The psychologist sat with his legs crossed on the guest chair near the foot of the bed in room 305. In his lap rested a small spiral-bound notebook opened to a blank page. He had talked to the teenage girl who now sat on the bed before him only briefly the day before, and he realized that she probably did not remember much about that encounter. This would be his first chance to have a meaningful conversation with her.
"Are you feeling any better today, Eppie?" he asked her.
"A little," the girl responded.
"What did they give you for breakfast this morning?"
"Some eggs and toast," she said. "It wasn't very good."
"Yes, I know. We serve lousy food here on purpose. It makes people want to get better a whole lot faster."
The girl smiled weakly through the bandages which covered half of her face.
"Do you want to tell me about what happened to you yesterday?" the psychologist asked.
"Not really," the girl said softly.
"Well, I think maybe you should. I think it might be best if you confided in someone about what happened."
The girl sat silently in her bed, staring absently at an unremarkable spot on the floor across the room.
"Your bruises seem to be healing pretty well," the psychologist remarked. "I can see the swelling has gone down a bit since yesterday. I think the doctors may let you out of here tomorrow."
"Yeah, that would be good."
"Of course they can't just release you on your own. Somebody will have to come down here and pick you up. Do you have anyone who can come and get you?"
"No."
"Well, that may be a bit of a problem. You see, we can only release you to your parents or a legal guardian. You know, kind of like when the pound finds a lost puppy. We have to try to find your owner."
The girl did not smile this time. "Why can't they just let me go on my own?" she asked plaintively. "I can take care of myself."
"It doesn't work that way, Eppie. You're only, what, fourteen? You're still a kid, at least in the opinion of the state, and that's the only opinion that matters right now."
The girl again went silent. She turned her head toward the window and looked out across the tree tops. The crisp autumn day looked bright and chilly. The leaves had not yet reached the height of their fall colors, but the days were getting noticeably shorter and the air was light with the feel of the approaching winter.
"Isn't there anybody who can take you?" the psychologist asked. "Any adult relative at all?"
The girl shook her head.
The psychologist sighed and stroked his chin with one hand. "Eppie," he said gently, "tell me about what happened to you. Who did this to you?"
The girl's lips tightened into a straight line, but she said nothing. Her eyes concentrated harder on the view through the window.
"It was somebody close to you, wasn't it?"
The girl swallowed perceptibly, and after a few moments her lips parted slowly, working to form words as if she were trying to speak in a new and unfamiliar language. "My stepfather got mad at me," she said, still looking out the window.
"He got mad at you?"
"Yeah."
"Why did he get mad at you?"
"He doesn't like me."
"Did you do something in particular that upset him?"
The girl paused. "Yeah, sort of."
The psychologist waited in silence for a short time for the girl to continue, but she only turned her eyes away from the window silently and looked down at the blanket covering her legs. "What was it that you did?" he finally prodded.
"He thinks I'm bad," she said. "He says that I don't listen to him and that I don't do the things he tells me to do. So he gets mad at me."
"What types of things does he tell you to do?"
"Just stupid little things. He tells me to take out the garbage and then he gets mad if I don't do it right away. Or he tells me to go down to the store to buy some things, and he gets mad if I don't get exactly the right thing he wanted. Stuff like that."
"And he hits you when he gets mad?"
"Yeah, sometimes. Sometimes he just yells at me, but other times he gets really mad and he starts hitting me."
"How often does he hit you?"
"It depends. Sometimes he doesn't hit me at all for a long time. As long as nothing upsets him he's not that bad. But every once in a while something happens that sets him off. Then he starts to change and it seems like he gets madder and madder every day. And he drinks a lot, too. It seems like the more he drinks, the madder he gets. Finally he gets so mad that it's like he can't control himself anymore and he just hits me."
"Does your mother try to stop him when he hits you?"
