Eyes of a Child

by Richard North Patterson

  Abruptly, they were gone.

  In the noise of the gallery, Victor Salinas walked across the courtroom. ‘Congratulations,’ he said to Caroline, and held out his hand.

  Silent, they shook hands. And then, to Paget’s surprise, Salinas turned to him and extended his hand.

  After a moment, Paget took it.

  Salinas faced Caroline again. ‘You outlawyered me,’ he said. ‘I learn all the time.’

  Caroline shrugged. ‘Mac screwed you, Victor. No help for that.’

  Salinas smiled a little. ‘Not now, anyhow.’ He glanced over his shoulder at the watching reporters and went to face them, stoic.

  What, Paget found himself wondering, had Salinas meant? But it hardly mattered now. He was rid of the specter that had haunted him since he first had lied to Charles Monk; thanks to Caroline Masters, and his own resolve, he had got away with it.

  ‘Ready for the press?’ Caroline asked him.

  Paget was quiet. Another thought had struck him: no one would ever answer for the death of Ricardo Arias.

  ‘First, I need to call Carlo,’ he said softly. ‘And Terri, of course.’

  Seeing her mother at the classroom door, Elena gave her a look that combined surprise, apprehension, and pleasure in such rapid sequence that Terri wanted to pick her up.

  Instead she walked over to the teacher. ‘I’m sorry,’ she said pleasantly. ‘But Elena has a doctor’s appointment. I forgot to call.’

  ‘Oh, of course.’ Turning, the young blond woman beckoned to Elena. The little girl took a few tentative steps from her desk, and then Terri smiled. ‘I’m here for you, sweetheart.’

  Elena looked at the teacher for permission. The woman nodded. ‘Your mother’s taking you to the doctor, Elena.’

  The little girl turned to Terri again, obscurely worried. ‘Dr Harris, Mommy?’

  ‘No.’ Terri smiled. ‘Dr Mom.’

  The teacher gave Terri a puzzled look. But Elena went to her mother, touching her skirt; something about this simple gesture filled Terri’s heart with love and sadness. Terri took her hand, and they left.

  Ouside, Elena blinked at the sunlight. ‘Where are we going?’ she asked.

  ‘For ice cream. I was hungry.’

  Elena turned to her, delighted by the surprise, and then frowned at another thought. ‘You didn’t tell the truth, Mommy.’

  ‘I guess that wasn’t good, was it?’ Terri smiled down at her daughter. ‘People don’t always tell the truth, you know. But next time, I will. I’ll just tell Mrs Johnson that I missed you.’

  ‘Did you?’

  ‘A lot.’ Terri opened the car door. ‘Moms are like that, you know. Much more than kids.’

  Elena paused by the door, turning to look up at her mother with Richie’s black eyes. ‘I miss you.’ She paused, and then added, ‘I missed you when I was with Daddy.’

  Terri knelt by her daughter. ‘You don’t need to miss me now, Elena. I’ll be with you always and take care of you.’

  Elena’s look mingled hope and fear. ‘You’re not going to die? Everyone dies, Mommy.’

  Terri felt words stick in her throat, felt sadness for Elena, a sudden stab of worry about Chris’s trial. But she managed another smile. ‘I won’t for a long time, sweetheart. Not until I’m so old that you’ll be a grandmother. Like Grandma Rosa, only older.’

  There was a troubled look in Elena’s eyes. ‘Let’s have ice cream,’ she said abruptly. ‘I want chocolate marble, like Daddy used to get me.’

  They went to Rory’s on Fillmore Street, double-parked, and bought two cones. Then they drove away in companionable silence, each licking her ice cream, to Terri’s apartment in Noe Valley. It was only there that Terri thought of Chris again.

  Mercifully, there were no reporters waiting.

  They climbed the stairs and entered Terri’s apartment; for an unwelcome moment, Terri remembered the night she had returned to find Richie waiting inside, with the papers accusing Carlo. She turned to Elena. ‘We’d better wash our hands, Elena.’

  The little girl looked up at her. ‘How come you never call me Lainie? Like Daddy did.’

  What, Terri wondered, was this about? ‘Because Elena’s a beautiful name, and I picked it myself. Elena Rosa, so you could have Grandma’s name too.’

  Elena gave her a serious look. ‘Mommy,’ she asked in a quiet voice, ‘did you and Grandma hate Daddy?’

