by M. A Wallace
At age twelve, she read how, in the Middle Ages, doctors used leeches to extract blood from a patient's body. The belief had been that bad blood was the cause of any distemper. She wondered if those people hadn't been on to something; when she cut, she felt better. The knife that her parents had thrown away served her well. Over time, she understood that she would have to buy her own bandages, without her parents' knowledge. Some days, when she left the house without permission, her father took out the belt. Other days, he ignored her, too wrapped up in shouting at the computer at the latest error message box that popped up.
She felt both horror and shock when she realized that her breasts were growing in. Her chest had always been flat, always the same without changing. Then, something new appeared. The brown circles on her chest grew wider while two round, curvy mounds of flesh protruded outward. Even though she knew that women had breasts—for she had once seen her mother's by accident—she never expected that she would grow any. She had always felt envious of women with large chests. She often spent time with the advertisements that came with the Sunday newspaper, looking at the women wearing nothing but braziers and underwear. Those women smiled with a confidence that she could only pretend to have. Having breasts, to her, meant fully being a woman.
As much as she had longed for a full chest, when one came, she found herself disgusted beyond reason. She threw a pillow across the room—for that was all that she could throw which wouldn't draw unwanted attention. She stared at it for a moment and, her fury not sated, she knelt before it and swung her fists downwards upon it. Being given, as if by pure chance, the penultimate symbol of womanhood was something she did not deserve. She was a small girl with small hands, thin bony legs, and the ghosts of scars all over her arms. If there was a God, she decided that he was a trickster to give her something that she had really wanted. She never got anything she wanted before, not even for Christmas when the single present she received every year was a bottle of shampoo purchased at the dollar store. She collected those bottles until she had a row of them on the desk in her room, the only manifestation of kindness that she knew.
The next cutting session came before her left arm had fully healed. She took off her shirt and brought the knife up against her right breast. Her hand shook while she tried not to think about cutting off all of her breast entirely. She didn't want that; just a touch would do, just another rivulet and another bandage. That was all that she wanted.
When the knife bit into her flesh, she cried out. She had bumped her chest against a door frame before, and it had hurt then. She hadn't thought that any part of her body could be more sensitive than any other part. She dropped the knife on the floor. It clattered against the clean white tiles. Blood dribbled out of her chest in slow but steady stream. She gathered up some toilet paper and pressed it against the wound, hoping that no one had heard.
Someone had. He came tromping across the hallway with his usual heavy steps. He knocked on the door and said in a rough voice, “Girl, you better not be fooling around in there!”
She pulled the toilet paper away from her breast. Soon blood appeared again. Tears welled up in her eyes when she thought of what her father might do to her. He had always been vindictive and spiteful, even when he was in a good mood. He put a meaty fist against the door and knocked. He snarled. “I heard something. I know I did. Now what did I tell you about answering me when I talk to you? Eh? You don't want to make me angry.”
A rueful smile crossed over her face when she thought that he was always angry, even when he was happy. He delighted in the misery of others. He always saw events in his life in the most negative way possible. He had everything he had ever wanted: a home, a stable job, two cars, more than enough food to eat, an expensive television that let him watch Netflix whenever he chose, and complete, unquestioned command of his household. He was a king on his own property, yet he acted like a prisoner of circumstance.
She knew that there was nothing for it. The blood just wouldn't stop. With her shirt off, her bare chest showing, and a bloody wad of toilet paper against the underside of her breast, she opened the door. Her father stood there in mute disbelief for a moment. Of all the emotions she had expected, shock had not been among them. He said, “Damn girl, get yourself together.”
Then, he walked away.
Somehow—and she did not understand how—his disregard was a worse punishment than any physical attack he could inflict on her. She let the toilet paper fall to the floor in front of the door, then sat on the cold tiles while blood continued to flow. After a time, it stopped. By then, a small puddle the size of her hand had gathered on the floor. She sat there, trying to cry, heaving dry sobs, hating herself and her life.
Her mother found her there a half hour later. The woman didn't say a word. She merely forced a shirt over her daughter’s chest, then led her away to her bedroom. Shannon Moore sat at the edge of her bed, the image of her father's mute horror burned into her mind. She knew it for the rejection that it was. Her father had rejected her in her deepest pain. There was nothing that he need have said, for his facial expression had conveyed everything to her.
In time, her chest wound healed. She swore off cutting herself, for now whenever she took her knife to the bathroom to find release, she instead saw her father's disgusted face. She couldn't bring herself to cut anymore, even if she wanted. Instead, she came to the dinner table every night, silent as she had ever been. Her father wanted her to talk more, yet when she did talk, he insulted her and called her stupid. Then, while in one of his long diatribes, he called her fat. Shannon immediately pinched her belly and knew it to be true. Though the pediatrician had said she could stand to put on a few more pounds, she knew that he had spoken true. He said she was stupid, and she knew that she was. He said that she was fat, and she knew that she was.
