by Paul Griffin
“I can’t work it out like this, in here. I don’t know if I’ll ever be able to stop hating her or Dave or that monster of a girl or me most of all, but any sense of forgiveness I can discover in myself has to come on its own. Not with people watching for it. Waiting for it. I’m not even sure it’s in me to find. Look, I’ll be waiting in the car. Doctor, I’m sorry.” He left quickly.
“I didn’t get to say it,” Nicole said. “I waited too long. I should have said it in the beginning of the session, when you asked me the first time, but now after hearing what he just said, I don’t think I’ll ever be able to tell him. To get it out.”
“Tell Jay,” Schmidt said. “He’s here for you. Go ahead, Nicole. You can do it.”
Nicole took my hands in hers. “Jay, I need you to know why I do it. Why I cut, I mean. I do it to control the pain my way. Without meds. To feel. To see my imperfection spill out of me. It started after the attack. Shortly after. I wanted to draw the heat in my face downward. I couldn’t bear to look at myself in the mirror in the beginning. I had no idea what the burn looked like. I needed to see it, but at the same time I couldn’t look. So I put it where I could look at it. Where I could control it in every aspect, how it appeared in my skin, how long it lasted. I could start the fire, and I could put it out at will. Remember in biology, that picture of the circulatory system? The blood pumping away from the heart is bright red. The arteries squeeze it through you fiercely, almost uncontrollably. Then there’s the other blood, the blood that goes to the heart, the softer flow, the blood that’s blue. It’s not really. Really it’s just a very dark red, but in the right kind of light, the soft light, the night-light with the sapphire shade, you can convince yourself that it’s the same color as the blood in the picture, that cool blue.” She rolled up her sleeves. The bandages were gone. The scar lines were parallel, all roughly the same length. “We’ve started to talk about it, Dr. Schmidt and I. About her. My mother. I hope at some point I’ll find the courage to contact her, maybe even to see her. I know I’ll have to do that, to hear it directly from her mouth, to know why. Jay, I haven’t cut in thirty-one days.”
“You are amazing,” I said.
“I can’t say I’ll never do it again. Not yet. Maybe I’ll never be able to say it.”
“You’ll always be amazing.”
Nicole was supposed to exercise a lot. Cutting unleashes endorphins in the bloodstream, but so does running. We took up jogging. We were at Palisades Park one beautiful winter day during Christmas break. Not that Nicole had come back to school. We took a breather underneath the George Washington Bridge, at the river’s edge. We hiked the trap rock and found a bench-like slab with a great view of northern Manhattan across the water. A double-flash of bright light hit us. We turned into it with our hands up in front of our faces to block the camera, but the flash had come from the sunlight’s reflecting off the window of a turning Coast Guard speedboat. “How bad was it while I was gone?” Nicole said. “The media attention?”
“Bad.” Actually, it was insane. Everywhere I went those first few days after Mrs. Castro was identified as the person behind the attack, I had at least two reporters tailing me. The stalking died down after a couple of weeks of my not saying anything. What could I say? I didn’t have any answers for them or any answers period.
“Detective Barrone called this morning,” Nicole said. “She wants to talk. Not Barrone, my mother. Talk with me, I mean. She’s cooperating, answering all Barrone’s questions, except one.”
“Why she did it?”
“She says she’ll only answer that to my face. All the stuff you told me about my dad and yours, that night at her debut, then needing to keep me around after the divorce, not being able to let me go. It makes sense on an intellectual level, but I won’t really understand why she did it until I hear her say the words. Until I see her eyes as she tells me. But how can I be in the same room with her? How can I be near her ever again? I swear, when my father told me the doctor said she would probably die from the infection? I was just so relieved. You know? Like I’d been spared my own death sentence or worse, my own life sentence. If she was gone, I’d never have to face her again. I could put away all the pictures and. . Oh my god. Oh my god!” She buried her face in balled hands and rocked back and forth. “My mother had me burned, Jay. My own mother. My mom. I miss my mom.”
