Flying in Place

by Susan Palwick

  “You little bitch,” my father said, and slapped me across the mouth. The blow jolted me all the way back into my body, into that achy, wavery place where everything was ugly, where nothing seemed real but the taste of blood in my mouth and the reawakened torment of my sunburn. I looked up at my father’s face and saw in amazement that his cheeks were wet, his shoulders shaking. He was sobbing, breathing in deep, shuddering gasps.

  “Pneumonia killed her. Pneumonia! We did everything we could. She had the best medical care available. She couldn’t have gotten better treatment in Chicago—”

  “She could have gotten better treatment in her bedroom,” I said. “Let go of me!”

  I twisted away from him and started crawling to the door, but he caught me and slapped me again, a stinging blow that reverberated through my skull. His momentary grief had crystallized into rage. “Where do you think you’re going, Emma? You can’t get away from me. Don’t you know that by now?”

  Quiet, I told myself. Just stay quiet and take it, and everything will be over with more quickly. But the part that had been talking before wouldn’t shut up. “Yes, I can.”

  “Where?” he said, and shook me. “Where do you think you can go?”

  “The same place Ginny went,” I said, and fled, dragging the chatterbox dummy with me. Out of this body, right now. It wasn’t going to last long, anyhow. Surely he’d kill me. He had to kill me, now, because I knew about Ginny, and he wouldn’t be safe unless I was dead too. Anyone doing an autopsy would know what had happened, but doctors stick together. He’d keep them quiet about it. He’d tell them some lie and make them believe it. No one was going to touch him. Not him.

  But even when I was out, safe from his hands, the breathing tossed me around the room as if I were only a rubber duck in a gale. “Ginny?” I said, screaming over the storm and fighting to get to the window. If I could get outside I could go to the lake. I’d be safe there. “Ginny, please help me. I need you. Ginny!”

  She didn’t come. She had to come. “Ginny! Ginny, where are you?”

  She wasn’t there. She wasn’t there. She’d done what she was supposed to do, what she’d come back for: she’d remembered, and she’d told me what she remembered, and she’d gotten me to tell it too. And then she’d gone away again, back to the land where children forget their names.

  And I could go there as surely as she had. I knew it, and my father knew it. I could go where Ginny had gone, where I wouldn’t have to feel anything anymore, where I’d always be safe from the evil men and the crocodiles, safe with the other lost children.

  But it hadn’t worked even for Ginny, had it? If I ascend up into heaven, thou art there: if I make my bed in hell, behold, thou art there. She hadn’t been able to stay in the painless place either, not while it was still happening, not before she’d made someone believe her.

  If I died, it would just happen to someone else. There were so many little girls in the world; he’d always be able to find others, even if they weren’t his. There were girls in the hospital, girls on the street, girls at the cemetery: little girls who couldn’t fight him because he was bigger than they were, little girls growing bigger, bigger, getting bigger where he wanted them to be big.

  Bobbing next to the ceiling, caught in the currents of my father’s rage as he tried to slap me into consciousness down on the bed, I knew that if I died now nothing would change. It would just keep happening, and all the pain I’d put Ginny through would have been for nothing.

  So I bucked the gale and fought my way back into my body, hating it, wanting only to be someplace where this wouldn’t hurt. I fought my way back in and then I started fighting my father—screaming, lashing out, going for the eyes and the groin.

  He blocked me, cursing, but I rolled away from him and started crawling towards the door, my fever melting all solid surfaces to rubber. Ginny. Remember what happened to Ginny, and it will be easier. “Mom!” I screamed, as loudly as I could, letting my fury fill my lungs. “Mom! He’s killing me. Mom, help me!”

  “Give up,” my father said, grabbing me by the back of my collar. “She can’t hear you. The door’s locked. There are only two keys. If you fight me you’ll just make it harder for yourself—”

  “Mom!” I screamed, and managed to pull away from him, landing a solid kick on his ankle in the process. “Mom! Wake up! Call the cops! Mom!”

