by Amy Hatvany
I was unsure whether my mother’s expression was one of pity or disgust. “I know that,” she said. “Nicole will be home. She’ll take care of all that.” She looked at me expectantly. “Right?”
“Can I still go bowling Friday night?”
“Of course you can,” my mother said.
“All right, then,” I consented. I was used to taking over my mother’s role when she left. I didn’t really have a choice.
My father shook his head slowly, considering all this. “I don’t know.” He looked at her sternly. “You’ll only be gone one night?”
“One night. I’ll leave early Saturday and be back Sunday.”
Dad looked at Jenny, then at me, his eyes full of an emotion I couldn’t name at the time. But his expression stuck with me over the years, hanging in my mind like a dark painting. Looking back, I believe it was dread.
After my mother left, Dad spent most of Saturday reclined in the family room, beer in hand, eyes glued to the roaring action of a football game. I was in the kitchen, dying to finish feeding Jenny so I could call Nova and talk about Jason DeLong, the dark-haired sophomore with smoky eyes who had bought me a Coke at the bowling alley the night before. He had brushed my hand with his fingers when we parted; the touch had sent shivers to places I never knew existed within me. I couldn’t wait to tell Nova all about it.
After rushing her through lunch, I set Jenny up on the couch, her headphones playing Chicago’s latest album. I figured she was probably tired of all the uppity classical stuff my mother made her listen to; I thought she might enjoy being more like other girls her age. Jenny loved any kind of music, patting her hands softly against each other and swaying, squealing in loud, happy approval when a particular tune struck her fancy. Her small body would rock back and forth, her eyes dancing in time with the song. In those moments she seemed free, unfettered by the twisted muscles and stunted bones of her disease.
She smiled at me that afternoon as I made sure she had enough pillows around her, ocean eyes sparkling, lit from within. I often wondered where her joy came from, what gave her such peace and happiness inside a body that caused her so much pain. When she slept, I imagined she was free, dancing and climbing trees, twirling and singing and calling my name. Perhaps she visited her dreams while she was awake, the relief she felt in that world shining through her eyes like the sun.
“Dad?” I said softly, looking over to his recliner in the corner of the room.
“Mmph?” he mumbled, not bothering to look at me. His eyes were heavy, half-lidded shades.
“I’m going to my room for a bit, okay? Jenny’s hanging out on the couch. Just call me if she needs anything.”
He waved me away, his eyes snapping open at a particularly vigorous roar from the television crowd. “Offsides, goddammit!” he yelled. “What are you, blind?”
I went into my room, pulling the hallway phone with me. Expecting my call, Nova picked up on the first ring, and we immediately fell into the excited linguistic squeals comprehended only by teenage girls. We were debating whether Jason would ever get the nerve to call me when suddenly the siren of my sister’s scream wrapped around my body and pulled me to my bedroom door.
“I have to go,” I told Nova urgently. I felt the pounding of my father’s feet across the floor; the walls vibrated with his movement.
“Is everything okay?” she asked, concern filling her voice.
“Jenny’s yelling. I have to go.” I started counting the pink stripes on the lampshade by my bed; if I could count them twice before I hung up, Jenny would stop screaming.
“Okay. Call me later.”
I dropped the phone to the floor and raced into the living room. My father was standing over Jenny, his arm raised above his head. Jenny’s body was rigid, her face twisted into a wretched expression, her skin flushed, and her mouth open wide, releasing another heart-wrenching shriek. Her fingers were clawed together, poised to ram into her mouth. She stared at my father’s arm as though it were an item detached from his body, watching it slice through the air like a knife.
“Dad, no!” I pleaded, running over to the couch. I felt the sting of his fist as though it had hit my own face.
In the stunned silence that followed, he knelt down in front of Jenny, gripping her shoulders, shaking her. “Quit it!” he bellowed. “Stop this right now. I will not allow it to go on. Do you hear me, young lady? I have had enough!”
