Heart of Ice

by Gregg Olsen

  “I should have had my tubes tied before you were born,” her mother said at least once a month.

  “No wonder you couldn’t find a man,” her father would say. “You are bigger than a football player. No man would want a woman like you.”

  Marilyn wanted to kill them. She certainly thought of ways to do it. One time she even left the house after turning off the oven pilot light. She imagined that she might even hear the explosion all the way over at Ogilvy. But it never came. When she got home, she found that the oven had automatically shut off.

  Her parents yelled at for her being late and all she could think of was how happy she was shopping after work, thinking they’d be dead.

  Marilyn lived for the job. It was her sanctuary. Being there was her release. The children were her therapy. They were her punching bags.

  The social worker told Michael and Sarah they would be at Ogilvy “temporarily” until another home opened up.

  Michael was glad to leave the Hansen place. He never told anyone what Mr. Hansen had made him do, though he almost confided what had been going on to a teacher one time. It was so close; the words begged to come from his mouth as the teacher’s sympathetic eyes drew him in. She’ll help me. She’ll protect me. She’ll save me.

  “Are you all right, Michael?” the teacher, a woman, asked. “I know it’s hard with your mom gone, but you can tell me. I care.”

  “It’s very bad,” he said.

  “Tell me what you did,” she asked.

  What he had done?

  If he’d spoken up, he might have changed the trajectory of his life. Her words stopped him cold. For a flicker, he thought that maybe he had deserved what Papa had done to him. After all, as far as he could tell, he’d been the only one in the Hansen household to have to do those terrible things. Maybe he had been bad? Maybe what he was doing was his fault?

  No, he thought. She’s wrong. She doesn’t know what she’s talking about.

  What stopped him was the dark threat that Papa lobbed at him when his face was buried in the man’s smelly crotch.

  “You tell on me and I will kill your sister. Papa doesn’t like little girls anyway, cowboy.”

  The teacher looked at the wall clock. She had something to do.

  “We can talk about it later. And, I promise,” she said, gathering her purse, “that I will help you.”

  “OK,” Michael said, knowing full well that he’d never tell her. He’d never tell anyone. The danger to Sarah was too great. The door had slammed shut.

  “I can tell that you’re nothing but trouble,” Marilyn McCutcheon said when she came upon Michael and Sarah ten minutes after intake. “And I won’t have it.”

  “You,” she said, pointing to Sarah, “are a dirty little bird.”

  “She’s not,” Michael shot back, while his sister sat on one of the stained green couches that lined the family visiting area that had once been a high school library. Shelves, though empty of books, were a visual cue that would not have been lost even on an eleven-year-old.

  Marilyn grabbed Michael by the wrist and wrenched him from his seat. He started to cry out and she shoved her big hand tight over his face.

  “Don’t. Don’t ever. Don’t ever defy me,” she said. Her words were a wretched vomit, spewing out of her mouth and all over the little boy. He was nothing. He was garbage. “This is my floor. You got it?”

  He started to squirm.

  She twisted him tighter and pushed so hard against his mouth and nose that he couldn’t breathe.

  “I said, do you understand?”

  His eyes were flooded with terror. Sarah sat still, almost catatonic, watching the big woman wrestle her brother.

  He nodded.

  “Good. You don’t ever want to mess with me.”

  His head bobbed again.

  Later that evening, with his sister in classroom 14 down the hall, Michael Barton wet the bed for the first time. It was the beginning of a cycle that he feared would never end, even in manhood.

  Every morning, Marilyn McCutcheon would haul Michael’s two-inch-thick mattress out in the hall and hand him a brush and a steel pail of soapy water.

  “You’ll clean this up or I’ll beat you,” she said, her cold blue eyes burrowing deeply into his. “You got that?”

  Of course, he did. Other kids laughed at him. The staff called him “Michael the Flood.”

