by Greg Herren
Maybe.
The other woman came back to the exam room and I could tell she had started to cry because her eyes were wet and glisten-y and the doctor had a different look on his face—a serious, concerned look, while before he had a kind and open look, like he was welcoming me into his house and ready to feed me dinner or tell me a bedtime story like I was small or something sweet like that.
Would you mind removing the gown? His voice was low and soft like the women’s, who I now knew were from some child protective agency because the nurse said it when she came back in the room. There was a policeman outside the door, but no one mentioned him.
I sat on the edge of the examining table and closed my eyes and took off the gown and tried not to feel like I was in my room with the eyes of the raccoons glowing at me and the sound of the door creaking open late at night and the smell of the scotch and cigarettes seeping into the room. I tried to remember that was all over and that now I was in a hospital and the man coming over to me was wearing a white coat and had a stethoscope and was talking low and soft but not those kinds of words but normal things like Tilt your head back, please and Open your mouth and stick out your tongue, please and Take a deep breath, please, and now let it out slowly. That’s good, that’s fine.
But I still didn’t open my eyes until he said, I need you to open your eyes and so I did. The woman with the red hair from the agency was standing right next to me, behind the exam table, and she said in the same soft voice everyone was using, Can you tell us about these marks?
*
In a crazy house, no one ever asks you questions about you, they ask you questions about them. So it’s Do you want to tell me about this blood in your underwear? and not What happened to you, are you hurt? Or Who hurt you?
So I wasn’t really prepared for the question, and that may be why I started to scream.
I didn’t mean to scream and I wasn’t really sure why I started screaming or why I kept yelling Stop stop stop because no one was doing anything to me and I never had said that before no matter what was happening because you just didn’t say anything or do anything because it only made things worse and it was easy to figure this out, even the baby seemed to get it pretty quickly. Don’t cry, don’t talk back, don’t complain, don’t don’t don’t. Be still, be quiet. Don’t.
The doctor almost fell back away from me while the nurse moved close but didn’t do anything. The women moved to the side but no one touched me or did anything or said anything. We just all kind of stayed in this bubble of sound where I was screaming and nothing else was happening except that. I wasn’t moving. I wasn’t flailing my arms or kicking my legs or doing any of the stuff that usually goes with screaming. I didn’t get off the table and I didn’t run to the door and try to escape. I didn’t even shut my eyes. But I could hear my own voice ringing in my ears and it was so loud that it hurt my head and made my lips feel numb and my hands started to sweat and I was shaking and then I just suddenly was quiet and the sound stopped coming out of me.
I think the nurse wanted to give me a shot or something. She looked at the doctor and they did that eye communicating thing, but nothing happened. And then the doctor asked if I was all right and I said yes and then he asked if he could examine me and I said yes and he asked if I would be very still and I said yes and then he moved close to me and I just felt all the air go out of me and I fainted onto the table.
When you wake up after a really bad dream, it’s hard to shake it. You feel like you are still in the place of the dream and you feel like you are in two worlds—the dream world and the awake world—and it is really unsettling and creepy and you just want to either be back asleep or really wide awake and not remembering the dream at all.
When I woke up, I was still in a different room from the exam room, but it was still the hospital and I was lying down and there was a thin tube in my arm taped to my hand and there was a blood pressure cuff around my upper arm and the sides of the bed were up and I was propped up on a pillow and the bed was halfway up, almost like I was sitting.
The woman with the red hair from the child protective services agency was sitting on a chair next to me and no one else was in the room. The blinds on the window on the door were shut and there was a TV on across the room but the sound was low, like a hum of voices from another room. I turned toward the woman and saw that her name tag read Emily Denton, MSW.
I wanted to ask her questions, but my mouth felt heavy and shut and the words stuck in my throat, all thick. She asked me if I wanted some water and I nodded my head yes and she got me a cup with a straw and ice and the water felt smooth and silken in my throat and made me feel like I could talk again.
Where am I? What happened? Where’s the doctor? My voice was cracked sounding and I didn’t recognize it and my throat hurt and I moved my hand to rub it and felt the rough marks the rope had made that were still there all these days later.
I had passed out from the screaming—too much oxygen going out and not enough coming in. Something like a panic attack, only different, Emily explained. They had given me a sedative and Dr. Blanchard had examined me. I had extensive trauma and would need to be hospitalized for a few days and have some more tests and this tube would stay in my arm because it was giving me fluids and drugs and I would stay calm and not get any infections and everything was going to be okay.
Emily’s words came out in the quiet, urgent rush of an adult who wants a child to understand something very important and understand it right away.
I asked about the policeman outside the door and Emily said he was gone and that he wasn’t going to be back. I told her that the detective said I was going to prison and she just looked at me. She shook her head so slightly that I almost didn’t catch it.
Your case has changed.
Her voice had an edge to it and I must have flinched involuntarily because it was a tone I was familiar with, a tone my mother used all the time, and when she saw me pull back, she put her hand on my arm above the place where the needle was in my hand and she just laid it there, not moving it.
