Suffer the Children

by Lisa Black

  “Yes, we insist on that. The county is always trying to send us more but I won’t let them bully us into overcrowding. If we’re going to help these kids we have to provide a specific and intensive—anyway, yes, their own rooms. Teens need the security of having a door they can close. For many of them the Firebird Center is the first time they’ve been safe. Ever. And they can’t heal until they feel safe.”

  Maggie said, “But you—”

  “The doors don’t lock,” Ms. Washington said, as if she had read her mind. “If a child is a danger to themselves or is being oppositional, we have to have a way in.”

  “But that’s a last resort,” Palmer insisted. “You’ll see in the under-twelve section there is no fourth wall, so the rooms are more like cubicles. That’s because smaller children are not used to being alone—especially ones from a low socioeconomic status who usually have a passel of siblings piled into a small space. They get scared in a strange room by themselves. But teenagers want the privacy.”

  Maggie had refolded most of the clothing and piled it neatly in the wall unit. The worn Tshirts and pajama pants seemed clean of bloodstains, mysterious notes, or, indeed, anything else.

  “Over fourteen have to do their own laundry,” Ms. Washington told her, again as if reading her mind. “They use the unit in the common area. We insist on them making their beds and keeping the rooms relatively neat as well. Many have never been taught basic hygiene, so we have to introduce it.”

  Riley gazed back at the group of inmates, a lion tamer to the lions, who had relaxed enough to converse among themselves yet without breaking their scrutiny of the interlopers. Hushed tones, hard looks, and the occasional giggle arose from their midst. “All these girls—do they argue?”

  “They’re teenagers. They argue about everything. Rachael more than most.”

  Jack asked her to expound.

  “She didn’t like the food. She didn’t like the other girls. Her teachers picked on her—not admitting that she didn’t pay attention in class or do her homework. She had an aunt who drove up here from Wheeling who wanted to get involved. She had suffered from the grandfather herself. We hoped that would prompt a bond, but Rachael blamed her for not intervening sooner.” Ms. Washington paused. “Can’t really blame her for that one.”

  Maggie folded a neon orange bra, size 30C. “The aunt knew?”

  “No, but the kid wasn’t in the mood to be understanding. Adults seem omnipotent to children, and they resent us when we’re not.”

  Riley asked. “How did she get along with staff?”

  “Hated everything and everyone.”

  Dr. Palmer said, “That’s completely typical, especially with a new arrival. What these kids are looking for, who they’re starving for, is someone who won’t give up on them. Each person they’ve encountered has turned into a disappointment until it’s easier to reject you so that you can’t reject them first. They keep pushing you away with preemptive strikes, seeing if you’ll stick.”

  Having finished with the clothes, Maggie moved on to the smaller items on the desk, Jack watching over her shoulder. Two photos, printed on regular paper about three inches square each. One showed Rachael and another girl in Public Square, scrunching up their faces for the camera. She had had at least one friend, once. In the other a little boy, perhaps three, gazing up at the lens with a solemn expression, arms wrapped around a filthy stuffed horse. Neither Ms. Washington nor Dr. Palmer could identify the kids in the photos.

  A handful of jewelry that had tangled together—all battered costume pieces. A drinking cup, empty. A spiral-bound notebook labeled SCIENCE without a single entry on any page. Another labeled ENGLISH with doodles, tic-tac-toe games (played by herself against herself, to judge from the pen ink and handwriting), and the occasional class note. Rachael had apparently found the word ellipsis and its plural, ellipses, either interesting or amusing and decorated their definitions with many dots. A small fringed bag with lip gloss, a state ID card, and a crumpled-up letter from the aunt who said she knew how Rachael felt and only wanted to help.

  “She rejected the aunt but kept her letter,” Jack observed. “Seeing if she’d stick.”

  A paper clip, a movie theater ticket stub dated two months before, hair scrunchies, eyeshadow, a small plastic bucket holding toothbrush and skin cream.

