“The flower’s in the woods, Daddy. Take me to the woods.”
And so they went to the woods, and her daddy was holding her hand. She felt safe.
They stepped out of the sunlight of the field into the deep shadow of the trees, and Sarah held her father’s hand even tighter. She looked around for the flower, and saw a bush. The flower was in the bush. She was sure the flower was in the bush, and the ant would be there too.
She pulled her father toward the bush.
“Hurry, Daddy, hurry. We’re almost there.”
And then she was there, crawling under the bush, its branches catching at her hair, thorns reaching out to scratch at her. Then she felt something grab at her ankle. A vine. It must have been a vine. She tried to shake loose, but the thing held tighter to her ankle and began pulling her from the bush. She couldn’t find the flower. Wait! There it was. If she could only grab it!
But she couldn’t, and the thing was pulling her out of the bush. She cried out.
“Daddy! Help! Make it let go, Daddy!”
She twisted around, and the thing was Daddy. But it wasn’t Daddy. It was someone else, and he looked like Daddy, but it couldn’t be Daddy. Not this man with his wild look. This man who was going to hit her.
She felt the blow, and tried to cry out to her father to help her, but she had no voice. Her father would help her.
Her father hit her.
She wanted her father to pull the man off her.
She wanted her father to stop hitting her.
She wanted her father.
The hand moved up and down through the air, and then Sarah couldn’t hear anything any more. She watched herself being beaten, but she felt no pain. She tried to get away, but she couldn’t move. As Daddy hit her again and again, she watched herself fade away. And then there was only the gray, the gray that she lived in, and in a far corner of the gray a girl—a blond, blue-eyed girl who would take care of her.
Elizabeth. Elizabeth knew what had happened, and would take care of her. As the gray closed around her, she reached out to Elizabeth.
Sarah woke up, and the hands that were outstretched moved slowly back, and she held herself. When she slept, she dreamed the dream again.
Elizabeth lay in her bed, staring at the ceiling, watching the progress of the moonlight as it moved slowly toward the far wall. She listened to the silence.
She had tried not to hear it; tried to bury her head under her pillow as her parents fought But the sounds came through the walls, under the door, into the bed, and she listened. Finally she heard her father as he went down the stairs. Now she waited, and watched the moonlight She would wait until she heard him come back up the stairs, until she heard the click of her parents’ door finally closing for the night. Then she would sleep.
Didn’t her mother know what had happened in the woods that day? Elizabeth knew that she could tell hermother, but that she wouldn’t Elizabeth knew that she shouldn’t know what had happened. And she also knew she couldn’t forget it, either.
She had been watching them from the house, and had decided to go with them. She had called to them, but the wind had blown her words the wrong way and they hadn’t heard. So she had followed them across the field. Then, just as she had been about to catch up with them, she had decided to play a game with them instead.
She had veered off to the left, toward the road, and cut into the woods about fifty feet from them. Then she had begun making her way back, moving from tree to tree, keeping herself hidden. At the last minute, when she was so close that they would have to see her, she would jump out at them.
She had heard a scuffling noise, and peeped around the tree to see Sarah crawling under a bush. She used the opportunity to dart closer and hide behind a fallen log, watching her sister through the tangle of rotting roots that thrust skyward. Sarah had pushed farther under the bush, and Elizabeth thought her father was about to crawl after her.
But instead he grasped her ankle and began pulling her back toward him.
She heard Sarah cry out, and watched as her father lifted his