by Lisa Gardner
“Common area,” Karen said immediately. She was already out of her chair, grabbing the keys around her neck, running for the door.
D.D. was right on her heels. She could just make out words now. “Devil!” the children were screaming. “Diablo. Está aquí. Está aquí. The Devil is here.”
CHAPTER
TWENTY-EIGHT
VICTORIA
I dream of distant beaches. Of silky white sand that sinks beneath my feet. Of turquoise waves rocking against the shoreline. Of a deep-orange sun warming my upturned face.
I dream of walking with my husband, hand in hand.
Our children are running ahead, laughing together happily. Evan’s golden curls stand out in the bright sunlight, Chelsea’s darker-topped head bent near his. They dig a hole with a stick, just out of reach of the lapping ocean.
Then Evan reaches over and casually pushes his sister into the hole. The sand collapses, swallowing her in one greedy gulp. Laughing, Evan runs back toward us. Now I realize he doesn’t hold a stick, but a long pointed blade. He aims it at his father, and picks up speed, the phantom dancing in his eyes as he races across the opalescent beach.
“You’re mine,” he says to me as he runs his father through. “You will always be mine.”
Then he advances with the bloody sword.…
I wake up to a strange beeping sound. The high-pitched tone hurts my ears. I squeeze my eyes shut as if that will dull the sound. It doesn’t, so I open them again, becoming aware of many things at once.
I’m in a hospital room. My side aches with a nearly impossible pain. Monitors surround me, with wires and lines sprouting from my left hand. I’m hot. I’m confused. I have no idea what has happened to me.
Then I discover belatedly that Michael’s asleep in a chair next to my bed.
While I stare at him in bewilderment, he slowly rouses, glancing at me, then performing a double-take when he realizes I’m awake.
“Victoria?” he says in a raspy voice.
“Evan?” I ask in panic.
Immediately, Michael’s face shudders. He climbs out of the chair, wearing the same khaki shorts and Brooks Brothers shirt he wore to my house. This confuses me more. What day is it? What’s happened to me?
“How do you feel?” he asks, crossing to the bed, glancing at the monitors, as if they mean something to him.
I swallow once, twice, three times. “Th-thirsty.”
“I’ll ring for a nurse.”
I nod. He pushes a button. “Evan?” I try again.
“He’s okay.”
“Chelsea?”
“She’s at home. With Melinda. What do you remember?”
I shake my head. I don’t remember. But then it comes back to me. Sitting down on the couch next to my sun-drunk child. Feeling a little sleepy. The sudden pain in my side …
My hand drops down to my ribs. Sure enough, my left side is covered in a swathe of gauze. I don’t have to touch it to feel the pain, the red, swollen mess of it. My son stabbed me.
“The knife penetrated your liver,” Michael tells me, as if reading my thoughts. “If the EMTs hadn’t gotten you here in time for emergency surgery, you would’ve died.”
“Evan?” I ask for the third time.
“Do you understand me, Victoria? You would’ve died.”
A nurse appears. She bustles in, picking up my wrist, checking my pulse even though some cumbersome plastic object attached to my fingertip must be telling her the same thing. “How do you feel?” she asks, studying the monitors.
“Thirsty.”
“I can bring you ice chips. If you hold those down, next we can attempt water. Sound like a plan?”
I nod. She exits, returning quickly with half a cup of ice chips. I take them sparingly, realizing the increasing discomfort in my abdomen. I’ve never been good with anesthesia. Ice chips probably are the best I can do.
“Doctor will be in to talk to you shortly,” she says. Then the nurse is gone and Michael and I are staring at each other again.
“Thank you for coming,” I manage. I don’t know what else to say.
He shrugs. “Someone had to come. It was either me or your mother.”
We both know what he means. My mother would’ve pulled the plug. I’m not a daughter to her. More like the competition. At least I used to be. It’s been so long since she’s visited me or her grandkids, she has no idea how far I’ve fallen.
“Evan?” I try yet again.
“Evan’s okay.”
“He didn’t mean to—” I start.
