Pretty Girl-13

COMMUNICATION




TWENTY CLEAR PLASTIC BOXES STACKED FOUR HIGH AND five across lined the garage wall. Clothes, books, toys, drawings—who knew what else? Good thing Mom was such a pack rat. Angie caught her in the kitchen, scrambling some eggs for Dad’s Saturday breakfast. “Hey, Mom. Do we still have that old Fisher-Price tape recorder I used to love so much?”

“Look in ‘Toddler Two’ on the left,” Mom suggested. “Second row.” A pack rat with a perfect mental filing system.

Angie left the connecting door open behind her as she returned to the garage. She unpiled the boxes and dove into Toddler 2. Sure enough, the friendly recorder with the red-and-yellow microphone was next to the barn with the pudgy plastic animals. She cradled the pink pig in one hand, the rooster in the other, lost in the childhood memory.

“What do you want that for, hon?” Mom yelled out.

“I, um, was working on a song and I wanted to get it on tape before I forget,” she called back. She tossed Wilbur and Doodle-doo back in the bin, snapped the lid, and restacked the boxes.

Mom smiled to see her blowing silently into the microphone. “Batteries dead?” She turned away from the eggs and pulled open a drawer. “Fresh ones in here. Hey, I’m glad to hear the sounds of guitar strumming in your room again.”

Okay, she wasn’t exactly writing a song, but she had reunited with her guitar. Gradually fingering the chords and relearning the picking patterns she’d worked on so hard in the before-time was relaxing. It took her mind away from … from her mind for a while.

She glanced over Mom’s shoulder at the steaming yellow fluff in the pan. “Add a dash of thyme and some paprika,” she suggested. “Dad’ll love it.”

“Since when are you the master chef?” Mom’s right dimple showed her amusement at the unlikely suggestion.

“I have absolutely no idea,” she said flippantly. “Maybe a recipe I whipped up in captivity.”

“Oh Lord, I wish you wouldn’t joke like that,” Mom said. Her cheeks sagged.

Angie was pretty sure she had Girl Scout to thank for that culinary suggestion. “Mom, if I can’t joke about it, I don’t think I can live with it.”

“Just please, not around your father. He’s having a hard enough time.”

“Work?” Angie asked.

Mom was silent.

A sharp pain cut across her chest. “Me? Having me home again?”

Mom was more silent.

“Why?” Angie’s voice rose. The words and fears she’d been holding back poured out with ugly urgency. “He already had me dead-and-buried in his mind, didn’t he? I am a ghost to him. He doesn’t even see me.”

“What on earth are you talking about, Angie?”

“I saw it, Mom. I know about it. I saw the picture.” Her chin trembled, but she wouldn’t cry. “I found the scrapbook and I saw the grave.”

Mom’s heated face faded to white. “No, Angie. That was a mistake.”

“That was supposed to be for my body. My mangled, murdered body. Tell me the truth, for once.”

Mom’s hand flew to cover her mouth. “It wasn’t like that,” she whispered between her fingers. “Our grief counselor, she told us to do it. To begin to move on, because I couldn’t. I wouldn’t. We never gave up. I swear.”

Cold invaded Angie from head to toe. Her voice was pure ice. “You didn’t, Mom. But Dad did. He moved on. He started a replacement child. Is it a girl? A boy? Has he named it?”

In the last month, the size of Mom’s stomach had grown from “too much dessert” to “no more tucking shirts in.” It was so obvious, Angie couldn’t pretend it away anymore. They had to talk about it. But not now. She wasn’t ready.

“Ange, please …” Mom shook her head, reached out with the spatula. “It’s not that.”

Angie dashed it to the ground. “Do you realize he’s touched your stomach more in the last month than he’s touched me? He hates me now.”

Mom studied the grease splatter down the front of her white shirt to avoid Angie’s eyes. “Oh, you silly girl. He’s petrified, don’t you see? He can only imagine what some anonymous maniac must have done to you. He’s sick. He can’t sleep at night.”

Angie felt a bubble of rage. “Because his precious daughter is damaged goods? Because he thinks I would be better off dead?”