  Terri hesitated and then shook her head. ‘No,’ she said. ‘I didn’t love him anymore, and he didn’t love me. But I never hated him.’ Saying this, Terri felt a stab of guilt; perhaps she had hated Ricardo Arias too much to listen to what he was saying. On impulse, she asked, ‘Would you like it if, sometimes, I called you Lainie?’

  Elena looked down and then slowly shook her head. ‘No,’ she said quietly. ‘Only Daddy called me that.’ And then she looked at her sticky hands and went to the kitchen to wash them.

  Terri followed her. They stood at the sink, washing together.

  ‘What do you want to do?’ Elena asked.

  ‘I don’t know. What about you?’

  ‘Play Candyland.’

  The board game from hell, Terri thought wryly. ‘Okay,’ she answered. ‘I think you’re still the champion.’

  ‘I am.’

  Elena, Terri thought, seemed much more communicative; it was odd that, on this painful day, their interaction had the veneer of normality. ‘What else would you like to do?’ Terri asked.

  Elena looked up at her. ‘You’re not going to leave me, are you, Mommy?’

  The little girl’s voice had suddenly filled with apprehension. ‘What do you mean, Elena?’

  The child looked around. ‘You know,’ she said finally. ‘Leave me at Grandma’s tonight.’

  Terri picked Elena up and hugged her. ‘Not if you don’t want me to.’

  ‘I don’t, Mommy. Please.’

  The kitchen telephone rang. Suddenly remembering Chris, Terri carried Elena across the kitchen and grabbed it.

  ‘Terri,’ Chris said. ‘I’ve been looking for you.’

  He sounded strange. ‘Where are you?’

  ‘In the car, with Carlo, playing hooky.’ His voice rose. ‘They acquitted me.’

  She felt herself trembling, with emotion and sheer relief. ‘Oh, Chris’ – her voice was choked – ‘that’s so great.’

  ‘What is it, Mommy?’ Elena’s eyes were serious and almost accusatory.

  ‘It’s wonderful,’ Chris was saying through the phone. ‘Listen, can you get a sitter for Elena tonight? Carlo and I want to take you out to dinner.’

  Terri felt suddenly numb. ‘Dinner with you and Carlo?’ she repeated in a shaky voice, and then saw the look on Elena’s face.

  ‘Sure,’ Chris answered. ‘We’ll go to Stars.’

  In the whipsaw of her emotions, Terri could not find words. ‘I can’t,’ she temporized. ‘I just promised Elena.’ She tried again. ‘I hate to be elliptical, but it’s been a difficult day. For both of us.’

  There was a long silence. More softly, Chris said, ‘Getting acquitted is once in a lifetime. I hope.’

  ‘I know.’ Terri felt her eyes cloud. ‘I’ll buy you dinner tomorrow night. That way we can really talk.’

  ‘All right.’ In his disappointment, Chris’s tone became neutral. ‘We’ve got all sorts of time, after all.’

  She heard the question in his voice. ‘I’m so happy, Chris.’ Listening to herself, Terri imagined her own voice as a tinny echo on Chris’s car phone. ‘Please trust me when I say I should stay home.’

  ‘It’s okay. Carlo and I will have boys’ night out.’

  Terri felt Elena’s gaze. ‘I wish I could tell you how I feel,’ she said to Chris.

  ‘Then I’ll call you tonight,’ Chris answered with attempted casualness, ‘and you can tell me then.’

  He sounded all right. But when he hung up, Terri realized that she had not told Christopher Paget that she loved him.

  ‘What is it?’ Elena asked.r />
  Tern’s eyes shut. ‘Nothing,’ she said softly. ‘Chris just wanted to talk.’

  Wriggling, Elena grasped a piece of her own hair. ‘It’s not about Daddy, is it?’

  Only in the sense, Terri thought, that Chris was just acquitted of his murder. All at once, she felt alone. ‘No, sweetheart. It wasn’t about Daddy.’

  Elena stopped wriggling. Quietly, she asked, ‘Then was it about Carlo?’

  Terri felt a wave of guilt and shame. She set Elena down, watching her daughter’s worried face. No one, she silently promised Elena, will hurt you now. Ever again.

  ‘I’m here with you,’ she told Elena. ‘And I’m staying with you.’ Terri tried to smile. ‘so let’s play Candyland, all right?’