She got a job working at the stables, teaching the young kids to ride. She was starting to look at colleges with programs in early childhood education. One night her friend from the stables called and asked her if she wanted to see a horse foal. When we got there, the barn was dark except for a double stall in the corner. The horse was lying on her side and getting ready to deliver. This dog, a boxer mix, I think, sat at Nicole’s side and leaned into her. He kept sticking his nose into her elbow and flipping up her arm and wouldn’t stop until she stroked him.
“No allergies?” I whispered.
“Not that bad, actually,” she said. “The doctor said at some point I might outgrow them.”
We stayed like this for some time, crouching in the stall on upturned crates, just waiting for the colt to be born. The stable master held the mother’s head and stroked her neck. Everyone was quiet and smiling. When the colt was born, everybody laughed.
Her father had put the Brandywine Heights house on the market. He was renting a town house in a luxury condo complex down by the Hudson River, just south of the George Washington Bridge, where Nicole and I ran and hiked. The first floor was Mr. Castro’s office. He’d left his company and was working for himself now, to be around for Nicole. Upstairs was homey, lots of sun and space. Nicole’s room was on the water-view side. We were hanging out on her bed, playing dominoes. Sylvia came in. “Feet on the floor,” she said. She grabbed my ponytail. “If only I had a pair of scissors. One clip, and you would be handsome. Now go downstairs. Let Nicoletta get ready.”
Nicole had been asked to give a speech at the annual Girl Scouts conference in Manhattan.
That night, we were at a midtown hotel. After dinner, Nicole was introduced. She looked stunning, her hair back, her smile wide, except I could see her lips were quivering. The bandage had become smaller, but it still covered all signs of injury. “I’m grateful to you for this opportunity to tell you how much you girls inspire me,” was how she started. “You’re leaders, and we’re all depending on you to lead with kindness. What’s our motto?”
“Be prepared,” half the girls yelled.
Nicole nodded. “Prepared in mind, prepared in body, right? We train our minds to be ready when we need to act to make a situation a bit better. We train our hearts to be strong, to have the courage to give of ourselves to help somebody who-”
“Mommy, what’s wrong with her face?” a Brownie in the front row said.
Nicole kept going. “. . train our hearts to help those who might need. . help.” She brushed her hair with her fingers and covered her face with it. “I’m. .” She hurried away from the podium.
I caught up with her backstage. She was hyperventilating in the corner, facing the bathroom door. “Somebody’s in there,” she said. “The people, they’re still looking at me, Jay, but they can’t see me,” she said. “They can’t see past it.” She rapped on the door. “Please, I have to get in there.”
I held her hand and led her to the street. Mr. Castro went for the car, and we got her home. I slept over at her house that night, on the short couch in her bedroom. When I woke up, she was curled into me. The next day we got her in to see Schmidt for an emergency session.
Her second surgery didn’t go as well as planned, and a third had to be pushed back to the spring. She relapsed with the cutting, but this time she reached out to me about it. She continued with her therapy, but only with Dr. Schmidt and on a private basis, never in the school office. She continued with private tutors, but not in-home. She went to a center in Englewood for one-on-one sessions. She poured herself into her studies. In February, she took the SATs and nailed them.
In early March I met Detective Barrone at the coffee shop. She’d petitioned the DA to drop the obstruction charge. She was putting together her final report on the Recluse case for a study Princeton was doing on near-filicide as it relates to child abuse by proxy syndrome. She wanted to see if I had anything to add, but I was there looking for answers.
You see it in the papers, parents doing horrible physical harm to their kids out of jealousy or spite or for attention-any number of reasons. You say, “Wow, that’s crazy,” and then you click to the TV schedule for something light. You dismiss it as someone else’s hell and get back to your life. You have to, or you lose your mind. I couldn’t do that here. Every time I was with Nicole, the bandage reminded of the mystery of it. I still didn’t know the extent of the burn. Sylvia was the only one Nicole would allow to see it.