Mom pulled herself up to her full five foot six and glared. “No. Because he failed to protect you. He lost you. He is burning up with guilt.” Her voice broke, and she looked away with brimming eyes. “Do you want some of these eggs? I can’t eat any. The smell is killing me.”

“You guys are killing me,” Angie said. “As if I didn’t have enough pressure.”

She dashed up to her room, slamming the door behind her. She leaned back against it and breathed as if she’d run a marathon, not a flight of stairs. It wasn’t supposed to be her job to make her dad happy. It was supposed to be the other way around.

Angie flung the plastic tape recorder onto the bed. She collapsed facedown on her pillow and considered crying, considered not breathing. Neither one worked. The pillowcase gave off the faint, fresh scent of laundry detergent. It was such a happy smell, she couldn’t follow through with tears or self-suffocation. So she got up and retuned her guitar, a process she could control, a discord she could fix. The flood of fury trickled away, leaving only a depressed puddle.

The honey-toned wood grew warm in her hands. She ran up and down a scale and began picking out an old tune—Grandma’s lullaby. “When you wake, you shall have all the pretty little horses …” She closed her eyes, playing the tune over and over till her fingers knew it without thinking. She disappeared into the music.

A hissing sound drew her back. Shoot. Had she turned on the tape recorder by accident? It was rewinding itself. She probably had fifteen minutes of pretty horses.

Angie held the toy tape recorder in her lap and pressed the big green PLAY button. The tape was old and had been recorded over and over again. Static ran for several long seconds, and Angie was just about to hit the red STOP button when she heard, “Hello? Hello? I think this is working.” The child’s voice was high and soft and breathless. Angie felt a jolt of recognition. Electricity ran all the way down to her toes.

“The big girl told me to say thank you very much for the tape recorder,” the child went on. “It’s really easy to use. I like it.”

Angie couldn’t help smiling at the formal politeness. She sounded very sweet.

“This is my story,” the girl said. “It’s scary to tell. He made me promise I wouldn’t tell. People who break promises go to Hell, he said, and they burn up forever. And I really don’t want to burn up forever,” she said. “He showed me how much a burn hurts with a match, and he said, That’s just one little match. Imagine a whole world of flames. And he said, Friends don’t tell on each other, see, like he didn’t tell about me breaking Dad’s best coffee mug. So I promised I wouldn’t. And he said, The magic word is hush.”

Another few moments of silence. The coffee mug. Angie had a vague memory of an oversized, brown-speckled mug teetering on the edge of the counter. The tape whirred another turn, and Angie imagined the little girl gathering courage to break her solemn promise of silence.

She resumed. “We played a few tea parties, and we did dress-ups, like pirate and princess, when he came over to play with me. And it was fun. He showed me how to play Uno and Crazy Eights, and Slap Jack, too. We had lots of fun games while Mom and Dad were getting ready to go out to dinner all the Fridays. Then they kissed me good night and told me to be a good girl and do everything Yuncle said. Everything… .” The little voice trailed off. “Everything,” she added sadly against the static hiss.

So literal, Angie thought. Little kids are always so literal. Yuncle? Why was her alter Tattletale talking about Yuncle Bill? That was so long ago. When her chest spasmed, gulping air, she realized she’d forgotten to breathe.

“So, this day Yuncle had an idea. He said, I’m tired of pirates. Princesses like horses better than pirates. Do you like horses, Princess Angela? Of course I do, I said. I love them. All the girls love horses. And he laughed so hard. He told me to hop on his back, and he crawled around on his knees while I yelled giddyup. And he said, all the best horse riders go bareback, so we had to take off our shirts so we had bare backs. And I rode around on his bare back, but it was hard to hold on without a shirt.”

Angie’s mouth went dry. A creeping feeling of dread touched the base of her neck. She wanted to turn off the tape now, but the innocence in the voice compelled her to hear the rest.

“He said, I’m afraid you might fall off this horse, my princess, and he laughed and rolled us both over. I giggled at him, lying with his hoofs in the air, so he said, hey, I know. Let’s make this a better game. Want me to show you how big girls ride? And I said okay, because I was getting kind of bored.

“Then he showed me. Then he showed me and he said, now you’re a big girl too.”

There was a long silence. Angie filled it with a thousand questions. Yuncle? How could he have done it? That bastard. A tear rolled down her cheek. Mourning for the poor little girl and her awful, agonizing secret.

