I didn’t sense the same strength and confidence I usually heard in her voice. I sensed something different, something unnerving. Montoya sounded defeated.
“What do you mean?”
“She’s dead,” Montoya said softly.
I felt the floor fall out from under my feet, and my legs buckled. I stumbled to the bed so I didn’t fall.
“We had a meeting scheduled at seven thirty to go over everything. When Trina didn’t show up and I couldn’t raise her on her telephone, I sent a patrol by the hotel where she was staying.” Montoya paused to gather herself. She was, or had been, crying. “He shot her. Then he shot himself.”
12
David Bateman’s murder of his ex-wife and subsequent suicide made headlines in San Mateo County. I did not sleep that night, nor much that week. I feared going to bed and closing my eyes. David Bateman came every night, haunting me, taunting me. Trina and Daniela called out to me, pleaded with me, telling me that I had assured them no harm would come to them.
My insomnia stretched to months.
When I did sleep, it was with the aid of a pill, but even that did not prevent the nightmares, David Bateman shooting Trina Crouch, silver flashes blinding me, the thunder of the gun causing a ringing white noise in my ears that did not abate after I awoke. The persistent ringing prevented me from concentrating at work. I missed appointments. Mickie covered for me. I lost my train of thought in the middle of sentences. Large chunks of my day seemed to vanish, unaccounted for. My inability to sleep brought fatigue, which brought lethargy and a darkness I had never known.
At Mickie’s suggestion, I consulted Dr. Pridemore, who put me in contact with one of his colleagues at the Stanford medical school. The diagnosis was post-traumatic stress disorder, the illness so many young men brought home from the jungles of Vietnam. The doctor recommended therapy, which only confirmed what I had already concluded—I blamed myself for Trina Crouch’s death. I had been the one pushing her to stand up to her husband, and I couldn’t dismiss the thought that I had used her to do what I had been unable to do—to fight the bully. My counselor explained to me why that wasn’t the case. He told me that I, too, had been willing to stand up to David Bateman in court. He reasoned that even if I hadn’t, Trina still might very well be dead. He explained that David Bateman was psychopathic, so damaged as a child as to be beyond repair. It was all very rational and pragmatic, but it did not change the fact that Trina Crouch was dead and Daniela would be raised by an aunt in Tucson, without her mother or her father. It did nothing to cure my insomnia or my nightmares or to make me feel any less guilty. Now more than ever, David Bateman’s face and voice haunted me. It was as it had been in grammar school, his specter ever present.
Mickie suggested more counseling, but I had grown tired of people asking me how I felt and what I wanted. What did I want? I wanted to understand. I wanted to believe what every person on the planet wants to believe—that God had a plan for me, and that “God’s will” was not just a parent’s answer to silence a child who asked too many questions. I also knew I would not find that answer in Burlingame.
I cannot say I left Burlingame in search of answers. That would be a lie. At that moment, I was not searching for anything. I was running. I was running from Trina’s death, running from the memory of David Bateman, and running from a faith that seemed to solve every problem not with a solution but with an excuse.
“It’s God’s will.”
PART SEVEN
SAYING GOODBYES
1
April 1999
Costa Rica
Nine in the morning and I was already perspiring beneath a loose-fitting blue cotton shirt when my team of ophthalmologists arrived at an eye clinic set up in a concrete masonry building with a metal roof and no air-conditioning. Our visit, part of Orbis’s rural-outreach program, had been advertised on the national radio for a week, and more than five hundred people waited in line for basic eye examinations.