mother and I were brought into the hospital.
We were separated.
I was given some sort of patient advocate as the all-female team came in, scraped under my fingernails, trimmed them, took pictures of my body, put me in stirrups, and prodded already sore spots.
It was then that I told the police about the birthmark. I'd even taken her pad, drawn a hand, and colored in the spot, so I knew she would get it right.
It never occurred to me at the time, but my father never came to the hospital.
Eventually, my mother and I huddled together in the back of a cab and rode home, both in silence, but clinging to one another, neither of us able to talk about it yet, to vocalize the horror. Just there for each other. Just in it together.
We went back into the apartment, and she settled me on the couch, knowing I couldn't go back into my room, not going back into hers either.
She made us tea, but never drank her own.
She put on Gilmore Girls.
She put a blanket over me.
And then she sat in the chair at my side, eyes glued on the front door of the apartment, seeing something I didn't, thinking thoughts I never considered because I was so confused with my own. Thoughts of stolen innocence. Thoughts of feeling unsafe in my own home. Thoughts of how I was going to explain this to my friends. How anyone could ever understand.
"I should have talked to my mom," I told Lorenzo, feeling tears clinging to my lashes. It had been a long time since I let myself remember that night. It never got any easier when I did.
"You were a little girl, Gigi," Lorenzo reminded me, hand touching my knee, giving it a little squeeze. "And you had just been through hell."
"I know that."
And I did.
On a rational level.
But people, well, we were rarely rational. We were emotional people.
And as horrible as the last part of my story was, the hardest was the next part.
Because my mom knew something I didn't.
I hadn't known that at the time.
I hadn't asked.
And maybe she wouldn't have told me if I had.
But she knew something.
Something so horrible that when I had fallen asleep, she'd taken a kitchen knife, went down the elevator, gone onto the front steps of our apartment building, and slit her wrists.
On the steps.
Because she didn't want me to find the body.
In fact, she was found just ten minutes after it was too late.
I didn't wake up for ten hours.
Then, finally, there my father was.
Face grim.
Eyes strangely hard. And in the aftermath, I had attributed that to his way of grieving.
"Mom killed herself," he told me, not bothering to sugar-coat it, ease me into this new, harsh reality.
Mom was dead.
And the only person who truly loved me was gone.
The only person who could possibly understand how I felt after the attack was done.
And nothing, absolutely nothing would ever feel the same again.
I spent my sixteenth birthday in a therapist's office, curled up in the chair, hugging my legs, putting a wall up between us, as the kind woman said things about how some people process trauma, about how my mother's way of processing didn't have to be mine, about how there was always someone to help, about how there were medications if I needed them, that I had people there for me, people who loved me.
I knew the grim truth, though.
There wasn't anyone who loved me left.
I was alone in the world.
I didn't think medications would help me process that.
I didn't think therapy would either, so I stubbornly refused to go after a month of sessions.
Instead, I went back to school. I worked in the bakery. I slept on the couch. And I rather obsessively drew that birthmark on lined pages of my school notebook.
Dozens, hundreds of times.
They scattered around the apartment.
My father picked them up and threw them away.
"He knew about that birthmark. He'd seen it every day for months," I told Lorenzo. "There was no way he didn't know it when he saw it. He looked right down at it upstairs. And he wasn't surprised to see it there."
The reality of that still made it feel like someone had a hand around my throat, like they were cutting off air.
It all came tumbling back as I sat there while my father shook hands with my rapist.
My mom staring at the door.
That hadn't been kicked in.
The police said the locks hadn't been tampered with, that we must have left it unlocked.
We