Unbreathed Memories

chapter 10

I hate to admit that I’m old enough to remember the good old-fashioned G.P. who sometimes made house calls. Nowadays, every doctor has a specialty. I swear I’ve got a doctor for every part of my body-my gynecologist, my surgeon, my oncologist, the ENT guy who once dug a plug of wax out of my ear. Most of the doctors I see in Annapolis have relocated from downtown to offices on Bestgate Road or out by the new hospital facility being built near Annapolis Mall. Consequently there had to be some sort of rule that the best plastic surgeon in the county had established her office in a 1970s-style office building on Route 2 halfway to Glen Burnie, a soulless, wall-to-wall corridor of strip malls, fast-food joints, and car dealerships.

I’d spent a restless night thinking about what I would say when I saw the doctor, but got up in the middle of the night and padded down to the basement to take another look at myself in the yellow bikini. Whatever it took, it was worth the price.

At Dr. Bergstrom’s the nurse ushered me into a small office with comfortable chairs and a large TV set on a mahogany credenza. I was glad I didn’t have to undress. Dr. Bergstrom had done all the examining and clinical photography on a previous visit; today I was supposed to have made up my mind about options. At first she had recommended a saline implant that would be pumped up with water every week, gradually expanding the tightened skin across my chest until it had stretched far enough to remove and slip a permanent implant underneath. I wasn’t particularly comfortable with the idea of carrying a foreign object around in my body. With my luck, I’d no sooner get it installed than the FDA would outlaw whatever it was they were using in place of silicone these days. I asked to see the introductory video again; about halfway through I decided on a free TRAM flap procedure. They’d take a mound of tissue and skin from my abdomen and transplant it to my chest. Sounded like good news/good news to me. Lose a chunk of stomach flab and gain a breast. Afterward, they’d do a bit of touch-up and tattoo a nipple on. My son-in-law, Dante, would get a kick out of that. I had never made any secret of my dislike for the elaborate tattoos that snaked up and down his arms.

The videotape ended and began to rewind automatically. I stared at the blue screen for a while, trying to relax. Eventually Dr. Bergstrom breezed into the room, her pink lab coat flying. She flipped on an overhead light and perched on the corner of the credenza.

“Well, Hannah. Made up your mind, or do you still have questions?”

“No, I’ve decided to go for the TRAM flap thing.”

She sprang to her feet. “Wonderful! I know you won’t regret it for a minute.” She beamed. “Except for the few days immediately after surgery, when you’ll be a little sore.”

I favored her with a half smile. “You’ll prescribe something for that, I trust.”

“Of course.” She laid one hand on the doorknob and handed me my folder. “Take this to the receptionist and she’ll make all the final arrangements.”

I took the folder from her outstretched hand, but didn’t move to leave. “Doctor?”

“Yes?”

“I’ve made up my mind to do this, I really have, and I know that we blocked out the date on your calendar, but because of some pressing family matters… well, what would be the possibility of postponing it for a couple of months?”

“Cold feet, Hannah?” Her smile was sympathetic. “We could put it off, of course, but I have to attend a medical conference in Helsinki in three weeks. My calendar is full. If we don’t do it now, it will be months before I can reschedule.”

“When would be the earliest?”

“You’ll have to check with Cindy, but not until May or June, I should think.”

May or June. It took three to four weeks to recover from a TRAM flap procedure. This meant my new body wouldn’t be ready in time for the summer sailing season. My vanity genes kicked in and I shrugged. “Might as well get it over with!”

“Good girl!” She laid a reassuring hand on my shoulder. “You won’t be sorry. See you in two weeks.”

Out in the reception area, I pushed my folder through the glass window that separated the cashier from the patients. I wrote a check for the day’s visit, cringing at the amount, and hoped that Blue Cross/Blue Shield wouldn’t give me any grief about the claim. After I paid, the cashier directed me to Cindy, who handed me a preprinted instruction sheet. On my way to the elevator, I scanned it. On Monday I’d stop taking aspirin because it thins the blood; a week later, I’d report to the hospital. Nothing for breakfast, the instructions said, not even black coffee. I pushed the elevator button. No coffee. Bummer. Maybe there was still time to change my mind.

