Birthdays of a Princess (10 page)

Chapter
23

Another week has drifted by, barely noticed, except for the falling
leaves outside my window. The old trees out there are high enough for me to see
a few stubborn leaves still attached to their otherwise bare branches.

I’m staring a lot out this window, and at the empty page of my
journal. I have too much time on my hands, but I still refuse to leave my cell
for anything other than the dreaded morning classes, the bike riding and
Stanley’s visits. He hasn’t been back for a few days now—I guess I’m not on his
priority list. My stubborn-like-an-autumn-leaf attitude persists every time the
case worker assigned to me shows up to do her job. She has a lot on her plate
and only checks with the Center’s admin every time she comes visiting if I have
changed my mind. I tell them thanks, but no thanks.

Can’t do that with the detective though. It seems he is drawn back
to me like a magnet. I protested all the way to the visitor room, just to make
a point, and my warden ignored me, just to prove her point.

“Wait in here,” she orders.

A little while later he barges in, puffed with resolute
determination. Or has the long walk down the Center’s hallways exhausted him
beyond his advanced age? He doesn’t look to be in his best shape. I glance at
his tight fitting belt. Aren’t policemen supposed to be fit and trim and young?
Silly of me to think like that, it shows how little I still know of this world.

“Tell me, where do policemen go when they’re old?”

He is not in the mood for banter. His whole stance indicates that he
is here to defend his position.

“To a desk in an office.”

“Shouldn’t you be there, shuffling papers or something?”

“Believe me, that’s where I’d rather be.”

Nice. A real charmer. “So why did you come back?”

“Maybe because my partner doesn’t see a lost cause when it pokes him
in the eye?”

I giggle.

“What’s funny?”

Now he got me. “I stabbed her in the eye, didn’t I?”

“You remember?”

“Only what I was told.”

“How convenient,” he says, followed by the rather redundant
question: “Why did you do it?”

He makes no secret out of the purpose of his visit. It’s so
glaringly obvious, he might as well slap my face with it.

“You could at least pretend to listen to me,” I say.

“Answer my question.”

“Why I did it? I told you, I don’t remember. But I guess you don’t
believe anything I say.”

He finally takes a seat and throws a gauntlet look at me.

His dislike of me is so raw and unfiltered, I picture solid lumps of
aversion clogging up his sieve of social graces. It makes me giggle again,
which only exasperates him even more, but I can’t help it, I always giggle when
I don’t know how to react.

“It’s no laughing matter. Tell me why you stabbed that women.”

 “No idea. If I had a reason, I don’t remember it.”

“Who was it?”

“If I knew, I’d tell you.”

“Have you met her before?”

“If I did, I don’t recall.”

He fires one question after another, and in the end I get tired of
insisting that I don’t know or remember or recall anything and just cross my
arms and don’t react anymore.

He finally gives up. Shakes his head in a waste-of-time manner and
looks so miserable I feel sorry for him.

“Why did you come here?” I ask. “You know I can’t help you.”

“I told you.”

“No, you didn’t.”

“My partner thought it would be good for me.”

No tit-for-tat on the information road?

“Why’s that?”

“It’s supposed to heal a nasty wound.”

Now I get it. He’s not really here because of me. Something has hurt
him deeply and I’m the band aid he wants to slap on the oozing gash.

“How did you get hurt?”

He is actually thinking about my question. It takes him a while to
get his guard up again. Finally his back straightens and his expression freezes
over again.

“Doesn’t matter.” He takes a deep breath again. “Look, I just want
to make some kind of sense out of this senseless goddamn crime.”

“You think what I’ve done was senseless?”

“If you can’t explain it, it doesn’t make sense.”

He’s got a point.

“I’m sorry. “ It slips out. “I really do wish I could help you. I
just can’t.”

He frowns at me for a minute.

“Sorry is a start.”

“But what I’ve done has nothing to do with you.”

“You throw a stone in a lake, it makes waves all the way to the
shore.”

Now I need to think about this.

“I’m the stone?”

“You wielded the knife.”

 “What if someone threw me?”

“Then you drown.”

We stare at each other, stalemate, confused. Then he nods and leaves.

I’m convinced I’ll never see him again.

