Outside, he balled his hand into a fist and struck it against the cinder-block wall. He pummeled the cement again and again. He did this even as the tears came and a nurse led him away, to wash the blood off his knuckles and to bandage the scrapes on his palm. He did this until he knew Trixie wasn't the only one hurting.
* * *
Trixie wasn't where everyone thought she was. She might have physically been in the examination room, but mentally she was floating, hovering in the top left corner of the ceiling, watching the doctor and that other woman minister to the poor, sad, broken girl who used to be her.
She wondered if they knew that their patient was a husk, a shell left behind by a snail because home didn't fit anymore. You'd think someone who'd been to medical school would be able to hear through a stethoscope that somebody was empty inside. Trixie watched herself step onto a sheet of white paper with stiff, jerky movements. She listened as Dr. Roth asked her to remove her clothes, explaining that there might be evidence on the fabric that the detectives could use. “Will I get them back?” Trixie heard herself say. “I'm afraid not,” the doctor answered.
“Your dad is going to run home and get you something to wear,” Janice added.
Trixie stared down at her mothers sheer blouse. She's going to kill me, Trixie thought, and then she almost laughed - would her mother really be paying attention to the freaking blouse when she found out what had happened? With slow movements, Trixie mechanically unbuttoned the shirt and pulled it off. Too late, she remembered the Ace bandage around her wrist.
“What happened there?” Dr. Roth asked, gently touching the metal pins holding the wrap in place.
Trixie panicked. What would the doctor say if she knew Trixie had taken to carving her own arm up? Could she get thrown into a psych ward for that?
“Trixie,” Dr. Roth said, “are there bruises under there?” She looked down at her feet. “They're more like cuts.” When Dr. Roth began to unravel the bandage on her left wrist, Trixie didn't fight her. She thought about what it would be like in an institution. If, in the aftermath of all this, it might not be such a
bad thing to be sealed away from the real world and totally overmedicated.
Dr. Roth's gloved hands skimmed over a cut, one so new that Trixie could see the skin still knitting together. “Did he use a knife?”
Trixie blinked. She was still so disconnected from her body that it took her a moment to understand what the doctor was implying, and another moment after that to understand that she had just been given a way out.
“I... I don't think so,” Trixie said. “I think he scratched me when I was fighting.”
Dr. Roth wrote something down on her clipboard, as Trixie kept getting undressed. Her jeans came next, and then she stood shivering in her bra and panties. “Were you wearing that pair of underwear when it happened?” the doctor asked. Trixie shook her head. She'd put them on, along with a big fat sanitary napkin, once she saw that she was bleeding. “I wasn't wearing underwear,” Trixie murmured, and immediately she realized how much that made her sound like a slut. She glanced down at the floor, at the see-through blouse. Was that why it had happened?
“Low-rise jeans,” Janice commiserated, and Trixie nodded, grateful that she hadn't been the one to have to explain. Trixie couldn't remember ever being so tired. The examination room was runny at the edges, like a breakfast egg that hadn't been cooked quite long enough. Janice handed her a hospital johnny, which was just as good as being naked with the way it was hanging open in the back. “You can take a seat,” Dr. Roth said. The blood samples were next. It was just like when they'd had to pair up in eighth-grade science to try to analyze their own blood type. Trixie had nearly passed out at the sight of the blood, and her teacher had sent her to the nurse to breathe into a paper bag for a half hour, and she was so mortified that she'd called her father and said she was sick even though physically she was feeling much better. She and her father had had a Monopoly tournament, and like always, Trixie bought Park Place and Boardwalk and set up hotels and creamed her father. This time, though, when the needle went in, Trixie watched from above. She didn't feel the prick, she didn't feel woozy. She didn't feel anything at all, of course, because it wasn't her. When Dr. Roth turned off the lights in the room, Janice stepped forward. “The doctor's going to use a special light now, a Woods lamp. It won't hurt.”
It could have been a thousand needles - Trixie knew she still wouldn't feel it. But instead, this turned out to be like a tanning booth, except creepier. The light glowed ultraviolet, and when Trixie glanced down at her own bare body, it was covered with purple lines and blotches that hadn't been visible before. Dr. Roth moistened a
long cotton swab and touched it to a spot on her shoulder. She left it on the counter to air-dry, and as it did, Trixie watched her write on the paper sleeve that the swab had been packaged in: Suspected saliva from right shoulder.
The doctor took swabs from the inside of her cheek and off her tongue. She gently combed Trixie's hair over a paper towel, folding up the comb inside the towel when she was finished. Dr. Roth slipped another towel underneath her, using a different comb to work through her pubic hair. Trixie had to turn away - it was that embarrassing to watch.
“Almost done,” Janice murmured.
Dr. Roth pulled a pair of stirrups from the end of the examination table. “Have you ever been to a gynecologist, Trixie?” she asked.
Trixie had an appointment, scheduled for next February, with her mother's doctor. It's a health thing, her mother had assured her, which was just fine because Trixie wasn't planning on discussing her sex life out loud, especially not with her mother. Months ago, when the appointment had been made, Trixie hadn't even ever kissed a guy.
“You're going to feel a little pressure,” Dr. Roth said, folding Trixie's legs into the stirrups, a human origami that left her stark and open.
In that instant, Trixie felt what was left of her spirit sinking down from where it had been watching near the ceiling, to take dark root in her beaten body. She could feel Janice's hand stroking her arm, could feel the doctor's rubber glove parting the heart of her. For the first time since she'd entered the hospital, she was completely, violently aware of who she was and what had been done to her.
There was cold steel, and a rasp of flesh. A push from the outside, as her body struggled to keep the speculum out. Trixie tried to kick out with one foot, but she was being held down at the thighs and then there was pain and force and you are breaking me in two.
“Trixie,” Janice said fiercely. “Trixie, honey, stop fighting. It's okay. It's just the doctor.”
Suddenly the door burst open and Trixie saw her mother, lion-eyed and determined. “Trixie,” Laura said, two syllables that broke in the center.
Now that Trixie could feel, she wished she couldn't. The only thing worse than not feeling anything was feeling everything. She started shaking uncontrollably, an atom about to split beneath its own compounded weight; and then she found herself anchored in her mother's embrace, their hearts beating hard against each other as the doctor and Janice offered to give them a moment of privacy.
“Where were you?” Trixie cried, an accusation and a question all at once. She started to sob so hard she could not catch her breath.
Laura's hands were on the back of Trixie's neck, in her hair, around the bound of her ribs. “I should have been home,” her mother said. “I'm sorry. I'm so sorry.”
Trixie wasn't sure if her mother was apologizing, or just acknowledging her own errors. She should have been home. Maybe then Trixie wouldn't have chanced lying about going to Zephyr's; maybe she never would have had the opportunity to steal the sheer blouse. Maybe she would have spent the night in her own bed. Maybe the worst hurt she would have had to nurse was another razor stripe, a self-inflicted wound.