Your case has changed. There is new evidence. Her voice was steadier, without the edge, and now I knew that the edge wasn’t about me at all, but about something else. Probably the marks.
She stood up and said she would be right back and left the room. I was waking up from whatever the latest nightmare was, but not all of it. My eyes focused on the TV and I saw a flash of my crazy house on the screen and the crawl at the bottom explaining news at 11 would have continuing details about the case of the murdered family. I closed my eyes and flashes of blood and flies and meaty bits flooded my head. I opened my eyes and Emily was coming back into the room. Behind her was the detective, Ruggiero, from the police station. He didn’t look like he was going to tell me about his daughters or anything else about his house. He had a notebook in his hand and he had the same serious concerned look I remembered from the doctor’s face. He said he had some new questions he hoped I could answer and that those answers would help him piece things together. And then I remembered that he had said over and over they were cut to bits, but I was sure that wasn’t what he meant about piecing things together.
Emily said I didn’t have to say anything I didn’t want to say. She gave the detective a menacing kind of look and I wasn’t really sure what that meant. Except she had told me before the detective came back that she was in charge of me now, that she was appointed by the court—she didn’t say what court—to be sure I was treated fairly, that I was thirteen and not an adult at all, but a child.
Detective Ruggiero asked the questions and I answered them one at a time. I explained about my grandfather and my dog and about the raccoons at my bedroom window and the room filled with the smell of scotch and cigarettes and words and sounds I didn’t like hearing. I explained about my mother’s screaming. I tried to explain how between when my grandfather died and the dog died, my baby brother got really sick and turned blue and that my brother had held him for a long time and then
he had just been quiet in the crib. I told him that my brother had stopped talking soon after Christmas, which was after my baby brother got so quiet, and that my mother kept him home from school and said he was just learning at home for now. I explained how the last time my father came in and the raccoons were there, my mother was there when he left, or maybe it was my brother, it was someone, and that I didn’t see my father again after that. I had just gotten up and gone to school in the morning, like always. I hadn’t seen anyone, actually—not my parents or brothers or grandmother. I had just gone to school, because it was what I was supposed to do. And then I came home from school and there was all the blood and I had gone to the woods and come back again.
*
After the detective left, Emily came back and sat next to me. I had heard her talking to the detective outside my door, but I hadn’t been able to understand what she was saying. I saw her shake her head and I saw him put his hand on her shoulder. I saw her kind of shake herself, like the cats did sometimes. And then he went away and she came back in.
Emily told me there would be another small surgical procedure and then a few more days in the hospital. She told me that after I left the hospital I would not be going back to the crazy house, but to a different place that was sort of like a hospital where I would stay for a while. After that, she said, We’ll see.
*
The reporter was standing out on the walkway in front of my house, her left foot right up against one of the little bushes. I recognized her from other stories. She had the same concerned face that everyone around me had now. New details about the grisly murders here tell a story of brutality and abuse, she explained. The medical examiner has determined that the eleven-month-old infant boy may have been dead for some time of what appear to be natural causes and that the blood found on the body was not his but his brother’s. Autopsy reports indicate that the father was the first victim, and that he was most likely killed while he slept. It has yet to be determined, however, whether the mother, who had experienced a psychotic break after some as yet undisclosed events, or the young boy, aged ten, was the killer, as tests are still pending. The grandmother was not the killer. The boy was, according to police sources, suffering from some kind of emotional collapse himself and had not been attending school for at least a month, possibly longer.
The sole survivor of the carnage, the thirteen-year-old girl who had been at school when the mayhem occurred and who had originally been in police custody as a person of interest, has been cleared of all involvement in the tragedy.
According to hospital officials, the girl suffered extensive physical trauma of an ongoing nature and has already had two surgeries since her hospitalization, although the nature of those procedures has not been released by the hospital. She has been sedated much of the time and a hospital spokesperson has said that her injuries are consistent with ongoing and severe child abuse. Sources tell me that she will be sent to a rehabilitation facility in the western part of the state which specializes in extreme trauma and in fact deals extensively with torture victims from Africa and the Middle East. The court has appointed a guardian for her, since all her family members are now apparently deceased. Officials at the girl’s school declined comment when we asked why they hadn’t noticed anything unusual in the girl’s behavior or demeanor or what police say were visible physical injuries to her and why school officials had done nothing about the fact that her brother had not attended classes for a significant period of time or notified child protective services that the girl was obviously being abused.
Then the reporter turned toward the front porch and the door with the big brass knocker and waved her gloved hand in the direction of the house. A small puff of breath came out of her mouth as she said, No one knew what went on behind this calm exterior. Her voice slightly hushed, she added, And in the days and weeks ahead, we can expect there will be more revelations and more disturbing findings. Stay tuned to Action News for continual updates on this tragic, tragic story.