  “Fat chance, fat girl.” Panting, he grabbed my collar again and started shaking me so hard I thought my teeth were going to fall out. “I unplugged the phones in case Donna decided to call. In her present condition, your mother can’t manage modular jacks.”

  Somewhere I heard a door slam; I couldn’t think what it meant, because my father was talking to me kindly, reasonably, even as he transferred his grip to my hair. “Now just relax. If you relax you’ll be all right. Stop fighting me, Emma. You’re making it worse for yourself.”

  I gritted my teeth and talked around the lump in my throat. “You’re the one making it—”

  He slapped me again. “How can you let yourself be hurt like this, Emma? It would be so much easier to give in.”

  “You taught me,” I told him, the words distorted by pain, my brain blazing with fever and rage. “You taught me to protect everybody except myself—”

  The slap was a punch this time. “Who are you protecting, Emma?”

  Ginny. No, Ginny’s dead. Mom. Donna. The girl at the cemetery. Think about them, because if you think about yourself you’ll be too afraid.

  Think about Jane. Eyes and crotch. Think about water; he gave you that too, water and all its blessings, the way it flows around you, the way it shines in sunlight. You have to get away from him, so you’ll be able to swim again.

  I managed to pull out of his grasp, my skull searing, the world going black for a moment, and twisted onto my back, kicking up at his groin with both feet. He danced back just in time and let out a bellow of rage, the loudest sound I’d ever heard him make. Winded and terrified, unable to move, I lay on Ginny’s dusty carpet.

  “For that,” my father said, and I thought I heard banging on the door but I must have been imagining it, because no one was going to help me. I was alone, alone with all the other little girls. I couldn’t protect myself or anyone else, and I’d never see water again. “For that—”

  For that, I thought, he’s going to kill me after all. Just let it happen quickly. Let it be over. But instead there was a shattering, splintering sound and the shriek of wood on wood and a ripping noise accompanied by more clouds of dust, and my father was yanked backwards, emitting a yelp like a wounded dog. Tom Halloran stood behind him, my father’s collar in one hand and Jane’s baseball bat in the other.

  “If you touch that child again,” Tom said, his face beet-red, “I’ll smash your skull in, you psychotic prick.”

  After that, it’s all fragments for a while. I remember noticing that the windowshade had flown upwards, revealing shattered glass and the end of a ladder leaning against the outside of the house. I remember being puzzled because the door was still booming, and hearing Tom say to it, “I’ve got him, Tommy. Go get your mother.”

  There were sirens, then, and Myrna came and wrapped me in a blanket. I remember leaning on her, going down the stairs and outside into a hot spring night rendered chaotic with flashing lights and squawking radios and uniformed people who looked bored and worried and disgusted. Shoulders hunched, hands over her eyes, my mother stood in the middle of the front yard, peering out at the scene from between her fingers.

  Later, Myrna told me how Mom had run into the Hallorans’ kitchen without even knocking and grabbed the phone and started calling everyone on that absurd, oversized list: the cops and the Fire Department and the Ambulance Squad, the Poison Control Center, the Animal Hospital. She said the same thing to all of them. “My daughter’s in trouble at 357 Spruce. Please hurry. I’m afraid it’s too late.”

  And then she’d put down the phone and dial the next number, punching the buttons with her s
haking hands. She was down to the National Guard when Myrna finally got the phone away from her, and by then Tom had already gone roaring out of the house with his baseball bat, followed by Tom Jr.

  It must have been the hardest thing she’d ever done, but I didn’t know that yet, when I saw her covering her face. I thought Myrna had made the phone calls, and I wondered why my mother wasn’t sleeping on the couch. The sirens must have woken her, even through the drugs. I wondered whether I’d really saved her, whether she’d die after all, what I could say to her. But Myrna spoke for me.

  “Pam, look, here’s Emma. Emma’s here. She’s safe now. Pam? Can you hear me?”

  My mother uncovered her eyes and closed them instead, bowing her head and clasping her hands in front of her as if she were praying. “Please forgive me,” she said, in her clear, lovely voice, and I knew she wasn’t talking to us at all.

