Getting Somewhere (15 page)

Sarah is keeping her eyes closed, but she can't stop the tears that have started to leak from the corners. She collapses into Donna's embrace, her own arms folded against her chest, sobs quietly, periodically saying, “I'm sorry, I'm so sorry.”

Donna is methodically patting Sarah's back, doesn't say anything. Eventually, Sarah backs up to see Donna's face, is relieved that there is no anger there. Sympathy, maybe pity, but no anger. When Sarah falls back to the pillow, she turns her face to the window, and Donna immediately sets to work, pouring hydrogen peroxide onto the washcloth and daubing at the crusty sores on Sarah's stomach, applying a bit more pressure to the angry red ones, the places blistered with pus. She spreads the antibiotic ointment over the entire area, then folds a piece of gauze over it, securing the edges with tape. Donna goes to the bathroom and returns with a glass of water, which she sets on the floor beside her bowl, then taps out two pills from each of the bottles, one analgesic and the other, Sarah guesses, antibiotic.

“We're just going to have to keep an eye on this. I don't know if it's the infection that's making you sick or something else. Obviously, you have a fever, which would mean a pretty severe infection so, even though it's weird to say, I'm kind of hoping you have the flu or something. I know you don't want to go to the hospital, and I don't want you to either. I'm thinking we can give this one more day. If you're not better, I mean really better, by Sunday morning, we're going to have to do something else like call a doctor. If you want me to call her right now, I will. Do you want me to?”

Sarah shakes her head. “I don't want to call the doctor.”

“Okay. I didn't figure you did. Either way, we had to get this cleaned up, try to lower the fever. If you start feeling worse, though, you have to promise you'll say something. Will you?”

Sarah is nodding slightly. “Yes.”

“This is probably a stupid question but why didn't you tell someone?”

Sarah is quiet for a while. She's not sure if Donna means tell someone she's sick or about the cutting. She just mutters, “I don't know.”

“You don't know why you are doing it, or you don't know why you didn't tell someone when it got bad?”

Donna is talking about the cutting. “I don't know. Both. Neither.”

“I guess maybe you're not used to having someone to tell, huh?”

Sarah turns toward Donna. “I guess not.”

“But now you do. Do you know that?”

Sarah starts to cry again, but she is nodding.

“Do you mind if I lie down here with you?”

Sarah's eyes are big but she is shaking her head no. She scoots her body over, turns to the middle, and Donna lies beside her, lifts her arm above Sarah's head until the girl has moved her head onto Donna's shoulder, and pulls her arm tight around her.

“Can you talk about it?”

Sarah is quiet for a long time, worries that her tears are trickling down Donna's arm, making a wet spot on her shirt.

Finally, Sarah says, “I don't really understand it myself. It's stupid, I know, but it's like being here makes me scared, more scared than I was even on the street. And I like it, that's the thing. I like you guys and I like the farm. I mean, I think I actually love the farm, and something about that makes me really scared. Like, if I like it too much, everything before won't be real, my friends and the street will just get erased and I'll lose everything that's me.”

Sarah studies her hands for a moment and then lifts her eyes to Donna's face. “You probably think I'm ridiculous but sometimes it feels just like at the Center when I was still coming down, like it actually feels like real falling and I have to stop it before I hit the bottom. I just think maybe I don't belong here like maybe it would be great for someone else but not for me. I just need . . . I don't know”—and her laugh comes out as a half cry—“what do I need?”

Donna waits until Sarah's breathing is even again, then says, “I don't think you're ridiculous at all. I'm not going to pretend I know very much about drug addiction, but it seems pretty obvious that the effects are not going to disappear just like that.” She snaps her fingers.

“What do you mean?”

“I just mean that whatever you're feeling is real. If something is driving you nuts, making you feel anxious or whatever, there's pretty much always a good reason for it. If you're judging yourself, you know, thinking that you should be feeling different, then the feelings are just going to have to get stronger to make you pay attention to them. The drugs were a way for you to feel better and the . . . cutting”— Donna hesitates as if the word is hard to say, somehow profane and uncomfortable to voice out loud—“the cutting is the only way you have now, the only resource you've learned to rely on that's still available to you.”

“What do you mean by a resource?”

“Like a tool.”

“A tool?”

“Yeah. You know, like if you've always used a screwdriver to clean your nails, a fingernail clipper is going to seem pretty inadequate.”

Sarah giggles a little but becomes quickly serious. “So, cutting is like using a screwdriver to clean your nails?”

Donna nods. “Kind of. I mean, cutting is the wrong tool for the job, but it's not like the job doesn't still need to be done.”

“What job?”

“Well, that's what you have to figure out. You know, just because something is good for you doesn't mean it's not stressful, too. This place, it's like a challenge. It gives your body everything it needs so you can focus on giving your heart and mind what they need, too. Facing those needs can get pretty scary sometimes.”

“What do you mean by what my heart and mind need? How do I figure out what they need?”

Donna twists a piece of Sarah's hair between her fingers, thinking. She asks, “Do you hate when I tell you stories?”

Sarah smiles. “No. Do you have one for this?”

“Have you ever heard the story of Rapunzel?”

“You mean like the girl in the tower with the long hair?”

“Uh-huh.”

“I guess. I mean, that's all I really remember. A witch puts her up there, right, sort of like Snow White, jealous of her beauty or, no, maybe like she wants to hide her so she doesn't get the kingdom or something. I don't know. A prince rescues her, right? That's the way all those stories end. Drives me nuts.”

Donna laughs. “Me too. Or that interpretation anyway. But there's another way to think about it. Can I tell you?”

“Sure.”

“Well, I don't know if you've ever heard this, but they say that a lot of times the figures in a dream come in threes, and all the people in it are really different parts of yourself. Have you ever heard that?”

“No.”

