by Amy Gentry
Only late at night, just as I’m drifting off, does that precise shade of bluish-greenish black on her rib cage evoke the word tattoo.
The next day, I drive her to a pebbled-concrete office complex off Memorial Drive, Tom’s phone call having yielded a referral to the dark and slightly down-at-heel office of Carol Morse, PsyD. Julie goes in, and in the waiting area, where the ficus trees are mysteriously flourishing in the absence of natural light, I pull out a book on Byron and landscape, then put it down and spend ninety minutes paging through magazines instead. I think about the many appointments in my future, all the waiting rooms in store for me, and hope they update the magazines regularly.
On the way home, Julie asks if she can drive herself to her therapy appointments.
Tom and I argue about it for three days straight.
“She can’t drive without a license,” he says. “End of story.”
“The therapist’s office isn’t that far away. She won’t have to go on the highway—”
“Then we’ll get her a bike.”
But in a city without sidewalks, a bike feels more dangerous to me than a car. “And have her get honked at, even hit? People get abducted off bikes, Tom. And the bus is just as bad.” Unprotected, I want to say. I think of Julie walking along the feeder road. “Of course she’ll get a license, but it takes months, and there are all those tests and forms and documents. What does she do until then? She’ll have to get a vision test—”
“She should! There are reasons for those things,” Tom says, but I can tell he’s wavering, and so I keep fighting. It’s the first thing Julie has really asked me for, and she asked me, not Tom. I assume she wants to be alone in the car for the same reason I do: that sheltered, armored feeling of sitting high up behind the tinted windows in the recycled, air-conditioned air, the total privacy. It’s something I can give her that’s better than clothes.
In the end, we compromise. I sign her up for the midsummer session of driver’s ed at the community college near our house, and Tom agrees to take Julie out for driving lessons now so she can get herself to therapy and back, carefully, using the neighborhood roads. The private lessons are what clinches it; his resolve crumbles in the face of her obvious delight at the prospect, and for the next week they wake up conspiratorially early and head off to various parking structures around town for a few hours. When they come back, we eat lunch together, and then Tom goes to work while Julie and I swim in the pool. In the afternoons, I take her out shopping—we buy all her bedroom furniture in one trip to IKEA, as if she’s a college student—or to her therapy appointment, when she has one, or, a few times, to an afternoon movie. After a family dinner, we watch TV with Jane curled up nearby, absorbed in her notebook. It’s a cozy routine, one where Julie is always accounted for and our time together is comfortably filled with tasks so no one has to reach far for things to talk about that aren’t Julie’s eight-year absence or find reasons to gently touch her forearm that aren’t, at least not obviously, about checking to make sure she’s still there.
For the first few weeks, this routine feels like it could last forever, in spite of minor disturbances. Tom answers the phone sharply when he doesn’t recognize the caller ID, telling the reporters that we’re not interested in talking; “I don’t know when,” he snaps, “our family needs privacy right now.” Eventually he turns the ringer off, and I sink back into the bliss of knowing he is taking care of things, as he did in the days after it happened. In the back of my mind are certain topics I avoid thinking about—my job, Jane’s incompletes, the SANE, the SAFE—but then I send my department chair an e-mail telling him my grades will be late and decide that Jane, who has grown quieter in Julie’s presence, must be making progress on her late papers. What else could she be writing about in her notebook all the time? And when Julie starts driving after a few weeks of early-morning lessons with Tom, she gets to her appointments and back just fine, as I knew she would. This is our new normal, and it feels like something we are all learning together, as a family.
Tom and I even start having sex again, something that hasn’t happened regularly for years. He touches me gingerly, as if he can sense that my skin feels almost raw. Julie has been in the house for a few weeks, and though I’m getting used to it, it still feels like someone has rubbed me all over with a rasp. Every pore seems to be open, every hair a fine filament ready to shoot me full of sensation at the slightest breeze. I have been fighting for so long to stifle sensation. I remember when the grief was so potent I would lie on the sofa with the television on drinking vodka gimlets, one after the other, just waiting to pass out, staying as still as possible, teaching myself the art of numbness. And now it is as if I’ve been dropped into scalding water and the numbness has peeled away and the skin underneath is affronted by air.