Michael holds up a hand. His face is the angriest I’ve ever seen. “You know why I left?” he said abruptly. “You know why I took Chelsea and got the hell out of our home?”
I shake my head. His anger frightens me.
“Because I figured it was only a matter of time before I had to kill my son in order to protect my wife and daughter. And call me crazy, but I didn’t want to kill Evan. Dammit, I love him, too, Victoria. I’ve always loved him, too.”
I don’t know what to say.
“Do you know what you’ve done to him?” he continues, the force of his emotions causing his voice to tremble. “He’s eight, and he now has to deal with the knowledge that he stabbed his own mother. That he nearly killed you. He’s just a kid, for Christ’s sake. How’s he supposed to handle that? With everything else going on in his fucked-up head, how the hell is he ever supposed to deal with that?”
I don’t know what to say.
“I thought you’d died. I got the call, and the way the emergency room nurse was talking … I raced all the way here thinking you were dead. That Evan had murdered you. Then I run into the emergency room, and the police have a million questions and the doctors have a million questions. I can’t even see you; you’ve already been whisked away to the operating room. And Evan’s shackled to a hospital bed. They’ve got him cuffed and everything. My son. My little boy …”
Michael’s voice breaks. He turns away from me, walks toward the wall, and stares at it for a bit.
“I had to call Darren,” he says at last, referring to an old college friend who’d become an attorney. “I had to get legal advice for Evan. That’s where we are with things, Victoria.”
“He didn’t mean—” I try again.
Michael whirls around. “Shut up. Just shut up. I don’t care that you’re hurt. I don’t care that you almost died. I want to hurt you worse, Victoria. I want to slap you until you realize once and for all that your denial is destroying our son. Evan did mean to hurt you. He intentionally stole that goddamn knife out of the drying rack. He cleverly slipped it inside the fabric on the underside of the sofa, where you wouldn’t find it. And he carefully retrieved it during an opportune moment, just so he could drive it through your ribs.”
“How do you know all that? How can you possibly know?”
“Because he told me.”
I stare at him, slack-jawed, disbelieving.
“He’s broken. He answered my questions by rote. There’s no light in his eyes. He stabbed you, but he broke himself. And I don’t know if we’ll get him back. Sure this was better than an institution, Vic?”
The bitterness of his words hurts, just as he intends. I feel the full force of his helplessness. The buried rage from all the times I overrode him, shut him out of the parenting process because I didn’t agree with his solutions, couldn’t let go of my own notions of what was best for my child. I’m the nurturer. Michael, the fixer. We were doomed from the start.
“Did … did they arrest Evan?” I ask, shifting a little in the bed, trying to get comfortable. I feel queasy, but that might be from the conversation as much as the aftereffects of the anesthesia.
“I’m sure an arrest warrant is only a matter of time. At the moment, however, given his fragile mental state, he’s been hospitalized.”
I stare at him in confusion. “Where?”
“Upstairs. Turns out this medical center has a locked-down pediatric psych ward on the eighth floor. Evan’s now a pati
ent.”
My eyes widen. Once again Michael holds up a hand. “I don’t want to hear it. I had Darren pull our divorce decree. I still have custodial rights to Evan and, given your current physical and emotional state, I’ll take you to court and demand full custody if I have to. Our son’s experienced a psychotic break. He’s upstairs and he’s gonna stay there.”
“He’s just a child—”
“Which is why it’s a pediatric ward. And, since you asked so nicely, it’s an excellent acute-care program. Highly recommended, considered very progressive in its approach to mentally ill kids. You can visit anytime you want, assuming you get yourself healed enough to get out of bed.”
“Bastard.”
“I wish I’d become one sooner,” he says flatly. “Maybe then we could’ve avoided this.”
“I’m not a bad mom,” I whisper after a moment. It seems a stupid thing to say, given that I’ve just been stabbed by my own child.
But Michael seems to understand. His face smooths, some of the tension seeps from his shoulders. He sighs, rubs his forehead. Sighs again. “No, you’re not a bad mom, Vic. And I’m not a bad dad, and Evan, when he’s Evan, is not a bad kid. And yet, here we are.”
