No. No. Can’t.

  Amnesia was a balm. Amnesia is the great balm of life. Wept with gratitude for all that I did not remember which was confused (in observers’ eyes) with what I might be remembering.

  The shock of it is, what was intimate and secret becomes public. What occurred without words becomes a matter of (others’) words.

  Sexual abuse of a minor. Abduction. False imprisonment.

  In that deep sleep, in which my heart had barely continued to beat, at the very bottom of the marble coffin, I had been protected, safe. Almost I would think that Mr. Sandman’s arms had embraced me.

  Vio-let Rue! Vio-let Rue!

  You know, I love you.

  He had never uttered these words to me, I was sure. Yet often I heard them, confused with voices at a distance. Muffled laughter.

  “. . . what that terrible man did to you. Try to . . .”

  But I did not remember. And Mr. Sandman was my friend. No one else was my friend.

  Aunt Irma staring at me, disbelieving. Uncle Oscar, with repugnance.

  For I would not testify against the abuser. My eyes were heavy-lidded, my voice was slow, slurred, insolent.

  No. You can’t make me. I’ve said—I don’t remember.

  There was a female police officer, questioning me. But I knew better than to make that mistake again.

  A (female) gynecologist who would report no evidence of vaginal or anal penetration, no (physical) evidence of sexual abuse. A (female) therapist who would report probable extreme trauma, dissociation. Ms. Herne from the Children’s Protective Services.

  It would be held against me that I was uncooperative with authorities who were trying to establish a case of repeated and sustained sexual abuse against Mr. Sandman unless it might be argued that I was a victim, mentally ill, unable to testify against the teacher who’d drugged and abused me for a period of approximately seven months.

  Mr. Sandman had been careful, fastidious. My clothes had been laundered—no DNA. (Except an incriminating trace would be discovered on one of my sneakers. Just that trace would be enough to convict.)

  If you don’t help to convict this terrible man he will hurt other girls, they told me.

  I thought—Other girls will be hurt whether Mr. Sandman is in prison or not. That is our punishment.

  “VIOLET. NO ONE IS PUTTING PRESSURE ON YOU . . .”

  You are all putting pressure on me.

  “. . . but you must tell us, you must take your time and tell us, all that you can remember. When did that man first . . .”

  Ms. Herne was visibly upset. For (she believed) there’d been a special understanding between us, I’d (should have) known that I could trust her. And yet, I must not have trusted Ms. Herne for the abuse had been going on for months when she’d met with me several times and there’d been no hint.

  Of course, there’d been a hint. Plenty of hint. Ms. Herne had failed to detect, that was all.

  And now with the (ugly, relentless) publicity in the local media it hardly looked as if Dolores Herne of the Port Oriskany Children’s Protective Services had been very good at her job, one of her at-risk juvenile clients having been sexually abused, terrorized by a teacher, over a period of seven months and she had not noticed.

  I’d thought—Not abuse but punishment. And not the worst punishment either.

  “VIOLET! THESE BEAUTIFUL FLOWERS ARE FROM LULA.”

  A half-dozen pale pink roses in a vase, on the table beside my bed.

  Irma blushed, adding—“Your mother.”

  As if I might not know who Lula was! A wave of emotion for my aunt swept through me, a mixture of anger and love.

  Wanting to believe but no. Irma had bought the roses herself. For there was no card from my mother, Irma couldn’t go so far in deception, forging a card from her older sister who happened to be my mother.

  “Aren’t they pretty? Lula was very worried about you . . .”

  Irma’s voice trailed off, uncertainly. Badly I wanted to say Was she! Really! But I remained silent.

  In fact I was touched to have received two cards while I’d been in the hospital, from Miriam and from Katie.

  Get well soon! Love.

  As if I’d been stricken with flu. As if wellness could be expected to come soon.

  After five days in the Port Oriskany hospital I’d been brought home to the tidy beige-brick house on Erie Street. Weakly ascending the stairs. Out of breath at the top of the stairs. Thinking—But maybe I have died. This is one of their tricks.

  The slightest exertion left me breathless. Had my heart been damaged?

  If my heart had ceased beating in the ER, it had been shocked into beating again.

