His Name was Ben

by Paulette Mahurin

  On the occasions Rosalie walked in on him, he lied and said he was trying to help his baby sister relax, that he heard her whining. Those were the nights he was frustrated, because he didn’t get to finish. When the intruder didn’t interrupt him, he touched the baby and became aroused. He liked playing with himself until his thing got hard. Once excited, he’d leave and finish in his own bed. Night after night, he’d return…

  Startled, Sara was relieved to wake. It happened! I know it happened! These are real memories surfacing. Holy shit! At just after three in the morning, with Ben asleep beside her, she reflected back on the nightmares. The surgery must have triggered them. The loss of her breasts—her sensuality—latched onto the intrusion of her body during infancy. Sara had not been able before to make the connection to her promiscuity, her need for sex to feel loved, and the sexual molestation. Without each piece of the puzzle in place, the process of unearthing her denial was slow in coming. Hammering away at the repressed trauma in sleeping trances, unraveling the psychic pain, had taken over two years.

  At first the dreams made absolutely no sense to her. As they progressed, however, the revelations became clearer, repeating until she accepted what had happened, and that her mother knew. At long last there would be no more denying her sixth sense. The time had arrived for Rosalie to be called to account.

  The day moved on with Sara traipsing back and forth, anxiety building over confronting her mother. She removed the bandage and prodded her ribs, grateful that they were healing nicely. It was the fortitude she needed to help her deal with the asphyxiating angst. A couple more days and she could keep it off. Reaching to put the dressing back on, Taz grabbed hold of an end. “Stop that!” Sara yelled. “Let go!” She went off at the dog in a loud and frantic tirade, sending Tazzie crouching out of Sara’s bedroom.

  Ben stuck his head in the doorway. “You okay?” Sara had told him everything, solidifying the actuality she was really going to do it, stand up against her mother.

  “Yes,” she paced.

  Furrowing his brow, he gave her a look.

  “No! I’m not okay!”

  “Want a foot rub?”

  “I don’t think I could lie still for it.”

  “Anything I can do?” He moved closer.

  “Not really. I just need to do it.”

  “Want me to stay with you?”

  You’ve been subjected to enough, Ben. “Nah, I’m okay, but I think Tazzie could use a friend.”

  Looking down the hallway, out of Sara’s line of vision, “Taz is on her back, belly up, fast asleep.” Turning to leave, “I think I’ll join her.”

  The escalating nervous energy intensified after Sara phoned her mother and said, “I need to talk to you.”

  “So talk.”

  “I want to come over and do it in person.”

  “Ben coming? How is he?”

  Oh that’s just great. You want to know how Ben is and not me! Furious and approaching a meltdown, she felt her legs quavering. Breathe. Get a grip. She took in a slow, long breath, held and released it, Let go of the anger. “He’s okay.” Another deep inhalation to calm herself barely impacted. “I’ll see you later.”

  Watching the street signs as they approached her parents’ house, “I don’t know how I’m going to keep it together.”

  “You’ll do fine. I have every confidence in you.”

  “Thanks, Ben.”

  “I’ll be close by, at the park around the corner. Phone me when it’s over.”

  Arriving to the coffee wafting through their home, Danish pastry on the table with three places set, her father out at the racetrack with friends, the first thing Rosalie said, “Where’s Ben?” pissed Sara off.

  You don’t ask a thing about me? Not one “how are you!” Sara fought the urge to pick up one of those fancy antique vases and shatter it across the wall. Restraining herself and in a very controlled way, “Let’s go sit,” she headed to the living room, away from the food.

  “You don’t want coffee? A bite to eat?” superficially droned her mother. “Ben on his way in?”

  Breathe. Stay calm. Sara turned, “Ben’s not coming in.”

  Sara knew what she wanted to say, the script rehearsed in her head over and over. Her well-chosen words were no match for the recoil from the betrayal and abandonment, the unrelenting loss she grew up with.