Chapter 24

When Macintosh got back to the station, Harding walked straight over
to his desk, nibbling on a granola bar.

“And I thought detectives ate donuts,” Macintosh said.

“I prefer the crunchy taste of nuts and oats.”

“Sounds like a commercial.” Macintosh watched as Harding bit into
the bar. A few flakes landed on his desk and he wiped them away.

 “Anything from our friendly Texas contact yet?”

Macintosh had asked Harding to establish email contact with
Detective Josh Grant from the Houston Homicide Department after the Brown case
had become the Brown/Rodriguez case with one simple phone call to the girl’s
grandmother.
“Louise, what was the surname of Tiara’s father?”

 Piece of cake it had been, and he was still amazed at his
amateurish assumption at the first interview with the mother. How could he
allocate Brown to Mike’s name without even confirming this with Melissa?

“Give them a day or two. How did the interview with Tiara go?”

How did it? Macintosh nodded to Harding to sit down. He wasn’t sure
how to sum it up. The girl had been clever—and curious. Disarming his questions
and turning them against him. Holding her ground while he fled the room. He had
felt exposed; she’d seen right through him, right into the core of his rotten
pretense of a bully-cop.

“She’s smart.”

“Too smart for her own good?”

 “Probably. She knows she’s committed a crime. Made light of it. Hell,
she practically made a joke about poking the victim in the eye.”

“Did you ask her if she remembers anything else about the attack?”

“Oh, she knows alright,” Macintosh said. “She’s playing us.”

 Harding frowned.

“You don’t know that.”

“I don’t know any different, either.”

“Nobody does,” Harding said.

 Macintosh shrugged. The girl was either a psychopath in the making
or she’d been driven by a motive he couldn’t comprehend, at least not with his
current level of knowledge.

“Could be something so horrible happened to her that she erased it
from her memory,” Macintosh said.  “But let’s not waste our energy on analyzing
the girl. Others do that much better. Let’s get back to our job. We need Josh
to dig up everything he can find on the name Rodriguez. Send another email to
Texas. Maybe that’ll speed up those lazy cowboys down there.”

Chapter 25

No denying it, at his last visit this guy Macintosh got under my
skin. He tried to project guilt onto me and I’m not prepared to shoulder any
more guilt. I carry enough around already. Loads of guilt, a sack full of it,
strapped onto my back by people I don’t remember.

I hate to carry that load. Nowadays I seem to hate a lot of things,
but most of it I hate the emptiness within the hate. It’s such a powerless feeling,
like falling into an imploding star.

Suddenly, I’m in the hate-room again. I spent a lot of time in there.

Birthday Seven

The choreographer, The Stick, had been to ballet school, he knew all
about grace and poise. When he had been young and flexible, he’d been able to
do all the moves he poked into me with this dreaded stick of his. He knew what
a human body was capable of, he’d been there!

“He can’t help it,” Gracie explained to me, when one of those more
grueling sessions that left me crying with exhaustion were over. “When he was
younger, he’s had a terrible accident that smashed his leg.”

With his dreams of gracing the world’s stages ruined forever, he had
to settle for kids like me, and some days his pent-up frustrations over my
short-comings burst out with a vengeance.

So what do I remember? An afternoon like many before, the
air-conditioner rattling at high speed, the music from the stereo blasting the
same happy tune in an endless loop, The Stick yelling at me to pay attention,
to move my arms like this, to lift my leg higher, to turn faster, to smile. Me,
being tired, irritable, confused. Not understanding what I’m doing wrong.
Wanting to do it right. Most of the time nowadays I want to please the
grown-ups because if I don’t, we’ll lose our home or they’ll get sick and I
might finish up all alone in this world.

Back to the afternoon. The Stick yells, I cry. I stand in the middle
of the room, he is in front of me and the end of his hated stick pokes me in
the tummy.

I can feel warm urine run down my legs. I press them together to
stop it, I’m six years old, not a baby any more, but my panties are soaked and
a small puddle is forming around my dancing shoes.

That’s all I remember.