If there is something missing—if I am afraid to love her quite as much as before—it is only because the potential for love feels so big and so intense that I fear I will disappear in the expression of it, that it will blow my skin away like clouds and I will be nothing.
I wake up one morning with Jane standing over me, shaking my elbow. For a moment, caught in dreams I can’t remember, I think we’re doing the whole thing over again.
“Mom,” she whispers urgently. “Mom, can you wake up?”
I reach a hand instinctively over to Tom.
“Don’t wake Dad. Just come quick, okay?”
I’m naked under the covers, I realize in time to keep from pushing them off me. Jane sees. “I’ll wait outside. It’s Julie,” she adds unnecessarily, since even as I wake up completely I’m still reliving that day.
I skip the bathrobe and pull on jeans and yesterday’s shirt in case we need to get right into the car. “Gone?” I ask when I’m out of the bedroom, my skin clamping shut under the air conditioning.
Jane looks at me oddly and shakes her head. “No, nothing like that. I think she’s sick.”
We’re still whispering as she leads me upstairs. Jane peers down the hall at the closed bathroom door.
“It’s locked,” she says helplessly.
“How long?”
“I don’t know,” she says. “Since before I got up, half an hour ago. I thought she was taking a bath but then I heard her—moaning, or something. I knocked, but she won’t answer.” Her voice is quavering.
I walk to the bathroom door, knock softly. “Julie?”
There is no moaning now, only a rhythmic click and shuffle that I associate immediately with a night spent doubled over on the toilet.
“Baby, are you okay in there? Are you hurting?”
Two words sent explosively outward on an expulsion of breath, barely audible.
“What?”
“Go away.” Followed by a gasp of pain.
I turn to Jane. “Get a blanket from the hall closet and put it in the car. My keys are on the table. I’ll be down in a few minutes.” She leaves immediately to follow my orders.
Facing the bathroom door, I say, “Julie. You’re going to have to let me in. You’re going to unlock the door, okay?”
Nothing but a moan and the rhythm of the clicking toilet seat.
The next thing I know, I am in the bathroom. I don’t remember this part, but Tom tells me later that he woke up to pounding (mine) and screaming (Julie’s), and that by the time he made it to the hall in his boxers, my arm had already disappeared up to the shoulder in a ragged hole in the bathroom door, and then I was turning the doorknob from the inside, pulling my arm out, and opening the door. Between my bloody fist and the blood on the bathroom floor, there was blood everywhere, and he turned around and around looking for the intruder who had laid waste to the household.
But however I got in, when I see Julie, I know what’s happening to her right away. I had one myself, after Jane. It’s a painful, bloody thing, though I remember wishing during the worst times that I had lost Julie that way instead of the other.
Tears are streaming down her face, and I wrap a towel around her shoulder
s and help her to her feet. “I’ll call you from the hospital,” I tell Tom, who is still shaking as he follows us down the stairs and into the kitchen. The last thing I say to him, as he stands by the island in his boxers, is “I didn’t know we even had a gun.” More to remind him he’s holding it than anything else. He stares down at it in his hand as if he hadn’t known either.
“She’s okay,” I tell Tom over the phone from my chair in the waiting area. “Ovarian cysts can be very painful when they rupture. Tell Jane it’s okay.” He protests. “Yes, they’re concerned about the blood too, but they don’t think it’s anything serious. It was mostly mine, from the door. The ultrasound—”
The ultrasound showed a tiny, irregular smudge, already half disintegrating, washed out in the early morning, tiny bits of tissue in a thick red exodus. When she saw what was on the monitor, she went pale and silent, dropped my hand, and said, “Get out.” I got out, but before I did, I saw her face.
She knew.
