Abandoned

CHAPTER EIGHT

I’m almost home and am pleased at just how much of a relief this is. This is the way I used to feel. Home was my sanctuary, the place the shadows couldn’t come. It’s taken a while, but it’s become that way again.

It’s a different home, of course. Tommy and Bonnie are not as innocent as Matt and Alexa were. They’ve both seen murder, and Tommy has killed people. Funny thing is, the differences don’t make me long for the past. I find them appropriate, even comforting. Civilians in my life have too hard a time.

I see my exit approaching, and I allow myself to consider all the current uncertainties for one last time tonight. They won’t be allowed past my threshold.

What am I going to decide about the strike team?

Another:

What about the secret Tommy and I are sharing? The last.

What about the secret I’m not sharing with anyone?

No answers arrive. I hear the sound of my tires against the pavement, the wail of the radio turned down low.

I pull into my driveway and do as I’d promised: I stuff the uncertainties away.

“Welcome home,” Tommy says. His eyes are troubled, and the kiss he gives me is perfunctory, distracted.

I allow myself a moment of selfishness, a second to feel irked and disappointed that I couldn’t just walk in to find sunlight and smiles. Then I push it aside and do my job as a partner.

“What’s up?” I look around. “Where’s Bonnie?”

“Something happened,” he says. “Let’s sit down.”

Fear flashes through me. My hand finds my weapon, an almost unconscious gesture. “Is it Bonnie? Is she hurt?”

He reaches out and covers my gun hand with his own. His touch is gentle. “Nothing like that. No one is hurt. But let’s sit down anyway.”

I allow him to lead me over to the couch. I’m still jumpy. Tommy is generally a rock. The petty challenges of life that tend to pique me, like getting cut off on the freeway, lukewarm coffee, and long bank lines, don’t faze him. Right now he’s nervous and deeply troubled. This frightens me.

“Bonnie did something,” he finally says. “Something bad. She feels terrible about it, which is why she told me. It happened a few days ago, and she’s been holding it in, but she broke down when we got home.”

I close my eyes and almost breathe a sigh of relief. This is old, familiar, comfortable territory. Kids do bad things sometimes; dealing with it is part of parenting. Tommy’s never raised a child, so it caught him off guard. I open my eyes and put a hand onto his knee to reassure him.

“What did she do? Shoplift? Beat up another kid?”

His eyes level on mine. “She killed a cat.”

I blink. “Sorry?”

I’m sure I didn’t hear him right.

“She killed a cat. A stray she found. She brought it into the backyard two days ago and shot it in the head with the twenty-two target pistol you keep in the gun safe.”

“How’d she get the combination to the gun safe?” I ask, though of course it’s not the most important question. The important question belongs to something unreal.

“She guessed it. Alexa’s birthday.”

Stupid, I think to myself. Stupid of me, not Bonnie.

“Did she say why?”

I’m amazed at how level my voice is, how normal. We could be having a conversation about a casserole. “She did. But I want her to tell you.”

He looks away and can’t meet my gaze. This cuts through my shock. I feel a stirring of fear in my stomach, a dark churning. “Tommy. You tell me.”

He shakes his head. “No. I need you to hear it from her. I want you to be watching her when she says it.”

“Why?” Now I can hear the fear, hear it in my voice. It’s bubbled up and found its sly way into my vocal cords.

He takes my hands in his. “Because,” he says. “I believe her. I think you will too, but only if you’re looking into her eyes while she tells you.”

I yank my hands away. They’re shaking.

“Go see her. She’s waiting for you in her room.”

I’m standing outside Bonnie’s door, hand raised to knock. I lower it and grip the knob instead.

She killed a cat. Shot it in the head. Whatever the reason, she’s lost her right to privacy.

It feels like a meaningless gesture, but this again is familiar territory, and it comforts me. I steady myself and turn the knob. I open the door.

Bonnie is lying on her bed. She’s staring at the ceiling. Her face is expressionless, but she’s crying. She doesn’t turn to look at me when I come in.

“Bonnie.” I keep my voice firm but gentle.

“I’m sorry,” she says.

“Sorry isn’t going to cut it, honey. I need you to sit up and explain this to me.”

She wipes her eyes with the back of her hand. The sigh she emits sounds so old, so … bone-weary that my heart skips a beat. It makes me want to go over there and take her in my arms, but I restrain myself. This isn’t the time for comfort.

She struggles to a sitting position, her legs dangling down from the bed. Her eyes remain averted.

God, she looks like Annie.