I sat in the doctor’s parking lot with the engine running, turned the heat to high, and considered where to go next. If I turned right, I could go home, have a late lunch, and continue making cold calls to people who might or might not have been patients of Dr. Sturges’s. If I turned left, I could drive to Georgina’s, like I promised Daddy. Either way, I figured I was in for some abuse. People on the other end of the telephone can always hang up in your ear, but if I showed up on the doorstep at Georgina’s and rang the bell, I would be a little hard to ignore. I desperately needed to talk to my troubled and troublesome sister. If Dr. Sturges’s self-help group met at All Hallows, Georgina almost certainly would have been involved. And if so, she might be able to tell me a lot about the other patients.

I turned left.

Thirty minutes later, I had parked on Colorado Avenue and was standing on Georgina’s front porch, mashing on the doorbell with my thumb and admiring the stained glass in her neighbor’s dining room window. I pressed the bell again and could hear it echo from somewhere at the back of the house. Nobody home. I checked my watch. Three o’clock. I found myself hoping Georgina was out consulting a new therapist, but she was probably at the grocery store or taking the boys to a Cub Scout meeting. I sat on the porch steps, the concrete cold as ice through my slacks, and considered my options. I could wait here for Georgina, freezing my tush, or do a little retail therapy and get something to eat. I wasted a couple of hours at the Towson Town Center, annoying shopkeepers at the White House and Hecht’s by trying on clothes without actually buying anything, then, because Café Zen was on Belvedere only a couple of miles away, I took myself there and dawdled over a delicious veggie stir-fry. At six, I returned to Colorado Road, but before I laid so much as a toe on the porch, I knew no one was home. The curtains were still drawn, no lights shone from behind them, and Scott’s SUV wasn’t parked anywhere on the street. Shit! If I wanted to find out more about the group at All Hallows, I’d have to try the direct approach. It was Wednesday. In one hour it would be seven. The hell with Georgina. I’d simply join the group myself.

I remembered that All Hallows stood on the corner of West Melrose and Roland. I parked on Melrose and approached the building from the front. The double wooden doors were painted bright red. I jiggled the knob, but they were securely locked. I followed a concrete sidewalk around the side of the church to where another set of double doors led into a passageway that connected the south door of the church with the parish hall. I pulled on a brass handle and was relieved when it opened easily. Since I knew the church itself was locked, I turned right and passed through another doorway into the parish hall. It was so dark where I stood that I couldn’t even read my watch, but at the other end of the room slivers of light outlined three evenly spaced doors, all closed. I selected the one on the far left, pulled it open, and found myself in another dimly lit hallway, wondering vaguely if I hadn’t been walking around in circles. Making an educated guess, I turned left and strolled along the corridor past a number of offices with their doors closed. From an office near the end of the corridor, however, light spilled and I could hear a radio playing softly. Civilization!

When I appeared in his doorway, the occupant looked up, startled, his eyes round and gray over the tops of his glasses. Lionel Streeting, the Senior Warden. Since I’d last seen him at that organ concert, he’d traded in his slimy silver suit for one in gray-green polyester. Still a sartorial disaster.

“May I help you?” Lionel closed the folder he was studying and stood, checking me over, taking in my gray slacks, white turtleneck, and dark blue car coat. I must have passed inspection, because he nodded almost imperceptibly.

“I’m looking for the self-help group that’s meeting here tonight,” I said.

Streeting had been standing, rigid as a telephone pole, behind his desk, but he oozed around it, stopping just in front of me. “And you are…?”

“Hannah Ives.”

“Pleased to meet you. I’m Streeting.” The hand he extended was cold and slightly damp.

“They’re in the fellowship hall in the church basement.” He touched my elbow. “Here, let me show you.”

I preceded him out the door while he held it open with the flat of a broad, hairy hand. “I didn’t mean to interrupt your work,” I apologized. “Please. I’m sure I can find it myself.”

