Unprotected (25 page)

“Rachel, I’m sorry. Brit thought Amanda could help you. I didn’t know what to do.”

“Stay out of my business. Stay out of it!” Rachel whipped back around and ran for the door.

“You can’t just keep letting yourself get raped!” Brittany yelled the words, not realizing the effect they would obviously have. Jess turned toward Brittany in horror. Rachel, her hand on the locker room door, froze. She turned around and gave Brittany an icy stare.

“You don’t know what you’re talking about.” Her words were short and detached. “Stay. Out. Of. My. Business.” She turned and walked out of the locker room.

* * *

Amanda stayed with the girls for a few minutes to help them calm down. Jess wrapped her arms around herself and cried, and Brittany, who didn’t know Rachel but was caught up in the drama, sobbed like it had all happened to her.

“You need to do something, Amanda. You need to help her.”

Amanda was so exhausted from the day’s events that it was difficult for her to process what she needed to do next. She realized Rachel hadn’t made a single disclosure or anything close to a disclosure, so there was nothing she could do. Everyone in the room knew that something was happening, but they were powerless because Rachel didn’t want any help.

“You girls have to realize that sometimes it takes a long time for people to deal with what’s happening to them. She needs support, not pressure.” The girls finally settled down, and Amanda was able to collect her belongings and go to her car.

She shuffled through the pile of junk on the passenger seat until she found a granola bar from earlier in the week, still wrapped. She tore into it and ate it in three bites, washing it down with a warm diet Coke from the morning. She started her car and sat back with an exhausted sigh, waiting for it to warm up. Rachel’s face stuck in her mind. Suddenly, the realization nearly knocked the wind out of her. The resemblance, the name …

Rachel Thomas was Chuck Thomas’s daughter.

* * *

When she got back to work, her message light was blinking at her. Amanda spent the ride back to work playing back the conversation with Rachel, trying to remember if Rachel had said anything that constituted a child protection report. Hoping something was reportable. Hoping there was an obvious answer, and realizing there probably wasn’t.

Amanda walked across the hall into Max’s office. “Have a minute?”

Max was looking at something on his computer. “Sure. Have you recovered from your day?”

Max was referring to the fight, which had become the furthest thing from her mind.

“Actually, something else happened as I was leaving school.” Amanda replayed the conversation with Rachel. When she said Rachel’s name, she waited to see if he recognized the name. His blank look showed her he didn’t.

“I suppose that’s the risk of having a social worker in the school,” Max said, leaning back in his chair, and hoisting his foot up on the edge of his desk. Max was wearing hiking boots and socks with reindeer on them. He noticed Amanda noticing. “The socks were a gift.”

She smiled obligingly at the socks. “Rachel Thomas is Chuck Thomas’s daughter. I just looked it up. Somebody is hurting her, and it looked like she was ready to tell. Then she recognized my name, freaked out and left.”

Max sighed deeply. “I’m sure you’re right, Amanda. The thing is, we don’t know who or what may have hurt her, and we certainly don’t have a shred of evidence to prove it.”

“I knew that, I guess. I just feel like I need to do something. I can’t just have this knowledge and do nothing.”

“What knowledge do you have, exactly?”

Amanda replayed the conversation in her mind again. Rachel said she couldn’t handle anyone else touching her. For all Amanda knew, she could have an abusive boyfriend, or something could have happened on a date. It was a pretty big leap to assume someone in the family was hurting her. But even if it wasn’t someone in her family, something was happening to Rachel, and Amanda knew it but couldn’t help.

“I know it’s hard, Amanda.” Max said, seeing her frustration. “Sometimes we have these very frustrating situations when our hands are completely tied. It seems like we should be able to help, but we can’t.”

Amanda nodded.

“Why don’t you head home,” he said. “You’ve dealt with enough for one day.”

“I need to stop by and see Hailey Bell. I’ll go home from there. My brain is completely fried.”

* * *

Hailey had just moved in with her mother, and it had been a rocky start. Hailey’s mother, Nancy, doted on her grandchild and subtlety undermined her daughter every chance she got.

