Twilight Children (27 page)

She cried and cried. There were maybe ten minutes or more of really heavy sobbing, her body doubled forward in the chair, her face pressed into her hands, resting against her upper legs. She was consumed by it and isolated by it, showing no awareness that I or anyone else was in the room. Then the physical burden of so much crying began to catch up with her. Her sinuses grew too clogged to remain in that position. Her breath was catching, so she had to sit up to get air.

I pulled out tissues and handed them to Cassandra. She took them, a whole wodge of them, and pressed them against her face. This renewed her crying.

Time passed. I didn’t speak. Cassandra continued to cry. Like small snowdrifts, used tissues piled up on her lap and in and around the chair. More time passed.

The other children rose from their places near the TV and left the room to go for dinner. One of the staff came out of the nurses’ station and approached us but stopped perhaps ten feet away. He watched us a moment, assessing whether or not Cassandra would be coming for a meal at some point; however, he didn’t say anything. Neither did I. We just exchanged looks. I shook my head slightly. Finally, he turned and left. Cassandra and I were alone in the huge shadowy room.

Finally the tears gave way to exhausted hiccupping. She lay slouched over to the right in her chair, her head almost resting on the steel arm. Her face was swollen and red; she could only breathe through her mouth.

“I’m so tired,” she murmured at last.

“I’m sure you are.”

“I hate to cry.”

I nodded.

Then silence. Cassandra continued to lie crumpled to the side of the chair, still dabbing at her inflamed cheeks and drippy nose.

The usual noises native to hospital environments ebbed in around us, most of them metallic sounds: grindings, gratings, clangs, bangs, bumps, buzzes, made vague by walls and corridors, but there were also human voices, always remote, always blended, forming simply a human noise.

Cassandra looked at me. It was a quiet, searching expression, and when I made eye contact with her, she held it only a moment and then looked away.

“Can I tell you about something?” she said at last.

“Yes, of course,” I said.

“When I was little,” she said, “Uncle Beck used to come in the room where I was sleeping.”

I nodded.

“That’s when I lived at my dad’s. Uncle Beck used to babysit me all the time. I don’t know where my daddy went. My daddy wasn’t there very much, but Uncle Beck was there all the time.”

I sat back in my chair.

“When I was in bed, he would come in and get under the covers with me. He’d feel me up. He’d put his hands all over me.”

“I wouldn’t like that,” I said, “if someone did that to me.”

“I couldn’t do anything about it. If I tried to tell him to go away, he put his hands over my mouth. One over my mouth and one around my neck. He said, ‘I could break your neck like a matchstick, you little bitch.’ I think he could, too.”

I nodded slightly.

“He couldn’t put his prick in my cunt, because he had to hold me that way, with a hand over my mouth and a hand around my neck. So he put his prick in my butthole.”

She paused. She wasn’t looking at me. Her head was actually turned away from me, her gaze downward toward the floor.

“That hurts so much,” she said very softly. “It hurt so much. I wanted to cry and cry and cry.”

I nodded.

“I couldn’t. He hated me to tell him I didn’t like it, say not to do it. He got really mad when I did. He said, ‘You little bitch, you want it. You know you do. You keep asking for it. So don’t talk shit now.’ But he hated it more if I cried. It made him really, really mad at me. Sometimes he’d put a piece of newspaper on the floor and shit on it. Then he’d take the turd and put it in my mouth. He said because I talked shit, there
was
shit and that would shut me up.” A pause. “Now when I cry, my mouth always tastes like shit.”

Silence.

Cassandra was leaning over the right arm of the chair, her head against her hand, the other hand bracing her elbow. She just sat, her expression distant and inward.

“That sounds horrible, Cassandra. You had a very frightening time when you were with your father. Terrible things happened,” I said softly.

She nodded almost imperceptibly.

“I’m really sorry for that. What your Uncle Beck did was very wrong. Those things shouldn’t ever happen to a little girl.”

A tear trickled from the corner of her eye. She made no effort to wipe it away.

“But those times over now, Cassandra. They’re finished. You’re with your mom. You’re safe again.”

“But my mom didn’t keep me safe.”

“Your mom didn’t know then what your dad was going to do, but she does know now. Things are different now. Just because things happened once does not mean they will happen again. You’re safe with your mom now. Uncle Beck isn’t here anymore.”

“Yes, he is,” she said very softly and she looked at me then, the eye contact brief but unambiguous.

I regarded her.

“Because what you said’s true.”

She let out a long breath.

“You said I had a Troubled Place inside me. And I do. And that’s where Uncle Beck lives now. It’s just exactly like you said. My Troubled Place goes everywhere I go. Even when I don’t want to, I can see Uncle Beck. Even here. If it gets too quiet, if I’m not careful, I’ll see him. I’ll feel him doing that stuff to me.”

“Then it’s time to get rid of Uncle Beck, Cassandra. He doesn’t belong in your head. That’s a private place for just you.”

Cassandra looked at me, her great dark eyes searching my face.

“Maybe you’re thinking Uncle Beck’s too strong,” I said. “You’ve had to live with him all these years. It’s probably hard to imagine being able to get rid of him because he’s been so powerful.”

She nodded faintly.

“But this is what I meant about our needing to be on the same side. If we work together, if you and I and the nurses and the doctors and your mom and your stepdad all band together on the same team, there’ll be more of us than him. We
will
be stronger. We
can
beat him then. We can make him go away.”

She continued to regard me, her expression unreadable.