Streeting turned out his office light and pulled his door firmly shut behind him, checking to see if it was locked. “No, it’s no trouble. No trouble at all.” He leered at me, revealing long, impossibly white teeth. “Always like to be helpful.” At the end of the hall, he flipped a light switch that illuminated a stairway. “This way.” He bowed slightly and made a gallant sweep with his arm, indicating that I should go down ahead of him. I shuddered. Lionel gave me the willies. Particularly as I had no idea where he was taking me.

“I’m new to the group,” I said. And just in case he had mischief on his mind, I added, “They’re expecting me.”

I had reached the bottom step. Here the hallway smelled damply of cinder blocks and new paint. Marbleized tiles like black bowling balls covered the floor. Lionel did a little quick step to catch up with me. “I suppose you heard.”

“Heard what?”

“About the tragedy. Terrible. Terrible.” He wagged his head from side to side, his eyes clamped shut. “The woman who ran the group was murdered last week.”

“Really?” I stopped dead in my tracks and turned to look at him. “How perfectly awful! Is the meeting off, then?”

“Oh, no. No, no. I don’t think so. You’ll find some of the ladies already here.”

“Does the church sponsor the group?”

“We give them a place to meet, but we do the same for the Girl Scouts, Alcoholics Anonymous, and a mystery writers’ critique group, so we can’t be accused of playing favorites.” He chuckled dryly.

We were passing the church kitchen, whose stainless steel counters and appliances gleamed. I paused for a moment to consider a series of bulletin boards, where pictures of missionary couples and of members doing an inner city neighborhood cleanup were posted. Nearby, on a wooden rack, name tags of church members had been slipped into slots labeled with letters of the alphabet. In the C’s I touched my sister’s name tag.

Lionel noticed. “Our church organist,” he told me.

“Oh?” Good. He didn’t recognize me, then.

“Damn fine organist, but she plays too loudly.” He pointed to his right ear with a crooked index finger. “Used to come to these meetings regularly, but I haven’t seen her around for a while.”

“Maybe she felt she didn’t need the support anymore.”

“Maybe.”

I followed Lionel through another set of double doors into a narrow corridor lined with choir robes hanging on hooks. It opened into a brightly lit fellowship hall. Tables, their legs folded flat against their undersides, lay stacked one upon another at the far end of the room. At the other end, near a stage hung with limp, gold-trimmed maroon curtains, sat six women in folding chairs arranged in a circle. Two of the chairs were empty.

An attractive African-American woman in an electric blue business suit stood slightly apart from the others. Her eyes were swollen as if she’d been crying. I imagined she was grieving about the doctor, but she could just as easily have had a fight with her husband. Or suffered from allergies.

Lionel coughed discreetly and the chattering stopped. “Ladies!”

All seven heads swiveled in our direction. Lionel cleared his throat. “Ladies, this is Hannah Ives. She’s interested in joining your group.”

A tall woman with long, thick salt-and-pepper hair set against dark olive skin, heavily made up to mask old acne scars, rose to greet me. “Welcome, Hannah. I’m Joy Emerson and this is Toni, Claudia, Suzanne, Mindy, JoAnne, and Gwen,” she said, pointing at each of the women in turn.

I wondered if JoAnne was the J in J. S. Riggins, but nobody was offering any last names and I couldn’t very well ask.

“My friend, Georgina, told me about the group.”

“Really?” Joy extended her hand in my direction, palm up, indicating that I should take a seat. “I don’t believe she’s here tonight.”

“No,” I said simply.

I grinned and pointed at Toni. “Let’s see… that’s Toni and Claudia and Mindy-no, Gwen… Oh, Lord. I hope there won’t be a test in the morning!” I shook my head and plopped myself down into an empty chair next to Suzanne, the woman in the blue suit who was now repairing her makeup, applying glossy red lipstick to her mouth with a narrow brush.

Toni, who had been busily stuffing her purse under her chair, looked up. “It won’t take you long to get to know everyone.”

