Heart of Ice

Chapter Forty-six

Before Olivia, every move Michael Barton made was meant to hurt someone. She changed all of that. She was forgiving and beautiful. And, most important of all, she soothed him. She might have thought that she understood him. But of course, she could not. He’d let her inside his messed-up world more than anyone he’d ever known. But he could never tell her specifically what he’d done when he was younger.

“My background’s not so good,” he had told her. “State institutions, a few run-ins with the cops. Let’s just leave it at that, OK?”

“But I want to know you, babe. Let me in.”

“You’re in. You’re in as far as I can allow you. Maybe later, maybe down the road, I can tell you more.”

His words were a lie. He knew that if she’d known all the things he’d done, she’d leave him, too.

She was his hope. She was his chance not to be a monster anymore.

How could he tell her that when he was serving food in the cafeteria at the Ogilvy Home, he spat on the food, poured salt in the milk, and emptied Visine into the counselors’ iced tea because it made them sick and that made him feel good. When the boys found a cache of balloons that had been brought into the institution for a water balloon fight, he filled them with urine. He also filled the balloons with water and froze them so that when he hurled them, the strike would almost break a bone.

Only then did he feel a kind of joy. Holding those frozen balloons—red, yellow, blue—and throwing them at the kids he hated most. The weaker ones. He broke one fat boy’s nose with a well-aimed shot, and though he felt a flutter of satisfaction, he also felt a bit of remorse. He wished he’d broken something more vital. Like the fat boy’s neck.

There was always cover there for that kind of an act. No boy, no matter how tough he thought he was, would ever tell on Michael Barton for what he did to them. When he offered up a new kid to service one of the security guards, he didn’t choose the weakest. He chose a kid from a well-off family in Los Angeles.

“You’ll suck his dick and you’ll shut up about it,” he said.

“I will not,” said the L.A. kid, a redhead with freckles and blue eyes that were unable to hide the fear that swelled through his bloodstream.

“You will. Or I’ll cut off your head.” Michael stepped closer to the boy as they stood in the hallway outside the institution’s library. The librarian smiled uneasily through the glass and Michael just smiled a phony smile. A practiced one. He put his arm around the boy and leaned forward. “I’ve done it before.” His voice was a whisper, cold and flat. “And I really want to do it again. Welcome to Ogilvy.”

The security guard thanked him the next day. And gave him a five-dollar bill.

Michael could care less about the money. He was glad there was someone else to take his spot on his knees in front of a man with a lowered zipper.

Nothing, he knew, would ever get back the years he’d lost in the system. Nothing could erase what his mother had done to him. He was just a little speck of human life, floating around a world in which there seemed to be no place to land. There was nothing to love. And without love, there could be no other emotion but hate.

Michael knew that there were things about him that were so dark, so out of the boundaries of acceptable behavior, that what he’d done was deviant. Aberrant. He looked for understanding in the stacks of the Madison library. The psychology books talked about how sociopaths had no ability to empathize with others. How they had no connection to another human being. Isolation from emotion was a term one of the books used. Sociopaths were like pod people who just existed in a world designed for their own empty pleasure. One writer said they could only mimic the feelings of others, unsure how to act or react. They were completely detached.

But that wasn’t him. He knew that he did have an attachment. His sister Sarah was out there. He loved her. He wanted her to be free, to be happy. Sometimes he wept for her, thinking that his loss was so great. And at the same time he hoped that she felt at least a little like he did.

He wrote several letters that he never sent because he didn’t know where she was.

Dear Sarah,

I think it’s your birthday this week. I’m not sure of the exact day? Maybe the fifth? I wish I knew. I wish I’d paid more attention to things like that. I’m imagining you in a pretty white house with one of those big chocolate cakes with curls of chocolate stuck to the sides. I’d bet you’d like pink candles, too. I remember how much you liked pink, when you were a baby.

He stopped and thought how silly that note sounded. Sarah wore pink when she was a baby because their mother bought her pink clothes and blankets. She might have loved lavender or yellow. He crumpled the paper into a tight ball.

He missed her. One day, he told himself, they’d be together again.

While Danny and Carla played amid the array of toys scattered like a cyclone had hit the basement, Olivia continued to rack her brain about their missing cat, Simon. Simon had been a housecat who never ventured outside because he hated the feeling of morning dew on his paws.

“He ran out when I opened the door,” Michael had said. “I think the coyote got him.”

Olivia asked the neighbors about the coyote that her husband had insisted had been the likely culprit.

“Good news on that one,” said Angela Martinez, the retired schoolteacher next door, when Olivia ran into her one afternoon shopping at Vons. “Animal control trapped the miserable animal three weeks ago. Your cat surely wasn’t a coyote snack.”

The information surprised her. “My husband said he saw the coyote last week.”

Mrs. Martinez dropped a couple packages of white and pink Hostess Snowballs into her shopping cart. “Grandkids are coming Friday. Lucky me,” she said, with a kind of tone to indicate she was annoyed with the prospect of a visit by her daughter’s band of grade-school hellions. “Anyway, I’m sure of it. Talked to the officer myself. Coyote problem solved. Now if I could just find a way to make it through the weekend.”

Olivia smiled. “Call me if you need reinforcements.”

As she pushed her cart toward the checkout aisle, Michael’s words echoed in her thoughts.

“I saw the coyote by the garbage can. I never should have let Simon out.”