When my dear psycho-doc finally does show up for an afternoon
session again, I’m still in this don’t-remember mode, which drives me crazy.
But he never asks me about my childhood anyway, all his questions are
non-related. We pass our time together doing silly tests and quests. Last time
we did an IQ test. One for morons, I guess, as I finished it in no time at all
and without any difficulty.

Today, he asks me stuff like my preferences for colors and
activities and things like that, and I answer them semi-truthfully. My favorite
color is black—no surprise there—but I say blue, it’s less threatening. (Plus,
of course, black and white are technically not even a color). I haven’t
developed a hobby until now and haven’t been doing any sport activity outside
of dancing, which naturally I despise, but I say I like ballet when he asks me
what I enjoy doing. What girl my age wouldn’t? (Plus, I still have the posture
to prove that I’ve done my share of dancing).

For sure those are catch questions, but without a psycho background
I can’t tell which ones are traps. I need to show my cooperation, otherwise
they try me as an adult and lock me up in a real prison with real criminals,
and that is out of the question.

But if I want to get out of jail, I have to prove that I don’t have
a criminal mind. Maybe I should let him dig deep into me, it might give him,
and me, the answers he, we, so desperately crave.

I test him.

“I’ll cooperate with you, if you promise to show me your evaluation
of me.” He might be able to figure out why I feel covered in slime.

He says, although it’s unorthodox, he’d let me read his final
verdict if I, in turn, stick to my promise now and let him look at what I’ve
written so far.

I rip the pages out of my notebook and out of my heart and hand them
over to him.

He leaves, holding my pages like a precious china cup from which he
plans to drink in delicate sips. Mouthful by mouthful he will devour my soul.

What have I done?

I’m trying in vain to recall what I’ve written. He’s caught me in
one of my bad moments—a good one for him—when my soul was segmented. When that
happens, I exist of several parts which refuse to blend into one. Currently I
feel chagrined and at the same time proud! I’m struggling hard to stop this inner
turmoil. What the hell should I be ashamed of? And is my pride a fight for
dignity or an outburst of arrogance? Is my shame born out of guilt or is it disgrace?
Where have I failed? What have I done? I’m in for another lonesome-loathsome
night.

Dove-doc comes back next day. It didn’t take him long to analyze
what he believes to be my soul.

I’m still in a confused state of mind. He sits down, as usual, on
the chair next to his desk, I guess it is to have no barrier between us—a
demonstration of his trust in me—takes out his pen and his black book, adjusts
his glasses, smiles at me.

 “Bad night, huh?”

It was a really bad night, full of inescapable visions. I’m in a
speeding car, racing along an empty highway, golden statues crashing down from great
heights, burying the car, me trapped inside, snakes crawling all over me.
Senseless scary stuff.

But I don’t tell him that.

“Just a headache.”

“The court-appointed lawyer has contacted me to make an appointment
with you.”

I confirm yet again that I refused to speak to any Staff of the Youth
Forensic Psychiatric System—nice description for people working in a
loony-bin—other than my dove-doc.

He adjusts his glasses again, a signal that we will now continue
with the analysis of my mental health for which he gets paid, and says: “I will
let him know. But you may want to reconsider. He is not your enemy, he will be
your closest ally.”

That’s exactly what I’m worried about. “I can’t think straight
today. Maybe I’ll change my mind later, when I’m better.”

“May I ask you something that refers to what you have written in
your journal, or would you rather have me ignore this altogether?”

I shrug it off, a little curious what part of my ramblings caught
his attention.

“When you were six and you lost control of your bladder after an
exhausting dance rehearsal, was that an isolated incident or did it happen
again?”

“No, never.”

I don’t know why I bothered to lie, considering that he’ll read
everything I write as soon as I’m apathetic enough to hand it over.

Until then, I don’t want him to know that many nights after that
dance rehearsal incident I woke up, deeply ashamed, feeling warm fluid between
my legs and under my bottom. Lying there motionless until it was morning,
always hoping that the spot would dry up enough so nobody would notice. The
wetness felt worse when it got cold. Much worse. It smelled pungent when Mom
finally came in and woke me up and told me to get ready. By the time I came out
of the bathroom she was already gathering the sheets in her arms to take them
to the laundry. We both didn’t look at the large area of different shades of yellow
on my mattress. My shame was not to be spoken of. It didn’t exist.