I was released from the hospital four days later after insisting on it repeatedly. My sister was given instructions on how to change the dressings on my wounds, as well as all the instructions for the schedule of medications to fight infection, reduce swelling, and control the pain. I was wheeled to the big front doors in a wheelchair that was in major need of some oiling by Winney and Karen, the social worker. It squeaked and made a grinding sound with every revolution of the wheels, and I couldn’t wait to get out of it and on my feet. “Well, if the attack didn’t kill me, the sound of this fucking chair just might,” I said, trying unsuccessfully for a laugh.
The police had come to the hospital daily to see me and ask questions, and tried to get me to talk to them. I told them I didn’t recall much of anything, and that I must have been drugged to the point of amnesia. One of the detectives assigned to my case was a man named Mark; he prodded me for information using techniques that were no longer clever to me, but that over the years had become entirely predictable instead. He said I was alive and survived for a reason; he tried to convince me that I was meant to help identify the man who attacked me and maybe someone else. I knew I had survived because of something entirely different. He said I had to remember something, and asked about details of the events leading up to the attack.
And then he questioned me about where the attack had taken place, as the woman who had brought me in said she was in too much shock to know exactly where she had found me — only naming the general area. It had been a week of the biggest storms in years and they had no real idea of where I had stumbled from. I wasn’t falling for any of his gentle prodding and he knew it. He left me his card and asked that I call him as soon as I was ready or willing to talk to him. He seemed genuine enough, but somewhat sad. There was a sorrow about him, which seemed so tired and old, as though he had perfectly surrendered to it. I wondered how many horrific things he had seen in his career, and figured probably far too many.
Time spent with my sister was like getting to start all over: a beginning, a chance. She took me to her home, a small house close to the neighbourhood we had grown up in. I figured we’d wait to see our parents, when my bruises and wounds were diminished some, to hopefully spare them the worst of the jarring shock of me. I had to admit I was horrifying to look at, like a movie monster but worse. She put me in her guest bedroom and slept beside me for the first few nights, not leaving my side. She stayed home from work and cared for me, not letting me do anything more than rest, eat, and bathe, which she had to help me with.
I couldn’t imagine what I would have done on my own, and was grateful for her ability to take charge. I was in constant discomfort and had begun to have full-blown panic attacks. I had medicine for everything except the intense fear. After a few weeks at my sister’s, my wounds started to heal and the constant itching of them drove me mad. There were intermittent tingling sensations caused from all the nerve damage to my face. I had difficulty trying to reposition myself with several bruised and one broken rib, and a recovering dislocated shoulder. But in spite of it all, after time at my sister’s, I think I started to feel a little stronger or maybe just more familiar with the pain, fear, and anxiety.
Winney remained remarkably sad, and I sensed that it was more than my attack. When I asked her what was going on she would avoid and change the subject, until finally I gave her no choice.
“I want to know what’s up with you; did something happen to you? Who is he, I’ll crush the bastard.”
She looked at me with almost a glimmer of a smile; I imagine the thought of me in my condition crushing anyone was funny to her, but I also sensed a hint of relief. “I wanted to wait till you were stronger to tell you, Becca; but, there is no good time to tell you,” her lower lip started to quiver and tears fell. “I wanted to wait. I tried to wait, but,” she burst into tears and blurted out that Mom and Dad had been killed a month earlier in a car accident on the highway. She went on to tell me that a young mother and child had also lost their lives, but I wasn’t listening anymore. I saw her mouth moving and hands twisting but could no longer hear her.