  Trapped for years, worried how the fallout of a confrontation with her mother would affect her father, she knew she needed to face it, step into courage—for once, put herself first. Knowing it was not going to be easy, she relied on the hope that things would work out for the best, and she’d live with the results come hell or high water.

  Stay calm. “Mom, you know that I need to work on stress reduction if I want to get well.” Sara was not just referring to a remission or cure from the breast cancer, but also an inner health. Just as Ben had come to terms with his family situation, the work Sara needed to do now was forgiveness. Without putting to rest the fundamental question concerning why her mother stood back all those years, there could be no forward progress.

  Rosalie said nothing, her attention wandering around the room.

  “Mom! I’m talking to you. Can you at least focus on me while I’m speaking?” Sara waited for her mother to face her. “There’s something we’ve never discussed that I’m going to bring up and I need you to hear me. Please…”

  “Say what you have to say!”

  Sara finally lost it. Oh I’ll say it all right, you fucking bitch! “It’d be nice if you would park the attitude!”

  “You came here to talk?” Rosalie’s eyes turned into a pointed Uzi ready to fire. “So talk!”

  The volcano had been building: the bad dreams, the sleepless nights, and piecing it all together. The lid shot off the pressure cooker and out it violently gushed. “Why did you let Jack molest me!”

  Rosalie’s body jolted back, her mouth flew open, and she made a move to get up and leave.

  Sara stood to stop her. “Oh that’s great, just walk out! Walk out on your daughter with cancer!” Sara’s parched voice cracked out, “Where’s your compassion!”

  Pivoting around with a vengeance, “My compassion?” Rosalie laughed a psychotic squeal. “I protected you!”

  Sara, seeing the torment in her mother, stumbled in disbelief. “Protected?”

  Rosalie turned ashen. She made a fist and pounded air in an attempt to release the words stuck in her throat. Grabbing hold of her top and pulling it away from her chest, nearly ripping it off, she fell to her knees, breaking out in a wail to wake the dead.

  Sara teetered over to her mother. “Tell me.”

  Rosalie bawled, “I protected you.” Spasms of grief, rivers of tears from years of silence ran wildly out of control.

  “How?”

  “We had him committed,” Rosalie howled. “I committed my own son!” She collapsed into a torrent of weeping.

  Sara sat on the tile floor at her mother’s side and waited for the storm to pass.

  When Rosalie was composed enough to speak, “I knew all along what was happening. It would have killed your father. The doctor said he couldn’t take another heart attack. I tried to keep Jack away from you.” Chin bent into her chest, “I placed monitors in both your rooms, hidden from where Jack would find them, but they failed to alert me when I dozed off. I couldn’t stay awake twenty-four hours a day!” Refusing eye contact, Rosalie went silent, shaking her head, trying to cast off the heinous memory.

  Seeing Rosalie’s squinting gesture, Sara whispered, “What?”

  “I fell asleep,” she cried, “while he did that to you, his own sister!” She went on about how Jack continued the abuse when the voices in his head took over. “I heard him talking to himself and knew what I had to do. God help me.” She told Sara that she went to see a doctor to set a plan in motion. Once that was done, she let Irving know that Jack was schizophrenic and needed to be committed. She had sedative pills ready to give to her husband to ease his rea
ction. Irving lived through Jack’s institutionalization but Rosalie was never the same. She blamed herself for giving birth to a girl that her son molested, for having to put him away, and for not knowing how or doing better by both of them. After that she became closed and bitter.

  “Does dad know about what he did to me?”

  “No.”

  Sara recognized that what she and her mother had in common was protecting Irving, and now she also understood why he drowned himself in work. He needed to get away from the house, from mom. Not from me. Sara felt compassion replace resentment with the understanding of the hell her mother had lived through. When she tried to put an arm around Rosalie, her mother resisted, but this time Sara didn’t take it personally. She knew her mom had to resolve her own issues and it would take time. Sara pulled back, “Thank you.”

