Page 44 of A Girl, Unbroken
For several heartbeats, Nathan stood over Isaac, every muscle tense and his bloody fists clenched. “What did you do to her?” His words tumbled from the turmoil.
A strange laugh escaped Isaac. “You brain-dead idiot, you actually fell in love with her…”
“What-did-you-do-to-her?”
Isaac spat blood on the ground. “Not enough, brother! I should have fucked her to death.”
Nathan hit him again, and after that, Isaac lay motionless on the ground.
For seconds, silence flickered over the grass and forest like heat. Everything around me flickered. “Is he dead?” I heard myself whisper.
“I not know!” The twin, who I thought was Kjertan, was still holding me so I wouldn’t fall over. His familiar awkward language felt like an anchor of safety.I not know.
I wriggled out of his arms and he let me go. To this day, I don’t know what happened next or in what order. All I remember was running across the narrow strip of grass toward Nathan. And then, when I was between him and the twin, the merciless maelstrom of the last few weeks hit me. I realized that I wasn’t wearing any underwear even though my t-shirt was long. I looked down and saw plastered blood and semen between my thighs. The pain that had been flooded with adrenaline during the last few minutes returned full force as did my weakness. I saw Isaac’s men standing waist-deep in water, unsure of what to do, unsure of how to use their weapons because their leader had been struck down. I looked at Nathan,who was approaching me with a distraught expression on his face. I saw his tears.
And then I heard a scream. “Do you think you have been saved? Did you think I would let you live?”
Noah. He ran toward me from the porch, his chin jutted out. His eyes were glowing with pure hatred. His gun was aimed at my chest. I couldn’t think anymore. I opened my mouth, noticing the dark shapes projecting themselves in front of me before I heard the shot, and the world exploded into small black pieces.
I would only find out weeks later what exactly happened then.
Chapter 12
Sometimes, mothers who are seriously injured in an accident can still lift a ton of weight to free their trapped child from the rubble. That was what I think happened when I made it out half-naked. My will to survive had activated all my reserves, but then I collapsed.
I didn’t get up for a long time and sometimes it seems to me now as if I never left that room; as if part of me was still lying there staring at the beam of light.
Nathan and his men took me to an empty house on the south bank of the Atchafalaya. They had ripped out the seats of the barge so they could lay me flat and transport me, a precautionary measure since they didn’t know how badly I was actually injured. But I don’t remember anything of that trip. At first, they thought I was unfit for transport and Ian even suggested we stay for a while in the wooden house that had served as Isaac and his people’s quarters. Nathan, though, firmly rejected the idea because he believed it would be too much for me. He was right. I would rather die than be taken back inside those walls.
So, they took me to another house, a house that belonged to the brother of Mrs. Durand, the elderly lady who gave Nathanthe herbal brew for Sparta and the moonshine in Lost Memories. She said her brother was away on a trip for several weeks, but later we learned that he had spent several months in prison for illegal moonshine. It also turned out that he had stored sufficient quantities of illegal moonshine, bottles that I smashed one day in a fit of panic and rage because the smell of the liquor disgusted me so much. But there was another painful reason.
I don’t remember much about that time, just that winter was coming to an end. It was February or March, around sixty degrees in Louisiana. The migratory birds twittered through the open windows and the air was full of humidity and rain. Nathan gave me herbal decoctions for the pain of the belt blows that had eaten into my skin like whiplashes. He said there would be scars, but I didn’t care. I didn’t care. I took everything he gave me because otherwise, I wouldn’t have known how to lie down. Mrs. Durand came by waterway on her way to her shop every day to check on me. She was one of those women who didn’t ask questions because she’d been through too much herself. Raised by an alcoholic aunt and a violent uncle, she had left their home at fourteen in order to survive. Life, however, she said, had been hard on her. Her husband, a Creole, disappeared without leaving her a penny as soon as she became pregnant for the second time and her eldest daughter was snatched from her hands by Katrina. Hurricane, she told me again and again, was an indigenous word from the Caribbean. It meant god of the wind, but Huracán himself was a storm god of the Maya. That storm god had stolen her child. She hardly knew a family that had not lost a member in one tropical storm and talked a lot about the subject. Then I thought again about Coldville and my dad.
Mrs. Durand was a strange figure, although she probably looked exactly as we did at the time in Lost Memories. Her clothes were a colorful mishmash, sometimes a patched poncho, sometimes a frayed hat, whatever she could find—but I suspect itwas her unique style. She insisted that her parents had not given her a first name and she always addressed me as Miss Willa. In addition to the herbal decoction, which she called Remèdji, the condensed form of the Haitian word, she also brought a doctor with her to examine me when I was floating in a delirium, dazed by the decoction. I didn’t notice anything since I wouldn’t have been able to bear his hands on me.