"No, not anymore. Once she tried to stop him when he was really mad. About a year ago I think it was. But he just turned around and started hitting her instead. And then when he was finished with her he came back and hit me some more."
"Have you ever told anybody else about this? What about your teachers at school? Haven't they said anything about your bruises?"
"No. My stepfather makes me stay home from school for a few days if I have any bruises on my face. Then my mother writes a note for the principal saying that I was sick while I was out."
"You must miss a lot of school that way."
The girl nodded her head. "I had to go to summer school to make up for all the days I missed last year. It wasn't so bad though. I'd rather go to school than stay at home anyway, even in the summer."
"Have you ever told the police?"
"Our neighbors called the police once when he was yelling at me pretty loud. But he didn't hit me that time and my mother kind of stood up for him and told the police that he wasn't violent with us. So the police didn't really do anything to him. But he got really angry about having the cops come and question him, so he took it out on me later that night."
The psychologist slowly took off his eyeglasses and laid them on top of the notebook in his lap. He rubbed the bridge of his nose between his thumb and forefinger as a pained expression crossed his face. "Eppie," he said, "are you sure you don’t have any other relatives who can take you in for a while? A grandparent or an aunt maybe?"
The girl shook her head dejectedly. "No," she said. "I don't have much of a family. My grandparents are all gone. My dad died when I was six, and my mother is an only child. It's just me and my mom and my stepfather."
"Okay," the psychologist said with a sigh. "I'll see what can be done to get you a temporary guardian. You obviously can't be released back to your parents, and the doctors tell me that you don't really need to stay in the hospital much longer. Your injuries seem to be healing well."
The psychologist put his glasses back on and jotted a few lines in his notebook, then paused for a moment. He looked sympathetically at the girl sitting a few feet away from him. From her outward appearance she looked to be the picture of innocence horribly victimized by a senseless evil. Her young face was a patchwork of wounds, some covered by bandages, others sutured with black stitches and treated with a shiny balm. The severity of her injuries contrasted sharply with the underlying wholesomeness of her features, which was still evident despite the mask of dressings she wore. Her eyes were dark and sad, her nose small and doll-like and pink around the nostrils, her lips timid yet expressive in the refracted light of the autumn morning. The antiseptic atmosphere of the hospital room only added to the disparity of images portrayed on the girl's face. The fresh white bed linens, the shiny steel rails of the hospital bed, the dust-free floors and walls and furniture surfaces all lent an air of purity to the girl's form, yet simultaneously highlighted the fact that some wickedness—some ugly, malignant malice—had cast upon her a horrible brutality which would require a great deal of time to overcome.
The psychologist wished that he could let their conversation end there. He would have liked to be able to let time alone repair the damage done, but he knew that that was not possible. He knew that some wounds healed naturally over time in the absence of any further assault, and it was best to allow those wounds to mend in their own due course. But he also knew that other wounds festered, lying dormant below the surface for long periods of time, never healing, never mending, never succumbing to the salve of the passing days. These wounds had to be exposed to the open air and actively cleansed. Their healing was all the more important in a victim so young because, left untreated, they would inhibit the growth of the healthy life which lay with such inobscurable virtue behind the veil of violence on the girl's face.
The psychologist uncrossed his legs, straightened himself slightly in his chair and recrossed his legs in the other direction. "Can I ask you something else, Eppie?" he said, looking straight into her eyes.
The girl looked back at him and unconsciously wrapped her arms around herself. She shivered as if a cold breeze had enveloped her.
"Has your stepfather mistreated you in any other way?" he asked.
"What do you mean?" she said nervously.
"I mean has he done anything to you other than yell at you and hit you? Has he hurt you in any other way?"
The girl turned her face away from the doctor and again looked out the window. Her eyes squinted hard and her lips disappeared into her mouth as she tried to control her emotions.
"You need to tell me, Eppie," the psychologist encouraged. "You need to tell me what he's done to you. I know it's hard to talk about, but I can't help you unless you are honest with me. It's the only way."
