Paul Griffin - Burning Blue

I held her hand and led her to the street. Mr. Castro went for the car, and we got her home. I slept over at her house that night, on the short couch in her bedroom. When I woke up, she was curled into me. The next day we got her in to see Schmidt for an emergency session.

Her second surgery didn’t go as well as planned, and a third had to be pushed back to the spring. She relapsed with the cutting, but this time she reached out to me about it. She continued with her therapy, but only with Dr. Schmidt and on a private basis, never in the school office. She continued with private tutors, but not in-home. She went to a center in Englewood for one-on-one sessions. She poured herself into her studies. In February, she took the SATs and nailed them.

In early March I met Detective Barrone at the coffee shop. She’d petitioned the DA to drop the obstruction charge. She was putting together her final report on the Recluse case for a study Princeton was doing on near-filicide as it relates to child abuse by proxy syndrome. She wanted to see if I had anything to add, but I was there looking for answers.

You see it in the papers, parents doing horrible physical harm to their kids out of jealousy or spite or for attention-any number of reasons. You say, “Wow, that’s crazy,” and then you click to the TV schedule for something light. You dismiss it as someone else’s hell and get back to your life. You have to, or you lose your mind. I couldn’t do that here. Every time I was with Nicole, the bandage reminded of the mystery of it. I still didn’t know the extent of the burn. Sylvia was the only one Nicole would allow to see it.

Mrs. Castro was recovering at a lockdown hospital. She’d corroborated Angela’s story about the letter and the money. It started at a huge end-of-the-school-year party the Castros had at their house the previous June, when half the school was over. Angela came drunk. She and Dave had been hooking up for a while by then. Apparently, seeing Nicole and Dave together was too much for her. Mrs. Castro caught Angela following Nicole and Dave from a distance as they held hands. Angela was glassy-eyed, forlorn. Later Mrs. Castro found Angela inside, alone, crying in the painting studio. She was going through Mrs. Castro’s wallet. She pulled the cash and stuffed it into her pocket. She was about to slip out the side door when something caught her eye: my dad’s book. Mrs. Castro had left it out on her desk, opened to her favorite painting, Girl Before a Mirror .

After Detective Barrone informed Angela that Mrs. Castro was the mysterious patron who had commissioned the attack, Angela testified that Girl Before a Mirror just blew her away. Right there in Mrs. Castro’s painting studio, she grabbed a pencil and a piece of drawing paper and sketched it. Mrs. Castro came in, surprising Angela. Angela apologized and started to leave, but Mrs. Castro begged her to keep drawing. She asked Angela if she could keep the sketch and had Angela sign it.

Mrs. Castro had been plotting the attack for several months before the party, shortly after her husband left. But now that she found Angela, she had her acid thrower. The girl was poor, jealous of Nicole and extremely vulnerable-one could see that in the remarkable art she exhibited via her Facebook gallery. Angela had an unrelenting thirst to absorb the beauty around her and desperately tried to make it her own. In other words, she easily could be swayed.

This was the only association the two women had, and Angela truly must have been ignorant of the fact that her mysterious benefactor was also her victim’s mother.

Mrs. Castro had continued to be extremely cooperative, down to the smallest details. The bounced checks were a result of too much money juggling. She was pulling a thousand dollars here and there from a lot of different accounts to keep the transactions small and avoid suspicion as she put together the money to pay off Angela. She still refused to answer Detective Barrone’s last question: Why? “Let me see Nicole, and I’ll tell her,” Mrs. Castro pleaded. “Let me see my daughter one last time, face-to-face.”

On a cold clear Saturday in late March, I was at the driving range behind the mall with my father. We’d made a deal: If he lost fifty pounds, I’d cut my hair. I no longer looked like a Visigoth.

After hitting through a couple of buckets of range balls, Dad dropped me at Starbucks. Cherry got me a job there, though that day I wasn’t scheduled to work. Nicole was picking me up, and I wanted her to meet Cherry. They hugged when they met and talked as if they’d known each other for a long time and discovered they actually did. They’d both been in the same ballet class when they were five years old. They agreed quitting was the right call, because, per Nicole, “The shoes were murder on your pedicure,” and, per Cherry, “Picking leotard wedgies out of your butt crack in front of the boy dancers was a total drag.”

My new iPhone beeped one o’clock, which is when visiting hours started.

“Time to go?” Nicole said.

“Only if you want to,” I said.

Nicole pushed her sunglasses closer to her face and nodded.

She was quiet on the drive through the Meadowlands. The psychiatric center was a lockdown facility. It had been built on the site of a pre-Civil War prison called Snake Hill. A guard escorted us to a large room with a strangely high ceiling, maybe twenty feet. The paint peeled in patches from an old water leak. At the far end of the room, a few patients clustered around a TV and Jeopardy!

Mrs. Castro sat serenely in a chair by the barred window. She wasn’t restrained, not physically. Her pinned pupils betrayed heavy medication. The only evidence I saw of the oil splash was a wide burn scar under her chin. Her turtleneck collar and long sleeves covered the rest. Smiling, she appeared to recognize Nicole, but she didn’t seem to see me. She moved stiffly and in slow motion, as if she were underwater, motioning for Nicole to sit. As she spoke, she didn’t look at us but out the window at the bright blue day.

“I was losing you,” she said. “To your father, soon to college, then surely a husband. Burning you was the only way to keep you. You needed me, desperately. The only time I didn’t feel alone was when I was with you. Every moment you were out of the house, the sense of separation was increasing. It hurt more deeply than being cut off. I felt I was being cut out. The broken-down heart after the transplant: Where does it go? Even at the hospital with Emma, the children: I knew they were leaving me. But you would stay. I would care for you in a way that you couldn’t care for yourself. My beauty was my curse. In school, my teachers would offer false compliments as they looked not at or into but through my paintings. They would stand behind me, peeking over my shoulder, pretending to look at my work when really they were gawking at my breasts. Your father, too. I was a prop on a Christmas card. But you, my darling. You knew me. You loved me. You saw my art. You were my art. I had made you, and you were perfection. And to keep you, I was willing to destroy you. Nicole?”

Nicole needed a second to find her voice. “Yes?”

“I’m so afraid to be alone, darling. I’m looking out there and seeing just absolutely nothing. ” Her eyes clicked from the window’s picture of the beautiful day to Nicole. Mrs. Castro’s face was perfectly peaceful, but a tear dropped from her chin. She held out her arms for a hug.

Nicole hesitated, and then she hugged her mother.

“My sweetheart. My Nicole, I’m sorry. I stole it from you to save you from letting them objectify you.”

Nicole broke from the hug and rushed out.

“Stole what?” I said to her mother.