  I stayed numb through Mom’s nervous breakdown and hospitalization, through my father’s trial and conviction, through an endless round of doctors and social workers and therapists. For a while I thought I’d never feel anything again, thought my soul had gone away with Ginny even though my body had stayed on earth, with the birds and the wind and the lake. I lived with the Hallorans and slept in their extra bedroom with the lock on the door and somehow maintained my usual grades through the end of one school year and the beginning of the next, but I couldn’t feel anything.

  I remember snatches from that summer: looking up at July 4 fireworks—the fanciest our town had ever had, because it was the Bicentennial—and wishing Ginny could see them from heaven; going to Tom Jr.’s house for a barbecue and staying glued to the TV instead, because the Olympic gymnastics finals were on. “She’s hurting herself,” I kept saying as Nadia Comeneci bounced against the uneven parallel bars. “She’s going to have awful bruises. Somebody tell her to stop.”

  “It’s all right,” said Tom Jr.’s wife, and turned off the television. “She’s all right now, Emma. You just come out into the yard and help me and Janie cook the hamburgers, honey, okay?”

  Much later I learned that Jane had spent that summer beating up, or threatening to beat up, more than one kid she heard making snide cracks about me; Tom Sr., in his inimitable fashion, protected me from reporters and their cameras. As the trial approached, the Hallorans disconnected their television entirely, so I wouldn’t be subjected to the coverage. They told me it was broken. I never wondered why they hadn’t gotten around to fixing it.

  Myrna used every possible avenue of the social service network to keep me from having to go on the witness stand, although Donna did so willingly. Another doctor at the hospital came forward and shared his suspicions about Ginny’s death, and several of the nurses my father worked with testified to subtle, systematic sexual harrassment. But these are facts I was told afterward, rather than things I remember. My only memory of the event is of Donna sitting at the Hallorans’ kitchen table, holding my hand and telling me, “He can’t hurt you ever again, Emma. He’s not even allowed to live in the same town you do. He has to go away and get help for a very long time.”

  “Three years,” Jane’s brother Greg said behind me. “Three years of frigging therapy and community service, and then the bastard gets to practice again!”

  “Greg!” Myrna said warningly.

  “They should’ve thrown the creep in jail. So what if they fined him? They should have taken away his license! That judge has oatmeal between his ears—”

  “Greg, be quiet!”

  “Your father can’t hurt you anymore,” Donna said, holding my hands very tightly. “He can’t live here again. He’s not allowed to come near you. Do you understand?”

  “Yes.” I turned around and said to Greg, “It’s because of the judge’s prostate, you know. He gave us all those oranges.”

  “No,” Myrna said. “He was very upset. He was. Emma, he agonized over that sentence. I’m not saying he did what was right, because I think your father should have gone to jail too. But the judge felt awful for you. He thought prison would make your father even meaner than he is now, and he wanted your father to get counselling so he wouldn’t hurt anyone else. The judge tried to do the right thing. I don’t agree with his decision, but he’s a good man.”

  “He’s an idiot,” said Greg.

  “It doesn’t matter what he is,” Donna said quietly, “as long as Emma’s safe.”

  Even though I’d fought so hard against my father, I couldn’t make myself care about whether I was safe or not. I went about life in a fog which lifted only during my visits to the lake, where I kept searching for glimpses of Ginny. The place which had once seemed so comforting was desolate now, because she wasn’t there. Later I learned that one of the Hallorans followed me every time I went there, to make sure nothing happened to me, but at the time I didn’t realize it. I always thought I was alone; I’d have thought I was alone if I’d been in Times Square on New Year’s Eve, because I was all by myself in a place companionship couldn’t touch. I’d told no one but my mother about Ginny’s ghost.

  Myrna finally made her presence known one chill October afternoon as I sat on the end of the dock, looking out at the water. I was supposed to be at an appointment with another counselor, but I couldn’t take the questions anymore, endless questions, questions I didn’t know how to answer without telling people about Ginny. And if I talked about Ginny they’d really know I was crazy.

  “Emma,” someone called behind me, and I turned at the familiar voice and Myrna was on the beach, holding up a sweater. “Aren’t you cold?”

