“But you’re not even looking at it!”
Finishing one foot, moving onto the next, “It’s just a shadow, darling.”
“It’s not a shadow. It’s got legs!”
“Such a willful mind you have,” she replied through a dismissive laugh, wiggling her toes and admiring them. “I swear I don’t know where that comes from.”
The irony.
The following afternoon, still bothered by the incident, I asked my dad, “How come Mom pretends?”
His smile was tolerant and knowing. “Your mother’s a bit, well . . . she’s different.”
“Different.”
Sensing my confusion and taking the cue, he said, “Or maybe a better way to say it would be fragile.”
I still didn’t get it.
“Think of it this way,” he went on. “What happens when you drop a tomato onto the ground?”
I shrugged. “It smashes?”
“And how about an orange?”
“It’s okay.”
“Do you know why?”
“Because of the outside?”
“Exactly. Some are tougher than others.”
“Which one is Mom?”
He laughed. “Probably somewhere between the two. But that’s just how she is, and we love her anyway because of what’s on the inside.”
Well-meaning but completely flawed logic that, as the years wore on, would continue to fail the test of time.
Logic that would eventually backfire in the worst possible way, leaving my dad to pay the biggest price.
8
The hospital seems busier than usual—more people, more noise, more chaos. I’ve worked here long enough to gauge the activity without actually seeing it. Built in the 1930s, this building is so frail and rundown that sound travels easily through walls. Besides the structural shortcomings, poor planning has placed my office beneath Acute Care, a sort of psychiatric emergency room. There’s a lot of foot-pounding, cart rolling, and screaming, all of which at times make concentration difficult. Above that are six stories filled with treatment facilities and rooms for our patients, making Loveland often feel like a loose house of cards just waiting to buckle and collapse at any minute.
On this day, I’m also aware that my perceptions are more heightened than usual. I’ve been worn out from working too many long hours lately, and the pressure of Donny Ray’s arrival to Loveland only adds to my distraction.
Not a single body found.
I’m still stuck on that one. How do you strip ten people from the world without leaving any trace of them? In the pursuit of supporting logic, I start digging through Donny Ray Smith’s case files—at the same time, I hope to perhaps jog my memory and figure out how we might know each other.
Six-year-old Jamey Winslow vanished one morning while walking to school.
I stop right there.
Jenna said I shouldn’t worry so much about Devon, but this new information only confirms my fears. I may be overprotective of my son but only because of a deeper understanding about how truly vulnerable children are these days.
Now another concern pokes at me, this one just as relatable.
A child walks out the door one morning, and, by evening, her short life is a tragic memory.
Ten kids means at least ten parents trapped in a cycle of relentless agony. Ten parents who have not only lost their most precious young ones but also their ability to begin the healing process. No bodies to bury. Nothing tangible to prove their children are actually dead. To walk into a tiny bedroom and feel a void so powerful and deep, so excruciatingly endless. To realize you’ve lost something that can never be replaced. I try to imagine what that must feel like, whether I could accept or even believe my son was really gone.
I take a sustaining breath and move on through the file.
The detectives got a break in the case. Not far from where Jamey disappeared, they discovered small sneaker prints in the mud leading down toward a ravine. After combing the area, crews unearthed a clump of hair partially hidden beneath a small boulder. Hair that not only matched Donny Ray’s color and texture, but also his DNA.
It appeared the girl had fought to her death.
I swallow hard, feel the skin on the back of my neck turn cold. Picturing these details brings on an intense moment of conflict, squaring my personal and professional objectives directly at odds with one another. The commitment I made a long time ago to defend the rights of the mentally ill, now pitted against love for my child.
I remind myself to remain impartial, to keep things clinical, to compartmentalize and gather facts, even though the emotional toll is steep. As a regrouping effort, I return to the task at hand, or more specifically, to the question: Does Donny Ray Smith remember murdering Jamey?
I begin sorting through the nearly fifty pretrial motions, most of them from Smith’s lawyer, a guy by the name of Terry Campbell. He claims that, evidence or not, his client isn’t guilty by reason of insanity because of a closed head trauma he suffered at the age of eleven. The theory, according to Campbell, is that Donny Ray went into a dissociative state—induced by the injury—before murdering Jamey and is unable to recall the event. Therefore, he can’t be held responsible.
And then I keep forgetting things, and everything around me doesn’t fit, and that just makes it worse . . .
Donny Ray’s comment boomerangs back, along with my previous thoughts about a potential dissociative disorder. Of course, until I dig deeper and examine that possibility, there’s nothing on which to base a concrete diagnosis. Since my patient is suspected of malingering, he could have thrown out the comment as a means to plant doubt. But his panic and confusion yesterday seemed so real. Is he sophisticated enough to lie that convincingly?
I keep reading.