Missing Pieces by Joy Fielding

room.
    “Watch it,” I warned.
    “Watch this,
Ms.
Therapist!” Her door slammed shut.
    “Make that three weeks,” Larry yelled after her. The response was the sound of a shoe crashing against her still-vibrating door.
    Seconds later, Michelle tiptoed out of her bedroom, fixed her father and me with her most baleful glance. “You know that grounding never works,” she intoned, the seriousness of her message undermined somewhat by the teddy bear nightgown she was wearing. “Grounding only makes kids angry.”
    She’s right, I thought. “Go back to sleep,” I said.
    Not that it’s all been awful as far as Sara is concerned. Aside from the sheer creativity of some of her tirades, there is also a tremendous vulnerability, a genuine sweetness to Sara. Behind those enormous breasts beats the heart of a good kid. Sara is a child trapped inside a woman’s body. She still isn’t ready to come out.
    I remember when she got her period for the first time. She was fifteen years old, which is late, and she’d long ago forgotten the mother-daughter discussion we’d had about such things. She took the pads I gave her, and skulked from the room, as if this appalling state of affairs was something I’d wished on her. The next morning, I asked if the pads had interfered with her sleep.
    She looked horrified. “You mean you have to wear them at night?!”
    I still laugh about that one, as I do when I recall her disgust some four days later. “How long does this go
on
?” she demanded indignantly. I didn’t have the heart to tell her another thirty-five years.
    One night, Sara was reluctantly helping me stack the dinner dishes inside the dishwasher. I’d lined all the glasses along one side. There was one left over, which I placed on the other side of the dishwasher. Sara immediately took a glass from my neat row and put it beside the single one. “I don’t want it to be lonely,” she explained.
    It was all I could do to keep from crying. Instead, I hugged her and told her I loved her. Sara tolerated my embrace, mumbled something about loving me too, then left the room.
    So, how does one reconcile the sweet innocent thing who worries about the feelings of dirty dishes with the foul-mouthed hellion who doesn’t seem to understand that human beings have feelings too?
    “The apple doesn’t fall far from the tree,” I tell my clients, seeking to reassure them—and no doubt myself—that eventually life returns to normal, that teenagers such as Sara do become human beings again. Provided they live long enough.
    Is it true we get the children we need?
    I wonder what my mother would say to that. So, to answer my own question, I don’t know whether or not I could have prevented much of what happened later had I acted differently in the beginning. Hindsight, as they say, is twenty-twenty. You do the best you can with what you’ve got. Sometimes it’s good enough. Sometimes it isn’t.

    I steadfastly refused all Jo Lynn’s entreaties to accompany her back to the courthouse, insisting that neither Colin Friendly nor her designs on him held any interest for me. In truth, I’d started following the case quite closely in the paper and on television. In the last week, the prosecutor had called a long string of witnesses to the stand, all of whom had been able, in one way or another, to connect the defendant to at least eight of the dead girls. An elderly man testified to having seen one of the victims giving Colin Friendly directions on the day she disappeared; a teary-eyed woman swore she’d seen him sitting on a bench in the park where her friend regularly walked her dog. The dog had been found by a group of children as he wandered aimlessly through nearby streets, dragging his leash behind him. His owner—or rather, what was left of her—had been discovered four months later by a group of campers near Lake Okeechobee. The medical examiner had since determined that she’d been raped, beaten, then stabbed some eighty-six