The Escape Artist

by Helen Fremont

  “It’s all right, she’s going to be okay.” My mother took a deep breath, and I realized I had been holding mine. “She tried to kill herself.”

  My stomach lurched. I felt like one of those cartoon characters that get knocked down and have stars and squiggly marks around their heads. “What… I mean, how—”

  “It’s my fault!” my mother cried. “I gave her permission—remember when she broke down during medical school?”

  She was talking about the summer three years earlier, when I was working as a law clerk in Troy and my parents told me I couldn’t call home because Lara was so angry at me.

  “Mom, it’s not your fault.”

  “I gave her permission that summer,” my mother said. “I told her that she could. She begged me and I—”

  My face was wet with tears. I was sitting on the floor now, crutches by my side, staring at the scratches and scuff marks on the pale-yellow kitchen cabinets. I’d never noticed them before. Time seemed to collapse and expand. Four years ago my mother had called to tell me that Lara had cut herself up with a razor. But now, instead of demanding that I come home, Mom was blaming herself for Lara’s self-destruction.

  “She was so desperately unhappy.” Mom was saying. “And she begged me.”

  “Mom, there’s nothing you—”

  My mother talked over me. “And I realized then that I couldn’t help her out of her pain. I couldn’t do anything anymore. I told her it was all right. That she had my permission.”

  My face felt hot. Now I’d managed to crawl under the kitchen table and held my good knee to my chest and rocked.

  “Mom, that was years ago. That doesn’t have—”

  “She’s in the ICU now. We’re very lucky. Tanya found her and got her to the hospital.”

  Tanya was Lara’s closest friend, a surgical resident.

  “She’s going to be all right,” Mom said. Her words sounded hollow. “She just needs to rest. They’ll keep her there for a while.”

  After Mom hung up, I stayed under the table, crying. I was scared. My sister had nearly done it. She was really sick. I needed to wake up.

  * * *

  Lara was transferred to the psych ward of a community hospital outside town so she wouldn’t be treated in the same hospital with her patients. After a few weeks, she called and invited me to visit her for Easter. I could take her out to a restaurant. I was so eager to see her, I splurged on a plane ticket and rented a car at the airport. I was no longer on crutches, but my knee was still swollen, and it ached as I drove out to pick her up at the psych ward. Lara looked surprisingly good—thinner than when I’d seen her at Christmas, but her face was pink and fresh and she was in good spirits. We hugged, and I nearly burst into tears with relief to see her.

  “I took a bunch of pills,” she said over brunch. “I was just in a really bad mood. Really pissed off.”

  I was grinning idiotically, just happy that she was alive. She looked positively radiant. Although she was telling me about one of the worst days of her life, she spoke easily, almost with wonder, like an adventurer to the North Pole who had survived a terrible storm.

  “And I guess I… um, I had a bottle of vodka, and I drank some of that.…”

  It was so good to have my sister alive and sitting across the table from me. I didn’t think about how this had affected me or my parents yet. All that mattered was that she was here.

  “So I got pretty fucked-up, you know. And I guess… I must have called Tanya at some point.” She paused and looked at her hands. They were remarkably smooth, free of the usual dried skin and torn cuticles. “I don’t really remember.” Her voice drifted off. Around us, families were helping themselves to seconds at the buffet, and the smell of scrambled eggs and roasted chicken filled the room. “Tanya told me about it later,” Lara said. “She was working a shift at the hospital, and I guess she got really worried. So she managed to get off duty and drove out to the house. But there was some huge traffic jam, and she got tied up.”

  I tried to picture Tanya in her little VW, stuck in a snarl of traffic. They had been friends since their first year of medical school, and Tanya must have been freaking out. I sympathized with Tanya in a way that I couldn’t yet feel for my parents or myself.

  “She said by the time she found me, I had no pulse,” Lara said. “I’d stopped breathing.” Lara seemed amazed and a little impressed by this fact. As if she were talking about someone else entirely.

  “Jesus, Lara.” My scalp prickled.

