Elena Vanishing (32 page)

Valerie meets me in the driveway with a piece of disassembled baby crib.

“What up, Ho Face!” she says. “Great! You can watch Gemma. She's kinda had enough of her playpen.”

White U-Haul boxes form giant baby-block stacks in the entry-way, and Dad bumps into me with another chunk of crib.

Gemma is standing on her tiptoes in the living room in her portable playpen-crib. She shrieks hello and throws a yellow plastic ball at my feet.

“Hey, Itty-Bitty!” I say as I scoop her up, and she rewards me with another happy shriek.

Gemma is almost a year old. I've seen her eat her first solid meal, crawl, and now walk holding someone's hand. But I won't be there to see her take her first steps. She'll do that in Mississippi. I hug her squirming body close and feel her little hands pat me gently on the back.

“I'm going to miss you, Miss Itty,” I tell her. But Gemma only laughs. Valerie is such a great mom that Gemma's biggest heartbreak so far has been not getting ice cream for breakfast. She has no understanding of sorrow.

The packing soon winds down. It's funny and sad all at the same time to see how little Valerie and Clint actually own. The majority of the stuff belongs to Gemma. She's a little person, but she has all the biggest boxes.

Dad carries out the last heavy box and goes to bed. Mom walks around the house finding baby socks and teething rings tucked behind bookshelves. Valerie and I go through closets and drawers, packing her clothes. We give each other things we say we don't want but secretly love but hope the other person loves more. We don't say it, but each of us knows we won't sleep tonight. We'll be up till dawn to make this time together last as long as we can.

In the hush of early morning, I carry my warm, limp, sleepy niece out to the car and buckle her into her seat. Mom eases the trailer out of the driveway, and she and Valerie drive off with a rattle and a creak. I watch the red taillights move down to the end of the block and around the corner. Then I go back inside, hug my old cloth cow, and fall asleep.

More boxes greet me when I get to Sandalwood. Only three days left in the old building. I'm tired from my few hours of sleep, but it's crazy: even now, I don't feel as wiped out as I used to after sleeping all night. As the excess meds wash out of my system, I feel like Sleeping Beauty waking up.

Jen calls me into her almost-empty office for therapy. Her knickknacks nestle in packing paper by the door. She and I go over the meeting the three of them had with me yesterday, and I admit that it makes a lot of sense.

“But my critical voice has gotten meaner,” I say. “A lot meaner. It wasn't like this when I was little.”

“When did it change?” asks Jen.

“After the rape,” I say reluctantly. And I have to fight down a feeling of annoyance when she nods.

I need to work on trust, I remind myself.

“Can you tell me what you remember?” Jen asks. When I'm silent, she adds, “About the rape?”

I want to get mad and tell her that it doesn't matter, that the rape isn't important anymore. Then I think, if it's so unimportant, it shouldn't be a big deal to talk about, right? Then I realize that I'm holding my own hand very tightly in my lap, as if I'm twin girls walking hand in hand through a dark forest. That's silly. I want to let go and smooth my hands on my jeans to show how much this doesn't bother me. But I don't let go. I hold on tighter than ever.

What do I remember? Not much.

“It was a party,” I say. “A bunch of the boys' school boys were there. No parents. I think they were gone on vacation. My friend Mona and I were the only girls.”

That was the easy part.

“I was drinking beer. The party was in a big room in the basement. I needed to go to the bathroom, so I went upstairs. I . . .”

What do I remember?

“I remember tile,” I say. “The tile was cold and hard. My hair was up, and the bobby pins hurt against the tile.”

My hands are getting sweaty, clamped together. I am holding the hand of the younger me as she feels the cold, hard tile against her back.

“There was a hand smashing into my face. I tried to bite, but I couldn't. Just palm. Fingers were smashed into my nose. I thought it was broken, it hurt so much.” I take a breath. “Finger over my eye. That's what I was afraid of,” I say, suddenly discovering. “I was afraid the finger would gouge out my eye.”

