The Perfect Child

by Berry, Lucinda

  I’d felt the same way with my first child abuse case. You never forgot your first. Mine was a ten-year-old boy brought in by his mother with a bloodied and broken nose. His mother had kept trying to convince us that he’d fallen, but something about his demeanor had sparked everyone’s suspicions. We’d kept him in the hospital until the social worker could talk to him, and he’d finally confessed that his stepfather had punched him in the face after the boy had accidently spilled his beer. For weeks, I’d thought of excuses to call him so I could check on him until my supervisor made me stop. I didn’t have any choice but to let it go. It would probably take Christopher even longer to let go of Janie.

  “It’s not like she’ll be going anywhere anytime soon, and you’ll still have to follow up with her postoperative care,” I said, rubbing his arm.

  “I just wish there were more for me to do, but so much of her care is centered on her eating issues. There’s nothing I can do there.” He shook his head in frustration. “Nothing.”

  “How’s the oven timer working?” I asked.

  One of her nurses had brought in an old-fashioned oven timer so Janie would have an idea when she could eat again. The idea was to use the clock as a cue for her in hopes that it would calm her.

  “She watches it constantly, but I’m not sure it helps much. They put her meal times on the whiteboard too,” he said. He was quiet. For a minute I thought he’d fallen asleep, but then he said, “I think I’m going to stop at Target tomorrow before work and pick up some markers so people can sign her cast and she can color on it if she wants to.”

  “Oh, that’s so cute.” I scooted up and gave him a big kiss, wrapping my arms around his neck. “You’re going to be a great dad. The best. I just know it. Things have been busy lately, but now that they’re settling down a little, we can start looking at profiles again.”

  CASE #5243

  INTERVIEW:

  PIPER GOLDSTEIN

  “We hadn’t considered Janie a reliable source of information when we thought she was three, but all that changed when we learned she was six. She broke open the case.” My supervisor had finally called me back. She’d spoken with our lawyers and told me I should help the officers in any way I could, that I didn’t have to hold back. Despite the lawyer’s permission, I still wanted to be careful about what I said. “We started asking her real questions, probing into what happened before she got to the hospital. We pushed her further than we’d pushed her before.”

  “How did she respond?” Ron asked.

  It was just the two of us in the room now. Luke had gone to get us coffee. We’d been sitting in the room for over an hour, and we all needed a pick-me-up. I should have told him to grab me something from the vending machines too. I hadn’t eaten since breakfast.

  “During the times we met before, I only asked her yes-or-no questions, so I brought my iPad with me because I thought I’d need to use the TAP program with her. It’s a program that helps me communicate with nonverbal autistic children. Even though she was six, we figured her language was probably way behind. But I didn’t need it. She was able to answer all my questions. Once she opened up and started talking, I couldn’t believe how well she spoke, since she’d probably never been to school.”

  “She provided you information about her mother?” His interest was piqued again.

  I shook my head. “Sorry.” I hadn’t meant to mislead him. I needed to be more intentional with my words. “She still refused to talk about her mother, or any person for that matter, but she opened up about where she lived.”

  “She described the trailer?”

  “Almost perfectly, even down to the black garbage bags on the windows.”

  Investigators had always suspected Janie was from the trailer park, and they’d gone door to door with her picture, but nobody had reported seeing her. It had been Janie’s description of two dogs tied up in the front lawn next to a dilapidated bird feeder that had led them to the correct place—the last trailer on the left side of a dead-end street. Officers had expected to find tubing running through glass jars and odd-size bowls, since meth was what the trailer park was most known for, but they had found a ransacked trailer reeking of urine and spoiled food instead. It was clear from the holes in the walls and dried blood on the floor that there’d been a struggle. Maybe more than one. But it was the closet in the back bedroom that had shocked everyone the most.