I continued to look at the TV long after the report had ended, but I don’t remember what else was going on. I thought about how the reporter, who I had seen before reporting on other tragedies in other places, had been standing in front of my house this time, talking about my family, talking about me. Now that house was news, not home.
I lay in the bed staring at the screen, but not registering any new images. I spent a lot of time sleeping now, because of the drugs and what one of the doctors called “trauma deficit.” The detective had been back and had asked some more questions and Emily spent a significant amount of time in my room every day. So did a court-appointed psychologist. But there was nothing else to tell them. Everything I had to say I had said that first time. I told them that.
The psychologist explained that I needed to give details and explore my feelings, he wanted me to discuss the marks and the incident as he called it, but I didn’t really want to give more details and I didn’t know what he meant by exploring my feelings. I told him that what I wanted most was to go back to my house, with just me and the cats and the quiet. But without the blood. I knew how things were there. I didn’t know how they would be anywhere else. I didn’t know how I would be anywhere else. When you live in a crazy house, you have to be kind of crazy yourself, I guess. He just shook his head when I said these things and wrote them down on the long yellow pad of paper he had. I heard him tell Emily that if I didn’t talk I wouldn’t get better and that we will never get to the bottom of what really happened.
*
I knew what really happened. There was a trigger, and a gun went off. Not a real gun, but an emotional gun. What everyone wanted to know, of course, was who pulled that trigger. Was it my mother? My brother? Me?
When you live in a crazy house, you learn to make the line between the truth and not truth blurry and indistinct. You learn to say what’s expected of you, not what really needs saying. You learn how to tell a story—or how not to tell. You learn that truth and memory aren’t black and white because there are what the court calls mitigating circumstances.
The facts of the case came out after the investigation. According to those facts, my father was murdered in his sleep. My grandmother had her throat slit as she drank her morning coffee, which was why the blood swirled at the bottom of the cup. The cat who had been sitting on her lap had been stabbed once through the heart and killed dead right away. The baby had been dead for nearly a month—the report said mummified remains of a suffocated infant. What remained unclear, because the bodies were in the same place, was whether my brother or my mother committed the murders and which of them committed suicide.
I knew what really happened. I knew that my brother had the marks like I had. I knew there were probably handprints on my brother like there were on me. And the small round marks from the glowing eyes of the raccoons. There just weren’t the other things. The things inside. Probably. Probably not.
I knew my brother had held the baby until the breath came out of him and that he never said anything again after that. I knew my mother never looked at the baby after that day and that we all acted like I did when I saw all the blood. Like we could just move forward and pretend it was all okay, all normal. Like no one would ever look beyond the door with the big brass knocker and no one would ever say How awful or We had no way of knowing this was going on.
*
The place where I am now is quiet and in the mornings I go to a classroom and each day I have a class in something—English, math, history. No religion. On Sundays Emily comes and takes me outside this place to Mass and then we go have lunch and she brings me back. She still wants to know what happened, but there’s nothing I can say. Not if I want to leave here. Not if I want to move forward, as everyone keeps saying I must. I read a lot of books. I write in a journal like I am supposed to. I keep two journals—one with the memories I want to have, one with the memories I do have.
In the afternoons we sit in a group—there are kids and adults, it’s all blurry and in
distinct, the way we all have the same experiences. Some of the people are foreign, but some of them are from here. All of us have experienced some kind of killing. Some of us are murderers, all of us are victims. The doctor who runs the little group reminds us that victims who live are called survivors and that that is who we are and we must take pride in that. Like saints who were put on the stake but didn’t burn.
Some people talk more than others in this group. I don’t talk very much because there isn’t really anything to say. I wasn’t in a war. I wasn’t in a gang. I was never a child soldier. I really don’t think I belong here, but I never say that. Because I know what to say and what not to say.
Once a week, Detective Ruggiero comes to see me. Sometimes it’s a Tuesday, sometimes it’s a Friday. Once he came on a Saturday when we were all outside because it was sunny and getting warm, finally. He always asks me the same questions: He wants to put the file away, he says, he wants to close the case. But he needs more facts, he needs to know what else I know. He wants answers.
I have learned to tell him just a little bit. Just a little about the things that went on in the house with the big brass knocker. I have learned to tell him the words that were said to me and the color of the baby when he was blue and the smell of the cigarette that made the marks that will never go away. I have learned that these little bits of information are part of what Ruggiero calls the puzzle and that he has what I have learned is a voyeuristic interest in my case that is maybe just a little twisted up with thinking that something like what happened in my house could happen in his house. Except he has to really know it can’t, it won’t. Because he doesn’t live in a place where there will ever be some kind of killing—not like where I lived. Not like where the people in this place lived. He always makes a kind of awkward gesture toward me when he leaves. He wants to hug me, but I know the doctors have told him that I am not supposed to be touched. Not until I am healed. Which may never happen. Just like Ruggiero may never have the answers to the questions he has. The answers that will somehow end the investigation into how three adults, two children, and two cats were killed and one girl survived. He’s told me he’s never had a case like this. And I believe him.