Life in the Hot Seat

Later, the shift is over and I’m sitting on my couch. I think of what it must be like at Dori Swanson’s house. I envision a cramped mobile home, maybe one of those single-wide jobs with the rotting wooden siding and the redwood deck, about six by eight. I see the kids’ bikes that never got put away for the winter, now partially snow-covered.

Outside of the fact that she lived in a trailer, I really don’t know any of this. But I took the call; I’m involved. So I put myself there. I imagine it as it must have been, so I can grieve it, then maybe let it go.

Inside, I see the dirt-soaked beige carpet and the second-hand furniture of the Swanson family living room. I see the TV that’s always on. I see the overflowing ashtrays, and the filth, and the empty box of wine the chaplain later told me that she drank that day. I see kids’ drawings taped onto the harvest gold refrigerator. I see five lives that will never be the same. Six.

I see the bedroom where Dori killed herself, just briefly, but I don’t stay there long. I wonder if what the cops saw at the scene is more or less horrifying than the image in my head.

I check my stepdaughter and my husband in their beds, asleep. I wait for my husband’s chest to rise and then fall. I do the same with Lucy. I look around at my own family room, then at my kitchen. I scan Lucy’s drawings on the white refrigerator door.

I never met Dori Swanson, but I wish she had found something worth living for in that trailer. I cry on the couch in my living room, so I won’t have to cry in bed and wake up my husband.

I think about her boy, who is in his early teens. The chaplain said he called her a bitch just before she died. We’ll hear his name again, I’m sure. He will be what we call a “frequent flyer.”

Before I left, one of the other dispatchers gave me a hug and reminded me that we can’t change free will, and that we should pray for the kids. Before I drift off to sleep I think of the kind of gun Dori used: a double-barreled shotgun.

I think of a six-letter word for “run rapidly.”

Sprint. 

Caroline Burau is a 911 dispatch operator for the police and fire departments in White Bear Lake. She previously worked in a similar position for Ramsey County, where the episodes recounted in this excerpt took place. Names have been changed to protect individuals’ privacy.