by M. J. Rose
And then for the first time since I’d gotten there, I saw Alan’s mouth lift. His smile was the saddest I’d ever seen.
“Call him off, Alan. I won’t bother you anymore. You’re on your own.”
Seventy-Four
The whole way back to the office, I forced myself not to turn around to see if anyone was following me. When I got out in front of the office, I didn’t look over my shoulder to search for Terry Meziac. I knew that even if he was following me, he wasn’t there to hurt me, but to scare me. And no one could do that to me anymore.
I was getting a cold and my throat was sore. I wanted to go home and crawl into bed. Instead, I popped a throat lozenge, made some tea and saw my next patient. And then the next. I was waiting for Blythe when Allison called. “I forgot to tell you, the day you were out—yesterday—Blythe canceled, and I gave a new patient her spot. She’s on her way up.”
Moments later, Amanda stood at the door to my office, snow dripping off her boots and melting in her hair. There were bright spots in the middle of her cheeks. She couldn’t seem to cross the threshold.
“You can come in,” I said, encouraging her. “It’s okay. I’m really glad to see you.”
Tentatively, she took a small step forward. Her skinny body was wrapped up in a big black down coat, and she had her suede boots on her feet. She left melting snow in her wake.
Once inside, she froze again, holding her knapsack close to her chest and looking at me as if asking me to get up and usher her farther in.
“Take off your coat—it’s warm in here.”
She took one cautious step after another, as if she were walking on a bed of nails. Finally, she made it inside and over to the couch, where she shrugged out of her coat and sat on it. She went through that whole maneuver without letting go of the knapsack.
“Me being here, it’s a secret, right? Like at school?”
“Yes. Completely.”
Despite my response, Amanda didn’t relax.
“Do I have to pay you?”
“We can work that out later, okay?”
She nodded.
“This is harder than you thought it was going to be, isn’t it?”
She nodded again.
“What did you think it was going to be like?”
“I was hoping that somehow you’d know what I wanted to tell you, and I wouldn’t have to say anything.”
I laughed. “I think all my patients wish that I could read their minds and they wouldn’t have to talk. But I can’t, so you’re going to have to tell me. I can promise you, though, that I won’t be shocked or surprised, and I won’t judge you.”
“I know that from what goes on at school.”
I nodded and waited. Amanda still hadn’t looked around at all. Her fingers had not loosened from the knapsack strap. A few seconds went by. And then a few more. She started to play with the tab on the zipper, teasing it up an inch and then rezipping it.
As much as I wanted to coax her, I didn’t want to scare her off. Not when she had come this far.
Finally: “This is really complicated, Dr. Snow. It has to do with things that no one knows about.” She frowned. “Well, some people know but…”
“Do your parents know?”
She shook her head adamantly.
“Okay. They won’t find out. Not unless you want to tell them yourself.”
She wasn’t listening to me anymore but staring intently at a glass box that hung on the wall behind my desk. Inside was an iridescent blue butterfly, a gift from Nina.
“That’s weird,” she whispered.
“What is?”
“That you have a butterfly like that.”
“Why?”
“Do you like them?”
I nodded. She looked around my office now and noticed the butterfly print on the wall and the glass butterfly paperweight on my desk. Her expression became tortured. Without saying anything, she stood, reached down for her coat, muttered a few unintelligible words and ran out of my office.
Seventy-Five
In retrospect, there are always reasons for what we do, if we stop and examine them. Following Amanda that afternoon was not something I stopped to think about. Now I know that I went after her because I knew she was deeply troubled, and I was afraid for her. Also because of her age. She was just a few years older than my daughter, and I wanted to protect her the same way I wanted to protect Dulcie.
It was some sort of karmic exchange. If I took care of Amanda, then someone would take care of Dulcie if she were ever in this kind of distress. But it was also the horror on her face when she saw the trapped butterfly on my office wall that made me get up and follow her. What made her respond like that? What kind of trouble was she in that she had made her way all the way to my office to talk about something and then left?
By the time I reached the street, she’d reached the corner, walking west toward Fifth Avenue. I hurried to catch up to her, forgetting for the time being about my wrist and the doctor’s admonition to be more careful on the treacherous city sidewalks.
“Amanda!”
She turned, saw me and was about to run, but the light changed and she was trapped.
I was at her side in four steps and put my left hand on her shoulder, not actually holding her back, but suggesting it.
“Can I walk with you?” I asked.
“I guess.”
When the light turned green, we crossed Madison Avenue and continued west, walking in silence, passing the Rita Ford music box store, which was one of my daughter’s favorite places in the city. Amanda’s teeth were chattering, either from nerves or the cold. Her coat wasn’t buttoned up, she wasn’t wearing gloves and her head was bare.
Halfway down the block, we reached a set of wide doors. “Come in here for a while. You can warm up. We can just sit. You don’t have to talk about anything. I’ll just keep you company.”
Amanda followed me through the doors, into an unimposing lobby.
“Have you ever been here?” I asked.
“It’s where I went to Sunday school,” she said.
