“We’ll get you looked at first, then go check on her,” he said.
“I think we need to get over there now, Dad. Before things get any worse.”
He noticed how she was holding one arm, her hand closed around her bicep to cover the small circular scars that dotted the skin, hiding the cigarette burns that her so-called mother had inflicted upon her years ago.
“The doctor should look at you.”
“I told you, I’m fine. It’s just a few scratches. C’mon. And you said it yourself, Sarah’s the top priority here. I’m not.”
Having his words flung back at him by his own daughter like that stung him deeply, a real sucker punch. He hadn’t meant to make it sound like he was putting another family above his own, but there was a certain bite to Lauren’s words that he couldn’t ignore.
“I didn’t mean—”
“I know,” she said.
“You can go,” Dec said. “We’re good here. Thanks for getting us here.”
“I’ll stay with them,” Hendrix volunteered. “Make sure they get seen.”
Scott let out another deep breath, feeling cornered again—this time by his own people, even with the crush of strangers pressing against him.
“All right, fine,” he said. “But I’m bringing you back here after. You probably need a rabies shot or something.”
Lauren nodded, but her face remained implacable.
“Do you think Buckley is okay?” she asked.
Rather than answer, Scott put his arm around his daughter’s shoulders again, helping lead her through the crowds. Her phone was gripped tightly in one hand, and he caught her checking again as she stumbled through the mess of injured people.
Kids and their phones, he thought.
9
MELISA DELACOURT HAD BEEN a shitty mother.
As the years passed, Lauren stayed in touch with her less and less. Melisa had been apparently fine with the transition, as she never made even one attempt to reach out to her daughter or make amends for the past.
When she was younger, the visits were always supervised, either by her father and held in neutral public grounds, or conducted in the lobby of the police station within sight of the desk sergeant.
She had been very young when Melisa and her father divorced, and one of her earliest memories was of Dad explaining to her the cause for their separation.
“Mommy’s very sick,” he’d said.
Lauren had no reason to question this, and her immature mind had little reason to explore the subject with any depth or logic. At only three years old, she’d understood what it meant to be sick—coughing, runny nose, a fever—and those things always made her miserable. Whenever she got sick, she just wanted to curl up on the sofa and be left alone. So when Mommy left to go be by herself, Lauren understood only that Mommy must have been really, really sick.
Not until many years later did she learn the truth, when she started putting the pieces together on her own. Eventually, she’d had a heart-to-heart with her father, and as she was old enough and mature enough to understand the realities of the situation, Matthew Scott finally came clean to her.
Sitting at the kitchen table, he explained how one night, only a few months after Lauren’s birth, he’d come home from his shift to find Melisa in their apartment dining room stoned and cutting herself. He hadn’t gone into exquisite detail, but her imagination filled in the blanks nicely. She could imagine a young Melisa with manic, drug-shot eyes taking a kitchen knife to her forearm and carving slits in her flesh from wrist to elbow.
“Melisa was committed for a little while after that, and spent about three weeks in psychiatric care,” Scott had explained.
“I still loved her, though, you know? I wasn’t ready to give up on her. She just had some problems, and the doctors worked with her for a while to get her on a good medication schedule to help her screw her head back on right. And she was fine for a while,” he continued.
For a little more than a year and a half, things between Matthew and Melisa went well. Well enough that when their marriage began to deteriorate, he was able to turn a blind eye to it for a while. Until she became moody and took up smoking again, a habit she had broken after finding out she was pregnant and had kept at bay for the better part of two years.
“She started drinking and quit taking her medicine. We were fighting more and more, and she lied to me about it—about quitting the meds, I mean. I started counting the pills in her prescription bottle and…”
At that point, he’d rubbed his knuckles into his eyes and drank a glass of water. Lauren had been surprised at the amount of care and longing in his voice as she recognized that he was reopening very old wounds for her. As much as she admired her father, she could not understand for the life of her how he could be so choked up over the abusive crazy woman that she knew as her mother.
When he saw her absentmindedly massaging the scars on her arm with her fingertips, he’d sobered up and his eyes went clear, if still distant. “I don’t know how long she’d been off her medication, but things started to crystalize for me. She started wearing long-sleeved shirts all the time. Even in the summer, she wore long-sleeved t-shirts. I was stupid, you know? I didn’t think much of it at first, not until she started slipping.
“It’d been mostly a good year up to that, kinda like old times. I thought maybe we had started to resettle into a groove, gotten used to this new state of being. And I thought she was just paying you more attention, being more attendant, being a better mother. But she kept slipping, and I started to realize that what she was doing, really, was shielding you from me. Hiding you behind herself so I couldn’t see what was happening.
“I was working extra hours, trying to pull in as much OT as possible. It was good money, and we needed it, so I was missing an awful lot at home. And I know that’s not an excuse but—”
“It’s not your fault, Dad.”
