by Anna Quinn
She should feel relieved, but she isn’t—she feels a surge of nausea, anxiety swelling, heads of penises edging their way in—she fights to follow her breath, to stay present.
“You wrote that you remembered the Valentine’s dress, that Margaret is telling the truth,” David says. He’s decided on a new direction. And then ever so carefully, he says, “Nora, did your father hurt you?”
Her eyes well. Her father. Her daddy. She’d loved him. She’d hated him. She’d loved him more than anyone. She’d loved him more than anything.
“Your father?” he asks.
She nods. Tears come then.
He sits there with her, silently, for a long time. As Dr. Brinkley and Carol come and go with their stethoscopes and pills and worried faces, he stays. He stays and wipes her tears and sits by her in silence until she stops crying.
He takes her hand. “Nora, when your father abused you, you were a child. You couldn’t make sense of what was happening to you. Let me tell you something. When I was a child, I lived in San Francisco. One day there was a tremendous earthquake. The first earthquake I’d ever experienced—a 7.0. I was terrified. I was home alone with my father, and I thought we would die. Everything shook and crashed. An entire wall of our house crumbled in front of our eyes. I sat bundled into my father, the two of us curled up in the bathtub. I couldn’t stop shaking. I felt him shaking. When things finally quieted, we sat for awhile, not moving. Not talking. And then he turned me so he could look me in the eyes and said, ‘That was an earthquake. We’re okay,’ and then we talked about it until I stopped shaking.”
She gazes vacantly out the window. Searches for the silver of Puget Sound between skyscrapers. There it is. The mountains a snowy wall in the distance. She presses her face to the glass; the wire mesh behind it makes her feel like she’s in a confessional.
“Nora,” David says, even more softly, “a child who is sexually abused doesn’t have someone nearby naming what happened, saying that was sexual abuse and that’s a crime. Your father did a horrible thing to you and is very, very sick. He had no right to do such a thing. Do you hear what I’m saying? When you can’t name a trauma, or speak about it—”
Is there a name for what my father did?
“Love,” her father had said. “This is love.”
CHAPTER
TWENTY-FOUR
February 8, 1997
Nora wakes up in a different room. She’s still in the hospital—with its scoured air and slack light, but this room has an eerie, lonely feeling about it, and a ripple of panic sweeps through her. The IV is gone, but where her hand rests, a white cotton strap—a restraint—hangs from the metal railing of the bed. She reaches up and finds the gauze has been removed from her head.
“They’ve moved you, Nora.” It is David. He sits in the deep windowsill, a white blizzard outside behind him. With his white hair and white beard, everything white, she thinks wildly that maybe she’d been in a goddamned nightmare, and now the white will swallow up the darkness and she’ll wake up with the horrible ordeal behind her.
“You woke up last night, hysterical, and when they couldn’t calm you, they medicated you and moved you here—it’s a quieter room.”
Down the hall a woman screams. A murmuring of voices rush by. She’s not going to be rescued by the white. She’s in the One Flew over the Cuckoo’s Nest ward.
David pulls up a chair next to her. “You are in the psychiatric unit of the hospital. Dr. Brinkley, Paul, and I thought—”
But her actions stop his words as she struggles to sit up, her ribs still aching. She grabs a notebook from the bedside table and writes angrily.
Paul?
“Nora, when the hospital told him they couldn’t hold you any longer in the emergency unit, he called me, and well—after last night’s trauma, we spoke on the phone and decided this would be best.”
The sting of Paul making this decision fuels her temper. Her face burning, she writes with trembling fingers: I do NOT need to be here. I want to go home.
She aches for her daughter, wants to wrap her arms around her, even hear her giggle about the upcoming Valentine’s Day party. Erase old memories. Make new ones.
“I know this is hard,” David says, “but it’s really important you rest—that nothing, no one, triggers another crisis—that you get your voice back.”
Will I ever get better?