I was in shock; I felt as though I had been kicked in the stomach and all the wind was gone from me. My head was reeling and I stared in disbelief; I couldn’t imagine them being anywhere else. All I could think of was that I hadn’t been home to see them in several years, and I tried to remember my last visit. But I couldn’t remember much of it; I was still using heavily then and was angry at my mother, demanding that she tell me what had happened to me when I was a child in the hospital. My mother just wrung her hands and wept, saying she was sorry that she wasn’t there to protect me. But I didn’t remember much else. I had always thought I would get the chance to find out more when I got my shit together and stopped using. I had finally felt like I was ready to pull from her what I needed to know. I had stopped drinking myself into oblivion, and had almost stopped using dope since I got my own little room, and felt like I was as close to getting my shit together as I’d ever been. And now, now they were … they were … they were gone? My life suddenly felt like a bad fucking B-grade movie that couldn’t get any worse.
It was all just too much; I was overwhelmed and stunned. What the fuck? What the fuck, what the fuck? I couldn’t quite process the thought; the reality that I would never again have the chance to see them and talk to them, to hear the gentle timbre of my father’s beautiful voice while he read aloud; it was more than I could bear. I got up slowly and made my way to the bathroom and the medicine cabinet. I grabbed the pain meds — those beautiful small round white pills, each ten milligrams of morphine — and took four, chewing them to make them work faster, and a forty milligram oxy and washed the remainder down with a handful of tap water. I walked slowly and calmly back to the couch and curled up into a ball, pulled the heavy throw over myself, closed my eyes, and wished for oblivion to rescue me from the unbelievable grief.
I couldn’t speak; I couldn’t console her; I couldn’t utter a word. I let the drugs take effect and blanket me in a numbing high until I fell asleep, cradling a pillow for comfort.
I woke the next morning to my sister gently nudging me and the smell of fresh coffee teasing me awake. “Becks, you awake? I made you some coffee.” I opened my puffy eyes and turned my head to look at her. She looked so much older than I remembered and tired, so very tired. “I’m sorry I wasn’t able to find you, Becca; you have to know I tried, I tried. I even left notes at your door and told your landlord to tell you to call me, but I couldn’t find you.”
She was right: I got notes to call her immediately but crumpled them up because I was afraid to call; afraid she would remind me that I wasn’t alone — not really. I thought she probably just wanted to get together for my birthday, and I knew I didn’t have anything appropriate to wear to see her and that I would feel the shame of that.
How fucking stupid. I had avoided her because … who the hell cares about clothes anyway? She knew how I lived; she knew how I dressed.
“Maybe if I had found you,” and she stopped abruptly. “Oh my God, what would I have done if you … If only I had found you, you would have been here with me instead of out there. It’s all my fault; I should have tried harder to find you when they notified me about Mom and Dad. I tried, I tried, I really did, but I was in a daze, and there were so many arrangements and things to get done. I’m sorry; I am so, so very sorry. Why the hell were they driving Mom’s little car anyway?”
I sat up slowly, being careful not to put weight on my wrist or lean into my shoulder. I reached over and took the hot cup from her and set it on the table. I reached for her hand and pulled her in close. I let her cry, and her body heaved with each great ball of grief she had managed to conceal until that moment. I dabbed away at her tears until there were no more. “Mom and Dad were organ donors, you know; at least there’s that,” she said, choking back more tears, “at least there’s that.”
My eyes welled with tears, spilling. “Yeah, at least there’s that,” I said. I reached for my cup and gently pursed my still slightly swollen and broken lips, and took a big gulp to wet my dry throat. “Umm, that’s good. I haven’t had coffee in a while; not since … not since …” I thought of my birthday and the thirty minutes at the diner before my attack. “Never mind. Thanks, Win.” I set the cup down, took off the blankets she had covered me with, and started to get up slowly. “I’ll be right back. I have to pee and get some dope … I mean meds,” I tried to wink at her. I wasn’t used to this side of my sister; she was always so strong and poised and pulled together.
When I came back from the bathroom she had brought out a bunch of papers. She was making piles and was sorting through them intently; busy work, I thought. I crawled back into my spot, pulled the blanket back on, reached for my coffee, and took a few sips before setting it down to wipe the corner of my mouth.
