by Lisa Black
“Um,” Jack said to Ms. Cooper, “should we—?”
“No. He can handle Martina.”
And indeed, the man caught her, and more deftly than Jack would have expected he swung the little girl around and hugged her from behind, wrapping her arms across her own stomach and holding them there. Then he dropped to the ground, pulling her with him, and hooked his own calves over her shins, gently pinning her in place. She shrieked and squirmed but could not extricate herself.
“Does this happen often?”
“Once or twice a week. It used to be once or twice a day, so we’re making progress.”
Riley had come out to observe, with darting glances as if staring might be rude—not that the girl seemed to care. She was too busy yelling to even notice their presence. “What is her story?”
Ms. Cooper said, “We don’t know. She was found on the street about a year ago, filthy and starving. We never tracked down her parents. She won’t talk about any memories she has, probably repressed most of them. We can only imagine.”
With her limbs pinned, Martina could only move her head. She made full use of her neck muscles, pulling her chin down to her chest to get as much momentum as possible before snapping her head back. The guy turned his face from one side to the other to protect his nose but after one particularly savage attack Jack heard a crunch that might have been a cheekbone, or the cartilage protecting his carotid.
“This is the problem,” Ms. Cooper said absently, and in what seemed to Jack like a vast understatement. “She’s so desperate to belong, to have someone care about her, but so discouraged by whatever pain and rejection she’s suffered in the past. So she rejects you before you can reject her, before she’s tempted to feel close to anyone. Her subconscious believes it’s easier that way, to get it over with. She’s dying for someone who won’t shove her away, and instead makes it impossible for anyone to pull her close.”
“A self-fulfilling prophecy,” Riley said.
“Exactly. You see this all over in life, the girl who keeps burning through fiancés, the boy who gets his dream job only to send his boss a stupid e-mail. Unfortunately, Martina’s reaction is much more intense.”
The girl’s flailing hadn’t weakened. Jack couldn’t help but stare at a grown man getting the snot kicked out of him by an eight-year-old girl. She nearly lifted him off the ground with her contortions.
“Do you have a lot like her?” Riley asked.
“Traumatized kids? Yes. Ones who throw such spectacular meltdowns? Only a few. At least she doesn’t work on getting the other kids to join in. We had one a few years ago…. Compared to him, Martina is in the peewee league. She only resembles a tornado. He reached category five … put holes in cement walls, chipped the linoleum, threw adult-sized chairs ten feet.”
“What do you do when they get too big to pin?” Jack asked.
A touch of uncharacteristic hopelessness colored her eyes. “They go to jail. Or, if they’re lucky, a residential treatment program.”
“In the prison,” Riley clarified. There were no longer “hospitals for the criminally insane.” Prisons had their own designated areas.
Ms. Cooper said, “That’s Martina’s future if we can’t get her healthy. She’ll have issues into adult life, no doubt, but if we can redirect her rage into less destructive outlets, she may be able to have some semblance of what we’d call a normal life. Maybe, here and there, a moment of actual happiness—before her childhood is gone completely.”
“What did she do?” Jack asked.
“Martina? Nothing, actually. Nothing criminal other than the kind of assault you just saw. She’s here because there are few other facilities that will take her on the public dime. Fostering hasn’t worked out—it’s extremely difficult to deal with kids coming from this kind of abuse and neglect. Everything that is, well, normal doesn’t apply to them. Some people think all they need is love. Some people think all they need is discipline. They’re both wrong.” She paused, apparently trying to summarize human development in a few sentences. “All the things we take for granted—eating regular meals, hugging people we love, going to the bathroom in the bathroom—those aren’t as instinctive as we think. We were taught all those things by our parents. So severely neglected kids come into a foster home. A hug makes them scream. They defecate in their bedroom. They steal food no matter how many times you explain that there is plenty of food and that stealing will be punished because no matter how much they may want to please you they have to put their own survival first. Buying them toys does not produce gratitude because they don’t understand the concept of giving. They don’t want to wear a coat when it’s cold or else they insist on having one when it’s warm. They eat until they’re sick, or won’t eat with the family at all. They want to be loved, Detectives, but they make that so very, very difficult.”
As if to emphasize the point, Martina let out another scream and twisted to bite her captor’s shoulder.
“Come with me,” Ms. Cooper told them. “I’ll show you that drawing of Damon’s.”
She led them past the eating kids again, making Jack pity the really quiet ones. The cops had entered and nothing bad had happened. They had finally unbent enough to spoon in another mouthful or two, but now his glancing approach turned them back into statues.
“Under-twelve isn’t separated by gender?” Jack asked the woman, out of earshot of the kids.
“No. Aside from not having the space or the staff, it’s a conscious decision. Very young children are accustomed to being around other people and other children all the time. Their young ages are a chance for us to get them in the habit of cooperative, consistent socialization. And most of them are prepubescent so the threat of sexual activity isn’t as heavy as it is with the teens. Not that that necessarily counts for anything these days, not when grade school kids have oral sex. But they’re so closely monitored here that it hasn’t been a problem.”
“What is the age range?”
“Right now everyone I have is under ten. Damon was actually my oldest. The youngest is six.”
