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“Frost, you know I can’t. As her psychiatrist, I must keep everything she tells me confidential, just as I can’t tell her what happened to you.”
“Please…”
Grey sighed in defeat. “If you’re bent on this, as I know you are, then you need to bide your time and be there for her. It won’t be long before she confesses to you herself.”
“You don’t understand.” Frost hesitated, but with the confidentiality point in mind, went on. “Jonathan Aaron is in jail, awaiting prosecution. He tried to kill her last week and I found her just in time to save her. But, because she knows the defense attorney can pull her medical files, she wants me to release him.”
Grey’s eyebrows rose in surprise. Then, his face turned calculating and his mouth became a thin grey line. “Knowing what I do about the legality surrounding her circumstances, I’d stand by her. She won’t be a reliable witness for you, Frost.”
“But I know there is record of a bruise shaped like his ring in her file. If we have that, we prove he hit her and that the bruise was recorded during the same hospital trip after which he threw her down a flight of stairs.”
“Can you prove she went down a flight of stairs or that she was pushed? Can you prove that she received that bruise less than a minute before she went down the stairs? What you have is battery, Frost. Battery and a lot of accusations with no backing. Furthermore, if you knew what I did about Poe’s medical history, you would not want it announced in a courtroom any more than she does.”
Frost just stared at him, his hands fisted, looking ready to punch through every wall between the office and the Aaron house in The Heights, even as a terrible agony lay hidden in his eyes. “If I tell you what I suspect happened to her, will you confirm it?”
Grey shook his head sadly. “I can’t even do that. And in any case, there is no way in Hell that you could imagine it.”
“In your professional opinion, is there any chance at all that she can heal?”
Grey’s eyes tightened, calculating again, but with much more awful figures in his equations. “The trouble, Frost, is that no one should have survived half the things Poe endured. In this country, people commit suicide every day for the most temporary of reasons. What you’re talking about should have been a death sentence. She survived the ordeal and as soon as she was able, she should have killed herself. Every day since that nightmare should have been her last, but she keeps going. If she is given a chance to heal, it is possible. The problem is that this business with her foster-father and whatever it is that she is hiding from me could put her over the edge.”
FIFTEEN
I was in the same violet room I had stayed in once, waiting anxiously for Maddi to return with her make-up and my mysterious outfit for the evening when the door opened a crack and Trina peeked in. All I could see of her through the narrow threshold was half of her face and her fingers holding open the door. Her platinum blond hair was pulled back. “Poe?” she asked timidly.
I stood up from where I had established myself cross-legged on the floor, hearing some of my joints crunch with stiffness as I did so. “What is it, Trina? Come on in.”
Trina slipped through the door and shut it behind her, then turned to me. I smiled broadly as I looked down at Frost’s little sister. “You look beautiful!” When I had imagined Trina as a ballerina, I’d pictured her in a puffy pink tutu and pink tights. This went to show just how little I knew about ballet and about Trina. The only part of the image I had correct was ballet slippers. Trina wore a stunning white satin dress that fell gently over her shoulders and cascaded to just above her knees like a waterfall. Silver glitter streaked across the dress in thin lines, as if carved there by ice-skates. She wore white tights and ballet slippers and her hair was done up magnificently. The pale blond locks were curled to perfection and pulled back on one side, draping over her other shoulder artfully. Maddi had obviously gotten to her, as she wore blush on her china-doll white cheeks and white glitter eyeshadow around her icy blue eyes.
“Thanks,” Trina said uncertainly, looked down at her slipper-clad feet. Her heels were together and toes pointed out. I wondered if she always stood like that. I thought back to what Frost had said about just how long Trina had been trained as a ballerina. Since she was three? Two?
She didn’t say anything else. I frowned and bent my knees a little to look at her face closer. Her eyes were watery. “Hey,” I said quietly. “Are you okay, sweetie?”
“I don’t know.”
I knelt down before her and took both her hands. I tried to catch her eye and finally she looked to me, on the verge of tears. “Trina, what’s wrong? It’s okay, honey, you can tell me,” I said gently.
Trina nodded and sobbed quietly, but the tears didn’t spill over. “I just…I’m scared.”
Panic immediately began to seep through my veins. With all that was going on lately, what with Mr. Aaron and all the Edgar Allan Poe nonsense, the concept of fear was something that to me meant a huge deal. Fear to me usually meant a matter of life and death. “Of what?” I whispered gently.
“Being on stage. What if I mess up and everybody laughs at me?”
I sighed in relief and pulled Trina into a hug. “Oh, Trina, you’ll be great. I know you will. You won’t mess up and not a single person is going to laugh at you. I’m sure they’ll all be struck dumb by how amazing you are.” At this, Trina chuckled once, as if in disbelief. I continued. “But you shouldn’t care what they think. They don’t matter. All that you should be concerned with isyoubeing happy with how you dance.”
Trina bit her lip and looked at me uncertainly. “But…what if I’m not really…what if I don’t think I did a good job?”
I hadn’t considered this, but now as she asked I immediately realized the answer. “Well I can tell you right now that even if you mess up, you’ll still be a thousand times more graceful than me. But, more importantly, no matter how bad you do you’re going to make your brother very proud.”
She raised an eyebrow, a gesture which reminded me eerily of Frost when he was wondering if I was insane. “Ryan will sleep through the entire thing.”
I rolled my eyes. “Yeah, he probably will. I meant Frost. He loves you very, very much, Trina. No matter what you do, he will always be proud of you. If I were you, I wouldn’t care what anyone else thought. I wouldn’t even care if I hit each step right. I’d just dance whatever my heart feels. I’d dance for him.”
Trina smiled gratefully and nodded, giving me a tight hug, then pulling away, still smiling. “Thanks, Poe.”
She turned to leave, but as she placed her tiny hand on the door handle, she turned and looked at me again, still smiling. “Poe?”
I shifted my stance slightly and was rewarded by a loudcrunchin my right knee. I really needed to stop sitting cross-legged like that. “Yeah, Trina?”