  What seemed like a lifetime of more crying passed before Rosalie faced her daughter with a pained look that spoke, I’m sorry. For Sara, it was liberating to see. Hearing what Rosalie finally got off her chest and understanding her father’s absence all those years was redemption.

  When Ben arrived he found Sara and her father having tea at the dining room table, chatting and smiling. Rosalie was in the bedroom resting.

  Chapter Twenty-Nine

  Sara relaxed on the drive back to Ben’s hotel room and filled him in on what occurred with her mother. “I think they put new bulbs in those streetlights,” she laughed. “They’re so bright.”

  Seeing out of the corner of his eye that she was giddy with relief, “You’re what’s lit up.”

  “It turned out better than expected. I feel like I’ve lost a thousand pounds. She’s never opened up to me like that before.”

  “She needed to,” he slowed into the parking area of his hotel.

  “She’s still stuck, Ben.” Sara noticed the lot was almost full. “What’s going on here?”

  “There’s… a medical… convention over at UCLA,” he gasped.

  “What’s the matter?”

  Ben pushed against the seat to relieve the pressure in his back radiating from his belly. “Just a stitch,” he evaded the question, “nothing to worry about.”

  Sara mistakenly assumed it was from the negativity they’d both been involved in the last few days, “Okay, no more talking about family.”

  “That’s a deal.” He got out, stumbled, and reached for the side of his car to steady himself, before moving to open her door. The rest of the way to his room was uneventful.

  Sara fell asleep the minute her body hit the bed until Ben’s tossing and turning woke her in the middle of the night. “You’re soaking wet. Let’s get you out of those pajamas.” Putting the back of her hand to his forehead, “You’re burning up.”

  Ben moaned and writhed, unable to lessen the intense discomfort under his right rib cage.

  Sara rushed to the bathroom and came back holding a glass of water and aspirins, a washcloth draped over her wrist. “Take these.” Wiping the cloth over his body to cool and help him get comfortable was of no avail. He could barely tolerate the touch on his skin; the pain was too searing. Frantic, she went for the dry weed and bong.

  Ben’s plaintive expression stopped her. “It has a quick onset,” she stuffed and lit the water pipe and handed it over to him. “Take a long drag off this.”

  He did. And another. In close to thirty minutes he told her he felt moderately better. Relieved his fever had cooled, she felt calmer. She covered him back up and sat with him until he fell asleep. Several hours later, Ben awoke to people talking outside his room. It was a little before eight, Thursday, and Sara had a treatment at UCLA in the afternoon that he refused to have her cancel.

  Worried that he looked so sapped, “Ben, you should be seen right away,” Sara pleaded.

  “No, I don’t want you to miss your appointment. We’ll go when you’re finished. I just need to rest. A lot’s been going on.”

  “That’s true.” She thought of the Palo Alto trip and the scene with her mother. Not wanting to entertain otherwise, denial once again protected her from intuition hollering that it was more than the emotional sewage they’d just dealt with. “You’re probably right. Let’s get you some room service and take it easy till I’m done.”

  They arrived at Zimmerman’s office at half-past-five and the nurse ushered them in. Zimmerman took one look at Ben, the tinged jaundiced skin and his sunken eyes. “You were doing okay a couple days ago?” he asked them both.

  Sara nodded affirmation. “Up in Morro Bay, he had an upset stomach from stress.” She looked to Ben to see if she had misread him. “Ben?”

  Ben knew he needed to be honest with his doctor and Sara. He could no longer insulate her from the truth by hiding what was happening in his body; the distress was too great to keep pretending and covering up. “It started up in Palo Alto.” He gave Zimmerman a day-by-day account, that by the time they were in Morro Bay he had no appetite—even with pot the nausea was hard to control, and had progressed into abdominal pain. He eyed Sara, who recounted what had occurred the night before.

