When Rabbit Howls Read online

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  He drove carefully along the dirt road, wondering why anyone wanted to live at the tail end of nowhere. Along with his duties at Protective Services, he taught a course in family living at the university. It would have been easier to interview her there, as he did most of his private clients. When scheduling became extremely tight, he interviewed wherever he could—or wherever it was convenient for the victim. After that first call for help, some victims just wanted to hide in familiar territory; either you went to them or they never made the second phone call.

  He spotted the address on the mailbox, but had to look hard for the house. A-frame, snug and rustic, it sat behind fir trees at the end of a long, unpaved driveway. Midway up the drive, he parked and took his time walking, listening to the complete country silence. A tub of daffodils stood under the front window and three bees circled in endless frustration above the nodding golden blooms. When the door opened, he saw a loft above the living room and an enormous white collage on the brick entry wall. The rooms had been decorated with an eye to polishing and creative making do instead of spending. The overall effect was one of charm and warmth. Except that on looking more closely, he noticed the drawn curtains, absolute spotlessness, and a rigid alignment.

  The woman introduced herself with a firm handshake and a warm smile. She waved him to the sofa and knelt on a pair of orange floor cushions. She said she hated chairs.

  There was no objection when he took out his tape recorder. He accepted an offer of iced tea. She poured black coffee for herself and lit a cigarette, with little reservation in her manner. Having interviewed countless incest families, he knew the reservation was there, a gulf between them that would only be bridged with caution. He kept his observations as oblique as possible, intent on giving her the measure of privacy that most incest victims seemed to need.

  She was blond and slender, but big boned and moderately tall, her body well muscled, her movements fluid. Her cheekbones were high, and her eyes, which were partially obscured by bangs, had an oriental slant. Composed and in charge, she asked about his background and qualifications. He told her.

  “Thank god,” she said. “At least you know what you’re doing, which is more than I can say for myself.”

  “Do I detect an accent? Where were you born?”

  “Upper New York State, in a very large city. But I grew up in nearby towns, no bigger than spit. I left home right after high school and never went back. That was over twenty years ago. I don’t know if the family is dead or alive and aside from missing my half brother who was a very nice person, I don’t care. That upsets a lot of people to whom the idea of ‘family’ is sacred.”

  “Depends on the family, doesn’t it?”

  “Thank you.” Her gaze was direct as she spoke. Then the ferns hanging from the loft above started to swing in the morning breeze. Immediately she jumped. A bowl filled with white daisies tilted and water ran onto the glass coffee table. With a handful of paper napkins, he helped her mop up. She apologised and rearranged herself on the cushions. He had never seen a woman who could kneel that way, in a tailored business suit with a narrow skirt, and not show an inch of leg.

  “Shadows,” she said. “A waiter coming up behind me too quietly in a restaurant—lately, I scream. I don’t know why. People, my agents, my buyers, it makes them uneasy. If it gets much worse, they’ll think I can’t cope and I can, you know.”

  She told him what she wanted: therapy with fast results so that she could get on with her business and personal life. She expressed anger over her situation in a no-nonsense, businesslike fashion.

  “I’ve been told that treatment for incest victims hasn’t improved very much over what I got eight years ago. My marriage was in jeopardy then, mostly because of me, and I spent six weeks or six months—I can’t remember which—with a highly touted psychoanalyst and stopped. Now it’s erupted again and I’m scared. The counselor said I’d better make a careful choice of therapist this time.”

  She passed him several pages of yellow legal paper that showed erasures, one after the other. The final, inked version came out of her pocket, in hands that shook.

  “It’s yours,” she said. “When I was born, how old I was when I left the farm where I grew up, when I got married, when my daughter, Page, was born. She’s fourteen now, and lives with her father. These dates, I have trouble with dates, I told your Mrs. Greenwood the same thing. Every calculation on those pages was an effort. Wait. That’s a lie. My mother said I lied a lot. When I was making those calculations, some of them just popped into my head. From somewhere. If they’re wrong—” Her hands were shaking harder.

  “Please don’t worry. Dates aren’t important.”

  “You don’t want me to be precise? Shouldn’t I go back and differentiate between what I calculated and what popped into my head? I will, if you want me to.”

  He wanted her to relax.

  “My mother thought precision in general was very important.” She held up the index finger of her left hand and pointed to a black mark just under the skin’s surface. “During math homework one night, she jabbed me with a lead pencil.”

  “How did you feel about that?”

  “Nothing. I felt nothing.”

  He wrote it on his clipboard: “Distanced. Removed.” All victims, to one degree or another, distanced themselves from their feelings.

  “Maybe,” she said, “we’d better clarify one thing right now. If there’s . . . fondling, I guess you call it, from your stepfather, is that incest?”

  “In my book, yes. A stepfather is a close, adult authority figure; somebody you should be able to trust.”

  The woman on the orange floor cushions, cigarette burning unnoticed between her fingers, hugged herself and bent from the waist until her forehead touched the floor.

