Heart of Ice

Chapter Forty

Stanton, California

Michael Barton was never quite sure how it came to be that he and Sarah were taken from the Hansens’ foster home to the Ogilvy Home for Children in Stanton, California. Was it something he did? The dead animals? The little fire he set? Maybe it was that he was no longer wanted once a younger boy named Jeremy came to stay.

Maybe he was really worth nothing after all?

Years later, he’d tell Olivia about it, in terms that suggested a kind of rescue, but he really felt more regret than anything.

“The Hansens were despicable,” he said one time when he let her inside a sliver of his dark past, “but it felt like home. Sick. But home. Ogilvy always felt like a concentration camp for the lost.”

“It couldn’t have been that bad,” Olivia said. “It was state approved, wasn’t it?”

Michael allowed a wide smile across his face. Inside, he wanted to scream at the woman to whom he sought to make himself whole, normal.

“Of course. But Ms. McCutcheon did things her way.”

Marilyn McCutcheon was the floor director of the “intensive” unit of the Ogilvy Home. The building that housed the home for the wayward and the disposable had once been part of Stanton High School. It had a cafeteria, gymnasium, and forty-four classrooms which were converted in 1961 into dormitory rooms and offices for a staff of eighty, full-and part-time. Most who worked there, caring for the 220 children on the way station to either reform school or a foster home, were there because they couldn’t get a better-paying job elsewhere. If they were half decent in their appearance, skill, and work ethic, they’d be there no longer than six months.

But not Marilyn McCutcheon. The fiftyish, prematurely gray-haired, giantess of a woman with big hands and a lumbering gait was there because she loved it. She loved it because for eight hours every day at Ogilvy, she was in charge of her floor. She ran it the way she wanted. No one told her what to do or when to do it.

It wasn’t that way at home. When McCutcheon got home, her mother and father, both in their late seventies, yelled and screamed at her for being the lousy person they said she’d always been.

“I should have had my tubes tied before you were born,” her mother said at least once a month.

“No wonder you couldn’t find a man,” her father would say. “You are bigger than a football player. No man would want a woman like you.”

Marilyn wanted to kill them. She certainly thought of ways to do it. One time she even left the house after turning off the oven pilot light. She imagined that she might even hear the explosion all the way over at Ogilvy. But it never came. When she got home, she found that the oven had automatically shut off.

Her parents yelled at for her being late and all she could think of was how happy she was shopping after work, thinking they’d be dead.

Marilyn lived for the job. It was her sanctuary. Being there was her release. The children were her therapy. They were her punching bags.

The social worker told Michael and Sarah they would be at Ogilvy “temporarily” until another home opened up.

Michael was glad to leave the Hansen place. He never told anyone what Mr. Hansen had made him do, though he almost confided what had been going on to a teacher one time. It was so close; the words begged to come from his mouth as the teacher’s sympathetic eyes drew him in. She’ll help me. She’ll protect me. She’ll save me.

“Are you all right, Michael?” the teacher, a woman, asked. “I know it’s hard with your mom gone, but you can tell me. I care.”

“It’s very bad,” he said.

“Tell me what you did,” she asked.

What he had done?

If he’d spoken up, he might have changed the trajectory of his life. Her words stopped him cold. For a flicker, he thought that maybe he had deserved what Papa had done to him. After all, as far as he could tell, he’d been the only one in the Hansen household to have to do those terrible things. Maybe he had been bad? Maybe what he was doing was his fault?

No, he thought. She’s wrong. She doesn’t know what she’s talking about.

What stopped him was the dark threat that Papa lobbed at him when his face was buried in the man’s smelly crotch.

“You tell on me and I will kill your sister. Papa doesn’t like little girls anyway, cowboy.”

The teacher looked at the wall clock. She had something to do.

“We can talk about it later. And, I promise,” she said, gathering her purse, “that I will help you.”

“OK,” Michael said, knowing full well that he’d never tell her. He’d never tell anyone. The danger to Sarah was too great. The door had slammed shut.

“I can tell that you’re nothing but trouble,” Marilyn McCutcheon said when she came upon Michael and Sarah ten minutes after intake. “And I won’t have it.”

“You,” she said, pointing to Sarah, “are a dirty little bird.”

“She’s not,” Michael shot back, while his sister sat on one of the stained green couches that lined the family visiting area that had once been a high school library. Shelves, though empty of books, were a visual cue that would not have been lost even on an eleven-year-old.

Marilyn grabbed Michael by the wrist and wrenched him from his seat. He started to cry out and she shoved her big hand tight over his face.

“Don’t. Don’t ever. Don’t ever defy me,” she said. Her words were a wretched vomit, spewing out of her mouth and all over the little boy. He was nothing. He was garbage. “This is my floor. You got it?”

He started to squirm.

She twisted him tighter and pushed so hard against his mouth and nose that he couldn’t breathe.

“I said, do you understand?”

His eyes were flooded with terror. Sarah sat still, almost catatonic, watching the big woman wrestle her brother.

He nodded.

“Good. You don’t ever want to mess with me.”

His head bobbed again.

Later that evening, with his sister in classroom 14 down the hall, Michael Barton wet the bed for the first time. It was the beginning of a cycle that he feared would never end, even in manhood.

Every morning, Marilyn McCutcheon would haul Michael’s two-inch-thick mattress out in the hall and hand him a brush and a steel pail of soapy water.

“You’ll clean this up or I’ll beat you,” she said, her cold blue eyes burrowing deeply into his. “You got that?”

Of course, he did. Other kids laughed at him. The staff called him “Michael the Flood.”

Olivia Barton knew better than to have any books on child abuse in the house. She knew how angry Michael became when she appeared to be studying the subject. That meant no novels, no nonfiction on the subject. Anywhere in the house. She’d been a frequent visitor to the Garden Grove West Library on the corner of Bailey and Chapman where she practically owned the 150s of the Dewey Decimal system—all forms of psychology contained in four rows of books at the branch. For a time, she’d been sucked in by every Oprah or Dr. Phil TV show that even hinted at child abuse as a subject. Bonus points came when the program touched on the subject and how it might impact the lives of an adult survivor.

Olivia liked the word survivor when it was applied to her husband. She was sure that his experiences in foster care, in the state institution, maybe even in the years before his mother abandoned him, had likely been bad—but not Oprah or Dr. Phil bad.

How could it be, she asked herself over and over, when Michael is so normal now?