The Cassandra

by Sharma Shields

  I clutched Mother’s coat sleeve. My mouth worked. “I. Saw.” I couldn’t explain. I saw it all before it happened. All of it. The bombs. I deserved this.

  My eyes filled with tears.

  Her brow wrinkled. Then she put a palm on my forehead and its cool plumpness calmed the fever in me.

  “You brought this on yourself. I’ve always told you, Mildred, you can’t trust men, and yet you waddled right into a pack of them. But it’s over now. The doctors will fix you up and then you’ll return to Omak. You know what they told me years ago about you, after you pushed me into the river?”

  I stared at her, my mouth working.

  “They said I needed to occupy your mind. So I overdid it, Milly. I became a layabout, a sickling, a needy old maid. I half-believed it myself. But I don’t think that helped you at all. When you return, it will all be different. I’ll care for you. You’ll be the old maid, the layabout.”

  A loud whimper rose from my chest, exploding from my mouth and nose. A performance? Her needing me to bathe her, to wait on her hand and foot, to clean up her bathroom messes, was all for my benefit?

  A month ago, I would have hesitated to anger her, given how much I had told her that I shouldn’t have. She could have reported me, she could have caused trouble for me then. But now the whole world knew our secrets, so what did it matter?

  “If only,” I told her, lowly, with much effort, “you’d died.”

  If only I’d killed you at the river.

  It wasn’t eloquent, and I worried for a moment that it wouldn’t be an adequate message, but she drew back from me, putting a hand over her heart, registering the venom of my words. I enjoyed the pain they caused her.

  “If only I’d killed you,” I said.

  It was the most complete sentence I’d formed in weeks.

  Martha returned then, her hair combed into ringlets around the saucers of her ears. She was in a huff for being so rudely dismissed, but then she saw Mother’s face, and my own, and she balked.

  “What’s this about? What’s happened now?” She looked frantically between Mother and me, reading our tense faces. “Mildred, are you returning to Omak with us or not?”

  Mother had already risen, was taking up her purse and cane. “No, she’s not coming with us. We’ve done enough for Miss Mildred Groves here. We don’t owe her a thing. It’s your fault, Mildred, but I’m still sorry it happened.”

  She began to walk for the door but then turned back to me and said, “I’m not saying I’ve made the best choices. But one day you’ll see how we women are the only ones looking out for one another.”

  As Mother went through the door, Martha turned back to me with a sad, reproachful look. “Why’d you have to do that? You’re always so selfish. All she does is talk of you, you know. You never stop to think of the pain you cause her.” She put her hand on my arm, lovingly. “I don’t want to leave you here, but it’s for the best.”

  From the hallway Mother hollered Martha’s name.

  “Good-bye, Mildred,” my sister said.

  “Good,” I managed, exhausted, and if I’d had my full mental capacity, I would have added, riddance.

  FIENDSHIP

  “Go. Away.”

  This is what I told Kathy when she came to visit.

  Kathy cocked her head and snapped her fingers in front of my nose. “Mildred, don’t be difficult. Stop feeling sorry for yourself.”

  “Don’t,” I told her, but what I meant was I don’t.

  She shook her head at me, scowling in her mean way. “Just listen for one damn minute, Mildred. It’s not all about you, you know.”

  Why was she so angry with me? What had I ever done to her? I lay on my stomach with my right ear on the pillow, watching her with my face tipped to the left.

  She reached forward with a surprisingly kind movement and drew a coil of my hair behind my left ear.

  “It’s awful what he did to you. It happened to me, too, Mildred. An older boy when I was young. I loved him. He was my very favorite cousin, until…”

  She rolled up her fists and stacked them one on top of the other on the edge of my mattress, resting her chin atop them. We could look each other in the eyes this way, although from my angle she looked tipped onto her side like the queen on a chessboard, less mean, less threatening.

  “Men get away with everything,” she told me.

  My eyes filled with tears.

  “I. Want. To,” I said.

