Arts

A Story That's Not Mine to Tell

by Christina Piemonte, Cornell University, April 22, 2008

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Her left ring finger has swollen so that her middle knuckle is the size of a bottle cap. Her hand shakes as she holds it under my face.

“Look!” She whispers.

Her nails are a deep shade of red, and the polish is beginning to chip around the edges. Checking the door to make sure Steve hasn’t followed her into the room, she lets out one sob,

“It hurts so bad”.

Glancing from her finger to her face, I can tell that she has been struggling to hold back the tears. She pulls away from me and uses the back of her thumbs to scrape the black smudges from beneath her eyes. Opening her eyes wide, she fans her face with both hands, keeping careful not to move her left ring finger.

“What happened? Do you want me to help you clean it up?” She tells me the boy went to get ice from the machine downstairs.

“He did this!” she mouths, then adds quickly, “It was an accident. I don’t want him to see me crying; he already feels bad enough.” She shakes her head in response to my further questions, promising,

“I’ll tell you everything later.”

I want to hug her but know that it will only bring back the tears. Blinking hard once, she looks to the door and I know the moment is gone. Allowing herself one last shaky deep breath, she says thanks and that she loves me, reaching for the door handle with her right hand. Unlocks it, opens it, strides through.

After she leaves I lie awake thinking about how the walls around us can crumble and leave us standing naked. Exposed. It is on these rare occasions that I find out more about her than she could tell me in hours of conversation. Even though I have class in seven hours, I need to write. I won’t sleep until she comes home.

I sit up and grab a water bottle from our refrigerator before easing into my desk chair. While I wait for my laptop to go through its series of grunts and whirrs, I check my cell for any new messages. One: a drunk text from my best friend from home asking me whether or not she should answer a late night text from her ex-boyfriend. I tell her not to even though she won’t heed my advice. She’s not over it and they’ve been broken up for nine months. I’ll be hearing from both of them tomorrow.

My computer yells its six-note welcome and I reach forward to turn the sound down before opening up a new document. I don’t know where to start so I write the first words that come to my mind until they begin to form a coherent scene. I can’t quite tackle Vivian yet.

A full moon seen through the glass of a café window unfolds onto my page and suddenly I am seated at a table among friends, next to my main character. I begin to hear the idle chatter of his acquaintances and the clink of the coffee cups as they return to their white ceramic saucers. The aroma of coffee and greasy French fries wafts lazily through the air around me, coming to rest heavily on my shoulders. I write without stopping. Without realizing it I’ve placed my characters in Joe’s, our convenience store/late night eatery.

I bring up another new page and close my eyes, remembering the little things she said, all leading up to that day in Caribou Coffee. The first time she tried to bring it up we were sitting on our beds. It was early in the school year and we were laughing about move-in day. Her older brother, mother, and best friend from home came to move her in, but not her father. My curiosity was piqued after he didn’t even come to move her into her first year of college. I tentatively ventured,

“So, do you not see your dad at all? I remember you saying you don’t live with him…”

“He’s not in the picture”. She didn’t seem upset, so I pressed on.

“So your parents are divorced? Or, I mean, do you know your dad at all?”

“Ok don’t freak out when I tell you this--”

“Of course not”

“My dad is in jail.”

“Oh… ok.”

I nodded as though I dealt with this kind of news all the time, “That’s fine.”

“It’s kind of freaky though. My dad is a bad person.”

I am a little ashamed to admit how creeped out I was… the things that ran through my mind. Is he some kind of child molester? Rapist? Should I be worried? Whereas she already knew, my imagination would always be much worse than the reality. I changed the subject in what I thought was a smooth manner.

• • •

The words aren’t coming as easily now so I push my chair back, click off my desk lamp and lie down on top of my rumpled covers. The light from my computer screen is still blaring, but I don’t mind. I cross my hands and rest them on my stomach and I begin my nightly conversation with God. I’ve got a lot on my mind so I take my time tonight.
My thoughts blend together with my prayers and I’m suddenly in the kitchen with my mother. We’re both standing and she’s looking at me with a mix of pity and concern and I can’t stand that look because I can’t fix it.

“I know you’re upset about Dad losing his job. It’s been hard on all of us...”

“I know, Mom. And if I could decide to just not be depressed, I would, but please stop trying to point to one thing. It’s nobody’s fault but my own.” I can hear my own exhaustion even as agitation starts to creep into my voice, “Why can’t you understand that?”

