Testimony

By Jordan Cox.

Testimony

The inquiry rendered her larynx immobile

A top the faux-pillars of law

As the demon’s champion demanded a name

With his crooked claw staggering out

He claimed no trickery.

Just

One.

Couldn’t he ask about the adorable flowered dress?

Or the way it bloomed as she twirled?

Maybe he should inquire about her long spiral tresses

And the alien smell of hairspray

Applied solely for this day.

Instead he tried to extract the memories

Of rough skin on soft knees

Prying

For the bud behind Disney themed underthings

And the intruding tongue in a mouth

Of baby teeth

The devil’s advocate wanted the title

Of the chimera in her nightmares,

But

The ribbon between her lips remained in knots

Of fear-

Double and triple tied as laces on her

Playground shoes.

Lucifer himself watched behind oak

As long as she remained silent-

Petrified by his gaze,

He would walk free.

He walked free.

             As a child, I painted elaborate expectations in my head. Before my first soccer game, I imagined overwhelmed fans in a raised metal stadium cheering me on as I raced forward to kick the tie-breaking goal. I supposed they would paint their faces in my team colors and make up sing-song versions of my name. Imagine my surprise and subsequent heartbreak when I encountered lethargic parents, precarious plastic goal posts, and poorly watered field. My young mind worked in grand fantasies for everything including the “serious stuff.”

I was constantly shocked by the mundane and unspectacular aspects of life.  This is especially true when I encountered the judicial system at the age of six. Before, I believed the law to be all knowing and perfect. Bad people are supposed to go to jail, and their victims are supposed to feel justice holding them up. In big court rooms, the judge bangs the gavel and all is right. That gavel is supposed to fix everything.  Justice could never have protected me. I should have protected me and the others.  

***

            The court room I entered smelled like my great grandfather’s house. The air was musty with layers of dust, the kind of air that chokes you if you breathe too deeply.  I wanted heavily polished hardwoods, but the faded blue carpet muffled the clicks of my shiny white shoes. I focused my vision on the fraying, purple covered chairs and tables better suited for a high school chemistry class than a trial. My family was not allowed in the room as I testified, because then the defense attorney could accuse them of coaching me. I was only six, but I remember the exact dress I wore. It was silky blue with yellow roses. As I inched my way to the stand, I pulled at the loose strings at the cuffs of the matching yellow cardigan my grandma bought me because she knew the courtroom would be cold. How did she know?

            As I took my place on the slightly raised platform at the front of the room, I expected to place my hand on a bible. Mom told me it would be okay to swear this time, but instead of the lord’s book, the prosecutor asked me introductory questions. He asked me my name. The judge asked me my name. The defense attorney asked me my name. Maybe someone expected me to slip up on the only name I had, or maybe they wanted me to forget. At the end of the day, I wished I could forget. I wanted to cut a hole just below my ear and let the faces of the judge, the prosecutor, the defense attorney, the first police officer I met, and the man/monster bleed out onto the pillow with my name like draining the pus from an infected wound. That way I could forget all the men who could never scar me again, and pretend they never had.

            By the time the defense attorney got up to question me, I could hardly talk. All these people, most of them strangers, now knew my darkest secret. They knew the way I tried to hide stained under things beneath my dirty socks in the hamper. They knew the result of his whispered threats. They knew I was a tattle tale, but even more, they knew I was unclean. I was the type of dirty you scrub until your skin bleeds but you cannot get rid of. I did not want him to force me to say it all again, just in case they had plugged their ears, but I told them all again anyway. I had no choice.

            My lungs emptied out into the room again with every question. I tried to give this man his fill in hopes he would stop asking for more and more. Did my mom tell me to say this stuff? Did the other girl’s mom tell us to say this? Was I lying? No, no, no. I answered every question over and over again until my small frame shook from exertion. After a lifetime of question he finally asked me to simply tell the court the name of the accused.

