Unspeakable

I've had to deal with kids who were hit by semis, and eventheyweren't as badly traumatized as Daniel. He has a skull fracture, a broken collarbone, seven broken ribs, a broken pelvis, a fractured ankle, a ruptured spleen, and a damaged liver. That's not including all of his lacerations and contusions.'

'You say he's going to live?.'

'It's too early to say if he's going to make a comprehensive recovery. We had to relieve some pressure on the brain tissues as soon as they brought him in, and in the long term I'm worried about his mobility. His father must have used him as a trampoline.'

'Jesus,' said Holly.

Dr. Sokol lifted his finger and thumb, pinched only a half-inch apart. 'He wasthisclose to the cemetery, believe me.'

Holly didn't know what to say. Dr. Sokol sat down, breathing with the deep steadiness of a man who was doing his best to keep his self-control. Then he said, 'I thought Children's Welfare were supposed to keep an eye on situations like this? make sure that things like this didn't happen.'

Holly sat next to him. 'We try to do our best, Doctor. But we have very limited resources and very restricted rights. The law is overwhelmingly in favor of children being taken care of by their natural parents, and it isn't at all easy to define where careless parenting ends and calculated cruelty begins.'

'Careless parenting? Elliot Joseph has a long-term history of alcoholic psychosis. He seriously believed the kid was possessed by a devil. Judging by Daniel's general condition, he must have been whipped and beaten several times before, over several months at least. What clearer definition of constructive cruelty do you need than that?'

'He was beaten before?'

'Pretty consistently, I'd say.'

'I never saw any bruises? and his mother never said anything.'

'I thought you people were trained to see the signs.'

'I never saw any bruises, ever! My God! Don't you think I would have done something about it if I had?'

Dr. Sokol looked at her for a long time. He didn't say anything, but she could guess what he was thinking. She could also tell that she had shouted too loudly. When she shouted too loudly, her voice became even more distorted than usual. Her speech therapist had told her, and so had Daisy: 'When you're upset, Mommy, you sound like you're drowning.'

Mount Hood

The rain trailed away to the east, and the city sparkled in milky sunshine.

Holly stood by the window in the waiting room, watchingMount Hood reappear from the clouds.

Mount Hood was fifty-six miles away to the southeast, the tallest peak inOregon , at 11,235 feet. Sometimes it looked to Holly like a mountain from a Japanese painting, snow-covered and spiritual, a place where the gods assembled. At other times it appeared more sinister, like a pyramid-shaped spaceship fromStargate.

But she felt its presence every day; she felt its overwhelming gravity; and sometimes, when she and Daisy were out cycling throughForest Park , she would stop, and shade her eyes, and stare at it, as if it were somehow the answer to what had happened to her, and where her destiny lay.

She would look at Daisy afterward and feel that extraordinary sensation of being a mother, of having created a daughter to go out into the world and do things that she would never do. Most of all-most precious of all-was that Daisy couldhear, and when she saw Daisy clapping or dancing or listening to music, Holly was almost compensated for the total silence which always surrounded her.

Every day, winter and summer. Silence.

George GreyeyesDrinks Cappuccino

She was packing away her laptop and her report papers when George Greyeyes appeared in the waiting-room doorway.

'Holly? Hey, I've just been over at the Vets' Hospital: Doug told me I'd find you here.' He came up to her and gave her a hug. He was six feet four inches tall and always made her wish she were wearing six-inch heels.

'I was just leaving, as a matter of fact.'

'Are youokay?Doug told me that Elliot Joseph attacked you.'

'A couple of bruises, that's all.' She tried to smile but she was a little too close to crying, and all she could manage was a grimace.

'The nurse? told me about Daniel,' said George. He always spoke very slowly, so she found it easy to read his lips. 'I suppose we can thank our lucky stars that bastard didn't quite manage to kill him.'

'Not much to be thankful for, is it?'

George checked his weighty stainless-steel watch. 'Listen, how about you give me a ride back downtown and I buy you a coffee? I think we need to talk about this.'

