Heart of Ice

her big hand tight over his face.

“Don’t. Don’t ever. Don’t ever defy me,” she said. Her words were a wretched vomit, spewing out of her mouth and all over the little boy. He was nothing. He was garbage. “This is my floor. You got it?”

He started to squirm.

She twisted him tighter and pushed so hard against his mouth and nose that he couldn’t breathe.

“I said, do you understand?”

His eyes were flooded with terror. Sarah sat still, almost catatonic, watching the big woman wrestle her brother.

He nodded.

“Good. You don’t ever want to mess with me.”

His head bobbed again.

Later that evening, with his sister in classroom 14 down the hall, Michael Barton wet the bed for the first time. It was the beginning of a cycle that he feared would never end, even in manhood.

Every morning, Marilyn McCutcheon would haul Michael’s two-inch-thick mattress out in the hall and hand him a brush and a steel pail of soapy water.

“You’ll clean this up or I’ll beat you,” she said, her cold blue eyes burrowing deeply into his. “You got that?”

Of course, he did. Other kids laughed at him. The staff called him “Michael the Flood.”

Olivia Barton knew better than to have any books on child abuse in the house. She knew how angry Michael became when she appeared to be studying the subject. That meant no novels, no nonfiction on the subject. Anywhere in the house. She’d been a frequent visitor to the Garden Grove West Library on the corner of Bailey and Chapman where she practically owned the 150s of the Dewey Decimal system—all forms of psychology contained in four rows of books at the branch. For a time, she’d been sucked in by every Oprah or Dr. Phil TV show that even hinted at child abuse as a subject. Bonus points came when the program touched on the subject and how it might impact the lives of an adult survivor.

Olivia liked the word survivor when it was applied to her husband. She was sure that his experiences in foster care, in the state institution, maybe even in the years before his mother abandoned him, had likely been bad—but not Oprah or Dr. Phil bad.

How could it be, she asked herself over and over, when Michael is so normal now?

Chapter Forty-one

It was a shock wave of fear. If it was meant to stop everyone in the middle of what they were doing, it did so. The unintelligible scream coming from the kitchen was undeniably blood-curdling. All throughout the home, the children and their keepers turned toward the sound. Even the kid who sat in front of the TV day after day with a frosted strawberry Pop-Tart on his lap and the empty look of a lost soul glued to a video of SpongeBob SquarePants moved toward the horrific scream that ricocheted throughout the facility.

Something very bad just happened. Something worse than someone wetting the bed, trading their meds, or stealing extra food.

The next scream came with words. “Oh, my God! What could have happened here! Please help me!”

The voice belonged to Consuelo Ramirez, the cook.

“She must have cut herself again!” another voice called out, as the sound of a score of feet went clacking down the linoleum corridor to the kitchen. Something very, very bad had happened. One quick-thinking employee swung open the wall-mounted first aid kit and grabbed tape, gauze, and a fistful of bandages.

Indeed, when staff and a few children arrived at the kitchen, there was blood and the stink of death. At first, no one saw Consuelo. A rapid scan of the room found her sitting on the floor, crouched in a near-fetal position.

“Sweet Jesus, who would do this to our Boots?” Consuelo looked up at those who had arrived to her aid. She held the black-and-white body of Boots, the cat that Marilyn McCutcheon had found in the parking lot seven or eight years before. It was a black-and-white cat, named very unoriginally for its white paws. To be fair, the name could have been Mittens just as easily, but Marilyn had loved Nancy Sinatra so much that she named the cat Boots and frequently found time to whisper-sing “These Boots Are Made for Walking.”

“What happened?” Marilyn said, rushing to the lifeless body of her beloved cat.

“I don’t know.” Consuelo was in tears then.

“Where did you find her?” Marilyn held gently took the cat from the head cook’s arms. A bloody Rorschach blot was smeared on her light blue blouse. The form looked a bit like a snow angel; the bloody fur had smeared in such a way that it looked like the cat had left the imprint of wings.

One of the kids started to cry, and soon others joined in.

“She was in the mixer. It must have turned on somehow. She liked to curl up and sleep in tight spaces, you know.” Marilyn didn’t cry, but the look on her face indicated a melt-down was coming. Children and staff who knew her only hoped that she’d take out her anger on someone other than them. “There’s no way Boots turned it on,” she said, looking around at the horrified faces.

She was right, of course, but there was no way anyone was going to say so.

On the other side of the facility, Michael Barton stepped from the shower and got dressed. He’d put his bloody pajamas into a plastic bag he’d stolen from the supply room and wrapped that in a cocoon of paper towels in case someone looked through the trash. He also stole clean pajamas from the laundry room and hid them under his clothes.

He’d prepared.

The cat hadn’t really put up much of a fight. He didn’t get a single scratch. It had taken a quick turn of the animal’s head, a snap, and then he could do anything he wanted to with it. It was a furry bag of dead.

A broken neck was quick and decisive. It got the job done. But ultimately, it was no fun.

How to make it fun?

A knife was the answer. It beckoned from the counter next to the sink. In a second, in a flash that was too fast for him to really grasp, he made it fun. Michael gingerly gutted Boots with a small paring knife, splashing the smelly fluids—mostly blood—over the front of his pajamas. His heart rate remained normal. It was odd, and he’d ruminate over that later in life. Though he was excited by what he was doing, he wasn’t scared.

He set the cat’s corpse with his entrails oozing into the institutional-sized mixing bowl and turned it on the setting called Pulse.

Funny, she doesn’t have a pulse, he thought in appreciation of the irony of what he’d just done.

He knew how much Marilyn McCutcheon loved that cat. It might have been the only thing she ever loved. He’d see her from across the TV lounge, holding the cat in her lap talking to it in a kind of sickening baby talk.

“Who’s the prettiest kitty in the whole wide world?” Marilyn asked, scratching the cat under the dollop of white fur under its chin. “You are, that’s who.”

The cat didn’t know Marilyn was a terror to everyone else. Marilyn had scooped her up from the cold outside and given her a cozy existence. If it hadn’t been for the annoying children at the group home, it might have been perfect.

“How’s my precious little fluff ball?” she’d ask.

How was it that a cat was worthy of love when a little girl or young boy was only the focus of derision and