Damage Done

by Amanda Panitch

  The father slapped a hand onto Ryan’s shoulder so hard it reverberated around the walls of my office. “Ryan does want to be helped,” he said. “Ryan does want to change. Don’t you, Ryan?”

  Ryan wouldn’t meet my eyes. He wouldn’t meet anybody’s eyes, unless the tips of his shoes had suddenly sprouted a pair. “Yes,” he whispered.

  “Good.” The father stood, and the mother followed suit. The mother turned and gestured to the sister, who stood reluctantly, her eyes on her brother. “We’ll leave him in your capable hands, Doctor.”

  That was the problem. “Wait,” I said. “Can I speak with Julia for a moment? Alone?”

  The father nodded, and the mother followed suit. They didn’t even ask the girl. “We’ll see you in a minute,” the father said. “Come on, Ryan.” Ryan followed his parents out the door, turning for one last over-the-shoulder glance at his sister. She didn’t stop looking at him until the door had closed; then she turned and looked at me.

  “Ryan said you wouldn’t drug him,” she told me, like she was a teacher telling me I’d passed a test. Now that her brother was gone, she’d stopped shaking. “He was really happy about that. Thanks.”

  So he told her what happened in my sessions. The girl sat back down, and I sat in order to better address her on her level. “Julia, your brother needs help,” I said. “I’m sure you know that by now, right?”

  She was kicking her feet in front of her—left, right, left, right—and watching her toes. “He kills things sometimes,” she said. “But he said he’d never hurt me. Ever.”

  “He burned down a little girl’s tree house,” I said. Left, right, left, right. “He could’ve hurt her very badly. Could you please look at me, Julia?”

  She met my eyes but didn’t stop kicking. “He does bad things,” she said.

  “I know,” I said. “But you can help me help him. May I ask you a favor, Julia?”

  She blinked at me. “What?”

  “If he’s going to get better, he needs to do his therapy,” I said. “I think that if you ask him to go to his therapy, he’ll do it. Will you do that for me?”

  She shrugged bony shoulders. “I guess. I really want him to get better.”

  I could’ve hugged her; I didn’t, because that would have been unprofessional. “I promise I will not give up on your brother,” I told her. “I will be patient, and I will talk to him, and I will help—”

  Something hit me in the shin, and I flinched. She’d kicked me. The girl had kicked me. She was studying my leg, the way it jerked, with a look of mild surprise. “Oops,” she said. “I didn’t mean to kick you. Sorry.”

  I smiled reassuringly at her. “It’s okay,” I said. “And thank you for your help, Julia.”

  She hopped to her feet, a little smile on her face. “You’re welcome,” she said. “Are we done? I have to go to the bathroom.”

  “We’re done,” I said. “Would you send Ryan back in, please?”

  She bounded out the door without a second glance. A moment later, Ryan shuffled in, his eyes on the floor. “Look at me, please,” I said.

  The please did it; as I was saying the first part of my sentence, I could see his jaw tighten, his fists clench, but everything loosened when I said that magic word. He brought his chin up to look me in the eye. He was small for his age, and thin, and the overall effect was that of an impoverished chimney sweep. If only that were his problem; I could toss a few dollars at him and send him on his way. “Listen to me, Ryan William Vann,” I said, doing my best to sound strong and commanding. “I promise, I swear, I will help you, or my name isn’t Dr. Atlas Spence.”

  “You won’t give up?” His voice was tiny, afraid. “Never? You won’t give up on me?”

  “Never,” I assured him. “We will talk and we will work and we will make things better.”

  He looked back down and muttered something.

  I couldn’t be sure, but it sounded like “That’s what I was afraid of.”

  The sight of the black car in my driveway turned my insides to ice; I had to move slowly, carefully, or they’d shatter and break. “It’s him,” I said. My lips were numb. “He’s here.”

  Michael reached for his pocket. “Don’t get out of the car. I’ll call my dad.”

  He couldn’t call his dad. I stopped him with a touch to his arm; I hoped I wouldn’t freeze him, too. “Don’t,” I said. “He could have my parents in there. I need to deal with this myself.”

