by Torey Hayden
“Life does seem unfair to you, doesn’t it?” I said.
She nodded vigorously.
“What are you going to do about it?”
She shrugged in an exaggerated way.
“The truth is, Cassandra, the way things are right now, they’re a real mess for you, aren’t they?”
She rolled her eyes comically.
“Getting into trouble on the ward, going into lockdown all the time, getting your privileges docked, having problems with me every day, not being able to go home, having to cope with creepy thoughts, trying to get away from them. Things are a mess.”
She shrugged.
“You’re trying to pretend that’s okay,” I said. “Right now. You’re trying to act as if none of this is serious. And I can understand that. I’m sure it must feel really, really scary having to deal with your life all the time. These problems are everywhere. They affect everything. They involve everyone. You can’t get away from them, even for a minute. So I imagine pretending things aren’t serious makes you feel—at least for a moment or two—like they don’t hurt so much. I can understand that. I can understand why you keep doing these things.”
I seemed to catch Cassandra off guard. For the first time in several minutes, she broke eye contact. She glanced away, glanced up, looked back at me, looked away again. Her brow furrowed. I’d expected her to deny responsibility, to say these things were my fault or the staff’s fault for not helping her better, but instead she simply sat, her focus shifting to an unseen place in front of her.
“The real problem you and I are having, however,” I said, “is not about things being so scary. I know they’re scary. I know that makes them serious, and I know deep down you take them seriously. I also know they’re so, so hard to deal with. So that’s not the problem. The real problem is that you haven’t decided whose side you’re on.
“The plain truth is, Cassandra, I can’t make you better. Your mom can’t make you better. Dr. Brown can’t make you better. Even taking you away from the bad places, like where you were with your dad, and bringing you back to nice safe places won’t make you better. Do you know why that is?” I asked.
Her head was lowered. She didn’t respond.
“That’s because what’s wrong isn’t out here where your mom and Dr. Brown and I are. It’s in there.” I reached over and tapped her chest. “It’s there inside you. So wherever you go, your trouble goes with you.
“The problem we’re having is this: that troubled place inside you hurts a lot. I know that, Cassandra. Some really, really awful things have happened to you. Things children shouldn’t have to experience. But you did experience them and they hurt you very much. I do understand this. I also understand that it’s natural for us to try and protect something that’s gotten badly hurt. I understand that’s what you’re doing, that you don’t really want to be horrible and difficult with everyone. You are just trying to protect that troubled place inside you, because it hurts so much, and you don’t want it to get hurt again.
“Unfortunately, there’s a really big problem in doing this. And the problem is: you’ve protected your troubled place so well that you’ve ended up taking its side. You’ve ended up saying, ‘I’ll take care of you, Troubled Place, no matter what. I won’t ever let anyone hurt you.’ But the difficulty now is that Troubled Place is, in fact, hurting you, because it’s making you have to do all these bad things to keep it safe.
“We need to change this. In order for us to make things better for you, Cassandra, you need to get on our side. On the side that is trying to fix that Troubled Place, so it will heal up and go away and leave you alone.
“We can do that. We can beat this. But we can only do it if all of us together are on the same side, because it’s too big for one person alone to beat, whether that one person is you or your mom or me or Dr. Brown. We have to learn to fight together like a team, because that’s the only way we’ll be strong enough to make what happened to you stop hurting you.”
Head still down, Cassandra’s mouth crumpled. Tears trickled out of the corners of her eyes.
I reached a hand over and laid it on her shoulder.
She leaned forward, way forward, until her forehead rested on her knees. She sobbed.
It was the first time I’d really seen her cry and once she began, Cassandra continued to weep heavily.
It was late afternoon, about four-thirty or quarter of five. Thick cloud cover made it even darker outside than it usually was at this time of year. Everywhere else in the hospital was lit by bright fluorescent lighting, but the dayroom had quirky lighting, mostly small ordinary tungsten bulbs on tracks overhead, in order that the area over by the television could be dimmed without throwing everyone else in the big room into darkness. And it was a large room, more like a hall than a living space. Consequently, the kids watching TV were distant from Cassandra and me, as was the nurses’ station. The lateness in the day, the weather outside, and the TV brought a nighttime feel to most of the room. The lights were on over the nurses’ station and were glaringly bright where we sat, but everything else was in shadows.
For some reason this made a strong impression on me, as did the furniture where we were sitting, a group of chairs with steel armrests and hard-wearing, washable, waterproof Naugahyde seats and backs—institutional furniture—which, perhaps in some misguided effort to make them seem less institutional, were in colors no one could really live with—either bright orange or, alternately, an equally strong turquoise. As Cassandra cried, I sat quietly, not thinking, not doing anything really other than just being, and the lighting and the furniture imprinted itself on me.
I got up at one point and found a box of tissues at the nurses’ station, which I brought over, but otherwise I just sat. I kept my hand on Cassandra’s back, rubbing her shoulders occasionally, but mostly just resting it there. We were discouraged from touching the children beyond a hand on the shoulder, both for our own safety in this litigious day and age, and also because most of the children had issues of one sort or another with touch. In the case of a child like Cassandra, it was an absolute necessity to observe these strict boundaries because of her lies. Nonetheless, I still felt it was crucial to touch her now, to cross that gulf of physical space that isolates each of us from the other, and respond with sympathetic, caring, and appropriate touch.