***

            This is the point where I wake up in a cold sweat. A decade and a half later and I can still feel the little girl sitting in that dungeon of a court room staring across the room at the boy in question. I can still feel his blue-eyed gaze boring into my skin causing all the muscles in my body to painfully spasm. I knew his name then, and I know his name now, but the difference happens to be that back when I sat in that room, I still believed he could hurt me. My six year old self feared that if she uttered his name, he would harm her mother, her sister, and they would all blame her. My chest still tightens at the thought of the defense attorney’s jubilant smile.  He knew I could not say the name. For whatever reason he believed, he knew he would win this case.

The irony of my tale is I direct all of the anger and emotion inward until it becomes guilt I carry every day. I somehow failed to imprison a predator who not only hurt me, but hurt two other girls alongside me. He even acted upon a girl with Down syndrome, my friend Kayla. He went on to abuse four other girls until he finally went to jail. I feel guilty for all of it. I could not give anyone justice or protection all because I could not say his name during the trial. I shut down and started crying until the bailiff escorted me out.

  A jury member said it was not that they did not believe something happened, they just did not know without a doubt that the charismatic boy who cried during the court proceedings was the one to act. I wish I could have shown them my insides and all the scar tissue. If I had just told them the name, I could have changed everything.

Counting on Fingers

 3+3= 6

She could count that on her fingers

No need for toes for

a few plus a few more years

That beautiful girl with shinning eyes and beaming smile

The golden child with the golden hair.

Then you gave her scars to bear

Oh, that vile fruit of knowledge intended for

Those with a choice.

You stole her voice.

You marked her insides as vile,

Sullied by unknown sin

Now.

I have to carry this broken daughter of eve.

And you were barely 13.

 Her + I= We,

We live on.

 Needing both hands and

Both feet to count the years gone by

But clocks and calendars mean nothing  When we sleep.

Your face creeps in night tremors.

The face that violated as is spewed lies

Into her pores until they sunk down

And down into her core

3+3+5 and 7+3= 21

21 years and I cannot fathom

Forgiveness

I cannot forgive you (me.)

You dammed her, ruined her, but couldn’t bury me.

All I am is a torrent of anger, inconsolable emotion.

 

These fingers are no longer good for counting

But would serve to choke and mangle

Smash, claw, bruise

Demolish

-You

-Me

Instead I use them to write.

           

Logic tells me I was only six, but I cannot see through the lens of logic. All I know is the weight of feelings and memories. The little girl testifying is still me. We are one in the same and therefore I cannot excuse her mistake because of something as simple as age. More often than not, I envision my current 21 year old self going up to my six year old self right before walking into the court room and begging her to just say his name, say it and point across the room so everyone in the world would know of his actions. If she did it with confidence, he wouldn’t be able to hurt anyone anymore.  She could have saved the world, or at least a few dozen people’s families.

There is no way for me to travel back in time to tell myself to just say the name, or even stop the event from happening in the first place. All I can do is work every day to lessen my guilt bit-by-bit. I have to tell myself I was the victim, not the perpetrator. I deserve to let this go. Today I start by doing the one thing I couldn’t back then.

 His name is Gary.

Things I Don't Remember

Memory is an interesting thing, no matter how hard you try to remember specific episodes from your life, some will inevitably be forgotten with time; this is especially true of childhood memories. While concrete details will often be forgotten, feelings seem to linger.

*****

I remember being scared.

            I remember standing on the second-floor landing and trying to yell for help, but not finding the words.

“MO–," and then I threw up on the stairs. 

            Before that, I remember a week of feeling sick, not going to school, and wetting the bed. I was six and had long since outgrown that embarrassing phase of my life, but my bladder was trying to tell me something. I remember, on the first night of that week, waking up, realizing what I’d done, and rushing to the bathroom to try and sop up of the quickly cooling urine with toilet paper. I slept on the top bunk above my brother. It didn’t go unnoticed.

            I remember riding in the car to the doctor’s office after I puked on the stairs. His name was Dr. Jay; he was a very kind, bear of a man, with a low, throaty voice.