  “What’s that, Mildred?” She moved her fists away and lay her head on its side so that we looked at each other directly. How awkwardly she’d contorted her body, I thought. It was the kindest gesture I’d ever seen from her.

  “Die,” I said then, shutting my eyes tight so that the tears fell thickly, all at once.

  “I know,” she said. “But you can’t.”

  “No,” I said. I didn’t mean die. “Kill.”

  “Oh. That, too. Me, too.”

  “Gordon,” I said.

  Kathy sat up. “Gordon?” A thousand furies flitted over her expression. “God, Mildred. Gordon! Really? But he,” she stopped herself here, took a deep breath. “No. Never mind that. What a snake. I never liked him, you know. I see him with Beth now and again, but no wonder he’s lying low. You’ll have to just do your best to avoid him.”

  I didn’t like hearing this about Beth. “Yes,” I managed.

  She breathed deeply for a minute. “You can’t kill him.”

  I knew I couldn’t. The only person I could harm was myself.

  “You need to forget,” she said. “Forget and move on.”

  “You. Forget,” I said to her, brow furrowed. It was an argument, a retort.

  “I don’t know what else to tell you,” Kathy said, and she sounded sincerely regretful. “It’s easy to give advice. Harder to live it.”

  AUTHORITIES

  The next day a few men came to speak with me about “the incident.” They called themselves the authorities. I saw no badges or identification, but they looked well-groomed and each held a pen and a tablet of paper, so I believed in their importance.

  “Why were you out there in your nightgown?” one of them asked.

  “You know a young woman should not be alone outside of the barracks. We’ve given multiple warnings about this.”

  “The behavior itself was promiscuous.”

  “You weren’t meeting anyone? There wasn’t a secret rendezvous?”

  “A swimming date at the river?”

  “Are you Catholic? Would you like a priest? For a confession?”

  “A minister, then? A man you can trust?”

  “Was this your first time?”

  “Your head injuries could be explained by a bad fall.”

  “Have they checked you for pregnancy yet? Too early?”

  “Did you enjoy any of it? Did you indicate enjoyment in any way, shape, or form?”

  “Of course your memory is shaky. Given the injuries.”

  “This wasn’t your first time out there.”

  “Are you sure you weren’t wanting this to happen?”

  “We’ve known about your hysteria for several months, Miss Groves. People have been monitoring you.”

  “How do we know you didn’t do this to yourself?”

  “Would you say you enjoy the attention your ‘episodes’ bring you?”

  “Is it true you were sleepwalking prior to what you call ‘the attack’?”

  “Maybe you dreamed this?”

  They fell silent, waiting for my response. I watched them with throbbing eyes from where I lay on the cot.

  “Only,” I began. I thought of the hibakusha. I thought of the glass and metal impaled in the baby’s skull. “Expect. The. Worst.”

  They looked at each other, one of them smirking incredulously. “Well, that just about explains it, eh, boys?” He reached out and squeezed one of my toes, which hurt terribly, sending a painful shock to my brain. “Rest up. Heal up. Put all this behind you.”

 
My response slurred together into a garbled curse.

  When they left, I realized they’d never asked me the most important question: Who did this to you?

  I wouldn’t have named him, anyway.

  You know I will. Go to Omak. Your mom and sister.

  I shouldn’t have cared about them now—Martha, Mother—but stupidly I did.

  PARALYSIS

  Autumn passed in an unpredictable weather pattern of confusion and triumph.

  There were days when I could hardly grasp the instructions I was given (squeeze your hand, tap your toes, sit up straight) and days when something lost became, again, automatic. There were days, too, when I slept and dreamed. I dreamed of Japan, of the great blue heron, of Dr. Hall, of Stanley Johnson. I dreamed of the tortured and immolated children of Auschwitz. I dreamed of twins stitched together at their spines. Before my eyes the duo grew foul and rotted and died. The things we’ve done to the children of this world—slavery, brainwashing, exile, genocide—do any other creatures harm their children in this way? These deviances built our own nation, they’ve built all of the civilizations of men. I awoke with the certainty that none of us deserved to be alive, myself least of all.