  “So many people,” she said, “saying so many things. Nobody agrees on anything. How do you know when you’re right or wrong, if you hurt or if you don’t? People say that it’s only incest if it’s your own father, your own flesh and blood—”

  “For one thing,” he said, “there is no harmless sexual trespass against a child, no matter what it’s called. And I’m not concerned with ‘people.’ This is about you.”

  He saw the first tears.

  “Maybe it wasn’t incest in the beginning. My mother lived with him for a long time before they got married.”

  “Sorry,” he said, because it was obvious that reinforcement was needed, “it’s still incest. He was an authority figure. Your mother’s acceptance of him created that authority, even if they never married.”

  He’d given it to her: permission to call the abuse by name. He watched her stubbing out the cigarette. She gave no sign that the visible burn on her fingers had caused pain.

  “The psychoanalyst eight years ago, he never said exactly what it was that we were discussing. And I had trouble remembering after each session. Same thing with the counselor at A Woman’s Place, except I think she called it incest, too, but it was all sort of . . . vague. Does that make sense to you?”

  He said yes. Again, his affirmation pushed her forward. Stumbling over the words, she told him that she did remember her own screaming and a residual terror after each session. In the morning light, from the only window at which the curtains had not been drawn, her face became perfectly still. The stillness was in direct opposition to the hands twisting in her lap. She had, he noticed, an odd way of leaping from one thought to the other.

  “At one point during my marriage,” she said in a voice that became progressively more wondering, “things got so bad that I was treated for Premenstrual Syndrome. The same doctor who had delivered Page prescribed Valium and when that didn’t work, he gave me Librium. The tests seemed to go on forever. I’d never seen so many doctors and needles and pills. No illness was found. But before it was over, they tested me for epilepsy and even though the tests were negative, Dilantin was prescribed. It�
�s supposed to slow the rush of blood through your head. It didn’t work. I couldn’t stop being a bitch to Norman—that’s my ex-husband; I couldn’t stop feeling dizzy, or just blacking out.”

  The wondering voice had hardly faded before she started to laugh. The sound was harsh.

  “You’ll think I’m ridiculous when I tell you this, but I’ve got perhaps four or five memories up here.” She pointed to her head. “That’s it.”

  He assumed that she referred to the abuse. She reached out and seemed to hang onto the coffee table for support. Finally, she took a deep breath. Her words came out in a rush.

  “My eight years are gone, I can’t buy them back. But if the counselor at A Woman’s Place is right—that child abuse caused what I’ve been going through—and if incest is almost commonplace with few good therapists to treat it, then aside from clearing up my own situation, I want to make a contribution.”

  Her condition for taking on her treatment was that he would talk about it to everyone, to anyone, and the sessions were to be filmed for the eventual training of mental health professionals. It took him a minute to absorb what she was offering, the chance of a lifetime—to film a victim’s therapy from day one. She explained her desire to break most victims’ rule of privacy.

  “It hit me for the first time when I went down to that library. All those children, keeping their mouths shut. I can’t do it anymore. I’m tired of hiding and feeling dirty. I take three baths a day and still feel dirty. It doesn’t go away. Lately, I feel as if every memory I don’t have up here is boiling to the surface; as if it’s close enough to touch. If I dared. I’m telling myself that I dare. My mother warned us as children, my half brother and half sisters and me, not ever to discuss family business.”

  “Secrecy,” he said, “is incest’s biggest friend. But I want you to be sure before you enter into anything.”

  “I’m sure.” She said it bitterly. “I’ve been silent since I was two years old. That’s one calculation I didn’t need to spend time on. This will be a big step for me, one I need to take, or I’m not going anywhere. Land brokerage is a tough business; it’s twelve to eighteen hours a day of dealing with people. Maybe it’s always been a failing of mine, I don’t know—but lately, I find myself constantly fighting the urge to shut this door and never go outside again.”

  “You said you had four or five memories. Can you pick one and tell me?”

  “I remember, quite clearly, being two years old. My mother and father and I lived in an apartment in the city. I can tell you the layout of the rooms, the furniture placement, the kinds of flowers my mother put everywhere—even the little pieces of caramel done up in small squares of cellophane that rattled when you unwrapped the candy. Just before my mother left my father, a man came to see her. I sat on the man’s lap in the kitchen of that apartment, with two pieces of caramel in my mouth, and he smiled a lot. He wore a faded, soft red shirt that opened partway down his chest. I put my hand up against his chest to feel all that dark, feathery hair. And he smiled again and leaned further back in his chair. My hand was so small and the further back he leaned, the further the hand went down his chest. It got sucked below his belt. Warm skin down there and what felt like the soft bristles of an old hairbrush. It seemed to be a game we were playing, because he never stopped smiling the whole time. That’s the man my mother left my father for, two weeks later.”

  He wrote rapidly on the clipboard: Had the man been after the mother, or had he seen the child as easy prey? Some men instinctively ignored unattached women and looked for those with small children.

  She’d certainly had no trouble with time factors, he thought. Her words had come out like bullets. Details about the apartment and even the candy and the way the man had been dressed were all things that her mother might have told her. However, no one but the child could have remembered so vividly what the man had allowed and thereby encouraged.