Today Nancy met Amanda at the door and stepped outside with her, pulling the door almost closed behind her. “She was real short with him last night again. She was giving him a bath, and I could hear him splashing, and she just yelled, ‘Stop!’ Real loud.”

“So what has she done well lately?” Amanda had staffed this case last week, and her coworkers suggested asking Nancy that question to see if she had anything positive to say. Overall, Hailey had been doing very well with Charlie, and it was becoming clear that Nancy was more of a hindrance than a help to Hailey. When they were working on her social history, Hailey described the string of abusive men that Nancy brought into their lives. While she had only been hit a few times herself, she had watched her mother get dragged across the carpet by her hair, and that wasn’t the worst beating she ever took. Hailey had dropped out of school and moved in with her older boyfriend when she was seventeen, a mistake that started her down the path of her own abusive boyfriends.

“What has she done well?” Nancy repeated. Sadly, the question stopped Nancy in her tracks. Hailey had passed GED testing with flying colors, enrolled in technical college, and was almost done with her anger management class. It wasn’t a difficult question.

“I just need to meet with Hailey for a few minutes.” She stepped around Nancy and went inside, where Hailey stood just on the other side of the door. The ache in Hailey’s eyes revealed she had overheard the conversation.

“Hey, Amanda,” she said sadly. Charlie was hiding behind his mom, and when Amanda entered he plowed into her, hitting her kneecap with his skull so hard that it brought tears to her eyes. Hailey either missed the blow or ignored it. Charlie ran through the living room and down the stairs to the space that he and his mother shared.

“How’s it going, Hailey?” Amanda tried to keep her voice steady despite the pain. Charlie had crashed into the knee she had injured sliding into third base during her junior year, and it felt swollen already. Nancy finally came back inside and went straight to her bedroom, where she probably could hear their conversation best. “I just need to get a release signed for the evaluation we set up for Charlie.” She handed Hailey the forms and showed her where to sign.

“God I hope he can get on some meds. He’s so wild I’m afraid he’s going to hurt someone.”

Amanda’s throbbing knee proved Hailey’s point. Amanda and Hailey had completed a screening questionnaire about Charlie that had indicated some areas of concern regarding his behavior and overall development, so Amanda was setting up a more in-depth evaluation.

“It should give us some good answers,” Amanda said as she took the papers back from Hailey. “That’s all I need for today.” She headed for the door, but the look on Hailey’s face made her pause. “Are you okay?”

Blinking back tears, Hailey ran her hands through her enviable red hair. “Sometimes, I just wish I had a normal mom. The kind who can think of someone besides herself.” Her words came out in a shaky whisper. “I mean, I’m glad she let me move back home, and I know she adores Charlie. But she didn’t take good care of me. She was too busy making it all about her all the time. And, every once in a while, I just wish I would’ve had the kind of mom who stuffs you full of cookies and can’t stop bragging about you. You know what I mean?”

Yep
, Amanda thought. I know exactly what you mean.

* * *

At the end of another exhausting day, Amanda left Hailey and drove across Terrance to the bad side of town where LaToya lived so she could drop off one last form. The streets were narrow and the homes very close together in these neighborhoods. The railroad tracks ran parallel to the street Amanda was driving on, and were surprisingly close to the backyards of the homes. She stopped at a stop sign and looked over at a pink home with three butterflies mounted on the siding by the garage. For the third time in as many months, Amanda felt a surge of déjà vu so strong it took her breath away. She stared at the pink home, noting the mint-green shutters by the front window, with shutters missing on the left side. A gray army blanket blocked the front window. Several pumpkin garbage bags, faded and falling apart, were piled by the garage door. An image of ceramic gnomes with crumbling faces and faded bodies popped into her head. Plastic lattice leaning against siding … a tractor tire sandbox … matchbox cars and faded pink buckets.