Her thin, bony index finger went into her mouth after supper. The white porcelain toilet, whom she thought of as her only friend, flushed as it always did when she threw up her supper. She threw up twice more before nothing but watery bile came out. Then, queasy and light-headed, she wiped the toilet bowl clean and washed her hands. She staggered into her room, the homework she had to do forgotten. She no longer cared whether there was a math problem that needed solving, or a chapter in a book that needed reading. She wanted to lay in bed and close her eyes. She wanted to forget about the world and everything in it. She knew that she had first been a cutter, and now she was anorexic. She could no longer cry over her own uselessness, for crying never helped. The momentary relief she felt never changed her situation. It never made her father less angry, or caused her mother to speak her mind. It just made her feel weak. Crying only confirmed what she already knew: she was a stupid, powerless, ignorant, foolish, fat girl. When she lay in bed listening to the sounds of the house settling around her, she thought that it would have been better if she had never been born.
Time passed as she continued eating and throwing up, as her father had to call a plumber to fix the plumbing, which had been worn away from Shannon's stomach acids. She continued living, for what she did not know, going through the motions of each day, trying her best to find anything to keep her mind off herself. She drowned her world in music and books. Once she started reading Nancy Drew stories, she found that she couldn't stop. There was something about Carolyn Keene's protagonist that Shannon liked. Here was a girl who had enough confidence to take the world head-on with more cleverness than Shannon had believed possible.
She began taking books everywhere with her—to the grocery store, to school, to the gas station, to the bathroom, to the dinner table, everywhere. Reading, she found, served as both entertainment and an excuse to keep people from talking to her. She didn't have to think quite so much when she read. She didn't have to look at the small white marks on her arms, visible only to her, or about the urge to rush to the toilet where she would disgorge as much as she could. She wanted to be alone, for she was not any good to anyone. Solitude, she had found, provided the perfect r
espite from her life.
That was, until she met a young man with wavy blond hair and green eyes like sparkling emeralds. He hid his eyes behind thick, awkward glasses. She found him in the library while she browsed for small blue books containing the plays of Shakespeare. The text in those books had been very small to the point where she had to avoid reading them in places with strong sunlight lest she get spots before her eyes. She had been particularly fond of both parts of Henry IV, a story about a young man ready to inherit his father's throne and the rascals with whom he kept company.
While she had picked up Henry V, the next play in the story, the man beside her picked out Coriolanus, a story she had disliked from the start. It was a story about violence and gore. People had their arms cut off. When she had read it, she thought that Shakespeare had written it just to see how much he could get away with. Though she didn't like the story, when it was in that graceful, gentle hand, she found that she could not say or think a bad word against it. The stranger beside her, so handsome, so bright-eyed, transformed that which she liked least into that which she liked best.
He had smelled strongly of pine needles and grass. He had been outside for a long time, she reasoned. When he looked up at her, she felt her entire body stop, mesmerized by his gaze. She knew that, to him, it was nothing more than a casual encounter. He saw nothing special in her, for how could he? Nevertheless, she forced herself not to blush, suspecting that her cheeks flared up anyway.
She took a step forward and said, “Hi.”
He said, “Hi there. Do you read Shakespeare, too? I've never seen you in here before. Think I would have remembered a face like yours.”
As soon as he said that, she knew that she had been wrong. She had it all backwards. Isolation wasn't the best way to make herself feel better. If that were so, she would have felt nothing when she met him. There had to be something that other people could provide that she could not provide for herself. She said, “I'm Shannon. Who are you?”
When he gave her his name, she decided that she would treasure it for the rest of her life. She did not imagine that five years later, she would have trouble even remembering his face, or that he would not be the only person to take interest in her. Neither did she imagine that she would one day find herself in a hospital bed with a dislocated shoulder while her mother looked as though the world had come to an end.
2
At the very least, it was a blessing that her father had not shown up. She had gone out of the house as soon as she had graduated high school just to be away from her family. At the time, she had been so anxious to get away that she had jumped at the first offer she'd received. Staying within her home state allowed her to get tuition at a lower rate. When she boarded the bus headed for Shippensburg with her backpack and duffel bag full of supplies that her mother had packed, she could not resist smiling. Even the window from the backseat of the bus looked freer than anything she had ever experienced before. Ten miles of distance between herself and her father was all it had taken for her to finally unclench her jaw, to stop feeling on edge all the time.
Her mother had come to visit more often than she would have preferred. Shannon knew that her mother was driven by guilt—guilt that she had failed as a mother, a wife, a person. At times, Shannon sympathized, for she knew only too well how difficult it was to see the truth inside a toxic, stultifying environment. Too much time had passed for Mrs. Moore to get out on her own. She had been a homemaker all her life; she had no other job skills, no experience, and no confidence. She remained where she was because she could not imagine herself doing anything better.
While Shannon lay in the hospital bed, trying to stay awake through the babbling of the television in her room and the painkillers they had given her, she felt, for the first time, grateful that she had a mother who tried. At the TWOLHA group meetings, she'd heard too often stories about a young relative or sibling thinking about or attempting suicide while the whole world watched with numb disregard. That was what had always hurt her the most—people who had refused to see her for herself. Was it truly so difficult for human beings to understand one another?