  Ron splayed out the pictures of the closet on the table like he was laying down his hand at a poker game. He pointed to the picture with the zip ties and dog collar. I hated that one even more than the blood-marked walls. I was glad he had the pictures, though. It was something you couldn’t describe in words unless you’d seen it, and I’d thought I’d seen it all.

  “Did she describe this?” he asked.

  “No. She wouldn’t talk about the back bedroom.”

  “Understandable. Hard to imagine any kid ever wanting to talk about that.”

  I forced the images from the closet out of my mind. “But her information about the trailer gave us a physical address that led to a name.”

  “Becky Watson?”

  “Yes.”

  The trailer had been rented to Becky Watson for the last four years. Nobody else was on the lease. The police had spoken with the manager at the park, and he hadn’t remembered her at all, said she must’ve kept to herself. The only personal thing he could tell us about her was that she had always paid her rent on time, but he had given us an even more valuable piece of information anyway—her social security number. It wasn’t long before we had Janie’s birth certificate and confirmation that Becky Watson was her mother. It had also confirmed Janie was six and not three.

  “What led you to the GoFundMe accounts?”

  “Once child-protection investigators had a name and started digging online, they discovered Becky had been pretending Janie had cancer and creating fake GoFundMe accounts to get people to donate money for her medical expenses. It was why Janie’s head was shaved. She had seven fake accounts for Janie posted under various names with different cancer diagnoses, all of them with pictures.”

  They’d traced the GoFundMe accounts to the computer in the trailer. Becky’s account history showed the transfers from PayPal into her personal checking account, and the bank had her on camera cashing all the donation checks. There hadn’t been any activity since the day before they had found Janie.

  “And the blood in the trailer?” Ron asked.

  “It matched the blood that was on Janie.”

  I didn’t know why he was asking questions he already knew the answers to. Maybe it was some kind of test. The police at the initial scene in the parking lot had thought Janie was injured because of the blood on her hands and shirt. It wasn’t until after they’d gotten her cleaned up at the hospital that they had discovered the blood wasn’t hers. She had had plenty of old wounds and scars covering her body, but nothing fresh.

  “The blood belonged to her mother?” he asked.

  I nodded.

  SIX

  CHRISTOPHER BAUER

  I dashed down to the third floor to hang out with Janie whenever I had spare time during my day. The more time I spent with her, the less sorry I felt for her and the more amazed I was at the capacity of the human spirit to overcome unimaginable horrors. There was this part of her that was still innocent and untouched despite what she’d been through. I saw it in her eyes whenever she looked at me.

  Janie’s entire day was structured around different therapies and meeting with various doctors. Everything she worked on in the hospital had a specific purpose and goal, so I took it upon myself to teach her how to have fun. Go Fish was the first game I played with her, and she loved it.

  “Go fish, Dr. Chris! Go fish!” she’d squeal, bouncing on her bed like it was a trampoline.

  I let her beat me because her reaction was one of the best parts of my day. I even started skipping my lunch breaks so I could spend them with her instead.

  “What are
you going to do once she’s not here?” Dan had asked after I’d raced back upstairs just in time to see a patient after one of my visits.

  I didn’t like thinking about when she left, even though more and more of her case consultations shifted to discussions about potential discharge dates and her outpatient medical care. I wanted Hannah to meet her before she was gone. She hadn’t wanted to before, but she might want to now, since it would be her last chance.

  “I really want you to meet Janie,” I said that evening as she and I sat in the living room working on our latest jigsaw puzzle. We’d been competing with Allison and Greg for years over who could find the most difficult one. We were constantly trying to stump the other couple. The one we were working on now was a series of cats with no edges. Greg had said it had taken them over three weeks to complete. So far, we were two weeks into it and not even close to finishing.

  Hannah was hunched over the table, searching for a piece. Her fiery red hair was pulled into a ponytail with runaway strands trying to escape that she constantly brushed off her forehead while she studied the puzzle. She didn’t bother looking up.