I was aware that Lionel, who had been loitering near the door to the kitchen, had finally left the room. When he was out of sight, Joy returned to her seat, sat down, and leaned forward, a hand on each knee. “I’m not a therapist, but I’ll be facilitating the group for the time being, Hannah. Georgina may have told you about our therapist…” She paused and took a deep breath. “Dr. Sturges was murdered. I still can’t believe it.”

I nodded, not looking directly at anyone. “I read about it in the paper.” To my right, JoAnne-or was it Mindy?-gulped and fumbled in her purse, finally producing a tissue with which she dabbed delicately at the corner of each eye.

Joy shook off her melancholy as if it were an old shawl and chirped, “Perhaps introductions are in order.” A lopsided grin creased her elaborate makeup. “I’m the adult child of an alcoholic,” she confessed. “My mother.” She turned to her left. “Mindy?”

Mindy, an attractive brunette with pale, Irish skin, picked nervously at the sleeve of her sweater and said, “I’m trying to overcome my addiction to cigarettes.”

As we went around the circle, I met a drinker, a compulsive eater, a battered wife, a cutter who couldn’t control the urge to mutilate her body, and individuals in various stages of depression. As it got closer and closer to me, I started to panic. I hadn’t even decided what my problem was going to be.

“I’m Suzanne and I’m an alcoholic.” Suzanne sat directly on my right.

Fish or cut bait, Hannah! You’re up! I sat there, tongue-tied. Fourteen eyes were focused on me. Except for the cancer, I was fairly normal. Maybe a tad on the thin side after all the weight I lost during chemo. “I’m bulimic,” I blurted.

Joy plopped back in her chair and everyone seemed to relax perceptibly. I felt as if I’d passed some sort of test. “What we do here every week, Hannah, is support each other in our healing,” Joy explained with a sympathetic smile. “We’re all at different stages in our journey. Sometimes the path to healing is rocky and hard, but you’ll discover that the only way out is through.”

I nodded, trying to dredge up everything I had ever read in the popular press about bulimia in case I was called upon to perform.

“Today, we are going to be dealing with anger.” Joy surveyed the group, her dark eyes alighting on each of our faces for a moment.

A plumpish woman I took to be in her mid-thirties, with her dark hair tied back in a low ponytail, raised a tentative hand.

“Claudia?”

Claudia rummaged in the colorful fabric-covered gym bag at her feet and withdrew a photograph in a simple black frame. “I want to show you something.” Her voice quavered and she crushed the picture to her bosom so that no one could actually see it. After a few moments, she tipped the photograph away from herself slightly, looked at it one last time, then passed it to Suzanne. “This is the child my father was having sex with thirty years ago. That precious little girl with the flowered Easter hat, lacy dress, white anklets, and Mary Jane shoes. Me.”

Suzanne studied the picture for a few moments, then solemnly handed the photograph to me. I felt like Alice, stepping through to the other side of the looking glass.

“One night my father came into my room, slipped his hand under my nightgown…” Claudia’s voice broke and she began to sob. “After that, the world was never the same. How could he do that to me? I loved him! I trusted him!”

Joy’s voice was soothing as molasses. “Relax, Claudia, and let the memory come.”

“The next morning I told my mother, but she didn’t believe me. She slapped me halfway across the room and called me a liar. Said I was a wicked little girl. Mothers are supposed to protect their children! Oh, God, oh, God!” She rocked back and forth, tears streaming down her face and landing, unchecked, on her blouse.

The picture of Claudia had stopped with Gwen, who returned it to the sobbing woman, holding it faceup on her outstretched palms. “It’s not your fault, Claudia.”

Claudia retrieved her picture and gazed at it again, her cheeks streaked black with mascara-laden tears. She caressed the face of her childhood image. “I was a smart little girl. I should have figured out how to avoid it.”

“You were just five years old then, Claudia. You didn’t have the power to protect yourself.” Gwen caressed the other woman’s cheek.

With loving care, Claudia laid the picture on the floor next to her chair. When she looked at us again, her face was flushed and her eyes mere slits. “I’m so angry at him for doing this to me! He screwed up my whole life!”