I end the call with Tom, put the phone back in my purse, and sit. If any of the staff in the emergency department heard me and knew I was lying, they didn’t care enough to give me even a glance. I bet they’ve heard plenty of miscarriages become ovarian cysts on the phone with Dad.
I reach for a magazine and wince at the pain in my bandaged knuckles. Thinking of the clothes I bought her, I grimace. Have the snug jeans become more snug in the past few weeks? Have I failed to notice? I remember the tattoo, remember, above all, what she told the police: “Six months.” Now seven. And hate myself for thinking, She lied, she lied, she lied.
But omissions aren’t necessarily lies, are they? This is what the therapy is for, telling the horrible details that don’t add up but make all the difference. Surely that’s what she does in the therapist’s office for ninety minutes twice a week: talks to a surrogate me—isn’t that the theory? A trained professional onto whom she can project a version of me that, unlike the real me, will be able to handle everything, hold everything, make it all make sense?
The therapist, Carol Morse, suddenly seems like the answer. She can’t tell me anything confidential, of course, but maybe under the circumstances—a pregnancy, a miscarriage, Julie’s health at stake—she’ll find a way to give me some insights into what’s going on with my daughter. There’s so much more to her than I know, but I can handle Julie’s truth. I’ve already had the worst thing happen to me that can ever happen to a parent. And now, in a sense, Julie has too. It’s something we share.
When she’s finally discharged, we walk to the car. Another late night has turned into early morning during our time in the hospital. The sun is coming up, the freeway still clear, the heat just a soft shimmer that promises more to come. We drive for a few minutes in silence.
“It was the guard,” she says. “In the helicopter. I don’t know why I didn’t want to say. I guess because—” She struggles. “It wasn’t really rape.”
Pause. I take in this detail, try to make it fit.
“What I mean is, I offered. I thought he’d be less likely to kill me. I—I didn’t want to tell you. Because I was ashamed. Anyway I thought—” She gasps a little. “I thought I couldn’t get pregnant. My period has never been regular since—” She stops when a tear rolls down my cheek. “Well, ever.”
I nod. This woman is older than twenty-one. I am not as old as she is, and I am forty-six, with lines of mourning etched all over my face that will never go away. But she knew. I saw her face when she looked at the ultrasound screen.
“I love you,” I say, and it’s the truth, the absolute truth. But in this new world, after the miscarriage, it sounds like a lie.
“Mom,” she says, despairingly.
“I won’t tell your father or Jane. This is between us.”
A warm wave of relief radiates from her as she settles back in her seat. This is what she has wanted all along. She looks out the window, and I look at the road ahead, and we are closer in our secret than we have ever been.
Julie
woke up to a fresh round of cramps with a strangled cry.
The television was on, but muted; was it the same movie she fell asleep to or a different one? While she was still half asleep, Tom came running down the stairs from her bedroom, which he was using as an office during the daytime while they figured out where to move his desk. This made her nervous, but she didn’t want to say anything about it.
Looking at him now, standing at the bottom of the stairs, she briefly remembered him from last night, holding a gun. She wondered where it was now.
“Did I hear you calling? Are you okay?”
“I’m fine. Just a bad dream.” At first she’d dreamed of Cal, but it got bad near the end, when the cramps started rocketing through her body louder and louder. She couldn’t remember the worst of it with Tom standing there, just a feeling of dirt all around her mouth and the colors yellow and red—the shades of the afghan, she noted with disgust, throwing it off her. Now that she was awake, the sharp pain in her abdomen was already subsiding to a dull, empty ache.
“Can I make you some tea?”
“I’d like to get out of the house.” The air in here was somehow both cold and stifling, and the big windows made her feel like some kind of specimen under glass. Or maybe it was the way they all watched her. “Can I take the car?”
“You mother left a few minutes ago. Jane’s got mine,” he said swiftly. She could tell the idea of her driving without a license still made him uncomfortable. “Your mom should be back soon. She was just going by her office for some late term papers. Why don’t you keep resting for a while? You could watch another movie.”
