Blade

Chapter Three Ana

Chapter Three

Ana

Now

I am stunned. Electrified. Calling after Grace as she leaves the room.

“What does that mean?”

Her pace quickens, and I follow, down the short hall to the stairs.

“Grace—wait! You are safe. I promise!”

A door opens at the top and Jolene appears, dressed in sweatpants and a sweater, her hair flying around her face where it’s come loose from a clip.

“What’s happening?”

Grace reaches her mother. She tries to walk past her to the bedroom down the hall—the one she’s been locked in all afternoon, since the moment she got back from the police station, where they took her fingerprints and installed the bracelet around her ankle.

Jolene grabs her arm. “Grace! Stop. Talk to us. Please!”

But Grace pulls away, her face showing the same anger that was captured on that video.

“I can’t skate with this thing on my leg!” she screams, bending down, taking hold of the thick plastic. Trying to rip it from her ankle.

Jolene takes a step closer, reaches out and grabs her daughter’s arm before she hurts herself. “Stop, sweetheart—please,” she says, her voice shaking. “You can skate again when this is sorted out.”

But Grace doesn’t seem to care about any of this—the charges that might be filed later this week. The evidence against her. The man who’s been murdered.

“Get away from me!” she screams. “I can’t miss Nationals!”

Jolene looks to me for help, but I shake my head. I know this kind of rage. It hijacks the brain. We won’t be able to reach her until she calms down.

“Sweetheart!” Jolene says, ignoring my cues. Her voice is steeped in desperation.

Grace walks down the hall, then stops and turns, looking at her mother and then to me. “You don’t understand. Neither of you even came close to what I have!”

And with that, she silences us and disappears into her room with a slam of the door.

Jolene covers her face with her hands and shakes in disbelief, staring at the empty hallway. I grab hold of the rail, close my eyes, and take a long breath.

Grace is not my child. She’s a client. And I haven’t seen Jolene for sixteen years.

I think about what I know. What I just talked about in Aspen for five days, in endless seminars and workshops.

I can’t be derailed by what Grace said. Kids say all kinds of things when I first meet them.

Because as much as I tell them I’m here to help, I’m still part of the process connected to what is likely the greatest trauma they will ever experience.

This is normal, I remind myself.

There’s work to do. Focus on the work.

First and foremost, I tell myself, is making the list, the agenda for the defense—we need a psychological profile.

An explanation for why she keeps telling the same story that doesn’t add up.

Why she shows no emotion, then erupts into rage.

Is it the shock of a trauma? A mental break?

Calculated manipulation? Antisocial personality disorder or another sociopathic illness?

Yes, I think, centering myself as I open my eyes and walk up the last few steps to stand beside Jolene. I fight the urge to take her in my arms, this woman who was once a girl I loved so much her unraveling became my own.

She glossed over their history when she first called me in Aspen, and earlier today while Grace hid in her room.

A bitter divorce when Grace’s stepfather had an affair.

His move to California from their home in Oklahoma.

Even back then, Grace had been one of the most talented skaters in the country, something I might have known sooner if I still followed the sport.

Jolene didn’t want her distracted or possibly derailed.

So she sent Grace to The Palace twenty-two months ago, hoping to save her career from the domestic chaos.

I feel a jump in my chest, my pulse quickening as I remember my own mother driving away from Avery Hall, leaving me in this unimaginable place where nothing I’d learned in my thirteen years about life applied.

I couldn’t see the dangers around me. The peers who were also my competitors.

The mothers in the stands who weren’t like any mothers I’d ever known.

Dawn and the Fear Training. The strangers in the field where we went to escape.

And Emile Dresiér.

Jolene said she’d given Grace a checklist, a survival guide, thinking that would be enough. But knowledge isn’t the same as experience. She had to know that.

I hear a breath labor inside her chest. Her hands fall to her sides as she turns her head to look at me.

“Did she say anything?” Jolene asks, wide eyed.

