Free Somebody Somewhere by Donna Williams

time,” he said. “But it was not like a baby crying. It sounded frightening, like you were sick and in pain.” Also, I had begun, at about the age of two, to cough compulsively, speckling the pillowcase with blood. People blamed it on domestic violence. From the time I was six months old, the house had shaken with rage and the smell of gin. A mother in need of help got none.
    Professional assistance had come in the form of uppers and downers. In the sixties, male doctors generally weren’t so good at counseling on women’s issues. Community support came in the form of a non-English-speaking mother who accepted looking after the tot left in a stroller by her gate. She didn’t have enough grasp of English to ask why or refuse.
    Later there was the welfare center with bodies that walked back and forth past open doorways, and a frosted-glass window with crisscross wire running through it up above the cot. Later, community support came in the form of blue uniforms and closed blinds.
    “The hospital kept you for two days I think,” said my father. He couldn’t remember which one. “Where were you at the time?” I asked. “I don’t remember,” he said. “That was over twenty years ago. I’m not even sure if it was you who was seen or Tom.”
    Nevertheless he went on to tell me what he remembered.
    The doctors had found that I was tensing up my stomach muscles and coughing against them over and over to the point of coughing blood. They had found nothing physically wrong but declared that I was doing this to myself and didn’t seem to feel the pain. I was also tested for deafness.
    Although I could memorize and mimic entire conversations with the accents of the people in them, I hadn’t responded to being spoken to. My parents experimented with loud noises next to my ear without getting so much as a blink in response. They thought I was deaf. I was not. Unconvinced in spite of my huge vocabulary, my parents took me for tests again when I was nine. People had no concept of being “meaning-deaf.” In terms of the effect on one’s life, it largely amounts to being deaf. One is robbed not of sound but of the meaning of sound.
    “If you ever mention any of this, I’ll deny ever having told you,” my father finally warned. “After all,” he went on smugly, “I remember nothing.”
    I couldn’t understand. Of all the injustice, this support for denial is possibly the only part I find unforgivable. What was the crime? Is guilt, shame, or responsibility so hard to bear? I looked at him as though he had been a passive co-persecutor. Refusing to acknowledge what was under his own nose erased the need or responsibility to do anything about it.
    Denial was a family game. “Don’t talk to her, she’s fucking mad,” “she’s a wongo,” “leave It alone, don’t talk to It,” “look at the spastic”—The phrases play and replay like scratched records and I try to make sense of them. When I was growing up, the price of this had been to convince me almost daily that I was mad, bad, stupid, or not human at all. Though my father was not the perpetrator, I don’t know of any action he took to stop it. Being too busy is no excuse. If his own leg was lying across the railway line as the train came, nothing could have made him too busy to move it.
    I used to delight in my memory, which was acute, sometimes perfect to the finest detail. I could set off one part of it and it would run like a serial as I described the pictures, became the narrator of a silent movie, the verbal animator of a recorded soundtrack. This was part of what I considered conversing and I felt proud of it as a sign of ability and, therefore, intelligence. I had no “talking with,” but at least I had “talking at.” With almost every memory I had been told that this was not my own life that I was remembering. I was “sickin the head.” I was “possessed.” I was to “shut my fucking mouth before it was shut for me.”
    I came to mistrust