“A six-year-old?” Riley couldn’t help reacting.
“She stabbed her baby sister to death,” Ms. Cooper said as she pulled out a ring of small keys.
“Oh.”
Martina’s wails began to subside, with more seconds elapsing between the head butts.
Ms. Cooper unlocked a low horizontal set of drawers that doubled as a credenza.
“That’s one heavy-duty file cabinet,” Riley observed.
The dorm mother chuckled. “It has to be, surrounded by small children every day. Look at my desk—I think it could be used as a barricade against an invading Viking horde if necessary.”
Jack watched the children pile their empty dishes onto a tray on a counter near the door, though their teacher still sat with Martina in the corner. He couldn’t pick out who might be the youngest murderer in the group; they all seemed tiny to him, too young to cross the street by themselves, certainly too young to be incarcerated for violent crimes. “And everything locks. Is that to preserve each child’s privacy or to keep the rubber bands and tape from appropriation?”
“Both. We’re in a fishbowl here, as you can see. Transparency is important—these kids have been abused and traumatized by adults doing hidden, mysterious things in secret. We want there to be no secrets in their spaces. Plus I can’t keep an eye on them if I disappear into an office all the time.” She found Damon’s file, relocked the drawer, and sat at her desk. She gestured toward the various free chairs, but they tended to be undersized and Jack didn’t trust his bulk on them. He and Riley simply leaned over her desktop.
“This was his house drawing.” She pushed a sheet of construction paper toward them. In red crayon Damon had sketched a square with a complicated gable roof represented by angular peaks. It had three windows and a door with what looked like a detached garage in the back. Simple, but the lines were straight and firm. Jack had no background to judge average ten-year-old arti
stic ability, but it didn’t look half bad.
“I offered him other crayons but he stuck to monochrome. Usually we take that as a red—no pun intended—flag. Red and black indicate aggression, so if a child uses those colors in particular areas of the drawing, we pay attention to it. But in a case as unusual as Damon’s, I hesitate to make the usual assumptions.” She glanced at the picture again. “Of course, the house had been his prison, so maybe he knew exactly what he was about.”
“Okay,” Riley said.
“This is the interesting part. I got these crime scene photos from the county sheriff’s office. I didn’t show them to Damon, of course.”
Jack looked at a photograph of an old-fashioned basement, with bare wood walls and a dirt floor. What looked like a plow sat in one corner, with one handle used as a clothes pole. Shelves held dusty boxes, jars of old screws, and a box of cereal. A rectangle of blankets must have been Damon’s bed. Next to it lay another pile, the edge of the flash barely illuminating the tiny, desiccated form of what had been Damon’s brother.
In the corner, Martina’s noise lowered to a keening moan. Over it, the teacher instructed the other children to get out their spelling books. Some skipped off to comply, while others ignored him and headed for the toys.
“And this was the house.” She slapped another photo on top of the basement one. The house loosely represented in Damon’s picture, a small two-story structure with a gabled roof. “He only saw—as far as we know, of course, but I doubt the mother took him out for picnics in the yard if she didn’t even speak to him enough to develop even minimal lingual skills—he only saw this house for a few minutes as county authorities were dragging him away. Think of that, a kid who’d been locked up for ten years, who couldn’t have known other human beings existed. They wrapped him up in restraints because he reacted as any other wild animal would when cornered—hissing and scratching.”
She gazed at them. “My point is that he would have had only a glimpse of this house in the midst of overwhelming physical and mental upheaval. Yet he got the details right—three windows, the door on the left side, the garage in back. Two bushes at the corner.”
The two detectives compared the photo and the drawing, acknowledging that, yes, that was rather amazing.
Regret welled up in her voice. “As I said—very bright. I wonder what he could have done if he’d only been born to someone other than a monster.”
“Did he draw the basement?” Jack asked.
Ms. Cooper shook her head. “I couldn’t figure out a way to communicate that request to him. I gave it a few tries but I couldn’t be sure he understood that the basement was underneath the house. I also couldn’t be sure if he didn’t understand me or he simply didn’t want to draw his own prison. I didn’t want to push him.”
“What did this drawing tell you?” Riley asked.
“Other than that he was incredibly observant? Not much—or, not much that I could discern. This test isn’t a series of checkboxes. So much comes from the child’s body language and their response to questions, or lack of same—just like adults. What they don’t say is more revealing than what they do say.”
Rather like myself and Maggie, Jack thought. There were worlds of things that they didn’t say, that she didn’t ask. Where had he come from? Why did he start—why couldn’t he stop—feeling it to be his job to rid the world of predators? She knew pieces and parts of the story but seemed too afraid to ask for all of it.
Or too sensible. What she didn’t know, she didn’t have to torture herself over for not revealing.
She was in a hard and miserable spot. So was he, by extension. One pang of her conscience could compel her to expose him. Herself too, of course, but he could see her disregarding that. He needed to get himself out of it. If not the spot, at least the city.