Her mother and I met when we were both fifteen, just three years older than Bonnie is now. It seems like an impossibility of time ago. I feel almost no connection to the me-of-then; too much is too different. But then I look at Bonnie now, and the band of unreality disappears. I find myself cheek to cheek with my fifteen-year-old self. Mom dead, Dad struggling, me hurting but also so very alive, everything bright-edged and multicolored and dramatic. Songs could still make me cry when I was fifteen. I had no scars on my face and no calluses on my soul.

“So what happened?” I ask my adopted daughter, fearing the answer but knowing I need to hear it all.

She shifts on the bed. She lifts her head, catching my brown eyes with her blue ones. The ghost of Annie stirs.

“I needed to know what it felt like.”

I frown. “What? Killing a cat?”

She looks down again. Nods.

“Why?”

“Because …” She hesitates. “Because that’s what they start out doing.”

“Who?”

She lifts her gaze to me again, and the bleakness there shocks me. Each eye is a desert landscape, rocks and sand and wind.

“You know. Serial killers.” She drops her eyes, ashamed.

I am silent. I’m having trouble thinking, much less speaking. If she’d slapped my face with an open hand, she couldn’t have poleaxed me more.

“So …” I say, drawing the words out not by choice but because I can’t help it, because I feel like I’m running in a nightmare, churning through taffy or thickening mud. “You shot a cat in the head because serial killers start out by killing small animals?”

“Yeah.”

I don’t try to keep the desperation out of my voice. Or the amazement. “But why, honey? Why would you want to do what they do?”

“To help me understand them. So later I can catch them.” She whispers it. She sounds lost.

Maybe she is.

The slowness I’d been stuck in is dissipating. I can hear the thick metronome of my heart beating again. For some reason I think of Hawaii, of what I had thought of as God’s heartbeat thumping against the shore.

“Look at me, Bonnie.” It takes her a moment, but she does as I ask. “So? How do you feel about it? Did it help you?”

The bleakness, if anything, increases. More tumbleweeds. Scoured stone. A little hint of rain, as tears begin to pool at the edges. “No,” she whispers. “It didn’t help me.”

I don’t let up. “How do you feel about it?”

What I see next isn’t bleakness or grief or even misery. It’s despair. The tears begin to roll from her eyes, thick tears, creating unbroken streams that drip from the sides of her face and her chin to patter on her arms and her blue jeans. “I felt evil. I felt bad. I felt like …” Her eyes close, and self-hatred spasms across her face. “I felt like the man who killed my mom.”

I want to go to her. Everything I am wants to grab her, yank her close, and make her safe. I want to tell her it’s okay, she’s not evil, to forgive herself. Something stops me.

It’s not enough.

I’m not sure where this idea comes from, but I don’t question the truth of it, because the voice is me and I recognize the feeling it brings. It is the same feeling I get when I realize something about a case or a perpetrator, when things that had been disjointed and strange suddenly fit together.

Bonnie lost her mother to a madman. She watched as the man broke Annie, raped her, gutted her. Then he took Bonnie with gentle but insistent hands, and he tied her to the screaming corpse, face-to-face. I’ve never really been able to imagine what those three days might have been like for anyone, much less a ten-year-old girl.

She’s gone from screaming in the night and mute to sleeping through the night and speaking. She’s learned to smile, and she has a friend or two.

Sure, there are things I don’t like. She’s told me that she plans to do what I do when she grows up. She wants to hunt the monsters. There’s a certain stillness to her too-old eyes sometimes, a piercing sadness in her gaze. I find her watching the sunrise every now and then, and I worry. But these things always go away. The resilient thirteen-year-old always comes back, so I accept her injuries and her oddities. For God’s sake—how could she be otherwise?

But this is different. This is a crossroads. It is a touchstone. I don’t know how I know it, but I do. Either I save her here and now, or she’ll keep swimming away from shore, farther and farther out, until one day she’ll be in a place where I can’t reach her. I see what Tommy wanted me to see. Bonnie’s not a monster. I get that.

But… the voice whispers, and I nod to myself, inside, and complete the sentence:

But she could be.

I know this because I’ve been there myself. There is a dividing line, a place where trying to understand the monsters becomes too much understanding, where knowing becomes drowning. I’ve swum out to where the water is no longer blue. I’ve felt the black leviathans shiver against my naked feet, chuckling and slimy. There comes a time where I start to see too many similarities between them and me, and too few differences. More than once I wasn’t sure I’d find my way back to me. I always have, but my swims began in my twenties. Bonnie is only thirteen. She’s still forming. A decade is a lifetime of change at this age.