  Chapter 3

  Stars was a sprawling bright-lit three-level restaurant with high ceilings and splashy Parisian posters on the walls. It was jammed with people from black tie to punk, who crowded the tables and lined the mirrored bar two deep, talking and listening to a pianist at a sleek black piano set amid the diners, their voices mingling with jazz notes in a festive cacophony. Paget had gone there frequently with Terri; the food was superb, the bar was a San Francisco street show, and they could come in after the ballet or opera and eat and drink until one. Paget’s choice of Stars was both instinctive and deliberate: he wanted to go there, and if a lot of people noticed him, both they and he might as well get used to that. But one look at Carlo, and Paget realized that – for tonight –Stars was the wrong choice.

  They were sitting along the wall at a table that let them talk alone. But Carlo seemed painfully aware whenever someone stared at him; he looked uncomfortable and a little pinched, as if the bright lights hurt his eyes. When a bleached blonde with her hair combed back like Annie Lennox pointed them out to someone else at the bar, Carlo murmured, ‘It’s like we’re zoo animals.’

  Paget sipped his second martini. ‘Forget them, if you can. Soon enough, they’ll forget you.’

  Carlo gave him a look that was both steady and opaque. ‘How are you going to live with this?’ he asked under his breath. ‘People still think you killed someone.’

  Paget knew where part of the question came from: an interviewer had caught up with Joseph Duarte in time for the evening news. ‘I didn’t vote for Mr Paget,’ Duarte had said with a frown of dissatisfaction. ‘In the end, other jurors persuaded me that the conduct of the D.A.’s office had itself created a reasonable doubt.’ But beneath this, Paget knew, were deeper doubts of Carlo’s own.

  ‘I’ll be okay,’ Paget told him. ‘Caroline was right when she said I wouldn’t make a politician: when it comes right down to it, there aren’t many people whose opinion I much care about. Especially people who only know me through television. There’s nothing I can do about them, except live my life.’

  Carlo shook his head. ‘I’m not like that,’ he said. ‘What people think bothers me a lot.’

  Paget looked into his son’s face, too young to be stoic, and wondered what to say. ‘I never said it didn’t bother me,’ he finally answered. ‘But I know what I did and didn’t do, why I acted as I did, and who it is that I really do care about. Starting with you.’ He hesitated. ‘A long time ago, I learned the painful truth that you can’t look for how you should feel about yourself in the faces of other people. You have to have your own standards, both for how you act and for whom, besides yourself, you should answer to.’

  Carlo looked at him impassively. ‘Are you ever going to answer to me?’

  Paget felt his eyes narrow. ‘I already have, Carlo. I told you that I didn’t kill Richie and that the things I haven’t told you may involve someone else. If telling you everything I might know or guess would change this business with Elena, I’d do it in a heartbeat. But it won’t, so you’re just going to have to trust me.’

  Carlo did not look away. ‘This may be selfish, Dad, and I’m gladder you got acquitted than you’ll ever know. But you’ve shut me out of knowing why this ever happened. And no one is ever going to find me innocent of pulling Elena’s panties off and playing with her while you and Terri weren’t looking.’ His voice rose slightly. ‘Admit it – not even Terri is sure I didn’t do it.’

  Paget flinched inside. ‘Terri’s been through a lot,’ he said softly. ‘She’s still going through a lot, with both Elena and whatever this child psychologist is trying to accomplish. So give her time.’ He put his drink down. ‘I know you didn’t do it, and so do all your friends.’

  A shadow crossed Carlo’s face, the belief that Paget was living with his own doubts. ‘Maybe you can deal with it,’ he said. ‘But this thing with Terri is something I can’t live with.’

  ‘I’m not asking you to.’

  ‘I mean it.’ Carlo’s voice shook with sudden feeling. ‘I’m not going to be around someone every day who thinks I molested a six-year-old girl. Imagine dinner – all these silences. God knows what Elena must have said to her, for whatever screwed-up reason a kid says anything.’ His voice steadied. ‘What you and I don’t talk about, I guess I’ll have to live with – you’re not giving me a choice. But I don’t have to live with Terri, and I won’t.’

  Paget breathed in audibly. ‘“Happy acquittal, Dad. And have a nice day.”’

  There were sudden tears in Carlo’s eyes. ‘Do you understand me, Dad?’

  For a moment, Paget felt his own pain. Then he reached across the table, touching his son’s arm. ‘Yes, Carlo, I understand you.’