Ms. Cooper was explaining that Damon’s bizarre background made the test difficult to interpret. “Did he leave out the basement? Did he not make a connection between the house and the basement, perhaps thinking they were two different structures? Did he not consider his imprisonment traumatizing but assumed everyone lives that way? Damon was a medium physical challenge, but a large mental one. I had been contacting nationally known child psychologists trying to get them interested in his case, but so far … most responded but thought they’d stop by while on a lecture tour, that kind of thing.”
Riley said, “You skipped the tree. Did he draw a person?”
She pulled another sheet of crayon-covered construction paper from the file. “I asked him to draw himself—by drawing myself and then gesturing the connection. His eyes would light up when he figured out what you were trying to say, and he liked to draw, a new experience for him where his lack of speech didn’t matter. I would let him draw during classes because, frankly, trying to teach long division to a kid in Damon’s situation …”
In green crayon, Damon had drawn a sturdy boy in a T-shirt and pants, with curly hair. He had spent some time on the shoes, adding each grommet and twist of the laces. But—
“No mouth,” Riley said aloud.
Ms. Cooper shook her head. The figure had eyes, ears, a nose, even eyebrows—but the lower section of the face sat empty of crayon marks.
Jack asked, “How much would he have recovered, of, um, functioning? Would he ever have been … normal?”
“Normal isn’t a word we use around here much, Detective, but … other than speech, physically normal. Mentally? You hear about ‘attachment disorder’ and the like and you probably think it’s just the latest line of psychobabble—”
Jack said nothing, because on the whole …
“—but the orbital frontal cortex acts as a control center over the sympathetic and parasympathetic nervous system. Children who are deprived of attachment as infants most often have a lifelong inability to regulate primitive negative states. They may truly not be able to help it.” Her fingers made air quotes around the last six words. “Then if there had been drugs or alcohol in utero—before he was born—and certainly we saw evidence of lifelong malnutrition, he’d almost certainly have less IQ, less self-control and equanimity, distractibility, and oversized response to stimuli.”
As abruptly as Martina had begun her fit, she stopped, her body going limp. She sniffled and began to cry.
“So he’d have been violent?”
“Not violent, feral. We sometimes think that nothing in the first two or three years of life can hurt us because we don’t remember it, but that isn’t true at all. In utero, infancy and toddlerhood—the brain is still forming, and both the quantity and quality of its tissue and chemistry can be altered by trauma, malnutrition, and neglect.”
So the kid was pretty much a total loss. Jack asked, “Did Damon have an assigned therapist?”
Martina had quieted and now watched a boy building a wall using foam bricks. The young man took his legs off of hers, one by one.
Ms. Cooper brushed Damon’s paperwork back into its file and carefully locked the cabinet. “Yes … we schedule the under-twelve group a little differently than the other units, try to keep their environment as stable as possible. Most of them have lived with a revolving door of adults, extended family members, different schools…. Anyway they have me; my counterpart, a teacher who lives in Friday, Saturday, and Sunday—I teach about half the subjects, she takes the other half; and Hunter there is our child psychologist.” She nodded toward the slim young man as he now let go of Martina, letting her slide from his lap to the floor and releasing her arms. He stood up, quietly, gingerly, watching for her to continue with the fit. “He fills in the gaps and meets with the children individually, over at that table in the corner.”
“No secrets,” Jack murmured.
“Most of these children have been abused by men, so they are much more comfortable within sight of their playmates, or … fellow residents. On the other hand, they have to discuss very painful topics, so in that way the openness isn’t conducive. No one likes to cry in public, not even small childr
en.”
“That’s a lot of kids for only three of you to handle,” Riley said, observing the group.
“Half of these are day students. They come here for breakfast and go home about four p.m. Only ten of them are residents. That’s our maximum.”
“Sad that there’re ten kids in this city who can’t live with their own families,” Riley murmured, no doubt thinking of his own daughters. Hannah would be celebrating her twelfth birthday next week. Natalie would be upstairs in the fourteen to fifteen unit.
Ms. Cooper gave an unladylike snort. “Are you kidding? We have fifteen more on a waiting list. Damon’s little cubby will be filled as soon as we clean it out. There’re another fifty for the day program. But Dr. Palmer won’t let them overcrowd us. You can’t put kids’ lives on an assembly line—there’s no one-size-fits-all fix. They’re all different because all their stories are different, so all their problems are different and all the solutions have to be different.”
In the play area the psychologist walked away slowly, to wipe a drop of blood from a scrape on the corner of his mouth with a napkin before helping the children still at the tables to move their reusable lunch dishes into a deep plastic bin. Without being told they tossed any empty plastic cups into the blue recycling bin near the door.
Martina didn’t acknowledge the doctor’s absence but continued to watch the boy with the blocks. Then she rubbed her teary face with one hand, like the tired child she was. She picked up a plastic car and ran this along the wall of foam bricks. Jack wondered if ancient tales of demonic possession were actually the acting-out of traumatized children. It would explain a lot.
“And how did Dr. Hunter get on with Damon?” Riley asked, picking up on the touch of professional rivalry.
Ms. Cooper wasted no time in clarifying that Hunter was his first name, his last was Kohler, and he hadn’t made much progress. “Getting Damon to sit still for anything was extremely difficult. Hunter couldn’t find a way to communicate with Damon. He proved too much of a challenge.”
