49. Ambrose—age nine #2
But no one sees me like she does. Not the doctor with pity in his stare. Not Mom, sobbing hysterically at my side, rubbing her sweaty hands in a new-looking coat. Not Dad, who can no longer look at me.
Just Dollie…
When Mom pulls herself together, she asks, “Baby, do you know what happened to your brother?”
My gaze meets Dollie’s head-on.
Please, don’t tell them anything.
An understanding passes between us.
She nods, but it’s to me and not to Mom.
She says nothing to her, but she has something for my father, “I love you, Daddy, but I wanna be with Ambrose now.” She holds him for a quick few seconds before her arms fly out to me.
My actions mirror hers, arms stretched out and waiting for her tiny self to fill the space.
“I’m not sure that’s a good id—” Dad is cut off by Dollie screaming her last words again. And I grab her from his arms and pull her into my lap in the center of the bed.
Dad stands as if to take her away, and I shoot him a warning glance.
You are not taking her.
Mom steps across to his side with a suggestion that makes me thaw slightly at my parents’ presence. “Doctor, if he’s okay and she’s okay, is it a problem if they stay together while we talk? They’ve only had each other for so long.”
“We don’t know if he’s okay.” Dad’s head falls into his hands, and his body wracks with the light sobbing that comes from behind them.
“What does that mean?” Mom asks, her head snapping from Dad to my doctor, then back again. She places herself down on the arm of that old leather chair, waiting for someone to answer.
“I don’t know what it means.” Dad’s hands swipe his face before falling away from the red and flustered-looking sight. He lets out a big breath. “I’m sorry that things got a little chaotic, Doc. You were saying you’d like to run some tests.”
The doctor nods, and Mom repeats her last question as I lie back on a soft pillow. Guiding Dollie under the sheets, I put the edge in her hand, should she need any comfort. Her fingers don’t stay there. They move to my long hair, where the braid she’d perfected is long gone.
The doctor talks to Mom and Dad, Dollie’s chatter and songs for me, not stopping his efforts to continue this conversation.
Eavesdropping on the conversation the adults are having over her soothing noises, I close my eyes to the bright lights, and the abuse on my eyes stops again.
“It’s probably best that both parents are present anyway.”
Does the doctor know what happened to me? My blood runs cold. Why would he say that if he didn’t know?
I become more aware of the beeping machine at my side until a voice sounds above it—the one in my head.
Pat Dollie’s arm three times, and the doctor won’t say what you think.
My hand roams my sister’s arm with a light pat, pat, pat.
“It can’t be worse than what we see, though, right? I mean, he’s burned, he’s missing teeth, he has cuts and scars everywhere we can see!” Another tear rolls down Mom’s cheek.
The doctor takes a breath.
I glance at his name tag, feeling a bit weird that my mind still refers to him as ‘the doctor’, but his name is too long for me to work out how to say.
“When we changed the children’s clothes, Ambrose’s body showed severe signs of trauma.”
“He has scars in other places? Bruises? What?” Mom trembles. Dad tries to comfort her with his arm around her waist. It doesn’t work.
“I’m not referring to the scars, but there was bruising on his buttocks that seemed fitting with fingerprints. There was also some blood found on the inside of his shorts.”
“You think he was sexually assaulted?” Dad’s husky voice comes in, and I hear it over everything, even the voice in my head that’s still trying to convince me this conversation between my parents and the doctor won’t happen.
“I highly suspect he was.”
“No. No, he couldn’t have been. He couldn’t. He—couldn’t. That wouldn’t have happened to him. It wouldn’t have.” Mom’s cries pierce into my soul. Watching her over Dollie’s shoulder as she crumbles down to her knees on the floor.
There are too many tears on her pink cheeks for me to count.
It’s almost like she cares.
“Love.” Dad attempts to comfort her again, his hand smoothing through her newly dyed, darker hair, but his paling face stays on me with a look of shock I’ll never be able to scrub from my mind.
“We’d like to do a rape kit, and if that shows as positive, we will then test for any transmitted infections, including HIV.”
“HIV?” Mom’s cry is strangled, and I push myself up on the bed, Dollie still clinging to me as I look down on our mother.
She stares up at me, feeling everything I do and more because she understands what that means, and I don’t. “I’m sorry. Oh, God. I’m so sorry.”
“No, he can’t be prodded like that.” Dad shakes his head.
“What the fuck are you talking about!” Mom spins in a rush of dark hair, thrashing away to get his hand off of her. “We are doing this.” Her hands cover her face, muffling the words. “He is our son! How can you not want to know if something like that has happened to him?”
“Of course I do. But?—”
“There are no buts. We have already failed them. We are doing this. He needs this. Please, don’t fight me.”
“I can give you a minute to talk things through if you wish, but I urge you to agree with your wife.” My doctor takes a step back.
Dad’s tight smile returns.
I catch another sight of the police outside until the heavy door blocks them out with a loud thud.
“Gen…”
“I don’t want to hear it.”
“And I don’t want to have to have this conversation in front of the kids, but?—”
“No buts, Ronan! He is your baby, our son! They are thinking of testing him for HIV! Does that mean anything to you?”
“Of course, it does.”
“Then you understand that we have to do this. No matter what happens afterward. God, I want to walk out there to the police and tell?—”
Dad’s finger finds Mom’s lips and presses them closed, silencing her.
“Shhh… we can’t. They need us.”
Both Dad’s and Mom’s eyes move to me and Dollie on the bed, our arms tightly around each other.
I sit there silently because I have to, but my thoughts are loud.
We need no one but each other.