Burning Blue (25 page)

“Uh?” he said, his eyes still closed.

“Heading over to Nicole’s for dinner.”

No response.

“Dad?”

He snored. I taped a note to the TV. I was about to go when the blank spot on the living room wall caught my eye. The place where the painting used to hang, the one my father hocked for my bail. My memory of it sharpened. It was almost the exact picture I found when I broke into Angela’s house, the half-photo/half-sketch of Nicole sitting in front of a mirror, half her face covered with red ink. The one Angela had noted with sparkly glow pen in the corner of the sketch with that GBAM matrix or chat room name or whatever it was.

My father had a lot of artist’s prints, limited edition copies approved and signed by the artist of the masterwork they emulated. Which meant the original was likely hanging in a museum someplace. I had seen the original painting, the inspiration for my father’s print and Angela’s sketch, and I was pretty sure I’d seen it recently—very recently—but I couldn’t remember where. Somehow that painting connected Angela, Nicole and my father.

Sylvia got the door. She was in her pajamas.

“Hi,” I said.

“Mr. Castro’s here,” she said. “I’m just kidding.”

“Why do you hate me?”

“I don’t. I just don’t like you. Go. They’re in the kitchen.”

The kitchen smelled great. Mrs. Castro had the dumplings going. She was massaging Nicole’s shoulders. They were in their pajamas too. “It’s a pajama party,” Mrs. Castro said.

“I’m betting he sees that, Mom.”

“Go downstairs and get him some of your father’s PJs from storage.”

“Nah, I’m okay,” I said.

“He doesn’t want to wear Daddy’s clothes, Mom. Daddy terrifies him.”

“He terrifies everybody,” Mrs. Castro said. “Go. No pajamas, no dumplings.”

Nicole took my hand and led me downstairs. The basement was immaculate, and that made it creepier for some reason. Lots of storage racks. Nicole led me to the back. She sat on a wicker chest and patted the spot next to her for me to sit. I had the feeling she was going to kiss me. If she did, I wouldn’t be able to say what I had to say. So I just said it. “I know about it. The chat room.”

“The chat room?” Her eyes ticked right.

“Cutter’s Way.”

“What are you talking about?”

“Don’t do this, Nicole. Please don’t.”

“Do what, Jay? What exactly am I doing?”

“We need to get you help. We’re going to. I promise.”

“You
promise?
Really? Oh, that makes me feel so much better. He
promises.
You know what you promised, Jay? You promised you would never
hack
me.”

“I had to.”

“No, you really didn’t. Nobody asked you to. Nobody wanted you to, either.” She pulled up her sleeves to reveal the bandages. “This is mine, okay? This is the one thing I can own. Just me. This has nothing to do with you.”

“It has everything to do with me. You’re my friend.”

“Then honor our friendship. Honor your word. Please don’t tell my mom.
Please.
”

“I’m not judging you, okay?”

“Judge me or don’t, it doesn’t matter. Shit, you
broke
it. How do I trust you after this? I can’t. God, I feel your fingers under my skin. You know what? Go.”

“The username,” I said. “GBAM.”

“Get out of my house. Now.”

“Just tell me how you came up with the chat handle, and I’ll leave.”

“It’s an acronym for a painting, my mother’s favorite, my destiny.” She pushed past me, upstairs.

I followed. “The Picasso?
Guernica
?” I stopped cold in the main vestibule where I’d left my backpack. I heard the bathroom door shut, the one just ahead of the kitchen. I fished in my backpack for the book I’d had my father sign for Mrs. Castro. The one I had been dragging around with me for how many days now, forever forgetting to give it to her. I flipped to the page Mrs. Castro had flagged “his best.” But she hadn’t been referring to Picasso’s
Guernica.
She’d meant the picture on the opposing page, another Picasso, a vision of a woman standing in front of a mirror. This was the original, the basis for the artist’s print that used to be on my living room wall. I checked the caption and the title:
Girl Before a Mirror.

GBAM.

Mrs. Castro’s favorite painting.

