When she finally came round she did not ask where she was. She said her arms hurt, and could she go back to sleep.
“She ran herself into the ground at school,” Lazlo said. “They do.”
And my husband said very nearly the same thing that night at the kitchen counter.
More or less word for word. The same phrase about running herself into the ground.
I noticed that. I noticed it standing right there with a dish in my hand. And then I told myself I was being ridiculous and I put the dish away.
“Kids get tired, Nadia. You don’t have to treat every single thing like an emergency.”
It happened again eleven days later. Then again the week after that.
And then I started finding the marks.
Inside her elbow. Both arms.
A line of four of them going up the left one, each at a different stage of healing, which is the detail I could not get out of my head in the bath that night.
And one across the top of her back, the size of my own thumb, that she did not know was there until I touched it and she jumped.
And I asked that child about it carefully, the way all the reading tells you to.
No leading. No names in the question. Just: tell me about this one, baby.
“Mommy, I don’t know. I remember getting in Uncle Lazlo’s car.”
“And then what, baby?”
“Then nothing. Then I’m here.”
A seven-year-old does not say then nothing about four hours of her own afternoon.
They make something up. They tell you about a dog they saw out the window.
They do not hand their own mother a blank and then ask what’s for dinner.
I took her downstairs that night in her pajamas with the sleeve pushed up past the elbow.
“She’s blacking out and she’s coming home bruised. Rick, look at this.”
And my husband looked at our daughter’s arm for about two seconds without putting the remote down.
“She’s seven. She falls over.”
“That is not a fall.”
“You’re talking like she’s dying. She gets tired and she bangs into things.”
“I want to take her in.”
And that is the moment I should have understood everything, and I have gone over it about a hundred times since.
Because Emeric Varga did not say all right, if it makes you feel better.