Amanda finally drove through the intersection, but she couldn’t allow herself to pass by that pink house. She turned around and parked on the street, across from the pink house. When she got out of her car. She could only stare. The winter sun was setting behind the house in vivid pink and orange brush strokes. Amanda asked herself what she was doing, why she was approaching the house, and what she would do when she got there. She had no answers but kept walking.

The snow was only a few inches deep, and it had melted and frozen enough times to create a thick crust with a few blades of grass sticking through here and there. The driveway had never been shoveled, but there were ruts where cars had driven a few times. Amanda walked slowly in the yard by the driveway vaguely aware that she was approaching the backyard. She peeked around the hedge in the back of the house, her heart pounding for reasons she couldn’t explain.

Partially due to hunger, partially to shock, Amanda nearly fainted with what she saw. Crouching in a row against the back of the house where a flower garden would be in the spring, there they were, gnomes.

* * *

Amanda couldn’t process what she saw and felt. Stumbling back to her car, she drove back to her apartment, barely remembering how she got there. She went straight to her bedroom and curled up on her bed. Though she felt vaguely afraid of the mystery emerging from her subconscious, she was mostly overwhelmed by emotion. Utterly exhausted, she fell asleep.

* * *

Amanda woke up after midnight long enough to take out her contacts, brush her teeth, change into pajamas and get back into bed. She felt calmer as she fumbled around her bedroom in the dark. She turned on the TV in her bedroom that barely showed two channels, but she needed the reassurance that nighttime TV could provide. As she was falling asleep, the realization came to her slowly but surely, as if the fog that had covered this part of her life had dissipated, revealing the truth that, at some level, she had always known.

That house belonged to her grandmother.

Chapter Eighteen

Somehow, having family in Terrance should have been more earth shattering than it was. For the next several days, Amanda went about her daily routine as if nothing was different. She still got up every morning and went to her job at Terrance County Social Services, and at the end of the day she still went home and spent almost every evening alone.

What was different was the knowledge that she was no longer alone on the planet, and in fact never had been. She had family.

The question was what to do with the knowledge. She basked in it for a day, feeling reassured that there was at least one more person who was connected to her. Sitting at her desk, she had stretched her mind for more memories of that house, and a few rolled in. Amanda remembered sitting in that yard by the gnomes watching ants crawl through the flower garden and up and down the gnomes. She remembered sitting on the tire sandbox, and she sensed there were other kids there, but she couldn’t pull up any of their faces. And she remembered playing with matchbox cars there. Her mother’s running joke that she was going to be a stockcar driver because she loved matchbox cars probably began when she played with the cars in her grandmother’s sandbox.

Grandmother.

The problem was that her grandmother didn’t acknowledge her. And then she became obsessed with the question of why.

Amanda tried to remember if her mother had ever talked about her own mother. She couldn’t recall any conversations, but the subject of family was always taboo with April, and suddenly this made much more sense.

She suddenly remembered her grandmother had called once. Amanda was about eight years old, and they were living in an apartment complex that Amanda loved because it was full of kids. As a teenager she drove by and realized that the complex was low-income housing, and understood better why many of the kids she knew there as a child were struggling as teenagers.

She and her mother were in the living room watching a rerun of
Happy Days
, eating a TV dinner of salisbury steak and French fries when the phone rang. Amanda answered it, and a woman was crying on the other end. Amanda didn’t speak, but her bewildered look must have prompted her mother to grab the phone away from her. She listened for a moment, and then told the woman to stop calling and “give it up.” Amanda asked her mother who called, and her mother suddenly blurted out, “It was your grandmother, but she’s nothing but a troublemaker so just forget about her.” Amanda did as she was told.

After three days, Amanda got up the nerve to pick up the phone book to try to look up her number, when another startling revelation came to her—she didn’t even know her grandmother’s name. She looked up Danscher but only found herself, of course. When Amanda had driven by every day on her way home, though it wasn’t accurate to say it was on her way home because Amanda lived in the opposite direction, there were never any signs of life at the home, yet it still appeared to be lived in. The fleeting thought came that her grandmother might not even live there anymore, but that would close a door that Amanda simply wasn’t willing to close yet.