Disappearing Acts
My friend Anna’s daughter is in a bad way. Fifteen years old and thin as kindling, Sequoia lies in her hospital bed, refusing to eat. Her heart beats half-time, her brain doing stubborn laps: I want to go home, I need to work out, I want to go home.
“You’ll be with us for a while yet,” the pediatrician tells her, his tone kind but firm. Hearing the story from afar, I can’t help but picture him in stereotype: glasses and a side-part, Dockers crisp under his clean white coat. He’s a comfort, my imagined specialist. He’s used to it—day after day, girl after dwindling girl.
“Mommy,” Sequoia says after the doctor leaves them, “I get to go home on Thursday.” Anna stands at the window, hands in her coat pockets, the nurse’s words stuck on repeat. She was at it again this morning. Jumping jacks this time—she just about tore out her IV.
“When I’m home,” Sequoia adds, “I can just have smoothies.”
Anna forces herself to turn around. “Sequoia, we can’t ever go back to the way things were.”
Sequoia glares at her. “I get to go home on Thursday.”
“That depends, honey.”
Silence. Then, “I get to go home.”
“This disease,” Anna says into the receiver, “it’s got her in its grip.”
I bow my head, listening to my old friend breathe. We’ve known each other since we were Sequoia’s age, when we met in the art room at Central Junior High in Victoria. Anna was the one who could draw—cats with subtle backs and caring faces, pages of interlocking designs. When she wasn’t doing that, or listening, or laughing, she had her nose in a book—a long nose to match her long, lovely face. Oversized blue eyes, flawless skin. She was model-tall without being model-thin—the kind of body most boys overlooked. She hated her feet, size twelve when a seven was considered big. Her hands were large and soft, with naturally strong nails that grew long and shapely all on their own. You know you love someone when you can close your eyes and see her hands.
I don’t see her as often as I should. Our worlds are worlds apart, me in my east-end Toronto apartment, writing and circling the park, Anna tending to the flora and fauna that surround her rented farmhouse in BC—when she’s not tending to her troubled girl. Normally months pass with no contact between us, each of us saving up stories to share on our annual seaside walk. Anna’s never come to Toronto and she never will. She does better sticking close to home.
It’s not only soldiers who suffer after the fact; there are other veterans, other wars. When we were twenty, Anna fell for a man who stared at her in a bar. He was handsome, lank black hair and a logger’s build, his blue eyes paler than hers. I remember the day they came over to pick up a table—my husband Clive and I were shedding our belongings, getting ready to move out east. Anna’s new man slid his eyes over the room and over me. He was eager to be gone, something he let Anna know by slapping her ass. I was grown up enough to know you don’t always like your girlfriends’ boyfriends. Besides, Anna and I were already drifting apart.
I hadn’t heard from her in over a year when I ran into a mutual acquaintance in the grocery store. Clive and I had recently moved back to Victoria, and so, it seemed, had Anna.
“You know she was living out in the country with that guy?” the acquaintance said.
I nodded. I’d heard something about a cabin in the woods.
“I think she had a pretty hard time. I think he was, you know, abusive.”
“—What?”
“I don’t know the details, but I think it was pretty bad.” She brightened. “Anna looks incredible, though. I didn’t recognize her at first.”
She kept talking, but I could no longer hear. I abandoned my half-full cart. Drove too fast the whole way home, alternating between panic and shock. I called Anna’s mom the moment I got in the door. After a brief exchange, she handed her daughter the phone.
“Hey.”
“Hey, buddy.” Silence. “Jesus, Anna, are you okay?” She’d been free of him for a week. The two of them had moved back into town to make some money, and after his initial plans had fallen through, he’d allowed her to take a job at a garden centre. Anna’s new boss was a woman; she knew the signs and she had the guts to inquire. Before Anna could fashion a lie, she heard herself spilling the whole mess. How he’d kept her in the cabin, never letting her go into town on her own. How, no matter what she did, he boiled over every couple of weeks—usually at the kitchen table, his chair to the left of hers, so he came at her from that side. That was where the broken bones were: left cheek and jaw, both of which healed without a doctor’s care. The left arm, too—they had to go to the hospital to get that one set, but they agreed on a story and Anna stuck to it, even when one of the nurses got her alone.