  One evening, in the middle of the night, I awoke to a snuffling noise at the foot of the bed. The coyote was there, the heron’s yellow eyes boring out at me from his protuberant face. He licked my bare toes with a pitying look, ears low, tail sagging. I kicked at him, hissed at him to leave. He lifted my shoes—Susan Peters’s shoes—in his mouth. They were filthy, caked with dirt. I remembered the last time I’d worn them and cried out. A nurse came running and the coyote slipped away, under the cots of my bedfellows.

  The next day an aide presented the shoes to me, polished to a fine sheen.

  “Let’s try walking in these today, shall we?”

  I shook with rage and frustration. “No,” I said. “They aren’t safe.”

  I spoke even now, months later, with hesitation. I could handle short words but nothing else.

  “I love these shoes,” the aide said, admiring them. “So fashionable. Where did you find them?”

  Outside, it was snowing. Every morning they told me the date but the information slipped through the new holes in my skull. I couldn’t keep track of the simplest details.

  “Susan Peters.”

  “What’s that?”

  “Susan Peters, the actress,” I said again. “Her shoes.”

  “How funny you should mention that,” the aide said, smiling. She put up a finger, indicating she would return in a moment. She left the shoes sitting on the edge of my bed. I didn’t want them there. I pushed them onto the floor with my feet. They clattered onto the linoleum. Maybe the floor would open up and swallow them whole.

  The aide returned with a newspaper and cleared her throat.

  “Listen to this,” she said. “‘On January first of 1945, Spokane-born actress and Hollywood ‘Girl Next Door’ Susan Peters went duck hunting with her husband, Richard Quine, and was accidentally struck in the spine by a discharged bullet. After a year of hospitalization, doctors say she is paralyzed from the waist down. Peters remains plucky even in the face of her mother’s death this December. She promises to continue acting, even if from a wheelchair.’” The aide looked up at me. “Something else, huh? She’s had a horrible year. And we always think stars have it all.”

  I tried to sit up. The aide saw me and reached forward, but I batted her hand away. I struggled into a seated position and managed, slowly, to swing my legs over the edge of the cot. The aide tried to help me but I pushed her away again.

  “Why are you weeping?” she asked, putting a hand on my back.

  I wanted to stand and walk into the lavatory where I could be alone. The effort of it was too much. I brought my hands up to my eyes, covering them, but even the darkness there swam and dissolved, and before me unfolded all that would happen to Susan, all of it: her forced cheer, the cancellation of her contracts, the pathetic attempts at acting, the isolation, the divorce, the sanatorium, the electric shock therapy that triggered an even darker depression, the anorexia, the bronchial pneumonia, the terrific release of death.

  For a moment I was her in that last second of life, etiolating into exultant erasure. I wept tears of gratitude even as a headache implanted itself behind my eyes, the worst headache of my life. Over the next months, I became more and more acquainted with the power of these headaches. My visions took on a more focused strength, and so did the pain.

  “Don’t cry,” the aide said. “It’s only an actress.”

  “A person,” I protested. “All of these discarded persons!”

  She congratulated me on formulating such a long, eloquent phrase.

  1946

  AN UNEXPECTED GIFT

  Daily, as I improved, a nurse’s assistant, usually Joanie with her carefully straightened hair, would hand me a cane and take my arm and together we would walk outside, a five-footed, two-headed beast, slowly circuiting Richland Hospital’s courtyard. I relished the fresh air. The hospital air was sterile, its aroma grotesquely clean, bones scoured in bleach, but outdoors I inhaled the scent of the earth and its snowy richness. Inside the lights flashed faintly at all times, just enough to make me think I was losing my mind, but the light outdoors, thin and cold, was stable, omnipresent. “Let’s go around again,” I would beg, and the assistant, especially if it were Joanie, would usually comply. It was an escape for her, too, from serving the cafeteria slop and straightening sheets and scrubbing shit from bedpans. We looped around and around again, and each visit to the courtyard served to deliver a part of me back to myself, my brain and limbs remembering one another again, finally. Before long, I abandoned the cane. Spring was coming; the creeks and rivers swelled with melt. My feet were steady, even on the ice. But now I had a limp, a noticeable one, and after a few weeks of no improvement I realized my ambulation was as good as it would ever be. I struggled to accept this, what had been done to me, and I tried to grow accustomed to dragging a reluctant part of me along, but I could never shake the sense that there was a corpse attached to me now, hindering my movement. My own corpse, presumably. The old me from before Little Boy and Fat Man, the one Gordon had bludgeoned to death.