I lie by omission.

“More of the same—she says she doesn’t know anything about the murder.”

“God . . .”

I take her arm, lead her into the bedroom, and sit beside her on the edge of the mattress.

“I don’t understand any of this.”

“I know,” I tell her. And that’s the truth. She has no idea.

The first thing Jill taught me when I was hired was that parents, like their children, are not evil.

They didn’t want this outcome, their child accused of committing a crime.

They didn’t see where their parenting, their personal decisions, their own behavior setting an example—even just their benign neglect—might lead.

How nurture (or its lack) was the predominant factor in children becoming criminals—and that nurturing was their job.

It’s a tired analogy, but we don’t let people drive without obtaining a license. Yet anyone can have a child, raise a child, and not know what the hell they’re doing. No particular preparation, no training beyond whatever modeling they had from their own parents.

When they crash that child into a tree and claim they didn’t know how to steer, well—I sometimes choke on my disdain.

Maybe that’s what this is. The weight pressing on my heart. Somehow I thought we’d all felt the same way about this place. The four of us. The Orphans. If that wasn’t true, which one of us was wrong?

Jolene can see these thoughts as they march across my face like an army headed to battle.

“It was a gift to be here,” she says. “To have the chance for this kind of dream.”

I draw a breath and push it down, hard, into my lungs.

“You know how good she is, right? She landed two triple Axels at Sectionals. Next year she could have a quad. And she’s so beautiful out there . . .”

Jolene gets up to find a box of tissues.

“She’s right. I never got close to what she has.”

I release the air from my lungs and feel these things swirl in my memory.

The Axel—the hardest of the triple jumps because of the forward takeoff, the extra half rotation required to land backward.

More speed. Faster spin in the air. When we were here, the triple Axel was a novelty among the women skaters but also the future of the sport. A future that is now here.

Jolene folds one leg under the other, the way she used to when we lived together at Avery Hall. And for a split second, I see her there, the long red waves of hair, the mischievous smile.

“What do you think happened to Emile?” I ask.

Jolene doesn’t look at me but reaches for my hand, and suddenly the comfort she once gave me is back, racing through my blood. Filling my bones.

“If I thought she was in trouble, I would have brought her home.”

“I know.”

“I always looked after you, and Indy . . . and Kay—I tried to . . .”

“I know.” I close my eyes, jolted by the mention of their names.

Then she laughs before the tears come.

“IndyAna,” she whispers.

I pull my hand away, stand from the bed as if it just caught fire.

“This isn’t about us,” I tell her.

I explain how I have to clinically understand Grace’s mind. “We need mitigating circumstances—which I can then shape into a defense as an expert. This is what I do now. We need the story, Jo. Not our story, but hers. What happened to her. To Grace.”

Even as I say these words, I feel split in two. Two chapters of my life. Two entirely different selves. The defender of children. The helpless Orphan. The one I love. The one I hate.

Grace’s words ring in my head. It’s all your fault.

I recite the evidence. She was last seen getting a ride from Emile Dresiér, from Avery Hall to The Palace.

She was wearing the signature blue skating dress with yellow butterflies—the same one every skater got when they walked through the door, even for a one-week summer session.

It was brilliant advertising—wherever those skaters went to train next, The Palace would go with them.

“And the skates,” I say now. “They were in her locker, cleaned, but with traces of blood on the right boot. The lock was intact.”

Jolene gets up, shaking her head. “You’re talking like she might have done this.”

“That’s what I do, Jo—I’m not an investigator. I build defenses.”

“No!” The softness, the vulnerability drains from Jolene’s face as she becomes a warrior for her daughter. And this, too, brings me back. Jolene had tried to protect us for as long as she could.

“Grace didn’t do this,” she insists. “She left Emile at the rink and came back here. Anyone could have taken her skates. Taken the dress.”

“And the video?” I remind her.

Jolene gets off the bed and starts to walk, pacing the room, bare feet pounding the blue specked carpet.

