Strawgirl Read Free Page B

with one finger on the piano. And a Cairn terrier named McDermott who howled when her mother practiced the violin and slept every night with his head on Bo's pillow. Vague, innocent memories devoid of the complexity only possible after the brain has completed its circuitry between five and six years of age. "The age of reason" defined by the ancients. The age when it is possible to learn to read, to manipulate symbols, to frame ideas of right and wrong. Samantha Franer would never be six years old now. She would remain forever three, just a memory of a flaxen-curled toddler frozen in the minds of those who loved her. Like Bo's sister, Laurie, who twelve years after her death was still twenty. Who would always be twenty.
    Bo squeezed her eyes shut and felt tears spill and run down her flushed cheeks. But was she crying for the dead child on the operating table or for her own sister whose suicide twelve years ago had triggered in Bo a depression so profound she'd been hospitalized for three months? It was hard to tell. But she was going to have to get control of herself.
    "So what will it take?" the imagined voice of her best-loved psychiatrist, the sprightly Dr. Lois Bittner, echoed from the past. "A piano has to drop on your head out of the sky before you see you're in trouble?"
    "I'm not in trouble," Bo told the gray ceramic wall. "I'm okay without the lithium. I've just never seen a child dead on an operating table before. I mean anybody might decompensate a little. . ." she exaggerated the psychiatric term, ". . .seeing that."
    "You're not anybody," the memory pointed out with dogged good cheer. "You have manic depression. You have to protect yourself."
    Bo considered the savage arrogance necessary for the act of rape, and realized that she would never comprehend it, only hate it. An act somehow generated in the chemistry of the male, where apelike charades of dominance could go wrong and become brutal defilement. But to defile a thing with no defenses, no hope of resistance or self-protection? Even though her job required near-daily brushes with its not uncommon reality, the rape of children continued to shock Bo. A sickening horror endured by millions of children every day. And this one was magnified by its deadly outcome—the pale, still body below.
    Bo wished Lois Bittner were still alive. Wished she could talk about what she'd just seen. Wished she could climb the wooden stairs to the shrink’s comfortable loft office in a seasoned downtown St. Louis building that had been new when Teddy Roosevelt took office, kick off her shoes, and talk. Bittner had been a complete fluke, a coincidence, a mistake. And the best thing that had happened in Bo's train wreck of a life.
    Turning to hunker on her heels with her back to the wall, Bo massaged her skull to erase the scene in the operating room and let herself remember Lois Bittner. A reassuring memory in spite of its beginning. A mental earthwork buffering the shadowless image of the dead child below.
    A depression, the worst ever, had crept like an iron fog into Bo's brain after Laurie's funeral. In the beginning she'd thought she could handle it. Driving the new BMW Mark had bequeathed her as compensation for annulling their marriage of three years, she'd left Boston a week after the funeral and begun the cross-country trek. The long drive back to Los Alamos where she'd continued to work on the Navajo reservation after her husband left to find a wife who would bear his children. A wife with no history of psychiatric problems. The BMW had held up well, but by St. Louis the same could not be said of Bo. Everything had turned dark, colorless, without hope.
    Waking in a Holiday Inn overlooking the Mississippi River, Bo had looked out the window and understood that to go outside was to succumb. To go outside was to walk over the roughly cobbled bank and into mud-brown water that would swiftly cover her, swiftly drag her downward to an utter, final silence. There was no question