  Maggie tried to think of what had been in her bedroom at fifteen. At least four times as many clothes, pictures cut from magazines, stuffed animals she refused to part with (and still hadn’t), bottles of perfume, records, books, statues, knickknacks, a radio shaped like an old-fashioned telephone that she liked to pretend was her very own phone in her very own apartment, to which she would move after graduating from college. School records going back to first grade and an elaborately decorated sheet of paper reading “Alex Stay Out” taped to the outside of her door, which her brother had, of course, ignored on principle. A very ordinary and, she thought, very boring existence, without runaway mothers and incarcerated fathers and a monster for a grandfather. There but for the grace of God—

  Jack and Riley checked the bed, lifting the mattress, the usual hiding place for everyone from small children to death-row inmates. But Rachael hadn’t secreted anything under her mattress. Perhaps she had learned the futility of trying to hide from a system that had control over every single aspect of your life. Or perhaps she had nothing worth hiding.

  “We search their rooms twice a week,” Ms. Washington told them.

  Dr. Palmer agreed. “It’s regrettable, since we’re trying to establish trust with them. Without trust we can’t possibly develop a relationship, and without a relationship we can’t approach rehabilitation. But we have to balance caring with safety. We try to do it subtly, when they’re at class, so most of the time they can’t even tell.”

  “It used to be every week,” Ms. Washington said. “But we upped it after an overdose last month.”

  Riley perked up like a dog getting a whiff of beef jerky. “A kid overdosed?”

  “A boy in the sixteen-to-seventeen group—Tyson, Derald Tyson. Lord knows where he got the stuff. Probably bought it off a day student. The metal detector can’t pick up string needles or powders.”

  Dr. Palmer said, “Drugs are the second-biggest scourge we have to deal with here, after abuse. Virtually every child we get has some sort of history with mood-altering substances. They’re pervasive in the schools. Plus most of them got some diagnosis along the line—every tenth child in America is now on some kind of psychotropic medication—so their addiction of choice is or was legally prescribed.”

  “Nothing here but Pepsi,” Maggie said, pulling an empty can from under the desk. She used her flashlight to confirm it held nothing more dangerous than sugar residue inside.

  Ms. Washington frowned. “Don’t know where she got that. Must have talked one of the other girls out of it. She certainly didn’t earn it.”

  Dr. Palmer explained, “We use little things like that as rewards. The kids buy privileges back with good behavior. It develops self-discipline and teaches that they can control their destiny.”

  “Both carrots and sticks,” Jack said.

  “Um … you could put it that way. Not ideal for their dental health, perhaps, but there have to be some joys to balance the sanctions.”

  “Why was Rachael here?” Riley asked.

  Dr. Palmer hemmed a bit as he had with Maggie earlier, until Riley pointed out that the right to privacy died with the person. “After the incident with her grandfather, Rachael had been placed in foster care. Her social worker put her with a wonderful couple who already had two other girls and who assured Rachael that she would never, ever have to see her grandfather again except to testify at his trial. Her life should have been looking up at that point. But one day at dinner her foster parents were trying to teach her how to load a dishwasher and the father patted her on the shoulder, that’s all, and with his wife and the two other foster kids in the room. Rachael grabbed a steak knife from the sink and t
hreatened to, um, cut his balls off and make him eat them.”

  “So she came here?”

  “No … the foster parents had seen reactions like that before. They took it in stride—just got extra careful around the cutlery,” the doctor said, huffing to himself as if this were a joke he’d told before. “But a week later Rachael was hanging around with some kids from the neighborhood and word must have been spread about the incident. They started to tease her. Rachael had already found another knife and stabbed four of them before the screaming prompted a neighbor to call nine-one-one.”

  “Four,” Jack said, with his usual lack of inflection. He had often shown a virulent—and, Maggie knew, violent—empathy for the victims. Rachael, perpetrator and victim in one, must challenge that mind-set.

  “She lashed out,” Dr. Palmer said. “One wound went into a girl’s side and it nicked the heart. She died before the ambulances arrived. A second girl had slashes to her arm and back. A boy had a minor cut to his arm.”