Gwen wrapped her arms around Claudia in an expansive hug. Toni stood and did the same. Everyone began chanting variations on a theme of “It’s not your fault.” I sat motionless, silently observing.

Joy approached and touched Gwen on the shoulder. Gwen and Toni stepped back, leaving Claudia exposed, her head bowed, looking sad and vulnerable. Joy handed Claudia a soft towel she’d produced from somewhere. “Here,” she said. “Pretend your father is sitting in that chair and show him how angry you are.”

Claudia held the towel by both ends and, in a practiced motion, twirled it into a tube. “I hate you!” she screamed, slapping the empty chair with the towel that cracked over it, like a whip. “How could you do this to me?” Thwack! The chair shuddered with each blow and inched across the floor away from her.

All of the women were standing now, cheering Claudia on.

“Hit him, Claudia!”

“Show him who’s boss!”

“Kick him in the balls!”

“Kill the bastard!”

Claudia, red-faced, continued to flail at the defenseless chair. After a few minutes, she wound down and drooped, exhausted, the towel hanging limp in her hand, the tears dry on her face. Everyone leapt up and surrounded her like Teletubbies in a big group hug. Seeing me hesitating on the sidelines, Joy turned to me and cocked her head toward the huddle, indicating I should get into the supportive spirit of things. I strolled over and stood uncomfortably on the periphery, my arms draped loosely around Joy and Mindy. Half of the women were crying, and I was pretty close to tears myself. Eventually individuals began to peel away from the edges of the group, break up, and return to their seats. Claudia retrieved her chair, sat rigidly in it, her precious picture in her lap. “I love you,” she told her image. “I’m so proud of you.”

Then it hit me like a ton of bricks. That was the significance of the photograph in Georgina’s bedroom! The children hadn’t been playing with it, after all. Georgina had been using it in just this way, to handle her feelings of guilt over our father’s alleged sexual abuse. As much as I wanted to wring her neck, I felt a twinge of sympathy for my sister. For whatever reason, perhaps what went on in this very group, Georgina really believed she had been abused.

“You are a good little girl,” Claudia cooed.

“We talk to our inner child,” Mindy whispered helpfully in my ear. “We let her know that we love her and forgive her.”

For a minute, I thought I’d been beamed from Maryland to a commune in Malibu. People in Maryland didn’t speak to their inner children. I wondered, vaguely, where I had stashed my love beads.

For the remainder of the session we listened to Toni complain about her louse of a husband. She had been hoping to get him into therapy with Dr. Sturges, but just when he agreed to go, the doctor had died. “Now I have to start all over,” she whined. “In the meantime, if he lays one finger on me,” she waggled a finger for emphasis, “even one little finger, I’m going to have him arrested for assault and battery.” I shared the opinion expressed by Mindy that Toni would be better off without the bum, then we surrounded Toni in a group hug.

I was thinking about the old saying-a little knowledge is a dangerous thing. Joy was not a trained therapist, after all. How much of what I was seeing tonight was Diane Sturges’s and how much was Joy’s interpretation of her former therapist’s techniques? I recalled that party game where the first person whispers “I went to London to visit the Queen” in someone’s ear and dozens of players later it comes out “Camels wear army boots in winter.” It was scary. These women were still so profoundly under Diane Sturges’s influence that she might as well have been controlling them from beyond the grave.

When I checked my watch again, it was nearly eight-thirty and I had just breathed a sigh of relief when Joy, the perfectly correct facilitator, turned to me.

“How can we help you, Hannah?”

I started tap-dancing. “Well, talking about anger, I’m here because I’m angry with myself for not being able to control my eating. I binge on ice cream and pizza, Little Debbie snack cakes, potato chips, any kind of junk food I can get my hands on.” I paused and looked around the circle. “Then I throw it all up.”

“First of all,” Joy explained, “you need to understand and accept that it’s not your fault. There’s something in your past that’s making you treat yourself this way.” She aimed a long, manicured finger at my chest. “There’s an unhappy child in there. Think about your history. Search your memory.”