I don’t remember the visit.

I don’t remember getting my blood tested and I don’t remember being weighed, although I do remember sporting a new, slim figure, having lost close to 15 pounds in the previous week alone.

I remember Dr. Jay pulling my parents aside while I sat on the examination table after the tests, and saying something to the effect of, “We can’t say for sure, but we’re going to send you to the Barbara Davis Center, where they’ll run some more tests.” The room was well lit, and the morning so sunny that I couldn’t see anything but silhouettes.

I don’t remember anything after my visit with Dr. Jay other than meeting Dr. Peter Chase, whom I would visit every three months for the next 12 years, who said, definitively, “It’s diabetes.”

I don’t remember whether or not I knew what that meant, and I don’t remember Dr. Chase promising my mom that I would play in my soccer game that next Saturday, but I remember the changes that came with the diagnosis.  

*****

I have never liked needles. I’ve been afraid of injections, IVs, and even pokes as small as finger pricks for as long as I can remember. Something about the image of skin resisting the initial puncture only to inevitably succumb to the syringe has always made me writhe, even now, as I write this after 15 years with my disease.

I’m better about it now – thank god – but during my first few months, and maybe even my first few years as a diabetic, I was a nightmare for my parents. After meals when I would need a shot of insulin to bring my blood sugar down, I would run away as fast as I could around the house. I pretended it was a game and that I wasn’t scared, but really I ran as though it was for my life; that’s how much I dreaded shots.

We had a circular, wooden table where we would normally eat dinner. Around this table I was at my best when it came to injection avoidance and escaping the pain. Eventually, the game turned to hide and seek; I tried to figure out how I could avoid the injection for the longest period of time.

The lunchtime shots were unavoidable, especially during the school week when I would be lucky enough to pick a friend – usually, that was my best friend and next-door neighbor, Connor – who would escort me to the nurse’s office at the other end of the school. I would have to check my blood, tell the nurse how much food I was planning on eating, and get a shot anticipating that amount of carbohydrates in the food. If I was given too much, I had a stash of juice boxes in one of the drawers of my classroom, but I was always embarrassed to drink from it because I didn’t want my classmates to see and think I was somehow being given special treatment.

Other than that, I don’t remember life at school being all that different. On my first day back after being sick for so long Ms. Weins, my first grade teacher, asked me to say something to the class. I remember her asking me to show the class what I had brought in that day. Unfortunately, diabetes still hadn’t registered in my system, and instead of showing off my new, stainless steel bracelet that said “Jack Todd, Type I Diabetic, Insulin Dependent,” I showed off the National Geographic animal explanation clippings I had happened to bring to school that day. I remember getting as far as explaining the clipping about polar bears before Ms. Weins stopped me and told me what she really wanted me to talk about.

I don’t remember telling my classmates “I’m a diabetic;” I don’t remember them asking me what that meant, or even actually explaining it to them. I do know, though, that it had been described to me as “my pancreas, the organ that creates insulin in my body, got shot and died,” and that’s likely how I related it to them as well. The image accompanying that description was a pancreas – which, thinking about it now, looked suspiciously like a kidney – wearing a cowboy hat, boots with spurs, and a pistol on its hip. I don’t remember whether or not there were tumbleweeds blowing in the background, but for some reason I think there were. It was all very dramatic.

*****

I remember meeting Tavia. It was my second visit to the Barbara Davis Center.

“Heyyy JT!” she said with a high five and no previous introduction. That was all the introduction I needed. “How we doin’ today?”

Every three months, after the initial onslaught of visits to the Center, I remember Tavia greeting me in the same way.

I don’t remember how I responded, at least not the first time. “Uhm, hey,” followed by clutching my mother’s hand and nuzzling my shy face into her hip is a good guess.