  Ms. Washington put in, “She chased him through four yards. She told the cops she needed to take care of any witnesses.”

  “Yes, um—and the last girl took a stab to the back. I don’t know where the blade went in but she bled out in the ambulance.”

  The detectives were silent. Then Jack said, “And then she came here.”

  “With blood still on her clothes,” Ms. Washington confirmed. “But at least they’d taken the knife away.”

  Dr. Palmer frowned.

  “Where was she going to go from here?” Riley asked. “What was the plan for her, um—”

  “Treatment,” Dr. Palmer finished for him. “This is not punishment. The children here are exactly that—children, who have been abused and violated and neglected. Most, as I said, have a diagnosed mental disability along with substance abuse issues. We do what we can with those issues as we try to get them back on an even keel and to set them up for successful reentry into a more ‘normal’—and I put that word in quotes—life.”

  The cops’ expressions didn’t change. “And what was going to be the next step in her treatment?” Riley asked again.

  “Rachael had not yet been adjudicated. Her next hearing is scheduled for … I don’t know—”

  “Next Wednesday,” Ms. Washington supplied.

  Palmer nodded his thanks. “The prosecutor, as always, wanted her tried as an adult. The public defender, as always, is overwhelmed and has only been here twice that I know of—”

  “Three times.”

  “Since Rachael got here. Meanwhile we immediately put her in classes with therapy once daily and more upon request. As far as I know, Rachael never requested.”

  Ms. Washington confirmed this with a shake of her head.

  “Or cooperated much during the sessions. But that’s common for new arrivals. They stonewall, waiting it out, assuming we’ll give up. As I said—they’re looking for someone who will stick.”

  “Any incidents in the three weeks she’d been here? Between her and other kids?”

  Riley looked at Ms. Washington but Palmer answered. “No. Little bit of shoving, trash talk—as usual for the ‘new kid.’ ”

  “She was trying to carve out her territory?”

  Ms. Washington said, “More like the other girls were establishing theirs. Just playground stuff. Rachael wasn’t much of a joiner. She talked tough enough that they settled down and let her cohabitate, if not exactly let her in.”

  Dr. Palmer assured them, “We want to make sure no one is isolated by the others, but adults interfering often makes things worse.”

  “She would have picked up friends eventually,” Ms. Washington said with an assurance born of years spent observing teens. “She didn’t care much either way—with the adjudication hanging over her head, probably saw no point in getting comfortable. Kids with these backgrounds learn real quick to sort out the temporary from the semipermanent, and they don’t waste time on the former.”

  Maggie took a close-up shot of the two-month-old ticket stub, in case the detective wanted to run it down later, see who she’d been with. Rachael had hung on to it, so perhaps it served as a memento of a special afternoon. Insidious 5 at four-ten p.m. So the girl liked horror movies. You’d think her own life had been horrible enough.

  Meanwhile Riley apparently wanted to separate needles of fact from the haystack of social theory: “So she didn’t get in any fights, no physical violence or complaints of same?”

  The doctor and the dorm mother both said no.

  “Any fights between any other kids? Not involving Rachael?”

  “No … not in this unit. In the under-twelve group—”

  “Damon,” Ms. Washington interjected.

  “Damon. He’s a—challenge.”

  “The Damon we just met downstairs?” Jack asked.

  “The same. But Rachael shouldn’t even have known of that, much less been concerned about it.”

  “What did Damon do?” Riley asked, apparently out of curiosity.

  “He bit a few of his groupmates, tried to choke one. He is, as I said, a challenge. But that’s the under-twelve group.”

  Ms. Washington said, “He scratched Trina, just lunged at her for no reason when the groups were passing in the hallway. But Rachael wasn’t even there.”

  “Then why did he want to see her body?”

  “Damon would want to see any body,” Ms. Washington said. “He has none of the usual filters or instincts, but he couldn’t have known it was Rachael. He couldn’t have known Rachael period.”

