In one, a girl with opened, dilated eyes. A look of fear. A smear of blood on her face. Hands not clasped on her chest in that attitude of exquisite peace but uplifted as if pushing away the camera.
But already forgetting. Forgotten. The ugliest sights.
Unless it was myself I’d seen, confused with another.
What had he done to this girl? Stared and stared.
She’d failed to fall asleep properly. She’d been stubborn, resistant.
Or he had not drugged this girl because he had not wanted her to sleep. He had wanted her awake, conscious.
But why was this? Why was one girl treated differently from the others?
You are that girl, you wish to think. Always, you are different from the others.
8.
Not true that all times were the same time. For there was the last time in Mr. Sandman’s house that would not be repeated.
Inadvertently he’d given me an overdose. A fraction of a teaspoon of fine-ground barbiturate dissolved into sweet blueberry juice but he’d miscalculated, or he’d become complacent over the months. For so obediently the stupor came upon me, each time a mimicry of the time before, his vigilance had diminished.
And then, Mr. Sandman couldn’t wake me.
Vio-let! Vio-let! Wake up, dear...
No memory of falling asleep. Only vaguely, something in my hand that had to be taken from my fingers to prevent its spilling.
A terrible heaviness. Sinking downward. Surface of the water far overhead, no agitation of my numbed limbs could bring me to it. Comfort in the dark cloudy water like many tongues licking together.
Violet! Open your eyes, try to sit up — the voice came from a distance, alarmed.
Shaking me, and shaking me. Bruising my shoulders with his hard fingers, naked inside the silk robe. My skin still warm from the bath, not yet beginning to cool into the chill of death. Slick creamy lotion caressed into my skin, smelling of lilac. Talcum powder on all the parts of my body that would be covered by my clothes, when I was clothed again.
Except: he could not wake me.
Did not dare call 911 (Mr. Sandman would confess) for then he’d be discovered, arrested. His secret life exposed.
Yet, he did not want the girl to die.
Well, yes — (Mr. Sandman would confess) — the desperate thought came to him, he might let the girl die, he would never succeed in waking the girl and so there was no alternative, he would let her die, and in that way he would be spared exposure and arrest, the outrage and loathing of the community of decent persons, he would be spared prison, how many years in prison, of which he could not bear even a few days. Yet, he did not want Violet Rue to die for (he would insist) he loved her...
Or this he would claim, afterward.
His solution was to dress me hurriedly, haphazardly, in the clothes he’d removed from me, and had partly laundered, and partly dried, and to wrap me in a blanket snatched from a cedar closet, and carry me out to his car, stumbling and sobbing; in the car, he drove me to the Port Oriskany hospital, to the ER which was at the side entrance of the building; half-carried, half-dragged me inside the plate-glass doors that parted automatically, and left me there, slumped on a chair; hurried back outside even as a hospital security guard was calling after him — “Mister! Hey mister!” He’d left the car running. Key in the ignition. He would make a quick getaway, was the reasoning. But so agitated, within seconds Mr. Sandman collided with a van turning into the hospital drive as he tried to escape.
In the telling it would become a story to provoke outrage, and yet mirth.
For, outside the tyranny of the math teacher’s classroom and house, the math teacher was revealed as bumbling, foolish. Bringing an unconscious fourteen-year-old to the brightly lit emergency room of a hospital, a hastily clothed and (seemingly) dying girl, believing that he might abandon the girl there, might simply run back out to his car idling just outside the entrance and drive away undetected, and then, so agitated, such a fool, colliding head-on with the first vehicle that approached him as if in his desperation he’d failed to see...
But mostly, the story provoked outrage. Of course!
A mathematics teacher entrusted with middle-school students, revealed to have been sexually abusing one of his ninth-grade pupils over a period of seven months, routinely drugging the girl to make her sexually compliant, at last overdosing the girl with barbiturates, bringing her blood pressure lethally low...
In the ER the girl whose heart was barely beating was revived. In the hospital driveway the ninth-grade algebra teacher was arrested by Port Oriskany police officers.
Taken into police custody in handcuffs, brought downtown to police headquarters. Overnight in the county jail and in the morning denied bail by a repelled judge. Suicide watch, for the distraught man had raved and sobbed and uttered many wild things, pleas and threats.
It would be revealed that Arnold Sandman, fifty-one, longtime resident of Port Oriskany, faculty member since 1975 of Port Oriskany Middle School, had been accused of “unacceptable” behavior at previous schools, including a Catholic school in Watertown; but he’d been allowed to resign from the positions, and school administrators at two schools had agreed to provide him with “strong” recommendations, to get him out of their districts without a scandal. For there was the uncertainty of several girls’ accounts — there was the uncertainty that the girls’ parents would even allow them to make statements to the police, which would be revealed to the public. And Mr. Sandman denied all — everything. And Mr. Sandman did speak persuasively. And Mr. Sandman was, all conceded, a capable, if eccentric teacher whose students tended to do well on state examinations; in fact, better on the average than students taught by other math teachers. Jocosely it was said that Mr. Sandman “terrorized” students into learning math, where other, more gentle methods failed.
This time, however, Arnold Sandman would plead “no contest” to charges of protracted child endangerment, sexual molestation of a minor child, drug statute violations, abduction and false imprisonment.
The cobblestone house on Craigmont Avenue would be searched top to bottom. The incriminating archive would be discovered. Of thirty-one girls photographed by Mr. Sandman over a period of eighteen years all but six were identified; of these all but two were living in upstate New York and vicinity; the two no longer living had died “suspiciously” (suicide?) but in no ways connected with Arnold Sandman.
None of the photographed girls could remember being photographed by their ninth-grade math teacher. None could remember having been sexually abused, coerced, threatened by him but most could remember “after-school tutorials” and their math teacher being “very kind” and “patient” with them.
9.
“Violet. Please try to remember. Tell us...”
But I could not. My throat was shut up tight, there were no words to loosen it.
For some time I was very sick. Too weak to sit up in bed. Fluids dripped into my veins, too weak to eat or drink.
No. Can’t remember. Don’t make me.
Amnesia was a balm. Wept with gratitude for all that I did not remember and not for what I did remember.
The shock of it is, what was intimate becomes public. What occurred without words becomes a matter of others’ words.
Sexual abuse of a minor. Abduction. False imprisonment.