  Olivia Barton knew better than to have any books on child abuse in the house. She knew how angry Michael became when she appeared to be studying the subject. That meant no novels, no nonfiction on the subject. Anywhere in the house. She’d been a frequent visitor to the Garden Grove West Library on the corner of Bailey and Chapman where she practically owned the 150s of the Dewey Decimal system—all forms of psychology contained in four rows of books at the branch. For a time, she’d been sucked in by every Oprah or Dr. Phil TV show that even hinted at child abuse as a subject. Bonus points came when the program touched on the subject and how it might impact the lives of an adult survivor.

  Olivia liked the word survivor when it was applied to her husband. She was sure that his experiences in foster care, in the state institution, maybe even in the years before his mother abandoned him, had likely been bad—but not Oprah or Dr. Phil bad.

  How could it be, she asked herself over and over, when Michael is so normal now?

  Chapter Forty-one

  It was a shock wave of fear. If it was meant to stop everyone in the middle of what they were doing, it did so. The unintelligible scream coming from the kitchen was undeniably blood-curdling. All throughout the home, the children and their keepers turned toward the sound. Even the kid who sat in front of the TV day after day with a frosted strawberry Pop-Tart on his lap and the empty look of a lost soul glued to a video of SpongeBob SquarePants moved toward the horrific scream that ricocheted throughout the facility.

  Something very bad just happened. Something worse than someone wetting the bed, trading their meds, or stealing extra food.

  The next scream came with words. “Oh, my God! What could have happened here! Please help me!”

  The voice belonged to Consuelo Ramirez, the cook.

  “She must have cut herself again!” another voice called out, as the sound of a score of feet went clacking down the linoleum corridor to the kitchen. Something very, very bad had happened. One quick-thinking employee swung open the wall-mounted first aid kit and grabbed tape, gauze, and a fistful of bandages.

  Indeed, when staff and a few children arrived at the kitchen, there was blood and the stink of death. At first, no one saw Consuelo. A rapid scan of the room found her sitting on the floor, crouched in a near-fetal position.

  “Sweet Jesus, who would do this to our Boots?” Consuelo looked up at those who had arrived to her aid. She held the black-and-white body of Boots, the cat that Marilyn McCutcheon had found in the parking lot seven or eight years before. It was a black-and-white cat, named very unoriginally for its white paws. To be fair, the name could have been Mittens just as easily, but Marilyn had loved Nancy Sinatra so much that she named the cat Boots and frequently found time to whisper-sing “These Boots Are Made for Walking.”

  “What happened?” Marilyn said, rushing to the lifeless body of her beloved cat.

  “I don’t know.” Consuelo was in tears then.

  “Where did you find her?” Marilyn held gently took the cat from the head cook’s arms. A bloody Rorschach blot was smeared on her light blue blouse. The form looked a bit like a snow angel; the bloody fur had smeared in such a way that it looked like the cat had left the imprint of wings.

  One of the kids started to cry, and soon others joined in.

  “She was in the mixer. It must have turned on somehow. She liked to curl up and sleep in tight spaces, you know.” Marilyn didn’t cry, but the look on her face indicated a melt-down was coming. Children and staff who knew her only hoped that she’d take out her anger on someone other than them. “There’s no way Boots turned it on,” she said, loo
king around at the horrified faces.

  She was right, of course, but there was no way anyone was going to say so.

  On the other side of the facility, Michael Barton stepped from the shower and got dressed. He’d put his bloody pajamas into a plastic bag he’d stolen from the supply room and wrapped that in a cocoon of paper towels in case someone looked through the trash. He also stole clean pajamas from the laundry room and hid them under his clothes.

  He’d prepared.

  The cat hadn’t really put up much of a fight. He didn’t get a single scratch. It had taken a quick turn of the animal’s head, a snap, and then he could do anything he wanted to with it. It was a furry bag of dead.

  A broken neck was quick and decisive. It got the job done. But ultimately, it was no fun.

  How to make it fun?

