Playing With Fire

by Tess Gerritsen

  Dr. Cherry is sitting behind his desk when I step into his office. Through the viewing window, we can watch the two children in the next room; on their side is a one-way mirror, so they cannot see us. They play in parallel, ignoring each other in their separate boy and girl worlds.

  “I think you’re reading too much into this incident,” he says.

  “She’s only three and she’s killed our family pet.”

  “Was there any warning before this happened? Any sign that she was going to hurt him?”

  “None at all. I’ve had Juniper since before I got married, so Lily’s known him all her life. She was always perfectly gentle with him.”

  “What might have set off this attack? Was she angry? Was she frustrated by something?”

  “No, she looked perfectly content. They were so peaceful together, I let them play while I practiced my violin.”

  He considers this last detail. “I assume that takes a lot of concentration, playing the violin.”

  “I was trying out a new piece of music. So, yes, I was focused.”

  “Maybe that explains it. You were busy doing something else, and she wanted to get your attention.”

  “By stabbing our cat?” I give a laugh of disbelief. “That’s a drastic way of going about it.” I look through the viewing window at my golden-haired daughter, seated so prettily at her imaginary tea party. I don’t want to bring up the next possibility, but I have to ask him. “There was an article I read online, about children who hurt animals. It’s supposed to be a very bad sign. It could mean the child has serious emotional issues.”

  “Trust me, Mrs. Ansdell,” he says with a benign smile. “Lily is not going to grow up to be a serial killer. Now if she repeatedly hurt animals, or if there’s a history of violence in the family, then I might be more concerned.”

  I say nothing; my silence makes him frown at me.

  “Is there something you wanted to share?” he asks quietly.

  I take a deep breath. “There is a history in the family. Of mental illness.”

  “On your husband’s side or on yours?”

  “Mine.”

  “I don’t recall seeing anything about that in Lily’s medical records.”

  “Because I never mentioned it. I didn’t think something like that could run in families.”

  “Something like what?”

  I take my time answering, because while I want to be truthful, I don’t want to tell him more than I need to. More than I’m comfortable with. I look through the playroom window at my beautiful daughter. “It happened soon after my brother was born. I was only two years old at the time, so I don’t remember anything about it. I learned the details years later from my aunt. I’m told my mother had some sort of mental breakdown. She had to be sent to an institution because they felt she was a danger to others.”

  “The timing of her breakdown makes it sound like a case of postpartum depression or psychosis.”

  “Yes, that’s the diagnosis I heard. She was evaluated by several psychiatrists and they concluded she wasn’t mentally competent and couldn’t be held responsible for what happened.”

  “What did happen?”

  “My brother—my baby brother—” My voice softens to a whisper. “She dropped him and he died. They said she was delusional at the time. Hearing voices.”

  “I’m sorry. That must have been a painful time for your family.”

  “I can’t imagine how terrible it was for my father, losing a child. Having my mother sent away.”

  “You said your mother went to an institution. Did she ever recover?”

  “No. She died there two years later, from a ruptured appendix. I never really knew her, but now I can’t stop thinking about her. And I wonder if Lily—if what she did to our cat…”

  Now he understands what I’m afraid of. Sighing, he takes off his glasses. “I assure you, there’s no connection. The genetics of violence isn’t as simple as Lily inheriting your blue eyes and blond hair. I know of only a few documented cases where it’s clearly familial. For example, there’s a family in the Netherlands where almost every male relative has been incarcerated. And we know that boys born with extra Y chromosomes are more likely to commit crimes.”

  “Is there an equivalent in girls?”

  “Girls can be sociopaths, of course. But is that genetic?” He shakes his head. “I don’t think the data supports it.”

  The data. He sounds like Rob, who’s always citing numbers and statistics. These men have such faith in their numbers. They refer to scientific studies and quote the latest research. Why doesn’t that reassure me?

  “Relax, Mrs. Ansdell.” Dr. Cherry reaches across the desk and pats my hand. “At three years old, your daughter is perfectly normal. She’s engaging and affectionate and you said she’s never done anything like this before. You have nothing to worry about.”

  —

  Lily has fallen asleep in her car seat by the time I pull into my aunt Val’s driveway. It’s her usual naptime and she sleeps so deeply that she doesn’t stir as I lift her out of the seat. Even in her sleep she clutches Donkey, who goes everywhere with her and is looking rather disgusting lately, frayed and drool-stained and probably teeming with bacteria. Poor old Donkey’s been patched and repatched so many times that he’s turned into a Frankenstein animal, zigzagged with my amateurish seams. Already I can see another new rip starting in the fabric, where his stuffing is starting to poke through.

  “Oh, look how adorable she is,” coos Val as I carry Lily into her house. “Just like a little angel.”

  “Can I put her on your bed?”

  “Of course. Just leave the door open so we can hear if she wakes up.”

  I carry Lily into Val’s bedroom and gently set her down on the duvet. For a moment I watch her, enchanted as I always am by the sight of my slumbering daughter. Leaning close, I breathe in her scent and feel the heat rising from her pink, flushed cheeks. She sighs and murmurs “Mommy” in her sleep, a word that always makes me smile. A word I’d ached to hear during the heartbreaking years when I repeatedly tried and failed to get pregnant.

