Abandoned

Sure, there are things I don’t like. She’s told me that she plans to do what I do when she grows up. She wants to hunt the monsters. There’s a certain stillness to her too-old eyes sometimes, a piercing sadness in her gaze. I find her watching the sunrise every now and then, and I worry. But these things always go away. The resilient thirteen-year-old always comes back, so I accept her injuries and her oddities. For God’s sake—how could she be otherwise?

But this is different. This is a crossroads. It is a touchstone. I don’t know how I know it, but I do. Either I save her here and now, or she’ll keep swimming away from shore, farther and farther out, until one day she’ll be in a place where I can’t reach her. I see what Tommy wanted me to see. Bonnie’s not a monster. I get that.

But… the voice whispers, and I nod to myself, inside, and complete the sentence:

But she could be.

I know this because I’ve been there myself. There is a dividing line, a place where trying to understand the monsters becomes too much understanding, where knowing becomes drowning. I’ve swum out to where the water is no longer blue. I’ve felt the black leviathans shiver against my naked feet, chuckling and slimy. There comes a time where I start to see too many similarities between them and me, and too few differences. More than once I wasn’t sure I’d find my way back to me. I always have, but my swims began in my twenties. Bonnie is only thirteen. She’s still forming. A decade is a lifetime of change at this age.

She hunted down a cat and shot him in the head, because she wanted to feel what the monsters feel. Her tears and her brief despair aren’t enough. They won’t ensure her survival as herself.

I try to push away all the protectiveness I feel for her, the desire to wipe away her tears. It’s not easy, but it’s not as hard as it might be for some, I guess. One of the things you have to learn in order to interrogate suspects is how to set aside your own reflex humanity. The rapist, the killer, the thief—they’re all people. Once caught, they tend to collapse, to pull into themselves. Half of what makes them formidable is the mystery of who they are. What you’re left with, most times, is something pathetic. Something that looks miserable, something that weeps.

It’s only natural to experience feelings about that. You have to overcome it. “We all have a little bit of cold granite inside us,” Alan told me once. “Some more than others. A good interrogator learns how to flip between being as loving as the suspect’s own mother and as merciless and unreachable as God. It’s all manipulation and a little bit inhuman, so you gotta find that cold granite part of you and bite into it. Let it hurt your teeth a little.”

I find it now and bite down hard.

“Do you remember what your mother looked like when he was cutting her?” I ask Bonnie. I’m simultaneously amazed and dismayed at the level I’ve managed to find; there is no solace at all in my voice. I sound like a bored, slightly hostile drive-through attendant.

Her eyes widen. She doesn’t reply.

“I asked you a question. Before she died and you were tied to her body, do you remember what your mother—Annie—looked like?”

“Yes,” she whispers. She’s staring at me, unable to look away, like a baby chicken watching a snake. “Tell me. How did she look?”

She pauses for a long time. “She looked like …” She swallows. “I never told you something about that night, Mama-Smoky. Something he said to her. When he put the knife on her the first time, after he made her scream, he told her she could choose.”

“Choose?”

“Yes. That anytime she wanted, she could tell him to take me instead and he’d stop cutting her up.”

Something bottomless opens up in my soul.

“She was screaming, you know? He gagged her, but it hurt her so bad. She jumped against the handcuffs he used, and her wrists and ankles were bleeding, they were bleeding so much. He danced to the music he put on, and he laughed sometimes.” Another swallow. Her eyes still fixed on me. “So this one time—you asked me how she looked—so this one time, while it was happening, I saw it in her eyes. It was only there for a minute, but I saw it.”

“What?” I prod her, still biting on that cold granite. Shoving her face into the darkness of it.

“She wanted to give me to him. Just for a moment. She wanted to give me to him, and she hated herself for wanting that.” The sound of loss in her voice, at that moment, is heartbreaking. She shakes her head, seeing the image, not fully able to believe it but knowing it was real. “She died hating herself for that, Mama-Smoky.” Bonnie hugs herself and starts to rock, back and forth. She moans a little, and the tears, which have never stopped, stream a little harder.

No no no no no, I want to tell her, she didn’t die hating herself. She died loving you.

I resist this urge. We’re not done yet. I don’t know what done is, just that I’ll recognize it when we arrive.

“So here’s what you need to understand, then, Bonnie,” I tell her, and I’m still amazed at the absolute disinterested cold of my tone. “Listen close, because I need you to get the differences here. What you did and what you are not. Both are equally true. What you are not is evil. You are not the same as the man who did that to your mother.” I lean forward now, fixing her with a heartless, baleful gaze. “But when you killed that innocent cat? When you hunted it down, caught it, brought it into our backyard, and put a bullet into its head? At that moment, what you did to that cat was no different than what that man was doing to your mother. You say you want to do what I do in memory of your mom?” I sneer then and hate myself for it, because it actually makes her flinch. I bring my face close to hers, close enough so she can feel the heat of my breath. “She took the pain to save you, Bonnie. When you killed that cat, you spit in her face.”

Hey eyes widen more than I would have thought possible, and her face goes white. There is a space of horrified silence, and then Bonnie’s breath expels from her chest, as though she’d just been punched in the stomach. She lets out a low moan. It’s a hushed, soulful thing, the voice of misery.

Now we’re done.

She scrabbles back on the bed, fisted hands to her mouth, shaking her head back and forth, back and forth, horrified at herself, at what she did, at the truth of it. This time, I go to her. She fights me, but I grab her and clutch her to me, not letting her get away no matter how hard she tries or how much she pummels. Eventually she stops resisting, and her arms wrap around me and she just cries. Sobs and sobs and sobs. I cry too. In the midst of my own mix of relief and self-hatred, I lean down and give her the truth I’d denied her earlier.

“When your mom died, honey,” I whisper into her hair, “she wasn’t hating herself. She was loving you. Don’t let him take that away from you.”

I glance up at some point and see that Tommy is there. I wonder how much he saw. He watches for a little while longer, his gaze unfathomable, and then he gently closes the door, leaving us alone.

Bonnie has wept herself to exhaustion. She’s in my lap, too big to fit comfortably but unwilling to let me go. “I really am sorry,” she says.

I stroke her hair. “I know you are, honey. Believe that.”

We fall into silence again. She sighs once, and I continue to stroke her hair. I glance out her bedroom window and see my old adversary: the moon. So … we meet again. The attempt at humor topples to a soundless death.

“Listen, baby,” I say after some more time has passed. “There’s nothing wrong with you having a goal to do what I do when you grow up. I mean, it’s not the career I’d want for you, but if you still want it when you’re older, I’ll support you.”

“I’ll still want it,” she says.

“But there have to be limits, Bonnie. That’s part of the secret and the safety net. There’s a huge difference between us and them. We can understand them, but we’ll never be them, you follow?”

“I think so.”

“Here’s the thing you have to understand: They can pull you under. They can suck the life and the soul out of you, and once that’s done …” I search for a metaphor. “Think of yourself as a lighthouse. No matter how foggy it gets or how rough the sea, the lighthouse will guide you home. Well, if you get too close to them, if you go too far, the light can die. You don’t become what they are, but you lose yourself.”

She’s quiet for a time, thinking about this. “If the light goes out,” she asks, “can you ever get it back?”