Five weeks later, Thursday, December 16, Nicole, her father, and I were in a joint therapy session in Dr. Schmidt’s office. Nicole had just come back from a month’s stay at an in-treatment center for teens coping with self-injury impulses. The particular program she was in required her to stay off the phone and offline, but she was encouraged to write, and we’d exchanged a dozen or so letters. But now we sat facing each other, staring at each other as Mr. Castro said, “I can’t do that. How do you not see that it’s my fault?”
“What does holding on to your fault, Elaine’s fault, anybody’s fault do for Nicole?” Schmidt said.
“But you don’t just let it go, Doctor. It won’t. It can’t. It’s its own thing, and it lives in you until it dies, if it ever does decide to die. If you try to cut it out too soon, you risk all this collateral damage.”
“Like what?” Schmidt said.
Mr. Castro closed his eyes tightly and dug his fingertips into his temples. He still wore his wedding ring. “Nicole, I can’t do this, honey. I’m sorry.” He stood up.
“Dad?” Nicole said.
“I can’t work it out like this, in here. I don’t know if I’ll ever be able to stop hating her or Dave or that monster of a girl or me most of all, but any sense of forgiveness I can discover in myself has to come on its own. Not with people watching for it. Waiting for it. I’m not even sure it’s in me to find. Look, I’ll be waiting in the car. Doctor, I’m sorry.” He left quickly.
“I didn’t get to say it,” Nicole said. “I waited too long. I should have said it in the beginning of the session, when you asked me the first time, but now after hearing what he just said, I don’t think I’ll ever be able to tell him. To get it out.”
“Tell Jay,” Schmidt said. “He’s here for you. Go ahead, Nicole. You can do it.”
Nicole took my hands in hers. “Jay, I need you to know why I do it. Why I cut, I mean. I do it to control the pain my way. Without meds. To feel. To see my imperfection spill out of me. It started after the attack. Shortly after. I wanted to draw the heat in my face downward. I couldn’t bear to look at myself in the mirror in the beginning. I had no idea what the burn looked like. I needed to see it, but at the same time I couldn’t look. So I put it where I could look at it. Where I could control it in every aspect, how it appeared in my skin, how long it lasted. I could start the fire, and I could put it out at will. Remember in biology, that picture of the circulatory system? The blood pumping away from the heart is bright red. The arteries squeeze it through you fiercely, almost uncontrollably. Then there’s the other blood, the blood that goes to the heart, the softer flow, the blood that’s blue. It’s not really. Really it’s just a very dark red, but in the right kind of light, the soft light, the night-light with the sapphire shade, you can convince yourself that it’s the same color as the blood in the picture, that cool blue.” She rolled up her sleeves. The bandages were gone. The scar lines were parallel, all roughly the same length. “We’ve started to talk about it, Dr. Schmidt and I. About her. My mother. I hope at some point I’ll find the courage to contact her, maybe even to see her. I know I’ll have to do that, to hear it directly from her mouth, to know why. Jay, I haven’t cut in thirty-one days.”
“You are amazing,” I said.
“I can’t say I’ll never do it again. Not yet. Maybe I’ll never be able to say it.”
“You’ll always be amazing.”
Nicole was supposed to exercise a lot. Cutting unleashes endorphins in the bloodstream, but so does running. We took up jogging. We were at Palisades Park one beautiful winter day during Christmas break. Not that Nicole had come back to school. We took a breather underneath the George Washington Bridge, at the river’s edge. We hiked the trap rock and found a bench-like slab with a great view of northern Manhattan across the water. A double-flash of bright light hit us. We turned into it with our hands up in front of our faces to block the camera, but the flash had come from the sunlight’s reflecting off the window of a turning Coast Guard speedboat. “How bad was it while I was gone?” Nicole said. “The media attention?”
“Bad.” Actually, it was insane. Everywhere I went those first few days after Mrs. Castro was identified as the person behind the attack, I had at least two reporters tailing me. The stalking died down after a couple of weeks of my not saying anything. What could I say? I didn’t have any answers for them or any answers period.
