Live to Tell (30 page)

D.D. stepped back, turned to Neil. “When you notify the ME, remind Ben we’ll want the knot on the rope left intact.” She turned to Danielle and Greg. “You two can return upstairs if you’d like. We’ll take it from here.”

But neither of them took the hint. Greg’s arm went around Danielle. She turned, ever so slightly, into him.

“We’ll stay,” the nurse said, her voice flat. “It’s the duty of the lone survivor. We must bear witness. We must live to tell the tale.”

CHAPTER
TWENTY-THREE

DANIELLE

Six months after the funeral, Aunt Helen took me to pick out tombstones for my siblings’ graves. She’d already selected a rose-colored marble for my mother, inscribed with the standard name and timeline. But when the moment came to select a stone for Natalie and Johnny, Aunt Helen wasn’t able to bear it. She walked away.

So my sister and brother lay in unmarked graves for the first six months, until Aunt Helen decided it was time to get the job done. I went with her. It was something to do.

The monument store was a funny place. You could pick out lawn ornaments, decorative fountains, or, of course, tombstones. The man in charge wore denim overalls and looked like he’d be more comfortable gardening than helping a black-suited woman and her hollow-eyed niece pick out grave markers for two kids.

“Boy like baseball?” he asked finally. “I could engrave a bat and ball. Maybe something from the Red Sox. We do a lot of business with the Red Sox.”

Aunt Helen laughed a little. It wasn’t a good sound.

She finally selected two small angels. I hated them. Angels? For my goofy siblings, who liked to stick out their tongues at me, and were always one whack ahead at punch buggy? I hated them.

But I wasn’t talking in those days, so I let my aunt do as she wanted. My mother was marked in rose marble. My siblings became angels. Maybe there were trees in Heaven. Maybe Natalie was saving bunnies.

I didn’t know. My parents never took me to church, and my corporate-lawyer aunt continued their agnostic ways.

We didn’t bury my father. My aunt didn’t want him anywhere near her sister. Since she was the one in charge of the arrangements, she had him cremated and stuck in a cardboard box. The box went in the storage unit in her condo building, where it stayed for the next twelve years.

I used to sneak the key from my aunt’s purse and visit him from time to time. I liked the look of the box. Plain. Small. Manageable. Surprisingly heavy, so after the first visit, I didn’t try to lift it anymore. I wanted to keep my father this way, remember him this way. No bigger than a stack of tissues, easy to tuck away.

I could loom over this box. I could hit it. Kick it. Scream at the top of my lungs at it.

A box could never, ever hurt me.

My twenty-first birthday, I got drunk, raided my aunt’s storage unit, and, in a fit of rage, emptied the box into a sewer grate. I flushed my father down into the bowels of Boston, having to keep my mouth closed, but still inhaling bits of him up my nose.

Immediately afterward, I was sorry I’d done such a thing.

The cardboard box had contained my father, kept him small.

Now I knew he was somewhere out there, floating down various pipes and channels and water systems. Maybe the ash was soaking up the water, steadily expanding, enabling my father to grow again, to loom once more in the dark undergrowth of the city. Until one day, a white hand would shoot up, drag back a sewer grate, and my father would be free.

The cardboard box had contained him.

Now, for all the evil in the world, I had only myself to blame.

“I thought we’d agreed on the buddy system,” Karen was snapping at Greg. It was after four. We were all tired, pale-faced, shocked. Karen had arrived just in time to hear the news of Lucy’s death. She’d stood with us while the ME gently lowered Lucy’s green-shrouded frame onto the waiting gurney. Then the man took Lucy away.

A child is like a snowflake
. First thing you learn in pediatric nursing.
A child is like a snowflake
. Each one unique and original from the one before. Lose one and you have lost too much, because there will never be another quite like her again.

I had my left hand in my pocket, my fingers wrapped around Lucy’s final gift, rolling the little string ball between my fingers again and again.

“Oh Danny girl. My pretty, pretty Danny girl …”

“She was with the police,” Greg answered tightly. “I thought that was buddy enough. ’Sides, unit was busy. We had a lot going on.”

“Apparently!”

“Dammit, Karen, you can’t possibly think—”

“It doesn’t matter what I think. In a situation like this, appearance matters as much as reality. Fact is, we had a staff member and a child off radar for at least fifteen minutes. You were in charge of checks, Greg. What the hell were you doing?”

“I checked! Cecille vouched for Lucy; we agreed on twenty-minute intervals for her, so I waited another twenty to check again. As for Danielle, she was with the police. Or so I thought.”

Now all eyes were on me. I didn’t say anything, just rolled the string ball between my fingers.

“Oh Danny girl. My pretty, pretty Danny girl…”

“You said you went to fetch a glass of water,” Karen repeated directly to me. “Did you see Lucy tonight? Visit her at all?”

“I saw Lucy. She was dancing in moonbeams. She was happy.”

“When?”

“Before I got water.”

“Danielle, start talking. The hospital will be launching an investigation. The state will be launching an investigation. You need to tell us what happened.”

“I saw Lucy. I got a glass of water. I met with Greg about Jimmy and Benny. Reloaded the copy machine. Met with the detectives. That’s everything I did. All that I did.”

“That doesn’t take twenty minutes,” Sergeant Warren stated.

“But it did.” I finally looked at her. “You were right before. It’d be better if we had security cameras.”

