Page 3 of Blade
It was no more than one large room with a square table. A love seat against the wall. An unmade bed with gray plaid sheets, always tangled and strewn.
The access road turns at the base, until it ends at the highway that passes along the edge of town, running north to Denver and south to Pueblo.
Hidden in the darkness somewhere between is the abandoned property that was once a dairy farm—the place we all knew simply as the field—where Emile’s body was found, frozen in a pool of his own blood, making the time of death uncertain.
And in the other direction from the highway is this rented condo. It’s in a complex—one of several that were hastily built when The Palace doubled in size. Gray prefab two-unit structures. I could never tell them apart when I rode past them on my bike on the way to school. No one stayed long enough to place a welcome mat by the front door, add aname to a mailbox. All these years later, they haven’t changed, just multiplied.
Thousands of skaters have come through The Palace since it was founded. I try not to think about the ones I knew, though some have found me over the years, on Facebook or LinkedIn—mostly coaches now at smaller rinks. Lesser rinks. They reach out, desperate to reconnect with that past through the people who might hold its pieces. To lasso it, perhaps, and drag it into the present. Rewrite it, even just a few chapters.
In betweenhow are you?andwhat have you been up to?was the question they really wanted to ask.
How do I leave this place behind?
That’s what they crave when they begin to reminisce, then see that I’ve truly moved past it, not having skated since the day I left, no longer even owning a pair of skates, not poring over old photos and videos of my performances. When they learn that I have reinvented myself so completely I can stand in this room and look at The Palace and still feel my feet planted firmly on the ground. They want to know how. They want me to show them the way. But how can I? Leaving this place, and skating, behind me has felt like an exorcism.
It wasn’t pretty.
I turn my gaze back to Grace.
“My first year at Avery Hall I had a room with a view of the mountain. But I think I lived in every one by the time I left—even the one in the back where your mother stayed. Did you know that?” I ask her. “That your mother and I were here together?”
She answers with a nod.
More reflections about Avery Hall and my time there take shape in short sentences, snippets, but I don’t say them. I stop myself because I still don’t know how to use this, the fact that I knew Jolene. And because I haven’t found a place to contain my feelings about her sending her own child here after everything that happened to us. Me, Jolene,and the other two girls who lived here year-round, alone. Kayla and Indy. The girls they called the Orphans.
Grace walks until she’s beside me, and together we look at the lights through the window. Side by side, though every detail about her lingers behind my eyes. The tightly drawn ponytail. The doll-like features of her face. Long dark lashes, delicate nose, a natural blush in her full cheeks and lips. Beneath her joggers and shirt are limbs that are slight but toned. Athletic perfection beneath a facade of youth.
It’s the youth that strikes me. And this is good. It’s what adults are meant to see. Children should stand out to us. They should be easily recognizable so we’ll remember that they’re vulnerable and do what we can to protect them. Except for the monsters among us who spy an opportunity.
Jolene used to hover over me at the bathroom mirror, teaching me to cover my face with eyeliner and lipstick. Youth didn’t serve us here.
Grace stares at the lights—and I wonder which ones are pulling her in. The Palace? Avery Hall? The fifth house on the access road—the one belonging to Dawn Sumner?
I feel the words and lock them in my head. What I really want to know.
What happened to you here, Grace?
I think about my speech at the conference. I never would have accepted an invitation to come here—to Colorado, just five hours from Echo—had I not been given the main stage and a chance to reach other professionals who treat children. To teach them what I know. Not a chance in hell.
Christ, I’d felt the memories begin to stir as the plane descended five days ago, cutting through the clouds. Exposing the snow-covered mountains.
Over three hundred people heard my talk about the specialty of criminal defense work with minors. How it recognizes their developing brains and gives them defenses that don’t always play as well with adult offenders. The so-called excuse defenses, meaning they are excused, forsound reason, from criminal culpability for the crimes they commit. Acting in self-defense, or in the defense of others. Trauma response from prior abuse. Insanity, both temporary and chronic. Intoxication. And the mere fact of being a child—the defense appropriately calledinfancy.
Building these defenses, I told them, requires two things. The what. And the why.
I’m the youngest attorney in our practice of six, but I’m the best at connecting the dots. The firm’s founder, Jill Kirk, hired me to do just that, and I’ve proved myself. The facts, the circumstances—no two cases are the same. What has been done? Why has this child done it? There’s always a reason.
Because children are not born evil. We still don’t understand exactly how empathy, morality, and compassion develop—except that a child’s environment plays a major role. The damage begins the moment we get our hands on them. Some believe it starts in the womb.
I stood on that stage and told them what I know to be true.
“Children become what we do to them,” I said.
My eyes linger now on this child, the one in front of me. The stillness of her face as she stares out the window. The murder and the precipitating events, trapped behind it.
“Let’s sit down,” I tell her. I go first, leaving the window and the night sky I had nearly forgotten.
I find the chair and the file on the table, right beside the cold tea and the pale ring around the bottom of the cup. I sit, again on the edge, elbows on knees, hands clasped together, and wait impatiently. My knuckles turn white as I press them into the backs of my hands.