‘Thank you.’ Groote signed in and hurried down the hall to Amanda’s room. He heard the plaintive notes before he reached her door, stepped in slowly so she could see him, not be startled. She remained jumpy, months after the horror.
Amanda lay twisted on her bed, knees drawn close to her chest, her right cheek pressed to the pillow. Patsy Cline, her mother’s favorite singer, drifted softly from the speakers. ‘Walking After Midnight.’ Too sad a song for a bright morning, too sad a song for a sixteen-year-old. She ought to be listening to those boy bands, snapping her fingers, singing into a hairbrush, dancing before bathroom mirrors. At home with him, where she belonged.
‘Amanda?’ He stepped over to the CD player, turned the volume low. ‘Amanda, it’s Daddy.’
Now she opened her brown eyes, looked at him, through him.
‘Hey, Amanda Banana.’ He drew a chair close to the side of the bed. ‘How are you?’ He kept his voice gentle and soothing.
Amanda didn’t answer. The frown on her mouth, the way her stare cut through him as if he were mist, told him a bad day loomed for her. And for him.
He took her hand. ‘You want to get up and go outside?’
She barely shook her head. One of the scars on her face – the small star-shaped one near the corner of her mouth – jerked and he thought she would say good morning. But she went still.
‘I’m so sorry I’m late, pumpkin, I had a work project this morning I had to finish.’
Now her eyes focused on his face. She said, slowly and carefully, ‘Mom came to see me.’
‘Ah. Did she?’
‘Yes.’
‘What did Mom say?’
‘She wants me to hurt myself.’
‘Oh, no, baby, she doesn’t. She doesn’t.’ Groote tried to take one of her hands in his but she kept her hands twisted into claws, tucked tight against her chest.
‘She said,’ Amanda whispered, ‘that I should cut off my face.’
‘No, baby,’ Groote said. The drugs, the lame-ass therapy’s not working, she doesn’t even remember Cathy’s dead. ‘She wasn’t here.’
Now steel crept into Amanda’s tone. ‘She was. She comes nearly every day.’
‘Baby. It’s all in your head.’
‘She was here!’
He stopped trying to argue with her. He wanted her calm and talking, not shrieking and screaming and cutting his visit short. There was so much necessary ugliness in the world, she was his pocket of beauty. He touched the scar at the corner of her mouth; another scar bisecting her eyebrow; the wriggled thread of tissue beneath her ear. The outward souvenirs of bullets smashing through glass, of a car tumbling down a rocky canyon. He kissed each scar. He whispered in her ear: ‘Mom would never tell you to hurt yourself.’
He smelled a raw, metallic odor. Familiar. The smell of blood. He leaned back from her, searching her face, running fingers along the bed. ‘Amanda!’
She folded her gaze back into herself.
He yanked the covers off her. She lay in soft pants and shirt and he groped along her limbs and her torso for injury. Nothing. He pulled her cheek up from the pillow; her skin lay smooth and unbroken. His hands hurried at the back of her head and stickiness gummed his fingers.
She began to scream, thrashing against him, screaming for him please to take her face off.
‘I don’t understand,’ Groote said, ‘why she hurts herself.’
‘The reasons are many.’ Doctor Warner was a heavyset man, florid face under carrot-red hair starting to gray. ‘She blames herself for the accident.’
‘She shouldn’t. It wasn’t remotely her fault.’
‘She still blames herself.’
‘Well, I blame you for her state of mind,’ Groote said in a voice of icy calm. ‘My daughter is cutting her scalp open, for God’s sakes. Your staff let her get hold of a safety pin.’ And that had been her shrieked explanation as he summoned help: Taking my face off has to be done from the back, Dad, it’s easier.
‘It won’t happen again.’
‘I want you,’ Groote said, keeping his control but nearly hissing through his teeth, ‘to help her.’
‘We’ve tried art therapy, medications, group therapy. All the standard treatments to process unintegrated, traumatic memory. Amanda is simply not improving.’ Warner tented his hands under his jaw. ‘The mental damage she suffered, trapped with her dead mother for so long, it may not be reparable.’
‘If it’s broken, it can be fixed,’ Groote said.
‘Amanda is not a dish to be glued back together,’ Warner said.
Patience, he reminded himself. Deep breath. ‘When I say fix, I mean… give her enough health to have her life back. To want to live again.’ Groote thought, I’ll find out if you have a family, Doctor, because if you don’t help my daughter you won’t be able to help your own. You can get a real sense of what pain is.
‘Amanda had problems before the accident. Her biological father abused her.’
‘Yes.’ Groote didn’t care to be reminded of the sad details, and he felt Warner was saying, Sorry, buddy, your daughter was damaged goods before you brought her here. But Groote had taken care of the rotten, no-good deadbeat father as a secret favor to his new wife and daughter. He never experienced hate when he killed, except when he’d put ten bullets into that worthless scum. He had not known he could love Cathy and Amanda so much; the idea of love had seemed like a rumor, never real until he found them.
And now Cathy was gone, and Amanda needed him. She only had him to protect her.
‘Obviously the loss of her mother is devastating to her. But the conditions in which she lost her mom, they’re much more damaging than her mother dying in a hospital bed of cancer, or even dying instantly in an accident. In a way, Amanda experienced her own death when she experienced her mother’s. Think of it as a compound fracture against her mental health. It took her straight over into complex post-traumatic stress disorder.’
‘You’re not helping her,’ Groote said in a low tone. ‘She’s trying to take her face off. If she hurts herself again I will hold you personally responsible and you’ll learn an entirely new meaning of the word consequences.’
Warner smiled. He was a smart man, Groote thought, who knew very little. ‘Threatening me doesn’t help your daughter, Mr. Groote.’
‘I’m sorry. But I need you to fix her. To make her right again. Please. Please.’ And then salvation came, in the form of his cell phone ringing. Only the hospital and his clients had this number. He opened the phone; he didn’t use voice mail, it carried too much risk. ‘I’ll have to call you back,’ he said instead of hello.
‘Please do,’ a smooth voice answered. ‘This is Quantrill. I have the perfect job for you. It could even help your daughter.’
Groote drove over the speed limit all the way to Santa Monica. Oliver Quantrill’s house, a fusion of steel and glass, stood in a wealthy neighborhood. Quantrill sat on his expansive tiered deck, drinking mineral water, tapping on a laptop. He was tall, gym-club and protein-diet gaunt, in his early forties. He closed the laptop as Groote approached him.
‘How did you know about my daughter?’ Groote cooled his rage – No, be honest, it’s not rage, it’s fear – down to a simmer.
‘Calm down, Dennis. I had you checked when I first hired you. It would have been foolish not to, given your past. I mean Amanda no harm.’
‘Talk. What job could I do for you that helps my kid?’
‘Do you know exactly what I do, Dennis?’
‘You sell information. I don’t know specifics.’
‘Here’s a specific. I’ve acquired medical research designed to help people suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder. People such as Amanda.’
Groote’s legs went weak. He sat down. ‘Research.’
‘Abandoned research. It didn’t work the first time. I’ve had my team make improvements. Now it works.’
‘Works how?’
‘It’s a drug that makes PTSD controllable. Possibly curable.’ Quantrill sipped at his orange juice. ‘Would you
