Free Gideon - 02 - Probable Cause by Grif Stockley

worry about her,” I say tentatively, hoping I’m not being presumptuous.
    I know firsthand how meaningless words of sympathy are from most people. The pain from the death of someone you love can hardly be imagined by someone else. In an effort to establish my sincerity, I add, “My wife died of cancer, so I Spock pretty easily.”
    I have pushed the right button. Olivia’s small bust rises and falls as she sighs, “How old is your daughter?” “Seventeen,” I say and, unable to stop myself, add, ‘she’s at the Governor’s School at Hendrix College for the Gifted and Talented this summer.”
    Her smile is genuine.
    “You must be very proud.”
    “I am,” I say and stop. How callous can I be? Her child was born without a normal brain, the first words out of my mouth are how superior my child is.
    Olivia’s gray eyes are warm with concern as she empathizes.
    “I understand how you feel about your daughter. Unless she was in restraints or heavily drugged, there were times I couldn’t stop worrying about Pam, and then it was a different kind of worry. When you have a child who injures herself, for months every time the phone rings after it happens you think they’re calling you to tell you something new and even more horrible than before.”
    I have begun to nod, but I can’t really even imagine what she has gone through. Almost every day with Sarah has been ajoy; has this woman even had one happy day with her child?
    How has she endured it? As grotesque as shock sounds, a radical form of treatment at some point may seem unavoidable.
    However, probably only the parent of the child can say that convincingly. For the next forty minutes Olivia Le Master tells me a story that I will remember the rest of my life, for it is impossible for me not to think of Sarah while she recounts her child’s tortured existence. While I listen to the predictable anguish and guilt all parents must feel upon learning their child is retarded, I think of how much I take my daughter’s normality for granted. Would I have deserted Rosa (as Olivia Le Master’s husband did) if Sarah had turned out to be profoundly retarded? Surely not, I tell myself, but the truth is that I would have been sorely tempted. As she speaks, I can hear my mother saying an hour before the wedding: God knows, Gideon, you don’t know a thing about her background. She, of course, was not so obliquely referring to my own father’s mental illness. Knowing myself, I would have tried to find a way to blame Rosa had Sarah been screwed up. How does a young mother have the strength by herself to raise a child like that at home? Incredibly, Olivia Le Master tried, but she found it was impossible alone. She had to work to support herself, and child care is difficult enough in Arkansas under the best of circumstances. For her, but perhaps not for others, she concedes, it was too much.
    Certain she was abandoning her daughter when she began to abuse herself, Olivia placed Pam in the Blackwell County Human Development Center when she was ten.
    “You can’t imagine the relief I felt when she was accepted,” Olivia says, her eyes filling with tears.
    “I felt I could breathe for the first time since my husband ran off.”
    Men are truly jerks, I think. What makes us weaker than women? Is it simply that they are the ones to have children and thus come by a sense of responsibility more naturally?
    As I listen to her account, I imagine I am hearing the story of every women who has turned her child over to the state.
    If she missed a weekly visit, she felt enormous guilt. In a kind of feeble way I try to identify with her. There have been more nights than I care to remember when I have come home much later than I promised Sarah. The look on her face (anger and relief) has, from time to time, haunted my dreams.
    Still, time brings a measure of acceptance of events that cannot be reversed. A healthy sense of fatalism, Olivia calls it during the interview, and though I don’t