SUBTITLES
by Jackie Shannon-Hollis
The cord on your phone is cut straight and neat. There are two small nicks higher up on the cord where he tried the knife, but that's not where he cut through.
You call your mother from a neighbor's apartment. You don't know the neighbor. She saw the police cars and the uniforms and the detectives coming in and out of your apartment. She saw you taken away in the shorts and t-shirt that you put on after. She saw you dropped back off, in the blue hospital scrubs they gave you when they put the shorts and t-shirt in a plastic bag for evidence.
You don't know your neighbor so you don't tell her what happened. You want to. You're in the habit now of telling strangers. It only happened this morning, but you've already told five. The policeman in uniform was first. You told the doctor at the hospital. There was a nurse there too and someone from the police to look for fingerprints on your skin, pluck your dark hair, comb for hairs that weren't yours, scrape under your nails, take pictures with a Polaroid. You were a crime scene. And you told the detective in the police station. She wore a brown suit and sat with you at a gray metal desk that she shared with another detective who brought you coffee.
You sit on a plaid ottoman by the end table where the neighbor pointed to the phone. The neighbor steps outside for a cigarette. She's just outside the door, which she left open. She leans back against the wall with one foot up and her head tilted to let the smoke flow from her lungs and up to the sky.
The sky is blue. It's spring. It's warm in the sun and cool in the shade. It could be a perfect day. It could be the kind of day to take your books and your mesh lawn chair and set up by the front door in a slice of the sun. It could be the kind of day where you mean to study for finals but instead you just stretch your legs out and rest in the sun.
You call the number to the farm. It's been the same number all your life. You know it'll be your mother who answers and not your father because he never answers, especially when your mother's home, and she'll be home on a Sunday afternoon. You always call on Sundays.
The smoke from the neighbor's cigarette comes in and you want one of your own. You set the receiver in your lap and clasp your hands. You rest your elbows on your thighs and your hands on your knees. The receiver is in the triangle made by your stomach and your arms. The dial tone is small. You practice the words without saying them. The words are like subtitles, lined up under the pictures of what happened: A man broke in, I was raped, a man broke in, I was raped, a man broke in, I was raped. You wish your mother could read the subtitles.
Your mother answers from the only phone in the old farmhouse. The farmhouse is where you grew up and where you lived until the end of last summer. The phone is next to the big picture window. Outside that window are the fields and the barn and the picket fence and the sidewalk and the porch.
You say, "Mom?" in a question, the same way you always do. Before she answers you say, "It's me," like you always do. Just now she doesn't know anything is different than any other Sunday afternoon when you always call.
She says, "Oh, hi," like it's a surprise, like she doesn't expect you to call. She doesn't expect anything from you, except that you be in college. "You have to go to college," she'd told you. You were in your last year of high school when she said that. You were in the nook at the kitchen table and she was mixing cake batter. She held the bowl in the circle between her arm and her side. She used a wooden spoon to beat the batter, counting. "You're the smartest," she'd said and picked up her count, four beats past where she left off.
When you call, your mother is by the picture window. The swallows have been darting in and out of the porch. They come back every year to build their mud nests in the crook of the porch. Maybe this year she won't fight them. Maybe she won't put up the strips of plastic to scare them or use a broom to knock away what they start. Maybe this year she'll leave them be. Either way, their nests will grow and by the time there are eggs, she'll have given up.
You say, "Something happened." And her breath doesn't change yet, but you know it will and you wish she read subtitles. You wait and have a small breath, and you think you hear something, her sigh or the sound of the swallows. You say, "A man broke in," and the breath your mother takes is big and sudden. The subtitles fade out.
"Oh no," she says because she doesn't yet know what else. The subtitles and their pictures fade back in and there are more than before. But the only ones you say are, "I was raped."
The neighbor's cigarette lasts just as long as the call. What you tell your mother takes just minutes even though what happened took hours. You tell your mother not to come.
"No," you say, "I'm okay." And you stand back up and lean over the phone, already moving the receiver away from your ear. "There's nothing to do," you say.
#
Your mother waits a week to tell your father because once he said he didn't know if he could stay married to her if she was raped. She was a virgin when they married. But you're his daughter, not his wife. You are far from a virgin and you hope he knows that.
In a class last fall you read that in some places they kill a woman who is raped. Small villages, daughters of farmers, dark-haired girls. If she's gone and had sex outside of marriage, she's dishonored the family. It doesn't matter if she didn't say yes, it doesn't matter if it was in the fine dawn of a spring morning and she was still asleep and a man, a man she didn't know, was over her bed with a knife from her kitchen and a stocking over his head. It doesn't matter that he pressed that knife into her side, not cutting, just saying, in a fast hard whisper, "Shut up shut the fuck up if you don't do what I say I'll kill you." It doesn't matter if you think, do what he says, and you do, in the gray light that comes in from the window onto the alley behind your apartment.
During that week you wonder why your father hasn't called. During that week you go to your classes because that's why you're here, in the city, to go to college, to get your degree, because you're the smartest and you won't waste it.
During that week the detective comes by. She wears her brown suit. She says, "I thought I'd check in with you, see how you're doing." She sits on your couch and you sit in the chair next to it. She hopes you've remembered something that can help find him. "We don't know who he is," she says. "But you're part of a pattern of a guy who's been doing this." She buttons her jacket and says, "The way you look, how long he stayed." She runs her thumb in a circle on one of the buttons. "What he said to you." Subtitles: Where's your money. Fucking bitch. I'm going to fuck you. Touch yourself. I'll kill you. The detective says, "We think he watches first." She leaves a card with a counselor's name.
During that week you throw the card for the counselor into the trash can in the kitchen. The next time you put something in the trash there's the black and white lettering: rape crisis victims' assistance. You empty your ashtray into the trash can. You take the trash out to the green bin with the heavy lid. The trash spills into the bin in a papery swish, the lid lands solid.
After a week, your mother finally tells your father because they live in a small town and, even though you're in a city three hours away, word will get back. She tells him in the morning.
During that week you've replaced the phone cord. You've planned to move to a different apartment. You've cleaned your apartment every day. You still find fingerprint dust on the insides of cupboard doors and baseboards.
Your father calls. His voice has a low sound, a slowness you aren't used to. "Babe?" he says. "You okay?"
"I'm okay." The way he asks it you have to be, for him.
Your father is at the picture window. The wheat in the fields is coming to green. The swallows have finished a nest in the corner of the porch and mud drops dot the side of the house below the nest. Your father wonders whatever happened to the martins, with their big yellow breasts, that used to nest in the yard when you kids were young.
Before now you've never heard violence in your father. He won't even kill the chickens he keeps for eggs and fryers. One of your brothers swings the axe. But his voice stops its breaking when he says, "I'd like to kill him. Get my gun and your brothers and come shoot the bastard."
There are no subtitles, just an easing of the tightness in your chest, the way you've held your breath, the way you've been trying to just get on. There are no subtitles but there's this, like from a Western: Your father and your two brothers walking shoulder-by-shoulder, felt-brim cowboy hats pulled low, long guns held down to their sides and almost hidden in the folds of their drover coats. Your posse.
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