  And of this too I would remember nothing, or almost nothing.

  The reluctance to wake. A conviction that wakefulness is an unnatural state.

  My heart is broken. Silly, sentimental.

  Not living with my family but with relatives. Far better than a foster home or a detention facility for runaways.

  It wasn’t clear that anyone from my family had actually called while I’d been in the hospital. Since Irma had not told me about specific calls I had to assume there’d been none but truly, I did not know, for my parents might have wished the calls to be secret. I was sure that my parents knew about Mr. Sandman, for Irma had to have told them. And they had to have read about him. (Though my name, as a juvenile victim, was kept out of the papers.) It seemed to me likely that Irma and Lula spoke on the phone frequently, even daily while I’d been hospitalized.

  It seemed to me possible, that the sisters spoke on the phone frequently. And their subject had to be me.

  Me. Most piteous syllable in the language.

  Anyway, something I’d have liked to believe.

  And what had happened to Arnold Sandman? He’d been in custody in the county jail. Wisely, he would not risk a trial. (The prosecutor was calling for a sentence of ninety-nine years.) Instead, Mr. Sandman would follow his attorney’s advice and plead no contest, and express contrition, and repentance, and shame for his crimes; and the presiding judge would sentence him to twenty-five to thirty years in the maximum security prison at Attica.

  A death sentence. Arnold Sandman would never survive Attica.

  None of this was known to me, at the time. Though if I shut my eyes and began to drift in the rapid current that was always there, inside my eyelids, far below the Lock Street Bridge, amid the churning writhing snakes of the hue of eggplant, there came Mr. Sandman to stoop over me, his face no longer jocular and mocking but contorted with grief.

  Violet! You know, of all the girls I loved only you.

  Upstairs in the small neatly furnished room allotted to me lying on the bed that felt as if it were floating over a river. So grateful to be alone, my tears wetted the pillow.

  Hours passed. Might’ve been days. Or no time at all.

  There came a timid knocking at a door. A woman begging please, could she speak with me?

  Pulled the covers over my head. So that I could see Mr. Sandman more clearly. So that I could hear him more clearly.

  At last the timid knocking ceased. Whoever was outside the door had gone away and left me alone with Mr. Sandman.

  “Dirty Girl”

  UNCLE OSCAR WHO’D NEVER BEEN MY UNCLE. AND NOW, never would be.

  The almost-tenderness between us when we’d leafed through the little book of math puzzles together had vanished utterly in the wake of revelations about Mr. Sandman and the (drugged) girl student (who happened to be me) (who happened to be living under Oscar Allyn’s roof as a pseudo-adopted-daughter).

  Staring at me when Irma wasn’t in the room. Tongue poking between wormy moist lips. You dirty girl.

  The Stalker: 1997

  AT THE 7-ELEVEN, A DISPLAY OF BRIGHTLY PACKAGED VIDEO games. Their titles were Stalker, SWAT Team, Murder 1, Grand Theft Auto, No Mercy, Nuke!

  On the cover of Stalker was a digitally produced likeness of a young hawk-faced man with a shaved head, glaring eyes and flaring nostrils, an angry mouth that resembled my brother Lionel’s mouth. Or was it the look of steely hatred in the eyes that made me think of my brother.

  In the young man’s bloody hands, a large machete dripping blood.

  Coming to get you, rat. Rat-cunt.

  Nowhere you can hide.

  QUICKLY I RETREATED, FEELING FAINT. WHATEVER I’D INTENDED to purchase at the 7-Eleven, I left without purchasing it.

  My heart was beating rapidly, cold sweat oozed down my sides. The last news I’d had of my brother had been from Katie, the previous week—Lionel is up for parole on Monday. We didn’t even know about it until now! Mom has been praying. Thought I’d better warn you, Vi’let.

  “You Are Not Wanted”

  AND THEN, WHEN I RETURNED HOME AUNT IRMA WAS ON THE phone.

  I could not bear to overhear. Terrified of learning that my brother had been paroled.

  He’d been in the facility at Marcy for five years by this time. Not quite as long as Hadrian Johnson had been dead.

  Both of us: incarceration.

  Yet Lionel was still young: twenty-two.

  And I was still young: seventeen.