My homework was to buy a notebook. “The prettiest notebook you can find,” advised Mindy. I was supposed to go to a quiet place where I wouldn’t be interrupted and write a letter to the little girl inside of me.

“Even if you don’t yet believe she exists, say that. Or you can say, ‘I hate you! You got me into this mess!’ ” Joy instructed. “You can’t begin to have a relationship with your child until you make contact with her. Writing to her is the first step.” I gathered I would be first up at next week’s meeting, so if I intended to come back, I’d actually have to give this writing nonsense a whirl.

The meeting ended with everyone standing in a circle, holding hands in silent prayer. Lord, get me out of here, I prayed.

In two minutes, He did.

On the way to my car, while wrapping my scarf around my neck against a chill mid-January wind, Mindy and Gwen caught up with me. Gwen had blond pigtails, wide blue eyes, and freckles. She looked like Pippi Longstocking. “Mindy and I usually go to Starbucks for coffee afterward. Would you like to join us?”

“Sure. I could use a tall cappuccino right now.” The heck with the decaf, I decided. I’d have high-test.

“Do you know where it is?” Mindy wanted to know.

“Off Falls Road, over by Fresh Fields?”

“Right! We’ll meet you there.”

From the church, I turned right onto Roland, left on Lake, and proceeded cautiously down the hill to Falls Road. As I passed Coldbrook, I shivered. For all I knew, Dr. Sturges’s ghost was still hovering about, unavenged, in the woods surrounding her house down at the end of that dark, silent street. I turned right on Falls and left almost immediately into the Fresh Fields parking lot, winding clockwise around the store until I came to Starbucks.

When I entered, Mindy and Gwen were already saving me a place in line. We picked up our coffees, and I watched Mindy doctor hers with two packets of brown sugar and a generous sprinkling each of cinnamon, cocoa, and vanilla. In spite of the season, Gwen had ordered a Frappuccino.

Feeling uncomfortably new-kid-on-the-block, I joined the two women at a small, round table.

“Where do you live?” asked Gwen.

“In Annapolis,” I said without thinking.

“Annapolis. That’s a long way to drive. Don’t they have support groups in Annapolis?”

Mindy rapped the back of Gwen’s hand with a black plastic spoon. “Don’t be so rude, Gwennie. You’re supposed to be welcoming!”

“No, no,” I said, thinking fast. “It’s a fair question.” I set down my cup. “To tell you the truth, I just didn’t know anybody in Annapolis to ask. And Georgina was so keen on your group that I decided to give it a try.”

“Where is she, by the way?” Gwen pushed the ice around in her Frappuccino with a straw.

“I’m not sure,” I said truthfully. “I stopped by her house, but she wasn’t home.”

Mindy studied me seriously over the rim of her cup. “Your bulimia?”

“Yes?”

“You force yourself to throw up all the time?”

“Uh-huh.”

A looked passed between Mindy and Gwen. “You know what Diane would have said about that?”

“What?”

“Diane would have told you that’s usually a symptom of childhood sexual abuse.”

I nearly choked on my coffee. “No way!”

“Way!” said Gwen. “ ‘Don’t vomit,’ she would have advised you. ‘Get that penis out of your mouth another way.’ ”

I stared at Gwen, hardly daring to breathe.

“Believe me, I know,” offered Mindy. “I used to be anorexic.” She ran her hands down her sides and over her hips. “You’d never know it to look at me now.”

“I’ll say.” Mindy was the perfect size six most women were fruitlessly starving themselves for. “So Diane Sturges cured your anorexia?”

Mindy nodded. “We did it together.”

“How?”

“I’ll have to go back to the beginning to explain. I started starving myself in college. I felt obese if I weighed more than one hundred pounds. I’d eat a cracker and a can of tuna. That’d be it for the day. I dated for a while, but I was terrified of sex. But you have to be a woman to have sex, don’t you? So if you don’t eat, you don’t mature. No hips, no breasts, no period-no problem!” She turned her coffee cup around and around in its saucer. “I was raped by my uncle every summer from the time I was nine until I turned sixteen.”

