Give Me Your Heart (16 page)

Witnesses would be interviewed. Records and documents would be checked. Mrs. Ulrich might provide names. Mrs. Ulrich might take a polygraph if she wished. The body of Pink Bunny Baby would very
likely be exhumed for DNA analysis.

A match to Mrs. Ulrich?

Unless the child had been adopted.

Unless the child had been abducted.

“. . . never spoke of this, Mrs. Ulrich? That you can recall?”

“Spoke of . . . ?”

“Having seen your husband smothering a child. Telling your daughter it was only a doll.”

“Of course not.”

“This is entirely new to you.”

“Yes! It is.”

Wanting to scream at him. The enemy.

Lydia was speaking more calmly now. A sob in her voice.

She would not cry.
Swiping at her eyes, which stung as if she’d been staring into a blinding sun.

They would be impressed with Lydia’s integrity. Her honesty.

She’d taken a seat on the ottoman. Backless, because her posture was so impressive.
She would not cry.

“She began taking drugs in high school, I think. She was fourteen, wouldn’t come downstairs to dinner one evening when Hans was home. He called her, insisted that she come eat with
us. There was a wild stomping on the stairs—Alva had wound transparent tape around her head, over her face, she’d made a grotesque mask of her own face, distorted, hellish, she was
laughing and flinging herself around as if she wanted to hurt herself. Hans and I were terrified . . . She’d taken methamphetamine—we’d hardly known such a drug existed. Hans
couldn’t deal with it. I had to calm Alva, try to calm her—her skin was burning. I managed to unwind and cut the horrible tape away from her head, her eyebrows and eyelashes, clumps of
hair, were pulled out—what a nightmare! Hans, the most agonistic of men, who hadn’t a shred of belief in anything supernatural, said of our daughter, A devil gets into her,’
sometimes ‘A devil is in her.’ But he never hurt her. Except once, that time in the park. The lilac bushes were in bloom—it should have been a beautiful time. Stands of lilac
growing wild. That rich smothering smell, there’s a kind of madness in it. Hans hadn’t meant to hurt her. She was a torment to us. ‘A devil, a devil is in her.’ But after
that he rarely touched her, even to hug her, kiss her. He was frightened, I think. Of what he might do to her. I was the one who loved her. I’ve never given up.”

Yes, she would be calling an attorney. This very day.

Yes, she would cooperate with their investigation, for she had no reason not to cooperate. Her daughter’s charges were absurd. Her daughter was mentally unstable. There was a medical
history, there were medical records.

The good that came of this would be, Alva would receive medical treatment. In Carbondale, or here in Bethesda. Lydia would make arrangements.

Would not cry. Would not be destroyed.

Yes, she would hear the tape of her daughter’s accusations. She was prepared for the shock of it. She believed.

Then, as one of the detectives moved to change the cassettes, Lydia asked him to wait a minute. She would be right back.

Rising shakily to her feet. One of the detectives helped her.

How brittle her bones felt! For the first time, she was feeling her age.

In her bathroom Lydia ran cold water from a faucet, distracted by the stricken face in the mirror. Perhaps she did look sixty-one. Perhaps the detectives had not been surprised. The capacity to
recognize the self is located in the left brain hemisphere, but in Lydia, so wounded, the capacity seemed to be damaged.
Why is that woman so old? I remember her young.

She could not bear it, the woman’s eyes.

In the medicine cabinet were numerous little bottles of pills. Old prescriptions she’d never thrown away. You never know when you might need sleeping pills, painkillers. She’d
amassed a considerable quantity.

More than enough. If necessary.

Running water, Lydia opened the bathroom door stealthily.

She’d hoped that in the mirror, which would pick up a reflecting surface in the dining room, she could see slantwise into the living room, where the detectives were. By now one was
probably on his feet, stretching. Perhaps both. In lowered tones they would be speaking of their suspect. The mask-faces were animated now. They were alive now, scenting their prey. Their teeth
were bared in exhilaration. Yet they were uncertain of the woman; she was nothing like they’d expected. The daughter’s story was so far-fetched. Much of it was unverifiable. Much of it
was common knowledge, widely reported in the media. The defense attorney would rebut their case. There was the daughter’s medical history; they would investigate.

