The Perfect Child

by Berry, Lucinda

  “I don’t care about her,” Janie said.

  I knelt down next to Blue and turned her head. Her eyes bulged out of the sockets. Blood leaked from her nose. Her chest wasn’t moving. There was no air. No movement. No life. The hair on the back of my neck stood up. I slowly turned to look at Janie. Time stilled.

  She smiled down at me with the same grin she’d worn when she’d come out of the bedroom. “She’s dead.”

  Blood pooled in my insides. My stomach heaved. Jumping up, I pushed her out of the way. I ran down the hallway and barely made it to the toilet in time, where I heaved again and again.

  Cole.

  I leaped up and ran to the living room, where I’d left him napping in his swing. Janie stood next to the swing, staring down at him.

  “Get away from him!” I screamed as I ran over to them. I grabbed her by the arm and pulled her away. “Don’t you ever go near him! Ever!” I shook her, flinging her small body back and forth. “Do you hear me? Don’t you touch him! Don’t you even look at him!”

  FORTY-THREE

  CHRISTOPHER BAUER

  “Send her away. Please send her to Allison’s. She’ll take her for a while. Or my mom. She can go to my mom’s. Please, I just can’t have her here. Not right now.” Hannah was sobbing so hard it was difficult to make out her words.

  I hugged her tightly. “It’s okay. It’s going to be okay.”

  “No, it’s not. How can you even say that? She’s evil. She killed an animal. Killed an animal.” She kept saying it over and over again.

  My brain reeled. I never would’ve believed it if I hadn’t seen it myself, but I had. I was the one who had put Blue’s body in a plastic bag and laid her in a cardboard box. Janie had sat on the outside steps by the back door observing it all like she was watching a movie. I had sat down next to her after I’d finished.

  “Did you hurt Blue?” I had asked. I’d still been hoping it had been a weird accident, like maybe Blue had had a seizure and died. Or a stroke. It was possible. Maybe Janie had just happened to be there when it had happened, so she had thought she’d done it.

  “Yep. I hurt her real bad,” she’d said without an ounce of emotion in her voice.

  “How?” The question had come out without thought.

  “I put my pillow on her and sat on her head. She really meowed. She didn’t scratch me though, because I had the pillow, so she couldn’t get me.” She said it like she was proud that she’d thought it through.

  I didn’t ask any more questions after that.

  Hannah hid in our bedroom with Cole until after I put Janie to bed. “I want you to put a lock on her door,” she said when I came into the bedroom. “She has to be locked in there at night.”

  I grimaced. “A lock on her door? We can’t just lock her in her room.”

  “What if she gets up in the night while we’re sleeping and kills us?” Her voice was hysterical. Her arms shook as she held Cole close to her chest.

  “She’s not going to kill us,” I said with more calm than I felt.

  “How do you know that? She killed Blue.” She started sobbing all over again.

  Killing an animal was one thing. Killing people was another—sociopathic. Sociopaths didn’t have any feelings toward anyone, animals or otherwise, so Janie couldn’t be one because she had feelings. I’d seen them. She cried when she was afraid and laughed when she was happy. She was proud when she did something right, like the first time she’d learned how to swing without a push or had gone down the slide by herself. She was just a damaged girl—a severely disturbed girl, too, but she wasn’t a sociopath.

  Hannah wasn’t going to rest unless I did something, though. I went out to the garage and dug through my tools until I found rope. I brought it back inside and started wrapping it around her doorknob.

  What would we do if there was a fire? How could I get her out of her room quickly if there was an emergency? Or what if she got sick and needed to wake us in the middle of the night and couldn’t get out of her room? I unwound what I’d done and headed back to our bedroom.

  “I can’t tie her in there. Something might happen, and we wouldn’t be able to get her out in time. Even if it’s for one night, I don’t feel right about it. I’ll just sleep on her floor.”

  Hannah’s face crumpled. “Why? Why do you always pick her?”

