Caught in the Blaze

Loony Bin

2

Randy Williams was the one who found her daughter, sitting on the curb of the old gas station mini mart staring out blankly at the inky sky. The girl was tiny, small even for the age of ten. She had a rich, amber colored hair, part of the reason why the little child's name was Amber, and partly because it was Randy's favorite stone.

The police were there too, and two balding men in uniforms restrained the hysterical woman from thrashing at her own daughter. The lights from the sirens flashed red and blue against the child's face, but still she remained motionless, distant, blank and as unreadable as white paper, even as her own mother fought against the police to get at her, screaming and crying, even as her house burned not an eighth of a mile away, even as her step daddy lay dead, burned into the floor, and even as a woman by the name of Franny sat beside her and took her small hand, leading her towards the police car, setting her in the seat, closing the door against the world.

If anyone had asked Amber Williams what she remembered from the date June 8th to July 16th, she would have answered quite simply: nothing. There was a blank spot in her life, an empty space where too many things happened, where too many people talked to her, where too many life changing events took place. Amber was in shock-that's what an intensive therapist for criminally damaged children had told the judge-in a sort of living coma state. The judge looked over his half glasses at the small unresponsive girl, staring out eerily at nothing, and humphed, before continuing to scan the papers in front of him. Amber was "gone" for a month, a month where her mother, Randy Williams, declared she wanted nothing to do with the child, a month where a hundred therapists, shrinks, meds, and police, visited her, the month it took to decide what to do with a ten year old girl who had set someone on fire. And then one day, she blinked, and looked up at a woman with dark hair and brown eyes. Her name was Franny, and she was with child protective services, and she knelt down beside Amber and smiled.

"Are you back?" she asked, and that was the beginning of the end.

Amber's age and her psychiatric state made commitment to a mental hospital the only reasonable option. She didn't know where she was for weeks anyway. It took five weeks of intensive therapy to retrieve Amber from her near-catatonic state. Five weeks.

There was therapy. Play therapy. Group therapy. Art therapy. Puppet therapy. She did everything they asked, drew pictures, looked at books, took pills, but she didn't speak.

There were legal reasons to keep her in the hospital, before she could be released doctors had to say she understood what she did. That she understood it. A judge had to say she was not a danger to herself or others, and if she wasn't talking, it wasn't going to happen.

Amber turned eleven.

She should have been in girl scouts.

She weighed seventy-two pounds.

She had a loose tooth.

She had murdered a human being.

Amber watched the clock as the thin, long, red hand ticked by another second. It was towards the middle of her hour of not talking to the therapist, who had her heeled feet propped up on her desk, and was reading a magazine about sailing. The shrink was wearing red-rimmed glasses that matched her cherry glossed shoes, and as Amber watched her, she flipped the page, to show her she had all the time in the world.

Well, so did she. Two could play at that game, and Amber went back to watching the clock.

"I get paid whether you talk to me or not," the shrink said, not looking up. The second ticked closer to the top of the clock.

"I know," Amber responded, and her own voice surprised her. It sounded rusty and unfamiliar. The shrink seemed just as surprised, but she played it cool, as if Amber hadn't noticed her face change at all.