  Terri pulled the comforter beneath Elena’s chin, placed the book they had read on the child’s bedside table. Turning out the light, she kissed Elena’s cheek. The little girl’s skin felt soft, her hair and face smelled fresh and clean. At that moment, Terri could not imagine loving another person as much as this child, the vulnerable person Terri once had carried inside her.

  On the table, the elephant night-light flickered, casting light and shadow across Elena’s face. The light was dying, Terri realized; tomorrow she would replace it. ‘I love you, Elena.’

  ‘Can you stay with me, Mommy?’ The little girl’s arms reached out for her. ‘Just for a while, okay?’

  Terri smiled at the child’s bargaining. How many times, she wondered, had Elena said ‘just a minute’ or ‘one more time’? And how often had Terri spent the time Elena needed?

  ‘Okay,’ she said, and lay down on the comforter.

  ‘Get inside the covers with me, Mommy. Please.’

  Terri slid beneath the covers and turned on her side. Automatically, Elena turned and curled her legs and back against her mother, waiting for Terri to put her arms around her. Terri felt an almost primal familiarity; she and Elena called this ‘making spoons,’ just as Rosa had, lying next to Terri when she had been so young that she now remembered little else. Lying beside Elena, Terri still half expected to hear father’s angry voice, feel the rage that had driven Rosa to Terri’s bed, until she herself had not known who was giving or receiving comfort.

  ‘I love you,’ Terri said again.

  Elena burrowed closer. ‘I love you too, Mommy.’

  Gently, Terri stroked Elena’s hair until the child’s breathing became deep and even, the pulse of sleep.

  She herself should not fall asleep, Terri realized. She might have the dream of Ramon Peralta and cry out in fear, making Elena’s own nightmare that much more frightening to her. It is the adult’s job to seem strong and competent, Terri told herself. At least until the child is old enough, and secure enough, to accept the doubts beneath.

  Chris and Carlo were out tonight, celebrating the escape she had prayed for but felt much more deeply as relief than as elation. Silently holding her daughter, she thanked God that Chris was free.

  Chris and Carlo. Thinking about them, she knew she would not sleep. For Elena, at least, that was good.

  Next to her, she felt Elena stirring.

  Elena Arias awoke in a pitch-black room.

  She was alone. The night-light was gone; Elena sat up in bed, stiff and fearful, eyes adjusti
ng to the light.

  She was in her grandmother’s house. Her mother was gone and could not help her.

  There was banging on the door.

  It was the black dog; Elena was certain of this, although she had never seen him. Her mouth was dry.

  The dog had never come through the door. But tonight, Elena knew, he would.

  The knocking grew louder.

  Elena began to tremble. Tears ran down her face.

  She already knew what the dog wanted from her.

  Desperate, Elena turned to the window, looking for escape. But it was nailed shut; even in the dark, she remembered that Grandma Rosa feared the men in Dolores Park.

  The door began to splinter.

  Elena tried to scream. But the cry caught in her throat; suddenly she could not breathe.

  He was coming.

  The door burst open.

  The pale light in the hallway was from candles. Shivering and silent, Elena could hear and feel the dog’s breath. But still she could not see him.

  Elena hugged herself, and then his shadow rose above the bed.

  It was more human than dog. For an instant, Elena prayed that it was Grandma Rosa, and then his face came into the light.

  Standing over the bed, Ricardo Arias smiled down at her.

  Elena woke up screaming.

  In the flicker of the night-light, Terri saw her daughter’s eyes as black holes of terror.

  ‘Sweetheart,’ she cried out, and held Elena close.

  The little girl’s heart pounded against Terri’s chest. ‘It’s okay,’ Terri urged. ‘I’m here.’

  She could feel her own heart race. Elena’s trembling arms held Terri like a vise. ‘It was just a nightmare,’ Terri said in a soothing voice. ‘Only a nightmare.’

  Elena could not seem to speak. Softly, Terri stroked the little girl’s hair again, and then Elena began to cry.

  Terri kissed her face. ‘What was it, Elena?’

  The little girl kept on crying, softly and raggedly, pausing to breathe. After a time, her keening became half spasm, half hiccup, the residue of fear.

  All at once, Elena was still.

  Gently, Terri pulled away a little, cupping one hand at the side of Elena’s face. Fearful, the child looked back at her.