  “That’s all,” the woman said, interrupting his train of thought. “Are you wondering if it’s unusual to remember so clearly that far back? I don’t have an explanation for it. There’s nothing more in my head until a few months later, when my mother and I were living with him in the first farmhouse. I can’t remember if things were clear, even then. For instance, when you are only two, how do you know where you will find someone, unless you’ve found them there many times before? But I knew without anyone telling me that day, just where the stepfather was. His family—his mother, father, and sister—had come out to the farm to spend the day with us. Just before dark, their car was packed up; they were ready to go back to the city and wanted to say good-bye to their son.

  “Suddenly, he was nowhere to be found. So I went straight into the cornfield a little way from the house. Summer was ending, the cornfields were full; you couldn’t see into them. The corn was high, like a green, swishing forest above my head. I remember the milky odour of the tasseled, drooping ears; the smell of the earth and the feel of it, dark and crumbling between my bare toes as I trotted along with a broken, two-year-old gait.

  “It was darker between the rows of corn; the heat of the day was still wrapped in the soil under my feet and in the long green fronds. He was there. Lying between two of the rows, with his hands behind his head, waiting. He was uncovered. He always wore work pants and a shirt—his pants were down.”

  A jittery, staccato laugh preceded the lighting of another cigarette, the downing of her coffee. The words were not totally clear because she cried through them, telling of being placed atop the stepfather’s naked body, astraddle first his midsection, and then being moved lower. She described something flesh-coloured and curved, with masses of dark, wiry hair surrounding it. She said there had been a feeling of body warmth. Through it all, she used not a single word for either the male or female sex organs.

  Short of asking her, he had no way to tell how far the first or second sexual encounters had gone.

  “Do you remember any other occasions with your stepfather?”

  “Except for maybe two other times, there are no clear pictures, only flicks against my mind. The flicks scare me and I cry. I can’t stop.”

  “What you’ve told me, is that all you remember about the cornfield?”

  “Yes. After I see his—” She stopped, unable to say the word. She was trembling. “After he puts me on top of him, there’s no picture. Nothing.”

  He waited. Her movements had become erratic, her voice raspy.

  “Why did that counselor at A Woman’s Place say that it was child abuse? I hardly had anything to tell her.”

  “Perhaps your actions helped her to understand,” he said. “Right now, I can see that you’re terrified. I believe it’s with good reason, and I’d like to help you.”

  “You’re not saying that I’m overreacting or crazy? I’m willing to accept either one or both. Sometimes I feel crazy.”

  “What you’ve described can make a person feel crazy, especially if it’s kept inside.”

  “You believe me.” Again there came the jittery, staccato laugh. “But I don’t think even that is going to help. There’s something wrong here, and I don’t know how to explain it.”

  Confusion, desperation, and fear; all were plain in her manner. She looked right at him, opened her mouth, and started to speak, then stopped.

  “Perhaps it’s best,” he said, “just to continue taking what I call a psychosocial history. You’ve put down some dates and that’s a help. But I need to know a little more about your life.”

  The person kneeling before him at that exact moment spoke as precisely as she could. Her eyes were on the daisies in the glass bowl. “I told you. I have four or five memories and a lot of flicks against my mind. I’m in real estate because that makes me self-employed. I don’t have to face job applications full of questions that I can’t answer. Just a few months ago, I threw a census taker right down these front steps. Afterward, I couldn’t believe I’d done it. He was very tall and
big. But he came at me as if it were his inalienable right to interrogate me; he said there’d be a hundred-dollar fine if I didn’t fill out his form. I was afraid that if I made a mistake, they’d think I’d done it on purpose.” She frowned, as if unsure that she had made herself clear. “My memory—you don’t understand, do you? It’s like that thing—remember that thing in the cornfield, the—”

  “Penis?”

  “Yes. That. I never saw another one of those, until I was twenty-four. I think I was twenty-four.”

  “Were you sexually active up until the time you were twenty-four?”

  “I don’t know,” she said.

  “And after twenty-four?”

  “I guess so. I don’t know.”

  “Is Page an adopted child?”

  “Oh, no. Norman wanted a baby so badly. Page may be the one thing I ever did that pleased him.”

  He looked at her. She looked right back at him, with a blank face. He knew by practised instinct that this woman saw nothing out of order in her conflicting statements.

  The woman rubbed the burnt skin on her fingers, feeling the hot, smooth surface. There was no pain. The man across from her looked so pleasant—and confused. People often looked that way, as if they couldn’t quite follow her reasoning.

  His voice now had begun to reach her from a distance, mingled with thoughts that went through her mind like wandering strangers. There were too many thoughts and she ignored them. She didn’t have to ignore his voice; she was simply no longer there to hear it.

  The daisies were so pretty. She touched one of the petals and studied its thin green veins. The veins were like tiny, mysterious roads. After a while, the daylight in the room seemed to have shifted, as if it had grown much later. She saw him getting up from the sofa.

  “Well,” he said, “I’ll see you this Thursday. Don’t feel bad. I’m not that good at directions, either. Here’s the map I drew. Follow it and you won’t have any trouble reaching the university.”