“She finally got the courage to confront him.” Gwen looked at Mindy and smiled, obviously proud of her friend’s accomplishments. “We couldn’t have done it without Diane.”

I turned to Gwen. “Were you anorexic too?”

“No. I came to Diane for help with my drinking problem. She made me see that my addiction was a way of coping with sexual abuse. I drank to keep the memories at bay, and when they did come, I drank to numb the feelings, to escape the pain. When I sobered up, those memories started flashing back at me like a slide show gone berserk. Diane saved my life and my sanity.” Gwen covered her eyes with her hands for a few seconds, then turned her unflinching gaze on me. “I was raped by my father when I was three. He hurt me so badly I had to have stitches.”

“My God!”

“We lived on a farm in Wisconsin. Isn’t that a hoot? The land of purest milk and cheese. One time my father forced me into the barn and made me stick a nail into my doll, right between her legs where her vagina would have been. I had forgotten all this, but Diane helped me remember.”

“Why would you want to remember? That sounds like a nightmare, Gwen. Are you sure that it really happened?”

Gwen twisted her straw into a spiral and wove it around her fingers. “Would anyone invent something that bad? Would anyone willingly go through all this torture?” She threw what was left of her straw onto the table. “I don’t think so.”

We sat in silence for a while, drinking our coffee while the staff behind the counter made noisy preparations for closing.

Suddenly Gwen turned to me and changed the subject. “How’s Georgina? Have you talked to her recently?”

I shook my head.

Mindy and Gwen exchanged glances. “We haven’t seen her since before Diane was killed.”

“She’s taking that pretty hard,” I told them.

“She was abused by her father, too, you know,” Mindy added.

I froze. “She mentioned something about that.”

Gwen rested her elbows on the table, leaned forward, and whispered. “Her father gave her a knife and ordered her to dismember her favorite Cabbage Patch doll.”

I started to feel light-headed. I wished the kid behind the counter had a good tot of rum I could slosh in my coffee. I stared at a poster on the wall and silently counted to ten. “Pardon me for saying this. Perhaps it just shows how naive I am, but don’t you think it’s a little strange that both you and Georgina have such similar memories about mutilating your dolls?”

“The faces of abuse are often very similar. Sometimes what you hear from other people in the group… it’s like holding up a mirror to your own life.” Gwen spoke slowly and distinctly, as if she thought I might have trouble understanding her.

“I’m sure I’ve never been abused.”

Mindy raised an eyebrow and shot Gwen a knowing glance. She reached into her purse and extracted a silver case with the initials A.G. engraved on the lid, flipped it open, and took out a business card. “Here.” She laid the card flat on the table and shoved it across to me with two slim fingers. “Call me. Anytime. I’ll be there for you.”

Gwen smiled at her friend, then turned to me. “Mindy’s a wonderful mentor.”

I sent a smile back across the table. “Do you do this for everyone, Mindy?”

Mindy started to answer, but Gwen cut her off. “No.” She paused and at a nod from Mindy continued. “It’s odd, but when we first joined the group we thought-this is so great! We’ll have all these new friends to share our problems with. But it didn’t happen that way.”

Mindy shook her head. “No. Gwen and I have been best friends for years. We met at a good, old-fashioned tent revival, didn’t we, Gwennie?”

Gwennie nodded.

“But we’ve never become close with any of the others,” Mindy continued.

“Why?” I asked.

“I think it’s because we sit in these weekly meetings, throwing up our lives, examining each other’s vomit, so to speak. It’s embarrassing. Once I ran into Toni on the street, and we simply ducked our heads and walked on.”

“Why did you invite me here, then?”

“I think we have a lot in common, Hannah, and I want to help.”

“I appreciate it, Mindy,” I said, tucking the card into my shirt pocket. “But as I said, I’m certain I’ve never been abused. I would know if something like that had ever happened.”

Gwen laid a hand on my shoulder. “Just listen to your Little Girl this week. See what she has to say.”

“I’ll do that,” I promised. But as I left them in the parking lot and climbed into my car, I was confident that the only thing my Little Girl was going to tell me this week was that nice as they were, these ladies were freaking nuts.