“Can you see that? Can you see how it works? All of us on one side together,” I said and held up one hand, fingers splayed, “and just Uncle Beck on this side.” I held up one finger of my other hand. “Can you see? We’ll be stronger, huh? No one person could fight all these.”

She nodded.

“But not so strong this way, huh?” I said and held up four fingers on one hand and two on the other. “Because that’s you and Uncle Beck together on this side and the rest of us over here. That would be harder.”

“I’m not on Uncle Beck’s side. I don’t want to be on his side.”

“Which is why you’ve got to stop protecting that Troubled Place, because that’s where Uncle Beck lives. When you protect that, you’re protecting him in there. You’ve got to get over on our side so we can get him out of there.

“It’s still going be a big fight,” I added. “And some of it is going to hurt, because we’ll have to get in and look around in that Trouble Place to find where he’s at and then beat him out of there. But it
can
be done, Cassandra. We
can
make him go away. Things don’t have to be this way.”

She didn’t react. Still slumped far to the right in the orange Naugahyde chair, her head all but resting on the steel arm, she just stared forward, her gaze vague.

“Does this make sense to you?” I asked.

There was a long pause, then slowly she nodded.

“So shall we try?” I asked.

Again the pause, but this time it grew even longer. She was completely silent, completely still. Her unfocused eyes were so vacant as to be dead. Then at last she brought her gaze into focus and looked over at me. She gave a faint, faint nod. “Okay.”

I
found it hard to shift gears back into ordinary life after that conversation with Cassandra, not only because it was so intense, but also because it had occurred so late in the day. The harrowing impact would have been eased if I’d been fresh and if there’d been other people and events coming after that required my attention. As it was, it was the last interaction of my working day. Consequently, it loomed over me, immovable and implacable as a leviathan.

I’d had plans to meet up with a friend after work. We were going to have a bite out in a new, trendy vegetarian restaurant, and afterward I was going to help in her quest for the perfect patio-door curtains. On this evening, however, I just couldn’t. I could not go directly from Cassandra to something as frivolous as shopping. I didn’t want to spoil my friend’s innocent pleasure with bleak insinuations that what she was doing was shallow and meaningless against the tapestry of suffering in the world. At the same time, however, I did not want to demean my own feelings or the horror of Cassandra’s life. So I phoned with vague apologies and backed out of the evening’s arrangements.

Although I knew a lighthearted girlie evening would not have worked for me, I knew, too, that going home alone to my apartment would probably not be helpful either. I needed space in which to distance the conversation, to put it into objective, realistic proportions. Quiet, respectful space and quiet, respectful distraction. So I stopped to eat at a small independent fast-food diner specializing in ribs and French fries, and afterward I went to the local library.

Our city had an active historical society, and there was a large well-organized database of local history available to the public in the main library. For some time I’d been intending to go in and look up Gerda’s family in hopes of giving a more concrete structure to the gauzy fabric of Gerda’s stories.

The database, which covered the period from the city’s earliest pioneer days in the 1860s to 1960, was in three parts. The first was composed purely of statistics: births, marriages, deaths, land ownership, records of commercial development, and so forth. The second was a collection of local photographs donated from various sources or copied from private collections. The third section was called “Grandma’s Stories” and consisted of personal recollections taken from oral accounts, which the members of the historical society had collected over the years by interviewing elderly residents of the area.

I wanted to know the history of Gerda’s birth family and didn’t actually have her maiden name, so I had anticipated difficulty locating the information I was looking for. As it happened, not so. She and her husband had married locally in the 1930s, so those records were in the database. From the marriage details, I was easily able to trace her maiden name. From there, it was straightforward to her birth family because hers was a distinctive German surname.

There was a curious sensation in seeing the now-familiar names from Gerda’s stories—Louisa, Willie, Alfred—recorded in the dispassionate statistics of the database. It was almost as if I had come across Peter Pan’s birth certificate or Frodo Baggins’s address.

From the records I couldn’t tell if Gerda’s parents were immigrants themselves or simply second-generation Americans who had been attracted to the area’s large ethnic German community, where the German language was still commonly spoken in some public schools right up through the 1950s. Certainly, the couple seemed to have an interesting history. They had been married in Pennsylvania, and soon afterward, they made the long trek west to take up what was described as “donation land,” an early form of homesteading, where land was offered by the federal government to individuals who agreed to settle there and become residents. A little farther down the page, I read where her parents lasted only four years on this land and then returned east again.

The story became more curious, because eight years after returning east, they turned around
again
and came back here. This amazed me, because the distance one way would have been close to twenty-five hundred miles and this was in the era of covered wagons. The thought of making three such cross-country journeys in such conditions seemed an astounding undertaking. Why, I wondered, had they not stayed the first time?

I went back to the statistics section to look at the birth dates for Gerda and her siblings. She had been born here on the homestead, as had Louisa, Willie, Alfred, and Karl. They weren’t the only children, however. There were five elder children, two of whom had been born in Pennsylvania and three during the first period the family was in the West. All five had died in childhood. Indeed, as I looked carefully at the dates, I realized four of them had died within six weeks of one another.

There was nothing to tell me more than that. Just the statistics. The four children who had died close together were three girls and a boy, aged six, four, three, and one at the time of death. The other was a girl, aged four, who died about the time the family was returning west for the second time.

I looked at the names and the dates. There was no way to know how or why so many children had died close together. Illness? That was the logical conclusion, because if it had been a disastrous accident, one would have expected them to all die about the same time. I suspected it was something like diphtheria, as I knew there had been a couple of catastrophic epidemics in the early history of the community. Or perhaps it was simply the ills of poverty and hardship. No way of knowing.