The girl bent her knees and brought her legs up close to her chest, wrapping her arms tightly across the front of her shins. She sat frozen on the bed in an upright fetal position. Every muscle in her body seemed to contract simultaneously, each muscle pulling in one direction with a force that was precisely offset by another muscle pulling with equal force in the opposite direction.
"Has he forced himself on you?" the doctor asked. "Is that what he's done?"
Eppie lost her battle with her emotions. Tears welled up instantly in her eyes and spilled forth over her cheeks, soaking into the bandages on her face. A gasping sob escaped from her throat.
"Has he raped you, Eppie?"
Eppie nodded her head vigorously and her face became contorted with grief, her pain straining the stitches which held closed the deeper cuts.
"It's okay, Eppie," the doctor consoled her. "That's what I needed to know. You've done the right thing by telling me about this. We don't have to talk any more about it for now if you don't want to."
Eppie buried her face in the blanket between her knees and cried forcefully with a mixture of shame and relief. The doctor fought back his instinct to approach and comfort her, knowing that the touch of a male hand at this moment, even if given in solace, would be felt as a threat. Her anguish was ultimately therapeutic, he reminded himself—just the first in a very long series of steps that this young girl would have to take on the way to recovering her lost sense of security.
"I'll leave you alone now," the psychologist said as he stood up to leave. "Try to get some sleep if you can. I'll have the nurse look in on you in a little while. Please don't hesitate to ring for me if you want to talk some more. I'm always available to talk—any time."
He left the door halfway open behind him as he left the room. He walked directly to the nurses' station at the end of the hallway and left explicit instructions for a female nurse to check on the girl in room 305 every thirty minutes. He was to be called immediately if the girl gave even the slightest hint that she might want to speak with him.
"Yes, doctor," said the nurse. "Is there anything else?"
"Yes," the psychologist replied. "Page Doctor Wheelan for me."
* * *
The detective told himself to remain patient, but, Lord help him, this girl's behavior just did not make sense. "I don't see why you would want to protect someone who has done this to you," he said, exasperated.
He had told the psychologist that he would only need fifteen or twenty minutes to get the information he needed from the girl, but he had now been in her hospital room for nearly an hour. It had seemed like such a straightforward case. The doctor had told him that the girl's stepfather was the perpetrator, as indicated by the girl herself. The charges of assault and battery could be easily proven with a few photographs of the girl's face and Caldwell's report as to what he had witnessed in the parking lot of the hardware store the previous day. The rape charge might be a bit harder to prove, depending on the results of the gynecological examination, but even if the exam gave no clear evidence of sexual assault it would not be difficult to make the charge stick based on the testimony of the psychologist alone. This was all assuming, of course, that the girl herself was willing to press charges and give testimony against her stepfather, a requirement which, based on her behavior over the past hour, seemed an ever more remote possibility.
"Don't you want him to be punished for what he's done to you?" the detective asked.
The girl just sat there morosely on the bed and shrugged her shoulders.
"Do you want him to get away with it?" the detective pressed. "Do you want to let him do this to somebody else?"
The girl was unmoved. "I don't really care what happens to him," she said. "I just want to be away from him. I don't ever want to see him again."
The detective closed his eyes and shook his head in bewilderment. It was always one extreme or the other, he muttered to himself. In his third year as a detective, he was beginning to learn something of the diversity of human nature. Some people loudly demanded that he pursue the most severe charges against another person for the most minor infraction, based on the flimsiest evidence, and God help him if he suggested to them that the situation was really not so serious and perhaps the two parties could resolve things between themselves without police intervention. Such people were unable, in the blind fury of the offense that they had chosen to take, to consider any course of action that even resembled forgiveness or understanding. And then there were people like this girl. Victimized time and time again, with injuries so severe and evidence so overwhelming that no jury would deny a prosecutor whatever prison sentence was requested. And yet, while they did not go so far as to forgive their attackers, they became completely apathetic to the idea of justice. Just keep him away from me, they would say. Just let me be.