We turned left and went through another door and into the main sanctuary of Temple Emanuel.
“I went here, too,” I said. And my daughter goes here now, I thought but didn’t say. As much as I wanted Amanda to feel comfortable with me, I didn’t want her to think of me as a parent, but rather someone she didn’t have to keep her secret from.
The sanctuary is almost the whole width of a city block and has a lovely stained-glass rose window above the entrance that washes the interior with soft red and blue light. I slid into one of the pews not far from the altar and looked up at the familiar golden doors that protected the Torah. Amanda took the seat beside me.
The quiet and emptiness of the temple was soothing, and I hoped it would calm Amanda.
We had only been there two or three minutes when the first sonorous tones of the organ wafted out and surrounded us. Someone was practicing, but flawlessly and as Beethoven’s music filled the space, Amanda became less tense.
“It’s really peaceful here, isn’t it?”
She nodded as she started to play with the zipper on the knapsack she was once again hugging to her chest.
“Is there something in there you wanted to give me?” I spoke softly, hoping my words would meld with the music and not alarm her. She didn’t respond. As if talking to a three-year-old who needed to be cajoled, I said, “Why don’t you let me have it, Amanda.”
She looked at me. I attempted what I hoped was an encouraging smile. Finally, Amanda unzipped the knapsack and pulled out a clear plastic square. Now the satchel was abandoned, useless, no longer important to her. The thing clutched in her hands held all the value.
“Do you know who Simone is?” she asked.
“No.”
“None of the guys told you about her?” She seemed incredulous.
“No. Is she a friend of yours?”
“We were best friends.”
“Did somet
hing happen to her?”
Amanda sighed and then sucked her lips in so that they disappeared. “They said that it was an overdose.” The weight of the words defeated her and she slumped down farther in her seat.
“What kind of overdose?”
“Pills and vodka. But the thing is she never…we never did drugs.”
“When did she die?”
“Last June. It wasn’t an overdose. Well, it was, but it wasn’t an accident the way it was reported.” As hesitant as she had been to speak before, now she was in a rush to get it all out. I was having trouble understanding all the words over the music.
“What do you mean it wasn’t an accident?”
“She’d been depressed and miserable for like a whole year, and she finally told me that she was going to do it. She even told me what the note was going to say. All the day before, I tried to talk her out of it, but I couldn’t. I didn’t know what else to do, so I threatened to go to her mother. I told her I’d help her find someone to talk to. I told her I’d get the name of a therapist that a girl in our class was seeing. She said okay. She promised me that she wouldn’t do it. I called Robin that night. I got the therapist’s number. The therapist even gave me an appointment for the next day and said he’d give me a break on the price. He was only going to charge me fifty dollars and I had way more than that in my savings account. I called Simone back—it was still only seven at night. She sounded much calmer. She promised me that she really was okay. That she’d go with me.” Amanda had started to cry.
I felt more maternal than was good for me if I was going to be her therapist, but I didn’t want to keep asking her questions and remain at a distance. I wanted to gather her up in my arms and promise her that I’d help her, and do whatever I could to make her pain go away.
“What was bothering her, Amanda?”
She looked down at the thing she still held in her hands. “This. What we did. It got around. Her mother found out. She was so embarrassed.”
“With the other kids?”
“No. With her mom. She just wanted her mom to, y’know, to try to listen or understand what had happened or something…” She was running her finger up and down the spine of the plastic case.
“Do you want me to play it?”
She nodded but didn’t hold it out to me yet. “Before… first…I have to explain.” She took a deep breath, as if she were getting ready to dive underwater, and then launched into her secret, speaking now at an even faster pace so that her words blurred the way scenery does when you pass it by on a train going more than one hundred miles an hour.
“We just wanted the guys to see that we could do what the other girls did. I knew how to use the digital camera. I’d made movies before. It didn’t seem like it would be too complicated. We decided that we needed to watch what they were watching and copy it. You know, we’d just do what those girls did and then we’d send it to them. They’d see that we could do the same stuff and they’d want to be with us. Simone liked Timothy. She wanted him to, y’know, be with her. I wanted… well, that doesn’t matter. So we had to watch first to know what to do, y’know? It was a little gross when we first tried to copy the Web-cam girls, but the more we did it, the easier it got. And the more we liked it. And then…when—” She broke down again and I let her cry, watching her shoulders heave. I put my hand out and rubbed her back.
“It took us a while to get, comfortable with each other. It was hard at first to be naked. And it was weird to touch each other. But then we got into it.” Big sigh. “We liked it. And we didn’t know what that meant.” She stopped. I thought this was the end of the confession. I could see the two girls, playing at being lesbians for the sake of the camera and discovering that it felt good.
“It means that people can give each other pleasure. That if we open ourselves up to it, many of us would discover that some things just feel good no matter who does them to us.”
Amanda actually seemed to hear me. She nodded. “We didn’t know if it meant we were lesbians or not.” The trance was over for the time being. “No boys had ever touched us. We went down on them. They let us do that. But what Simone and I did to each other on the tape, no one did to us. And it felt good. That didn’t mean anything, did it?”