“Okay, I’m really sorry to have to do this, Becks, but we have to make some decisions. It’s about the house and I can’t make any decisions without you. That real estate agent that lives down the street from Mom and Dad has already brought me — I mean us — an offer on the house, and it’s a really generous one, Becca. She said Mom and Dad had already discussed selling it, and, well, I know they had started looking at condos.”
I stared in disbelief; I wasn’t ready to be practical. But I knew she needed to be to feel a sense of control and order, something that had been taken away from her in these past four weeks. “So we really should consider it and then, well, here’s the thing: Dad’s lawyer read the will to me and Dad specified in it that he wanted you to have Grandma’s farmhouse, because they wanted you to have your own home, as far away from the streets as possible.” My jaw dropped and my heart jumped with momentary joy: I loved that old house. I started to cry again, a soft sobbing. My sister continued. “So, Mom and Dad made me their power of attorney after Grandma passed away and they inherited the farmhouse, in the event anything happened to them. They had asked me if I would administer any inheritance money to you if you were still … still using dope, which, aside from the pain meds, you have definitely needed — even when you need four at a time.” She smiled and winked at me. “It doesn’t look like you are, so if we agree on the sale of the house, it will leave enough money for you to live on for a long time, and you wouldn’t ever have to work the streets again, ever. You could even go to school, Becks. Or write or paint, or just heal and learn to feel safe for a change.” Tears spilled from her eyes again and with that, I started to cry, too. Feel safe! How was I ever going to feel safe again? I wondered. But when the tears were spent, and I was once again emptied for a time, my sister suggested we go for a drive.
I closed my eyes as my sister drove, and we softly sang along to an old Eagles CD. I must have drifted off to sleep, because when the car came to a stop and the music turned off, I opened my eyes to see that we were in the long, winding laneway of our grandma’s farmhouse. I slowly got out of the car and stared in wonder at the graceful old and elegant trees that lined the lane and property. It was extraordinary, and for the first time in a long time, as I crunched the last few stubborn patches of the snow beneath my feet, I felt that life just might have a little hope.
The next few weeks were busy; my sister went with me to the animal shelter so I could adopt a dog. I saw my dog immediately and chose her just as fast. She was a large female German shepherd who was three years old and just suspicious enough. Her name was Clara and I didn’t consider changing it. My sister went to see Thievin’ Steven to see if she could get my old leather bag with all my notebooks and papers for me; they were the only things I cared about, and he didn’t refuse her. He had thoughtfully packed these precious things up in a single box with my name marked across the sides, and gave it to her. He did have a heart. I wanted nothing else from the life I was leaving behind.
She helped me and Clara settle into the farmhouse. We cleaned and painted and worked together every day; neither of us wanted to be anywhere else, and we needed to be together to get through our grief any way we could. The result of all of our work was remarkable. The house was beautiful, sturdy, and clean. Glorious built-in bookcases lined the walls of the living room. The deep, rich colour of the wide, hardwood floors were warm and glistened again once waxed. The baseboards and mouldings were original, thick, and magnificent.
I felt a pang for my once-coveted little room in the rooming house; it, too, had some of its original mouldings in places, as well as high baseboards. The memory of all of the tricks, the violence, and the fight seeped back into my mind as it had many times over the last few weeks. This was the longest I had gone without having to survive by sex, and now I couldn’t ever imagine having to do it again. I brushed the threatening tears away and my body shook the memories off as best it could, for a time at least.
The farmhouse kitchen had huge, built-in armoire cupboards with thick, black wrought-iron handles on them; the countertops were two-inch thick wood, worn in places from decades of use. I didn’t want them replaced as my sister suggested; they had memories, I said, and the memories were all good there. We had picked out new appliances, which were delivered and installed, and bought new linen and even new clothes, something I hadn’t had in years. A truck came and took most of my grandmother’s furniture away to charity, and the items were replaced by some new and some old things from our parents’ house. We brought dishes and the kitchenware from my mom’s kitchen, some of which had originally belonged to my grandmother.