The doctor—later, it turned out that he was a veterinarian for large animals, mainly horses—found that in addition to the hundreds of bruises on my body, bruises and contusions, he also discovered several broken ribs, a fractured left forearm, and a fractured right fibula. Those were the obvious things for which he didn’t need an X-ray machine, he told the men and Mrs. Durand as he left my room. He asked them to take me to a clinic, but I refused. I had whispered that to Nathan in the beginning. I didn’t want to be identified by personal data in a hospital, where the press would probably have pounced on me immediately. I didn’t want the world to know what had happened to me. And Dad should not hear it from the press either.
So the doctor came back with antibiotics, splints, plaster casts, and other medicines. I thought of Sparta. Maybe this man could have helped him die better, but back then, it had always been about the plan. All of them. How crazy that sounded now.The plan. It seemed almost like a fantasy from some other life and yet so real because I was lying here.
In the first few weeks, my body recovered while my mind was distracted by the pain and the recovery process. It was easier to endure physical pain than psychological pain. In retrospect, I can describe the time as a comeback, as if I was returning bit by bit from a distant place that was deeply rooted within me. Today, I know that the horror sometimes takes time to emerge from the depths. Just like with war veterans who only have nightmaresafter months of deployment. That was how it was with me. My body was in the here and now faster than my soul.
It started when I could get up again. It was then that I realized how broken I truly was, what scars I bore inside, scars that could not be sterilized or cleaned with disinfectants.
I could not stand closed windows, drawn curtains, or darkness. I had bitten my fingernails down to the flesh and let my hair fall over my face. If someone accidentally closed the door of the room I was in, I could hardly breathe and started to cry. I could not bring a glass or cutlery to my mouth without constantly shaking, without feeling Isaac’s restless, driven gaze on my skin, promising me pain and torment.
During the day, I often lay fully clothed on my bed, the only one around, as if laid out, and at night, I crept sleeplessly through the corridors with my head bowed along the walls like a caged tiger. Although I couldn’t stand the darkness, I couldn’t bear to meet the men in the light, so I turned off the lights when I entered a room but made sure the lamps in the next room were on. I still couldn’t look at them for long with Nathan being the exception.
Mrs. Durand continued to come and often helped me shower when I didn’t have the energy. She also occasionally brought us something to eat, but I would snatch the chicken jambalaya from her hands and empty it mindlessly into the tributary of the Atchafalaya. Afterward, I was ashamed, but she understood. It was good to have a woman around, so from that day on, she came to her brother’s house even more often.
Time sank inside me like fog and I only realized afterward how it had passed without me noticing. Nathan was my unshakeable support. He instinctively knew what I needed. He talked me to sleep when I couldn’t sleep because I was filled with terror. He had attended so many dying people and told them stories, even in icy Coldville. That was one of the reasons theyhad made him leader of the seafaring party back then, not only because he could steer a cutter, but because he had guided the relatives and friends of so many men across the line between life and death. Only now did I understand how valuable his gift was. At night as I stalked the corridors, he stayed close to me, and around three or four in the morning when I could no longer put one foot in front of the other, he made sure I lay down and led me across the threshold to sleep.
It was as if he was diving into my mind and seeing the horrors with his own eyes. And he always painted me pictures strong enough to fight those horrors. Through him, I could smell the nearby cotton fields of Rosewood Manor again, and through him, I walked the dream paths through a sea of fragrant roses, indigo-blue hyacinths, and snow-white orchids that radiated purity and innocence. He resurrected my mom so that I could hold her and Dad’s hand when the nightmare became overwhelming. He slept sitting next to me, always there when I needed him. I now know that I couldn’t have made it without him. Without him, I would have lost the last part of my old self, leaving me completely broken.
It was April now. Today was a good day, I knew that as soon as I opened my eyes. In my world, a good day meant that I managed to get up early in the morning. When I stretched in front of the open window, my ribs ached, but the stabbing pain was lessening every day. My countless bruises were now just a smidge of yellow and green on my skin and I heard my father say:The whole child was shaded in river green, dawn red, and silver like the walls.
It was the first time that one of his sentences popped into my mind again and I took that as a good sign. He knew that I was alive; Mrs. Durand had made sure of that weeks ago. She hadwritten him an anonymous letter in which she revealed details that only I could know and that I had told her for that purpose only. For example, about the day the pills had fallen out of Mr. Sparkles’ stomach. She wrote that I would recover with her after my difficult time and would return home when I was strong enough. She wrote that he should not look for me because that would put me in danger. Then, she gave the letter to her friend, the vet, who in turn gave it to his daughter when she visited a friend in El Paso. That way, Dad would not be able to trace the letter. As far as he was concerned, I did what Scarlett O’Hara did and postponed all my feelings and thoughts until the next morning.
Today was no exception. Dad and I—that was a completely different story.