The inspiration for the sketch I’d found in Angela’s bedroom. The one where Nicole reaches out to her reflection, exactly as the girl does in Picasso’s original. In the mirror, half of her face is perfect beauty, and the other half is horrific, rearranged, red.

My eyes ticked to the corner of the vestibule, the wall space next to the grandfather clock, above the umbrella stand. There it was again, the same image, locked in a small frame. I hadn’t given it but a half a glance the other day when I dropped Nicole’s umbrella into the stand, a black-and-white sketch copy of
Girl Before a Mirror.
I studied the sketch, the artist’s initials: E.C.

Elaine Castro and Angela Sammick were in love with the same work of art. Obsessed by it.

I had taken my anti-seizure meds that day, and they generally softened things, but at that moment I felt as if an intense and rough-edged heat was trying to squeeze between the hemispheres of my brain. I had to slump into the chair next to the grandfather clock to take it in. How the two women had come together was a mystery, but this much was definite: Mrs. Castro had hired Angela to burn Nicole. Angela had come up with the Arachnomorph ID that inspired the news sites to the spider-themed nickname, but Elaine Castro was the real Recluse.

It made no sense and perfect sense. Nicole told me that her mother wanted her to find the good in the burn, the fact that Nicole and Mrs. Castro could spend more time together now that Nicole didn’t have to run off to this match or that meeting, off to college, marriage, a life away from her mother, one that would leave Mrs. Castro even more isolated than she was after her husband left. Burned, Nicole would never leave her, would need her mother forever, would give the woman purpose. Elaine Castro had no one and nothing else. Her dreams of living life as an artist had been ripped from her that night of her debut when the doubt stared her in the face: Was she truly meant to paint? She
wanted
to, yes, but maybe she didn’t have that thing that makes it all worthwhile, whether you hit it big like Picasso or not: the
need
to.

I needed to get Nicole. Book in hand I rounded the corner to the bathroom off the kitchen. I tried the knob, locked. “Nicole, we have to get you out of here. Now.”

The bathroom door swung open. Mrs. Castro was drying her hands on a bright blue towel. She looked as I’d never seen her before, ugly somehow, her brows arched. She eyed the book in my hand, my fingers tucked into it at the page she’d flagged. “What’s wrong, Jay?” she said.

“I thought you were Nicole.”

“I gathered that. What’s the rush?”

“What do you mean?”

“You said, ‘We have to get you out of here.’”

“My father texted he got us tickets to the St. John’s game. It’s at the Garden, courtside. We have to get out of here now if we want to make the opening jump—”

“No, Jay, you said, ‘We have to get
you
out of here.’ Meaning Nicole.”

Nicole’s sobbing echoed from down the hallway.

I was terrified. Not of Mrs. Castro. At that moment she seemed smaller to me. Shrinking. I was terrified of myself. Of what I might do to this trembling, cornered thief in front of me. I felt
she
was a guest in
my
home, an uninvited guest who’d charmed her way into my heart and then pocketed my treasure, my trust, while my eyes were turned. I glared at Elaine Castro. “How could you?” I said.

“Ex
cuse
me?”

“Why?”

Her eyes reddened. “Let’s just sit down for a second and talk about this. We, I have no idea what’s going on here, except that you’re upset. You need to calm down.”

I pushed past her, nearly knocking her over when she tried to block me.

“Jay, wait,” she begged.

I strode through the kitchen, into the studio. Nicole was on the couch with Sylvia, crying on Sylvia’s shoulder. Sylvia held her, rubbing her back. A tabloid magazine played quietly through the TV. Sylvia glared at me. Over her shoulder, in the backyard, a pair of deer looked in on us. They scattered into the dusk. Sylvia’s eyes widened on something behind me. “No, Elaine,” Sylvia said.

Nicole looked up and followed Sylvia’s eyes. “Mom?” she said.

I turned around slowly. Mrs. Castro was standing right in front of me, holding the pot of dumplings. The oil smoked. “You’ve ruined it,” she said to me. “You ruined
us.
I warned you, Jay. I warned you to let the police do their job.”

“Mom, what are you talking about?” Nicole said.

“Nicole?” Mrs. Castro said. “My baby, I’m so sorry.”