We made several trips to our parents’ house before the sale closed. Each of us quietly revisited our respective childhoods, lost in thoughts of life without parents and the sale of their first and only home. Winney came upon me sitting quietly in my dad’s almost new jeep in the garage and screamed, startled to find me there. I laughed right out loud — my first good belly laugh — at her dramatics, turned the key, and stuck my tongue out at her.
“Can you still drive, you little brat?” she joked.
“Yup; want a bust outta here and go to the drive thru?” We laughed remembering the time I had stolen Dad’s first jeep and taken it for a midnight spin at fifteen and ended up at the police station. “Yup, and I even know how to avoid cops and lose them if I need to now, sugar snot.”
She came around, opened the door, and got in beside me. “Well, good, ’cause you’re going to want to go for your famous midnight drives in this now, I imagine, ’cause it’s yours.” My sister’s kindness and thoughtfulness meant so much to me right then. We drove in silence for a while until we arrived at the drive thru and ordered our milkshakes.
On the way back we sang along, on and off, to a Leonard Cohen CD. I pulled in and parked in the garage and waited until the song ended before getting out. We went in to pack up the things we each wanted to take. I loaded box after box with all the books I could, along with some art work I loved. The furniture and other items were being picked up by the Salvation Army except for the deep, comfortable, worn brown leather sofa and armchair from the den, which I wanted. We carefully dug up our mother’s rose bushes to transplant, two for me and two for Winney; each one was in memory of our parents. My sister had the trim of the kitchen door taken down to keep, with our heights and ages carved in it. She said she didn’t want to ever forget how little we once were or how lucky we had been to have had these carvings.
Back at my grandmother’s house, we finished stacking wood and fixed the fence and raked up leftover leaves and debris from the season past. We dug two deep holes on either side of the back porch door and filled them with burlap, hay, and fertilizer, and gently placed the rose bushes into the ground before backfilling with nutrient-rich earth and covering it all with layers of newspaper, just to be sure. That was something our mother used to do, and so we did, too. Before my sister left, she insisted that we had an alarm system put in and all the locks upgraded to deadbolts. “Just common sense, that’s all. And it lowers your insurance premiums, too,” she said.
Insurance? There was so much for me to learn. I was suddenly overcome with emotion, and broke down.
“What is it, are you in pain? You’ve been doing too much, I knew it. Where are your pills? I’ll get them for you.”
“No, it’s not that; there’s just so many things I don’t know, so many things I need to learn and I’m scared, I’m really scared, Win. What if I can’t do this, what if I get lonely? What if I want to talk to Dad and ask him stuff, like making a fire, or turning on the furnace, or how to start the lawn mower? I don’t think I’m ready for all this, not by myself. What will I do when you leave? What if … what if …” I sobbed, “What if he finds me?” touching my hand to my face and the repulsive wounds it bore. It all just tumbled out of my mouth before I could stop.
“What if who finds you? So you do know who did this to you, don’t you, Becca? Please tell me.”
I couldn’t tell her, I couldn’t tell anyone. But it had slipped out and rightly so; I couldn’t help but feel every day that he might be looking for me — the one that got away! I also knew that if I told her what I thought, what I knew — that I had been his victim in another life — she may just have me committed.
So I said what I knew she really wanted to hear. “I don’t remember what the hell happened. And that’s got to be a good thing, don’t you think?” I ran my fingers over my deep red scars. She moved to put her arms around me, and I flinched. “No, I’m okay. I’m just tired, and you’re right, I am in pain. I’m trying to still come to terms with Dad and Mom being gone, and you going home soon, that’s all; but I’ll be okay, right?”
“Yes, you’re going to be better than okay, and I’ll stay a few more days and I can come and see you on weekends. We’ll revive Grandma’s garden together, okay? And any questions you need answering, you can always call me or Mr. Maxwell. You remember him, don’t you? His farm is only a mile away. Remember when we were kids, that’s where we’d go to sneak through to the creek?”
