We sit in glowing sunshine eating bagels and sipping coffee.
It is a hopeful morning.
Dr. Sarah Lang is a not unattractive woman in her early fifties, I guess, wearing her gone-to-white hair shoulder length, wearing as well black-rimmed eyeglasses that frame and highlight the effect of her vivid blue eyes.
“Miss Gulliver?” she asks.
“Yes?” Annie says.
“Did you want to come in, please?”
“I want my brother to come in with me, if that’s all right,” Annie says.
Dr. Lang looks at me.
“I can wait out here,” I say, “that’s okay.”
“I want you to hear this,” Annie says.
Dr. Lang looks from one to the other of us.
“Would that be all right?” Annie asks.
“It’s your nickel,” Dr. Lang says, and smiles.
Annie smiles back.
“So come in,” Dr. Lang says. “Both of you. Please.”
The windows in her office face north on Ninety-sixth Street. This is ten in the morning; the light is oblique. There is a desk with some papers on it. There are diplomas hanging on the walls, nothing else. Three or four diplomas from various universities and medical schools. No framed paintings. Just the diplomas and a license to practice psychiatry in the state of New York, and a commendation of some sort from a psychiatric society. There is a long leather couch to the right of the desk, but Dr. Lang motions to two matching leather chairs slightly to the left, and my sister and I sit facing her.
“So,” she says, “what’s this you want both of us to hear?”
“I was molested,” Annie says.
Dr. Lang nods.
“When I was eleven years old,” Annie says.
And now comes the second version of the story.
In this version, the super is upstairs fixing a leak in the plumbing under the kitchen sink. Annie is home with a cold. My brother and I are off at school. My mother has gone downstairs to Gristede’s, to pick up some soup for lunch. Annie is watching television. She remembers exactly what she was watching. She tells Dr. Lang and me that she was watching a re-run of Lassie. She also remembers what Mr. Alvarez was wearing on that fateful July morning.
Mr. Alvarez is wearing baggy blue trousers and a little blue sweater vest, a shabby straw hat he takes off and rests on the counter top before he crawls under the sink, and a green, short-sleeved shirt open at the throat to reveal a gold crucifix nestling in curly black hairs on his chest and creeping up to his Adam’s apple. He has a tattoo on the bicep of his left arm, Jesus Christ’s red heart encircled by a crown of blue thorns.
“Little girl?” he says.
She is not sure at first that anyone is actually calling to her. She is lying on the sofa in the living room, her eyes glued to the TV screen where the family has come out on the porch and is yelling for Lassie, when she hears this voice calling “Little girl?” or actually “Little gorl?” was probably more like it, since Mr. Alvarez’s accent was as thick as a Colombian rain forest. She thinks at first that it is a voice coming from the TV set, someone calling to her from somewhere in the episode she’s watching, or rather calling to someone actually in the episode, one of the actors, a member of the family that owns Lassie, but certainly not a voice calling to her from under the kitchen sink.
“Little gorl?” he says again, and this time she realizes the voice is actually in the apartment with her and not being beamed from somewhere out in Televisionland, actually coming from under the sink, actually coming from Mr. Alvarez under the sink in his baggy blue pants and short-sleeved green shirt and little blue sweater vest. Annie herself is wearing a short cotton nightgown with red check cotton panties and over that the bathrobe Grandma Rozalia gave her for her tenth birthday last year. She is also wearing bedroom slippers that have bunny faces on them, and little bunny ears sticking up. The slippers are purple, and she knows they don’t match the nightgown or the robe or for that matter the red check panties. This bothers her a little. That the slippers don’t match anything.
“Little gorl, come here a secon’,” Mr. Alvarez says.
She gets off the couch reluctantly — Lassie is just about to rescue someone from drowning, if she remembers correctly, or perhaps from a burning building — and she slouches into the kitchen where the straw hat with its uneven edges is resting on the counter top catching sunlight. She cannot see Mr. Alvarez’s face. He is under the sink. She sees only his arm with its heart and thorns tattoo, and his outstretched hand.
“The wrench,” he says. “In my box.”
She sees his open tool box on the floor, and inside it she sees a variety of screw drivers and hammers and wrenches and other tools, she doesn’t know what they are. She stands there puzzled, wondering which wrench she should hand him. She is about to ask him which wrench he means, when she feels his hand sliding up the inside of her leg.
She stands stock still.
“He shoved aside my panties and stuck his finger inside me,” my sister tells Dr. Lang. “I wet my pants. I peed on his hand.”
“That must have been awful for you,” Dr. Lang says.
“It was. Oh, you’d better believe it. It’s what caused all that trouble in Italy.”
I do not for a moment believe that Annie is going to reveal she was in a nuthouse in Italy. I know my sister better than that. She is here today to get to the bottom of things, to set the record straight. She is here today because kindly Mr. Alvarez molested her, and as a result she has behaved strangely for the past twenty-five years. She is not nuts, she is merely neurotic.
“What trouble in Italy?” Dr. Lang asks.
“I was hospitalized in Italy,” Annie says, and nods.
But this is not what she’d been rehearsing! Have the voices changed their mind? Her mind? Have the voices advised her to change her mind? Are the voices themselves beginning to lose it?
“Oh?” Dr. Lang says.
“Well, I wouldn’t say ‘hospitalized,’ actually,” Annie says at once. “I was taken to a hospital, yes, but I wouldn’t say I was ‘hospitalized’ as such.”
“Why were you taken to a hospital?”
“Because I was bruised and bleeding.”
Dr. Lang nods. Smiles. Waits.
“I was attacked.” Annie hesitates. “I was raped and beaten. That’s why they took me to a hospital.”
“Which hospital was this?” Dr. Lang asks.
“Ospedale Santa Chiara,” she says. “In Sicily. Do you know it?”
“I’m sorry, no.”
Annie hesitates, and then says, “It’s a pediatric hospital.”
“I see. They took you to a pediatric hospital.”
“Well, yes. It’s all they had. It isn’t New York, you know.”
“I can imagine. How long were you there?”
“In Sicily? Almost two months. I’d spent some time in...”
“The hospital, I mean.”
“Oh. A week.”
“They kept you there a week.”
“Yes. Well, I was waiting for Andy to get there.”
“Your brother.”
“Yes. Andy,” she says, and turns to look at me.
“I’m sorry, I’m not sure I understand. Why was your brother coming there?”
“To get me.”
“Why did he have to come get you? Were you injured very badly?”
“Well, they had to release me.”
“Yes, I understand. But why did your brother...?”
“He had to sign some papers.”