  Upstairs in my room. Threw my textbooks onto my bed. Pressed my hands against my ears. For it seemed to me that Aunt Irma would call to me up the stairs Good news, Violet! Lionel has been paroled.

  Katie had told me how hopeful the family was. Thousands of dollars had been spent on appeals without results but Daddy refused to give up—if there wasn’t the likelihood of a new trial or a commutation of sentence for Lionel there was the possibility of parole for “good behavior.” Lionel had been taking courses in the prison, he’d earned his high school equivalency diploma. He’d “kept out of trouble”—unlike his older brother Jerome Jr. who, it was said, was covered in lurid tattoos, a member of the Aryan Brotherhood whose prison sentence had been extended by another six years for participating in the near-fatal beating of another inmate.

  In the facility at Marcy the Kerrigan brothers did not see each other. They’d been purposefully separated, in different parts of the prison. Jerome was considered the more dangerous, as Jerome was the older, the one believed to have committed the murder, and now a member of a white racist gang; Lionel had been (only) an accomplice.

  Trying to think in hopeful terms: Lionel was not a murderer, Lionel was (possibly) reforming in prison. (Reformed? Re-formed? Was that the idea of a penitentiary? Was re-formation actually possible?)

  Trying to reason that, if Lionel were released on parole, he would do anything in his power to avoid being sent back to prison.

  He would not threaten his sister. He would not hurt his sister . . .

  On the phone Katie had said, meaning to be encouraging—If Lionel gets out, he’s paroled back here. Back home. It would violate parole if he left South Niagara, I think. I mean, I think so. The lawyer was telling us. If, like, he tried to—well, you know—find you, in Port Oriskany.

  Even if he tried to contact you, I think. Any kind of—threat. Or—whatever.

  One of the terms of the parole would be he kept a distance from you. Didn’t try to contact you. Didn’t leave town.

  Did you know, they can do that? It’s what parole is—parole for “good behavior.”

  Trying to convince myself that my brother, having served time for manslaughter, had an investment in good behavior.

  It was not often that Katie called me. Helplessly I’d listened to her voice. At such times my loneliness was greatest for when we hung up the silence would be overwhelming.

  Whatever I wished my sister to say to me, it was not said.

  And Miriam whom I adored, Miriam who’d once been so loving to me—she rarely had time to call. Married now, with a young child, living in Albany, New York, where her husband worked as a chemical engineer.

  Miriam was ashamed of the Kerrigans, it was said. She’d urged her husband to get a job in a city far enough away from South Niagara that no one would associate her with the Kerrigan brothers who’d beaten a black boy to death with a baseball bat or the “controversial” politician Tom Kerrigan who stirred racial anxieties and animosities in his (successful) campaign for a state assembly seat.

  Miriam felt sorry for me, I’d been told. Maybe a little guilty. Intended to invite me to spend time with her in her new life in Albany, soon.

  Neither Katie nor Miriam had said anything to me about Arnold Sandman. No communication except the get well cards.

  Anything to do with sex, we were shy to speak of. Sometimes when there are no words, that is best.

  I wondered what the relatives thought of me now. That girl, Violet! Who’d ratted on her own brothers, got them sent to prison. Sent away by her parents to live with relatives in Port Oriskany where she was abused by a teacher in some unspeakable way.

  For shame! Lucky the pervert didn’t kill her.

  “Violet? Come here”—at last, there came Aunt Irma’s wavering voice from the foot of the stairs.

  By this time I was badly trembling. I had tried not to listen to the one-sided conversation below. Whoever had called Irma had done most of the talking; Irma had murmured in agreement, little exclamations of surprise, sympathy. As I descended the stairs slowly I saw that my aunt was looking grave and I dared to think that the news could not be good—that is, Lionel could not have been paroled. “Such sad news, Violet. Your grandfather Kerrigan has died.”

  My grandfather! For a moment my mind was blank.

  “. . . would have been eighty-eight years old in just a week. Of course, he’d been ill for a long time, poor man . . .”

  Irma spoke solemnly. Probably she hadn’t glimpsed my father’s querulous father in many years, and (probably) she’d been my mother’s confidante, in Mom’s bitter complaints about the old man who’d come to live with us when I was a little girl, in an addition to the house at the rear that Daddy had built for him.