Mrs. Castro was recovering at a lockdown hospital. She’d corroborated Angela’s story about the letter and the money. It started at a huge end-of-the-school-year party the Castros had at their house the previous June, when half the school was over. Angela came drunk. She and Dave had been hooking up for a while by then. Apparently, seeing Nicole and Dave together was too much for her. Mrs. Castro caught Angela following Nicole and Dave from a distance as they held hands. Angela was glassy-eyed, forlorn. Later Mrs. Castro found Angela inside, alone, crying in the painting studio. She was going through Mrs. Castro’s wallet. She pulled the cash and stuffed it into her pocket. She was about to slip out the side door when something caught her eye: my dad’s book. Mrs. Castro had left it out on her desk, opened to her favorite painting, Girl Before a Mirror.
After Detective Barrone informed Angela that Mrs. Castro was the mysterious patron who had commissioned the attack, Angela testified that Girl Before a Mirror just blew her away. Right there in Mrs. Castro’s painting studio, she grabbed a pencil and a piece of drawing paper and sketched it. Mrs. Castro came in, surprising Angela. Angela apologized and started to leave, but Mrs. Castro begged her to keep drawing. She asked Angela if she could keep the sketch and had Angela sign it.
Mrs. Castro had been plotting the attack for several months before the party, shortly after her husband left. But now that she found Angela, she had her acid thrower. The girl was poor, jealous of Nicole and extremely vulnerable-one could see that in the remarkable art she exhibited via her Facebook gallery. Angela had an unrelenting thirst to absorb the beauty around her and desperately tried to make it her own. In other words, she easily could be swayed.
This was the only association the two women had, and Angela truly must have been ignorant of the fact that her mysterious benefactor was also her victim’s mother.
Mrs. Castro had continued to be extremely cooperative, down to the smallest details. The bounced checks were a result of too much money juggling. She was pulling a thousand dollars here and there from a lot of different accounts to keep the transactions small and avoid suspicion as she put together the money to pay off Angela. She still refused to answer Detective Barrone’s last question: Why? “Let me see Nicole, and I’ll tell her,” Mrs. Castro pleaded. “Let me see my daughter one last time, face-to-face.”
FIFTY-FIVE
On a cold clear Saturday in late March, I was at the driving range behind the mall with my father. We’d made a deal: If he lost fifty pounds, I’d cut my hair. I no longer looked like a Visigoth.
After hitting through a couple of buckets of range balls, Dad dropped me at Starbucks. Cherry got me a job there, though that day I wasn’t scheduled to work. Nicole was picking me up, and I wanted her to meet Cherry. They hugged when they met and talked as if they’d known each other for a long time and discovered they actually did. They’d both been in the same ballet class when they were five years old. They agreed quitting was the right call, because, per Nicole, “The shoes were murder on your pedicure,” and, per Cherry, “Picking leotard wedgies out of your butt crack in front of the boy dancers was a total drag.”
My new iPhone beeped one o’clock, which is when visiting hours started.
“Time to go?” Nicole said.
“Only if you want to,” I said.
Nicole pushed her sunglasses closer to her face and nodded.
She was quiet on the drive through the Meadowlands. The psychiatric center was a lockdown facility. It had been built on the site of a pre-Civil War prison called Snake Hill. A guard escorted us to a large room with a strangely high ceiling, maybe twenty feet. The paint peeled in patches from an old water leak. At the far end of the room, a few patients clustered around a TV and Jeopardy!
Mrs. Castro sat serenely in a chair by the barred window. She wasn’t restrained, not physically. Her pinned pupils betrayed heavy medication. The only evidence I saw of the oil splash was a wide burn scar under her chin. Her turtleneck collar and long sleeves covered the rest. Smiling, she appeared to recognize Nicole, but she didn’t seem to see me. She moved stiffly and in slow motion, as if she were underwater, motioning for Nicole to sit. As she spoke, she didn’t look at us but out the window at the bright blue day.