  The curtain had risen and in plain view the stage was set for her to see what was going on. No longer could she buy into the story that family strain on both sides was the probable cause. Oh God, please. It was hard for her to accept and as much as she wanted to turn away, stay hidden in her rationalization that stress was aggravating his health, perhaps just causing a temporary setback that he could get beyond with his treatments, she now knew better. Putting on her medical hat scared the hell out of her.

  Zimmerman’s eyes held compassion as he rested a hand on Sara’s shoulder. Then focusing on Ben became his primary objective. “Okay, let’s have a look. Take off your shirt.” He had him lie down on the exam table to palpate his abdomen. The percussion over his liver produced a dull thud, which told him there was more solid mass in there than just liver tissue. When he turned him on his side to tap on his back, Ben flinched and drew his knees up to his chest. “That hurt?”

  “Yes.”

  Zimmerman had to assist Ben to sit up. “I’m ordering some labs and a scan of your abdomen. You can go to St. John’s and get it done.” He turned to Sara. “Do you think you can handle our patient for a little while?”

  Sara nodded and grabbed Ben’s arm.

  “I’ve got a few patients to see over there. I’ll check in with you when I’m finished. Wait for me in radiology.”

  At St. John’s, Ben had blood drawn, and in agonizing discomfort stripped down to slide into the cylinder tube that scrutinized and imaged his body. Forty-five minutes later they were in the radiologist’s office with Zimmerman.

  Hunched over, hugging his gut, Ben asked, “So what’s the verdict?”

  “Your blood work shows you’re anemic.”

  “What’s his red blood cell count?” Sara asked, knowing that several things contributed to anemia in cancer patients—the cancer itself, the treatment, internal bleeding, the body making fewer cells, and a combination of any of these. She also knew this changed with remissions and was not, in and of itself, a gauge of prognosis but more a general picture of the current state of the patient. When Zimmerman said 3.2, her stomach turned over. He’ll need a transfusion.

  “The scan?” asked Ben.

  It was obvious from the tight-lipped expression on his face that this was the part of Michael Zimmerman’s job he hated the most. “Ben,” he hesitated, “I’m not going to mince words.”

  “It’s okay, just say it.”

  “There are several new masses on your liver. But that’s not what concerns me.”

  Feeling like her chest caved in, Sara strained her neck muscles to move enough oxygen in to help her focus. The tone in Zimmerman’s voice, the way his words moved out slowly, told her more was coming and it was not going to be good.

  “That back pain you felt during the exam is another mass around your celiac plexus.”

  Ben looked confused.

  “It’s a bundle of nerves grouped around the aorta w
here it passes through the opening in your diaphragm. The problem with this is pressure from the mass can build up and cut off circulation or make breathing difficult.”

  Not anticipating this degree of sudden bad news, Sara became lightheaded. Grabbing hold of the chair to steady herself, she realized that none of her experience had prepared her for this.

  “What do you suggest?” asked Ben, who barely comprehended the overwhelming information. He could not make sense out of the fact that death was knocking, and was not retreating with the research study or injections.

  “You need to be admitted to get a transfusion. Let me run some follow-up tests and we’ll give you something to help with the pain.”

  “What are we talking about here?” He coughed up the next words, “I mean, how long do I have?”

  Trying to deflect the conversation, “Let’s just get you settled in and comfortable and talk about this later.”

  Ben would have none of it and unprepared for what would come, he asserted, “I want to know.”

  With both of them staring at him, Zimmerman reluctantly drawled, “It’s hard to know for sure.” He crossed his arms over his chest in a protective gesture used by doctors when they’re withholding bad news. “This is like Russian roulette.”

  “Meaning what?” asked Ben.

  Zimmerman’s pupils dilated. “It could be a month, maybe two, probably not more.”

  Ben turned white.

  Unable to gather her wits, Sara asked, “You’re sure there’s nothing else we can do? What about other studies?”

  Zimmerman shook his head.

  “What do I need to watch for?” With attention on Ben, her heart cracked into millions of tiny particles scattering incomprehensible thoughts, blinding her from fully grasping what was occurring.