Tavia was warm – something that I needed, however removed from the situation I may have been. When she saw that I was afraid of needles, she, and she alone, could talk me down, reassuring me that “this won’t hurt one bit.” Or when my bloodsugar would plummet, she would greet me in her office with graham crackers, peanut butter, and a can of apple juice with the tinny aftertaste.

I remember one time when I visited the center with my grandmother; my bloodsugar was the lowest it has ever been, 22 mg/dl – a meaningless number, even, in some ways, to me, but a diabetic’s bloodsugar should hover around 100. My grandmother had no idea what to do or how to react; Tavia was the only resolution. I don’t remember her saying “Heyyy JT!” as I walked in asking for sugar, but I have no doubt it happened.

*****

            I remember – mostly because my family will never let me forget – waiting for my sister, Sony, to finish a piano lesson as my bloodsugar plummeted. I wailed, “Mom, I feel flimsy.”

            My mother swears that’s when the reality of my diabetes hit her. “None of my children have ever used the word ‘flimsy,’ other than on that day,” she says. We went to the 7-Eleven down the street and got a Slurpee. I hardly remember drinking it on the front doorstep of her piano teacher’s house as Sony finished her lesson.

*****

            Apart from my diagnosis, I remember relatively few concrete details from my childhood. I remember many of my adventures with Connor, some of them only vaguely, but couldn’t possibly put them in context.

I vividly remember random days like those spent playing Hi-Ho! Cherry-O in Connor’s basement. In one such memory, I can still see the horrible bowl-cut Connor was sporting at the time and the black and white striped turtleneck he was wearing that was stained with red juice.  Apart from times like these, though, much of my childhood is hazy to me now.

I don’t remember why Connor or I thought it was a good idea to go climbing around on his roof or “tire-tapping” each other as we biked to and from school; I don’t remember how we discovered an enormous sink hole in his back yard or why his sister, Bailey, thought it was a good idea to run around my house with an open Sharpie; I don’t remember our parents passing us over the chain-link fence connecting our backyards. I do remember being happy, though. I don’t remember diabetes changing that, and I’m satisfied knowing it all could have ended a lot worse than it did. 

"I'm Fine."

I remember the first time I lied and told someone I was “fine.”  I was five and sitting in the back of car on the way home, having just embarrassed my mother by responding to an acquaintance’s, “how are you, Emily?” with, “I am having a bad day.”

Up until that moment, and it might have been the first moment the question had ever been directed at me in a conversation, I had never realized that the phrase was in fact a question, presented to illicit a response. As if the person, however distant an acquaintance, was genuinely interested in my physiological well-being.

            My mother struggled to get me to understand that the people who ask, “How are you?” do not want a textured response depending on my mood of the moment; that as a child, unless I am being maimed, I am fine. That while trying to be polite by showing interest in my life beyond a passing greeting, they did not require an in depth analysis of the grievances of my day, but just to make sure no one had died, or that I wasn’t being kidnapped. I do not need to share my personal problems with the world. This was before Facebook – clearly.

I was five and had a very minimal understanding of nuance, let alone socially rhetorical questions, so all I gathered at that young age was the appropriate response to people’s poking and prodding into my personal life was to inform them that I am “fine,” and not to let them linger in their concern for me.

To clarify, this was by no means my mother being heartless by implying that no one was concerned about my negative observations on life (though at such a young age, I am not sure anyone should have been,) but instead her providing insight into the way in which social interactions were conducted in my family and where I am from. People did not, as a general rule stop on Main Street and have discussions with strangers about their day, and unless close friends or long lost acquaintances, grocery store interactions stopped at a polite head nod. While most of the 136,225 people of Merrimack County were in some way or another closely acquainted, social graces were quite proper, and the grocery store remained a place of anonymity.  

So when my mother said “N’est ce pas?” the little pig French I knew in our family to mean, “do you understand?” I dutifully replied, “Nass pa: I am fine.”