She hunted down a cat and shot him in the head, because she wanted to feel what the monsters feel. Her tears and her brief despair aren’t enough. They won’t ensure her survival as herself.

I try to push away all the protectiveness I feel for her, the desire to wipe away her tears. It’s not easy, but it’s not as hard as it might be for some, I guess. One of the things you have to learn in order to interrogate suspects is how to set aside your own reflex humanity. The rapist, the killer, the thief—they’re all people. Once caught, they tend to collapse, to pull into themselves. Half of what makes them formidable is the mystery of who they are. What you’re left with, most times, is something pathetic. Something that looks miserable, something that weeps.

It’s only natural to experience feelings about that. You have to overcome it. “We all have a little bit of cold granite inside us,” Alan told me once. “Some more than others. A good interrogator learns how to flip between being as loving as the suspect’s own mother and as merciless and unreachable as God. It’s all manipulation and a little bit inhuman, so you gotta find that cold granite part of you and bite into it. Let it hurt your teeth a little.”

I find it now and bite down hard.

“Do you remember what your mother looked like when he was cutting her?” I ask Bonnie. I’m simultaneously amazed and dismayed at the level I’ve managed to find; there is no solace at all in my voice. I sound like a bored, slightly hostile drive-through attendant.

Her eyes widen. She doesn’t reply.

“I asked you a question. Before she died and you were tied to her body, do you remember what your mother—Annie—looked like?”

“Yes,” she whispers. She’s staring at me, unable to look away, like a baby chicken watching a snake. “Tell me. How did she look?”

She pauses for a long time. “She looked like …” She swallows. “I never told you something about that night, Mama-Smoky. Something he said to her. When he put the knife on her the first time, after he made her scream, he told her she could choose.”

“Choose?”

“Yes. That anytime she wanted, she could tell him to take me instead and he’d stop cutting her up.”

Something bottomless opens up in my soul.

“She was screaming, you know? He gagged her, but it hurt her so bad. She jumped against the handcuffs he used, and her wrists and ankles were bleeding, they were bleeding so much. He danced to the music he put on, and he laughed sometimes.” Another swallow. Her eyes still fixed on me. “So this one time—you asked me how she looked—so this one time, while it was happening, I saw it in her eyes. It was only there for a minute, but I saw it.”

“What?” I prod her, still biting on that cold granite. Shoving her face into the darkness of it.

“She wanted to give me to him. Just for a moment. She wanted to give me to him, and she hated herself for wanting that.” The sound of loss in her voice, at that moment, is heartbreaking. She shakes her head, seeing the image, not fully able to believe it but knowing it was real. “She died hating herself for that, Mama-Smoky.” Bonnie hugs herself and starts to rock, back and forth. She moans a little, and the tears, which have never stopped, stream a little harder.

No no no no no, I want to tell her, she didn’t die hating herself. She died loving you.

I resist this urge. We’re not done yet. I don’t know what done is, just that I’ll recognize it when we arrive.

“So here’s what you need to understand, then, Bonnie,” I tell her, and I’m still amazed at the absolute disinterested cold of my tone. “Listen close, because I need you to get the differences here. What you did and what you are not. Both are equally true. What you are not is evil. You are not the same as the man who did that to your mother.” I lean forward now, fixing her with a heartless, baleful gaze. “But when you killed that innocent cat? When you hunted it down, caught it, brought it into our backyard, and put a bullet into its head? At that moment, what you did to that cat was no different than what that man was doing to your mother. You say you want to do what I do in memory of your mom?” I sneer then and hate myself for it, because it actually makes her flinch. I bring my face close to hers, close enough so she can feel the heat of my breath. “She took the pain to save you, Bonnie. When you killed that cat, you spit in her face.”

Hey eyes widen more than I would have thought possible, and her face goes white. There is a space of horrified silence, and then Bonnie’s breath expels from her chest, as though she’d just been punched in the stomach. She lets out a low moan. It’s a hushed, soulful thing, the voice of misery.

Now we’re done.

She scrabbles back on the bed, fisted hands to her mouth, shaking her head back and forth, back and forth, horrified at herself, at what she did, at the truth of it. This time, I go to her. She fights me, but I grab her and clutch her to me, not letting her get away no matter how hard she tries or how much she pummels. Eventually she stops resisting, and her arms wrap around me and she just cries. Sobs and sobs and sobs. I cry too. In the midst of my own mix of relief and self-hatred, I lean down and give her the truth I’d denied her earlier.