“Listen,” he says, leaning in, his brown eyes warm and clear. “The fact that you remembered the Valentine’s dress while you were awake is huge. The splitting of your mind was, and is, a brilliant coping mechanism. Your brain’s entire physiology changed so you could endure what happened and go on living your life. As a child you had no control over your body. And ever since that time, you have been in control. You’ve had control over emotions that may have overwhelmed you, overwhelmed anyone, saved your life. And now, you’ve remembered something—something that could mean your brain is attempting to integrate—heal the splitting. That’s huge. Remember when we talked about looking for patterns and images that could give us clues to your past? Those images are linking. It’s like finding the missing beads for your rosary. It means—” he hesitates.
She mouths, “What?”
“Some incest victims survive by ignoring what the perpetrator did—by refusing to believe it. They come to me again and again telling me they are crazy—and believing it—coming to me with addiction issues, relationship issues, week after week, until finally, some of them admit to the truth of their past. Margaret is your truth. Which is why it’s possible,” he says, “that the integration will include Margaret.”
You mean she might go away?
“Yes, potentially.”
But he has barely uttered the word when the thinning door in her mind begins to slide, slide, slide shut and she drops the notebook and the silence spreads and she is gone.
“Nora wants me to go away?” says a small, tearful voice.
“Margaret? Margaret, is that you?”
She tries to pull the blanket over her head, but Nora’s bruised ribs are hurting her, and it’s hard, but she gets it over herself. Once she’s all the way covered, she listens for where he is.
“Margaret?”
He sounds too close. “Could you please move away from me?” she says, her voice barely a whisper.
He screeches his chair back.
“How’s this?”
She peeks out of the blanket. “A little more.”
He backs up another few feet. After a minute he says, “Margaret, thank you for coming,” and then, gently, “Is there something you want to tell me?”
“Please,” she says, “could you please lock the door?”
“We can’t lock the door, but everyone has promised to stay outside unless I call them in. You are very safe here.”
She will keep being brave. She will talk to him.
“Margaret, did you come to help Nora?”
“I hate Nora. I hate her,” she says louder than is safe and she forgets to keep the blanket over her head and she sees him see her.
“No one will hurt you, Margaret. No one.”
She wiggles back under the blanket now. She will stay hiding.
“Margaret, why do you hate Nora?”
She shouts in a tremulous voice from under the covers. “You know why! Nora broke us! She ran us in front of a car and the car slammed us and broke our chest and banged our head and we had a mean needle in our hand and she’s not speaking and now …”
“And now?”
“And now we can’t help Fiona!”
“Fiona? Why does Fiona need help?”
“Oh, this is bad!” she says beginning to rock, the blankets quivering. “So bad. It’s almost Valentine’s Day, oh no, oh no, this is so bad, sobadsobadsobad.”
“Margaret, what is too late? Please, please tell me.”
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“Paul was telling Fiona the princess words,” she whispers. Her heart is going very fast now. “He keeps saying, ‘My little princess, my little princess,’ and it’s almost Valentine’s Day and we have to help Fiona!”
“Margaret. It will be okay. I will help Fiona, okay? I promise, but you have to help me.”
“How?”
“Can you tell me if Fiona’s daddy has hurt her before?”
She will try very hard now. She brings her head above the covers, nervously glances at the door, and then looks right at him, blinking rapidly.
“I don’t know, but he says the princess words and she has tummy aches and when daddies say the princess words, next come the candy hearts that say ‘Kiss me’ and the big hand and ‘kiss me, kiss me’ and the hurting and ‘You are my princess’ and then a new pink bike with rainbow streamers and a Barbie and a doll house and more ‘kiss me, kiss me’ and Nora isn’t there to watch out and oh no, oh no, oh no …”
Margaret’s insides are fluttering, and there is a glump, glump, glumping in her ears. David is not acting like this is an emergency. She needs to get to Fiona. Even though Nora has teached and teached Fiona to say “NO!” to bad touching, daddies can be very, very tricky and bad. She tries to throw the blankets off her body, but the ribs hurt her too hard—
“Margaret!”