  “No way,” Michael said. His arm tensed under my grip. “He’s dangerous.”

  “I can talk him down,” I said. “If I don’t come back out in fifteen minutes, then you can call your dad.”

  “Lucy—”

  I didn’t have time to reason with him. I hopped out of the car and did my best to form a reassuring smile. My lips felt like skin stretched over a skull. “I’ll be right out,” I said, and walked quickly toward the front door, rummaging for my pepper spray in the bottom of my bag. I didn’t look back.

  It was dark inside, and every shadow lurked in a suspicious manner: the armchair might well have been a crouched man lying in wait, gun tucked into his armpit, and the coatrack a killer poised beside the closet door. My heart tattooed a rhythm against my ribs—Spence is here Spence is here Spence is here.

  “Hey!” I called, hoisting the pepper spray. “Show your face or I’ll call the cops.”

  A glow was shining around the corner, in the living room. “Lucy,” my mother called. Her voice was shaking. “Come in here, please.”

  My ears pricked. It was definitely her voice, but it might not have been her talking. Spence could be in there holding a gun to her head. “What’s going on?” I called back, still clutching the pepper spray.

  “Just get in here.” That was my father. I considered backing away and running out the door, back into Michael’s waiting arms. I actually thought I heard the front door creak open behind me, as if I’d pushed it open with my mind.

  “What’s going on?” I repeated.

  “We need to talk to you.” My father again. Usually he sounded angry, commanding, no matter what mood he was in. Now he only sounded numb. “Come in here. Please.”

  The pepper spray fell limply to my side. My father never said please.

  I stepped into the glow of the living room and blinked in the sudden light. My parents sat side by side on the couch—though not touching, never touching—and across the coffee table, in chairs, sat two men in blue police uniforms. One was bald; the other had a head of bushy white hair.

  “You must be Julia Vann.” The cop with white hair stood and extended his hand. “Nice to meet you, Julia. I’m Officer West, Sunny Vale PD.”

  “My name is Lucy now,” I said coldly. I didn’t shake his hand. Eventually his smile faltered and he slowly lowered his arm.

  “Lucy, then, whatever you prefer to be called,” he said. “This is my partner, Officer Goodman.”

  The name zinged through my head. Officer Goodman. Joseph Goodman. It couldn’t be a coincidence. But why was Spence driving a cop’s car? Staying in a cop’s house?

  What I did know: I couldn’t trust anything this Officer Goodman said.

  “Good evening, Lucy,” Goodman said. He was very studiously not looking at me. “Mr. and Mrs. Vann, did you want to speak to your daughter alone?”

  “Mr. and Mrs. Black,” my father corrected, his tone entirely void of emotion. A black hole. A Black hole. “I think it’s best if she hears it from someone other than us.”

  My stomach squirmed. “Hears what?” Ryan had woken up. I waited for the words. I had to hear them in front of my parents. That would make them real, solid, something I could grab onto.

  “Miss Black,” West began, “there’s no easy way to say this, but Ryan has gone missing.”

  That was unexpected. “Excuse me?”

  My mother reached out and touched my father’s knee. I couldn’t remember the last time I’d seen them touch. “Last night, the night security shift got to…Ryan’s roo
m and realized he was gone,” she said, her voice trembling. “They don’t know where he is, or who took him, but he’s gone.”

  “Wait,” I said. My heart was pounding so hard I thought it might explode. I thought I might explode. “But he’s still in a coma.”

  My father sighed. “I told you we should have told her.”

  I thought for a moment that he was talking to me, but then I realized he was looking at my mother, who in turn was staring hard at the floor. “We did the right thing,” she said.

  My father sighed again. “Yes, but now—”

  “We did the right thing,” my mother said loudly.

  “What are you talking about?”

  Now my father was looking at the floor, too. I snuck a glance, but there was nothing there. Maybe they were hoping the floor would split open and swallow them up. “Ryan was only in a coma for a week.”

  “You’re lying.”

  My father didn’t respond to my accusation, just kept talking, as if this was a speech he’d rehearsed. “Ryan woke up shortly after the police moved him to their facility. They brought us in to talk. They said it would be better if he underwent rehabilitation without the attention of the media. He wouldn’t have to face trial until he could talk again.”