Jenny trembled violently, her full bottom lip rolled out in a deep pout; tears ran in large, silent drops down her face. She began to weep in earnest, misery racking her twisted body. A swollen crimson mark rose on her cheek, just below her right eye, the shadow of my father’s fury.
Her eyes searched his intently, unbelieving. Why, Daddy? The words found my heart, and I wept as well, sitting next to her and pulling her tiny body to me, sheltering it under my more substantial frame. She screamed again, though softer than before. “Shh,” I whispered. “It’s okay. Everything will be okay.” I looked at my father as though he were a stranger. Jenny’s muscles were solid stone beneath my touch.
My father stood, blue eyes wide, backing away from us with his callused hands up in front of his body defensively, as though we oozed some life-threatening disease. His orange curls twisted out from his scalp like tiny flames; they wanted to get away from him, too. Shock tensed his long limbs, and he stepped woodenly toward the back door. “Shit,” I heard him whisper. Then he was gone.
The television droned on in the background as I sat holding my sister. I could not believe what had just occurred. Usually my father left the house as soon as a fit began, but lately he had stuck around, using his voice as a weapon against each attack. And now my father’s violent words had progressed to action, as though he somehow believed normality could be beaten into his already broken child.
My mother had tried everything: dietary changes, hot baths, cool showers, herbal teas, but nothing seemed to help. And sadly, no one seemed to care. The doctors could tell us nothing; they’d offer tranquilizers and institutional recommendations. I found my mother in Jenny’s room one afternoon, watching my sister sleep, whispering to her.
“Come out where I can see you,” my mother had said, her voice shaking and tearful. “I can’t fight what I can’t see, dammit. How am I going to fix this if I don’t know what’s broken? How am I going to save my baby? God help me, I can’t do this anymore!” The tremendous force of desperation behind her words had rattled me to the core. I did not know how I was going to explain the now-purpling mark on Jenny’s face to my mother; I was sure my father would not admit what he had done.
Late that night, after I had settled Jenny to bed, I heard him return. He crept through the house, the stink of cigarettes announcing his presence outside my door. He kept moving, and as the door to Jenny’s room creaked open, I jumped out of bed and stuck my head out of my own door, watching in disbelief as my father’s tall shadow stepped softly into my sister’s room.
I quietly closed my door and held my breath as I stood with my ear against the wall that separated our rooms. I heard the squeak of Jenny’s bed, the sound of added weight. “I love you, Jenny girl.” I could barely make out my father’s murmur. “I’d never hurt you, never. You know that, right?”
The bed squeaked again as more inaudible notes of my father’s voice played through the air. I slid back into bed, lying tense and ready to hear him leave her room, but for too long a time he stayed, the only noise the creaking of her bed, its high-pitched moans sounding eerily like a child’s cries for help.
• • •
During the week that followed our first appointment with Dr. Fisher, Jenny, Mom, and I were sitting in the kitchen together eating the chicken fettuccine I’d prepared for dinner when the phone rang unexpectedly. Mom didn’t get many calls; it seemed that she, like me, kept a limited social circle. Most of the time she went out to dinner and movies alone, though occasionally a member of her book club or a fellow employee joined her. In the few weeks I’d be
en home, I could count on one hand the number of times the phone had rung. That evening, we both jumped at the noise, looking at each other in surprise.
“It must be Shane,” I concluded, as I pushed back from the table and stepped into the hallway by my bedroom to catch the call. “Hi, sweetie,” I answered, fluffing my curls for a man who could not see me.
“Already I’m sweetie?” a female voice teased me.
“Nova?” I ventured, slightly disappointed it wasn’t Shane. I slumped against the textured wall. He hadn’t called me for days.
“Yep,” Nova said. “I hadn’t heard from you, so I wanted to make sure you didn’t lose my number.” The confusing chatter of her children played in the background; the loud screech of the television competed with them. It was good to hear her voice again. After our meeting at Dr. Fisher’s office I had hesitated to call her, fearful I’d misread the apparent ease of our reconnection, that she’d only been so friendly to me out of a sense of politeness. I’d fallen out of practice communicating with other women. I hadn’t had a friend like Nova in San Francisco; I’d never found someone I felt comfortable opening myself to. There was always too much to explain about who I was, why I didn’t talk with my family. I kept my relationships pretty much on the surface, going out for drinks and movies and other things friends do together, but never moving past the basics into deeper emotional territory. I was afraid that even if Nova were the friend I remembered, I might not remember how to be the friend I had been to her.