The door to the hospital room clicked open, and a middle-aged female administrative clerk appeared in the doorway.
"Excuse me, sir," she said, wearing her reading glasses halfway down her nose and cradling a clipboard in the crook of one arm. "I need to get some more information from this patient. Her form is incomplete."
The detective's shoulders dropped. "Will it take long?" he asked.
"Not as long as she gives me the correct information."
"All right then, go ahead. I need to call my supervisor anyway. I'll be back in a few minutes."
The clerk and the detective passed each other in the doorway. The clerk stepped into the room and approached the bed, looking over the form.
"Is 'Eppie' your full first name?" she asked, dispensing with any greeting.
"No," the girl replied.
"I need your full first name."
"Why?"
"We need accurate information for billing and insurance purposes. Do you have insurance?"
"No."
The clerk checked a box on the form. "Your first name?" she asked, with pen poised over the clipboard and eyes which peered demandingly over her reading glasses.
Eppie bowed her head slightly and looked down into her lap. "Penelope," she said, in a soft, embarrassed voice.
"P-e-n-e-l-o-p-e?"
"Yes."
The clerk crossed out Eppie's entry and transcribed her full name onto the form. She paused for a moment and looked at the name she had just written. "How do you get 'Eppie' out of that?" she asked, somewhat ungraciously.
"I didn't talk very well when I was little," Eppie explained. "When my father tried to teach me to say 'Penelope', I could only repeat the last two syllables. It came out as 'Eppie', and I guess the name just stuck."
The clerk looked at her frostily. "I see," she said. She turned back to her clipboard. "You didn't fill in the medical history section of the form."
"I don't have any medical history," replied Eppie.
"Well then, we need to state that on the form."
"Oh."
"Are you currently taking any prescription medications?"
"No."
"Any illegal narcotics?"
"No."
The clerk made two more check marks on the form. "Were you being treated by a physician for any medical condition or illness prior to your admittance to this facility?"
Eppie hesitated noticeably. "No," she replied after a few moments.
The clerk paused and looked up from the clipboard. "Are you sure?" she asked in a doubting tone.
Eppie kept her eyes fixed toward the bed. "Yes, I'm sure."
The clerk made another check mark on the form and scribbled a brief note. "Who is Rachel Farrell?" she asked.
Eppie looked confused for a moment, not recognizing the name. "Oh," she finally said with a strained sincerity. "She's a friend of mine."
"She's not a relative?"
"Not really. She's just a good friend. She looks out for me."
The clerk tapped her pen disapprovingly against the side of the clipboard. "Her name is shown here as the contact person for your treatment. That means we would talk with her about your treatment and get her approval if you needed any type of elective procedure. Is that what you want?"
"Yeah, that's fine with me," Eppie said.
The clerk pursed her lips. "Normally we have a relative serve as the contact person," she said. "Especially for a minor."
Eppie began to get agitated. "I already explained to the doctor that I don't have any relatives to look after me," she pleaded. "The doctor agreed with me. You can ask him yourself. He said that none of my relatives were good contacts for me. Please, Rachel is my friend. She can look after me better than anyone else."
"All right, all right," the clerk said, not wanting to upset the girl any further. "I'll leave her as the contact person for now. I suppose she'll be acceptable for routine things. But if you require anything major, we may have to contact a relative."
"I don't want anything major," said Eppie, pouting through her bandages. "I just want to get out of here. This place stinks."
"Well, there's nothing I can do about that," replied the clerk impassively. "All right, that's all I need from you for now. Make sure you stop by and see me again when you’re discharged. I'll need more information if the doctor wants you to come back again."