  A knife was the answer. It beckoned from the counter next to the sink. In a second, in a flash that was too fast for him to really grasp, he made it fun. Michael gingerly gutted Boots with a small paring knife, splashing the smelly fluids—mostly blood—over the front of his pajamas. His heart rate remained normal. It was odd, and he’d ruminate over that later in life. Though he was excited by what he was doing, he wasn’t scared.

  He set the cat’s corpse with his entrails oozing into the institutional-sized mixing bowl and turned it on the setting called Pulse.

  Funny, she doesn’t have a pulse, he thought in appreciation of the irony of what he’d just done.

  He knew how much Marilyn McCutcheon loved that cat. It might have been the only thing she ever loved. He’d see her from across the TV lounge, holding the cat in her lap talking to it in a kind of sickening baby talk.

  “Who’s the prettiest kitty in the whole wide world?” Marilyn asked, scratching the cat under the dollop of white fur under its chin. “You are, that’s who.”

  The cat didn’t know Marilyn was a terror to everyone else. Marilyn had scooped her up from the cold outside and given her a cozy existence. If it hadn’t been for the annoying children at the group home, it might have been perfect.

  “How’s my precious little fluff ball?” she’d ask.

  How was it that a cat was worthy of love when a little girl or young boy was only the focus of derision and scorn?

  Later that day, when the excitement of the horror of what happened to the cat had died down, Michael and Sarah played together in the corner of the TV lounge that had been set aside for reading. It wasn’t really a library, of course. Just as the place wasn’t really a home, though it had branded itself as one.

  Marilyn came through on her rounds and looked over at the pair.

  Michael looked up. No expression. Nothing at all. Then he returned his gaze back to the book he was reading to Sarah.

  The Cat in the Hat.

  Chapter Forty-two

  Garden Grove

  Michael Barton cried when the ultrasound technician turned to him as she moved the jellied wand over his wife’s abdomen, looked at the monitor, and said, “You’re going to have a son.”

  Olivia tilted her head up from the table to get a better look herself. The image was a little grainy, but to a mother-to-be it was a portrait done by American impressionist Mary Cassatt.

  A tear ran down Michael’s handsome face and stopped on his nose. He almost breathed in his tear before reaching for a medical wipe from a large cardboard box on the tray table. He stayed silent for a second, and tried to smile. He had hoped so much that the baby Olivia was carrying would be a girl. He’d read the statistics, of course, and he knew that those who are abused are likely to become abusers themselves.

  “Honey, I feel the same way,” Olivia said, looking at her husband’s silent tear. “I’m so excited and scared at the same time.”

  Scared? He thought. Olivia doesn’t know fear.

  He did.

  Michael was a facile liar by then, and he knew it. He thanked God for the practiced skill. Being able to skirt past the truth without batting a lash was an ability that had served him well. It allowed for survival.

  “Having a son has been a dream of mine,” he said, his voice very soft. “I want to give him the boyhood that I never had.”

  “I know. Me, too,” she said, lifting her head, this time toward her husband, so that he would kiss her. He bent down, and pressed his lips against hers.

  As the technician started to mop the gooey globe that was on Olivia’s swelling abdomen, she grinned and shook her head slightly. There was so much joy in seeing people’s dreams come true. The tech pumped the foot pedal and dropped the used wipes into the stainless drum garbage can.

  “You’re going to make a beautiful family,” she said exiting the examining room.

  Olivia got dressed, euphoric with the news. She wanted nothing more than to get on the phone and call her mother.

  “A boy!” It would be the first boy in her family in years. She gave Michael another kiss and dialed her mom with the news.

  “I’m going to go to the bathroom,” he said, leaving Olivia to her call.

  The bathroom was one of those family-oriented configurations, with a changing table and a toilet. Best of all, it had a lock on the door. He clicked the lock, turned on the water, and splashed it all over his face. He looked into the mirror.

  What am I? A man or a monster?

  Michael wasn’t sure. All he knew was that all the things that happened to him, that made him who he was—whatever it was—were seeded long ago.