She cried and cried. There were maybe ten minutes or more of really heavy sobbing, her body doubled forward in the chair, her face pressed into her hands, resting against her upper legs. She was consumed by it and isolated by it, showing no awareness that I or anyone else was in the room. Then the physical burden of so much crying began to catch up with her. Her sinuses grew too clogged to remain in that position. Her breath was catching, so she had to sit up to get air.
I pulled out tissues and handed them to Cassandra. She took them, a whole wodge of them, and pressed them against her face. This renewed her crying.
Time passed. I didn’t speak. Cassandra continued to cry. Like small snowdrifts, used tissues piled up on her lap and in and around the chair. More time passed.
The other children rose from their places near the TV and left the room to go for dinner. One of the staff came out of the nurses’ station and approached us but stopped perhaps ten feet away. He watched us a moment, assessing whether or not Cassandra would be coming for a meal at some point; however, he didn’t say anything. Neither did I. We just exchanged looks. I shook my head slightly. Finally, he turned and left. Cassandra and I were alone in the huge shadowy room.
Finally the tears gave way to exhausted hiccupping. She lay slouched over to the right in her chair, her head almost resting on the steel arm. Her face was swollen and red; she could only breathe through her mouth.
“I’m so tired,” she murmured at last.
“I’m sure you are.”
“I hate to cry.”
I nodded.
Then silence. Cassandra continued to lie crumpled to the side of the chair, still dabbing at her infl
amed cheeks and drippy nose.
The usual noises native to hospital environments ebbed in around us, most of them metallic sounds: grindings, gratings, clangs, bangs, bumps, buzzes, made vague by walls and corridors, but there were also human voices, always remote, always blended, forming simply a human noise.
Cassandra looked at me. It was a quiet, searching expression, and when I made eye contact with her, she held it only a moment and then looked away.
“Can I tell you about something?” she said at last.
“Yes, of course,” I said.
“When I was little,” she said, “Uncle Beck used to come in the room where I was sleeping.”
I nodded.
“That’s when I lived at my dad’s. Uncle Beck used to babysit me all the time. I don’t know where my daddy went. My daddy wasn’t there very much, but Uncle Beck was there all the time.”
I sat back in my chair.
“When I was in bed, he would come in and get under the covers with me. He’d feel me up. He’d put his hands all over me.”
“I wouldn’t like that,” I said, “if someone did that to me.”
“I couldn’t do anything about it. If I tried to tell him to go away, he put his hands over my mouth. One over my mouth and one around my neck. He said, ‘I could break your neck like a matchstick, you little bitch.’ I think he could, too.”
I nodded slightly.
“He couldn’t put his prick in my cunt, because he had to hold me that way, with a hand over my mouth and a hand around my neck. So he put his prick in my butthole.”
She paused. She wasn’t looking at me. Her head was actually turned away from me, her gaze downward toward the floor.
“That hurts so much,” she said very softly. “It hurt so much. I wanted to cry and cry and cry.”
I nodded.
“I couldn’t. He hated me to tell him I didn’t like it, say not to do it. He got really mad when I did. He said, ‘You little bitch, you want it. You know you do. You keep asking for it. So don’t talk shit now.’ But he hated it more if I cried. It made him really, really mad at me. Sometimes he’d put a piece of newspaper on the floor and shit on it. Then he’d take the turd and put it in my mouth. He said because I talked shit, there was shit and that would shut me up.” A pause. “Now when I cry, my mouth always tastes like shit.”
Silence.
Cassandra was leaning over the right arm of the chair, her head against her hand, the other hand bracing her elbow. She just sat, her expression distant and inward.
“That sounds horrible, Cassandra. You had a very frightening time when you were with your father. Terrible things happened,” I said softly.
She nodded almost imperceptibly.
“I’m really sorry for that. What your Uncle Beck did was very wrong. Those things shouldn’t ever happen to a little girl.”
A tear trickled from the corner of her eye. She made no effort to wipe it away.
“But those times over now, Cassandra. They’re finished. You’re with your mom. You’re safe again.”
“But my mom didn’t keep me safe.”
“Your mom didn’t know then what your dad was going to do, but she does know now. Things are different now. Just because things happened once does not mean they will happen again. You’re safe with your mom now. Uncle Beck isn’t here anymore.”
“Yes, he is,” she said very softly and she looked at me then, the eye contact brief but unambiguous.
I regarded her.
“Because what you said’s true.”
She let out a long breath.
“You said I had a Troubled Place inside me. And I do. And that’s where Uncle Beck lives now. It’s just exactly like you said. My Troubled Place goes everywhere I go. Even when I don’t want to, I can see Uncle Beck. Even here. If it gets too quiet, if I’m not careful, I’ll see him. I’ll feel him doing that stuff to me.”
