by Paula McLain
We both nod.
“She wanted to go on birth control. She wasn’t having sex or anything. Don’t think that. Apparently it’s supposed to be really great for your skin.”
“It is,” I say. “Lots of girls do it for that reason.”
“Right. Anyway, she asked me to go to the free clinic with her. We took the bus to Fort Bragg after school one day a few weeks ago. It was like this racy grown-up thing.”
“Go on,” I urge. “You went to the free clinic.”
“Right, but the woman there wouldn’t just give her the prescription without doing a full exam. I waited for her, no big deal, but when she came out she was super quiet and shut down. I kept asking what had happened, but she wouldn’t even tell me until we were halfway home on the bus. It was awful.”
“What was awful?” Will asks.
“The nurse told her she had scarring.” His face freezes and then crumples. It takes a minute before he can go on. “Like, inside her body.”
I feel my gut twist. “Did she ever mention her uncle to you? Drew Hague?”
Gray shakes his head. “I don’t think so.”
“How about someone else? A man? Think, Gray.”
“There weren’t any men. Not that she ever told me about. After that day, she shut down again and wouldn’t talk to me about it at all. That wasn’t how we were with each other.”
He’s just a kid. Of course he’s felt powerless, but so has Cameron. Otherwise she would have leaned on him, her best friend. She would have told him if she’d had the words.
“You’re really brave for being so open with us,” I finally say. “This could be important, Gray. I think someone hurt Cameron once. That person could have come back into her life, or she might have met someone new who’s gotten close to her the same way. You can’t blame yourself for not knowing how to make it better. There isn’t really any way to do that. Do you understand?”
Gray’s nod is almost nonexistent. I see him struggling to forgive himself.
“Can you let us know if you remember anything else? Anything at all?” Will asks.
I move closer to the beanbag, kneeling with my hands out. “And Gray?”
“Yeah?”
“None of this is your fault.”
(twenty-two)
When Will and I get back to the car, we’re silent. For the longest time, he doesn’t even start the engine. Just outside my window, a eucalyptus branch stretches against the glass, making the clustered green-gray leaves look magnified, pearled with raindrops.
Hap had always called them gum trees. Once he told me there are seven hundred varieties of gum tree in Australia alone and that they can make their own fog, a blue haze that’s created when their compounds vaporize in warm air. Seven hundred varieties of a single genus and counting, and yet human lives seem destined to repeat the same terrible patterns over and over, as if there is only one way the story can possibly go.
“Does this type of scarring for sure mean sexual abuse?” Will asks at last.
I’m not surprised he’d wonder, even after seeing how upset Gray became remembering the whole ordeal. “Not always. It’s a controversial issue. A lot of providers will tell you scars like these are inconclusive. Others will tell you that most physicians either don’t know what they’re looking at or don’t want to open that door. The most telling thing to me is Cameron’s reaction.”
“That she shut down, you mean.”
“Right. My guess is she’s buried this stuff really deep.”
“I don’t know what that nurse was thinking. It sure seems irresponsible to drop a bomb like that on a kid.”
“Well, it’s complicated. These clinicians see all kinds of things. Not telling her might have been more irresponsible.”
“Is there a legal issue here? Shouldn’t the clinic have alerted Cameron’s parents?”
“You’d think so, but California doesn’t require that kind of disclosure, at least not yet. I’m wondering what we should do with this information. Maybe just sit on it awhile, particularly since we haven’t ruled out Troy as a suspect. What happened when you polygraphed him?”
“No discrepancies. Emily’s results were more interesting.”
“How so?”
“You know these things are fallible. I try not to take them too seriously unless I have nothing else to go on.”
“Right.” Something about his tone trips a faint feeling of unease in me. “What happened?”
“She failed.”
Before I can respond, the radio in Will’s cruiser screeches to life, startling us both. He picks it up, thumbing the receiver. “Flood here.”
“This is Leon, Sheriff. We’ve just gotten a call from Gualala. Apparently a girl’s been reported missing there. Seventeen-year-old Shannan Russo, last seen June second.”
“June? Why is this coming in now?”
“Because of the others, I guess.” The deputy sounds uncertain and also young, maybe not much older than Will was when he first began to work under his father.
“I’m on my way,” Will says, and then rings off facing me, both eyebrows arcing toward the brim of his hat in pure bewilderment.
“Shit,” I say for us both, wishing there were a way to press pause. If I could only step out of the car and into the woods alone, I might be able to think clearly. But Will is still looking at me. “Sometimes there’s a waterfall effect,” I offer. “A kid runs off and no one gives it a thought until someone like Polly Klaas becomes front-page news. Then the family decides it’s time to panic.”
“Maybe that’s it.” Will seems eager to believe me, though I haven’t said much. “I’ll send someone down to talk to the sheriff’s department there. Or I might go myself. I know Denny Rasmussen pretty well.”
“You want me to come along?” I suggest automatically.
“You’ve got enough to do. We’ll meet up later and compare notes.” He starts the engine and I lean back in the passenger seat, relieved to be given a pass.