And I ride the dizzy wave of that sudden fear.

What else do I remember? I don't know. From here on, it all shatters. Time doesn't flow in a smooth line from future to past. It heaves up big blocks with jagged edges. I tiptoe hand in hand with the younger me through the ruined chunks of time.

What do I remember?

Other voices, laughing. Does that mean other boys were watching? What would I say to them if I could?
You were there
, I would say.
Can you tell me what happened? I can't remember. I want to know what you saw.

I blink. The office is bright. It smells like vanilla even though Jen's candles are already packed. Time is standing still here, too, as Jen waits for more.

But there isn't any more. No more remembering.

“And that's when your critical voice got meaner,” Jen says, circling back to the beginning again. And I clutch my hands tightly together in case Jen asks us to go back through that wasteland of not-remembering, the younger me and the older me hand in hand.

But Jen goes in a different direction.

“It's a catch-22,” she says. “You don't want to think something as violent and horrible as a rape is out of your control. If it's out of your control, it could happen again, couldn't it? So you tell yourself you were in control. You're the one who caused it. You went down the wrong alley, or you trusted the wrong guy, or you weren't wearing your lucky socks. That's why it happened.”

“I went upstairs to the bathroom,” I say.

It's the young me who says that. She sounds solemn when she says it, and I realize she's been saying it for years. But as I hear that solemn voice speak out loud, I realize how stupid it sounds. You don't rape a thirteen-year-old kid just because she goes to the bathroom.

“But then,” Jen says, “if you make what happened your fault, what can you do with all the disgust and anger you feel? All that negativity turns inward. Because if you
were
in control—if
you're
the one who didn't stop it—then the rape must be your fault.”

Your fault
, says the voice in my head.
Your fault!

But the rape wasn't my fault. It certainly wasn't the fault of the dumb little kid who wore her hair in a bun to a kegger.

“I remember how my OCD behaviors flared after it happened,” I say. “I counted my steps all day long, everywhere I went. One time, I fell downstairs because I was concentrating so hard on counting. The scrapes and bruises didn't bother me half as much as the fact that I lost count.”

“OCD rituals feed that desire for control,” Jen says, “that desire to make sure the bad things stay away. Those rituals keep us from coming to grips with the scary idea that sometimes bad things just happen.”

“The rape is what it is,” I say, echoing one of Jen's mantras. “It wasn't my fault. I didn't cause it to happen.”

That doesn't mean you're not a stupid bitch
, says the voice in my head.

I don't have an answer for that.

“Now I want you to open your journal,” Jen says. “I'm going to say something to you, and I don't want you to answer. Instead, I want you to write down how it makes you feel.”

I am instantly defensive and suspicious.

You can't trust her!
says the voice in my head.

But I open my journal, take out my pen, and wait.

“The rape is what it is,” says Jen. “That's true. Bad things happen, and they're not our fault.” She pauses. “And the miscarriage is what it is, too.”

Instantly, a flood of horrible thoughts and images pours through me: blood, agony, shame, death.

Your fault!
shouts the voice in my head.
Dead baby!

I am furious. Jen knows not to mention the miscarriage. She knows what I go through when I think about it.

No wonder I don't trust her!

“Don't speak,” Jen says, holding up her hand. “Just breathe. Surf the feelings.”

And I do.

“Now write down the emotion you're feeling.”

I hold my breath like I'm underwater and write
ANGRY
in big block letters. Then I hold the journal up and glare at her.

“Fair enough,” she says. “Now, still keeping silent, I want you to look inside that anger. Try not to argue with yourself—we all know how good you are in an argument. Just quietly look at your anger until you can see inside it to find the emotion that it's covering up.”

I'm still seething, but I force myself to look inside the bubbling mess that is my current emotional state. Just as I did yesterday, watching my urges to put my arms down, I watch now to see what's coming up.

As calmly as I can, I look at my own anger.

What is it blocking me from? What's it hiding?

