Fear flashes through me. My hand finds my weapon, an almost unconscious gesture. “Is it Bonnie? Is she hurt?”
He reaches out and covers my gun hand with his own. His touch is gentle. “Nothing like that. No one is hurt. But let’s sit down anyway.”
I allow him to lead me over to the couch. I’m still jumpy. Tommy is generally a rock. The petty challenges of life that tend to pique me, like getting cut off on the freeway, lukewarm coffee, and long bank lines, don’t faze him. Right now he’s nervous and deeply troubled. This frightens me.
“Bonnie did something,” he finally says. “Something bad. She feels terrible about it, which is why she told me. It happened a few days ago, and she’s been holding it in, but she broke down when we got home.”
I close my eyes and almost breathe a sigh of relief. This is old, familiar, comfortable territory. Kids do bad things sometimes; dealing with it is part of parenting. Tommy’s never raised a child, so it caught him off guard. I open my eyes and put a hand onto his knee to reassure him.
“What did she do? Shoplift? Beat up another kid?”
His eyes level on mine. “She killed a cat.”
I blink. “Sorry?”
I’m sure I didn’t hear him right.
“She killed a cat. A stray she found. She brought it into the backyard two days ago and shot it in the head with the twenty-two target pistol you keep in the gun safe.”
“How’d she get the combination to the gun safe?” I ask, though of course it’s not the most important question. The important question belongs to something unreal.
“She guessed it. Alexa’s birthday.”
Stupid, I think to myself. Stupid of me, not Bonnie.
“Did she say why?”
I’m amazed at how level my voice is, how normal. We could be having a conversation about a casserole. “She did. But I want her to tell you.”
He looks away and can’t meet my gaze. This cuts through my shock. I feel a stirring of fear in my stomach, a dark churning. “Tommy. You tell me.”
He shakes his head. “No. I need you to hear it from her. I want you to be watching her when she says it.”
“Why?” Now I can hear the fear, hear it in my voice. It’s bubbled up and found its sly way into my vocal cords.
He takes my hands in his. “Because,” he says. “I believe her. I think you will too, but only if you’re looking into her eyes while she tells you.”
I yank my hands away. They’re shaking.
“Go see her. She’s waiting for you in her room.”
I’m standing outside Bonnie’s door, hand raised to knock. I lower it and grip the knob instead.
She killed a cat. Shot it in the head. Whatever the reason, she’s lost her right to privacy.
It feels like a meaningless gesture, but this again is familiar territory, and it comforts me. I steady myself and turn the knob. I open the door.
Bonnie is lying on her bed. She’s staring at the ceiling. Her face is expressionless, but she’s crying. She doesn’t turn to look at me when I come in.
“Bonnie.” I keep my voice firm but gentle.
“I’m sorry,” she says.
“Sorry isn’t going to cut it, honey. I need you to sit up and explain this to me.”
She wipes her eyes with the back of her hand. The sigh she emits sounds so old, so …
She struggles to a sitting position, her legs dangling down from the bed. Her eyes remain averted.
Her mother and I met when we were both fifteen, just three years older than Bonnie is now. It seems like an impossibility of time ago. I feel almost no connection to the me-of-then; too much is too different. But then I look at Bonnie now, and the band of unreality disappears. I find myself cheek to cheek with my fifteen-year-old self. Mom dead, Dad struggling, me hurting but also so very alive, everything bright-edged and multicolored and dramatic. Songs could still make me cry when I was fifteen. I had no scars on my face and no calluses on my soul.
“So what happened?” I ask my adopted daughter, fearing the answer but knowing I need to hear it all.
She shifts on the bed. She lifts her head, catching my brown eyes with her blue ones. The ghost of Annie stirs.
“I needed to know what it felt like.”
I frown. “What? Killing a cat?”
She looks down again. Nods.
“Why?”
“Because …” She hesitates. “Because that’s what they start out doing.”
“Who?”
She lifts her gaze to me again, and the bleakness there shocks me. Each eye is a desert landscape, rocks and sand and wind.
“You know. Serial killers.” She drops her eyes, ashamed.
I am silent. I’m having trouble thinking, much less speaking. If she’d slapped my face with an open hand, she couldn’t have poleaxed me more.
“So …” I say, drawing the words out not by choice but because I can’t help it, because I feel like I’m running in a nightmare, churning through taffy or thickening mud. “You shot a cat in the head because serial killers start out by killing small animals?”
“Yeah.”
I don’t try to keep the desperation out of my voice. Or the amazement. “But why, honey? Why would you want to do what they do?”
“To help me understand them. So later I can catch them.” She whispers it. She sounds lost.
Maybe she is.
The slowness I’d been stuck in is dissipating. I can hear the thick metronome of my heart beating again. For some reason I think of Hawaii, of what I had thought of as God’s heartbeat thumping against the shore.
“Look at me, Bonnie.” It takes her a moment, but she does as I ask. “So? How do you feel about it? Did it help you?”
The bleakness, if anything, increases. More tumbleweeds. Scoured stone. A little hint of rain, as tears begin to pool at the edges. “No,” she whispers. “It didn’t help me.”
I don’t let up. “How do you feel about it?”
What I see next isn’t bleakness or grief or even misery. It’s despair. The tears begin to roll from her eyes, thick tears, creating unbroken streams that drip from the sides of her face and her chin to patter on her arms and her blue jeans. “I felt evil. I felt bad. I felt like …” Her eyes close, and self-hatred spasms across her face. “I felt like the man who killed my mom.”
I want to go to her. Everything I am wants to grab her, yank her close, and make her safe. I want to tell her it’s okay, she’s not evil, to forgive herself. Something stops me.
I’m not sure where this idea comes from, but I don’t question the truth of it, because the voice is me and I recognize the feeling it brings. It is the same feeling I get when I realize something about a case or a perpetrator, when things that had been disjointed and strange suddenly fit together.
Bonnie lost her mother to a madman. She watched as the man broke Annie, raped her, gutted her. Then he took Bonnie with gentle but insistent hands, and he tied her to the screaming corpse, face-to-face. I’ve never really been able to imagine what those three days might have been like for anyone, much less a ten-year-old girl.
She’s gone from screaming in the night and mute to sleeping through the night and speaking. She’s learned to smile, and she has a friend or two.
