“Pia, I think I need to know more about you. You’ve told me little about yourself even though I’ve tried to be open with you about me.”
“What do you want to know?”
“Everything!”
Pia took a deep breath. Occasionally in life there is a key crossroads moment that can be identified as such even as it’s taking place. Pia understood she couldn’t hide or keep quiet. The time to talk was now. Except with her caseworker, Sheila Brown, she’d never talked about her childhood. She took another breath. She felt as if the room were closing in on her. The only light in the room was a small library light on the desk, which put Rothman’s face in shadowy relief.
“I do remember my mother-not much, just little things. She was also a Pia. My first name is actually Afrodita, but we were both called Pia. Sometimes out of the blue, a scent on someone or a gesture will make me think of her. But she died when I was little. I don’t know how, and I don’t even know how I know she died, but I do. I lived somewhere in the city with my father, Burim, and his older brother, Drilon, who stayed with us. They were Albanians, real Albanians, just off the boat, very rough around the edges. My father was away a lot, and I had to spend time with my uncle, who was a real creep. Have you got any water or anything?” Pia’s throat was dry.
Rothman got out a bottle from a small fridge under the Nespresso machine. He pushed it and a cup across the desk’s leather surface.
“He hit me a couple of times, my uncle. He used to touch me, never when my father was around, he was very careful. He made me touch him inappropriately, to say the least. He took pictures of me, you know, and developed them himself, and I think he used to sell them to other creeps like him. It developed into a side business for him. One night I had enough, and I went for him.”
“What did you do?”
“I tried to stab him in the penis with a pair of scissors. Unfortunately I missed the target. It bled a lot. I remember later during first-year anatomy when the professor was talking about the femoral artery and joked about how you should avoid puncture wounds there. I suppose that’s where I must have stabbed my uncle.
“When he got out of the hospital, he beat me up pretty well, and I guess someone called nine-one-one about a little girl with a bruised face because the police came and grabbed me. My uncle and my dad both got arrested. So I became the property of New York City Child Protective Services.”
Pia took another drink of water.
“And your father?”
“He vanished. Years later I made Sheila Brown, my final and best caseworker, tell me what happened. She managed to find out that the two of them made bail and disappeared into the city. I’ve no idea where he is, if he’s even alive. I guess I convinced myself that my father wasn’t to blame for what his brother did to me. When I was in foster care, I used to fantasize that he would suddenly appear and rescue me from those places I was in, but he never did. I gave up hoping after a few of years.”
“How old were you when you were taken into care?”
“Six. I was a problem for the foster care people from the get-go. My father hadn’t officially given up his parental rights, so I couldn’t be adopted. He had to register with Child Services before-I wasn’t in school, I guess- and genius that he was, he said I was a Muslim, which, as an Albanian, he may have been. Sheila said he must have thought I’d get better treatment if I was a minority, but it just meant none of the religious agencies wanted me. Back then the system was dominated by Catholic, Protestant, and Jewish organizations. So instead of having a chance at some reasonably appropriate placement, I was put in a kind of temporary group home, and a janitor there tried to abuse me like my uncle did, but I fought him off. I complained about it, and I guess that marked me down as a troublemaker.
“I ended up in juvenile court a couple of times. I was lucky not to get locked up, I suppose, but I was designated a ‘person in need of supervision’-I love that phrase. So the first dump I got sent to was called the Wilhelmina Shelter for Troubled Children. I got in trouble a lot. They’d write me up for not looking the staff in the eye, which they interpreted as being insufficiently remorseful, that kind of thing.”
Pia looked at Rothman. His face was impassive. He nodded almost imperceptibly.
“When I was twelve or so, I got shipped to the Hudson Valley Academy for Girls, in a town called Eden Falls. It sounds nice, right? Eden Falls. The supposed school was a nineteenth-century institution. They used to send teenage prostitutes there, you know, to reform them, but when I was there it was all the hard cases who’d been thrown out of everywhere else-the girls no one wanted to adopt or deal with appropriately. The girls lived in these cottages. The paint was peeling, the plumbing didn’t work. Roasting in summer, freezing in winter. That was bearable. It was the other girls that were the problem.
“The place was run by these girl gangs that were like crime families. Well organized-‘daddies’ at the top, then ‘housewives,’ ‘cousins,’ ‘uncles,’ and so on. They’d take your money, make you do their chores, beat you up for no reason. They came out at night. There was a lot of abuse-you know, physical stuff, sexual stuff sometimes. The staff knew, but they didn’t care-the girls kept much better order than the staff ever could. I tried to stay out of the way, but they got everyone in the end. They found me hiding one night and attacked me in a bathroom. . . .” She paused.
“Anyway, I found an old book on boxing in the library and a couple of the younger girls knew some karate so we did a makeshift self-defense class. I was determined. Every time they came looking for something from me, I fought back. So I never joined their ‘shadow society,’ as one social worker called it. I got into a lot of fights, spent quite a lot of days and nights in the little punishment room, which was the moniker for solitary confinement. I spent a week there once. What I did was get the girl who was the leader of the group that attacked me in the bathroom off by herself and gave her one hell of a beating.”
Pia worried that she was saying too much, but Rothman simply nodded again when she looked at him.
“I worked really hard at the lessons that were available at Hudson Valley Academy. It was my escape. There were some teachers who cared. I was determined not to end up pregnant on welfare or in jail like most of the girls did when they left. For the most part the staff didn’t care what happened or what anybody did as long as we didn’t actually kill each other. Excuse my English, but it was like a goddamn garbage dump. Leave the trash there till it’s eighteen and had developed a taste for drugs and then release them into the world with no supervision. Good luck.
“The superintendent there, he knew it was the system that created as many problems as it fixed. Papitano was his name. He tried to get better therapists and teachers. He even tried to have the place shut down, but he was threatened so he stopped trying.
“I knew about that because the superintendent lived in a big mansion on the school grounds and a few of us used to clean his house and make his meals. He helped me out by putting me on that detail and getting me the good teachers. But he was a real sad sack and abusive-I guess his wife had left him, and he never saw his kids. I was sixteen, and I was around his house a lot and he got it into his head that I was interested in him even though I had resisted all his advances. One night he got really drunk, and I was in the library reading-it was the only library in the whole school-and he came down and said he loved me. He was really pathetic, but he got me in a corner, and I don’t like being cornered. I think he said he got the black eye falling in the shower.
“I think Papitano was more embarrassed than mad at me because nothing happened to me. Except he wanted to get me out of there, which was a good thing. In retrospect I don’t think it was for me, but rather so he wasn’t tempted again or whatever his problem was. But his intercession worked by finding me a good and competent caseworker.”
“Sheila Brown,” Rothman said.
“Sheila Brown. She was very persistent, and she went to court, and Child Protective Services agreed to move me to a group home so I could possibly get my high school diploma before I was ‘emancipated’ out of the system. Emancipation, which is a very well chosen word. So I left Eden Falls, thank God. I was happy to leave, but that Papitano guy, the superintendent . . .”
Pia’s voice trailed off and she paused to collect herself. When she resumed she talked very quietly, leaning forward, practically addressing Rothman’s desk.
“You know, I really had grown to trust him. I thought we had a connection. But before I got shipped out, he got drunk again, and he was a big man. He caught me alone in the library again. I’d let my guard down, and he betrayed me.”
Pia stopped talking. They were sitting so still that the motion-detector-operated switch in Rothman’s office