  I shrugged, and she trudged up the dock towards me. It didn’t occur to me to wonder that she was there. “Awfully cold out here,” she said, draping the sweater over my shoulders and sitting down next to me. “What are you doing?”

  “Thinking.”

  “What about? Your dad?”

  I turned back to the lake, into the wind. “Yeah, I guess. Everything, you know?”

  She couldn’t possibly know, and being Myrna she probably knew it. Instead of answering, she passed me an apple. “Here,” she said. “Thought you might want a snack.”

  “To keep doctors away?” I asked, and she laughed. The little birds pecking for food on the beach scattered at the noise.

  “Yes,” she said, grinning hugely. “Yes, to keep doctors away. God bless you, Emma. That’s the first joke you’ve made for—well, just for ages. Keep that up, you hear me?”

  I hadn’t thought it was funny. I pulled on the sweater, a thick one of Tom’s way too large for me, and said, “Will it work on all those counselors, too? I mean, I know I’m probably crazy, but I’m sick of them. All they do is ask stupid questions.”

  “You aren’t crazy,” Myrna said, and her vehemence scattered more birds than her laughter had. “You were never crazy, Emma. Your father’s crazy and your mother may be crazy, and what happened to you was certainly crazy, but you aren’t. Not one bit. Nobody thinks you are. Honey, you’re sane and sound and strong as God’s little green apples, or you never would have survived all that.”

  “You don’t understand,” I said.

  “No? Then tell me what I should understand.”

  “You won’t believe me.”

  “Try me.”

  I shrugged again, and told her about Ginny: maybe because it was time to tell someone, maybe because Myrna had gone to the trouble of following me to the lake, maybe because I couldn’t find Ginny and needed to make her real by talking about her. Maybe I was trying to drive Myrna away, or maybe I was testing her to be sure she’d stay no matter what I told her. Whatever the reason, I told her, all of it, and she listened, and when I was finished she was silent for a long time.

  “Well,” she said, just when I thought she wasn’t going to acknowledge the story at all, “well, that explains a lot, doesn’t it.”

  “You think I’m crazy too, don’t you?”

  “No, I don’t.”

  “It happened! Really it did. Ginny came and she told me the tru
th, things I couldn’t have known—”

  “Ghosts always tell the truth,” Myrna said mildly. “That’s why people are afraid of them.”

  We sat there as the sun sank lower and the little birds that sounded so much like Ginny hunted on the beach. “I think,” Myrna said slowly after a while, “that most of us never really treasure being alive. We take it for granted. I think Ginny wanted you to understand how precious it is.”

  I shook my head. She hadn’t gotten it at all. “You don’t understand. Mom was right—Ginny was a better person than I am. She was! She was prettier and nicer and smarter—”

  “I don’t know if she was or not, Emma, because I never knew her. I don’t think she could have been much smarter than you are, though. You’re a damn smart kid. And you’re every bit as pretty as anyone needs to be.”

  I wrapped Tom’s sweater more tightly around me. I was shaking, and because I’d fled so far from my pain I thought my trembling was just the cold. “She was nicer! She was! She came back so I’d be able to stop my father, and I couldn’t do anything for her at all.” Little bits of darkness were flashing in front of my eyes, like an obsidian scalpel slicing open the sky. “All I did was hurt her, just like he did. All I did was make her relive the bad stuff.”

  “You gave her back her name,” Myrna said gently. “You shared the lake with her.”

  “But I couldn’t give her anything new! I couldn’t give her anything she really wanted! Disneyland or anything!”

  “She wanted you to live. She wanted you to feel all the things she can’t feel anymore. Do you understand?”

  “But she helped me! She did all those things to help me, and I couldn’t do anything for her at all!”

  “Emma, no one can help her. That’s what being dead means. But a lot of people are trying to help you. The best way for you to honor Ginny is to let them.” Myrna’s voice was sharper then, and I realized dimly, for the first time, how much trouble she’d gone to for me: making all those counselling appointments that I never kept, taking me into her house even though I hardly spoke to anyone there.