“When your mom died, honey,” I whisper into her hair, “she wasn’t hating herself. She was loving you. Don’t let him take that away from you.”

I glance up at some point and see that Tommy is there. I wonder how much he saw. He watches for a little while longer, his gaze unfathomable, and then he gently closes the door, leaving us alone.

Bonnie has wept herself to exhaustion. She’s in my lap, too big to fit comfortably but unwilling to let me go. “I really am sorry,” she says.

I stroke her hair. “I know you are, honey. Believe that.”

We fall into silence again. She sighs once, and I continue to stroke her hair. I glance out her bedroom window and see my old adversary: the moon. So … we meet again. The attempt at humor topples to a soundless death.

“Listen, baby,” I say after some more time has passed. “There’s nothing wrong with you having a goal to do what I do when you grow up. I mean, it’s not the career I’d want for you, but if you still want it when you’re older, I’ll support you.”

“I’ll still want it,” she says.

“But there have to be limits, Bonnie. That’s part of the secret and the safety net. There’s a huge difference between us and them. We can understand them, but we’ll never be them, you follow?”

“I think so.”

“Here’s the thing you have to understand: They can pull you under. They can suck the life and the soul out of you, and once that’s done …” I search for a metaphor. “Think of yourself as a lighthouse. No matter how foggy it gets or how rough the sea, the lighthouse will guide you home. Well, if you get too close to them, if you go too far, the light can die. You don’t become what they are, but you lose yourself.”

She’s quiet for a time, thinking about this. “If the light goes out,” she asks, “can you ever get it back?”

“Almost never.” I put a hand under her chin, angle her face up to mine. “That thing you did with the cat? That’s the kind of thing that puts the light out, honey. You understand?”

She nods. I let her chin go, and she snuggles back into my embrace. “So what do I do?”

“You learn to balance. Look, honey, regular people, they know how to enjoy life. It’s more natural for them to look for the good stuff than the bad. It’s harder for people like us. We have to force ourselves to engage in the good stuff. Even when we don’t want to. The thing is, even if you have to force yourself in the beginning, somewhere along the way you’ll find yourself having a good time.”

“But how does that work for me?” she asks, and I’m pleased to hear the impatience mixed with the pleading. I cracked her, but I didn’t break her. Thank God.

“Well, let’s see. Balance and Bonnie. Okay, here’s an example. You told me you wanted me to take you to the shooting range, right?”

“Yes.”

“Well, fine. I’ll agree to do that every other week. On the weeks off, you have to find an extracurricular activity at school to take part in. I don’t care what it is. Band or track—I don’t care. Just something any other thirteen-year-old would do.”

“Sounds boring.”

“It might be, at first. But you’ll be surprised. There’s an old acting trick. If you make yourself start laughing, at first it’s just going through the motions. It’ll feel silly, sound silly. But you almost always end up laughing for real. This is like that. Besides, it’s really a part of your current goal, anyway.”

“What do you mean?”

What do I mean, exactly? I can feel the idea swarming within me. It’s something I understand innately but have never had to put words to.

“Our biggest advantage over the monsters isn’t that we know how they think, honey. That’s not so hard. It’s that they can never understand how we think.” I kiss the top of her head and whisper again into her hair. “They can’t understand how we can love each other so much, and they know it. That’s what they hate us for the most. Love is the light.”

Bonnie is finally asleep. I’d lain in bed with her as she tried. She kept waking, checking to make sure I was still there. I waited until her sleep was certain, and then I disentangled myself and crept back to my own bed.

I remove my clothes, which smell of salt: the sweat from Bonnie’s troubled forehead and the wet from her tears. I crawl into bed next to Tommy, naked, and reach for him.

“She okay?” he asks.

“She will be.”

“You okay?”

I shake my head, realize he can’t see that in the dark. “Not really. Can you make me okay?”

He pulls me to him and kisses away my tears, then his lips find my lips and later we come together in that sweetest way. Afterward, I am lying with my head on his chest, listening to the gentle thump thump of his heart and the slow, even sound of his restful breathing. He’s fallen asleep after sex, the man way. I’m headed in that direction but take a last moment to look at the moon and whisper some words to the God I’m not sure I’ll ever really reconcile with.

Thank you for showing me how to reach her, I think, my eyes beginning to flutter. Keep doing things like that, and we might have a truce.

It’s probably my imagination, but the moon seems to disappear behind a cloud at that exact moment, and I imagine it’s Him, the Him I doubt more than I believe in, saying, You’re welcome.