“Oh, yeah!”
“Well, his son Michael is close, too, if you need help with anything. They are only a call away, and so am I.” With that, she reached for me and gave me a hug, which I allowed without pulling away from her.
Over the next few days we finished rearranging and filling the bookcases with the collections from our childhood, including my father’s collection of beautiful leather-bound books that he had left to me, and a portion of my mother’s books. Books were definitely in my blood, I surmised, considering the floor-to-ceiling, built-in bookshelves on three of the four living room walls that had been turned into more of a library some fifty years ago. The fourth wall had a huge stone fireplace flanked on either side by large windows overlooking the garden and trees: apple, sugar maples, and two cherry blossom trees.
We made a fire both nights, and curled up and took turns reading to each other and sharing funny stories of our childhoods and our parents. We laughed remembering some of the incredibly embarrassing things they did or said that only age and distance allowed to become hysterically funny. It seemed that I was almost close to being happy, and I had a feeling that I would be okay when she left. I mean, Jesus, if I survived the streets for seventeen years, this should be a cakewalk.
I had my remarkable books that I had been given, and more importantly, entrusted with. And they were good books, well used, read, and loved, shelf after shelf of books that were now mine to take care of, learn from, and get lost in. I had Clara for company. I had instructions on the fireplace and the damper system that my sister made me practise over and over with her, and I had her hand-drawn instructions as a guide, which helped me and my learning disabilities. I had the phone numbers of neighbouring farms, their names and how far they were from me, just in case. She also wrote out a complete list of services in the area and the names and numbers of everyone from Marcel who delivers firewood, to Heather and Paul who sold fresh eggs, and the home number of Martin, the local chief of police. But what she didn’t know was that I had also found the shotgun, tucked away in the basement along with boxes of shells the day I put the mirrors away, and this instilled in me a little more security. I thought about what I would do with it if he ever did show up. I’d shoot his fucking knees out first and then aim for his dick. And then I’d demand to know why — why he did what he did. And then I’d call the cops, but not too quickly because the fucking bastard deserved to suffer. The image would sometimes stick in my mind. Jesus, it had to be normal to fantasize about getting the bastard, didn’t it?
I tried to remind myself that I had been given a chance at a different life, far removed from the one I had escaped. And I meant to try, at least, to live it separate from all violence. Although it took time, I found myself adapting after a while. I spent my days puttering around the house and revelling in all of the space, all the amazing quiet, all for me. It was a feeling I couldn’t explain, not having to be woken by screaming or fighting, or someone banging at the door for a place to get high or sleep, or occasionally cops searching for someone. I was even able to write again, on beautiful, full, clean pieces of paper — not scraps or receipts — that I filled with short stories written to fill the spaces in the days. My sister bought me a laptop computer to use, and taught me the basics and left instructions and little drawings; her instructions were meant to help guide and assure me. That trick was something my father had started long ago to help me with my unique learning style. I tried some days to write on the computer, but I loved the feel of paper in my hands under a pen. It kept me busy during the days that fell between the weekends.
Weekends were spent mostly with my sister who would faithfully come out after work every Friday to keep me company, and I imagine, check on my state of mind. She would try and entice me to go out to the city, to a movie or dinner, but I always would decline claiming one malady after another. I knew she knew that I was just too afraid to be in public. I was afraid of trying to live a life I had no experience with, living in an environment that I had not had history with since I was sixteen. I knew I would stick out and draw unwanted attention. After a while, she stopped trying to get me to go out and seemed to reconcile herself that I was not going to be any more social than I was. She stopped badgering me so that I could stop refusing her.
