Birthdays of a Princess Read online

  “Her father’s name?”

  “Mike.”

  He wrote that down too.

  “And when did you and your daughter come back from the States?”

  “About three years ago.”

  “So, your daughter Tiara has been living here in British Columbia, in Vancouver, the past three years. Where did she go to school?”

  Now both women looked at him, Melissa spoke.

  “She’s done her eighth grade in the States—before we came back. Since then, well, she’s kind of looking. I’m homeschooling her to do her GE.”

  “To your knowledge, is your daughter taking drugs?”

  “No, she isn’t.”

  “You sure?”

  “Look, Inspector—”

  “Detective.”

  “Detective. She’s a teenager. They’re a bit wild sometimes, but she’s a good kid. Always has been, honestly. She’s going through a phase just now. If you have kids, you understand. Let me tell you about her. Just so you understand.”

  Macintosh didn’t want to understand. Christ Almighty, he should have insisted on Harding handling this. He couldn’t deal with stuff like this anymore.

  Melissa didn’t seem to notice his discomfort. She went on relentless.

  “My Tiara is bright and beautiful. She always got top marks on all her tests! I home-schooled her, you know, I used to be a teacher. Every single day I sat with her for hours on end and read to her and practiced writing and counting. I always insisted Tiara speak properly, so she wouldn’t adopt that dreadful Texas drawl, and she didn’t. My little girl was such a quick learner.”

  Finally, she needed to catch her breath and Macintosh took over again.

  “If your daughter is such an intelligent girl, how come you didn’t enroll her in high school when you came back to Canada?”

  “I told you, I’m homeschooling her.”

  “We didn’t find any registration for this.”

  “I didn’t get around to it. Good Lord, what else am I supposed to do? I can’t handle everything all by myself.”

  “It’s the law.”

  “So charge me.”

  Macintosh’s face turned to stone.

  “What about your daughter? Didn’t she want to meet kids her age?”

  “She was twelve years old, had never been in Canada before. When we left Texas she left her whole life behind her. I can understand why she refused to go to school. Can’t you?”

  “That’s not my position, ma’am,” he said.

  “And that is not the point, right? The point is, what happens now? What will happen to her? What will happen to me? When should I go and see her?”

  “I really can’t say, ma’am.”

  “Then find out, for crying out loud. Somebody has to know! Get your supervisor on the phone. Talk to somebody who knows. You can’t just leave me hanging in there. I’m her mother!”

  Macintosh thought she had a point there. He had come here to do the preliminary interview with the woman who was the mother of a crazy druggie gone wild. He had expected a run-down, anti-social milieu, not a clean, neat flat with all the signs of low-income suburbia—table and chairs cramped into a claustrophobic kitchen with cracked linoleum tiles, a pot of herbs on the windowsill, a bank calendar with red circles around several dates, tea cups that didn’t match, seat cushions that did. But all this didn’t silence the voice in the back of his head. There is something wrong with this whale of a mother. And the meddling granny.

  “Tell you what, ma’am,” Macintosh said. “Let me call my superior and see what can be arrange.”

  Both women nodded vigorously. He called Sergeant Tong at Homicide and read out what he had written. It wasn’t much.

  His boss didn’t sound too happy, which was understandable. In a serious case like this, with a minor committing attempted homicide in front of fourteen witnesses who would all have a different view of what had happened, a hell of a machinery would kick into gear.

  He listened to the Sergeant with growing incredulity.

  “I’m sorry,” Macintosh said, after he finally hung up. “We thought we could keep the lid on this one, with her being underage and all. You know, the press isn’t allowed to mention her name, and with the victim not…I mean, with it not being a homicide…we didn’t think it would be an item after the initial excitement…”

  “So what?” Granny asked. “Did she die?”

  He shook his head. “Not as far as we know.”

  “So, that’s good, isn’t it?” The two women exchange a conspiratorial look of relief. “Nobody will know Tiara’s name. Nobody will know who she is.”

  “Wrong,” he said. “It’s all over the internet. Somebody posted a full, unedited clip of Tiara’s attack on YouTube, and it’s gone viral.”

  “Oh God,” Melissa sighed. “I guess I need to see her right away.”

  “I’m so sorry again,” Macintosh said. “You can’t.”

  “What are you talking about? She’s my daughter! I’ve got rights, as a mother. You can’t just ignore me.”

  “I understand, ma’am, but your daughter has rights too. And right now she refuses to see you.”

  Chapter 8

  My psycho-doc makes a fresh attempt to get me talking. Beware! Remember, he is dangerous. I’m back in his IAU office and stare at him with crossed arms (I know, that’s such a childish gesture, but how else can I demonstrate the insurmountable frontier I wish to establish).

  He pretends not to notice and carries on with his monolog as if we were having a perfectly normal conversation. Continues to stress again and again how important it is for me to find myself.

  I don’t tell him that I have already made an attempt to untangle the twisted fibers of my childhood and moor some of their frayed ends—or beginnings, whichever way you want to rope them in—in the notebook he gave me for exactly this purpose.

  “Leave me alone. I told you already, I don’t remember a thing.”