  “I’m not picking her. I would be responsible if something happened to her, and I’m not taking that chance. It’s not right,” I snapped. “I’ll get an alarm system for her room tomorrow. A proper system that we can set and program so that if anything goes wrong or there’s an emergency, she can easily get out.”

  “Fine,” she huffed.

  But nothing was fine. We both knew that.

  FORTY-FOUR

  HANNAH BAUER

  I hadn’t been able to sleep since it had happened. I saw Blue’s face every time I dozed off, the way her eyes bulged out, and Janie sitting on top of her with that stupid grin on her face. I’d made Christopher tell me how she had killed her. He’d tried to pretend like he didn’t know, but he wasn’t a good liar. I could tell by the look in his eyes that she’d told him, so I had forced him to tell me. Afterward, I’d wished I hadn’t.

  A sense of impending doom filled every room in our house. The smell of urine hung in the air no matter how much I cleaned because Janie peed everywhere like a dog that wasn’t housebroken. I couldn’t even be in the same room with her, and just the sound of her voice made my skin crawl. Waves of fear pummeled me. As soon as my heart sped up, so did my breathing. It was only a matter of seconds before I was gasping for air. It didn’t matter that I was a nurse and knew I was hyperventilating; I still felt like I was going to die.

  I was putting away the leftovers, trying to keep it together, when Janie came into the kitchen.

  “Can I have a cookie?” she asked.

  I took one look at her and started sobbing. Christopher ran into the kitchen. I gripped the counter with both hands.

  “What’s going on, Janie?” he asked.

  “I want a cookie,” she said, unsure of herself or what she’d done to upset me.

  He grabbed a cookie and handed it to her. “Why don’t you go eat this in the living room while I talk to Mommy?”

  “What happened?” He knelt beside me and ran his hands through his hair.

  My finger shook as I pointed to the other room. “Her.”

  “What did she do?” His face blanched; he braced himself for what was to come.

  “Nothing. She’s already done enough. I can’t be around her anymore. I can’t do it.”

  He lowered his voice so Janie couldn’t hear in the room next door. “Be quiet. She might hear you.”

  “I don’t care if she hears me.”

  “I do.”

  “Of course you do,” I said under my breath.

  “What did you say?” he asked, then quickly shook his head. “Never mind.” He reached out to take Cole from me. “Why don’t you give him to me and go lie down for a while?”

  I turned away, pulling Cole tighter against my chest. I only put him down to change him. Besides that, I wore him on me at all times.

  “I don’t want her here.” I spit the words out.

  “She’s our daughter. Where else is she supposed to go?”

  “She’s not really our daughter.”

  He recoiled like I’d slapped him. “Don’t you ever say that again.” His eyes flashed with anger. “We knew what we were getting into when we adopted her. We knew she would have problems. We signed up for this.”

  “Problems? You call these problems? She’s a killer!” I shrieked.

  He threw his hands up in disgust. “She hurt an animal because she was mad at you. There’s a big difference.”

  “She’s a killer!”

  He grabbed my arms, his fingernails digging into my skin. “Stop saying that.”

  I jerked away. “Get your hands off me! Don’t touch me!”

  He let go but stepped closer.
His face was in mine, wearing an expression I’d never seen before. “She is our daughter, and she’s only seven years old.”

  I folded my arms across my chest and looked at him without flinching. “I don’t want her here.”

  “What are you talking about? We can’t just give her back—we’re her parents. Her parents, Hannah. Whether you like it or not, that’s what we signed on for.” His body shook as he tried to control his anger. “You can’t just give your kids away when it’s rough.”

  “You can if your kid is a monster.”

  CASE #5243

  INTERVIEW:

  PIPER GOLDSTEIN

  Ron cracked his knuckles like he’d been doing all afternoon. I cringed. I didn’t know what was worse, their relentless questioning or the silence that made me so uncomfortable I wanted to start talking just to fill it. “What I’m having a hard time understanding is why Christopher went back to work if things were so bad and he was supposed to be such a good husband. What kind of a husband leaves his family at a time like that?”