The voice came on again, sober and subdued. “I didn’t like the new game so much. He said, stop crying, you baby. Princesses don’t cry. Next time won’t hurt. And then he burned me with a little piece of Hell and made me promise not to tattle about our game. And it was the same next time and next time and next time.”

The recording finished. It was static to the end of the tape.

Next time and next time. Oh God. How many next times were there? Four years of Fridays? Right under her parents’ noses?

Angie rolled up her sleeve to study the sore that had appeared without explanation the day Yuncle and Grandma had visited. The livid spot surrounded a swollen, oozing blister, just about the size of a match head.

And Angie instantly knew without knowing—he’d done it again. That night. After dinner. That goddamn bastard had taken her for a sunset walk and done her. Or rather, done the trapped little girl inside he’d trained to be his sex toy. Poor, defenseless, silent Tattletale.

And where? In his car? In the shed? On the filthy ground in the cobwebs and dust? She couldn’t remember a moment of it, like her mind had been wiped clean of his guilty fingerprints.

A sick rage like she’d never felt before surged inside her. Damn him to his own burning hell. Her hands reached for an invisible weapon, a blade to defend the child. A sound like the brush of a hundred dove wings filled her ears, almost blocking the sound of Mom calling, “Time to go, Angie.”

Oh yes, Angie. Our Angel was very angry. Tattletale clung to his robes, ashamed and worried she’d done the wrong thing, telling you. Maybe it was too soon. Maybe you weren’t strong enough. But you had to know, I told them, if you were ever going to defend yourself. I held the gate against Angel. This was your time. He stormed away with the look of heaven’s own wrath on his beautiful face, denied his vengeance, denied his role.

If Angie’s parents noticed her tense silence in the car, they never commented. They were so oblivious, they probably thought she was just nervous about starting the brain mapping procedure that Dr. Grant had convinced them to try. She tried to cling to the hot, hard emotion, but the fury was draining away again, and a dull, gray calm spread through her. A smothering blanket of numbness pressed down on her head. Her eyes were achy dry.

Had her parents missed the signals of abuse? Or had she just absorbed everything deep inside herself and buried it in her mind—literally in a secret compartment? Either way, Yuncle had gotten away with it for years. Because she believed him, because she couldn’t tell. It was impossible to imagine how much pain was buried in her head, like … what was the opposite of secret treasure? The rotting corpses of her innocence? Yeah. Like a mass grave. God forbid they should ever dig it up and examine it. She shuddered and prayed that the mapping would work.

Would they find the boundaries of all the secret compartments in her mind, empty them, and nail them shut? That’s what Dr. Grant had promised. That was the goal, anyway. Step one of the experimental treatment—discovery before recovery.

The plan was that Dr. Grant would hypnotize her and hold the attention of one of the alters while the functional MRI machine mapped her brain. All the nerve pathways for that alter would light up with activity, and the computer would record their exact locations. Dr. Grant had arranged for a five-day stretch of recording slots at UCLA Medical Center, assuming that Angie could tolerate the one-hour sessions in the belly of the noisy, claustrophobic scanner. It was a huge time commitment, an hour’s drive each way in traffic, plus scanning time.

Dad hovered uneasily in the radiology reception area as they waited to get started—the downside of starting on a weekend so she wouldn’t miss too much school. “This shouldn’t hurt or anything,” he assured her. “It’s all done with magnets.” He wasn’t telling her anything she hadn’t already heard. He patted her back in a stiff-handed way, transferring his own anxiety into her instead of the opposite. Why was he here instead of ignoring her as usual?

Angie bit her lip, holding in the tears that ached in her throat for the entire drive over. The numbness froze her. After what Mom had spilled about Dad’s emotional meltdown, there was no way she could tell him the truth about his brother.

Hey, Dad. Guess what? Finally figured out why my brain knew how to break up into compartments. I had to build a wall between daily life and being molested by your brother. Over and over again. That’s how I learned to keep pain and fear locked away in another place.

Oh yeah. That conversation would end well.

She chewed her cheek till she tasted blood, forcing herself to feel the pain. It anchored her as she followed her parents along the corridor into the imaging room.

