My backyard neighbors own a small pink car which a toddler can ride on and push with foot power. This is Patches favorite backyard activity. He’ll sit on that car and push it around their patio for hours vigorously defending it against any incursions from their one-year-old toddler.
This evening bedtime loomed near and I advanced on Patches to begin the exhausting process of removing Small Boy from Beloved Car. As I walked toward Patches I noticed some odd-looking spots on the pavement. Lots of odd-looking spots. I leaned closer to figure out what they were, because on first glance my brain was telling me they were blood. I dismissed this impression as the influence of watching too much CSI and because there were so many of them. If a child had done that much bleeding, there would surely have been screaming as well. A closer look revealed that they weren’t so much spots as smears. I tried to picture kids throwing berries to make smears like these, but there were no available berries. Then I realized that the smears were in a pattern. They followed exactly the same around-the-picnic-table path that Patches uses for driving the pink car.
In my head I flashed back to several days ago when Patches had a mysteriously bloody toe which I only discovered because he’d tracked blood through the kitchen. I turned to look at Patches and sure enough, both of his big toes had been scraped bloody. The quantity of smears sugguested that the toes had been bleeding for the past 20 minutes or more. I picked up Patches and began carrying him home. The moment he noticed the state of his toes he imediately began crying in fear: “I bweeding!” This distress cry quickly drew the interested attention of Gleek who always finds blood fascinating and frightening. The actual scrapes were quite small. Only by continual abrasion was Patches able to spread his blood so far. After bandaging the toes and tucking the boy into bed, I wandered back to my neighbors to advise them what the splotches on their patio were and to help wash them off before the splotches became sun-bakedly permanent.
Watching CSI has definitely changed the way I think about some things. Even though the patio came relatively clean, I can now picture a CSI team with their special lights out there finding all that blood and spinning theories about spatter, and smear, and directions of dropplets. As for me, I feel oddly pleased with myself for sorting out this little evidentiary puzzle. Mommy: Child Scene Investigator.
One of my favorite stories about forensics — and I’m sorry, this doesn’t have to do with mommyhood — has to do with a colleague of the great criminalist Robert Ressler. This man was shot by an unknown assailant (later proven to be either his wife or a man his wife had hired — I forget which) in a hotel room. He survived and was later able to reconstruct events for the investigators.
Before he did so, the investigators were baffled by the blood smears on the television set, and some unexpected splashes — unexpected because they were nowhere near where the man was shot or where they found him.
When the story came out, it turned out the man woke up from his initial unconsciousness, and was bleeding slowly but wasn’t coherent enough to realize what was happening to him — he was aware of the situation but didn’t have the expected panic-let’s-fix-this reaction. Instead, he decided to watch TV and maybe have a drink. The blood smears and splashes were his own, and investigators had assumed they were left by the assailant.
And these investigators were the best of the best.
So — NICE JOB figuring out that one.