I tried to grab the pot from her, but she was too quick. She poured the oil onto herself.

Five weeks later, Thursday, December 16, Nicole, her father, and I were in a joint therapy session in Dr. Schmidt’s office. Nicole had just come back from a month’s stay at an in-treatment center for teens coping with self-injury impulses. The particular program she was in required her to stay off the phone and offline, but she was encouraged to write, and we’d exchanged a dozen or so letters. But now we sat facing each other, staring at each other as Mr. Castro said, “I can’t do that. How do you not see that it’s my fault?”

“What does holding on to your fault, Elaine’s fault, anybody’s fault do for Nicole?” Schmidt said.

“But you don’t just let it go, Doctor. It won’t. It can’t. It’s its own thing, and it lives in you until it dies, if it ever does decide to die. If you try to cut it out too soon, you risk all this collateral damage.”

“Like what?” Schmidt said.

Mr. Castro closed his eyes tightly and dug his fingertips into his temples. He still wore his wedding ring. “Nicole, I can’t do this, honey. I’m sorry.” He stood up.

“Dad?” Nicole said.

“I can’t work it out like this, in here. I don’t know if I’ll ever be able to stop hating her or Dave or that monster of a girl or me most of all, but any sense of forgiveness I can discover in myself has to come on its own. Not with people watching for it. Waiting for it. I’m not even sure it’s in me to find. Look, I’ll be waiting in the car. Doctor, I’m sorry.” He left quickly.

“I didn’t get to say it,” Nicole said. “I waited too long. I should have said it in the beginning of the session, when you asked me the first time, but now after hearing what he just said, I don’t think I’ll ever be able to tell him. To get it out.”

“Tell Jay,” Schmidt said. “He’s here for you. Go ahead, Nicole. You can do it.”

Nicole took my hands in hers. “Jay, I need you to know why I do it. Why I cut, I mean. I do it to control the pain my way. Without meds. To feel. To see my imperfection spill out of me. It started after the attack. Shortly after. I wanted to draw the heat in my face downward. I couldn’t bear to look at myself in the mirror in the beginning. I had no idea what the burn looked like. I needed to see it, but at the same time I couldn’t look. So I put it where I could look at it. Where I could control it in every aspect, how it appeared in my skin, how long it lasted. I could start the fire, and I could put it out at will. Remember in biology, that picture of the circulatory system? The blood pumping away from the heart is bright red. The arteries squeeze it through you fiercely, almost uncontrollably. Then there’s the other blood, the blood that goes to the heart, the softer flow, the blood that’s blue. It’s not really. Really it’s just a very dark red, but in the right kind of light, the soft light, the night-light with the sapphire shade, you can convince yourself that it’s the same color as the blood in the picture, that cool blue.” She rolled up her sleeves. The bandages were gone. The scar lines were parallel, all roughly the same length. “We’ve started to talk about it, Dr. Schmidt and I. About her. My mother. I hope at some point I’ll find the courage to contact her, maybe even to see her. I know I’ll have to do that, to hear it directly from her mouth, to know why. Jay, I haven’t cut in thirty-one days.”

“You are amazing,” I said.

“I can’t say I’ll never do it again. Not yet. Maybe I’ll never be able to say it.”

“You’ll always be amazing.”

Nicole was supposed to exercise a lot. Cutting unleashes endorphins in the bloodstream, but so does running. We took up jogging. We were at Palisades Park one beautiful winter day during Christmas break. Not that Nicole had come back to school. We took a breather underneath the George Washington Bridge, at the river’s edge. We hiked the trap rock and found a bench-like slab with a great view of northern Manhattan across the water. A double-flash of bright light hit us. We turned into it with our hands up in front of our faces to block the camera, but the flash had come from the sunlight’s reflecting off the window of a turning Coast Guard speedboat. “How bad was it while I was gone?” Nicole said. “The media attention?”

“Bad.” Actually, it was insane. Everywhere I went those first few days after Mrs. Castro was identified as the person behind the attack, I had at least two reporters tailing me. The stalking died down after a couple of weeks of my not saying anything. What could I say? I didn’t have any answers for them or any answers period.