  One day when Joanie and I rounded the bare hydrangeas, their branches finally relieved of snow, I heard a familiar, warm voice calling, “Mildred Groves! I’m so happy to see you!”

  I looked up from the glittering walkway and there was Tom Cat hurrying toward me, a sporting figure in his sturdy winter coat and good boots and hunting cap. I was genuinely happy to see him. Joanie no longer held my arm during the walks, but we walked close together for companionship, sometimes with our elbows touching. We separated now and I waved at Tom Cat, smiling. Joanie moved away from us, providing space for us to speak privately.

  Tom Cat stiffened at the sight of my face. The rest of me must have looked the same, hidden as it was beneath a winter parka and a long wool blanket, wrapped around my hospital gown like a skirt, but my face was changed, one eye dead and unblinking, the nose busted and healing in an angry, crooked line. There were other scars and lacerations, too. I was Mary Shelley’s monster, stitched together with parts that didn’t match.

  “Oh, Mildred,” he said, and I was grateful for the pity in his voice, the awareness of loss. But when he reached forward to take up my hand, I yelped and pulled away from him.

  It hurt, being touched by a man. The pain slammed deep in my organs, like someone had plunged a butcher knife into my bowels. I struggled to catch my breath.

  “I won’t touch you,” he said. “I shouldn’t have done that.”

  He waited with me, hanging back, and I could see how he battled against his instincts, how he longed to put his hand on my shoulder and pat me comfortingly, how he sensed that this would only intensify my agony.

  “I’ll never not feel it,” I said, and he seemed to understand, and sadness flickered in his eyes, not just pity for me, but for himself.

 
When I regained my composure, he said, “I brought you a gift.”

  We began to walk, side by side, toward the hospital doors. I was feeling the chill now. I looked forward to getting inside.

  “Oh?” I couldn’t imagine what the gift would be. “How kind of you, Tom Cat.”

  “I wanted to visit you for so long, but Beth told me you weren’t ready. I hope it’s okay I came today.”

  “It’s good to see a friend,” I told him, and I was relieved that I actually meant it.

  “I think of you all the time. I’ve written to my mother and sisters in Tonasket about you. When I told them you’d been involved in an accident—”

  I stiffened. An accident.

  “—they all gave a little money and bought something for you. It isn’t much, but I thought it might cheer you, even give you some guidance. At the very least, it will let you know we’re all praying for you.”

  He brought out a prettily wrapped gift, handing it to me, and I sank onto a little stone bench near the hospital entrance to open it. Joanie lingered nearby, no doubt curious about the item. It had been a long time since anyone had given me a gift, and I remembered my childhood, the excitement of a birthday party when I got everything I wanted, including a handsome stuffed bear.

  I unwrapped the present while Tom Cat settled himself on the other side of the bench, shining at me.

  It was a Bible. They’d paid money—good money, I knew—to inscribe the front of it in gold leaf, For Our Friend, Miss Mildred Groves.

  I looked up at Tom Cat, and he read the question in my eyes.

  “I know, I know,” he said timidly. He reached up and scratched his ear beneath his red hunting cap. “It’s a common gift for newlyweds. I hope that doesn’t make you uncomfortable.”

  I considered what all of this meant: that Tom Cat had expressed his interest in marrying me to his siblings and mother; that they had liked and supported the idea; that Tom Cat wanted to marry me now, despite what had happened.