Burning Blue (26 page)

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.

“Her beauty.”

“You didn’t come close to touching it.” I hurried after Nicole.

We drove deep into the Meadowlands to a nature preserve and hiked to the river’s edge. We sat facing each other on a backless bench, straddling it. We locked hands and watched the cattails duck and weave against the cold clear afternoon sky. We were all alone.

“The hug,” I said. “Does that mean you’re in forgiveness territory?”

“I don’t know. Maybe I’m on my way there. Maybe it was good-bye. Except, it’s too late for good-bye. She’s already gone. She doesn’t feel the same. Like her spirit evaporated, and the only way I can know her now is in my memories of her. Like when we were with Emma this one time. We took her to the beach. We were in the water, waist high. Mom was holding Emma. The waves were crazy that day. Each time one came in, Emma scream-laughed and Mom said, ‘I got you. Relax, Emma, I promise. Ready? Now hold your breath.’ The wave rolled over us, and we pushed up through it and floated out of the back of the wave. And Mom said, ‘See? Nothing bad happened. I kept my promise. I had you the whole time. We were flying, right? We were flying.’ That was my mother.” She took off her sunglasses and looked out past the cattails, to the psychiatric hospital in the near distance. It rose red and solitary from the swampland. “I want to go back, Jay. To school, I mean. I’m ready, I think. Yeah, I’m ready.” She turned so I couldn’t see the wounded side of her face. She peeled away the tape, balled up the bandage and tucked it into her pocket. Her hair hid the burn. She was breathing quickly, heavily. She turned to me. She brushed back her hair with her fingers.

I studied her naked face. I took it in, every bit of it. I held her hands and put them to my face, and then I put my hands to her face as I leaned in and kissed her. I kissed her cheeks, her eyes, her mouth. In time, we stopped trembling, and the cold was gone from us and the day and my world and maybe hers too, if only for a while. I tasted the sun in her lips, a warmth as gentle as it was strong. I’d always thought of surrender as a giving up. It wasn’t. To surrender deeply, truly, was to give in to an idea that hadn’t occurred to me until this kiss: that your admiration for somebody could be as great as your adoration of her. It moved me, her trust in me, her faith in herself, her belief in us.

I didn’t feel sorry for Nicole Castro. I felt hope for her. She wasn’t a victim or a snob, a pageant queen or an athlete, a scholar or a saint or any of the other things I’d labeled her over the past few months. She was Nicole, and she was beautiful.

B
URNING
B
LUE
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS AND A NOTE:

Thank you . . .

Kirby, Ian, Alicia and everyone at WME. My Penguin/Dial/Speak family, especially Regina, Jasmin, and Steve, Lauri and Kathy, Dani for the cover, Scottie, Marie, Erin and Emily, Courtney and Anna, the amazingly awesome Jess S, Donne, Kim, and Draga, Mary, Colleen, Eileen and Dana. Sheila and Heather, you are rock stars. Most of all, thank you, Kate. You are the most amazing editor and friend—love ya a ton.

My Griffin-Morimoto family for the enthusiasm, especially Kath and Mom, for assigning themselves the title “Manager” and having fun with it. Eileen and Trev. My niece Sarah, for being an awesome early reader. For their encouragement, Scott Smith, Coe Booth, Barry Lyga, T-Rock Maldonado and David Levithan. My Text friends Penny, Michael and Steph. Anne, Jessica, Regan, Karlan and literacyforincarcerated teens.org. Mica, Jo, Kris and behindthebook.org. My cousin Sheila for her twenty-plus years of providing compassionate psychological counseling, often pro bono, to traumatized young adults, and for giving me a chunk of her scant free time to help me glean a bit of an understanding about self-injury impulses. Lastly (and firstly) thank you to my best friend, my wife, Risa.

The NYPD Citizen’s Police Academy, particularly Sgt. Shelley Greene and PO Adolph Kiah. My friends at the Central Park Medical Unit, an all-volunteer ambulance corps 150 members strong. Please check us out (and feel free to donate!) at cpmu.com. Some background on
Burning Blue
: A few years ago my ambulance was called to aid a man who had been attacked on a subway platform. The victim, blinded and showing signs of moderate chemical burns, did not know the assailant. Someone simply tapped his shoulder, he turned, and the assailant sprayed his eyes with Mace. Even after the victim hit the ground, covering his eyes, the attacker continued to fire Mace into his mouth and ears. In the subsequent treatment and transport to the hospital, the randomness of the attack induced in the victim confusion, despair, and self-blame that still sadden me.

In another subway incident, I was called to aid a man who had suffered a seizure on the train, halting the express line during evening rush. The man was facedown on the subway car floor, in post-seizure recovery. Several frustrated passengers cursed my shabbily dressed patient and called for him to be dragged from the car to get the train moving again, but a witness told me the man hit his head as he fell. I couldn’t move him without taking precautions to protect his spine with immobilization devices. One onlooker was laughing at the patient, who was snoring loudly in a puddle of his own urine. The laughter reminded me of a time I was in the park, walking my dogs, and one of them, a big old boxer who suffered from epilepsy, collapsed in a seizure. This one guy was snickering, recording the seizure with his phone. Somebody else asked him why he was laughing, and he said something along the lines of, “I don’t know. Maybe I’m scared.”

Finally, while at college I was friendly with a guy whose name I’ll withhold out of respect for his family, but he was stellar, Ivy League basketball’s Rookie of the Year, an activist as popular off the court as he was on it. “B” was the nicest person you could hope to meet. Great smile, soft-spoken—a very humble guy. This was back in the late 1980s. A few years ago, I was stunned to learn that after his separation from his wife B had killed his daughter and son and then himself. Writing this story was, in part, a way for me to try to understand how a man who was so creative in the way he brought people together with his leadership could sink into a hopelessness so deep he destroyed his own children. I can’t say I’m any closer to understanding what happened with B, but I’m reminded that isolation breeds despair. If you see a friend or family member cutting herself off, reach out to your teachers, parents, friends and guidance counselors and help her get the help she needs. Peace from NYC this Feb 14, 2012.