These last few hours have drained me more than I want to admit, talking to Emily and then Gray, learning of Cameron’s scars, how much she was hit with all at once. Too much for anyone, let alone a fifteen-year-old.
Almost as if he can read my thoughts, Will says, “That poor kid. Can you imagine being raped and not remembering it?”
“No,” I say.
But I can. It happens all the time.
* * *
—
On his way to Gualala, fifty miles south, Will drops me in the parking lot of the high school. I let myself into the building, instantly colliding with the past, the teenager I was here, just a moment ago, it seems. The smells of floor polish and hormones are the same, the banged-up rows of lockers and cinder-block walls and greenish fluorescent lights. But was it really this small?
It’s the end of the day, and the building’s almost empty. I find the main office by muscle memory, where an administrative assistant directs me to Steve Gonzales’s English classroom. I catch him putting the chairs back in order and introduce myself.
“Cameron,” he says, and sits down hard, as if I’ve pushed him. Just that, the heavy way he’s said her name, tells me he isn’t going to be anyone of interest in our investigation. Tells me how much he cares about her.
Round shouldered and soft eyed, Gonzales wears wide-wale corduroy slacks and a cheap tan blazer he’s probably put on every other day for years. There are threads of silver in his deeply black hair. He’s been here a long time, I guess, and has seen every type of kid.
“Tell me about her work,” I say. “What kind of student is Cameron?”
“A good one. I only had her for a month, but she stood out right away. The sensitive readers, they have a certain look. You can almost smell it on them, that they need books to feel okay.”
“Emily Hague says you prais
ed Cameron’s writing.”
“She wrote some poems and showed them to me. They weren’t part of an assignment.”
“Can I see them?”
“I gave them back to her, but I wish I’d made copies first. Maybe they’d be useful somehow.”
“What were they like?”
“Really good, actually, but dark. It was a tricky moment for me. I’m supposed to talk about the craft of the poem, the imagery or a particularly good line, but in this case, the subject matter was disturbing, and I didn’t know if I should say something about that. Young writers, they’re almost always autobiographical, even when they don’t mean to be.”
“It says a lot that she would show you something so personal. She must have known she could trust you. What happened next? Did you get the feeling that Cameron wanted you to do something about it? That she was asking for help?”
Steve’s dark brown eyes cloud over. “God, I hope not. I edit the school magazine. I asked her if she wanted me to publish the poems, and she said she’d think about it. Then she folded them up a bunch of times. It made me think she was embarrassed she’d shown me. I felt bad after she left, but then in class the next day she seemed fine.”
“You love your job, Mr. Gonzales.”
“I do, yeah. Though right now, I’m struggling.” He looks down at his soft meaty hands. “The other students are still really scared. They can’t focus, I’ve noticed. My colleagues say the same.” I know exactly what he’s talking about. When terror like this hits so close to home, it’s common to see numbness, inability to focus, depression, and anxiety. Most grown-ups don’t have the tools to deal with this kind of fear, let alone kids. It makes me feel for Steve, for all of them.
“The news about Polly Klaas has to have made things a lot worse,” I say. “They must be feeling like it could happen again, to any of them.”
He nods. “What can I do?”
“Be patient. Listen. Reassure them with your presence. Let them feel their feelings. Kids are resilient. They can heal with time, but first they need some kind of resolution. I hope we can provide that for them soon.”
He gives me a long look. “Do you love your job, Detective Hart?”
The question catches me off guard. Once I had an easy answer, but not anymore. “I’ve always felt a need to help people. It gets to be too much, though, particularly when they’re in real trouble and you don’t know if you can make a difference, no matter how hard you try.”
“Yes,” he says. “That’s how I feel right now.”
* * *
—
Before I leave, I ask him to show me Cameron’s locker, which is just a row over from where mine once was. Will’s team has cut off the lock and taken nearly everything. Only her textbooks remain, Algebra II, Beginning Latin, World History, and a ragged paperback of Jane Eyre.
“We’d just started our unit on it,” Steve Gonzales says beside me. Down the hall, a janitor rides a clunky floor polisher around and around in circles, the patterns behind him like glassy, disconnected bull’s-eyes. “Girls like Cameron love Jane.”
“I did too,” I say, feeling a current of connection. “Jane has every reason to feel like a victim, but she’s not. She’s quiet, she’s interior, but a fighter for sure.”
I pick up the paperback to take with me, and then move the stack of books aside. In the lower-right corner of the back of the locker, somewhere only Cameron can see it easily, she’s taped a blank postcard with a poem from Rainer Maria Rilke, the whole poem line by line in her steady, neat hand.
I am too alone in the world, and not alone enough
to make every minute holy.
I am too tiny in this world, and not tiny enough
just to lie before you like a thing,
shrewd and secretive.
I want my own will, and I want simply to be with my will,
as it goes toward action,
and in the silent, sometimes hardly moving times
when something is coming near,
I want to be with those who know secret things
or else alone.
