Tremors

It’s late, and every muscle in her body is tense. She is 13, maybe 15.

Looking back, she can never really remember how old she was at the time. Online forums will tell her trauma can ruin memory. Not the trauma itself, of course, but the repeated refusal to remember. After the initial trauma, a person can either ruminate or forget, or at least those were her choices. And, really, she didn’t have a choice at all. If she ruminated, she wouldn’t be able to live with herself, or with him.

As time went by -days first, then weeks and then months which stretched into years before she even knew it- she pushed the memory away again and again. Some days it was deliberate, but often it was a passive exercise, habit. Eventually, the details of the memory became harder to retrieve. What once felt so visceral was now hazy at the edges. Now, it was more like a hazy haunting, this memory. But damn, if only she could erase the ghost completely. Even as years passed, the stubborn thing sat in the peripheral of her vision, and whenever she least expected it, there would be a sudden clarity, a reminder, a jump scare, and she’d feel it like cold fingers at the base of her neck or a sharp ache in her heart.

When she was old enough, ready at last to confront the memory, she looked for the ghost, tried to force it forward by choice so she could look it in the eyes. It turned out to be the last insult he would give her, this ghost of a memory which had her flinching from kindness, from hands, from intimacy- it was a ghost so blurry she could no longer pin it down. Ghosts are scariest when you don’t know where they lurk or what they look like, and this ghost didn’t want to be confronted or exorcised. And so, it remained.

But for now, it’s late and its dark in Georgia, and she is somewhere between 13 and 16. She sits on her bed, hovering on the edge, and she is so young. He sits down next to her, a late-night visitor who looms so large in the darkness. From the kitchen light outside her open door, an orange glow is filters into the room and illuminates just enough to cast shadows.

She knows that wolf spiders live in the corners of her bedroom, where the shadows are darkest. She had found the curled-up carcasses of their predecessors while she cleaned, once. She thinks of them, their hairy and fragile little bodies, as he puts a hand on her knee and asks if she’ll hold up her end of the deal. She thinks about the spiders and the way that they encase their prey. It must feel good for a moment, all that pressure tight around the flies’ body. The knowing that there isn’t anything else you can do but give yourself over to the predator. For the fly, death is close and inevitable. It will succumb in the darkness, and never be unwrapped from the silk it’s trapped in. It doesn’t need to look its predator in the eye the next day and be told that it had a choice, that it had made the right one.

But she will. She will be cocooned tonight, violated in the cover of darkness. He will smother her with the heat of his body and greed, and she will be trapped, knowing that tomorrow she will be unwrapped and forced to present herself in the harsh light of day again, as if nothing had happened in the first place. The game of pretend is the hardest part for her young mind.

She knows what he is asking about when he asks about the deal. He had cornered her in the sunlight earlier that day, where she had been hovering over a fire ant pile, avoiding being inside with him for this very reason. He stood next to her and asked leading questions while she watched the ants work. The questions started innocently (they always did in those years, when she pretended to be ignorant) when he asked if she wanted a laptop. And she had entertained him (yes, I do she had said) in the desperate hope that the conversation wouldn’t go where it always did when they were alone. He asked what she would do for a nice laptop, nicer than her sister’s. He asked if she would let him do it to her again. She tried not to answer, tried to deflect. He wouldn’t let her. She thought about placing her hand in the pile to avoid telling him yes or no, but she was afraid of the pain. She was always afraid of the pain, damn her.

Now, in the dark of the night, she feels the weight of her choices pressing in on her just as the bed creaks and his hand slides further up her thigh. Her mother snores quietly through the wall between their rooms.

She will later learn that the term is “fawning”. A response to repeated, prolonged, complicated trauma. The idea that someone will attempt to appease their predator by pleasing or flattering them, in order to prevent harm. And later she will learn that she has to try and forgive herself (it’s hard to realize that autonomy was an illusion, that all of her guilt was for nothing) for her perceived obedience to this man, this predator. She will know that it was only a tactic for survival.

But she doesn’t know that now. She doesn’t know that he is 30 years her senior and that she never really had a choice. Yes, she knows that if she had said, “I want a laptop, but I would also like you to never fucking touch me again” that he would have punished her in some other way. She knows this, but her young mind still perceives it as a choice, as doing the easier thing. Because she never did like pain.

But then he touches her between her legs, and suddenly, for the first time, she thinks that she isn’t in a cocoon yet. She isn’t a fly. She looks at him and thinks that he is worse than the spider, that he is playing with his food. And suddenly all she wants to do is force him to make a choice.

“Why are you doing this?” The words are choked, slow, and every muscle in her body is twitching. This will linger into her adulthood, the tremors of her muscles in times of stress and how difficult talking will become when she feels high intensity emotions. It feels like there are tight fingers reaching into her throat and pinching it closed, right at the base of her tongue. All the words are there, but none of them want to come out.

She knows that he can feel her tremors, tries to suppress them, tries to seem strong (she is a child), with his hand still between her legs. She stares into the shadows, suddenly furious with him, suddenly patronizing in a way that she didn’t know she could be. She thinks he is weak and disgusting, a culmination of repressed feelings that can only come out as a simple, vague question. But still, it’ s more than she had ever done before, and she feels powerful in her rage. This feeling will linger for years. The sneer and the dismissal will become the basis of her confidence and this will make her a difficult person. She will have to remember that being kind and vulnerable is also a type of strength. It will be hard. This is another thing he left her, another ghost she will have to exorcise.

She is making him choose: acknowledge this is wrong and that you have the power here, or choose to be a coward, but know that I will remember your choice. She’s backed him into a corner, changed the dynamic for the first time. Attempted to exorcise the ghost of silence between them. Revealed that she isn’t as pliable as she pretends to be. He removes his hand and they both sit in silence. He leaves, and it feels like a victory. Even as her breath releases in a gust, and she collapses onto the bed with the remnants of tremors shaking through her, she knows it will not always go this way. She never does get that laptop, and she is relieved.

The ghost of this conversation will haunt her for years, vague and only sharp when she least expects it. It was the first time she can remember coming close to saying no, although it would not be the last, and the only time she ever asked him why. They lived together until she was 18, and even now (26 and still struggling with intimacy), she doesn’t know why he did it. She wishes he had answered her but knows that no answer would ever have been sufficient.

Years later, she sits up in bed, the ghost of memory brushing cold fingers down her neck. She keeps her room pitch black now, removing the possibility of shadows. She gathers her cat into her lap, listens to his sleepy purring while her trembling fingers stroke down his back. Instead of pushing away the memory, she fights instinct and tries to catch it. She wants to hold it until it feels real again, until it corporealizes into something she can look at head on. As awful as each ghostly memory is, she finds a little more of herself in each one she reckons with. Learns that she was brave and forgives her past self for choices that were never really hers to make. She thinks that maybe she will spend the rest of her life doing this. She hopes she can be as brave as she was that night all those year ago. She hopes.