“Four strikes to his head with the heel of her blade? No—she adored Emile. Just like we did.” Jolene weaves her fingers through her hair and closes them into two fists. Then she walks to the window and looks out to the night sky. The pitch black with the flickering lights.

And I wonder, as I did with Grace moments before, where they land, her big blue eyes.

On The Palace? The fifth light on the access road—Dawn’s house and the guest cottage where Emile lived?

Or the patch of darkness before the highway?

The field where Emile’s body was found, buried in the blood and snow?

Or does she see Emile? His dark eyes. The wave in his hair. He towered over me but stood eye to eye with Jolene. Maybe she’s remembering the way he walked, the distinctive limp from the fall that ruined his career, relegating him to a life coaching beside Dawn Sumner. Beneath her, as her assistant.

Dawn. I see us on a couch in her living room, watching my programs on a large television screen. I see the rich colors on the walls and fabric, reds and blues. Soft velvet and candles burning. Sinking in, safe. Warm.

But then, her voice. “There! You see? You slowed down before the takeoff. You were afraid.” And then silence as the music played, and I stroked around the edge of the boards, cut into the middle.

A turn, a toe pick jabbing into the ice, a catapult sending me into the air.

Dawn beside me, so close I can feel the heat from her body as my back stiffens, watching myself on the screen, knowing what’s about to happen and what I felt when it did happen.

The relief when the edge of my blade dug in for a landing.

And the shock when my body slammed into the ice.

I can see me now, my younger self, watching as Dawn frowned, or smiled, assessing my performance. Her feelings about me becoming my own. A flood of joy. A flood of despair that I think just might kill me.

Dawn Sumner.

Her voice is in my head. Don’t tell the others. This is our special time. Our secret. I didn’t understand why she brought me to her house for dinner. I didn’t understand why Emile joined us, walking up from the guest cottage where he lived back then.

I wonder now about Grace. If Dawn sneaked her out of Avery Hall, too, brought her home for stir-fry and orange soda.

Videos of her programs, smiles and hugs that left her with the same desperate swells of joy and despair.

And if Emile Dresiér was always waiting for this to break her down into pieces so that he could pick them up off the ground.

If Dawn did bring Grace to her house, singled her out for conditioning or training or whatever the hell that was, Grace might be afraid to say anything that would hurt The Palace—even if it meant saving herself. And now Grace’s words take on new meaning.

It’s not safe here.

Jolene tells me the facts she’s been clinging to.

“Nothing was ever reported about this place. There was no abuse, no sexual misconduct, no neglect. It’s different now, Ana. After what happened.”

Jolene walks toward me, stopping just far enough so she can see my whole face but still take my hands in hers.

“Your life turned out okay, didn’t it?” she asks.

And this catches me off guard.

I left this place at sixteen, spent two years at boarding school on the East Coast, went to Middlebury, then NYU Law.

I was an acclaimed defender of traumatized children.

Practically a celebrity, according to Artis, who has followed my career.

I’m the children’s mouthpiece. I win back their lives.

All of those things have been said about me.

How ironic that I was, in the end, hailed as a kind of champion.

And a walking endorsement for The Palace.

Her question hangs in the air. Your life turned out okay . . .

I stayed at The Palace after Kayla and Jolene both left. I stayed with Indy. Me and Indy. IndyAna.

Grace’s other words play again, this time with new meaning.

It’s all your fault.

My fault.

Me—Ana Robbins. The skater from The Palace. The Orphan at Avery Hall. The one person who also knows the truth about Emile Dresiér. About the field. About the room next to Dawn’s office where we learned how to fight our fear.

And who hasn’t told a soul. Not even Jolene, who might have understood. And who could have foreseen the danger it still posed to Grace.

I’m the one who didn’t try to stop it, even though helping children is my life’s work.

It’s all your fault.

And I think now, fuck.

Maybe it is.