“So, when are you coming over?” she asked me.
I hesitated. “Are you sure it’s okay?” A loud crash erupted through the phone, followed by the high-pitched wailing of a child.
“James, honey,” Nova soothed, “I’ll be right there.”
“Is he okay?” I inquired, sitting up from the wall where I had been leaning.
Nova sighed. “Yeah, but he bit the dust off the couch and whacked his head on the floor. I should go. But come over tomorrow, okay? I won’t take no for an answer.” She quickly reeled off the address and basic directions. I agreed to come, then hung up, returning to the kitchen only to find my mother gently cleaning up Jenny’s hand and face. “Who was it?” she inquired.
“Nova,” I said flatly. “You don’t have to do that.” I stepped over to take the washrag from her. If she wasn’t going to offer her help, then I sure as hell wasn’t going to let her think I needed it.
“I know I don’t have to,” she said, letting me take the rag. She began clearing the table. “Old habits die hard.”
You could’ve fooled me, I thought as I finished cleaning Jenny up. “We’re going to see Nova tomorrow,” I told my sister, ignoring my mother altogether. Jenny’s eyes lit up at the sound of Nova’s name. I touched her nose with the tip of my own and smiled. “We’re going to see our old friend.”
• • •
On the way over to her house the next day, I considered telling Nova about what had happened that night so many years before. What my father had done to Jenny. What he continued to do for several years. The times he hit her—those were the nights he’d go into her room. Nova knew about my father’s physical violence; she’d even seen him hit Jenny a few times herself. But I wasn’t sure what my old friend was ready to hear, what kind of support she would provide. From our brief interactions at Dr. Fisher’s office and on the phone, I was fairly sure she’d react with compassion, but then again, maybe she’d be disgusted that I hadn’t done something to stop my father—the same way I was disgusted with myself. Terrified by the thought of being judged for my inaction, I had long ago vowed never to talk about the sexual abuse to anyone. But being home, being in the same room and hearing the ancient squeak of Jenny’s bed every night as I laid her down, had reached into my heart and lodged there like a splinter. I could not ignore its sting much longer.
After years of schooling on the subject, my psychologist’s mind knew that men like my father, men who felt weak in their own lives, often resorted to sexual abuse as a means to exert power over those who made them feel most powerless. That it wasn’t about sex—it was about control. I understood that my father felt lost in the life that having Jenny had created for him; I understood that her disabilities overwhelmed him, made him feel inadequate as a man for having created her. To be the father of a retarded child is to have failed. Sperm malfunction. You are told by men in white lab coats with official-looking certificates on their walls that it is impossible to say what caused your daughter’s retardation. They say it is nobody’s fault, but you feel it deep in your bones that you made it happen. All the pot you smoked in college, the bad LSD trip you took only a year before your girlfriend got pregnant and you knew the only thing to do was marry her. You are deficient, broken, not a real man.
Worse, still, is that you cannot do anything to fix her. Every day you don’t know the name of her disease you are ground a bit deeper into a hole. Every day as your wife wheels her into the kitchen for a pureed breakfast, you see your child’s sagging mouth and startled, wide eyes and you are reminded how you have failed this child, bringing her into the world malformed, unable to experience the joy of being alive. Your child does not live; she is simply maintained.
You ache for a life without medical bills and doctors’ appointments and a wife who cries herself to sleep almost every night. You long for family barbecues with the neighbors without the bright, uncomfortable chatter and polite inquiries about your daughter’s health. The sliding stares that glance over her but never truly see her. The stare that is becoming more like your own. Your inability to see her anymore, the detachment you are attempting so that maybe, if you can open your eyes and she isn’t there anymore, you can leave. Or maybe your wife will finally decide to place her in a home where they are trained in maintenance. You want her to leave so that you can have a normal life. If she isn’t going to leave, you will have to.