She stops frozen because David is standing up and moving to her—Oh, no. Oh, no. I am a stupid, stupid girl. She makes herself very small and very still, very still, very still. Please don’t hurt me, please don’t hurt me.
He stops moving. “Margaret. Please. You are safe. But if you try to get out of that bed again, you will hurt yourself more, and it will take longer to see Fiona.”
She looks at him. He has stopped. He is not going to hurt her. She will listen. Even if he is tricking her, he is right. She will be quiet with her body. She will use only her mouth. “You need to help Fiona right now!”
“Okay, Margaret. I will. He walks to the coat rack and plucks his raincoat from the hook. “I would like to say goodbye to Nora first. Will you help me with that?”
Margaret is sitting straight up now, eyes wide. “Yes, but the biggest thing is to remind Fiona of how to dial the 911 and to bring the phone close to her and there is one on the dresser and it has a long cord you can stretch and stretch all the way to her bed. Nora showed her how to use it. And … and … tell her for sure to call it when she’s scared and tell her about all the bad touching things again.” She begins rocking, rocking, saying, “You will do that right?”
“Yes. I will absolutely do that. I will go as soon as I talk to Nora. And Margaret?”
“What?”
“You are so very brave and I am really sorry your daddy hurt you. What he did was horribly wrong. He had no right to do that to you. He was very sick.”
She doesn’t stop rocking, whispers, “Will you please go now to check on Fiona?”
“I will call Nora’s doctor and leave a note for you as soon as I know about Fiona, okay?”
“Okay,” and she closes her eyes so he will leave faster.
Nora is pulled from the deep gray silence and opens her eyes and struggles to know where she is and if she’s in a dream or not. She sees David and smells the room and remembers. Worry slides across his face, and her stomach tightens with what he might say.
He tells her Margaret spoke to him, “Which means,” he says, carefully, “that your not being able to speak is psychological.”
But all she wants to know is: What did she say?
He stares at the note for a few moments and says slowly, “She thinks … she thinks Paul may be abusing Fiona.”
Her eyes shout “What!” His words turning the room red. She needs to get out of this damn bed and go home. She struggles with the covers, her movements still limited because of the bruised ribs, and realizes suddenly she is wearing only a hospital gown. Her arms cross over her chest.
Without hesitating, David goes to the closet and comes back with her robe. “Paul brought it yesterday,” he says. “Your brother was with him; Fiona was in school. They brought a whole suitcase of clothes for you.”
Paul and James were here? She wraps the white robe around her tightly, reaches for the belt, but it’s not there.
“Belts aren’t allowed, Nora. Sorry.”
Out the window, feathery snowflakes fall so thick and heavy, all she can see is white. Fiona’s words burst into her mind: “The angels are sifting flour from heaven! It’s like we’re in a snow globe, Mommy!”
If the window weren’t locked, if it didn’t have this wire mesh, she might jump. She might. She could jump into the thick, slow silence and kill her body, kill her madness.
She begins shaking her head, no, no, no, slowly at first, then faster and faster until David is there, hands on her shoulders, shuffling her toward a chair, asking her to please sit down, please breathe in, breathe out.
She tries to speak, but there is only a small frightening sound, her mouth stiff and useless. She shakes her head again, no, no, no. Paul would never hurt his daughter. Never. His life, fast and aggressive to her, every moment an opportunity to make money, climb a ladder, strike a deal over cognac. He’s been hungrier for power, more ravenous for status than she’d expected. And she’s turned her back on his world, made him angry. But NO, he would never hurt Fiona.
“Nora, there really is nothing you’ve told me to suggest Paul would hurt Fiona in this way. Have you ever seen him display affection that is inappropriate?”
She shakes her head no.