            For the thirteen years that followed, I lived quite contently within the rules of social engagement; only those closest to me being privileged to my personal insights, pursuits, and later transgressions. There were side effects of sorts; despite having a class size in the low 60’s for most of high school (and having known most of that 60 for at least three years prior in the adjoining middle school,) longtime fellow classmates were usually the last to find out when someone’s parents got divorced, grandparent died, or heart broken. Most often, the news would trickle down through the ranks through an intricate web of personal connections that anyone else outside the school (or town, depending on the setting of the subject,) would be referred to as violent gossip. It was simply impolite to confront an individual’s hardship face to face.

            Without the blatant social opportunity to cry for help, those who were truly concerned about your well-being learned to see the signs elsewhere: the physical signals that everyone has when they are in one form of distress or another.  There is the obvious and often embarrassing flood of tears, or bloody gash, but before trouble crescendos in such a harsh direction there are more subtle indications.  The cardinal example was in April of my sophomore year. 

I had just finished working sound on the school musical; Anything Goes, (I remember because on this particular day, I was wearing our production’s shirt.) I walked out of a particularly unpleasant 45 minutes in Mr. Cole’s English class to find my father standing in the middle of the Sophomore hallway amongst all my classmates looking incredibly lost, likely because he had only been to my high school a handful of times, and had clearly yet to see a familiar face.

“Dad?” He seemed immeasurably pleased to have found me, but the relief faded far too fast, to a look of unbearable discomfort.  “Why are you here? You’re not supposed to come and get me for another… six hours?” My father’s awkward presence quickly began to be a source of embarrassment, and panic welled in my gut.

“Emily... Emily we have to go. I came to get you. Something has happened.” I have rarely been tested, but somehow I have always handled terrible situation with all the grace I can muster, what little that may be. I calmly blew past him, dumped a random handful of work and textbooks from my locker into my bag, and turned around to look at my dad, who now seemed more comfortable standing in the emptying hallway.  At that moment no one I was close to was near; no one to throw me a look of questioning concern, no one to introduce to my father to break the tension, just me and him, leaving in silence.

I knew somehow what had happened. I knew because my arms were still blessed with the lingering tan from the vacation we had all taken barely weeks before. I knew because he would have wanted to go quietly, on a bright, beautiful spring day. I knew because he would have wanted to make it as easy for everyone else as possible. Especially mom; so he waited until dad was home so she wouldn’t be alone. 

And right as the front door of my goofy, rural, private school settled into the frame behind us, and my dad was no longer burdened with his desire to not send me over the edge in front of people, “Emily, your grandfather died.”

There was no one outside. It was too early; we had only just gotten to school a few hours earlier. It was a Thursday. There was still muddy gray snow in awkward lumps throughout the yard where the plow had piled it too high. 

My dad smiled. Not a friendly smile per say, but an uncomfortable reassuring one. And I laughed. Not as if watching the Daily Show after an unpleasant Presidential Debate, but when you see all the pieces of a complicated puzzle come together and realize you’ve had the image right in front of you all along. I laughed, and my dad smiled, because even in death, my grandfather, the eternal caregiver had found a way to make sure we would all be okay. He had orchestrated an elaborate vacation, with everyone present just a few weeks before. He had been an intolerable, lecturing grump; he had railed on me about what I was eating, lectured my dad about his work, and done everything he could to make sure that our shortcomings were highlighted. Not to be a jerk it turns out, but because he did not want to leave us all here without making sure we would be alright without him. He wanted to ensure I made it out of my teens healthy and happy, that my dad spent time with his family, that we all did our best to not wallow in his loss for too long after he was gone. 

“Boo child, are you okay?” My dad asked on our way home.

I knew we were driving home to tell my mother that her favorite person in the world had died, and that she would be a horrible wreck for the foreseeable future as a result. I knew that this was the first of many moments of loss to come over the coming years, and I knew that there was very little I could do to stop them. I was terrified, but it was clearly not my turn to be upset. My turn did not really come for a long time afterword…

“yeah dad, I am fine.”