I halfway thought I decided to study psychology in the first place so I could find a way to understand all this about my father, and though I did, I could not forgive him. Would not forgive him. What he had done was unforgivable.
I looked over to Jenny, who sat next to me in the car, a twenty-five-year-old strapped into a booster seat that was designed for children, yet even with her weight gain fit her perfectly. She stared out the window, hands quiet in her lap, entranced by the bright lights in a stereo store’s display. I gripped the wheel a bit tighter.
“How you doing, sweetie?” I asked her, but she did not look at me, seemingly lost in her own thoughts. What were those thoughts? I often wondered. Was she communing with God? Conversing with angels? I could not believe her mind was a blank, as so many doctors had told us over the years. I saw such life behind her eyes; I imagined piles of words in her brain, laid up like a logjam desperate for release. The language we shared was a gift, a link between sisters. I believed that when I heard her voice within me, one or two of those jammed words managed to slip through whatever held the rest back. Whatever disease threaded through her brain, it had not touched her soul.
Nova lived near Alki Beach in a sky blue rambler with a daylight basement. “It’s the one that looks like there’s a yard sale going on,” she had said with a laugh over the phone. Finding this description true, I pulled up in front of the address she had given me, a little taken aback by the mess on the lawn. Piles of brightly colored plastic toys littered the grass along with a few scattered lumps of clothing. There were a swing set off to the side of the yard and a Big Wheel and three open bags of sand on the parking strip. I had to move the car a little farther down to make sure there was room to get Jenny out and into her wheelchair.
Nova saw me through a small window over the garage and waved. Her three older children ran out the red front door and down the stairs toward us. “They’re here! They’re here!” they screamed. “Mama, they’re here!”
My eyes widened at the small onslaught of tiny bodies clambering around me as I tried to maneuver Jenny out of the car. Nova came rushing down the stairs,
her wavy hair frizzed and loose around her shoulders. She was barefoot and wore a brightly colored East Indian–style wraparound skirt that emphasized her fleshy hips. Her white V-necked T-shirt was hiked up on one side over her breast, an appendage to which Layla was firmly attached. Nova appeared unfazed by nursing in the middle of the street, as if she were simply holding her child’s hand. I admired her comfort with such a seemingly intimate act. It told me she did what she thought was best, despite what other people might think. It told me she was still the woman I had known.
“Hey, Buster Browns,” she sweetly addressed her brood. “Give ’em some room! Remember what we talked about?”
Isaac and Rebecca nodded; their little brother, James, watched them and followed suit, his head bobbing vigorously in agreement. Nova smiled. “Okay then. Back off.” She smiled at me, too, a bright and beautiful thing. “We’re working on the personal-space issue.”
“Gotcha.” I leaned down and forward, wrapped my arms around Jenny’s waist, and hiked her into a standing position. “Ow!” I touched my twinging back.
“You okay?” Nova asked, concerned but still watching her children race around the front yard.
“Yeah, just not used to all this lifting. She weighs a ton.” I stopped myself and hugged Jenny. “I’m sorry, sweetie. You don’t weigh a ton. You’re just right.”
I managed to hoist Jenny and her wheelchair up the few stairs into Nova’s house. Her living room would have given Shane a heart attack. Toys everywhere, magazines and books spread across the floor like a second layer of carpet. I immediately noticed a plaque above the fireplace that challenged you to LOVE ME, LOVE MY MESS in Gothic black letters. The air smelled of cinnamon, something taken fresh from the oven, then set on the counter to cool.
Nova swung out her arm. “Welcome to my humble abode. Make yourself at home.” She set Layla carefully in the baby swing that sat next to the couch and hollered out the front door. “Time to play in the backyard, buddies, okay?” They seemed to ignore her. “Hey!” she bellowed. “Did you hear me? Backyard, now!”