“Ready, Angie?” Dr. Grant’s smooth, cheerful face pulled her away from the echo of Tattletale’s little voice and back to now. “Let me introduce all of you to Dr. Hirsch, the guy in charge of the study.”

Now he looked like a typical “brain shrinker,” from his black goatee to his bushy black eyebrows. Startling black eyes like giant pupils had a piercing quality, like X-ray vision into your psyche.

While he obtained formal consent from her parents, Angie mind-wandered. Who would come out today? Girl Scout seemed most comfortable with the doctor. But Tattletale was close to the surface. Little Wife was a total blank, just a name right now. And someone had growled in her ear. So that should be the four that Girl Scout had told Dr. Grant about. Or was Little Wife the growler, and there was someone else entirely? What a patchwork quilt she was—bits and pieces sewn together by disaster.

Dr. Grant’s job was to bring out the alters one by one and hold them long enough to trace them. The bait she planned to use was inviting them to tell their stories as Girl Scout had already started to do, not to flood Angie with traumatic memories, but to give her an arm’s-length look at her lost time. Of course, Dr. Grant didn’t know yet about Tattletale’s trauma, about what Angie had only just found out.

She tuned back in just as Dr. Hirsch said, “Then ideally we will know the exact extent of the splintering, and can proceed with the therapy.”

“Which is what, exactly?” Angie asked.

“Erasure. In two steps. We’ll block, that is, deactivate, the neurons used only by the alters after tagging them with special genes we can manipulate. And when that is complete, you will have your unitary consciousness, one personality continuously in control. I have treated five prior patients with great success.”

That was what she wanted, wasn’t it? Questions answered, gaps filled, and the alters could be retired. Girl Scout and Tattletale had already told her their worst, and she could handle it. Not feel it, exactly, but now she knew.

The machine room was intimidating, scary—the perfect place to send her primary personality fleeing in terror. A huge machine with a circular opening dominated the room. Her head was supposed to fit in the circle. She imagined invisible beams drilling into her skull and dissecting her, but then they’d promised her it was just a huge magnet.

In the dressing room, she shed her street clothes and put on the hospital gown. Her reflection looked back, pale and frightened. What secrets would she babble under hypnosis? She wasn’t so much worried about what Dr. Grant would hear, but Dr. Hirsch was monitoring. He didn’t know her. She didn’t know him. And what if Tattletale came out and told Dr. Grant about Yuncle? Would she have to tell Angie’s parents? There was some kind of law about teachers and health-care workers reporting abuse of minors if they found out or suspected. It was posted all over school. Did that law include psychologists?

Angie whispered to the mirror. “Tattletale, you absolutely have to stay quiet. It’s not time for you yet. Keep hiding from the scary doctor. Please.” Whether she imagined it or not, a feeling of agreement spread over her.

Dr. Grant was right outside the door when she came out. The doctor handed her a pair of wireless earbuds and lightly patted the back of her hand. “Nothing to worry about, Angie. I’ll be talking to you through these, since the machine is noisy. There’s a voice pickup, so I’ll be able to hear you. I’m sorry I have to be in another room. Now let’s go somewhere quiet where you can become more relaxed and see who wants to talk.”

Dr. Grant took you into a dark, quiet room and sat you down. By that point, you were trembling. She talked in a soft, soothing voice about nothing at all until the fear drained away. Then she brought out a gleaming disc on a chain and asked you to follow it with your eyes until you surrendered yourself and allowed us to peek through the windows of your eyes. Doctor said, “Girl Scout. We need to talk. We need to take away Angie’s pain.”

It wasn’t Girl Scout who came up spitting, though. I sent another through the gate—the Little Wife. It was time for her to lighten her burden, time for Dr. Grant to meet her. And time for you to know.

Angie, you thought you were making the right choice. Our mom and dad were completely won over by the doctor’s sales pitch. In a way, they only wanted their Pretty Girl-Thirteen back again. They wanted their three years back, just like you did. They wanted to forget too. They didn’t want to know the full damage, to understand all our scars. But you had to.