The months passed and I got another dog that was about five years old from a neighbour who found him on the road near his barn, badly injured, afraid and abandoned. I agreed to take him and give him a home before I even met him; I named him Bandon. I loved him quickly and Clara loved him cautiously for a time, until she folded and loved him completely. I was moved by his fate of being injured and discarded, and he in turn stayed close and hovered always, I mean always, just beneath my feet.
I eventually began to listen to music again, but not too loud, and the rest of the time I worked on writing down stories. It seemed a good life for a girl who not too long ago was giving three quarter blow jobs to make rent. I lived simply by some people’s standards, but by mine, I was living like a queen and I couldn’t help but feel extraordinarily privileged. It was far more than I could have dreamed or dared asked for. I had food each day — oh, glorious food! — and the weight gain to prove it. I had a clean place to sleep, in a bed that hundreds hadn’t slept in before me; a safe place to live that I knew I couldn’t lose at a moment’s notice; heat to keep me warm; clothes and the means to wash them.
But I couldn’t help but struggle with waves of tremendous guilt as I thought of how every woman I knew had to scrape, claw, fight, and sell services just to barely survive — and the impact it had on all of us whether we admitted it or not. And all the women who worked part time, to ensure they had enough money to pay rent and feed themselves because no matter how hard they tried, the money just never seemed to stretch far enough. I considered the possibility of opening my new house to some of them when I felt strong and safe enough. If nothing else, it would be a safe and warm place, just far enough from the streets, to be a whole new world of hope and possibilities.
I knew the life — it was a world I had desperately wanted to leave, but oddly, one that was difficult to break from after too much time. Once entrenched in it, and the things you do to survive it, and the invisible wounds you repeatedly sustain from it, there remained only threads of hope for disentanglement. Maybe the young ones had the best odds, before the lifestyle became too deeply imprinted on their souls to disengage from, let alone recover completely from.
But the long-time working girls who appeared on the surface to be hardened, angry, and cynical — to those people that never looked deep enough — who had learned that trust was just a word, not a reality, were the ones I wanted to share the house with. They were the ones that there was no real support for, and more often than not they bore the brunt of distain from people; the ones no one really tried to reach or gave a shit about; the ones that everyone had given up on years ago, being dismissed so incredibly easily. I couldn’t imagine a single soul not being equally bitter and hardened if forced to endure even a single week of what most of us endured every single day, year after year, out there. The kindnesses for them were few but were always felt deeply, in the quiet times alone, where the lingering emotions that an act of kindness — no matter how big or small — left an impression.
I thought of the kind woman who years earlier had taken off her coat and gloves and handed them to me before getting into her car. And the various people over the years who stopped at the curb, rolled down their window, and handed me money without asking for service or dictating how the cash should be spent. There was the front desk guy at the motel that occasionally had given me the key to a room on really cold nights, when I had nowhere to stay; the store owner who fed me; the pharmacist who didn’t charge me for cough syrup when I was sick. I thought about the gang of teenagers who jumped in to help me when a pimp was beating on me because I refused to trick for him. And of course, so often these days, I thought of Betty, who always had a warm and sincere smile without a trace of judgment.
I found myself writing down the stories — well, fragments anyway — of the lives of women, many no longer here. Some women I had known well and others I had not, but I was familiar with their stories. I wrote the stories of women who were once part of the vibrant fabric of the streets in an attempt to record and preserve the memory of their lives, however difficult they might have been; they needed to be remembered. I needed to remember those who fell victim to murder: first one, then another, and then another. Each of them had a story. And I wrote them to never forget them.
And then the day came when I heard the broadcast that shattered my new-found sense of safety; it changed me, it changed everything within moments.
A drug-addicted prostitute known to police was found dead by joggers early Friday morning in a shallow grave. Sources say she had been brutalized and tortured, and had to be identified by tattoos.
And I thought about the killer, and I thought about him, and I thought about him and the times in between the times; it began to take over the time spent doing other things to forget. And then all I could do was remember.
And then … all I could do was plan.
… to be continued