But she thinks now about how insistent she’d been with Paul, that it was her, not him, who would give Fiona baths. Paul had thought this unreasonable, but as with most of their parenting decisions, had shrugged it off as her decision. She’d not understood her own insistence or the vague anxiety that wound around it. Had she sensed something unconsciously?
“And there are signs, you know?” he says. “Like sexual preoccupation in her play or language or drawings, inserting toys into—”
She holds up a hand to stop him from going on. I know the signs! Have you forgotten I’m a teacher? Nora’s eyes welling. Her head shaking an emphatic “No!” but her mind panicking. God, had she been paying enough attention?
“So let’s just stay calm about this,” David says. “I’ll meet with Paul and Fiona, make sure she’s safe.”
Yes, she nods, taking deep breaths to slow the fast blinking of her eyes.
“I want to honor Margaret’s fears, but I also know—Nora, are you with me?”
She nods.
“Children and adults who have been sexually abused trust very few people, and it takes a long time for them to regain trust—so let’s take this a step at a time, okay?”
Her mind is a blur. She needs to get to Fiona. She paces, frantic short breaths jarring the quiet room, playing and replaying conversations with Fiona: good touching, bad touching, good secrets, and bad secrets. Was it enough? Is that why Paul asked for more time alone with Fiona, took so long to tuck her in at night, was he really only reading her stories? Her ribs stabbing now. Oh, God, it hurts, it hurts, it hurts, now arms around her, it is David, laying her down on the bed.
He touches her arm. “I’ll check on her,” he says. “Right now. Do you hear me?”
Yes, yes, she nods, takes a deep breath, and closes her eyes.
“Nora, I need to tell Paul what’s going on. I’ll need to tell him about Margaret—probably best to tell James, too. Are you alright with that?”
He studies her face with unwavering eyes. She returns his look, unblinking, and at last she nods yes.
CHAPTER
TWENTY-FIVE
February 11, 1997
“Someone sent flowers,” Carol says, handing Nora a bouquet of yellow sweetheart roses.
Nora takes the flowers and breathes in the delicate smell.
Once Carol leaves, she pulls out the tiny white card stuck between the stems and lays the flowers on her chest. They’re from John.
I know you’re not seeing visitors yet, but I wanted you to know I’m thinking of you. The kids miss you. I miss you. Be well soon. Call me if you want.
She misses John. He is the only one she can talk to with complete freedom. He listens without trying to correct or fix. She can say anything she wants, and it’s all right.
“I believe Fiona is safe,” David says, entering the hospital room then, breaking her reverie. He takes his coat off and hangs it on the metal rack by the door. She reaches over and places the flowers in her water glass.
“Nora,” he says, genuine concern in his voice, “I really think she’s safe.”
Anxiety and relief distort her breath. She reaches for her notebook and pen, but before she can write anything, he says, “I’m going to keep meeting with her, for at least a couple of weeks and longer if necessary, but honestly, I think she’s okay. We talked and played for over an hour and she was quite animated—I didn’t see or hear anything to suggest she’s troubled about something. She’s worried about you, of course.”
Her eyes close. She can see Fiona sitting cross-legged on the couch in David’s office answering questions, biting her lip at first, her face scrunched with the effort to help.
“With each question I asked,” he says, “she relaxed more, and after awhile, it seemed she’d forgotten why she was there at all. She described all the fun she has with her daddy: riding the trolley to the aquarium and the library, listening to ball games on the radio, making pancakes in animal and heart shapes on Saturday mornings, and she didn’t talk in a way that suggested she was protecting him—I know that voice, Nora. She was very open—very unlike a child who is keeping a terrible secret. In fact, she told me all about the Valentine’s party coming up at school, and how excited she was to have James staying with them. This is all a good sign. If she’d been hurt, especially in the last few days, she would have been withdrawn or anxious, and frankly, I really doubt she’d have agreed to being left alone with me at all. Most abusers create an enmeshment where the child has no real sense of self—quite the opposite of Fiona. She seems very clear about her feelings and opinions—Nora, are you listening?”