  “My baby,” I whisper.

  When I return to the living room, Val asks: “So what did Dr. Cherry say about her?”

  “He says there’s nothing to worry about.”

  “Isn’t that what I told you? Kids and pets don’t always mix well. You don’t remember this, but when you were two, you kept pestering my old dog. When he finally gave you a nip, you slapped him right back. I’m thinking that’s what happened between Lily and Juniper. Sometimes children react without thinking. Without understanding the consequences.”

  I look out the window at Val’s garden, a little Eden crammed with tomato plants and lush herbs and cucumber vines scrambling up the trellis. My late father liked to garden, too. He liked to cook and recite poetry and sing off-key, just like his sister, Val. They even look alike in their childhood photos, both of them skinny and tanned, with matching boyish haircuts. There are so many photos of my dad displayed in Val’s house that every visit here gives me a sad tug on my heart. On the wall facing me are pictures of my dad at ten years old with his fishing rod. At twelve with his ham radio set. At eighteen, in his high school graduation robe. Always he wears the same earnest, open smile.

  And on the bookshelf is the photo of him and my mother, taken on the day they brought me home as a newborn. It’s the sole image of my mother that Val allows in her house. She tolerates it only because I appear in it, too.

  I stand to examine the faces in the photo. “I look just like her. I never realized how much.”

  “Yes, you do look like her, and what a beauty she was. Whenever Camilla walked into the room, heads would turn. Your dad got one eyeful, and fell head over heels in love. My poor brother never had a chance.”

  “Did you hate her all that much?”

  “Hate her?” Val thinks about this. “No, I wouldn’t say that. Certainly, not at first. Like everyone else who ever met her, I was
completely sucked in by Camilla’s charm. I’ve never met any other woman who had it all, the way she did. Beauty, brains, talent. And oh, what a sense of style.”

  I give a regretful laugh. “That I certainly didn’t inherit.”

  “Oh, honey. You inherited the best of both your parents. You got Camilla’s looks and musical talent and you got your dad’s generous heart. You were the best thing that ever happened to Mike. I’m just sorry he had to fall in love with her first, before you could come into the world. But hell, everyone else fell in love with her. She had that way of sucking you right into her force field.”

  I think of my daughter and how easily she enchanted Dr. Cherry. At three years old, she already knows how to charm everyone she meets. That’s a gift I never had, but Lily was born with it.

  I set my parents’ photo back on the shelf and turn to Val. “What really happened to my brother?”

  My question makes her stiffen and she looks away; clearly it’s something she doesn’t want to talk about. I’ve always known there was something more to the story, something far darker and more disturbing than I’ve been told, and I’ve avoided pressing the matter. Until now.

  “Val?” I ask.

  “You know what happened,” she says. “I told you as soon as I felt you were old enough to understand.”

  “But you didn’t tell me the details.”

  “Nobody wants to hear the details.”

  “Now I need to.” I glance toward the bedroom where my daughter, my darling daughter, is sleeping. “I need to know if Lily’s anything like her.”

  “Stop, Julia. You are going down the wrong path if you think Lily bears any resemblance to Camilla.”

  “All these years, I’ve heard only bits and pieces about what happened to my brother. But I always sensed there was more to the story, things you didn’t want to say.”

  “The whole story won’t make it any easier to understand. Even thirty years later, I still don’t understand why she did it.”

  “What exactly did she do?”

  Val considers the question for a moment. “After it happened—when it finally went to court—the psychiatrists called it postpartum depression. That’s what your father believed, too. It’s what he wanted to believe, and he was so relieved when they didn’t send her to prison. Fortunately for her, they sent her to that hospital instead.”

  “Where they let her die of appendicitis. That doesn’t sound so fortunate to me.”

  Val is still not looking at me. The silence grows so thick between us that it will turn solid if I don’t cut through it now. “What aren’t you telling me?” I ask quietly.

  “I’m sorry, Julia. You’re right, I haven’t been entirely honest. Not about that, at least.”

  “About what?”

  “How your mother died.”

  “I thought it was a ruptured appendix. That’s what you and Dad always said, that it happened two years after she was sent there.”

  “It was two years later, but it wasn’t from a ruptured appendix.” Val sighs. “I didn’t want to tell you this, but you say you want the truth. Your mother died from an ectopic pregnancy.”

  “A pregnancy? But she was a prisoner in a mental ward.”

  “Exactly. Camilla never named the father, and we never found out who he was. After she died, when they cleaned her room, they found all sorts of contraband. Liquor, expensive jewelry, makeup. I have no doubt she was trading sex for favors, and doing it willingly, always the master manipulator.”

  “She was still a victim. She had a psychiatric illness.”