With that the clerk tucked the clipboard smartly under one arm and strode from the room with measured steps and perfect posture. Eppie watched her as she left. She was reminded of the members of the marching band which played at the one high school football game she had yet attended. It occurred to her that it might be a long time before she could attend another football game without having a picture of the hospital clerk pop up in her mind. The thought brought to her face the first faint, true smile it had known in many days.
* * *
Sally Wheelan wore a look of concern as she walked along the pathway in front of the complex from the clinic to the hospital. In her hand she carried a thin file of papers—papers upon which were printed facts which purported to tell her all that was relevant about her newest patient. Within this file were precise measurements of bodily activities: blood pressure, pulse rate, body temperature. There were documentations of pills ingested and fluids injected, and analyses of other fluids drawn intravenously or excreted naturally. The facts were derived from the girl's body, which on the whole appeared to be, notwithstanding the trauma of her injuries, quite healthy. The girl's nutrition, her hygiene, her genetics were all fine and indicated the potential for a long and vigorous life. The facts spoke the truth. They told Wheelan all she needed to know about the girl's physical condition, and she required no additional information to make the proper diagnosis and to advise the patient as to the available medical options. But Wheelan was not troubled so much by the facts contained in the file as by the context into which those facts presented themselves.
Given the branch of medicine that she had chosen to practice, most of her patients came to her with nothing wrong with them. They were, for the most part, young women in good health who were experiencing an entirely natural process which their bodies were fully equipped to handle. They sought medical care only to ensure that the process was progressing normally, and intervention was required only when it did not. Most of her patients managed their way through their pregnancies with little more to discomfort them than some mild morning sickness. An occasional complication might arise which added an element of risk to their conditions, but most of these problems were manageable with close supervision and treatment which was not extreme.
But the girl in room 305 was a different type of patient. There was indeed something wrong with her, or, more precisely, something wrong about her. From a medical standpoint she was fine—a perfectly formed being without internal flaw or failure—but Wheelan knew that there were things about her that would work against her. They were things outside of her—external factors that neither she nor anyone who cared about her had yet been able to control. She was a healthy organism swimming in an unhealthy sea. The girl's environment, so important to the well-being of any patient regardless of her condition, did not nurture her. It did not protect her. In truth it often lashed out against her, and therefore she was at risk. And it was precisely those external factors—the ones which no doctor was ever fully capable of addressing—which concerned Doctor Wheelan the most at that moment.
She entered the hospital through the front lobby and asked an administrative assistant at the front desk for the complete file on her newest patient. As she waited for the assistant to retrieve the file, she heard a man speaking loudly into a public telephone on the opposite side of the waiting area. Without looking directly at the man, she listened discreetly to one side of the conversation.
"Yeah, Lieutenant," the man was saying, "I'm still here at the hospital." He paused and listened for a moment. "Yes, I'm still talking to her, but she's not really saying much. I don't know what's going on in her head. She confirms that it was her stepfather who did it, but she doesn't seem to want to press charges against him." Another pause. "No, you don't need to send Baker down here, for God's sake. I've got things covered. I shouldn't be too much longer with her. Either she decides she wants to charge or we just refer the case to social services. I can't make her file if she doesn't want to." Again he paused. "Ahh, I don't know, Lieutenant. Hold on a second and I'll check."
The man let the receiver hang by its flexible steel cord and walked a few feet toward the main entrance. He looked through the glass panes of the doors toward the sidewalk for a few seconds, then returned to the phone.
"Lieutenant?" he said. "Yeah, everything out front seems to be all right at the moment. It seems to be about the normal size crowd." Pause. "No, they seem fairly well-behaved today. I guess nothing has happened yet to get them riled up. But you never know, the day is still early." Pause. "Okay, Lieutenant. Like I said, I'm going to give this girl one more chance. Either she wants to do it or she doesn't. I'll be back at the station in half an hour either way. Goodbye, Lieutenant."
"Doctor Wheelan?" The voice caught her by surprise.
"Oh!" Wheelan exclaimed. She turned her head to see the clerk standing behind her. "You startled me, Betty. What is it?"
