“No,” she said, as calmly but firmly as she could. “What do you think I am? We’ve only just met.”
“I’m sorry,” Keith said, “really I am. I didn’t mean to offend you. I just thought…I mean I hoped. Oh god, you can’t blame a bloke for trying, can you?”
Martha could, but she didn’t say so. Instead, she tried to placate him despite the rage she felt. “It’s not that I don’t like you,” she said. “It’s just too soon. I guess I’m not the kind of person for a holiday quickie.”
Now Keith seemed offended. “That’s not fair. That’s not what I had in mind.”
But it was, Martha knew. Oh, Keith was a nice enough boy, not too pushy, but all it came down to was that he wanted to go to bed with her. He would make out that he didn’t usually do such things, and she was supposed to say the same. Then he would tell her how it was different with her, really special. He was a wolf, all right, but a tame one. Getting the brush-off just made him sulk and become petulant. They weren’t all as easy as him to fight off.
“Come on,” Martha said. “Let’s go back. It’s getting chilly.”
Hands in pockets, head down, Keith walked beside her back to the guesthouse.
14 Kirsten
It’s my body. I have a right to know.”
Kirsten leaned back on the pillows. Her eyes were puffed up, and the tear tracks had dried on her cheeks. The doctor stood by the bottom of the bed, and her parents sat beside her.
“You were in no state to be alarmed,” the doctor said. “You’ve been suffering from severe trauma. We had to avoid upsetting you.” For the first time, Kirsten actually looked at him. He was a short, dark-skinned man with a deeply etched frown that converged in a V between his thick black eyebrows. Somehow, the lines made him look like a short-tempered person, though Kirsten had seen no evidence of this. If he had tried to keep the full extent of her injuries from her, he had at least been gentle.
“I’m already alarmed,” she said. Her nightgown was buttoned up again now, but the memory of what she had seen still frightened her. “Look, I’m not a little girl. Something’s wrong. Tell me.”
“We didn’t want to upset you, dear.” Her mother echoed the doctor. “There’s plenty of time to go into all the details later, when you’re feeling better. Why don’t you just rest now? The doctor will give you a sedative.”
Kirsten struggled to sit up. “I don’t want a bloody sedative! I want to know now! If you don’t tell me, I’ll only imagine it’s worse than it is. I feel awful, but I don’t think I’m going to die, am I? What else could be so bad? What could be worse than that?”
“Lie back and keep calm,” the doctor said, gently pushing her down. “No, you’re not going to die. At least not until you’ve had your three score and ten. If you were, you’d have done so before today.” He moved back to the end of the bed.
“So tell me what’s wrong.”
The doctor hesitated and looked toward her father. “Go on,” he said quietly. “Tell her.”
Kirsten wanted to let him know that his permission wasn’t required. She was twenty-one; she didn’t need his approval. But if this was the only way to find out, so be it.
The doctor sighed and stared at a spot on the wall above the top of her head. “What you saw,” he began, “is the result of emergency surgery, the sutures. It looks bad now, but when they heal, it will be better. Not like new, but better than now.”
Anything would be better than now, Kirsten thought, picturing her red and swollen breasts covered with stitch marks like zippers, like something out of a Frankenstein movie.
“When you were brought in,” the doctor went on, “one breast was almost severed. We counted thirteen separate stab wounds to the mammary region alone.” He shrugged and leaned forward, gripping the metal bed frame. “We did the best we could under the circumstances.”
“Alone? You said alone. What else was there?”
“You’d been beaten around the face and head and, all in all, you had thirty-one stab wounds. It’s a miracle that none of them hit a major artery or organ.”
Kirsten gripped the top of the bedsheet and held it tight across her throat. “What did they hit then, apart from my tits?”
“Kirsten!” her mother gasped. “There’s no need to speak like that in front of the doctor.”
“It’s all right,” the doctor said. “I suppose she has every right to be angry.”
“Thank you,” Kirsten said. “Thank you very much. You were saying?”
The doctor fixed his gaze on the wall again. “Most of the other entry points were in the region of the abdomen, thighs and vagina,” he went on. “It was a vicious attack, one of the worst I’ve ever seen-at least on a victim who survived. There were also shallow slashes across the stomach, and something that looked like a cross with a long vertical had been cut from just below the breasts to the pudenda. The cuts weren’t deep, but they needed stitching nonetheless. That’s why your skin feels so tight.”
Kirsten lay silent and relaxed her grip on the sheets. It was even worse than she had thought. Thirty-one stab wounds. That terrible ache between her legs. She gulped and struggled to force back the tears. She was damned if she was going to prove them right and react like a baby. “If I’m not going to die,” she said, “why are you all looking like undertakers? What’s the bad news you’re hiding from me? What is it you’re all trying to save me from? Am I disfigured for life? Is that it?”
“There will be some disfigurement, yes,” the doctor said, glancing at Kirsten’s father again for the go-ahead. “Chiefly of the breasts and the pubic area. But that’s not the main damage. There’s always the possibility of further surgery to correct some of the disfigurement. The real problems are internal, Kirsten,” he said, for the first time using her Christian name, and saying it softly. “When you came in, you were unconscious. We had to operate immediately to put things right, to save your life, and we had to do it quickly, because there’s always considerable anesthetic risk when a patient is unconscious.”
“Well?”
“You were suffering from severe internal bleeding, and there was a strong chance of infection, of peritonitis. We had to perform an emergency hysterectomy.”
“I know what that means,” Kirsten said. “It means I can’t have children, doesn’t it?”
“It means surgical removal of the uterus.”
“But it means I’ll never be able to have babies, doesn’t it?”
The doctor nodded.
Kirsten’s mother began to sob into a handkerchief. Her father and the doctor looked solemn. One machine beside her bleeped rhythmically, another hissed, and colorless fluid dripped into her arm from the IV. Everything in the room seemed white, apart from her father’s charcoal gray suit.
“It wasn’t something I’d planned for the immediate future anyway,” she said with a little laugh, showing them she could put a brave face on things. But this time she couldn’t stop the tears from flowing. Her father and the doctor were both staring down at her.
“Why are you looking at me like that?” she shouted, turning her face to the wall. “Go away! Leave me alone.”
“You insisted I tell you everything, Kirsten,” the doctor said, “and you’d have to have been told eventually. I said I thought it was too soon.”
“I’ll be all right.” Kirsten reached for a Kleenex. “How did you expect me to react? Jump for joy? Is there anything else? Now you’ve started, you might as well get it all over with.”
There was a short pause, then the doctor said, “Some of the stab wounds perforated the vagina.”
Her mother turned away to face the door. Such frank talk was clearly too much for her. Vaginas, breasts, penises and the rest had always been forbidden subjects around the house.