When She Was Bad(101)

But something about Laurie, about the way she looked at me with those clear green eyes, her stubborn determination to try to make good of the shitty hand she’d been dealt, made me stick to my guns. Like Ed and Dan, I could see she had the potential to be happy, well-adjusted even, but unlike them I believed – no, I knew – that in order to achieve that bright future she would have to work through the darkness of her past. The lapses in her behaviour were too striking to ignore. Rather than going to a new environment and suppressing her past, folding it up into a tiny pocket inside her where it wouldn’t show but would always be there, she needed intensive ongoing therapy. She needed to talk about what had happened to her, to take it out of whatever box she’d put it in and shake it like a dusty tablecloth and expose it to the air so it lost its power.

I knew this in my gut. So I stood my ground against Kowalsky and Oppenheimer, and when they threatened to overrule me, I brought in my own experts, mostly from the very same elite universities Oppenheimer would later go on to work for. I called these experts in the evenings, leaving long messages on their answer-machines. There were a couple of ‘no’s’ but mostly they were keen to get involved, to bring their new theories to bear on this high-profile case. There was growing evidence to show that intensive early therapy in the first three years of life when the brain was still developing was much more effective in cases of serious trauma than waiting to treat problems that emerged in adulthood. I worked through the night in the university library so I could provide study after study to support my conviction that Laurie needed to stay where her past was acknowledged and dealt with, so that eventually she could be done with it and move on.

I was not popular. But I did my homework, and impressed the right people, and in the end an extraordinary meeting of all the relevant authorities ruled that Laurie should remain under our supervision and the adoption order was rescinded.

Her brother was a different matter. David. Child D. Aka The Thing.

A year and a half younger, he had been treated by a range of medical experts. In addition to Oppenheimer and Kowalsky, he’d received intensive therapy to deal with the physical effects of being kept incarcerated and intermittently restrained at such an early and vital stage in his development. He had to learn to walk properly, using muscles that had atrophied through lack of use. Vocally his development was also severely retarded. He’d been denied even the most basic social interaction. He’d never had the chance to absorb language or to develop his own speech. A small but dedicated team from the university’s Department of Cognitive and Linguistic Sciences had worked tirelessly with him over a period of months to overcome the delays to his communication skills.

But while physically he responded to treatment better than anyone dared hope, it was his emotional development that was deemed most critical, and in this respect, too, his progress far exceeded all expectations. Dan Oppenheimer and Ed Kowalsky were the ones who had ultimately rubber-stamped the adoption order, some months after the battle for Laurie’s future had been concluded. Their earlier pessimism had been misplaced, they decided. He would recover. He would forget.

‘Did you meet him? My brother?’

Since I asked her to come sit with me on the couch, so we could talk properly, Shannon has listened to me in virtual silence. That’s always been her way. Though naturally voluble and inclined to speak without thinking first, when the stakes are highest, she waits and considers before deciding on a reaction or an emotion, as if she is selecting clothes from an open closet. She has always known her early years were traumatic. She knows she was made a ward of state after her parents failed to take care of her. She knows she had a brother who was adopted overseas. She knows she had years of therapy when she was very young, and that’s how we met. She knows both her parents were incarcerated for what they did to their children.

The facts I haven’t shared with her are these: her parents were sentenced to life imprisonment for their maltreatment of their son. Her father has been on the psych ward of a medical centre for federal prisoners in Missouri for over two decades since he started believing he was God. Her mother – dead-eyed Noelle Egan – was released from prison five years ago. Her willingness to testify against her husband and her insistence that she’d been in thrall to him, incapable of independent action, worked in her favour. She was also, by all accounts, an exemplary prisoner. When I learned she was free and had been sniffing around after her daughter, I went back through the files making sure there was no trail leading to Shannon. Noelle has always believed both her children were adopted overseas. That way, I was able to keep my daughter safe.