“Well, it can be true of fairy tales, too. So, in the Rapunzel story, that would mean that the witch and the girl and the prince are all the same person. When you think about it that way, then you can start imagining that what the witch does to Rapunzel is the same kind of thing that we sometimes do to ourselves. When we're afraid, especially of our own power, our ‘beauty,' so to speak, we hide it away somewhere because we have been taught that if we think of ourselves as good or special or unique, that's bad and it might hurt someone else. Do you know what I mean?”

“Um, I guess. Or it could be that sometimes girls think that a certain kind of beauty is all they have, like the only thing that makes them worthwhile and that ends up hiding everything else about them that might be good or powerful?”

“Exactly. But the idea is not to see a part of you as evil but as, well, just that, a part of you. So, we have the girl hiding herself away for whatever reason, right?”

“Right.”

“And then the prince comes along. That's her, too, right? That's the part of her that she doesn't believe she has but is curious about, tempted by or whatever. Lots of times, that part is represented by the male figure.”

Sarah is nodding. “You're saying this prince is her, too, maybe the part of her that's kind of adventurous or willing to fight for stuff, that sort of thing.”

“Yep. And in some versions of the story, when the witch finds out that the prince has been in the tower with Rapunzel, she goes ballistic and strikes him blind.”

“Oh, I don't think I ever heard that part.”

“No, I don't know if that's in the kid versions most people know or not. But it's kind of the whole point of the story. He's blind and goes stumbling back through the forest. Of course, he can't see to get himself home or to get food or anything so he's dying. Rapunzel finds out about it and has to get down from the tower and uses her hair to do it. Right?”

“Yep. That's the part everybody knows.”

“Uh-huh. And then, she's out there in the forest searching for the prince. She finally finds him lying on the ground just about dead. She leans over him and her tears are dripping into his eyes and guess what?”

“Her tears heal him and make him see again.”

“Yep.”

“What do you think that's supposed to mean?”

“You tell me.”

“Well . . .” Sarah is quiet for a bit, thinking. “I guess it's like she had a really hard time of things for a while, but then her grief was the thing that actually could heal her.”

“Whoa, woman, you are good at this. That's fantastic.”

Sarah can feel Donna smiling.

“Why is it so fantastic? And don't say, ‘You tell me.'”

Donna snickers. “Okay. If the grief is healing, you can't just pick and choose which things to grieve about. You have to accept all of it. The part of you that's the prince is insisting that you tell the whole story, the whole true story. You can't be blind to any of it or you won't survive or you'll just be stuck in that tower forever, living a life that's designed for you by other people, along with all the things that hurt you in the first place. So, you climb down, even if it's dangerous, even if you have to cut off your hair, even if the part of you that's a witch is going to accuse you of all the horrible things you can think to call yourself, and you go searching in the woods until you find what is making you blind, whatever it is that's stopping you from seeing yourself and loving yourself. It's not about getting the guy at the end. It's about finding and loving and forgiving yourself.”

“What if what you've done is so bad it can't be forgiven, like, you've sort of become the witch?”

Donna pulls back from Sarah and stares down at her for a few seconds, shakes her head a little, and sighs.

“Sarah, there isn't anything that can't be forgiven. Nobody is just the witch. They're also the girl in the tower. And the prince.”

“Okay, but how do you know what you need in the end? How do you decide that?”

“You don't, really. You just do the steps with your eyes wide open. You can imagine Rapunzel trapped in a tower as a terrible thing, but you can also imagine how much better she can see from up there than if she'd been down on the ground the whole time. If she hadn't suffered, if she hadn't ever met her prince self, if she hadn't cried, even if she hadn't been blind for a while, she wouldn't understand how important it is to see, to make a new life.”

Sarah is up on her elbow now, studying Donna. “Where did you learn all this?”

Donna smiles at Sarah. “I like to read about this sort of thing. I thought for a while I wanted to go to Europe and study at an institute where they train you to help people with these kinds of stories and ideas.”

“Why didn't you?”

“I don't know. Trapped in a tower, I guess.”

Donna sits up and begins to gather her things. She turns to Sarah, touches her shoulder.

“Sarah?”

“What?”

“Can you give them to me?”

Sarah slowly gets up and goes over to her dresser, lifts the messy pile of underwear, stands for just a moment staring in. There are two wads of tissue stuffed in the far back corner, and Sarah reaches in, fingers one then pushes it aside, takes out the other and carries it in her palm to Donna. Donna pulls the edges apart and reaches in for a small box, about the size of a matchbook. Donna stares for a moment at the object, an ancient container of two-sided razor blades, the edges and bottom of the box rusty, a few tiny clumps of what look to be balls of grass or hay or dust jammed into the cracks.

She looks up at Sarah.

“These things are, like, a hundred years old,” she says, incredulous.

Sarah shrugs contritely. “I found them in the tool box in the barn when Grace sent me in there to get a hammer to put in the tomato stakes.”

Donna is still staring at the box. “Did you even wash them . . . ?”

Sarah is looking at the floor. “I guess I didn't . . .”

Donna is biting her lip, takes a deep breath, but before she utters the first word, Sarah interrupts. “I will, I promise.”

Donna isn't taking any chances. “You will what?”

“I'll . . . come to you. I'll talk to you before I do anything again. I promise. I won't . . . I won't do it anymore.”

Donna gets up and puts her arms around Sarah, the razor blades still in her hand.

“You can't control the feelings. They don't make you bad. You just have to know what to do when you get them. We all have those same feelings, different ways of coping with them.”

She holds Sarah away from her. “I just want to help you to find ways that don't hurt you, okay?”

Sarah nods, thinking of the other wad of tissue, thinking that, with all Donna knows, it's kind of funny and a little sad that she doesn't know the right things, can't even recognize when somebody is high.