He shrugged. “It’s one thing to hear you say that, and another thing entirely for me to believe it. And it’s something that your mom always used against me when we fought. My not being home was a weapon she could use against me, and damn it if it didn’t work. And in some ways she was right. I wasn’t home, I wasn’t seeing what was happening. To her. To you. I just didn’t see it. But I started putting the pieces together, slower than I should have. I wanted to give her the benefit of the doubt, though…you know?”
Lauren had reached across the table, putting her hand atop her father’s and giving him a gentle, encouraging squeeze.
“I’d left work early, got another guy to cover for me. Melisa was giving you a bath, and the water was running so she didn’t hear me come in. I could see what was happening—what was about to happen—in the mirror as I got near, but still, there I was telling myself I was only being paranoid, trying to trick myself into believing everything would be okay. And I knew I was lying to myself, too. Fuck’s sake, I could see you right there in the mirror and I could see all these tiny red marks on your body and it all clicked. Melisa had her sleeves pushed up so they wouldn’t get wet, and there were scabs all over her arms.
“She had a cigarette in her mouth. She was smoking and giving you a bath,” he said, unable to hide the exasperation at his ex-wife.
“She was blowing smoke right in your eyes and you started to cry. That’s when she took the cigarette from her mouth, and I knew she was going to burn you. If I hadn’t grabbed her wrist right then…”
Lauren nodded. Many of the cigarette burns that marred her body were small scars, diminished with age and they’d grown barely noticeable as she grew. A few, like the cluster on her upper arms, were more readily apparent, even if she had no direct memory of how they had occurred.
“I had to shove her aside and get you out of there, back into your crib, soaking wet and screaming your little head off. I arrested your mom that night, and the next morning I filed for divorce while she was put back into psychiatric care.”
After the Child Protective Services and po
lice investigations, and the ensuing court proceedings, Melisa was found guilty of child endangerment, willful negligence, and assault and battery, convicted and sentenced to three years at a women’s correctional facility. Upon her release, she petitioned to be allowed supervised visits, which the court granted. Matthew had not objected, still believing there was some small measure of hope for normalcy and that Lauren deserved a chance to know her mother.
Most of the time, Melisa skipped out on the visits, and Lauren and her father would spend hours together at the park making the best of the time they had together. He’d push her on the swings, take her for ice cream after. Those were good times, she thought, the memories dim and distant. Other times Melisa would show, barely lucid or exhausted from her prescribed pills. Eventually, as the years wore on, she stopped trying altogether and Lauren was left, out of some misguided sense of familial obligation, to carry the weight of salvaging their relationship. That burden grew too heavy eventually, and she began to show the same disinterest in continuing things. As she got older, she made friends, went to school, and—more recently—got a part-time job. Whatever mom-sized hole was in her life had been filled with other interests. Still, she couldn’t help but wonder what it was like to have that sort of happy balance. Of her small group of close friends, she was the only that came from a “broken” home. There were never any freshly baked, made from scratch, cookies in her home, although her dad was pretty good with the oven, and she had learned how to cook pretty well from the age of twelve.
When she suggested that they go check up on Melisa, it wasn’t out of any sense of loyalty or compassion for the woman. Instead, there was an odd sense of obligation and maybe even a degree of one-upmanship and a perverse display of moral superiority. A way to demonstrate to the woman how much better Lauren Scott was without her, despite Melisa’s best efforts.
You couldn’t even bother to call, but look at me. Look at us. We came out here to just make sure your pathetic, sorry ass was safe and sound. Even though you didn’t give a single shit about either of us. So suck on that, bitch.
“You expecting a call?” Scott asked.
His gaze flickered between her and the road ahead of them. She glanced down at her phone again, then slipped it into her pocket.
“No,” she said. Then shrugged, as if bored.
Please, Jacob, if you’re out there, please call me. Please.
Hex hadn’t been a dog easy to rile and often sat quietly in the compartment behind Scott. That said, the dog had carried a certain weight and made his presence known. The dog’s absence was unsettling, and despite knowing that Hex was dead, Scott still expected to hear the sound of his breathing, or snoring, or the shifting of his frame within the back of the SUV. Instead, the sterile quiet was painfully noticeable.
Scott fought back the tears of grief and tried his damnedest to ignore the burning iron ball that had settled in his belly. Hex was gone. His friend, his partner, a fellow officer, and—most importantly—a family member. He had no trouble admitting that Hex was his little fur baby, and with the shepherd gone, and so violently, Scott was fighting a rising tide of emotion. There was no time to mourn, though.
Casting his eyes at Lauren, he saw she was fiddling with her phone again, even though both of them knew damn well that it was dead to the world.
Who is she expecting to call? he wondered. Maybe one of her friends, maybe Crystal. She was a good kid. He tried hard to think of the names of her other girlfriends, but couldn’t dredge them up. Or work, but he wasn’t sure if she was expected at Best Buy today or not. She certainly hadn’t been in a hurry to get to her job when he saw her cut off that minivan earlier in the day, and even though she loved the beach he hoped she wasn’t that reckless just to catch some rays.
Driving like a mad woman, fidgeting with her phone, showing up downtown. What was she hiding?
“You expecting a call?”
“No,” she said, giving the phone one last look before sliding it into the hip pocket of her jean shorts.
