Listen

We are sitting in the medical office, cozy in the back corner of the Child Advocacy Center.  She is curled up on the oversized exam chair with her feet tucked up underneath her, staring out into the hallway at nothing.

A few minutes earlier, she’d asked the Child Forensic Interviewer if she could have a break from the “talking room,” walked straight into the bathroom, and vomited for five minutes straight.

She’s eight years old.

I let the silence rest over us, lightly, like a gossamer veil.  There’s no rush right now.  Her auntie and little sister are watching a movie in a different room.  The investigator and child protective worker are sitting in the conference room with the CFI, waiting to see if the little girl in front of me is willing to continue the interview.

She glances down and sees the tattoos on the fingers of my left hand.  “What do those letters mean?” she asks in her almost-whisper.

I lift my hand to look at it.  D.  M.  D.  R.  “It means ‘Dear Mother, Do Remember,’” I tell her, moving my hand closer to her.  “My mom died, and I miss her a lot, and this is one of the ways I tell her that.”

She looks away again.  “My mom died, too.”  This time is it a whisper.

I nod.  “Do you miss her a lot, too?”

She nods in return.

“Was she a good mom?”

“Yeah.”  There’s no hesitation.

“She must have loved you very much.”

“Yeah.”

She drifts back into her thoughts again, and we sit in silence for a few more minutes.

I knew about her mother.  I also know that her mother froze to death in the snow after passing out outside in the middle of the night last winter.

I have no idea if this little girl knows that part.  But she probably does.

She suddenly jumps up and runs to the window in the hallway.  “Helicopter!”  She’s right; she heard it before I did.  “I love helicopters.”  She comes back to the chair and sits down again.

“I do, too,” I say.  “Have you ever been in a helicopter?”

She shakes her head.

“But you’ve been in an airplane, right?”

She nods.  She and her aunt and sister got on a plane yesterday, and flew over the tundra from their village, where there are no roads to anywhere, to our town, where are no roads to anywhere either.  The logistics involved in bringing children in for these critical interviews are mind-boggling.

*

The helicopter gives me an idea.  I take a deep breath.  I’ve got one shot at this.

“You know when you get in the airplane and it takes off?”  She nods.  “How does your tummy feel when that happens?”

She thinks for a second.  “Like it’s big.  Like it’s got air in it.”

I nod.  “Does it sometimes feel like butterflies?  Like you’ve got airplane sick?”

She nods again.

“When you had to come to this building, to come to the talking room, did your tummy feel that same way?  Like big and full of butterflies?”

“Yes.”  She whispers this.  These kids know.  They know why they have to come here.  It scares them to their very souls.

I push on.  “And maybe sometimes the butterflies get worse when they ask you to talk about bad things?  Sometimes the butterflies are so so so bad that you wish you could pretend nothing bad is happening, so you don’t have to talk about it?”

She nods, and I let this sit for a moment.

“It’s easier to pretend, isn’t it.”  She doesn’t even need to answer me.  I asked the question already knowing the answer.

“I have an idea,” I say, and reach into a basket full of foam stress balls.  I take one and I hand her the other one.  She takes it from me curiously.  “Squeeze it, like this,” I say, and squeeze the ball ferociously and growl and squinch up my face.  She smiles and squeezes her stress ball as hard as she can.  “Again!”  I say, and we both squeeze together with all our might.

I look at her.  Her nails are a little too long, with dirt underneath, and her sweatpants are grimy and her sweatshirt has a stain on the front.  She lives in a house with 15 other people, and sleeps on a mattress on the floor with her sister, and sometimes it’s so cold in the winter that ice forms under the mattress.  There’s no running water in her village.

This stupid fucking country can put men on the moon, and spend millions of dollars on a red carpet event that everyone will forget within a week, and this beautiful, smart, shy and quiet child, who loves math and wants to protect her sister, has no running water in her home.

“Whenever they ask you to talk about a bad thing, a thing you don’t like talking about, a thing that makes your stomach hurt, I want you to squeeze the ball as hard as you can.  Squeeze all that hurt out from your tummy, out from your heart, out into your fingers, and into that ball.

“Do that every time you get ready to say something that you don’t like saying.  Every time.  Because if you squeeze the ball hard, and then say the thing, sometimes, sometimes, things can start to get better.”

She squeezes the ball again.  I hand her mine, as well.  “Now you have two.  Squeeze them both!”  And she does, and smiles a little.

I pause, then say, “Are you ready to try talking again?”

It is an eternity of waiting.  It is millions of years and thousands of miles, and the great ages of the earth pass roaring in my ears, because if she doesn’t share what we know is happening to her, everyone will go home and nothing will change and nothing will stop.

“Ok,” she says, and we get up and she walks back to the talking room.

I sit down in a different room, in front of the monitor, watching the interview on live video, listening to the audio feed through my headphones.  The investigator and the CPS worker are next to me.  Our eyes are glued on the image in front of us.

The CFI looks at the little girl, now curled up in a different chair.  “Can you tell me what happened, from the beginning?”

My eyes drop to her hands.

She squeezes the stress balls.  Hard.

And then she starts talking.

And everything comes out.

*

I spend time after the interview playing with the little sister, who is ablaze with energy and laughter and good humor and chattiness and could be the poster child for the facial features of Fetal Alcohol Syndrome.  I don’t know what services are available out here for FAS kids.  I don’t know if anything is available in her village.

I spend a long time listening to the aunt, sitting and weeping in front of a legal document that she’s going to sign, a piece of paper that will protect her niece but will rip another family in the village apart, and it is shredding her community and breaking her heart in a thousand different ways.

*

I leave two hours later. I have at least four or five hours of charting to do.

I go home instead.

I crawl into my bed and am instantly asleep.

I sleep for hours.

*

I wake up at 8:30pm, and it’s as light outside as it would be mid-day.  I reheat dinner and listen to an episode of the podcast “The Rest is History,” because the two middle-aged British hosts chatting about Napoleon somehow reminds me of my dad. 

I glance at my left hand.

I miss them both.

*

The first finishers of this years’ Iditarod will likely arrive in the middle of the night tonight, racing under the burled arch on Front Street.  My friends are participating in basketball tournaments, or in art shows at the church, or volunteering for the safety patrols that walk the temporarily busy night streets, pulling people out of dumpsters and snowbanks and getting them to the shelter.

I’ll be asleep.

Because there’s another interview tomorrow, another child and guardian flying in over the snow, coming to the Advocacy Center, another little girl sitting in the talking room, where the bad things are ripped from the shadows and the dark and face the chance for destruction in the thin arctic sunlight.

I couldn’t do your job, say my coworkers and my friends.

I think about helicopters, and mattresses frozen to an old wooden floor, and teams of dogs running and barking madly, joyfully, across the ice under a sky with blanketed with endless stars.

We all could do my job.

Because the heart of my job is simply to listen.

*