The Lies We Tell The Children, That We Don’t Know Are Lies » »

Human Kindness

Contributed by Rivka Jacobs on 06/11/09

Something’s inside me
Unborn and unblessed
Disappears in the ether
This world to the next
~ P. J. Harvey, “When Under Ether”

She was flung into the air like a bird about to be set free. She felt the rain drops on her face. The silver clouds above her swirled in the wind. Then there were metal and glass doors and shouting voices, and gravity claimed her again. She felt the motion of her gurney and stared upward at the flat panels of light that slipped out of sight one after the other. The flickering brightness struggled with a grainy darkness that crept into her peripheral vision. She no longer felt any pain. She wound her will tightly, one last time, and fought for her life.

“Honey, stay with us,” said one of the nurses.

She knew she was lying motionless now, she concentrated on breathing. She felt her clothing being cut off and torn away. Her arms were being turned over and over, as the emergency room technician looked for a vein that wasn’t blown or collapsed. Plastic patches were attached to her chest and she could hear a rapid and irregular beeping sound after that.

“Blood pressure 67 over 32,” one of the emergency room residents shouted. “Pulse 160….”

Two nurses were helping get the large-bore IVs started; they found veins in the backs of her hands. A physician assistant adjusted her oxygen mask. The other resident lowered the head of her bed. She could see her legs extended at an angle upward.

“Get that bleeding stopped,” the physician yelled, as the trauma team worked over her. “She’s going into hypovolemic shock; I want 1,000 mL of Lactated Ringers, rapid infusion, followed by plasma protein, and vasopressin 400 mg/500 mL 5% D/W continuous infusion at 1mL per minute. Get that blood type, George, now … I want 2 units of whole blood….”

George, the emergency room technician, had been examining her arms, trying to find a place to draw blood when he suddenly stopped. “What the hell? What’s this all over her arm?”

“She’s got them all over her body,” the younger of the nurses said. “Burn marks. Abrasions. Old, healed lacerations, infected wounds. There’s an infected and raw ring around her neck. It looks like there are bite marks on her breasts – one of her nipples is partially torn off.”

“I want all this documented,” the physician said in a cold and curt tone. “Dr. Garcia,” he said to one of the residents, “… call the police department, tell them to get over here.”

She held on to the voices, the sounds, the smells of antiseptics and plastic and laundered linens, like someone clutching the edge of a cliff they are sliding over. At last, at last …. she said silently, celebrating the certainty that someone at last would see her, would care about her, would save her.

Almost at once, as if drawn by the shifting of chilled and coiled air, the emergency room crew looked up and saw a pale male figure with ink-colored hair and a mustache, dressed in blue slacks, a shirt, and a tie. He was wearing sunglasses. He stood at the far end of the curtained cubicle, saying nothing, sucking in the shadows like a black hole. He was quietly backing away.

“Are you related to this girl?” the older of the two nurses sharply asked the man.

The shiny plastic lenses glanced at the naked and battered teenager with the bright-red blood-soaked pads shoved between her legs, at the men and women surrounding the girl’s bed. He briefly studied the infusion pumps and the metal racks above them dangling plastic bags of medicine, blood, and fluids. He gazed at the cardiac monitor that displayed a blood pressure of 60/30. He listened to the ping-ping-ping of a pounding heart. He took another step backwards, hesitated, then turned around and retreated with an arrogant swagger, as if he could time exactly how long it took to disappear without a trace.

She understood immediately that he was gone. That she was free. A bubble of joy lifted inside her, gave her the strength to raise one arm and lift her head an inch. She tried to make a sound under the oxygen mask.

“What should we do?” one of the residents asked. “Was that her boyfriend?”

The older nurse, a large woman in her forties with years of experience, noticed the girl’s movements. “Shut up, Dr. Foreman,” she said to the resident, not caring if he reported her. “The police should be here soon,” she said as she leaned over the head of the bed, taking the teen’s arm at the wrist and holding it while she gently lifted the mask. “What is it honey?” she asked.

