“Do you hear anything?”
“Static. From the radio. There’s a man speaking, but his voice...there’s static.” Mia is lying on the couch with her legs crossed at the ankles. It’s the first time I’ve seen her relax in the last two weeks. Her arms are folded against a bare midriff—her chunky cream sweater having hiked up an inch or two when she laid down—as if she’s been placed in a casket.
“Can you hear what the man is saying?” Dr. Rhodes asks from where she sits on a maroon armchair beside Mia. The woman is the epitome of together: not a wrinkle in her clothing, not a hair out of place. The sound of her voice is monotonous; it could lull me to sleep.
“Temperatures in the forties, plenty of sun...”
“The weather forecast?”
“It’s a disc jockey—the sound is coming from the radio. But the static... The front speakers don’t work. The voice comes from the backseat.”
“Is there someone in the backseat, Mia?”
“No. It’s just us.”
“Us?”
“I can see his hands in the darkness. He drives with two hands, holding the steering wheel so tightly.”
“What else can you tell me about him?” Mia shakes her head. “Can you see what he’s wearing?”
“No.”
“But you can see his hands?”
“Yes.”
“Is there anything on his hands—a ring, watch? Anything?”
“I don’t know.”
“What can you tell me about his hands?”
“They’re rough.”
“You can see that? You can see that his hands are rough?”
I scoot to the edge of my seat, hanging on to Mia’s every last muted word. I know that Mia—the old Mia, pre-Colin Thatcher—would have never wanted me to hear this conversation.
This question she doesn’t answer.
“Is he hurting you?” Mia twitches on the couch, pushing aside the question. Dr. Rhodes asks again, “Did he hurt you, Mia? There, in the car, or maybe before?” There’s no response.
The doctor moves on. “What else can you tell me about the car?”
But Mia states instead, “This wasn’t...this wasn’t supposed...to happen.”
“What wasn’t, Mia?” she asks. “What wasn’t supposed to happen?”
“It’s all wrong,” Mia replies. She’s disoriented, her visions cluttered, random memories running adrift in her mind.
“What is all wrong?” There’s no reply. “Mia, what is all wrong? The car? Something about the car?”
But Mia says nothing. Not at first anyway. But then she sucks her breath in violently, and claims, “It’s my fault. It’s all my fault,” and it takes every bit of willpower I have not to rush from my seat and embrace my child. I want to tell her that no, it’s not. It’s not her fault. I can see the way it grieves her, the way her facial features tense up, her flattened hands turn to fists. “I did this,” she says.
“This is not your fault, Mia,” Dr. Rhodes states. Her voice is pensive, soothing. I grip the arms of the chair in which I sit and force myself to remain calm. “It’s not your fault,” she repeats, and later, after the session is through, she explains to me in private that victims almost always blame themselves. She says that often this is the case with rape victims, the reason that nearly fifty percent of rapes go unreported because the victim feels certain it was her fault. If only she had never gone to such and such a bar; if only she had never talked to such and such a stranger; if only she hadn’t worn such suggestive attire. Mia, she explains, is experiencing a natural phenomenon that psychologists and sociologists have been studying for years: self-blame. “Self-blame can, of course, be destructive,” she says to me later as Mia waits in the waiting room for me to catch up, “when taken to the extreme, but it can also prevent victims from becoming vulnerable in the future.” As if this is supposed to make me feel relieved.
“Mia, what else do you see?” the doctor inquires when Mia has settled.
She’s taciturn, initially. The doctor asks again, “Mia, what else do you see?”
This time Mia responds, “A house.”
“Tell me about the house.”
“It’s small.”
“What else?”
“A deck. A small deck with steps that lead down into the woods. It’s a log cabin—dark wood. You can barely see it for all the trees. It’s old. Everything about it is old—the furniture, the appliances.”
“Tell me about the furniture.”
“It sags. The couch is plaid. Blue-and-white plaid. Nothing about the house is comfortable. There’s an old wooden rocking chair, lamps that barely light the room. A tiny table with wobbly legs and a plaid vinyl tablecloth that you’d bring to a picnic. The hardwood floors creak. It’s cold. It smells.”
“Like what?”