  “You should see how much she’s changed. She gets better every day. It’s really inspiring,” I said, remembering how she’d shown me how one of the nurses had taught her to write her name. She’d been so focused as she’d painstakingly drawn each line and so proud of herself when she’d finished. “There’s something really amazing about watching someone transform before your eyes. It’s like witnessing a small miracle. I don’t want you to miss it.”

  She finally raised her head. “Christopher Bauer, I would say you are officially smitten.”

  I laughed. “I can’t help myself. That’s why you have to meet her. Just wait until you do. You’ll see exactly what I’m talking about.”

  SEVEN

  HANNAH BAUER

  The following day, Christopher led me down Janie’s hallway for the first time. I didn’t know what to expect after all the stories he had shared with me. He’d told me in one of our previous conversations that she decided whether she liked you the first time you met, and apparently, it was impossible to recategorize yourself afterward no matter how hard you tried. What would I do if she didn’t like me?

  I heard her screaming from the nurses’ station. Primal screams unlike anything I’d heard before. There weren’t any words to accompany them. Only tortured sounds. I stopped in my tracks. “Maybe this is a bad time?” I looked toward Christopher, expecting him to agree with me and say we needed to come back another day, but he was already pushing through the officers outside her door and running into her room. I handed my badge to the officer, and he pulled my name up on her visitor log.

  “You might not want to go in there,” he said as he handed it back to me.

  I swallowed the fear in the back of my throat and stepped inside. Janie writhed on the bed like she was in the throes of demon possession, her eyes wild. She wailed like a wounded animal. Her bedding lay crumpled on the floor. Blood spotted the mattress. Two nurses scuttled around her bed, trying to grab her without hurting her. One of them held a syringe. Christopher lurched into action.

  “Janie. Janie, honey,” he said tenderly as he took cautious steps toward her bed. “It’s Dr. Chris. I’m here. Honey, you need to settle down.”

  She continued screaming incoherently. He tried to reach for her, but she was too quick. She dodged his grasp and tumbled onto the floor, her cast making a loud crash when she hit the floor. Christopher knelt beside her.

  “Janie, it’s Dr. Chris, and I’m here to help you,” he said softly.

  She just kept screaming.

  “Janie!” This time he yelled. “It’s Dr. Chris!”

  It was as if a light switch went off inside her. She stopped midfit, blinked, and turned to look at him. “Dr. Chris!” A relieved smile spread across her face.

  He crawled over to her and scooped her into his arms. She curled her head against his chest. He rocked her back and forth as she relaxed into him. “It’s okay. You’re okay now. I’ve got you, honey, I’ve got you.”

  I stood watching, stunned. A second ago she’d been in the midst of a psychotic episode similar to the ones I’d seen schizophrenic patients throw when they were dragged in from the streets. There was nothing that could calm them down except drugs, but just the sound of Christopher’s voice had stopped Janie. I didn’t know what to think. I looked at one of the nurses, the one wearing SpongeBob SquarePants scrubs. She smiled at me and shrugged her shoulders.

  The blood on Janie’s mattress was from where she’d ripped out her IV, and Christopher held her close while they put it back in place. She clung to him like he was her favorite teddy bear, and he whispered to her as they stuck her with the needle. She didn’t even flinch. Christopher wiped her tears away with the back of his hand after they’d finished.

  “I’m proud of you, sweetie. That wasn’t so bad, now, was it?” he asked.

  She shook her head, eyes watery and red rimmed. He carried her over to me while the nurses remade her bed. I hadn’t moved from my spot in the doorway. She was so small. It looked like he was holding an oversize doll.

  “Janie, I have someone I want you to meet,” he said. He motioned for me to come closer. “This is my wife, Hannah. She’s a nurse here too. She’s been waiting to meet you.”

  She kept her face buried in his chest.

  I stepped toward them. “Hi, Janie. It’s nice to meet you,” I said. I placed my hand on her back. She flinched. I took a step back.