“What will happen next?”
“I don’t know.”
“I won’t press charges,” I state defiantly. “They can’t arrest him without me, right?” My stomach rolls. I am going to vomit.
Michael, however, shakes his head. “Not that simple, Vic. He stabbed you, then confessed to the police. Those officers will prepare affidavits. Those affidavits can be used by the prosecutor to demand an arrest warrant. According to Darren, the court will probably be willing to accept Evan being held in a mental institution versus a juvenile center for the time being. So that’s step one. Next, we let the legal process grind along while focusing on improving Evan’s state of mind. If we can show he’s more stable, the court may be more forgiving. Maybe. But it’s going to take time, Vic. Time for him, time for you, time for the legal system. We’re in it for a bit.”
I cringe at what that means. Evan staying in a locked-down ward. My son, eight years old and institutionalized indefinitely.
My turn to look away, to study the white walls.
So many things I want to tell my son. That I love him. That I still believe in him. I’m not in denial. I’ve seen the darkness in his eyes. But I’ve seen the light, too. I’ve seen all the moments that Evan got to be Evan, and I wouldn’t have missed those moments for anything.
Something occurs to me. I turn my head to peer at my husband. “You said I was lucky the EMTs got me to the hospital in time. But how did they know? Who called them?”
Michael sticks his hands in his pockets. “Evan,” he says at last. “He dialed nine-one-one, told the operator he’d stabbed his mother. He said you were bleeding and needed help.”
“He tried to save me.”
“Maybe. Maybe not. The operator asked him what happened. You know what he said?”
I shook my head, bewildered.
“He said the Devil made him do it. And he said the ambulance had better come quick, because the Devil wasn’t finished yet.”
CHAPTER
TWENTY-NINE
DANIELLE
When Aunt Helen opened the door, first thing I noticed was her red-rimmed eyes. She tried to hide her tears. Brushed at her cheeks, ran her fingers through her short brown hair. Her cheeks remained wet, her face blotchy. She noticed that I noticed and, for both our sakes, gave up on pretense. She gestured for me to come in.
She’d moved out of her downtown condo years ago. Now she had a newer townhouse just outside the city limits. Lower maintenance as she approached the downsizing phase of life. She’d retired from her corporate-lawyer gig years ago. Instead, she worked thirty hours a week for a nonprofit that specialized in promoting better rights, funding, and legislation for abused and at-risk kids. She liked the work, she said, precisely because it was a one-eighty from her previous career. She’d gone from protecting the fat cats to fighting for children’s rights.
You’d think this would give us more in common, easy conversation for the few nights a month we shared dinner. Instead, neither of us ever talked about work. Maybe we had those kinds of jobs; you had to leave them at the office, or you’d go nuts.
“Coffee?” she asked, leading me into the small but expensively appointed kitchen.
“Whiskey,” I replied.
Sadly, she thought I was joking. She poured us both glasses of water. I didn’t think that was strong enough for what I needed to do next.
She carried the glasses to another small but beautifully decorated room. The sitting area featured gleaming hardwood floors, a white-painted fireplace mantel, and a vaulted ceiling. Off the family room was a screened-in porch that overlooked a stretch of wetlands. Earlier in the summer, we’d sat on that porch and watched for herons. This late in August, however, it was too hot and sticky.
We perched on the L-shaped sofa. I sipped my water and felt the ceiling fan brush freshly chilled air across my cheeks. Aunt Helen didn’t speak right away. Her hands were trembling on her glass. She wouldn’t meet my eyes, but gazed at the floor.
This time of year always hit her harder than it did me. Maybe because she gave herself the permission to grieve, to release the floodgates one week out of every year. She cried, raged, blew off steam. Then she picked up the pieces and returned to the business of living.
I couldn’t do it. Never could. I didn’t want to release the floodgates; I was afraid I’d never get them closed again. Plus, all these years later, I remained mostly angry. Deeply, deeply enraged. Which was why I rarely visited my aunt around the anniversary. It was too hard for me to watch her weep, when I wanted to shatter everything in her house.
