fifteen minutes accusing a mother of beating her daughter because a teacher had reported seeing bruises on her arm before she realized she was reading a report from another case.

With a client like Lisa, the walk to the front door was always tense. Carol could feel her watching from the front window with dread. In situations like this, she always tried to keep a neutral look on her face, but sometimes she wanted to smirk. Lisa unlocked the door as soon as Carol knocked. She had probably been waiting next to it for the past twenty minutes, ever since Carol texted her that she went to the wrong address. Carol imagined her taking a deep breath right before she opened it, so she wouldn’t think she had been standing right there. Lisa started talking before Carol had even stepped inside.

“I’m so sorry I didn’t tell you about the new address. We just moved three weeks ago and it’s been really hectic since then. I’m so sorry.”

She didn’t breathe between sentences. 

“I told you when we opened the case that it’s your responsibility to keep us informed of any moves so that we can ensure the safety of Elly.”

“I know. It won’t happen again.”

“Are you planning on moving again?”

Lisa didn’t know whether she should laugh. Carol walked past her.

“Where is she?”

“She’s upstairs, sleeping.”

“I need to see her.”

“Of course.” 

Carol started walking upstairs before Lisa even moved. Her new place was a lot bigger than the old one. It was too big for a couple and a baby. It was spotless. The smell of whatever piney chemical had been used to polish the floor was thick in the air. The windows were so clear it was like they weren’t there. Carol guessed the apartment where they had been staying when Lisa left her daughter in the car was a temporary place while they renovated this one. Even Lisa somehow gave off an antiseptic air, like she had had just come out of an autoclave. Many of her clients thought that cleanliness was a big part of the assessments, but it really didn’t matter too much. If there wasn’t mold growing in the kitchen, a trash barrel surrounded by flies, or shit on the walls, she didn’t care. It didn’t matter to her if all the magazines were in a rack and the sink was empty. 

Lisa opened the door to her daughter’s nursery. Elly was lying in her mahogany crib on a pink quilt, wrapped in a white swaddling blanket. Only her head was poking through. She looked like a cartoon butterfly beginning to emerge from its cocoon.  Carol walked over to get a closer look at her. Sometimes she would need to ask the parents to strip their children down to their diapers to make sure that there weren’t any bruises on them, but she wasn’t going to do that. Not this time. When they were this little, it was so hard to even tell that they were breathing. She had to put her hand on her belly so she could feel it rise and fall every few seconds. She could remember doing this with baby Halley just a few months ago. With her hand on Elly, she thought that if she hadn’t closed that case, she could have kept coming back and felt her breathing just like Elly was now. 

But she did close it. Had she any idea what was going on, there would have been no way in hell that little girl would have stayed in that house. If she had seen any signs that there were problems, she would have done something. But there weren’t any signs and she didn’t do anything. That was her job, she thought, to act on her best judgment. Act on the things she knew to be true. There was no way for her to know what would happen in the future. She wasn’t an oracle. She was a social worker. The state had thousands of cases every year. Statistically, there were bound to be some that didn’t work out. But why did it have to be her case? Why did it have to be Halley? 

After Carol took her hand off of Elly, she looked at Lisa. She was surprised that Lisa wasn’t looking at her, but instead had her eyes fixed on Elly. For a moment, this almost convinced Carol that she could trust her. She thought that she must love her. Before, she would have said she knew she loved her, but she would have said that about Halley’s mother too. She had forgotten how important that was. She can’t know anything. In her line of work, assumptions can leave children dead. The only thing that she could safely assume was that any parent she got a call about was potentially unfit and possibly dangerous to their children. If Lisa really did love her, how could she have left her in that car? Sweating in an oven. Alone and scared. Her excuses were useless. Lack of sleep. Being in a hurry. Bullshit. None of that mattered.

“Why are there pads on this crib?” Carol broke the silence that had lingered since they arrived in Elly’s bedroom. 

“What—what do you mean?” Lisa’s smile quickly disappeared. 

“These pink pads.” Carol tapped the side of the crib, which was covered by pink cushions with bunnies and clouds on them. 

“They’re to make sure she doesn’t bump her head on the side of the crib.” 

Carol rolled her eyes.

“For over ten years, everyone has recommended not buying these pads. They can smother your child. SIDs. Sudden. Infant. Death. Syndrome. Have you heard of that?” 

Carol waited for Lisa to say something, but she was silent, which upset her even more. 

“Take them off.”

“Now?”

“Unless you want me putting this in your file. The more mistakes you make, the longer this case is going to go on. The longer this case goes on, the more people I am going to need to make informed of it. As long as the case is open, every one of Elly’s doctors, teachers, and dentists will need to know about what you did to her so that I can be sure that she is safe. Do you want that? And remember, I have a car seat in the back seat of my car. If at any point I determine that she is not safe here, I can take her with me.”  

Lisa walked over to the crib and began to slowly untie the strings wrapped around the bars of the crib. Carol waited until the pads were removed and she had folded them and placed each on Elly’s dresser before she said anything else. 

“As I told you at our first meeting, it’s my job to assess whether you are protecting your child. If I keep seeing things like this, it’s going to be hard for me to report that you are unlikely to make any more mistakes like the one you made in the parking lot.”

Lisa started to cry.

“I’d never do anything to hurt my baby,” she sobbed. 

“You’ve already done two things to hurt her. Carelessness is just as bad as negligence or abuse.”

“Please don’t tell anyone about this.”

Carol didn’t answer her, but she began to walk out of the room with Lisa following. Before they left, she glanced at Elly, still silently sleeping in her crib. 

Lisa kept begging Carol not to report her all the way to the front door. She only stopped when Carol gave her a form to sign. 

“Our next appointment is in two weeks. Please let me know if you move again. But remember—I can always drop in before that.” 

Even as she said it, she knew she wouldn’t be back that soon.

Carol could see the tears in Lisa’s eyes when she walked out the door. She didn’t let it bother her. She was doing her job.