  “You don’t understand, Julia,” my mother said. I was still so stunned I didn’t even bother to reprimand her for using my real name. “He wasn’t himself. He was a mess. He could barely breathe on his own. We thought it would be best for you if you continued to think he was…gone. So you could make a fresh start.”

  My heart squeezed and wrung itself out, a piece of wet laundry. How could I not have known? How could Julia not have known? “What were you planning to do once it hit the media?” I said. My hands shook. “Once he recovered and had to face trial?”

  My father looked at my mother. My mother continued to look at the floor. “We were going to tell you,” he said helplessly. I knew that was a lie. They either hadn’t planned that far ahead or, more likely, hadn’t thought at all about how it might affect me.

  It didn’t matter now anyway. “I need to see him,” I said. “Take me to him.”

  “We can’t,” my father said, and now he looked at me. I expected his eyes to be as distant as they usually were, but they had glossed over with what I had to assume were tears. “You heard what the officers said. He’s missing.”

  “Don’t worry,” West said, his tone assured. “We’re doing all we can to track him down. It’s only a matter of time.”

  “How could you let him go missing?” My voice rose to a pitch I figured only dogs could hear. “He was well enough to escape? To get away? Is that what you’re saying? You let him go?”

  West’s plastic smile faltered. “We’re doing all we can,” he repeated.

  That falter in his smile. “You need to find him,” I said. My voice rose again, this time to a shout. “Don’t you know how dangerous he is? Don’t you know what he did?”

  “Lucy…,” my mother murmured.

  “How well was he? Could he talk? Did he kill anyone when he escaped?” I said. Or yelled. I might have yelled. “You’re really here to see if we’re hiding him, aren’t you? To see if he’s made it here? How did he go missing, exactly? Or did one of your own people help him? Was it—” Spence. Spence had to have something to do with this.

  I sank onto the couch and bowed my head. “You might as well leave,” I said. “He isn’t here.”

  “Of course he isn’t here,” my father said. Overly loud, I thought. “We would have called you immediately if he was. And if he should happen to show his face, we’ll call you immediately. Gentlemen…”

  West and Goodman popped to their feet. “If you have any questions, of course, don’t hesitate to give us a call,” West said. “You have my card.”

  “Thank you,” my mother said faintly.

  “I’ll see them out,” I said, jumping up.

  “There’s really no need—” West began.

  “Nonsense,” I said, baring my teeth in what I hoped looked like a grin. “Wouldn’t want you to get lost, would we? It’s only polite.”

  My parents let me go. They shouldn’t have let me go.

  I escorted the two cops to the front door, which I blocked. Not really blocked, of course. If they really wanted to move me, they could’ve easily pushed me out of the way. “You have one last chance to tell me what’s really going on here.” Before what? I didn’t know. I just hoped it sounded sufficiently menacing.

  Goodman leaned in. Onion breath washed over my face. “I don’t know what you’re talking about,” he said softly.

  And then they were gone, and I was shaking. Somewhere far away I could hear my parents’ steps on the stairs. They were going to their bedroom, I assumed, to hide from me. They always seemed to be hiding. As I was growing up, it was my mom in her pills, my dad in his work; my dad still hid in his work, but my mom now hid in her cleaning. It was like they thought of Ryan and me as afterthoughts, as brief diversions in their real lives.

  “Lucy?” I jumped in surprise.

  “Michael?” He was lurking to the side, in the doorway of the kitchen. I hadn’t even seen him in the dark. “What are you doing here?” It seemed like a million years ago that I’d turned into ice and left him outside. Now all the ice had melted.

  “I got worried.” In the dark, shadows took up residence in the hollows of his cheeks, in the pockets under his eyes. He looked curiously vulnerable. “Why did they call you Julia?”

  “I…” My voice broke, falling and shattering on the tile like the glass I’d thrown at my brother the time he told me he had a crush on a girl in his social studies class. We’d only been in fourth grade, but I’d never forget the fury that tore through me. “I’m the only girl you’ll ever need,” I’d told him, and I’d been right.