She swiveled her feet to the ground. “It’s okay. I’ll just take a walk.”
He watched her doubtfully as she pushed herself to standing. Her legs felt quivery, as if her feet were still in the stirrups. “I’ll be fine, Dad,” she forced herself to say. “I just need some head space. Let me go get dressed, okay?”
He nodded. “I’ll be in the kitchen.”
She went up to her room, opened the closet door, and stared at the rows of brand-new flats and boots, some she hadn’t worn yet that were still in their boxes. She could see, down the hall in Jane’s room, a pair of beat-up Converse high-top sneakers slouching toe to heel by the side of Jane’s bed, where it was her habit to kick them off. On an impulse, she walked down the hall and grabbed them. They gaped a little, so she added a second pair of socks, and, instead of wrapping the laces around the ankles like Jane, she laced them all the way to the top and double-tied the knot. She wanted something that wouldn’t come off if she had to start running.
The thought made her legs feel wobblier than ever. She grabbed a hoodie out of Jane’s closet, then thought better of it—Tom might notice—and hung it back up. There was nothing like a hoodie in her own closet, just cardigans and blazers and other things she’d never worn before. They’d excited her in the store for that reason, but now their unfaded pastels looked like candy to her. Too visible. She grabbed the most subdued cardigan, a soft gray one, and put it on. Then she reached under her brand-new and punishingly stiff mattress, slid the phone out from between it and the box spring, and tucked it into her front pocket, hoping the cardigan would mostly cover it.
Downstairs, she breezed past Tom, grabbed her new purse, and yelled, “I’ll be back before dinner,” over her shoulder as the door swung shut behind her. The outside air hit her face like steam off a bowl of soup; sitting in Tom and Anna’s freezing house, you forgot the sweltering heat waiting on the other side of the window. She peeled her cardigan off at the bottom of the driveway and stuffed it into her purse.
At the end of the block, she slipped the phone out of her pocket and turned it on, grateful for her last-minute inspiration to ditch it with her IDs in the front bushes before ringing the doorbell. Losing consciousness had not been part of the plan. Maybe it was the heat and all the walking, but when Jane stepped into the hallway, Julie had thought she was seeing Charlotte’s ghost. The hos
pital had not been part of the plan either, but at least the doctor had shed light on certain particulars.
Particulars that, of course, Anna now knew too.
No wonder she’d felt so weak. This whole time she’d thought it was love she was fighting against, or tearing herself away from, that feeling of warm belonging that threatened to betray her whenever Cal looked at her. Now she knew the betrayal ran deeper, down into her blood, bones, and tissue. No wonder she’d felt violated. No wonder she’d felt possessed.
It was a lucky thing he never found out what was inside her.
Recovering the phone had been tricky, since they watched her so closely those first few days. But on the third day she’d slipped out for the mail and picked it up on the way back in. Thank God the phone had stayed dry under the awning, and the IDs were all still there, rubber-banded to its back. When she’d powered it up, the screen flashed on, and there was Cal, smiling at her with that infuriating expression of faith and love she’d drunk in so deeply and grown so strong on—strong enough to remember who she really was and why he couldn’t find out. By the time she saw the article in the library that day—Cal had dropped her off there to study the GED books—she was strong enough to tear herself away.
She’d scrubbed everything else off her phone before she was out of Seattle, but she couldn’t quite bring herself to get rid of Cal. She felt as if he were with her still in some indefinable way. When, at the hospital, she’d learned what it was, she’d thought, maybe, somehow, when she was finished here, she could go back.
She knew it was a stupid idea, and her body agreed. It had made the decision for her.
She took one last, long look at the face on the screen, and for a moment she was lying next to him again, her fingers tracing his chest lightly, his fingers twined in her hair, listening as he described his mother’s white face, one eye swollen shut, framed in the rear window of his aunt’s Volkswagen. Sending one last, blank look in the direction of the small black boy crying at the kitchen window before twisting her blond head away and turning her back on him forever.