The Perfect Child(89)

Her eyes were vacant; she wore a thousand-yard stare.

“You look better today,” I said. I talked to her doctor every day, and she kept me updated on Hannah’s progress. They’d recently added a new medication to her cocktail of antipsychotics.

“You were here before?” she asked.

I nodded. “Yes. You were pretty out of it.”

“I hate the drugs. You know how I feel about drugs.” Her voice was flat, devoid of emotion.

I cleared my throat, nervous to ask. “Do they help?”

She shrugged.

“Are you eating?” I didn’t know what to talk about.

“Not really. The medication makes me nauseous.”

“Is there anything that sounds good? Maybe I could bring you something.”

“You’d bring me food?” Her eyes filled with tears.

I reached across the table and pulled her hand out of her mouth. I put it in mine. Her hands were dry, scaly. I rubbed my finger gently on top of hers. “Yes.” It was hard to speak around the lump in my throat.

She jerked her hand away. “Don’t touch me.”

I dropped her hand. “I’m sorry. I just—I just . . .”

“Please go. Just go.” Tears streamed down her cheeks. “Don’t come back.”

“I’m not going to go, Hannah. I’m not just going to leave you here. I love you. That doesn’t change because you’re sick.”

Her voice trembled as she spoke. “I am more than sick. I tried to kill a child. Don’t try to make this better for me.”

“We’ve all done some horrible things during this.” I lowered my voice to a whisper so the orderly sitting in the doorway couldn’t hear. “I hit you, Hannah.”





FIFTY-SIX

HANNAH BAUER

Our meetings blended into each other like one never-ending session. Twice daily. Sometimes three if it was a really bad day. Dr. Spence didn’t have a time limit. Not like Dr. Chandler. No way to tell if they were going to go twenty minutes or three hours. This one felt like it’d been going on forever. We might break our record.

“Do you remember when you started hearing voices?” she asked.

“Remember those images I told you about earlier?” I asked.

She nodded.

“The voices worked the same way. From out of nowhere, a voice started whispering, ‘Janie’s possessed by a demon.’ At first they were murmurs, just whispers that made me wonder if I’d heard them at all. I kept telling myself they weren’t there. That it wasn’t real. I felt my mind snapping, going somewhere it’d never gone, but I couldn’t stop it. I was outside myself watching it happen.”

The investigators had shown me my journal and all those things I’d written. Allison had given me the journal at my baby shower. She’d used the same one with her boys. I remembered my first few entries, but most of it was like reading a story about someone else. It was hard to believe it was me.

“You never sought help?”

“I didn’t.” I hung my head. “It’s different when it’s happening to you. I kept telling myself that it was normal because of everything going on and I’d adjust in a little while. But then I didn’t . . .”

“And then what happened, Hannah?”

“You already know what happened. Everyone knows what happened.”

“It might help you if you talked about it.”

That’s where she was wrong—where everyone was wrong. Nothing was going to help me. And I didn’t care how many times doctors told me I had had a psychotic break. It didn’t justify what I had done. It never would. I had walked into the bathroom that day intending to drown Janie. That part was crystal clear. So was how hard she’d fought as I’d tried to hold her under the water.





FIFTY-SEVEN

CHRISTOPHER BAUER

Janie screamed in the background of my phone. It’d only been twenty minutes since I had left Allison’s house after my visit with the kids, and it was the same routine every time. Janie sobbed and clung to me when it was time to leave, and Allison had to pry her off. Sometimes it took her thirty minutes to calm her down. Other times it took three hours.

“She bit me again,” Allison said.

I turned my Bluetooth down as I drove; it made Janie’s piercing screams in the background lower. “I’m sorry,” I said.

I’d lost count of how many times I had apologized to her in the past few weeks. Even though Hannah had confessed to hurting Janie and Cole, the Department of Children’s Services treated me like I was a criminal, too, as if I’d been in on some conspiracy with her. They didn’t understand that I had been as blindsided as they were when I had discovered the baby journal. The shock had dulled over time, but it was still there. Hannah’s story corroborated everything Janie had said—she’d been trying to drown Janie when she had slipped and Cole had hit his head as she’d fallen. None of that mattered, though. Janie and Cole still had to stay with Allison until they cleared my name. Piper said it was standard practice, but it didn’t make me feel any less like a criminal.

“She actually drew blood this time. Blood, Christopher. Do you know how hard you have to bite someone to draw blood?”