  They seemed confident on that point so Riley moved on. “Okay. Any other conflicts going on in the building?”

  They seemed to consider, then said no. No physical violence worth mentioning.

  Maggie had untangled most of the jewelry into cheap bangles; three necklaces with a Chinese character, a quarter moon, and a small stone bear, respectively; hoop earrings, skull earrings, earrings with dangling cats; and a ring with a scratched stone of purple glass. No piece appeared special to its owner, left as they were in a jumble. Not like the gold ring she apparently made a habit of carrying with her, hidden, kept in a pocket. Not hung around her neck with one of the chains, as women often did with a ring important to them.

  “We’re going to need to talk to the other girls,” Riley told the administrators.

  “Mmm,” Ms. Washington said.

  “Mmm,” Dr. Palmer said. “That could be problematic. Nearly all of them have legal cases pending—”

  Riley said, “They’re not suspects. We aren’t sure a crime has even been committed—this is most likely a case of suicide, and—”

  Dr. Palmer’s eyes widened. “Of course it’s suicide! What else would it be—well, unless she tried walking on the railing or something like that. Reckless behavior is quite common for these kids—so death by misadventure, yes, quite possibly. An unfortunate accident.” Having worked that best-case scenario out in his head, he visibly relaxed his shoulders.

  “Yes,” Riley soothed. “So all we want to ask them about is Rachael. Not their own situations. No legal worry in that.”

  “I understand that,” the doctor said with a touch of asperity. “But these girls have also been traumatized—Erica, what do you think?”

  “They’ll be fine,” she said, and led the detectives over to the conversation area.

  Chapter 4

  They pulled chairs over from the dining tables, all the adults, even Maggie. She didn’t have anything else to do and had no interest in trying to find her way out of the building without an escort. The doctor and the dorm mother clearly would not be leaving their charges in the company of homicide detectives without supervision.

  The conversation area, however, had been closed in by a low wall of planters with only two openings. Riley grabbed that one open space, and no one else felt inclined to walk to the other side of the ten-by-ten area to settle in the opposite opening, so the rest of the adults sat outside the cozy square, gazing at the girls inside over low shrubs
with yellowing leaves and dry soil.

  Nor did any of the girls offer their seats, or even shift their comfortable positions. Don’t give an inch, they seemed to have learned. Too often in their lives miles had been taken.

  Riley introduced himself, Jack, and Maggie. Maggie received softer, more interested glances than the cops did—not because of her gender but her occupation. Most teens were CSI fans in some way, and that bestowed her with a desirable but probationary judgment of “cool.” Maggie encountered this combination blessing/curse attitude often, and this time felt grateful for it. She would be given a mental pass until she disappointed them by not actually doing anything “cool.”

  The cops, of course, had their own predetermined judgments, not nearly so friendly. Riley spoke in a calm, matter-of-fact voice but he was a cop, a man, and an adult. They owed him nothing.

  He had two daughters now approaching their teens; Maggie wondered what he must be thinking. She would expect this entire facility to be one of the worst nightmares of any parent—Is my kid going to wind up here?

  But he kept any internal turmoil to himself as he told them that Rachael had died, apparently having fallen in the stairwell. Not one girl batted an eye. The one in the Hello Kitty sweatshirt paled and pressed her fists to her mouth. Another raised one eyebrow. Another smirked. They had already known, from that institutional osmosis that winds through any organization, or surmised it from the presence of cops in Rachael’s bedroom.

  “I know she hadn’t been here that long, but what can you tell us about her?”

  Blank stares.

  “We’d appreciate anything you could tell us about her life before she came here. What did she like to do, who were her friends?”

  Nothing.

  Then as if a bubble burst, several spoke at once.

  “She was a bitch,” the girl dressed all in black said. She had dark hair chopped at the jawline and a lot of eyeliner, fingernails bitten to the quick, and an oddly stiff manner of sitting, with both feet on the floor, hands on her knees. But she must have done something good because she held a can of Sprite Zero in one of them.