  “What else was he supposed to do?” It was the first time I’d challenged him, but I drew a line with the direction he was going. I didn’t like what he was implying.

  Luke jumped in, always on Ron’s side. “He could’ve stayed home, got her a nanny, called one of their parents. There were a lot of options.”

  I glared at them. “You can judge them all you want, but you weren’t in their situation.”

  “Neither were you.” Luke didn’t try to hide his smirk.

  Anger rose in my chest. They were never going to let that go. “He had to go back to work. They couldn’t afford for him not to.”

  Luke snorted. “Really? You’re trying to tell me that an orthopedic surgeon needed money?”

  “That’s exactly what I’m saying. The Bauers had sunk all their savings into buying their house and spent the last five years paying off all their student loan debts.” I wanted to point out that he’d know all of that if he knew the Bauers like I did, but I held myself back. “Do you have any idea how much it cost to pay for all Janie’s therapy? Medical insurance didn’t pay for her psychological care, and her medical costs were thousands of dollars each month. So Christopher couldn’t lose his job. Imagine how much stress that would’ve added to the situation. He was just trying to keep their family afloat.”

  Ron finally jumped back in. “It dawns on me that there’s no record of the incident with the cat anywhere.”

  “It wasn’t intentional.”

  “Was there anything else you may have unintentionally left out?”

  FORTY-FIVE

  CHRISTOPHER BAUER

  Hannah refused to come with me to the session I’d scheduled with Dr. Chandler. She said she was done going to therapy because Janie was never going to change, and she was sick of talking about it. She’d come around eventually. She just needed a few more days.

  We had thought we’d be able to meet with Dr. Chandler twice a week after Hannah gave birth, but we hadn’t been to her office since Cole was born, and he was going to be two months old next Monday. Just because we hadn’t been there didn’t mean I hadn’t thought about what we’d talked about last time. I’d done plenty of research on reactive attachment disorder since then. I kept getting drawn into morbid documentaries about kids adopted from Russian orphanages who turned into mini–serial killers.

  There were all these online tests you could take, too—the “Answer these twenty questions and get a diagnosis” kind. I knew I shouldn’t, that there wasn’t any validity in those kinds of test, but I couldn’t help myself. I’d taken them all: Does Your Child Suffer from RAD? Is Your Child a Psychopath? Should You Institutionalize Your Child? I’d taken the same test online that Dr. Chandler had given us in her office, and Janie had scored even higher than she had then. Her scores on the others were in the clinical range too.

  Dr. Chandler was a stickler for staying within her allotted fifty-minute sessions, so I didn’t waste any time on small talk once we were alone in her office. There was so much that had happened since Cole had been born, and I didn’t want to leave out anything. I talked so fast my words tripped over each other. She kept telling me to slow down.

  “It’s like walking into a war zone every day,” I said after I’d filled her in on everything. “And it just keeps getting worse. I don’t know what to do. I’ve tried getting Hannah help, but she refuses. Her mom comes to stay sometimes, and that always makes a difference, but everything goes right back to where it was after she leaves.”

  “I share Hannah’s concerns about Janie,” she said. She rarely took sides on any issue, so she had to feel strongly about it. “I’m really worried about Janie’s potential for violence.” She paused. “But I’m not just concerned about Janie. I’m also very concerned about Hannah and the toll this has taken on her.”

  I’d told her how Hannah had lost so much weight that her clothes drooped on her, her T-shirts sliding off her shoulders and sweatpants dragging on the floor. Her pale complexion looked pasty, sallow, and almost gray now, like she was sick. I couldn’t remember the last time her eyes weren’t sunken and rimmed in black.

  “Is she sleeping?” Dr. Chandler asked.

  “Not really. I expected her to start sleeping once Cole did, but her sleep got worse. It was bizarre. I’m not sure if she’s slept at all this past week.” When she wasn’t pacing throughout the house, I felt her tossing and turning next to me in the bed.