She'd heard the doctor speak of the humerus and the scapula. He had said she'd had a subcoracoid dislocation, which was the most common shoulder dislocation to have. He had spoken about nerve injury, though had done so in vague terms—she thought because he was fearful of malpractice suits. Her arm remained numb while she waited for the right specialist to come and take a look at her. She had been told that she would undergo a procedure would not be done until Sunday afternoon at the earliest. When she'd heard that, she found herself hating medical litigation which required so many facilities to put all their ducks in a row before they even did the smallest, simplest thing. They could not sneeze without making sure their noses were straight.
For the present, her shoulder did not look as it should. Her shoulder joint stuck out. Her arm remained numb. She could not move it, no matter what she tried to do. Her entire arm up to her shoulder had been placed in an air cast designed to restrict its movement. She had gone through X-rays and radiographs, both of which took a tremendous amount of time to set up, for she had waited more than a half hour beyond her scheduled time for each one. She was set to do an MRI for nerve tissue damage. She found the whole process wearisome; she wished it would be over and done with.
At some point, she suspected sooner rather than later, they would ask whether she had any insurance. She had been under her father's generous insurance plan four years ago. She suspected that the plan would not cover her now. She thought about what her options would be—go into debt for thousands and thousands of dollars? That would be added on to the student loans she had already taken out to afford college. No way the university will pay for everything, she thought. She had not, after all, become violent or said anything threatening. More than twenty-four hours after the fact, she could not understand just why the policeman had injured her.
With lunch came more police officers. She had requested better food than what they had given her for breakfast, but if her request had been passed along to the cooks, they had ignored it. She was given a small container of cottage cheese, a turkey and cheese sandwich on wheat bread, apple slices in a sealed bag, and a small carton of milk. She had grown too accustomed to cooking food for herself out of the biweekly wages she earned as a part-time waitress. She wanted to tell the nurse that she had a very specific diet that excluded gluten and processed foods, but she didn't think the nurse or even the cooks would have any idea what she was talking about. She decided to bear with it for the present until they released her, which she hoped would be soon.
The police officers who requested and were granted entrance into her room both looked like career officers. One of them was big, but aging, with crew-cut hair. He looked like a linebacker to whom the years had not been kind. He had a protruding gut and a second chin that became visible whenever he looked down at his notes. That man introduced himself as Detective McGee.
The other man, shorter and younger, introduced himself as Detective Ross. He had short black hair which curled as it grew. He left it curly, despite the fact that it made him look like a caricature from the eighties. He wore a wristwatch, an item that only added to his aura of being anachronistic. He never looked at the watch, nor even touched it. He wore dress pants and dress shoes to go together with a black overcoat. He held in his hand a wool cop, and she understood at once that he had served in the military. Some people never lost the habit of taking their hats off indoors, then putting them back on indoors.
Detective Ross said, “Good afternoon, Miss Moore. I wonder if you would mind having us ask you a few questions?”
She resisted to jubilant urge that welled up inside her. She knew that police officers were not to be trusted; she had experienced a firsthand demonstration of why this was so. Just because they wanted to know her story, did not mean they would do anything with it. She said, “A few. I'm a little dopey. This pain medicine. I swear it's a narcot
ic.”
The two detectives stepped into the room, closing the door behind them. They did not know about her mother, who had gone down to the gift shop looking for a stuffed animal. Though Shannon did not want to be treated like a little girl, she did not want to admit that she had trouble falling asleep without something fluffy or furry to cuddle up against. She had let her mother go, knowing that there was no use talking the woman.
There were two large wooden chairs in the room. The detectives pulled up both chairs and sat down without asking her. She wanted to ask them what it was all about, why they had come. Yet she thought she knew why they had come, and if she was right, then she wanted to keep as quiet about it as possible until she could consult with a lawyer.
Ross said, “Now, if you don't mind, I'd like to begin by asking you about Officer Kevin Bailey of the Shippensburg University Police.”
Shannon had plenty she wanted to say on that subject. She waved her hand in a permissive gesture as if to say, go right ahead.
Ross looked down at a notepad upon which were scribbled words that Shannon could not read. He said, “Let's start with your relationship with him. Before yesterday, did you have any contact with him at all? Of any sort?”
She sat up straight in bed, putting her back against the fort of pillows the hospital staff had given her. She said, “I might have. I've been there four years. I don't know all the police officers by name. I just know, that one is Grubbly Face, or that one is Bushy Brows. That's what I call them, those kind of names.”
“If I show you a picture of Officer Bailey, would you be able to identify him?”
Shannon had trouble keeping the officer's gaze, though she saw that he had no trouble staring right at her. She knew then that the interrogation was an invasion of her privacy. She had not thought they would come so quickly, or at all. Yet there they were, trying to pry open locked doors with words. Behind those doors lay information they wished to know—at least, she hoped that was the case. She hoped that they had not stopped by to collect information on her for future use.