Images begin to bubble to the surface. Me, grabbing my razor in the middle of the night. Me, lashing out rather than enjoying a massage. Me, waking up with my head in Dr. Greene's lap after the meditation on the pebble with the baby's foot.

The voice in my head is screaming.
Stop it now, you stupid, stupid bitch! Purge, grab a razor, throw your journal, run out of the room! Stop it, stop it, STOP IT!

FEAR.
I write the word in my journal. I'm afraid of what I'll find if I keep going down. And I just learned something important, something I never knew before:

The voice in my head is the voice of my fear!

“Very good,” says Jen as I hold up the notebook. “So your anger was protecting your fear. But what's behind the fear? What is it you're afraid of? Look for that, and write that down.”

I stare at the page and trace over the two words until their lines are thick black indents into the paper.

Stop it! Stop it now!

What is it that I'm afraid of? Loss of control? But I've lost control. I've blacked out, and I've woken up cuffed to a gurney in a hospital. It doesn't get much more out of control than that.

Pain? No. I live with pain every day.

The miscarriage? That already happened. It's over and done with, in the past.

But the fear grips me tighter, and the voice of my fear is like a banshee wail:

Stop it! Stop it! STOP IT!

There it is, trembling on the edge of my awareness, like a monster I've spotted out of the corner of my eye. But I don't write it down. I can't write that down. I can barely allow myself to think about it.

Hatred. That's what I'll find if I dig too deep. Hatred—for me.

Because the miscarriage wasn't like the rape. It really was my fault. And I think—I'm almost sure—that I hate myself for it. This isn't like me yelling at Mom, saying, “You hate me! I hate you!” This is the real thing.

The voice of my fears is trying to protect me. It protects me by starving me and abusing me and calling me every loathsome name it
can dream up. If that's the protection, what's it like without the protection? How much worse is the monster hiding behind it?

Hatred. There's no way I can possibly survive it.

I close the journal and shake my head. I'm hoping Jen will think I just can't figure this out, but I can feel the hard, expressionless mask settling onto my face.

“You really have done well,” Jen says warmly, so I know she knows I'm holding out on her. Does she also know what I'm refusing to write?

She's probably known it all along.

We sit in silence while she studies my face and I fight the urge to throw my journal at her. Stalemate. This isn't going any further. It can't, or I'll end up dead.

“What's her name?” Jen asks.

“Whose name?”

“The name of the baby you lost. Does she have a name?”

“Lilly,” I say. “Lilly Arabella.” I haven't said those words out loud before.

Pain blazes through me, past defenses that have held for almost a year. A lump swells in my throat, but I swallow it down and blink back tears in a kind of fury. This woman may have hurt me, but she's not going to make me cry.

I've had enough of trust for one day.

Next comes lunch. My twelve-year-old little brother is cracking jokes, and I try to take heart from his good mood, but I pick at my food in dreary misery while waves of nausea attack. It would help if I liked to eat before the anorexia took hold, but honestly, food never had that much appeal for me.

So here I am. I'm stuck with that damn critical voice forever because behind it is something even worse.

At the afternoon group therapy session, Jen asks me to tell the other patients about the miscarriage. I don't want to go back to that place in my mind, but I manage to say a few words. Jen adds a few more and then tells them, “Her name was Lilly Arabella.”

Again, hearing the name out loud, I feel tears coming to my eyes.

“Elena, I'm so sorry,” says my friend Molly.

She's crying, and she reaches out to hug me. To my surprise, I find myself hugging her back.

During break time, a quiet woman I barely know brings me a small, flat, shiny white stationery box. It says
Arabella
on the lid in lines of glued pearl beads.

“I'm so sorry about your daughter,” she says. “I made you a box where you can keep letters to her. That way you can write her whenever you want.”

I take the box, feeling awkward and vulnerable, and the woman hurries away. That's good, because I don't know how to respond to this kindness. Even my critical voice can't think of anything to say.

As I put the box into my backpack, I open it. There's already a letter inside.