It was Monday, the third day of recording, and Girl Scout had refused to come out, even under hypnosis. Another alter insisted on dominating the sessions. Dr. Grant gave a little “aha,” as if this was the one she’d been expecting all along, the one who was closest to the trauma that had splintered Angie’s sense of self in the first place.

“I always knew there had to be someone in this role,” she told Angie after the first two hours in the clanking machine. “The alter who personally took on the physical abuse. I believe this one who calls herself ‘Little Wife’ is at the heart of it.” She frowned and twisted her pink lips in concentration. “Although I still find it remarkable and somewhat baffling that a single event at your age could have initiated this degree of dissociation. That’s just so atypical.”

Dr. Grant was right, of course, but Angie wasn’t about to unload that secret. As she prepared to go under for the third time, she remained silent about Tattletale, the first little splinter. Dad was so fragile; Mom was so pregnant; Grandma was so completely dependent on Yuncle. And Angie wasn’t ready to deal with the firestorm of accusing her “favorite uncle” of incest. Dad would probably kill his little brother with his bare hands.

She would just never, ever let herself be alone with him again, she promised. And at some point, when she was whole and strong, she’d deal with the bastard. That thought brought a smile—the sudden image of an avenging angel with a sword. As Angie slipped under the spell of hypnosis, a satisfying fantasy of slicing Yuncle to ribbons filled her imagination. The sound of wings was the last thing she heard.

At the end of the session, Dr. Grant was cheerful and triumphant. “We got another one,” she announced. “A young man—very serious, very protective. He’s also quite compact, neurologically speaking. Probably the newest and least developed. We got his entire range mapped out in a single session. Good work, Angie.”

Like she had anything to do with it. A young man inside. Great. Did that mean she was bi? The doctor quickly assured her that the gender of her alters had nothing to do with her own sexual identity. Thank God. She could not deal with any more complications.

In spite of lying still for an hour and dozing in the car on the way back, Angie was exhausted and begged to stay home from school for the rest of the day. Mom gave her a sympathetic hug. “I have to go into work for at least a couple of hours,” she said. “I’m way behind on shelving.”

“I don’t expect you to stay home with me,” Angie said, a little more sharply than she meant to. “Not if piles of books are calling your name. I just need to lie down for a while.”

She dragged up the stairs and collapsed into a tight bundle under the covers. Everything softened and blurred. Just as she thought she was drifting off for good, her hand crept under the pillow, the way it did when she was truly asleep, and her fingers hit something unexpected. She jerked awake. Her journal had been stuffed there, open and a bit crumpled. The top sheet was blank, but thick, jerky writing showed through.

Angie heaved up on her elbows and flipped the empty page. Her cheeks heated as she read the four words, carefully centered like a title page: “Little Wife’s First Journal.” Little Wife? Her left hand rose before her face, the fog bank lifted from her memory. She remembered the inscription engraved inside the wide silver band. How could she have forgotten something so simple? She slipped it from her finger and read it again. DEAREST ANGELA. MY LITTLE WIFE. Something trembled inside her, and she threaded the ring back over her finger, where it was supposed to be. The words made her feel loved and scared at the same time. But she was only sixteen. She couldn’t be someone’s wife. So what did it mean?

More words showed through the paper, small and dense.

With a flutter of anticipation, she turned the journal page again. Chills raised the thin covering of blond hair on her arms. Once she started reading, she couldn’t stop.

Hey Ange.

I know you’ve met Girl Scout, or at least she’s had her chance to talk to you. Goody Girl Scout left a hell of a lot out, like the part where she freaked out and I came to the rescue. I mean, to listen to her, you’d think, “Oh yeah, so she could make a four-course gourmet dinner with two ingredients and one hand tied behind her back.” Ooh. Sure, that saved our life. As if. Feeding the man’s stomach, sure, that helped. But get real, bitch. That’s not all he wanted from his little wife. Girl Scout could only handle the front room. Left it to me to conquer the back room, the bedroom. Want to know how it happened? Sure you do. You can’t help yourself, wanting to know. Every girl dreams of her wedding night, right?

I’ll warn you now, honey. It’s no PG-13 story. Get it, Pretty Girl? We stowed you away safe, so you’d miss all the excitement. And now you’re poking around? You really want to know? Are you sure? Here goes, then.