  “She did CPR, and called nine-one-one, and they brought me to the ER. I don’t remember that part.”

  I took a gulp of my wine spritzer and nearly choked on the bubbles. Tanya had saved her life. If she’d arrived a minute later… If she weren’t a surgical resident, if she hadn’t known CPR…

  “I didn’t mean to kill myself,” Lara said, rolling her eyes, as if this should have been obvious to anyone. “I just didn’t realize I’d taken that much.” She shook her head with disgust. “They didn’t have to make such a big deal out of it.”

  “Well, it is a big deal,” I said, suddenly annoyed. I clamped my mouth shut so I wouldn’t say something I’d regret. What a nightmare for Tanya. Lara’s cavalier attitude was maddening. She’d scared the shit out of everyone.

  “But you know what pisses me off?” Lara said. “At the ER, they cut up my beautiful blue ski sweater—you know, the one Zosia gave me?”

  I knew exactly which one she meant. Zosia had given me one too, but I had outgrown mine years ago.

  “I’m still really mad about that.” She shook her head. “I mean, they didn’t need to cut my clothes off me! Jesus! That was a good sweater!”

  I looked down at my plate, unable to meet Lara’s eyes. I didn’t want her to see how angry I was. It was inconvenient, this anger of mine; it didn’t seem to belong here, at this nice meal we were having, this joyous reunion after a terrible scare. I was so happy she was alive. But it pissed me off that she seemed more concerned about her sweater than anything else. Didn’t she get it, that she’d nearly died? She didn’t seem to realize that she’d put her best friend in the position of having to save her life. What if Tanya hadn’t gotten there in time? What if Lara had died despite her efforts?

  All I managed to say was, “Lara, this is serious. You nearly died.”

  She shrugged. “So how are you? How’s the knee?”

  * * *

  By the time she was released from the hospital after a month, Lara had fallen in love. Maybe that explained her good mood when I’d visited over Easter. Jess was a psych nurse in the hospital, and it was complicated. But eventually Jess managed to disentangle herself from a bad marriage, and moved in with Lara.

  I visited them over the summer, and I liked Jess immediately. She was sweet, she was smart, and she loved my sister. Lara seemed to glow in her presence.

  And something else happened. Now that Lara was living with Jess, Lara and I magically got along better than ever before. Jess’s presence in Lara’s life seemed to smooth out all the waves in our relationship—as if Jess served as a buffer for Lara’s rages, for her demands on me and her anger at me for failing her. These seemed to melt away. Lara listened to Jess. She wanted to keep Jess. And she would, for the next twenty-five years or so.

  Eventually Lara returned and completed her psych residency, passed her boards, and became a psychiatrist at the same hospital where she had trained. She seemed pretty happy. She began to live her life. Our sisterhood blossomed. I came to rely on her for advice, for solace, for friendship. We were a team.

  * * *

  It’s strange to think about that time now, thirty years later, after I’ve been disowned by my parents—after they’ve unequivocally declared Lara their only child. Because back in 1984, I came pretty close to being my parents’ only child. It’s as if there was only room for one daughter, and Lara and I played Russian roulette with each other all our lives. As if one of us could actually win at the game.

  Despite
the fact that death—murder, suicide—was such a big topic of discussion among us, none of us ever succeeded in actually killing ourselves or each other in person; I got killed off on paper. Being disowned is violent and shocking, and although you can still move your arms and legs, it’s a permanent display of murderous rage, and it gets you thinking. How do you go from being the most treasured creature in the universe, the embodiment of your mother’s and father’s hopes and dreams, to being wiped out by them? What had I done?

  twenty-one

  The years after Lara’s near-suicide and hospitalization in 1984—before we found out we were Jewish, long before the publication of my book about our discovery—were a sort of golden age for my relationship with Lara. We emulated the perfect sisterhood of our mother and Zosia, who had taught us that the bond between sisters was sacrosanct. Husbands were nonessential family members, compared to sisters. You tended a husband more or less like a shrub: he needed to be fed and trimmed, but then you left him out in the rain. Sisters came inside with you.