The girl gathered the last of her resolve, the final fragments of a need to survive that had kept her alive for two years enduring the worst torture no one could imagine. “My … mom….” She whispered through gray, scarred, and dry lips. “Mrs. Kim … Lovett … Fairchild … Wisconsin….”

“Rena, we don’t have time … we’re losing her…,” the physician started to say.

The nurse shot him a glare without moving her ear from beside the girl’s mouth. “Go on, honey….”

“I … was taken … two years ago … tell my mom …. I got pregnant … he tried to beat it … out of me … stuck a broken bottle up ….” She closed her eyes. She felt the numbness and blankness and nothingness advancing now, closing in on her. She didn’t want to give up, she didn’t want him to win. She’d promised them, the other girls now dead, that she would make it.

Rena Thomas heard the cardiac monitor sounds begin to slow. She straightened and spun around to see the blood pressure flattening, the oxygen saturation dropping. “Code blue!” she shouted, before the physician in charge had a chance to do the same.

She stood across from them now. In the exact same spot where the man she had known as Misha hovered only moments before. She placidly watched the men and women try to revive her with medications and then an electrical device with two paddles. She watched them cut a hole in her throat and stick a tube inside, to help her breathe. She heard the loud, unbroken flat tone of the monitor like a bugler’s last note sounding the end of the world.

She walked out of the emergency room entrance of the hospital, past the spot on the walkway where they were still cleaning up her blood, where Misha had thrown her to the ground after she became too weak to keep up with him.

She walked down Girard Avenue leading away from the St. Joseph’s Hospital. The rain was drumming the pavement, each drop exploding in shimmers at her feet. The few trees that struggled to survive in front of an apartment building or a church were almost bare, dotted with brown leaves still stuck to the branches.

She was on 13th street, walking towards Vine. She wore her favorite outfit, the one her mother buried her in; the purple turtle-neck sweater, the black jeans, and her striped cable-knit Uggs. The rain was sleet like and razor sharp now. It caught on her sometimes and shivered.

She was in Misha’s world now, walking the back-streets and past the hidden entrances of windowless tenements where girls were kept captive, bars where his criminal friends met to discuss business and buy and sell human beings.

She moved all the time, pacing the streets, while the rain spun a cocoon around her and kept her dry. She spotted his car one dusk; the blue older model sedan with the tinted windows. He was parallel parking, the rear end swinging in, the front tires squealing as they were forced as far as they could to follow. He turned off his ignition.

They were in an alley at the back door of one of his apartment houses, one of the locations were Misha brought his victims, where he had brought her, where she was made to eat dog food and stay for days in a three-foot by five-foot box and wear a collar in between the beatings and sexual assaults and torture.

She stood at the driver’s side window, watching the liquid spots coalesce into globules and then into rivulets on the gray-green glass. She remembered a science project about water drops and how it was that as each drop came closer to the other a tenuous bridge was formed leading to a zero time before the two worlds become one. She observed how Misha tried to push open the door — but with one hand she had jammed it shut. He was approaching his zero time.

She was sitting next to him now, on the passenger side. After a year, he had let her have more and more privileges, possibly training her to become an overseer. Though still shackled, she had been allowed to sit in the front passenger seat as a reward. Or as a favor….

Did you care about me a little more than the others? she asked him. She was thrilled to see his face became white, his eyes bulge, and his spastic, frenetic attempts to open his car door. He banged his shoulder repeatedly into the window, rocking the car. He began screaming for help. Is that why you started giving me more food? Is that why you stopped sending me out to your fat friends, and kept me for yourself? Is that why you took me to the hospital instead of letting me bleed to death to be buried in some vacant lot?

She inclined her head slightly, bird like, studying how the sweat soaked his shirt and rolled down his forehead, and how the urine spread an ugly dark stain down the middle of his pants. She watched the drool spit from his mouth as he yelled things like “Get out of here,” and “Help me,” and “Fuck you,” and finally, “I kill you, I kill you.” No, she said, I don’t think you get to do that twice.

She reached her hand into his chest, and gripped his beating heart.