  She frowned and looked down at her notes. “I can’t imagine how tough insomnia must be on top of everything else that’s going on. Has she tried to take anything to help?”

  I shook my head. Hannah hated any kind of drugs. She didn’t even like to take Tylenol unless it was absolutely necessary. It was weird for a nurse, but she said she didn’t like putting foreign chemicals into her body.

  “And you already said she wasn’t eating. What’s her mood like?”

  “Her mood?” I rubbed my forehead. “It’s all over the place.”

  She folded her hands together and placed them on top of her notebook. “It sounds like everyone in the family needs help, and the best way for everyone to get it might be putting Janie into a residential facility for a while.”

  I sat up straighter. “What do you mean by a residential facility?”

  “It’s a facility that provides care for emotionally disturbed youth like Janie. They’re therapeutic homes designed to provide a more structured environment for the kids to learn new skills. They’ll also keep them from harming themselves or someone else. Some facilities are better than others.” She reached out and patted my hand. “I’d make sure we got her into one of the best.”

  “You mean she stays there? Like, lives there?” An overwhelming sense of defeat washed over me. Sending her away felt like we’d failed her.

  Dr. Chandler nodded.

  “For how long?”

  She shrugged. “It depends. Some kids stay for a few weeks or months. Others stay for years. At this point, there’s no way to know how long it would be for Janie. The first step would be completing an assessment for mental health services. I do them all the time and could easily do it for you. Then, based on my findings, we’d look for the best therapeutic placement for her. I know you guys have been against medication, but it might be time to consider it as an option to stabilize her impulse control, and a residential facility would be a great place to try it. The doctors there would be able to monitor her medication and adjust as needed.”

  “It just feels like we’re giving up on her.” Emotions filled my throat.

  “I know it feels like that, but you’re not giving up on her. You’re giving her what she needs right now. It’s not always going to be this way, but she needs help. More help than either of you can give her right now.” She squeezed my hand. “And Hannah needs an opportunity to rest and recover. She really does. This will provide her with a chance to regroup herself.” She tilted her head and smiled. “And you might find out that you needed the break
too.”

  I looked away so she couldn’t see the tears moving down my cheeks. “She’s going to feel like we abandoned her.”

  Dr. Chandler’s eyes filled with compassion. “You’ll be able to visit her. Initially, things will be very strict, and she won’t have many privileges, but once she adjusts, you’ll be able to take her on outings. Eventually, you’ll even be able to bring her home for overnight visits. Some kids flourish in residential settings. She might be one of them.”

  Normally, I wouldn’t have considered making such an important decision without discussing it with Hannah first, but I already knew what she’d say. There was no need to ask her.

  I took a deep breath, whispering a silent apology to Janie as she played in the waiting room with Dr. Chandler’s assistant. “Okay, how do we start the process?”

  Hannah was agitated when we got home. She looked ghoulish. She’d started losing clumps of her hair. I wasn’t sure if it was from the postpregnancy hormones or stress. Either way, it added to her appearance of being ill. She paced the house, back and forth. As soon as Janie and I came in, she scuttled to our bedroom and shut the door behind her. I settled Janie in front of the TV and went to talk to her. I knocked before entering.

  “Who is it?” she asked. Her voice was filled with paranoia.

  I jiggled the doorknob. It was locked. “It’s just me.”

  She opened the door a crack, peering out to see if Janie was hiding behind me, like maybe I was trying to trick her into letting Janie into the room. Once she was satisfied that I was alone, she opened it wide enough for me to slide through. She slammed it shut as soon as I was inside.

  “Look what I found today. Look what I found in her room while you were gone.” Her voice was pressured, rushed, like she couldn’t get the words out fast enough.

  Our bed was covered with photo albums and pictures. She grabbed my hand and pulled me over to it. She picked up one of the albums and thrust it at me. “Look! Look at this! Look at what she did.”