  But like many of my mother’s lessons, what had enabled her to survive the war did not always translate well into living in America in the late twentieth century.

  One evening in the fall of 1991, Lara called me in tears. I was in my living room in Cambridge, watching a football game when the phone rang. “There’s something I have to tell you,” she said. Her voice teetered, as if the words were strung across a high wire. “Oh God, what am I going to do?”

  I muted the television. “What happened?”

  “I… I’m starting to remember things. About Dad. When I was really little.”

  Something recoiled inside me. On TV, a running back plowed into a wall of bodies in breathtaking silence.

  “It’s… This is really going to freak you out.” Lara choked back tears. The men disentangled themselves and trudged back to their huddle. “Look, I’m sorry to tell you like this, but…”

  “What? Just say it.”

  She drew in her breath. “I’m having recovered memories. I remember Dad raping me as a baby.”

  A silence opened up in me, like a dark lake under a ceiling of stars. I stood and walked in a small semicircle, twisting the phone cord around me.

  “I know it sounds crazy, Helen. Just listen. I’ve been having these memories, and they’re hard to make out. I’ve been working on it in therapy. It’s been completely overwhelming, and—”

  I felt a little queasy and placed the palm of my hand on my forehead. Lara had always had a gift for the dramatic, but I didn’t know what to do with this revelation. In my bones I knew it wasn’t true, but I wanted to be supportive. “It’s okay,” I said, though I was pretty sure that nothing was okay, and nothing had ever been okay in our family.

  “The images that come back to me are just horrible,” Lara said. “It’s been really, really hard. And—it also involves you, Helen. I remember him doing the same thing to you.”

  “What?”

  “Dad raped you too, Helen.”

  I froze.

  “When we were infants. Toddlers. Before we could even speak.”

  On TV, Jerry Rice leapt five feet in the air and caught a pass one-handed over the heads of two defenders. I stared at him, as if he could help me make sense of what my sister was saying.

  “Helen, you there?”

  “Yeah. But I don’t think—”

  “I’ve been reading the literature, and it’s terrifying. I guess this is pretty common with trauma victims. Especially when it happens when you’re so young, as we were. The only way to survive the trauma is to repress it, split it off.…”

  Her voice galloped on, but I had trouble following her. Was she confusing her patients’ memories with her own? My fingers hurt, and I realized I’d been gripping the phone so hard my hand was white. My sister’s crazy. I tossed sibling loyalty out the window.

  “Are you there, Helen?”

  “Yeah, sorry.”

  “Look, I’m sorry to dump all this on you, but I think you need to know. I mean, it’s bound to come up for you too. And I just want to warn you, it’s really hard going. You might find that—”

  Her words swept past me now like a strong current. The more confused I felt, the more self-assured she sounded.

  “You’ve got to believe me, Helen. Do you believe me?”

  “I guess… I don’t know. I mean, I gotta think about it.”

  “I always knew something was wrong with Dad,” she continued. “He’s really, really sadistic. You know? He’s very disturbed. He’s a monster.”

  I closed my eyes.

  “With my therapist,” she said, “I’ve come to see so much. Dad’s a paranoid schizophrenic. When you start looking at our past, it’s really obvious. Everything is starting to fall into place.”

  Everything was falling apart. Nothing made sense. Allegiance had always been so confusing in our family. Either you supported each other, heart and soul, or you were archenemies. My sister and I had been pitted against each other throughout our childhood, and I couldn’t afford to lose her now. But I wasn’t prepared to give up my father for her. Sex abuse? It was ludicrous, it couldn’t be true. Our father could barely bring himself to touch us; how could he have had sex with us?

  “I don’t know, Lara.” I tried to remain calm.

  “I need you, Helen.”

  The trouble was, I couldn’t find what she needed anywhere in my house or in my mind or in my experience. A dark line fell between us, like a crack in the earth, and it grew deeper and more impossible to cross. I wanted her to go out for a run and come back to her senses and realize it was all a mirage, a strange, scary mix of memory and imagination that had created a bogeyman out of nothing.