But Lydia couldn’t see into the living room. The glass door of a breakfront reflected only a doorway, a wall.

Lydia was thinking of the famous experiment in childhood truth-telling and deception. Pandora’s box, some called it. Several children of about the age of three were left alone together in
a room, emphatically instructed not to look into a shut box. With a hidden camera, the children were videotaped. Nearly 90 percent of the children looked into the box, but when questioned, fewer
than 33 percent confessed to having looked. When five-year-olds were tested, nearly 100 percent disobeyed and tried, often very convincingly, to deceive. Demonstrating that as children mature,
their capacity for deception increases.

Curious, Hans had wanted to test Alva at age two. Her disobeying, and her insistence upon her innocence afterward, had been so charming, Hans had only laughed. His beautiful little girl, so
precocious! In a variant of the test, Hans offered a chocolate treat to Alva if she “really, really” told the truth. Some children, stricken with doubt, would have demurred at this. Not
Alva.

Lydia had laughed with Hans, though saddened by the child’s precocious duplicity. And, somehow, the innocence of it. But Hans had been charmed.
In
Homo sapiens
the talent for
deception is our strongest evolutionary advantage.

No trust. Preemptive war. The only wisdom.

Summoning her strength to walk back into the living room, even to smile at her tormentors, Lydia saw that, as she’d envisioned, one of the detectives was strolling about, admiring the view
from her windows. “Twelfth floor? Must be nice.” Gently Lydia corrected him: “Tenth floor.”

They asked Lydia if she was prepared to hear her daughter’s statement and Lydia said yes.

Tetanus

Diaz, César.
Like an upright bat, quivering wings folded over to hide its wizened face, the boy was sitting hunched over the table beneath glaring fluorescent
lights, shaved head bowed, rocking back and forth and humming frantically to himself. Arresting officers had banged him a little, torn his filthy T-shirt at the collar, bloodied his nose and upper
lip. His eyes, wetly glassy, frightened and furtive, lurched in their sockets. He was breathing hard, panting. He’d been crying. He’d sweated through his T-shirt, which was several
sizes too large for his scrawny body. He was talking to himself now, whispering and laughing. Why was he laughing? Something seemed to be funny. Spittle shone at the boy’s red fleshy lips,
and the nostrils of his broad stubby nose were edged with bloody mucus. He took no notice of the door to the windowless room opening, a brief conversation between two individuals, adults, male,
Caucasian, figures of authority, of no more apparent interest to him than the tabletop before him. He was eleven years old; he’d been taken into Trenton police custody on a complaint by his
mother for threatening her and his younger brother with a fork.

“César? Hello. My name is . . .”

Zwilich spoke with practiced warmth, calm. Pulling out a chair at the counseling table, at his usual place: back to the door. Outside were Mercer County guards. Mercer County Family Services
shared cramped quarters with the Mercer County Department of Parole and Probation and was adjacent to the Mercer County Youth Detention Center, which was an aggressively ugly three-story building
made of a stony gray material that looked as if it had been pissed on over a period of many years, in jagged, whimsical streaks. You came away thinking that these walls were covered in graffiti,
though they were not.

Early evening, a Friday in late June. Parole and Probation had shut for the weekend, but Family Services was open for business, and busy.

One of those days that, beginning early, swerve and rumble forward through the hours with the numbing, slightly jeering repetition of an endless stream of freight cars. Even as Zwilich’s
life was falling into pieces he was speaking in his friendly-seeming and upbeat voice to
Diaz, César,
whose latest arrest sheet lay before him on the table, beside a folder stamped
“Mercer County Family Services: Confidential.”

“. . . and I’m here just to ask you a few questions, César. You’ve been in counseling with Family Services before, I think. This time we need to clear up some problems
before you can go home. Can you hear me?”

The batlike boy sneered, smirked. You had to think that he was very frightened, yet his manner was hostile, insolent. He was rocking from side to side, gripping his scraped elbows. He was
muttering to himself and laughing, and Zwilich, an adult male in his mid-thirties, old enough to be César Diaz’s father and wishing to project a fatherly or older-brotherly manner,
wishing to convey to César Diaz that he sympathized with him, respected him, he was on his side and not on the side of the enemy, had no doubt that if he could hear the obscene words the boy
was muttering, a hot flash would color Zwilich’s cheeks above his patch of whiskers and his heart would kick in revulsion for the boy, but luckily Zwilich couldn’t hear.