  “Would you like Hannah to come back at another time?” he asked.

  She grabbed his head and pulled it down to her mouth, cupping her hand around his ear so she could whisper into it. He nodded at whatever she was saying and then turned to me. “Why don’t we try this another time? I don’t think she’s ready.”

  Christopher felt awful about how my introduction with Janie had gone, but it wasn’t his fault we’d come after one of her feeding times. It didn’t help that it was with one of her least favorite nurses. I was determined to make our second visit better than our first. I spent hours at the bookstore thumbing through the latest children’s books. There were so many to choose from, and I had no idea what Janie liked. Was she into princesses? Animals? Fire engines? Did she even have any clue what those things were? Had she ever been outside the trailer and exposed to life? I settled on a wide assortment of books ranging from Dr. Seuss to Fancy Nancy.

  Christopher wanted me to meet with her by myself, but I asked him to come with me again so she’d be comfortable and relaxed. I didn’t want to push myself on her and overwhelm her any more than she already was. This time, Christopher scheduled our visit after one of her physical therapy sessions, since she tended to be in a good mood after them.

  She was sitting on her bed chattering away with one of her nurses when we walked in. Her face lit up when she saw Christopher. The transformation that had taken place in the month since she’d been admitted to the hospital was astounding. She looked like a different child than the one he’d described to me. She was still very small for her age and looked much younger than six, but her stomach no longer distended from her body. She’d gained seven pounds, and her body had filled out. Her eyes were a light blue, so pale you could almost see through them. She’d grown into a sweet, cherub-faced little girl with a head full of wispy blonde curls.

  “Hiya, Dr. Chris!” She waved at him. Her hand still curled despite all the work in physical therapy.

  “Hey, sweetie,” he said, walking over and planting a kiss on top of her head.

  “Sit! Sit! Sit!” she ordered, pointing to a spot next to her on the bed.

  He motioned for me to come over. “Janie, do you remember when Hannah came to visit the other day? She came with me again today.”

  “Hi, Janie,” I said.

  She stared at me blankly—no sign of recognition.

  I stepped toward her cautiously, holding the books out in front of me like a peace offering. “I brought
some books. Do you want to read a book with me?”

  She looked at Christopher, searching for his approval.

  “Why don’t we read together?” he asked.

  This time, she nodded. Christopher pointed to the spot next to him on the bed, and I sat, the plastic mattress crunching underneath my weight. Janie scampered up on his lap. I fanned three books out in front of her. “Which one do you want to read?” I asked.

  She studied them carefully before pointing to The Day the Crayons Came Home.

  “Good choice,” I said. “This is one of my favorites.”

  I opened it and started reading. She was hooked from the first page. She strained to get a better look from her spot on Christopher’s lap. He slowly edged her in my direction until she was wedged between us, sitting on one of each of our legs. Christopher looked over at me and beamed. My heart swelled.

  EIGHT

  CHRISTOPHER BAUER

  Piper Goldstein’s name flashed on my cell phone screen. She was Janie’s social worker. Dan had given me her number, and I’d left a message earlier in the day. Hannah and I had read with Janie twice in the last week, and yesterday Hannah had suggested taking her out of the hospital. I loved the idea and had started figuring out the logistics immediately. I hurried into my office before answering the phone, shutting the door tightly behind me.

  “Hello?” I said.

  “Hi, this is Piper Goldstein returning your call.”

  “Thanks so much for getting back to me, Piper.” I didn’t waste any time getting down to business. I had a consultation in twenty minutes that I needed to prepare for. “I wanted to talk to you about Janie. I—”

  She cut in. “I’m sure you already know this, but before you get started, there are certain things about Janie’s case that I won’t be able to share with you because of the limits of confidentiality or because they relate to the ongoing criminal investigation.”

  I had limits of confidentiality with my patients, so I understood exactly what she meant. I’d expected as much given the nature of Janie’s case. “Of course,” I said.