  It started with the idea that if he stopped drinking a glass of water before bedtime, he wouldn’t wet the bed. Soon it was if he’d stopped drinking anything after lunchtime that surely would stem the nighttime occurrence that brought him such overpowering shame. Sometimes, he woke up in the middle of the night and put his hand to his crotch hoping against hope that the wetness that he’d felt had only been the result of seminal discharge and not the flood of urine that taunted him over and over. It was like a pelvic waterboarding, hitting him over and over, telling him that he was useless, a loser, a freak. Every now and then he woke up in time to strip the bed silently and bundle the sheets into a pillow-case so he could hide them from the staff. Those were the best mornings.

  Those were the mornings without the taunts from the others.

  Michael the Flood! Michael the Flood! Michael forgot to row the boat ashore!

  When he was fourteen, he created a contraption from a plastic Coke bottle and a pair of Ace bandages. He fashioned the bottle into a kind of homemade bedpan, which he held in place with the bandages strapped around his waist and thighs. He became adept at his stealthy subterfuge. He still didn’t drink past noon. He still hated the smell of his body, only more so because of the urine.

  If he’d have believed in God or anything good, holy or kind, he would have held hope that whatever was wrong with him would pass.

  That he’d never want to hurt anyone again.

  But now and then, throughout his teenage years, he couldn’t stop himself from looking for ways to kill someone and not get caught. It was merely a thought, and never put into practice.

  Maybe he’d found a way to cure himself?

  Michael had only one piece of paper that seemed to give concrete proof that he’d ever had a life outside of foster care or a state institution. It was the small news clipping about when he and Sarah were found at Disneyland. He’d used it to call the police department to see if there was a case file, but the cop who’d been mentioned had transferred to another jurisdiction.

  The idea that his mother could dump her children like garbage made the bile rise in his throat like a choking acid.

  The Ogilvy Home for Children had a two-bit computer lab of obsolete PCs and printers that didn’t work. It had no Internet access, or he’d have tried to find her. He smuggled a disc from the rickety lab and occasionally kept notes, stories, and thoughts.

  He wrote of a staff member who had looked at him with the “evil eye” when he was walking to the cafeteria after morning classes.

  He’s
a fat pig. He even has a pig nose. I’d like to take a knife, slit him up the middle and spill his smelly guts all over the chemistry lab. I’d do it slowly. I’d do it in front of everyone so that when he cried out, I’d tell everyone to shut up or I’d do it to them.

  Another time, after she was gone, he wrote tenderly of his sister.

  Sarah deserves better and I know she’s found it. She’s in a sunny place. She’s eating fruit that isn’t soft and mushy from a can. She doesn’t have that weird metal taste in her mouth and she shouldn’t. She didn’t deserve any of this shit that mom dumped on her.

  He never included himself in those rants. He never fixated on why he wasn’t worthy of a decent home, the love of the family. He was smart enough to know why. He’d wetted the bed. He was filled with hate for just about everyone. He figured that the rest of the world didn’t care about someone like him.

  Not until he did something to hurt them. Then, they’d get it. Too late. But they’d get it nevertheless.

  Almost everything with a heartbeat seemed to provoke him. He tried to interest the other boys in the institution in doing what he called “frog stomping.” Whenever the sprinklers ran long into the night during the summer, the cement courtyard would be dotted with the small jumping creatures. He saw no difference in turning them into splat than adults who’d crushed a bug.

  “You’re a sicko,” said one of the other kids, a Mexican who considered himself a badass, but who didn’t like the frog-stomping game.

  “You’re a faggot,” Michael shot back, using the word that he loathed more than anything. It was the word Mr. Hansen had called him a time or two.

  “You’re a good boy,” he’d said as he pleasured himself against Michael’s pale young skin. “Maybe too good a boy. Maybe you’re a faggot and you really like this.”

  Michael killed cats and dogs and found that he enjoyed it. Other kinds of animal murder merely brought him a smile. One time, he poisoned the fish in the dentist’s office. When the receptionist turned her back, he emptied a Baggie filled with ammonia. By the time he’d left the dentist chair, he was beaming.