Becoming Ellen Read Free

asked.
    Ellen stopped the rubbing and held her fisted hand firmly in her lap, though the sensation on her arm grew into a burning so strong she imagined she could hear it sizzling. “I’m fine,” she said quietly.
    â€œMs. . . . Homes, could I speak to you outside for a moment?”
    A gale force terror struck Ellen and she squeezed her eyes shut to block the wind of it, momentarily rendered incapable of movement. Then she rose stiffly and pried Lydia’s hand from hers. “I’ll be right back,” she told the girl.
    â€œDon’t leave.” The girl spoke simply, almost inaudibly. Yet the two words crushed Ellen.
    â€œI won’t,” Ellen said, then she thought,
Don’t lie to her!
So she added, “Not yet.” As Ellen followed the officer out, his partner sat down next to the bed. Lydia ignored him and kept her eyes riveted on Ellen on the other side of the glass.
    â€œSo, you wouldn’t have any idea who we could contact to pick this child up, would you?”
    Ellen’s heart leapt from her chest, slammed against the wall, and slid to the floor, shriveled and bruised. She stood motionless until it flopped its way back into her chest. This was too much like her own story, no one to come for her. It was one of many chapters of her life too painful to be relived. She had survived it precisely because she did not relive it—ever.
    Ellen shrugged off the shadow of her own debilitating scenario and managed a single word. “No.”
    The officer shook his head. “Child services is on their way, and they can place her for the night at least.”
    Ellen thought of the mother’s battered body being carried from the bus and understood that one night would almost certainly become a hundred, then a thousand. The memories of her own mother’s desertion that ambushed her now were so painful that, out of desperation, she began to shut down. The Novocain of denial, of a lifetime of conditioning herself not to feel, to look only forward, never back, began in her gut and spread. The addictive response was a hit of saturated numbness.
    â€œCan I go?” Ellen asked the officer.
    â€œI’m not going to keep you.”
    Without waiting, Ellen gratefully turned away from him and back toward the room. She would go in and tell Lydia that she had to go but that she, Lydia, would be all right. Though the only thing Ellen knew for certain was that the girl was about to become a ward of the state. Through the glass, Lydia was watching her with her strange, round eyes. She raised her hands and held them out toward Ellen.
    Ellen felt something just above her stomach splinter, like thin ice fracturing, and it crumpled her. She put one hand against the window to steady herself. She tried to force her body to turn toward the doorway and go back in, but at that moment a woman in tan slacks and a tight bun walked briskly through the emergency room doors. Ellen knew what she was even before the woman took up her position in Lydia’s doorway. She’d seen this same person a dozen times before, and each time they had been different ages, had different hair, skin color, were a different sex, even had different accents, but they’d all been the same person to Ellen. Not even a person really, more like a force, an
institution
.
    â€œLydia Carson?” the woman called out, advancing on the girl like an animal she’d struck with a car and that was bleeding on the side of the road. Through the open door, Ellen could hear her say, “My name is Serena and I’m here to help you. There’s no reason to be afraid.”
    Ellen could not enter while the generic face of so many of her nightmares occupied that space.
What a stupid thing to say,
she thought bitterly.
Of course she’s afraid, of course she has reason. Why pretend to a child who knows fear so much better than you?
She remembered hearing the same banal words, the same promises of