So Goody Girl Scout and the man finished their first dinner together. He made a point of telling her how dark it was outside the cabin, that there were cliffs and crevasses. The coyotes were howling like crazy, and he said, “Hear that? Hear them hunting? Just remember you’ll never hear the cougar before she gets you by the throat.” That’s all he needed to say. She knew she couldn’t run off in the dark.

Then he unlocked her bloody ankles and carried her through the door to the second room, the one she spent the whole day not looking at, not thinking about. The room was small and black. He put her down on that hard bed that was going to be my birthing place. I mean, that’s where I was born that night. You know? No, of course you don’t. Not yet. I’ll set the stage for you, so you can really appreciate it, appreciate what I do for you, for all of you.

Girl Scout couldn’t see a thing, just hear him moving in the room. She held her breath.

He lit the oil lamp on a shelf, and his face turned dark orange in the flickering light. Without speaking a word, he washed our feet with a wet cloth, rubbed the sores with some sweet-smelling liniment. He kissed our pretty legs. He treated her like a queen, and all she did was lie there like a stiff board. After he wrapped our feet, he leaned over her breathless, terrified face and kissed her on the lips. “There you go, little wife,” he said. “All better. Now, tell me how much you love me.”

She just lay there, the idiot. He smacked our cheek, gently. “Tell me, Angela.”

She forced out the words. “I love you.” She didn’t even know his name.

“Show me,” he whispered. “Show me how much you love me.”

She looked helplessly into his dark eyes. “I—I don’t—I—”

“Don’t love me?” His voice was cold, and his hand smacked our other cheek, hard enough to sting.

She cried out. The sound excited him, and he slapped her again. His eyes turned darker and closer together in the flickering yellow light. She rolled away from him, and he grabbed our hair and forced her to look him in the face.

“Angela, darling,” he said, but his teeth were tight. “I wanted this to be a special night for you, but you are not cooperating, my little wife.”

She wigged out, freaked. She screamed. He slapped. She begged. He ripped at her clothes. She curled into a tight ball to hide her shivering bare body. He was reaching for this coil of rope he had ready on the bedpost, when she checked out. Yeah, Girl Scout just up and left the head.

So Ange, there you were for just a second, terrified, like, how did I get here? Then it was little Tattletale, but she opened her eyes and saw it was the wrong person, and it wasn’t the horsey game, oh no. She scampered off screaming, and into the space she left behind I was born, tied down on that hard, hard bed with the man pushing and grunting and weighing me down. Well, that was done and over pretty fast, the first time. He shuddered and fell on me with all his sweaty body, and he said, “You love me, little wife?”

And I didn’t want to be hit, so I said, “Of course I love you.”

And he rolled off, and smiled oh-so-sweetly and said, “See, I knew it all along. You were just scared a little, weren’t you, my shy thing?”

And I asked oh-so-sweetly, “Could you please untie my hands?”

And he said oh-so-sweetly, “Well, not tonight. We’ll see how it goes tomorrow.”

And then, since I was in the middle of the bed, he lay down on top of me and fell asleep snoring, and I lay there awake till morning, trying to breathe and thinking about how I was going to get my hands untied.

And when the daylight came, he got up and went outside to pee. I asked, “What about me? Can I please, please go to the outhouse?” And he untied me and showed me the chamber pot in the corner of the room.

Then he put me back on the bed and did it all over again, taking his time to pause and make me beg for him. He told me how lucky I was to have a husband who wanted me so much. I didn’t want to be hit, so I said, “Oh yes, I know how lucky I am. I love you so much.”

And he said, “You are unimaginably sweet.” And he untied me and took me into the kitchen to start breakfast—her job. I left her to it with those heavy rings around her legs.

I knew if I said the right things at night, I could make things better for us. I knew if I did the right things in bed, I could make things better for us. And that prissy Girl Scout—I heard her saying, “Stop pretending you don’t like it. You’re just a slut.”

Yeah. That’s what she called me from the day of my birth. She called me Slut.

Ungrateful bitch.

Angie’s ears rang with the blood rushing through them. She touched her wrist scars with gentle wonder. She had absolutely no memory of them—no memory of pain, of terror, of rape. She was innocent. Untouched. A miracle.

“Thank you,” she said quietly.