  He tries a different angle. “Nothing? You know who you are, don’t you?”

  “Maybe.”

  “Tell me about your childhood. Surely you’ll remember where you grew up. Let’s talk about that.”

  “Talking is not for me, it is too unstructured.” Will he understand that? I can’t drag fragments of memories to the surface and explain them at the same time. Writing them down seems to help me get them in order. When I hold onto a pencil, it seems much less threatening to follow a sequence of thoughts.

  So I cross my arms, press my lips together and watch his reaction.

  With a casual shrug of his shoulder, he closes his own empty notebook.

  “I’m sorry then. You leave me with no choice. My assessment will state that you are unwilling to cooperate. I will recommend that you should be remanded until a more comprehensive assessment establishes your mental state and until the police have been able to complete their investigation. I’ll forward my recommendations to the court in the next few days. This means bail is out of the question for the time being.”

  Hallelujah. I will not be sent back to my mom.

  “It’s over,” he says. “You played your card, and you wasted it.”

  After the interview, they take me back to the prison part of the complex.

  I have to surrender my green sweat suit and am given a purple combination. Can you believe this, purple, the color I hate even more than pink—then they dump me in a cell block they call Living Unit. Again, can you believe this? A living cell! Is that the opposite of dead cell?

  According to the instruction booklet they gave me—together with a hygiene pack (toothbrush, toothpaste, soap) and one set of bedding—there are many Living Units in the prison. For security reasons each unit is isolated from the others. I will have to share my Living Unit with up to seven other girls.

  Lucky for me, I’m the only inmate, oops, resident, in this particular Living Unit for the time being, due to the current low adolescent crime level in the Province. They tell me this might change any day
, and I hope my luck will hold indefinitely. I can’t stand other girls around me. If another Living Unit resident-inmate does arrive, and they pair her with me, I’ll make sure I’ll be locked into solitary faster than the speed of light.

  My cell is similar to the one in the medical assessment ward, except for one rather disgusting element. Next to my bunk bed is a stainless steel toilet. The door has a narrow glass window inserted for the guard to peek through it. There is no way I can cover it. I own nothing. That’s why, I guess, there is no wardrobe in here. I have a small desk with a chair in front, and there is a window between the bed and the desk. I can actually look through the metal bars if I stretch my neck. The outside is segmented into neat squares.

  Lying on my bunk bed, I study my rights and responsibilities in the instruction booklet. I am a Level 1, which means, no privileges. For me, it’s lights out at 8.30 pm every night.

  A very faint Vancouver night shines into my cell. Thank you, city lights. I can’t sleep yet, it’s too early. A conversation forms in the dark, and as much as I try, I can’t stop asking questions and giving answers. It’s a vicious circle, a merry-go-round of nonsense.

  To appease my carousel mind, I take my journal and scribble along in the semi-dark.

  Birthday One

  Okay, I’m not trying to fool you again. I know that you know by now that I wouldn’t remember that particular birthday either. But according to Gracie, this birthday number one was an important one. It was the day my mom turned around.

  You see, until then, she’d been deeply depressed, which is understandable for several reasons. Her husband didn’t leave her any money (first reason) because he hadn’t really been her husband. In all the excitement of their youthful passion, this formality hadn’t been on their priority list. And this with a baby at home (second reason) which wasn’t even her home (third reason) but belonged to my aunt. Get the drift?

  In that first year and for many years to come, Gracie was much more than an aunt to me. She fed me, bathed me, sung me lullabies and took me for stroller outings along the ocean front, next to the highway, where the noise of the cars racing by gets lost in the seagulls’ fierce battle-cries over the surf’s decaying spoils, and the smell of the salty breeze overpowers the stench of the car fumes. You see, Galveston is considered a sea-side town, while in reality it is a freeway-side town. All the houses and shops are on the northern side; south of the four lane concrete snake lies only the beach and a few forlorn, dated tourist attractions.

  Lovely walks she took with me, along this chopped off piece of a struggling make-believe ocean-beauty, stopping whenever she met somebody she knew. Who would expect the handy little bags of white stuff underneath my pillow to be anything but baby powder?

  How do I know this? I’m making an educated guess here, having had enough opportunities to notice her illegal activities later on in life.

  Above and beyond her struggles to provide for me and Mom, I know Gracie did love me. I picture myself neatly tucked into the pink stroller with a pink foldable roof framed with pink ruffles to keep me protected from sun and wind and seagull-shit, with naked legs paddling in the fresh air, Gracie’s torso darkening my vision ever so often when she bent down to go tickle, tickle, my mija—she always called me mija, which means something like ‘sweetie’ in Spanish—her generous bosom dangling in front of my pink happy face. Pink was her thing. She loved that color and she loved me. I was her pink baby, and she couldn’t have been happier than in that first year when my mom was so miserable.

  On my first birthday she dressed me in my best pink attire and took me to a photographer. Gracie didn’t mind spending money on me. She always had enough money for the three of us to get by and for the up-keep of our drab but homely single-story structure in third row north of the all domineering oceanfront-freeway. In those days neither I nor my mom cared where the money came from—although Mom might have snapped out of her depression faster if she would have taken on the responsibility of providing for her infant.