“I’m scared,” Anna told me that day when I called. “I close my eyes and he’s there.”
It turned out her mom was heading off on holiday, a week in Hawaii booked before she’d known her daughter would show up on the lam.
“I’ll come get you,” I said. “You can stay with us.”
When I pulled up in front of her mom’s place, I had trouble recognizing Anna too. Part of it was the makeup—more than I’d ever seen her wear, heavy eye-shadow and mascara, a sculpting upsweep of rouge. Blond hair halfway down her back, blue eyes huge in a long, thin face. He’d been whittling her down for the market, prepping her to be pimped out.
“I tried to do it,” Anna confessed that first night. “I really did.”
She was lying on the pull-out couch in our front room. Close by in the armchair, I searched for an appropriate reply.
“Not working the street or anything,” she went on. “There was an apartment, you know, two bedrooms, me and a couple of other girls. I was okay on the phone, taking the bookings and everything, but when it came to the rest of it, I was useless. That made him really mad. He couldn’t hit me, though. He didn’t want to mess up my face.”
He had other ways of trying to break her, developments on a list of humiliations she’d been enduring since not long after they met. During that week she spent on our couch, Anna told me things. I’ve struggled to forget them, but the best I can manage is containment. There’s a dirty old trunk pushed to the back of my brain; I hope to pass out of this life without ever lifting its lid again.
Eight years after she made her break for freedom, Anna was delivered of a baby girl. The pain triggered a flashback powerful enough to replace the world: during the miracle of childbirth she lived over and over a brutal routine of rape. The baby’s father was already gone. He wasn’t evil like Anna’s first love, but he also wasn’t much good—he’d insisted his name be left off the paperwork so Anna couldn’t hassle him like the mother of his other kid. I’d held my breath when she’d told me that, picturing her seated by the window, one hand on her pregnant belly, the other pressing the phone to her ear.
“I think,” she said, “that means he won’t be any kind of father.”
“Yeah,” I said, exhaling. Finally, Anna had something she considered worth looking after, a life more precious than her own.
From the first, Sequoia was a strong-willed child, given to flights of imagination and sudden, tearful demands. At the age of four she asked repeatedly to visit a deer carcass she and Anna had come across on one of their roadside walks. Anna took her by the hand and led her back. Together they stood over the half-eaten body of the doe, Anna explaining patiently about prey and predator, life and death.
Home-schooled until the age of ten, Sequoia began to long for the wider world. Anna phoned me, weeping, on her daughter’s first day at school. “I’m so afraid for her,” she whispered. “I’m so afraid.”
Having no children of my own, I’m continually shocked by the growth of my friends’ kids. One moment Sequoia was chasing chickens around the yard while her mom and I drank tea, the next, she was fourteen years old. Anna and I had arranged to meet at the usual spot for one of our walks, and this time her daughter came along. My mouth fell open as she unfolded from the passenger seat.
“Sequoia,” I said, “you’re so… grown up.” She gave me a soft, self-conscious smile.
“You look…” The word came unbidden to my mind: incredible. And she did—in both senses of the word. A year before her illness landed her in hospital, Sequoia looked “like a model”—the compliment I’d prized above all others when I was her age. Her hair, her makeup, her clothes, everything was perfect—unsettling enough in a girl of fourteen, but there was something more. It took me a moment to see it: she was the living spit of her mother, not the gracefully aging hippie who stood beside her, but the twenty-something escapee.
Anna and I are in touch more often these days, ever since the first SOS text lit up my screen. S in hospital, heart-rate half what it should be. We talk about how her daughter might get better, or she might cling to her illness and die. Sometimes, when we exhaust that painful subject, we talk about ourselves—or the selves we were at Sequoia’s age. I remind her about lunch hour, our little group gathered around a paint-splattered table, Anna listening and laughing, glancing up from her sketchbook to catch my eye.
“It’s weird,” she says after a moment. “I can see you guys and the room and everything, but it’s like I’m… missing. Like somebody’s rubbed me out.”
I say the only thing I can think of. “I remember you, Anna. You were there.”
Photo by Flickr user Polycart
Read more