“Detective Barrone called this morning,” Nicole said. “She wants to talk. Not Barrone, my mother. Talk with me, I mean. She’s cooperating, answering all Barrone’s questions, except one.”
“Why she did it?”
“She says she’ll only answer that to my face. All the stuff you told me about my dad and yours, that night at her debut, then needing to keep me around after the divorce, not being able to let me go. It makes sense on an intellectual level, but I won’t really understand why she did it until I hear her say the words. Until I see her eyes as she tells me. But how can I be in the same room with her? How can I be near her ever again? I swear, when my father told me the doctor said she would probably die from the infection? I was just so relieved. You know? Like I’d been spared my own death sentence or worse, my own life sentence. If she was gone, I’d never have to face her again. I could put away all the pictures and. . Oh my god. Oh my god!” She buried her face in balled hands and rocked back and forth. “My mother had me burned, Jay. My own mother. My mom. I miss my mom.”
She got a job working at the stables, teaching the young kids to ride. She was starting to look at colleges with programs in early childhood education. One night her friend from the stables called and asked her if she wanted to see a horse foal. When we got there, the barn was dark except for a double stall in the corner. The horse was lying on her side and getting ready to deliver. This dog, a boxer mix, I think, sat at Nicole’s side and leaned into her. He kept sticking his nose into her elbow and flipping up her arm and wouldn’t stop until she stroked him.
“No allergies?” I whispered.
“Not that bad, actually,” she said. “The doctor said at some point I might outgrow them.”
We stayed like this for some time, crouching in the stall on upturned crates, just waiting for the colt to be born. The stable master held the mother’s head and stroked her neck. Everyone was quiet and smiling. When the colt was born, everybody laughed.
Her father had put the Brandywine Heights house on the market. He was renting a town house in a luxury condo complex down by the Hudson River, just south of the George Washington Bridge, where Nicole and I ran and hiked. The first floor was Mr. Castro’s office. He’d left his company and was working for himself now, to be around for Nicole. Upstairs was homey, lots of sun and space. Nicole’s room was on the water-view side. We were hanging out on her bed, playing dominoes. Sylvia came in. “Feet on the floor,” she said. She grabbed my ponytail. “If only I had a pair of scissors. One clip, and you would be handsome. Now go downstairs. Let Nicoletta get ready.”
Nicole had been asked to give a speech at the annual Girl Scouts conference in Manhattan.
That night, we were at a midtown hotel. After dinner, Nicole was introduced. She looked stunning, her hair back, her smile wide, except I could see her lips were quivering. The bandage had become smaller, but it still covered all signs of injury. “I’m grateful to you for this opportunity to tell you how much you girls inspire me,” was how she started. “You’re leaders, and we’re all depending on you to lead with kindness. What’s our motto?”
“Be prepared,” half the girls yelled.
Nicole nodded. “Prepared in mind, prepared in body, right? We train our minds to be ready when we need to act to make a situation a bit better. We train our hearts to be strong, to have the courage to give of ourselves to help somebody who-”
“Mommy, what’s wrong with her face?” a Brownie in the front row said.
Nicole kept going. “. . train our hearts to help those who might need. . help.” She brushed her hair with her fingers and covered her face with it. “I’m. .” She hurried away from the podium.
I caught up with her backstage. She was hyperventilating in the corner, facing the bathroom door. “Somebody’s in there,” she said. “The people, they’re still looking at me, Jay, but they can’t see me,” she said. “They can’t see past it.” She rapped on the door. “Please, I have to get in there.”
I held her hand and led her to the street. Mr. Castro went for the car, and we got her home. I slept over at her house that night, on the short couch in her bedroom. When I woke up, she was curled into me. The next day we got her in to see Schmidt for an emergency session.
Her second surgery didn’t go as well as planned, and a third had to be pushed back to the spring. She relapsed with the cutting, but this time she reached out to me about it. She continued with her therapy, but only with Dr. Schmidt and on a private basis, never in the school office. She continued with private tutors, but not in-home. She went to a center in Englewood for one-on-one sessions. She poured herself into her studies. In February, she took the SATs and nailed them.
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.”