"Here's the file you wanted."
"Oh, thank you."
"I think I should bring something else to your attention while you're here" the clerk said. "I don't think your new patient is being completely candid about her medical history. I just spoke to her about the information on her admittance form. She hesitated when I asked her about any other condition that she might be receiving treatment for. I think she's holding something back from us. Maybe she's got something that she is too embarrassed to tell me about. Anyway, I thought you should know. You might want to ask her about that."
"All right, thank you, Betty," Wheelan said. "That's good to know."
"Of course, she didn't want to give me her first name either," the clerk added, "and she didn't want any of her relatives to serve as her contact, so maybe she just doesn't trust us with any information at all. I don't know. Sometimes these teenagers are strange."
"Okay, Betty, I'll see if I can find out anything else. Thank you."
The clerk turned and walked back to her desk. Wheelan's concern grew stronger as she made her way down the hallway toward room 305. She already knew exactly why the girl would be reluctant to reveal very much about her condition. Her file of facts told her why.
And it also told her why the girl would be reluctant to press charges against her stepfather. Wheelan knew from long experience something of the emotions that the girl must be feeling at the moment. Her mind was trying to forget things that simply refused to be forgotten, while at the same time her body served as a constant reminder that those things were real. They were not just figments of her imagination, like some horrible nightmare that had only come upon her in her sleep. They were real and they had happened and they had left an evidence of their occurrence which could not be ignored. It was, however, an evidence which, unlike the memory of the events themselves, could be erased if she chose to do so.
Wheelan thought about the discussion at the board meeting the previous day. Her fellow doctors had not supported her as she had hoped. Perhaps they were merely procrastinating, putting off the decision until the time came when they could delay no longer. Now a patient had arrived who might force them to take a position. The girl was certainly a likely candidate. Wheelan wished that she knew which way the board would decide to go. If a test case was going to be fought, she would prefer to have a solid case with which to fight. She wanted to have a patient who would not offer the mayor any ammunition for his position. This particular girl was a mixed case. Certain aspects of her situation favored Wheelan's argument. The girl was unmarried, which meant that there was no husband to argue against the procedure. She was a victim of rape and a victim of domestic abuse. Most people would understand her desire to terminate, if in fact that was her desire. But there was one overriding difficulty. The girl was still a minor, and Wheelan knew that, as such, she was not legally able to make the decision for herself. Her parents were clearly unfit as well. The mayor might try to argue that he or some other official of the city government was properly entitled to make the decision for such an abused minor, claiming that she was a ward of the city. It was a dicey situation—just one more of the uncountable number of potential circumstances which no court could ever foresee and over which attorneys might argue interminably, until no choice remained for this girl, and the most important decision of her young life would be made, thoughtlessly, by default.
Wheelan could offer the girl a choice—if, indeed, she was capable of making such a choice—but that choice was strictly medical in nature. She could perform a procedure which would change the girl's condition, or she could guide her through the process to its natural conclusion, but, either way, she could not change her. She could not transform an unloved and uncared-for fourteen-year-old girl into a strong and independent adult, prepared to face a life which would change drastically for her no matter what she decided to do. Nor could she change the world which stood watching—a world which would soon begin to bear down upon the girl with such enormous pressure. And that pressure would come at her from every direction. It would come in the voice of the detective who badgered her to confront her attacker again. It would come through the open window of her hospital room, as the raised voices of complete strangers would be heard quarreling over her autonomy with a hostility that she did not share. And, most acutely, it would come from within herself, as the immature human being that she currently was would be forced by events to appraise the significance of another still less mature being and, ultimately, to decide its fate.
Armed with her file full of facts, Wheelan knew the truth and understood the options, yet she was entirely lacking in answers. She felt wholly unable to rescue the girl from a future that was not substantially different from her past. In concert with the dilemma soon to be faced by her patient, it was a task by which the physician felt completely overmatched.