“Then it’s time to get rid of Uncle Beck, Cassandra. He doesn’t belong in your head. That’s a private place for just you.”
Cassandra looked at me, her great dark eyes searching my face.
“Maybe you’re thinking Uncle Beck’s too strong,” I said. “You’ve had to live with him all these years. It’s probably hard to imagine being able to get rid of him because he’s been so powerful.”
She nodded faintly.
“But this is what I meant about our needing to be on the same side. If we work together, if you and I and the nurses and the doctors and your mom and your stepdad all band together on the same team, there’ll be more of us than him. We will be stronger. We can beat him then. We can make him go away.”
She continued to regard me, her expression unreadable.
“Can you see that? Can you see how it works? All of us on one side together,” I said and held up one hand, fingers splayed, “and just Uncle Beck on this side.” I held up one finger of my other hand. “Can you see? We’ll be stronger, huh? No one person could fight all these.”
She nodded.
“But not so strong this way, huh?” I said and held up four fingers on one hand and two on the other. “Because that’s you and Uncle Beck together on this side and the rest of us over here. That would be harder.”
“I’m not on Uncle Beck’s side. I don’t want to be on his side.”
“Which is why you’ve got to stop protecting that Troubled Place, because that’s where Uncle Beck lives. When you protect that, you’re protecting him in there. You’ve got to get over on our side so we can get him out of there.
“It’s still going be a big fight,” I added. “And some of it is going to hurt, because we’ll have to get in and look around in that Trouble Place to find where he’s at and then beat him out of there. But it can be done, Cassandra. We can make him go away. Things don’t have to be this way.”
She didn’t react. Still slumped far to the right in the orange Naugahyde chair, her head all but resting on the steel arm, she just stared forward, her gaze vague.
“Does this make sense to you?” I asked.
There was a long pause, then slowly she nodded.
“So shall we try?” I asked.
Again the pause, but this time it grew even longer. She was completely silent, completely still. Her unfocused eyes were so vacant as to be dead. Then at last she brought her gaze into focus and looked over at me. She gave a faint, faint nod. “Okay.”
Chapter
27
I found it hard to shift gears back into ordinary life after that conversation with Cassandra, not only because it was so intense, but also because it had occurred so late in the day. The harrowing impact would have been eased if I’d been fresh and if there’d been other people and events coming after that required my attention. As it was, it was the last interaction of my working day. Consequently, it loomed over me, immovable and implacable as a leviathan.
I’d had plans to meet up with a friend after work. We were going to have a bite out in a new, trendy vegetarian restaurant, and afterward I was going to help in her quest for the perfect patio-door curtains. On this evening, however, I just couldn’t. I could not go directly from Cassandra to something as frivolous as shopping. I didn’t want to spoil my friend’s innocent pleasure with bleak insinuations that what she was doing was shallow and meaningless against the tapestry of suffering in the world. At the same time, however, I did not want to demean my own feelings or the horror of Cassandra’s life. So I phoned with vague apologies and backed out of the evening’s arrangements.
Although I knew a lighthearted girlie evening would not have worked for me, I knew, too, that going home alone to my apartment would probably not be helpful either. I needed space in which to distance the conversation, to put it into objective, realistic proportions. Quiet, respectful space and quiet, respectful distraction. So I stopped to eat at a small independent fast-food diner specializing in ribs and French fries, and afterward I went to the local library.
Our city had an active historical society, and there was a large well-o
rganized database of local history available to the public in the main library. For some time I’d been intending to go in and look up Gerda’s family in hopes of giving a more concrete structure to the gauzy fabric of Gerda’s stories.
The database, which covered the period from the city’s earliest pioneer days in the 1860s to 1960, was in three parts. The first was composed purely of statistics: births, marriages, deaths, land ownership, records of commercial development, and so forth. The second was a collection of local photographs donated from various sources or copied from private collections. The third section was called “Grandma’s Stories” and consisted of personal recollections taken from oral accounts, which the members of the historical society had collected over the years by interviewing elderly residents of the area.
I wanted to know the history of Gerda’s birth family and didn’t actually have her maiden name, so I had anticipated difficulty locating the information I was looking for. As it happened, not so. She and her husband had married locally in the 1930s, so those records were in the database. From the marriage details, I was easily able to trace her maiden name. From there, it was straightforward to her birth family because hers was a distinctive German surname.
There was a curious sensation in seeing the now-familiar names from Gerda’s stories—Louisa, Willie, Alfred—recorded in the dispassionate statistics of the database. It was almost as if I had come across Peter Pan’s birth certificate or Frodo Baggins’s address.
From the records I couldn’t tell if Gerda’s parents were immigrants themselves or simply second-generation Americans who had been attracted to the area’s large ethnic German community, where the German language was still commonly spoken in some public schools right up through the 1950s. Certainly, the couple seemed to have an interesting history. They had been married in Pennsylvania, and soon afterward, they made the long trek west to take up what was described as “donation land,” an early form of homesteading, where land was offered by the federal government to individuals who agreed to settle there and become residents. A little farther down the page, I read where her parents lasted only four years on this land and then returned east again.