Her eyes did not rise to meet his, though, and he knew for sure that she was keeping a secret.
Hell, though, he couldn’t blame her, he supposed. With his work schedule of six months on days and six months on nights, he’d missed half of her life, at least. Those night shifts were killer. He’d sleep in the day, while she was at school, and by the time she got home he’d be getting ready to leave for work. When his off-days rotated in, they still only had a handful of hours before she was off to bed to start her next day, or, if on weekends, when he was lucky enough to have a weekend off with her, she’d be off to go hang with her friends. Day shifts were a little better, and made being a family easier, but Lauren still had a life of her own. A life that he wasn’t as integral to as he’d once been.
Somehow, in the blink of an eye, she’d grown from being this tiny little baby into an adult, or close to anyway.
His fingers curled tighter around the steering wheel, knuckles whitening. He’d never felt the wall between them as clearly as he did right now. She was keeping secrets, and his cop’s mind raced over the possibilities.
He’d missed out on enough of her life. He’d been blind to Melisa’s behaviors for so long, and by the time he’d glommed onto that, his daughter had been burned. What was Lauren hiding? Drugs? He thought not, but maybe she was just into the lightweight stuff. Could she be trying to get ahold of a dealer to score a joint, something to help cut through the day’s edge? She never behaved like a tweaker, and her skin wasn’t marred with track marks. Maybe a boy? He wasn’t overly thrilled with the idea of his little girl dating, but he knew she was mature enough to handle it. Still, things happened…
Was she seeing somebody? And if she were, was that really so bad?
No, he decided, it wasn’t the worst thing in the world. How long had it been going on, and why hadn’t she told him? That last question was the one that nagged at him.
He thought about all the times she’d checked her phone today and decided that, yes, it probably had to do with a boy.
“How long have you been seeing him?” he asked.
“Who?”
He glanced at her. After a moment she met his gaze, but there was that tell again.
“The boy you’re worrying over. The one you keep expecting to call, or hoping that you’ll get a signal so you can call him.”
Slowly, her eyes softened and she stared into the footwell for a moment, pushing back loose strands of hair behind her ears.
“His name is Jacob. We’ve been seeing each other for two—almost three—months now.”
“You like him, then.”
“I do.”
“So what’s the big secret then?” he asked.
Lauren sighed. “I don’t know,” she said. “I mean, I meant to tell you, like, a while ago. But somehow it just didn’t happen. You were busy with work, or I was, or with homework or whatever. And then somehow it just became a secret. And then I thought I couldn’t tell you, because then you’d be mad that I hadn’t told you earlier, which meant I couldn’t tell you at all, and…it’s stupid.”
“It’s okay,” he said. “I’m not mad.”
“You sure?”
“How old is he?”
“Um,” she said. “He’s a little older than me.”
Now he did look at her, hard and full on. “How much older?”
“He’s twenty-one.”
“Jesus, Lauren.”
“He’s a good guy, Dad. I swear. Don’t freak out. Please?”
For whatever reason, Scott couldn’t help but laugh.
“What?” she asked, her face crossed with worry.
“You remember when you were six? You found this old painting pole in the garage, and you were twirling it around in the living room and—”
“—and I broke that lamp Grandma gave us.”
“And you met me at the door before I could get into the house and you stopped me. You told me, ‘Don’t freak out. Please?’”
He lau
ghed, wiping away a tear that had been threatening to boil over. He thought that, maybe, that one was a small bit of joy, of relief.
“I wanted to be Donatello,” she said.
He laughed again, remembering his young daughter’s obsession with the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles. He’d had to buy her a cheap purple t-shirt so she could cut it up and make a mask.
“And it wasn’t a painting pole,” she said. “It was a friggin’ bo staff!”
She was laughing now, too, and the sound of it glued the fractures of his heart together.
“I was pretty kick-ass with it, if I recall right.”
Slowly, the laughter trailed off and both were plunged back into silence.
“I’m sorry about Hex,” she said, suddenly somber and swiping at tears of her own.
“Me too, baby. Me too.”
“Do you think, whatever all this is, that it got Buckley, too?”
Scott took his time answering. Based on what he’d seen over the course of the last few hours, there was definitely cause for concern in the case of Buckley, and a part of him figured that the dog was already—what? Possessed? Infected?
“I don’t know, Lauren,” he said, rather than admit his fears. “I hope not.”
Shortly after, the two lapsing into silence once again, he made the turn into Melisa’s subdivision, then turned left into her driveway a few blocks later.
Melisa’s neighborhood was oddly quiet. Her car sat in the driveway, a rusted old heap that hadn’t seen the inside of a carwash in as long as Lauren could remember. The vehicle was covered in mud and bird crap, but Scott pressed his palm against the hood.
“Hasn’t been run lately,” he said.
Looking at the excrement coating the car, Lauren shivered and wondered where all the birds had gone. Then again, maybe their absence was for the better.
“Stay close to me,” Scott said.
She nodded and shadowed her father’s movements.
Mass Hysteria Page 6