“No, sweetheart.” I heard myself slip and use the endearment. It didn’t matter, all the tenderness in the world wouldn’t hurt Amanda right now. “It didn’t mean that you were lesbians. Sexuality is very complicated, especially when you’re first discovering it. Is that what Simone thought? That’s not why she took the pills, is it?”
It couldn’t be, I thought. We were living in New York in the twenty-first century. Surely Simone’s parents would have been able to cope with a lesbian daughter.
“No. No, that’s not why. But it made it weirder. It made the whole thing more of a secret. And then we did it sometimes just us, without the camera. To practice, we said. And then Simone saw the cutter. That’s when I got scared. I mean, none of the guys were into that, but Simone liked it. It might have been okay, though…it still might have been okay…”
“Amanda, honey, what happened?”
She closed her eyes. “First you need to promise you won’t tell anyone. No one at school knows this is me. Or that it’s Simone. You can’t show it to anyone at school. I mean the teachers. Timothy knows. But he is the only person who does.”
“Okay.”
“Do you promise?”
I looked at her solemnly. “Yes. As God is my witness.”
“We…we copied what the Web-cam girls were doing and then we sent the movie to Timothy. We didn’t tell him then who we were. He showed it to Hugh and Barry. They couldn’t recognize us. We were wearing masks, like one of the Web-cam girls. That’s where we got the idea. We were going to tell him afterward. First we wanted them to think that these girls were hot. And to want them. But before we had a chance to tell him it was us, after just like two days, we started hearing about it at school. Timothy had e-mailed it to Hugh and Barry and they had e-mailed it to a bunch of other guys. And everyone was passing it around and talking about it. All the guys. Everyone was watching it and trying to guess who the girls were. It got really awful. Someone downloaded it onto one of the computers at school. I don’t know how many people finally saw it.” She blinked back tears. She was too busy explaining to stop and cry.
“Timothy got suspended for two weeks. So did a few other guys. The headmaster threatened to expel them if they didn’t tell who the girls were. But they couldn’t tell. We’d never told them. They really didn’t know. At least not then.”
“What happened next?”
“We were safe. Or we thought we were. But then Simone’s mom found the video file on her computer. She recognized her and went crazy. She grounded her and started picking her up at school every day and dropping her off every morning and she took away her phone and her Internet connection. She made her life miserable. She threatened to go to the headmaster if Simone didn’t tell her who the other girl was. But she wouldn’t. That made her mother even crazier. She saw what we’d done like it was this major crime that we’d—that Simone—had committed against her. Against her. Like Simone had done it to her on purpose, and she kept talking to her about how demeaning it was and how pathetic we were…I mean, I know it would have bothered most parents, but she acted as if Simone had done it just to embarrass her. But we didn’t. We did it because we wanted to get the guys to pay attention to us. To us. Not to those fake girls. We wanted them to know we could do the same stuff.”
She swallowed another sob. I could tell from how fast her words were coming that she was almost done and that she needed to get it all out now, as if it was poison rotting her insides. “Dr. Snow, you know about the girls who are getting killed? The Web-cam girls?”
“Yes.”
“The ones who got killed…all of them are the girls we copied. The same ones. And in the same order that we copied them in our movie. They’ve all gotten killed. Except the last one. The fift
h one. The girl who wore the mask.”
Seventy-Six
Finally, Amanda held out the CD, offering it to me. I took it but she did not let go. “You can’t show it to anyone, though. You’re the only one who can see it.”
“If I am going to help save the last girl, I’m going to have to show it to the police.”
“Can’t you just tell them about it?”
“I don’t think so. Will you let me show it to them?”
She shook her head. “My parents don’t know.”
“How about this? Let me take it for now. You think about it overnight. Tomorrow morning, I’ll call you and get your permission before I do anything.”
She was shaking her head. “There’s no way it will stay a secret if you give it to the police. Do you know what it would be like if anyone found out this was me? What my parents would do to me?”
The organ music stopped. It wasn’t silent right away—the chords lingered—and then it was so quiet in the temple that I could hear Amanda’s breathing.
“It’s our fault. Simone’s fault and mine. If we hadn’t made this, Simone wouldn’t be dead, and none of those women would be dead now.”
“No, it’s not your fault. You didn’t do this on purpose. You didn’t want anyone to get hurt.”
“But so many people have been.”
She heard the footsteps before I did and was up and walking toward the front doors in seconds. I grabbed my coat and, holding the disk, rushed after her.
“Wait,” I said.
“Who’s there?” A man’s voice echoed from behind me.
I didn’t answer as I rushed after Amanda.
“Can I help you?” he called.
Seventy-Seven
I’d been with Amanda for fifty-five minutes and only had a few minutes left to get back to the office for my next patient. Not long enough to figure out the ramifications of what Amanda had told me, or even to ask myself what my real obligations were. I wanted to call Noah right then and tell him everything. But could I?