I want to be a mirror for your whole body,
and I never want to be blind, or to be too old
to hold up your heavy and swaying picture.
I want to unfold.
I don’t want to stay folded anywhere,
because where I am folded, there I am a lie.
(twenty-three)
In Patterson’s, as I wait for Will, I scan Jane Eyre feeling uneasy for some reason, as if I’m peering into Cameron’s diary, or trespassing on sacred ground. Books can be incredibly personal to people, even holy. This one seems to be for her, worn soft and dog-eared, full of underlined passages and pencil marks—a coded map to her soul. I have the postcard with the Rilke poem, too, and copy it out in my notebook, circling phrases that feel meaningful. I am too alone in the world…something is coming near…those who know secret things…
The poem must be significant or she wouldn’t have taken the time to write it out by hand, let alone keep it. In fact, I was guessing she recognized herself in all of it, that every word seemed to point like a burning arrow to who she was on the inside, and what she carried.
What I’d said to Will earlier, about not being able to imagine Cameron suppressing memories of her abuse, had been a lie. In fact, it’s a common response, even endemic. The experience of being violated is often so overwhelming and annihilating, particularly for children, that the only way to survive it is for victims to leave their bodies. Not fight or flight, but complete dissociation. If the abuser happens to be a caregiver, someone who is supposed to be safe and loving, the experience of shutdown can be even more dramatic and far-reaching. What we can’t bear to know or feel, we often find a way to hide from ourselves, and hide well.
At whatever age Cameron was when the abuse happened, either once or repeatedly, her mind had likely stepped in to protect her. It wouldn’t have been a choice she made, but something closer to basic animal instinct, the only way to get out of a thing too terrible to name or feel. She might not have remembered any of it until the free-clinic visit, a fluke occurrence, called it out of the dark.
I can barely stand to think about what Cameron must have felt that day, lying flat out on the exam table, already compromised and vulnerable, her feet in metal stirrups while the nurse practitioner donned latex gloves, unaware that she was about to detonate a lifetime’s worth of secret pain. A tale Cameron’s memory had swallowed but not her body. It was all right there inside her, written out in scar tissue.
Even if Cameron’s memories hadn’t been forced to the surface like this, the damage has been simmering for years and has no doubt found other ways to erupt, in feelings of shame or hopelessness, drawing her unconsciously to people and situations that echo or approximate the original pain. I’ve seen it over and over, how a trauma survivor’s story finds a way to tell her instead of the other way around.
It makes me hurt for her, this girl I’ve never met but know. She survived violence, betrayal, and terror, the theft of her soul. She survived the smoking, buried shame and the silence, and years of forced amnesia. But can she survive what’s happening now, inside and out? Can she survive the remembering?
* * *
—
Feeling overwhelmed, I shove the book and poem away from me on the bar top and order a quick shot of whiskey. The second it’s gone, I push my glass forward, signaling one more.
The barmaid looks at me; her drawn-in brows shoot up. “You driving?”
“I’m fine.”
“I’ll tell you what. You hand over your car keys and you can have the whole damned bottle.”
Suddenly I’m irritated. “Just pour the drink, all right? Why do you care?”
She stares me down. “Because someone has to.”
> Under her deadpan delivery, I see legitimate concern, but I haven’t asked for it. For a split second, I feel an urge to throw my empty shot glass hard at the mirror behind her, just to do it, to make something break. Instead, I take a deep breath and let it out slowly. “How old are you?”
“What?” She snorts. “A hundred-some days. How about you?”
“Thirty-five. Thirty-five and a hundred-some days.”
“Now we’re friends?” Her teeth show when she smiles, but I can sense her trying to figure out what I’m up to and what I want from her. Is it just this next drink or something more? “I’ll be forty in December.”
“You been in this town a long time?”
She nods.
“Were you here when Jenny Ford was murdered?”
“I went to school with her. She was a few years younger. I’ve been thinking about her a lot lately.”
“Because of Cameron Curtis? Me too.”
She still holds the bottle. I can see her mind working out the puzzle of our talking. Of me. “Were you at Mendocino High? You look familiar.”
“You would have graduated before I was a freshman. That was a long time ago.” I draw a twenty out of my pocket and toss it on the bar. “I’m Anna. Sorry I’ve been such an asshole.”
“I’m Wanda, and I guess I’ve seen worse.” She picks up the bill and tucks it neatly into her bra just as Will walks up. “Speak of the devil.”
Wanda and I lock eyes, laughing.
“What’s so funny?” Will wants to know.
“Your face,” Wanda says with a wink, and just like that I love her. The world needs an army of Wandas—strong, sarcastic, unafraid women who say what they think and act straightforwardly, without apology or permission. Women who roar instead of flinch.
“Hilarious,” Will says flatly. “Just bring me a drink, will you?”
I brace myself for another round of Wanda’s responsible-driving lecture, but she’s obviously smarter than that, and wordlessly pours his pint, refreshes my drink, and then moves to the other end of the bar.