  Grandpa Kerrigan—“Joseph Kerrigan”—had never remembered my name. “Mir’um?”—he’d stare at me, frowning. And Mom would say, careful not to seem to be correcting him, “That’s ‘Violet,’ Dad.” Grandpa would continue to stare rudely at me as if assessing the name, or me; but next time, he’d have forgotten.

  He’d been a handsome man many years before. In old photos, he’d resembled Daddy with stiff dark hair lifting from his forehead, heavy eyebrows, an “Irish look”—it was said of all the Kerrigan men. But now Grandpa’s face had slid downward. Folds of flesh hung beneath his chin. He rarely shaved, whiskers sprouted from his jaws at crazed angles like wires. And he’d become smelly: menthol, tobacco, whiskey, soiled clothing, unwashed feet. That particular dark, sour smell that made me gag, the odor of dentures not kept clean.

  Miriam was his favorite granddaughter—the pretty one. As a young girl she’d known to squirm away from Grandpa as he ran his hands over her body, disguising her revulsion by giggling. Grandpa hadn’t liked it when he teased me by tugging at my hair and I’d shrieked and flinched away like a cat.

  And Mom, he’d ordered around like a servant, barely remembering her name—“Hey: Loo-loo.”

  Sometimes he’d winked lewdly at her—“Hey: Missus.”

  I’d wondered what it might be, to be so old that you neither knew nor cared who people were. Like a container filling up, and beginning to spill over. Unlike other, older persons in the family Grandpa Kerrigan made no effort to be “nice”—he didn’t give a damn if you liked him or not.

  Daddy had never gotten along well with his father he referred to as the old sod. Both father and son were short-tempered and thin-skinned, too much alike.

  Yet, Daddy had insisted upon bringing his father home to live with us when Grandpa became too arthritic and forgetful to live by himself in the falling-down house in Niagara Falls where Daddy had grown up. His wife, our grandmother, had died before I’d been born. In the family it was said that Grandpa had worn her out, he’d bullied and beaten her, yet after her death he grieved for her and drank heavily. Quarreled with his children, became belligerent, paranoid. He’d had an old feud with his cousin Tommy Kerrigan, couldn’t say enough crude obscene things about the politician of which the mildest was “God-damn cocksucking crook.”

  My sisters and I had had to help Mom clean Grandpa’s room. And Grandpa’s bathroom. Trying not to get sick to our stomachs. If we complained too much Mom lost patience and screamed at us—What about me? You will help me God damn you.

  But no one could complain to Daddy about Grandpa.

  Fortunately for us Grandpa spent most of his time in his room listening to ranting talk radio or watching TV; he didn’t care to eat with us though Mom prepared all his meals. Nights he fell asleep in front of the blaring TV, plates and cutlery encrusted with food, emptied ale cans, whiskey bottles on the floor at his feet in filthy carpet slippers. He hadn’t set foot in a church in decades—yet, officially, Grandpa was still Roman Catholic and would require a solemn high mass and burial in the St. Matthew’s cemetery which was hallowed ground.

  I smiled, remembering. The clatter of Grandpa’s whiskey bottles in the big green trash container one of us (usually one of my brothers, but sometimes me) would have to roll out to the curb for Friday trash pickup . . .

  “Violet, what? Is something funny?”

  Aunt Irma who was easily shocked, was shocked.

  Often it happened, I smiled when a smile wasn’t appropriate. Or, I didn’t smile when a smile would’ve been appropriate.

  At seventeen, I wasn’t a young girl. Not in my soul. No one messed around with me at school, I’d acquired something of the swagger of my older brothers serving time at Marcy. The taunts had long vanished. Ugly rumors of what the “pervert” math teacher had done to me back in ninth grade may have circulated but I knew nothing about them.

  With adults I was careful not to offend. I was polite, “mature.” Unfailingly I gave the impression of being cooperative. I had absorbed from Mr. Sandman the fact—(I didn’t doubt it was a fact)—that persons in positions of power want you to agree with them no matter what they say and that is all they want—agreement, acquiescence. The adults of the world controlled so much of my life, I could not make enemies of them.