Series: Four Lives, One Last Chance - A Year In Drug Court: Part 13 Of 41

ACT II. JENNIFER: A SECOND CHANCE

Jennifer goes into the bathroom with her home pregnancy test and looks at
the instructions.

Insert the tip into the urine flow for five seconds.

Lay the stick flat.

Results in three minutes.

One line is negative. Two lines are positive.

She dips the stick and lays it down.

As she waits for the results, Jennifer is both scared and exhilarated.

She wants to have another baby, one that she can raise right and maybe make
up for the mistakes of the past. She knows she wasn't ready to have
children the first time around when she was addicted to crack. Social
services ended up taking her daughters away, and a judge severed her
parental rights more than a year ago.

She's been clean since before the judge's decision, and now Jennifer
believes she can be a good mother. But she's afraid that her two girls will
think she's trying to replace them.

These thoughts run through her mind until the three minutes expire.

She checks the stick.

Two lines - a positive.

Jennifer is pregnant.

"I don't believe it," she thinks.

She gives the results to Ben, the baby's father. They've been trying to
have a baby for months, even praying that Jennifer would get pregnant.

Now they are skeptical of the reading, so Jennifer takes another test.

"It still says I'm pregnant," she says.

"That's because you are," Ben answers.

There is little time for celebration. Seeing Ben - let alone starting a
family with him - violates a new restriction that Judge Conway imposed on
Jennifer's Drug Court enrollment.

With her custody battle still mired in the appellate courts, Jennifer must
succeed in Drug Court if she ever hopes to win back her two children.

But despite the judge's order and everything riding on her success,
Jennifer can't stop thinking about Ben - particularly because they attend
the same church and frequent the same Narcotics Anonymous meetings.

"It don't just happen overnight where you stop talking to somebody," she
laments. "We had one downfall and we're not allowed to be together."

In the winter months, Jennifer's resolve breaks down.

She writes a letter to the judge asking him to lift the ban. Her mother and
Ben also write letters, but the judge is unmoved.

So the couple take matters into their own hands. Jennifer moves to Lee Hall
- - closer to Ben's Yorktown home and farther away from Drug Court and the
parole officers - and Ben starts sneaking over to her apartment whenever he
can.

The rekindled relationship is obvious to the Drug Court staff, particularly
when Jennifer shows up one day with a hickey on her neck the size of a
baby's fist. She plays it off, half-heartedly suggesting it came from
someone other than Ben.

Ford isn't buying it.

"You wrote letters to the judge. Your mom wrote letters to the judge. Ben
wrote letters to the judge," he says.

"And we're supposed to think you got that from someone else? Yeeeah, right."

But without more concrete evidence, Ford can't prove that Jennifer and Ben
are seeing each other again.

At first, Jennifer looks over her shoulder, worried about getting caught by
Charity, her parole officer. She gets a scare one day when she sees a car
similar to his in her parking lot. But the months roll by without a visit
from Charity.

As a leader in the program, someone who has climbed through the phases
unfettered, Jennifer has earned some latitude. By spring she has been
promoted from Phase Four to the "after care" portion of the program,
attending counseling just once a week and seeing the judge just once every
two months. Charity tells Jennifer that he won't worry about Ben as long as
she stays out of trouble.

"You got one foot out the door," he says, "and one foot on the banana peel."

Still, the stress of living this double life is hard on Jennifer. One day,
while standing in her kitchen, she thinks about Ben, the stress of work and
her fears about her children.

She starts crying. Then she takes a knife from a drawer and inexplicably
starts cutting her forearm.

Again and again and again.

She calls Ben, who comes from work to care for her. The cuts leave small
scars across her skin.

They aren't deep enough to require stitches, but they are severe enough to
scare the people who care about her most. Jennifer gropes for an explanation.

"I didn't want to kill myself, because I could have. I don't know why I did
it," she says. "Maybe I was wanting some kind of attention. I don't know
what it was."

When the Drug Court counselors learn of the incident, they send her to a
psychiatrist, who tells her she was acting out suppressed emotions. He
tells her she was trying to feel physically what she couldn't feel emotionally.

Many of the suppressed emotions, Jennifer believes, come from the ban on
seeing Ben and from hiding the relationship.

"I felt like I was living a lie," Jennifer concludes.