My visit today had probably surprised her. She twisted her water glass between her fingers, waiting for me to speak.
“Doing okay?” I asked at last. Stupid question.
“You know,” she replied with a small shrug. Better answer. I did know.
I cleared my throat, looked out the sunny bank of windows. Unexpectedly, my eyes stung and I fought through the choke hold of strangling emotion.
“Something’s happened,” I managed at last.
She stopped fiddling with her water glass and studied me. And suddenly, I was staring at my mother’s blue eyes. I was standing in the doorway of my mother’s bedroom, holding my father’s gun behind my back, while I tried to muster the courage for what I needed to say next.
“He hurt me,” I heard myself whisper.
“Danielle?” My aunt’s voice, my mother’s voice. They ran together, two women, both who’d claimed to love me.
I licked my lips, forced myself to keep talking. “My father. On the nights when he drank a lot … sometimes he came to my room in the middle of the night.”
“Oh Danielle.”
“He said if I did what he wanted, he wouldn’t have to drink so much. He’d be happy. Our family would be happy.”
“Oh Danielle.”
“I tried, in the beginning. I thought, if I just made him happy, I wouldn’t have to hear my mom cry at night. Things would get better. Everything would be all right.”
My aunt didn’t speak, just regarded me with my mother’s sorrowful blue eyes.
“But it got worse. And he drank more, came in more often. I couldn’t do it. Couldn’t take it. I went to Mom’s room that night. To tell her what he was doing. And I brought his gun with me.”
“You threatened Jenny?” my aunt asked in confusion. “You were going to shoot your mother?”
“No, I threatened my father. I told my mom that if she didn’t make him stop, I was going to shoot him. That was my plan. Not bad for a kid, huh?”
“Oh Danielle. What happened?”
“He came home while we were talking. He was drunk, calling our names. We listened to him come up the stairs. Mom demanded that I give her the gun. She said she’d take care of everything. She’d help m
e. She promised. I just had to give her the gun.”
“What did you do?”
“I handed her his gun. Then I bolted down the hall and hid under the covers in my bedroom. I didn’t come out until … afterward.”
My aunt took a shaky breath, released it. She set her water glass on the coffee table, then stood, walking a few steps toward the window. My aunt wasn’t a restless person. Her actions now distracted me, made me study her intently. She wouldn’t look at me. She stared out at the sun-bleached wetlands, where the birds had to be more comforting than our current conversation.
“You think it’s your fault, what your father did,” she said, softly.
“I was a kid. Can’t be my fault.”
She turned, smiling wanly at me. The first tear trickled down her cheek. She wiped it away, crossing her arms over her chest. “Dr. Frank taught you well.”
“He should’ve; you paid him enough.”
“Do you hate me, too, Danielle? Are my sister’s failings my own?”
“Did you know? You’ve been so adamant about therapy all these years. Did my Mom tell you what he was doing?”
Slowly, Aunt Helen shook her head. Then she caught herself, a second tear trickling down, a second tear wiped away. “I didn’t know about the abuse. I suspected. Dr. Frank suspected. But, Danielle, not everything going on in your family had something to do with you.”
“I told on him. I tried to make it stop and everyone died. My mom, Johnny, Natalie. If I hadn’t said anything … if I’d just kept trying to make him happy …”
“Your father was a self-centered son of a bitch. No one could make him happy. Not Jenny, not his kids, not all the second chances Sheriff Wayne gave him. Don’t pin this on yourself.”
“It wasn’t fair, especially for Natalie and Johnny. I can hate my mom. Some nights I do. She stayed with him. Worse, she took the gun from me. If she’d let me keep it and go with plan A … So during my bad moments, I tell myself mom got what she deserved. But Natalie and Johnny—” My voice broke. I got up and paced. “They died because they poked their heads out of their rooms. And I lived because I was too scared to get out of bed. It’s not fair, and no number of passing years changes that.”