He would tell Sofia, It’s been one of those days.

Which? Which days?

A day of temptation. Terrible temptations.

And did you succumb?

Goddamn, he was not going to succumb. He’d had a few drinks at late lunch to buoy his spirits, and the prospect of a few drinks this evening, alone or with another, somewhere improvised,
filled him now with a gassy sort of elation, like a partly deflated balloon someone has decided, out of whimsy or pity, to inflate.

Zwilich spoke. Kindly, with patience. Such evil in him, his secret little cesspool glittering deep inside the well of his soul; it was his task, a sacred task, to keep the lid on. Yet the boy
resisted. Staring, stubborn and unyielding, at a bloody smear on the table before him, where he’d wiped the edge of his hand after having wiped a skein of bloody mucus from his nose. Zwilich
was thinking that César Diaz, exposed in pitiless fluorescent lighting, might have been drawn, with finicky, maniacal exactitude, by Direr or Goya. No mere photograph could capture his
essence. His forehead was low and furrowed in an adult expression of anguish indistinguishable from rage. His bony boy’s head had been shaved, as if to expose its vulnerability, breakable
layers of skull bone upon which a scalp, reddened with rashes and bumps, seemed to have been fitted tight as the skin of a drum. A very ugly head, an aborigine head, crudely sculpted in stone and
unearthed from the soil of centuries. The arresting officers had pegged César Diaz as possibly gang-affiliated, but Zwilich thought that wasn’t likely; the kid was too young and too
scrawny—no gang would want him for a few years. The shaved head was more likely Mrs. Diaz’s precaution against lice.

Zwilich suppressed a shudder. Itchy scurrying sensation at the nape of his neck, his jaws beneath the whiskers. He’d caught lice from clients in early years. But not for years.

According to César Diaz’s mother, he’d been sniffing glue with other boys earlier that day, and coming home he’d caused a “ruckus” in their building,
he’d been “violent,” “uncontrollable,” “threatening.” Glue sniffing! It was an epidemic among boys César’s age, in certain Trenton
neighborhoods. If Zwilich hadn’t been assured that César had been examined by a doctor, passed back into police custody, and delivered to Family Services for evaluation, he’d
have thought the boy was still high, or deranged. Sniffing airplane glue was the cheapest, crudest high, scorned by serious junkies (meth, heroin) for causing the quickest brain damage. The
boy’s bloodshot eyes shone with an unnatural intensity, as if about to explode, and a powerful odor of unwashed flesh, sweat, grime, misery wafted to Zwilich’s nostrils.

It would be traumatic for César to be kept overnight in detention, but there, at least, he’d be made to take a shower. A real shower. As in a slow-motion dream sequence, Zwilich
could imagine the bat-boy cringing beneath hot rushing water, layers of filth gradually washing off his skinny body, in swirls at the drain beneath the boy’s bare feet. The darkish Hispanic
pallor emerging, a startling beauty, out of encrusted dirt.

He felt a sudden pang of tenderness for the boy. As if he’d glimpsed the boy naked and vulnerable and begging for love.

“César? Will you look at me? Your mother has said—”

Now César looked up sharply. “Mama? She here?”

“Not just yet, César. Your mother is very upset with you, and worried about you. She’s hoping that we can—”

“Mama comin’ to take me home? Where’s she?”

The bloodshot eyes widened, excited. The bony shoulders twitched like broken wings.

“Your mother might—possibly—be coming to take you home tonight. Or it might be better for you to stay overnight at the—”

“Mama here! Ma
ma
! Goddamn fuck Ma
ma!
”

“César, hey, calm down. Sit still. If the guards hear you and come in, our interview is over.”

Zwilich frequently saw young offenders, as they were called, not only handcuffed but their cuffs chained to waist shackles; not infrequently, since adolescents were the most desperate of all
offenders, their ankles were shackled too. Trooping in and out of the detention center next door, kids in neon orange jumpsuits, cuffed and shackled, and it was an unnatural and obscene vision that
passed over by degrees into being a familiar vision, one that induced a sensation of extreme fatigue in the observer, like simply wanting to give up: die.