  When Gracie came home with me from the photo session, she was still so excited that she forgot how catatonic my mom usually was when it came to her daughter.

  “Look, look,” she waved the picture in front of her, “look at her! She’s an angel!”

  The photographer had done me up with fluffy wings made of plastic feathers sprinkled with silver glitter. I’ve seen this picture often. He had captured an expression in my puffy baby face that was a mere fluke for sure, but made me look almost grown-up. There was purity and goodness—adorable, unspoiled beauty.

  My mom stared at this picture, and I don’t know what crossed her mind but I like to imagine something snapped. Is this child really mine? Even better: That child is Mike’s gift to me from heaven. Or better still: I love this little angel of mine.

  Gracie gushed on.

  “He didn’t take any money. Imagine, the photographer refused to get paid. He gave me money instead. Here, fifty dollars he gave me. All I had to do was sign a form that he could use the picture for his front window display. My mija is so beautiful, he said, people should see her. He wants to take more pictures. And he’ll pay for those too. I should come back, he said. Next week I’ll go—”

  “No!” my mom said.

  Gracie stared at her, dumbfounded.

  “You can’t just take her. She’s my daughter!”

  “You could’ve fooled me.”

  “Anyway, I don’t believe people pay so much money for baby pictures.”

  “Then come with me and find out for yourself.”

  And so the path of fate was corrected. Mom had woken up and joined the living again—if only to punish Gracie for not having a mija of her own.

  Chapter 9

  His day hadn’t started too well, with the milk carton slipping out of his hand and spilling its content on the floor. Because Macintosh couldn’t stomach the idea of coming back home to a rancid smell, he had wasted precious time cleaning up and risked being stuck in city traffic. Before he left his tiny apartment, he had noticed that the tray with his mail was screaming for attention. It would be mostly bills piling up there, but he couldn’t delay this chore much longer. God, how he missed his wife. She had kept such nuisance from him, and sometimes she must surely have felt unappreciated. It had seemed so insignificant then, but now he understood she had organized his whole life with the ease of a juggler. Five years of loneliness left their mark. If she were still alive, he would tell her every day how much he loved her and how grateful he was for everything she did for him.

  The day didn’t get any better once he had finally arrived at Graveley Street. All morning he was shoveling files around. Paperwork was tedious at best but today it performed a strict alibi function. Anything to keep his involvement in the Starbucks case to a minimum. But there was only that much desk work he was willing to tackle, and for some strange coincidence it was unusually quiet in the department. No new homicides, not even a measly brawl with bodily harm, to break the monotony.

  When Harding strolled by his desk, he closed the file he had been fiddling with.

  “Alright then,” he sighed. “What are you up to?”

  From there on, his day deteriorated even further.

  First he and Harding drove to Starbucks to look around the crime scene to get a better understanding. The manager on duty was immediately pestering them for more information. The place had acquired a morbid kind of celebrity status, he said, and his customers wanted to be fed with coffee, muffins and details. Macintosh realized with a twinge of annoyance that the manager probably knew more about it than they did.

  After that, they drove around the corner to St Paul’s Hospital, only to be told by the doctor on duty that there was no chance the victim would regain consciousness in the foreseeable future. In fact, she might never. In all likelihood, if she’d ever wake up, she’d have permanent brain damage. Her injures had been too severe and, to make matters worse, she’d gone into cardiac arrest on the way to emergency which had shut down
the oxygen flow to the brain for a dangerously long period.

  After listening to that depressing prognosis, they dropped by the psychiatrist’s office and were told the doc couldn’t see them. He had to go back to BYSC. Harding chose to take a route back to the station that let them down the same street Melissa Brown lived in and two things caught their attention. A mobile TV unit was racing around the corner at the same moment Melissa and her mother stepped out of their building.

  Macintosh told his partner to hit the brakes and waved at the women. They were startled at first, then recognized him. Macintosh didn’t waste any time explaining, but indicated they should get in the backseat.

  “What’s going on?” Louise asked, while they sped off.

  “Sorry about that,” Macintosh said. “We didn’t want the press to see you.”

  “We should have given those fucking scum-bags a ticket for speeding,” Harding said.

  Macintosh gave him a shut-up glance and turned back to Melissa.

  “Sorry, ma’am, but my partner has an intense dislike for the press. Can we take you somewhere?”

  “Yes!” Melissa leaned forward. “How about to my daughter?”

  Macintosh didn’t reply but looked at her apologetically, and she leaned back again, displeased and disapproving.

  Louise was holding her daughter’s arm in a motherly grip, hand over wrist. Don’t run away, all will be good.

  “We were going to the corner store for some groceries, and then maybe see a movie. We just wanted to get out of the flat for a while. You know, it gets boring being cooped up like that.”

  So the ladies were getting bored?

  “Well, since we’ve got you in the car,” Harding said, “why don’t you come to the department with us? We can get a few questions straightened out and won’t have to bother you later on.”

  “Of course we’ll come with you,” Louise agreed right away. “But what on earth did those press people want from us? How come they know where my daughter lives?”