Lie Still by Julia Heaberlin Read Free Book Online Page B

the photograph of the little girl flat against her chest. Not happy with me. Or the conversation with Todd hadn’t gone well.
    “Thank you so much for today,” I stammered. “I’m sorry I fell asleep.”
    “No problem. You needed it, I’m sure.”
    She edged us toward the door. Why did she even display thatsnapshot if she didn’t want anyone to see it? We walked up the few steps that led to the polished black granite landing by the front door.
    Impulsively, I made a decision. It seemed more ridiculous not to ask.
    “Misty, who is the girl in the picture? You?”
    She looked at me carefully before answering, deciding, I think, whether I could be trusted.
    Later, I would brood about her words, about her use of the present tense instead of the past, before I knew Misty’s secrets and after. How stupidly I’d misinterpreted everything.
    She said, without a trace of a smile, “It is the happiest day of my life.”

5

    T wo days after the rape, I purchased a hammer and a seatbelt cutter and taped them securely under the driver’s seat of my car.
    They weren’t tools to defend myself.
    I was tormented by a new, unreasonable fear that I would drown, trapped inside a car as it tumbled to the bottom of a river or a lake or the sea. Again and again, I imagined myself choking on the rising water, my terrified face pressed against glass. So, instead of studying for a critical trigonometry test or getting rape crisis counseling, I learned everything I could about how to escape from a submerged car.
    For example, it’s actually possible for electric windows to work for several minutes even underwater. I learned that I should roll them down immediately to equalize pressure in the car, hopefully as soon as the car hit the water. If the windows wouldn’t roll down, I knew to punch out a side window with my hammer because the windshield glass is made to resist.
    After swimming through the broken window, I might feel disoriented, so I’d look for air bubbles, which always travel up. If there were no air bubbles or it was too dark to see, I must not panic. Relax. My body would then naturally float upward, showing me the right way. And, of course, always swim toward the light.
    Eventually, like monsters in the closet, that fear vanished.
    When somebody asks, I always say I am happy. I
am
a happy person. Like everyone else, I am suffused with colors, hopefully more light than dark. The rape didn’t destroy me. It’s not the worst thing that could have happened. Others suffer far greater traumas. Most of them still laugh, love, pursue careers, remarry, have children, go on with life. Buoy themselves up. Appear smooth on the surface even though there is an active, textured inside life no one has a clue about.
    I can go months without thinking about the rape, but I’d be lying if I said it hadn’t transformed me. How much did it alter my future? I’ll never know. A teenage drunk driver killed my parents in a car crash a year and a half later, so it became a little hard to tell where one trauma left off and another began.
    I switched colleges four times, eventually earning a double major in visual art and theater, with a master’s in art history. A shrill, bitter acting professor was my earliest therapist, elated by my ability to mimic and disappear into someone else. At night, alone, I painted obsessively—the flowers on my kitchen table, the cracked mirror that the previous tenant left behind. Sometimes, the abstract slashes of Pierce’s face. I usually threw my work into the dumpster behind my apartment before it dried.
    I married a man professionally trained to rescue me. I love him more than anything on earth. I am afraid to tell him my whole story, although I feel that the time to do it is coming closer.
    Every morning in the shower, I take my finger and draw goodluck symbols in the fog on the glass: a heart with my initials, a four-leaf clover, a peace sign, a cross.
    I don’t think I’m an unlucky person. I just