“I was losing you,” she said. “To your father, soon to college, then surely a husband. Burning you was the only way to keep you. You needed me, desperately. The only time I didn’t feel alone was when I was with you. Every moment you were out of the house, the sense of separation was increasing. It hurt more deeply than being cut off. I felt I was being cut out. The broken-down heart after the transplant: Where does it go? Even at the hospital with Emma, the children: I knew they were leaving me. But you would stay. I would care for you in a way that you couldn’t care for yourself. My beauty was my curse. In school, my teachers would offer false compliments as they looked not at or into but through my paintings. They would stand behind me, peeking over my shoulder, pretending to look at my work when really they were gawking at my breasts. Your father, too. I was a prop on a Christmas card. But you, my darling. You knew me. You loved me. You saw my art. You were my art. I had made you, and you were perfection. And to keep you, I was willing to destroy you. Nicole?”
Nicole needed a second to find her voice. “Yes?”
“I’m so afraid to be alone, darling. I’m looking out there and seeing just absolutely nothing.” Her eyes clicked from the window’s picture of the beautiful day to Nicole. Mrs. Castro’s face was perfectly peaceful, but a tear dropped from her chin. She held out her arms for a hug.
Nicole hesitated, and then she hugged her mother.
“My sweetheart. My Nicole, I’m sorry. I stole it from you to save you from letting them objectify you.”
Nicole broke from the hug and rushed out.
“Stole what?” I said to her mother.
“Her beauty.”
“You didn’t come close to touching it.” I hurried after Nicole.
We drove deep into the Meadowlands to a nature preserve and hiked to the river’s edge. We sat facing each other on a backless bench, straddling it. We locked hands and watched the cattails duck and weave against the cold clear afternoon sky. We were all alone.
“The hug,” I said. “Does that mean you’re in forgiveness territory?”
“I don’t know. Maybe I’m on my way there. Maybe it was good-bye. Except, it’s too late for good-bye. She’s already gone. She doesn’t feel the same. Like her spirit evaporated, and the only way I can know her now is in my memories of her. Like when we were with Emma this one time. We took her to the beach. We were in the water, waist high. Mom was holding Emma. The waves were crazy that day. Each time one came in, Emma scream-laughed and Mom said, ‘I got you. Relax, Emma, I promise. Ready? Now hold your breath.’ The wave rolled over us, and we pushed up through it and floated out of the back of the wave. And Mom said, ‘See? Nothing bad happened. I kept my promise. I had you the whole time. We were flying, right? We were flying.’ That was my mother.” She took off her sunglasses and looked out past the cattails, to the psychiatric hospital in the near distance. It rose red and solitary from the swampland. “I want to go back, Jay. To school, I mean. I�
�m ready, I think. Yeah, I’m ready.” She turned so I couldn’t see the wounded side of her face. She peeled away the tape, balled up the bandage and tucked it into her pocket. Her hair hid the burn. She was breathing quickly, heavily. She turned to me. She brushed back her hair with her fingers.
I studied her naked face. I took it in, every bit of it. I held her hands and put them to my face, and then I put my hands to her face as I leaned in and kissed her. I kissed her cheeks, her eyes, her mouth. In time, we stopped trembling, and the cold was gone from us and the day and my world and maybe hers too, if only for a while. I tasted the sun in her lips, a warmth as gentle as it was strong. I’d always thought of surrender as a giving up. It wasn’t. To surrender deeply, truly, was to give in to an idea that hadn’t occurred to me until this kiss: that your admiration for somebody could be as great as your adoration of her. It moved me, her trust in me, her faith in herself, her belief in us.
I didn’t feel sorry for Nicole Castro. I felt hope for her. She wasn’t a victim or a snob, a pageant queen or an athlete, a scholar or a saint or any of the other things I’d labeled her over the past few months. She was Nicole, and she was beautiful.
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Griffin, Paul
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