  “Yes, that’s what the psychiatrists said in court. But I’m telling you, Camilla wasn’t depressed and she wasn’t psychotic. She was bored. And resentful. And fed up with your baby brother, who was colicky and crying all the time. She always wanted to be the center of attention and she was accustomed to having men trip over each other to make her happy. Camilla was the golden girl who always got her way, but there she was, married and chained to two kids she never wanted. In court she claimed that she didn’t remember doing it, but the neighbor witnessed what happened. He saw Camilla walk out onto the balcony, carrying your baby brother. He saw her deliberately throw the baby over the railing. Not just drop him, but throw him two stories to the ground. He was only three weeks old, Julia, a beautiful boy with blue eyes, just like yours. I thank God that I was babysitting you that day.” Val takes a deep breath and looks at me. “Or you might be dead, too.”

  3

  Rain taps my kitchen window and drips its watery fingers down the glass as Lily and I make oatmeal-and-raisin cookies for her preschool party tomorrow. In an era when every child seems to be allergic to eggs or gluten or nuts, making cookies feels like a subversive act, as if I’m crafting poison disks for the delicate darlings. The other mothers are probably preparing healthy snacks like sliced fruit and raw carrots, but I mix butter and eggs, flour and sugar into a greasy dough, which Lily and I drop in clumps onto baking sheets. After the cookies emerge warm and fragrant from the oven, we go into the living room, where I set two cookies, along with a glass of apple juice, in front of Lily for her afternoon snack. Yum, sugar; what a bad mother I am.

  She’s happily munching away as I sit down at my music stand. I’ve scarcely taken my instrument out of the case in days, and I need to practice before our quartet’s next rehearsal. The violin rests like an old friend on my shoulder and when I tune, the wood sounds mellow and chocolate-rich, a voice that calls for something slow and sweet to warm up with. I set aside the Shostakovich quartet arrangement I planned to practice and instead clip Incendio to the stand. Fragments of this waltz have been playing in my head all week, and this morning I woke up hungry to hear it again, to confirm that it’s as beautiful as I remember.

  And oh yes, it is. The sorrowful voice from my violin seems to sing of broken hearts and lost love, of dark forests and haunted hills. The sorrow turns to agitation. The underlying melody has not changed, but now the notes come faster, move up the scale to the E string, where they scamper up a series of arpeggios. My pulse quickens, along with the frantic pace. I struggle to stay on tempo, my fingers stumbling over one another. My hand cramps. Suddenly the notes fall out of tune and the wood begins to hum as if vibrating at some forbidden frequency that will make my instrument splinter and fly apart. Yet I struggle on, battling my violin, willing it to surrender to me. The hum grows louder, the melody rising to a shriek.

  But it’s my own scream I hear.

  Gasping in agony, I look down at my thigh. At the gleaming shard of glass that protrudes like a crystal dagger from my flesh. Through my own sobs, I hear someone chanting two words over and over in a voice so flat, so mechanical, that I scarcely recognize it. Only when I see her lips moving do I realize it is my own daughter speaking. She stares at me with eyes that are a placid, unearthly blue.

  I take three deep breaths for courage and grasp the shard of glass. With a cry, I wrench it out of my thigh. Fresh blood streams down my leg in a bright, scarlet ribbon. It’s the last thing I register before everything fades to black.

  —

  Through the haze of painkillers, I can hear my husband talking to Val on the other side of the ER privacy curtain. He sounds like he’s out of breath, as if he’s run into the hospital. Val is trying to calm him down.

  “She’s going to be fine, Rob. She needed stitches and a tetanus booster shot. And there’s a big goose egg on her forehead from hitting the coffee table when she fainted. But after she woke up, she was able to call me for help. I drove right over and brought her straight here.”

  “Then it’s nothing more serious? You’re sure she just fainted?”

  “If you saw that blood on the floor, you’d understand why she keeled over. It was a pretty scary wound, and it must’ve hurt like hell. But the ER doctor said it looks clean, and infection shouldn’t be an issue.”

  “Then I can take her home?”

  “Yes, yes. Except…”

  “What?”

  Val
’s voice drops to a murmur. “I’m worried about her. In the car, she told me—”

  “Mommy?” I hear Lily whimper. “I want Mommy!”

  “Shhh, Mommy’s resting, darling. We have to be quiet. No, Lily, stay here. Lily, don’t!”

  The privacy curtain jerks open and suddenly there is my angelic daughter, reaching up for me. I flinch away, shuddering at her touch. “Val!” I call out. “Please take her.”

  My aunt scoops Lily into her arms. “I’ll keep her with me tonight, okay? Hey, Lil’, we’re going to have a sleepover at my house. Won’t that be fun?”

  Lily’s still reaching for me, begging for a hug, but I turn away, afraid to look at her, afraid to glimpse that blue, alien stare. As Val takes my daughter out of the room I remain frozen on my side. My body feels encased in ice so thick that I don’t think I’ll ever break free of it. Rob stands beside me, uselessly stroking my hair, but I can’t even feel his touch.

  “Why don’t I take you home now, babe?” he says. “We can order in a pizza and have a quiet evening, just the two of us.”

  “Juniper wasn’t an accident,” I whisper.

  “What?”

  “She attacked me, Rob. She did it on purpose.”

  His hand pauses on my head. “Maybe it seemed that way to you, but she’s only three years old. She’s too young to understand what she did.”

  “She took a piece of broken glass. She stabbed me.”

  “How did she get hold of glass?”