  “I…” I sank to my knees; the broken shards of my voice sliced free the words I’d kept safe inside my head. “My real name is Julia Vann,” I said flatly before Michael had the chance to say anything. I knew he’d ask. He might as well hear it from me. Alane already knew, after all. I stood, steadying myself against the wall. “My brother is Ryan Vann. You’ve heard of him. You’ve probably heard of me, too.”

  “Ryan Vann,” Michael said slowly. I flinched to hear my brother’s name. For over a year now, the only place I’d heard it had been inside my skull, where it echoed with loneliness. “It doesn’t ring a bell.”

  “You know him,” I said. “Ryan Vann. Elkton. Eleven dead.”

  I could see the moment it hit him; his eyes widened and he sucked in a sharp breath, which was followed by a lengthy exhale that made me think he was going to throw up. “You’re the sister,” he said. “The only one who came out alive.”

  He kept staring at me like he wanted me to confirm. I wasn’t sure exactly what to say. “Yup, that’s me!” I said finally in a far-too-perky sort of way.

  “Oh my God,” he said. I tensed. If he was going to lunge at me, I was going to have to move fast. “I’m so sorry.”

  I relaxed just a tiny bit. “You’re not going to hit me?”

  “God, Lucy! Sorry, Julia, Lucy, whoever you are. Why would I hit you?” Now he looked angry, and his fists were balled. I shrank back into the wall. He seemed to realize the effect he was having and hopped back, his fists opening like flowers bursting into bloom. “God, no, Lucy! Julia! I would never hit you. Why would you even think that? That’s insane.”

  “It’s not so insane,” I said coldly. “After my brother…did what he did, nobody would talk to us. We had reporters outside on our street twenty-four hours a day. We had to disconnect our phone line because people kept calling to yell at us and tell us to get out of town. They blamed us.”

  His shoulders sank, and he suddenly looked six inches shorter. Not in a bad way, though. He became more approachable, somehow, like I could sink right into him. “That’s crazy,” he said, and then added, “Not on your part. On their part. How could they blame you? You didn’t do any
thing.”

  A snort escaped, and then a laugh, and then suddenly I was on the floor again, hysterical, barking gasps shaking my whole body. I thought they were supposed to be laughs, but I wasn’t entirely sure. “Thank you for that,” I said once I’d calmed down enough to speak. “I appreciate it.” And so, in that moment, I knew I’d fallen for Michael Silverman, both figuratively and literally.

  And that meant he had to go. “You should leave, Michael,” I said. “It’s time for you to leave.”

  My brother was not kind to people who’d wronged me. I, of course, felt that Michael was doing the opposite of wronging me—he was righting me. But my brother wouldn’t see it that way. He’d see Michael as keeping me away from him, of steering me away from my own blood, and so he’d have to do something about Michael. For my own good.

  A little girl had wronged me, once. Her name was Gabriella, and her mother had a French accent, which made her mother the coolest person in the world. Most of us would get embarrassed and shuffle away whenever our parents came near, but all Gabriella’s mother had to do was smile down at us and say “Bonjour,” and somehow Gabriella became even cooler. She compounded her coolness with a cool tree house, which became the cool hangout spot for all the neighborhood cool kids.

  Naturally, we all wanted to be her friend. Even me and Liv. We’d follow her around at recess and crowd beneath her when she took her spot (the throne, we called it) atop one of the slides and tell her how beautiful she was, even though in truth she kind of looked like a rat.

  One day Gabriella smiled down at me and told me to get lost. I blinked at her. She elaborated: “You and your brother are weird. I don’t want you here.” I had no choice but to go. Liv waved at me as I went, then turned away guiltily. She didn’t want to sentence herself to isolation by my side.

  I didn’t want to tell my brother. I really didn’t. This was after Fluffy had met her untimely end, and so I knew exactly what he was capable of. But he caught me crying by the side of the playground. His brows knit together and his breath came in short, sharp blasts, and I thought that if I didn’t tell him quickly he might hit the wall and hurt his hand, so I told.