She ignores my question. “Well what can I do to help you? I can promise I will never be involved in your social life again... is that part of it? You can never hang out with your friends again for all I care. I always thought you should call some of your smart friends from class…”

This is my problem! I want to scream at her as anger floods my entire body. This time I turn around and walk out of the room. She’s still talking at me as I climb the stairs to my room. By the time I get there, my anger has given way to sadness. What she doesn’t understand is that the sadness is always below the surface; it is so much easier to yell and scream than it is to cry. Hot tears begin to roll down my cheeks as I hear my father’s words replaying in my mind:

Honey, you know that when you’re happy, the whole family is happy... I’ve missed your beautiful smile…

His words bring me back to the present and I smile to myself now, thinking of how proud he is of me. Thinking of how far we’ve all come. Still in my prayer since I haven’t said Amen, I am getting to the part where I ask Him to help me be a better person when Vivian interrupts my thoughts, entering the room and closing the door behind her. She pauses briefly and leans her back against the door,

“He broke my fucking finger.”

“I was sitting at a booth with Steve at Joe’s and he was playing with the salt and pepper shakers, just banging them around like a kid, but it was funny then all of a sudden I moved my hand that was on the table, and he slammed one of the shakers right down on my finger. I jerked it away and hid my hand under the table, I wouldn’t let him see it. I told him it was no big deal I mean of course it hurt, but it wasn’t that bad.

“Well you know when you look at something and see how bad it is, and then it suddenly hurts so much worse? I pulled it up and there was blood all down my hand and I couldn’t even help it my eyes started to tear up”.

After careful examination, I determine that it really must be broken by the way her bone sticks out unnaturally. She just wanted to be alone, but she let Steve help her so he could feel better.

• • •

We had been standing in the middle of Caribou Coffee for quite some time, waiting for her caramel latte with skim milk when she brought it up again. She had made some comment about how her mom wasn’t able to do a lot of things on her own and I asked why.

“You know she’s disabled right? Remember I told you how she fell and hit her head the night before move-in? And I had to take her to the emergency room because she couldn’t get up on her own?”

“Oh yeah, you told me.”

“Well she wasn’t born like that.”

“What do you mean?”

The lady, who I distinctly remembered being behind us in line, went up to get her drink. Grabbing it from the counter, she loudly demanded for the other three drinks she ordered. I took a quick look around and determined that she was definitely by herself. Vivian appeared to be watching the belligerent lady but the look in her eyes betrayed her. She turned to me suddenly,

“Don’t you want to know why my dad is in jail?”

“Yeah of course, I didn’t know if you wanted to talk about it.”

“Chrissy you can ask me anything. Honestly I don’t care if people ask me stuff. I’d rather you hear it from me… My dad tried to kill my mom.”

Holy shit. Holy SHIT.

“Whoa. How? Oh my God I’m so sorry.”

The words tumbled from my mouth.

“He poisoned her… slowly over time and we just thought she was getting sicker and sicker. When we called the police and reported the amount of poison she had consumed, they asked when the funeral was. It’s literally a miracle that she lived.”

“Oh my God… wow. I can’t believe a person could do that.”

“I thought you would want to know though. I don’t mean to freak you out or anything, but… I just thought you should know.”

What I couldn’t believe was how she was standing there telling me all this like she was telling me what she ate for breakfast yesterday. The thought of telling her my problems flashes through my mind. For a second I want to tell her that I, too, had to turn to my older brother during tough times, and that I know how it feels to carry the weight of your family on your shoulder. But then I realized that my year or so of adolescent depression couldn’t begin to help me understand her pain. Her father tried to kill her mother. No family should ever have to go through that.

“No of course, I’m glad you told me” I had tears in my eyes. “I just care that you’re okay. If you ever need anything…”

I stepped forward and grabbed her hand, giving it a quick squeeze. She squeezed mine back and wiped the tear from my cheek with her other hand.
The warmth in her hand reassured me.

As I write, the guilt is forming a pit in my chest. I asked if I could write that her dad is in jail. I didn’t ask if I could say why he’s in jail, where we were standing when she told me, or even how she changed my life. She said yes to the question I asked, and I am afraid I betrayed her. I’m afraid I’ve cut her open and left her there, slapping her story on paper as though it were my own.

I’m sorry.

Exhaustion hits me like a brick wall and I crawl into my bed, pulling my comforter all the way up to my neck. I can tell from her slow rhythmic breathing that Vivian is already sleeping. Even though she can’t hear me, I whisper goodnight. She smiles slightly in her sleep. Flipping over onto my side, I smile to myself as I drift off. We will be safe our dreams tonight.

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