“Detective Barrone called this morning,” Nicole said. “She wants to talk. Not Barrone, my mother. Talk with me, I mean. She’s cooperating, answering all Barrone’s questions, except one.”

“Why she did it?”

“She says she’ll only answer that to my face. All the stuff you told me about my dad and yours, that night at her debut, then needing to keep me around after the divorce, not being able to let me go. It makes sense on an intellectual level, but I won’t really understand why she did it until I hear her say the words. Until I see her eyes as she tells me. But how can I be in the same room with her? How can I be near her ever again? I swear, when my father told me the doctor said she would probably die from the infection? I was just so relieved. You know? Like I’d been spared my own death sentence or worse, my own life sentence. If she was gone, I’d never have to face her again. I could put away all the pictures and . . . Oh my god. Oh my god!” She buried her face in balled hands and rocked back and forth. “My mother had me
burned,
Jay. My own mother. My mom. I miss my mom.”

She got a job working at the stables, teaching the young kids to ride. She was starting to look at colleges with programs in early childhood education. One night her friend from the stables called and asked her if she wanted to see a horse foal. When we got there, the barn was dark except for a double stall in the corner. The horse was lying on her side and getting ready to deliver. This dog, a boxer mix, I think, sat at Nicole’s side and leaned into her. He kept sticking his nose into her elbow and flipping up her arm and wouldn’t stop until she stroked him.

“No allergies?” I whispered.

“Not that bad, actually,” she said. “The doctor said at some point I might outgrow them.”

We stayed like this for some time, crouching in the stall on upturned crates, just waiting for the colt to be born. The stable master held the mother’s head and stroked her neck. Everyone was quiet and smiling. When the colt was born, everybody laughed.

Her father had put the Brandywine Heights house on the market. He was renting a town house in a luxury condo complex down by the Hudson River, just south of the George Washington Bridge, where Nicole and I ran and hiked. The first floor was Mr. Castro’s office. He’d left his company and was working for himself now, to be around for Nicole. Upstairs was homey, lots of sun and space. Nicole’s room was on the water-view side. We were hanging out on her bed, playing dominoes. Sylvia came in. “Feet on the floor,” she said. She grabbed my ponytail. “If only I had a pair of scissors. One clip, and you would be handsome. Now go downstairs. Let Nicoletta get ready.”

Nicole had been asked to give a speech at the annual Girl Scouts conference in Manhattan.

That night, we were at a midtown hotel. After dinner, Nicole was introduced. She looked stunning, her hair back, her smile wide, except I could see her lips were quivering. The bandage had become smaller, but it still covered all signs of injury. “I’m grateful to you for this opportunity to tell you how much you girls inspire me,” was how she started. “You’re leaders, and we’re all depending on you to lead with kindness. What’s our motto?”

“Be prepared,” half the girls yelled.

Nicole nodded. “Prepared in mind, prepared in body, right? We train our minds to be ready when we need to act to make a situation a bit better. We train our hearts to be strong, to have the courage to give of ourselves to help somebody who—”

“Mommy, what’s wrong with her face?” a Brownie in the front row said.

Nicole kept going. “. . . train our hearts to help those who might need . . . help.” She brushed her hair with her fingers and covered her face with it. “I’m . . .” She hurried away from the podium.

I caught up with her backstage. She was hyperventilating in the corner, facing the bathroom door. “Somebody’s in there,” she said. “The people, they’re still looking at me, Jay, but they can’t see me,” she said. “They can’t see past it.” She rapped on the door. “Please, I have to get in there.”

I held her hand and led her to the street. Mr. Castro went for the car, and we got her home. I slept over at her house that night, on the short couch in her bedroom. When I woke up, she was curled into me. The next day we got her in to see Schmidt for an emergency session.

Her second surgery didn’t go as well as planned, and a third had to be pushed back to the spring. She relapsed with the cutting, but this time she reached out to me about it. She continued with her therapy, but only with Dr. Schmidt and on a private basis, never in the school office. She continued with private tutors, but not in-home. She went to a center in Englewood for one-on-one sessions. She poured herself into her studies. In February, she took the SATs and nailed them.