Cold Springs(35)

“Glad you're up,” Chadwick said. “Can we talk?”

“Are you crazy? I just went back to bed.”

“Your room or mine?”

She scowled. With her buzz cut, her shapeless fatigues, her harshly plain face, she looked about twelve years old. Chadwick wondered why young women who tried to look butch always ended up looking frail and vulnerable.

“Your room,” she decided. “It's probably cleaner.”

The comment forced Chadwick to think about what his room would look like—and it was clean, but like a hotel room, not a home. He had never asked for new furniture since the early shoestring budget days of Cold Springs. He still had the particleboard desk, the hundred-dollar double bed, the Sears CD player. The corners of the sheets, the clothes on the shelves were folded with military precision, but there was little of personal significance—just a few pictures, and a few essential books. Herodotus. Mark Twain. David McCullough.

He opened the sliding glass door to the porch, let in the smell of cedar, the distant rush of the river.

Olsen examined the photos on Chadwick's writing desk. Her fingers hovered momentarily over the picture of Katherine—a young girl of eight, the summer they'd planted morning glories, her smile wide with amazement, the flowers making a raucously colored arch around her body. Mercifully, Olsen's fingers moved on. She picked up an old group shot of Chadwick with a bunch of Laurel Heights eighth-graders, all of them in colonial costumes.

Olsen looked up at the present-day Chadwick, then back at the photo of him with the powdered wig. “Anybody ever told you—”

“Repeatedly,” Chadwick interrupted. “I look like George Washington.”

Olsen managed a crooked smile. “And these kids in the picture—”

“Students. Former students.”

“Why'd you quit?”

“My daughter was a student there,” Chadwick said. “She committed suicide.”

Olsen's lips quirked, like she thought he was kidding, and then, when she was sure he wasn't, she returned the picture to its place, carefully, as if it were a detonator.

“Katherine,” she guessed. “What Mallory was talking about that night in the car.”

“She took her own life while she was baby-sitting Mallory Zedman, overdosed on he**in while Mallory was watching The Little Mermaid. Mallory was six. We were gone several hours longer than we should've been. Mallory put in the call to 911.”

Olsen sank into a chair. She rubbed her palms on her cheeks, pushing up the corners of her eyes. “Christ, Chadwick. Okay. Fuck. I feel like a jerk now.”

“As you can tell, I'm a lot of fun to be with.”

“I've been mad at you for a week because you wouldn't talk to me about the Zedman girl. Wouldn't explain why you were acting weird. You left me in the car while you talked with her mom.”

“So don't quit escorting. I need your help.”

Olsen hunched over, laced her fingers together and stared through them.

Her hair gleamed in the light. Her skin had a yellowish hue to it, like half-churned milk. Once during the week, on the flight into La Guardia, a flight attendant had told Olsen, by way of a compliment, that she looked a lot like her father, then gestured at Chadwick. The comment weighed on Chadwick's heart like lead.

He remembered how many times he'd had to explain that he was Katherine's father. Yes—her, the Latina child. He'd learned to stare through people's momentary disbelief, their embarrassment and confusion. He remembered thinking that he would never be able to claim a resemblance to Katherine, so he would have to claim something else about her—common personality, or interests, or career. Someday, he'd thought, after she grew up, people would look at Katherine and think, She's so much like her father.

“I should have told you I was requesting a new assignment,” Olsen decided. “It's not you, Chadwick. It's me. I'm not cut out for this work.”

“I don't agree.”

“Oh, please. I can't do what you do—not the direct intervention.”

“That's the job you requested.”

“I was unrealistic, okay? I wanted to be the rescuer, the one who whisked kids out of trouble. I thought they'd respond to me because I'd been there. I was wrong.”

She'd been there.

Chadwick remembered Olsen's interview, how she'd talked in vague terms about coming from a broken home, how that had gotten her interested in child psychology. Chadwick hadn't pressed her for details.

“You can't expect the kids to thank you,” he told her. “The more a kid fights, the worse she needs us.”

She shook her head. “The things Mallory said to me in the car while you were in the school . . . Not a thing about your daughter. Nothing about that. But vicious things. She reminded me—”

Olsen stopped herself.

Out the window, a trio of buzzards had gathered over the river, circling for breakfast.

“Kids like Mallory,” Chadwick said, “they've learned they can make authority figures cave in if they just act outrageous enough. That's terrifying power for an adolescent. They love it, but they hate it, too. So they keep getting wilder, hoping to find the limits. They need to hit a brick wall—somebody who finally says, ‘This is it. This is where you stop.' When a kid fights, she's testing to see if you're for real. Remember that. Remember you're basically dealing with a scared child, no matter how big or loud or out of control.”