  “Maybe you should talk more with your therapist,” I suggested.

  I could hear her crying softly. The gap between us opened wider, and I couldn’t find the words to close it. I held on to the receiver as if holding her hand. The silence grew uncomfortable.

  “Helen, don’t you remember it?” Her voice was soft, clear, chilling.

  I bit my tongue. “I don’t know,” I finally said. “I just—I don’t think so.”

  “You should think about it,” Lara said. “You should try to face it. But go slowly. It’s really, really hard. It’s the hardest thing I’ve ever had to do. The urge to repress it is huge. It’s classic PTSD.” She had regained her confidence now, and was explaining it from her expertise as a shrink.

  I pictured my father, the hard line of his jaw, the pale blue of his eyes. I’d just been home a few weeks ago, and as usual, he had sat in the living room, reading a medical journal, listening to Dvorak on the hi-fi. He was mildly interested in hearing about my work as a public “offender” as he liked to call it, but we didn’t say much; we were happy simply hanging out together. It seemed impossible to think of him as raping anyone, much less me and Lara as little kids.

  “It explains so much,” Lara said. “I mean, look at us—we’re both lesbians. We’re so much alike. I think that stuff is deep-rooted. It goes back to what Dad did to us.”

  * * *

  The following day I reported the news to my shrink, who cast a fishy eye and found it just a little alarming how much recovered memory of child rape and incest was going around these days. She reminded me that my sister was doing a fellowship in child psychiatry, and had been treating youngsters who had been sexually abused. Perhaps the power of suggestion had led her to make similar associations in her own life?

  I called Lara back that evening, but she was adamant. “I know what happened to us,” she said. “And at some point, Helen, you’ll remember too.”

  * * *

  Over the next few days, Lara’s words followed me wherever I went: to the swimming pool for my early morning laps; on the T downtown to work; back home where I vacuumed and did the laundry. The more I thought about it, the more impossible it seemed. Dad had been our family doctor since before we were born. He had brusquely steered us through mumps, chicken pox, scraped knees
, sprained ankles, fevers, the flu. “Say ‘ahhhh,’ ” was one of his more endearing remarks. His examinations were quick and precise. “Okay,” he’d say, with a perfunctory pat on the head. “You’ll live.” He had always seemed about as interested in my body as in a banana peel.

  It was curvy blondes he found attractive, women with large breasts, narrow waists, and swishing hips. Like his first love before the war, a blond Polish girl who’d accompanied him on the piano when he played violin.

  I also knew something about sex offenders from my work. A few years earlier, as a trial lawyer, I had defended men charged with rape. Child rapists tend to be unable to stop preying on children until someone forces them to stop. (Lara claimed our father abused us when we were babies, but never afterward.) I had once cross-examined a six-year-old child who believed he had been raped at a day-care center by one of my clients. I’d called an expert psychiatrist who testified to the lack of credibility of such recovered memories. “A child’s mind is highly susceptible to suggestion,” he’d said. “A kaleidoscope of factors can influence the reconstruction of false memories.” Like all criminal defense attorneys, I worshipped the god of reasonable doubt; I believed in the possibility of mistake.

  But what if Lara was right, and I was repressing everything? After all, I was hardly the picture of mental health myself. So I tried to remember. All night I lay awake in bed, picturing my father coming into my room when I was a child. It’s true, he did have a creepy way of suddenly materializing in a room without warning. He used to slink around the house, appearing now in the kitchen, now in the hallway, his size-twelve shoes soundless on the shag carpet. I tried to conjure images of my father leaning over me at night, and I managed to freak myself out. I have a wonderful imagination. But it was hard to ascribe these shadowy images of my father to memory. They were inventions, suggestions. In my clear moments, I saw that they were born of a desire to be like Lara, to have no barriers between us. Sexual abuse at the hands of our father would bind us together like nothing else. Her hand was extended across this terrifying new land; I just needed to remember what my father had done to me.