Sergeant Warren asked me to come with her for questioning. I refused. Karen informed me I was on paid leave, effective immediately, and I was not to come to work until the hospital granted permission. I refused.

Not that it mattered. Everyone was asking me questions, but no one was listening to my answers.

“She didn’t kill herself.” I spoke up, my voice louder, edgier. “Lucy wouldn’t do that. She wouldn’t.”

Greg and Karen shut up. Sergeant Warren regarded me with fresh interest. “Why do you say that?”

“Because I saw her. She was happy. She was a cat. As long as she was a cat, she was okay.”

“Maybe someone burst her bubble. Or the delusion slipped away. You said she was volatile, dangerously unpredictable.”

“She’d never shown any signs of suicide before.”

“That’s not true,” Karen protested. “She’d already demonstrated a need for self-mutilation, as well as debasement.” She turned to Sergeant Warren. “First day she was here, Lucy cut her arm and used the blood to draw patterns on the wall. The child did terrible things, because terrible things had been done to her. I don’t think we can say with any degree of certainty what she was, or was not, capable of.”

“She didn’t kill herself!” I insisted again, angry now and realizing how much I needed that rage. “She wouldn’t do that. Someone helped her get out. That’s the only way you can explain her getting through two sets of locked doors. Someone helped her. First time was yesterday, maybe as a trial run, then again tonight. Face it, the unit was hopping, we were short-staffed, and then the police suddenly appeared. Plenty of distractions, providing the perfect opportunity for someone to harm her. That’s what happened.”

“Someone,” Sergeant Warren drawled, looking right at me.

“I was only gone five to ten minutes—”

“Eighteen. I timed you.”

“I was with your own detective for part of that—”

“About two minutes, he says.”

“That’s not enough time to smuggle a child out of the unit and get down to radiology and back.”

“But someone did. You just said so.”

“Not
me
—someone,” I snapped. “Someone else, someone.”

“Really? Because I thought Lucy didn’t trust anyone else but you. So who could that someone-else someone be?”

I opened my mouth. Closed it. Opened it again. Gave up. Fuck if I knew.

Lucy, dancing in the moonlight. Lucy, swinging from the ceiling.

Then, out of the blue: my mother, with a single bullet hole in the center of her forehead.

“I’ll take care of this, Danny. Go to bed. I will take care of everything.”

“Oh Danny girl. My pretty, pretty Danny girl…”

“Do you need to sit down?” Karen asked me gently.

I shook my head.

“How about a glass of water? Greg, fetch Danielle a glass of water.” Karen found my right hand, cradling my fingers between her palms. But I snatched my hand back, held it against my chest. I didn’t want to be touched right now. I wanted to feel the rage, let it flood me like a river.

“Tika and Ozzie,” I stated, looking at Karen. “Ask Sergeant Warren about Tika and Ozzie.”

D.D. explained. Karen went chalky white.

“But … but … that doesn’t make any sense,” she protested feebly. “We can’t be the common denominator between two murdered families. We don’t make home visits. We work with the child, but hardly know anything about the family. Where they live, what they do … that’s not us….”

“But you have that information,” Sergeant Warren said. A statement, not a question.

“In the files, yes.”

“And didn’t I see some poster in the lobby about an open-door policy? Parents can visit the floor anytime they want?”

“Parents are invited to visit their child whenever they want. That still doesn’t mean we
know
them. Their time on the floor is a small slice of their overall universe, assuming they visit at all. Most of them don’t.”

“The Harringtons?” Sergeant Warren pressed.

Karen fidgeted with her glasses, adjusting and readjusting them on her face. “Ozzie’s parents, right? The mother, she came several times. Stayed over in the beginning, then came once or twice a week after that.”

“What about the rest of the family?”

“I have no memory of them. A shame, too. Parents seem to feel they’ll traumatize their other children by bringing them to an acute-care unit, when really, it’s good for all the children to see one another and reaffirm that each is doing okay.”

D.D.’s eyes narrowed. “And Tika’s family?”

Karen shook her head, bewildered. “Greg?” she asked.

He’d just returned with a tray bearing four cups of water. He handed me one, then Karen, then offered one to Sergeant Warren, who passed.

“Tika?” he repeated. “Little girl, ’bout a year ago? Cutter?”

“That’s the one,” Warren assured him. “I understand you worked with her.”

He nodded. “Cute little thing. Had a wicked sense of humor if you could get her to open up. But yeah, she had some self-esteem issues,
depression, anxiety. Maybe even suffered sexual abuse, though she never disclosed.”

“What was her family like?” Sergeant Warren wanted to know.

“Never visited.”

“Never?”

“Never. Tika’s file described the mother as ‘disengaged.’ We never experienced anything different.”

“And our records show them living in Mattapan,” I spoke up, remembering the exchange between Sergeant Warren and the George Clooney detective. “We wouldn’t know they’d moved; our involvement was over and done.”

“Not so hard to look up,” Sergeant Warren said with a shrug.

“But why? We’re caretakers. We don’t hurt children. We help them.”

“Tell that to Lucy.”

“Fuck you!”
I exploded.

“Eighteen minutes,” the sergeant shot back. “Gym Coach here just fetched four cups of water in a fraction of that time. Explain eighteen minutes.”

“Easy,” Karen interjected, ever the manager. “Let’s just take a deep breath here.”

“Lucy wouldn’t just wander into a radiology room,” I insisted hotly. “And where would she find the rope?”

“Like you said, someone must have helped her.”