My family and Derryfield were not alone in the emotional silence. It was the way everyone seemed to work. The East Coast is stereotyped by its unending dedication to work, frigid (some would say reserved,) emotional openness and the importance of community. Some stereotypes are just that, embellishments, but within every cliché there is a grain of truth. In this case, you could fill a bag of rice with all these grains of truth.

Leah, a classmate from my first year Latin class would go on to lose her last living grandparent the next week. We had been homework buddies in the months prior since her arrival at Derryfield that Fall, but had never been close.  

The day after my grandfather died, I still had not cried. Instead, all alone in the house I decided to bake, seemingly a logical substitute. Somehow, along the way, I had forgotten I really could not cook; I had been overwhelmed with the idea that it was something someone who was grieving would do. With my hands covered in a vomit like, purple icing, I left my disastrous attempt to bake behind and called Leah to find out our quirky teacher’s response to my absence.

“Doc was too focused on Jake getting kicked out to dwell on you missing, he did get upset that no one had done the homework though… Emily, I know you said you were fine… but… how are you really doing?”

I had thought up until this moment that I had protected my shattered psyche well, dwelling on homework and the newsy dismissal of our long time classmate, but Leah did not buy it. I had said I was fine at least a dozen times, but she hadn’t been convinced. Maybe it was how meek my voice was, or maybe it was the beginning of kismet: signaling the close friendship Leah and I would develop – she could see past the socially indoctrinated, politeness.  Fine was in no way synonymous with good in our world, and so she poked and prodded until I confessed my troubling concern:

“To be honest…I haven’t cried, at all. Is that bad?”

“Emily, It’s a lot to take in. You know that just because you aren’t crying doesn’t mean you don’t care, don’t you? You are taking care of your mom and Kate. Not everyone cries.”

Somehow, even though we had not been close, Leah knew me: I cared about the loss, I cared too much about those around me to show it, and I would not break down at that moment.  She did not need to hear a cry for help to know I was in need.

Until I left my bubble to go to college, I never realized that not everyone acts in such a way. I never realized people could be so open about personal feelings, or at least do so without being branded a lunatic.  In the Pacific Northwest there is a limit to how far the social graces I was taught would reach. People here wave to strangers in the street, get into never ending conversations with cashiers about their children, and announce their troubles to the world. It is more commonly defined as, warmth. Here the surface was the warmest part of a person: to share comfort with one another, to build trust, to welcome one another into our lives. At first it felt like Wonderland; a world full of kind, good people.

            After spending a fair amount of time here, I began to notice two problems with such an attitude. The first was what I viewed as the close-minded reaction people here had to those on the East Coast (“People in New York are so cold!” or “No one smiled at me when I visiting Boston, what’s their problem?”) However, the second and more important one was, the cost of my habit of saying, “I am fine.”

            It would seem quite logical I imagine to take everyone at face value, and assume that an individual is, in fact, fine. In truth, I never noticed how my false fine’s were affecting people till someone got upset.  Friends were repeatedly saying, “Why didn’t you say something?!” and I was eternally let down by them not seeing the signs.  To them, there would have been no need to pester me about how I was doing after my initial, “I’m fine,” the way Leah had. However I would equally imagine, that those same people would struggle to understand how I could be doing fine after my first experience with loss, and subsequently would have assumed I was either insincere or heartless.

I never realized until it was too late that the problem was in our disjointed communication: because all along, I was saying something, and yet had not given them their sign for trouble. Somehow, I was still relying on them to understand mine. 

At home, we never need the question, “how are you doing,” to gage the mood of those around us. I could hear it in my friends voices, see it written all over a person’s face, know by looking at how they were carrying themselves that things simply were not okay, and because of that, the chronic white lie, “I’m fine,” became as meaningless as “Hello,” or “Good Morning.” Instead of the formulaic words, what really mattered was how the conversation progressed after that first interaction, because if the person truly cared, and saw that the other was in need, “I am fine,” was never a suitable conclusion.