They left the Doernbecher Children's Hospital and Holly drove them into the city center. More rain was drifting in, and it speckled the windshield. George Greyeyes touched her arm to attract her attention. 'Knowing you, I expect you think? this is entirely your fault.'

She glanced at him. 'Who else can I blame? I've had my suspicions for over six months that Elliot Joseph was beating up on Daniel's mother.'

'Did you ever ask her direct?'

'Oh, for sure. She denied it-shealwaysdenied it. But whenever I made a visit, there was always anatmosphere,you know, especially when Elliot was prowling around. That thing with women when they fiddle with their jewelry and they won't look you in the eye and they keep repeating over and over that everything's just fine. My God, I've been doing this long enough. I should have trusted my intuition.'

The rain suddenly started to grow heavier, and people on the sidewalks scurried for cover. They stopped at a red traffic signal and George touched her arm again. 'There's nothing like hindsight, Holly, especially in the child welfare business.'

'But it honestly never occurred to me that he was hurting Daniel too. Daniel always seemed so? well, he wasn't particularlyhappy-that was obvious-but he wasn't distressed.'

'Detached, more like. Children have this way of accepting things, even abuse. After all, they don't have much of a choice, do they?'

'I never saw any marks on him. Never.'

'Well, Elliot must have been clever at hiding it, like most abusers are. Punch them in the stomach, twist their ears, whip them on the buttocks with a wire coat hanger.'

'But I didn't think the situation through, did I? I didn't ask myselfwhyElliot might have been hitting Mary. It didn't occur to me that she was trying to keep him away from Daniel.'

'No reason why you should,' said George. 'If anybody's to blame, it's me.'

'What do you mean?'

'Well, I knew that Elliot was hearing voices and experiencing psychotic episodes about demonic possession. I've come across it quite a few times before in Native American alcoholics. They get their tribal mythology all mixed up with theirdelirium tremens.'

George Greyeyes was forty-one years old, with high cheekbones and the classic Roman nose of the Nimipu, which was what the Nez Perce Indians called themselves. His shiny black hair was brushed straight back to his collar, and he always wore three-piece suits and two-tone shirts and black shoes as shiny as his hair. Instead of a necktie, however, he wore a silver necklace with a turquoise thunderbird on it.

He was a senior case worker for NICW, the National Indian Child Welfare Association, which was based inPortland -the only association in the country that dealt specifically with abused Indian children. He and Holly had known each other for more than eleven years. In fact, it was George Greyeyes who had persuaded her that she ought to look for a job in child welfare, and over the years they had worked together on dozens of cases, particularly Native American children with one or both parents in prison.

Holly and George had developed an unusual rapport, a calm and natural closeness in which conversation was rarely necessary. This was partly because of the mundane brutalities they encountered, day after day: daughters raped by their fathers, babies burned by their mothers' cigarettes, two-year-old toddlers starved and locked in cupboards for weeks on end. Most of the time, words weren't enough.

Holly parked opposite Peet's Coffee & Tea on Southwest Broadway. She and George dodged across the street under her red-and-white golf umbrella. Inside the coffeehouse it was warm and busy and smelled of freshly grinding arabica. Holly saw several people she knew from theJusticeCenter and gave them a wave. Then she and George took a table in the corner by the window. Holly ordered a skinny almond-flavored latte and George ordered a cappuccino with extra sprinkles. On the windowsill beside them stood a vase of yellow roses.

Holly pushed her hand into her hair. 'God? this is the first time in thirteen months I could really use a cigarette.'

'This wasn't all your fault, Holly, take it from me.'

'No? Michael Sokol was right: I should have read the signs. I always suspected that Elliot might be violent. But, for crying out loud, I havedozensof cases where husbands are violent-even in the most respectable families-yet, they never touch their kids. A mother finally told me last Friday that her husband had been punishing her for years-like, ritual punishments for little things that she'd forgotten to do: put a fresh roll of toilet paper in the bathroom, maybe, or press the shirt that he wanted to wear. Two or three times a week he locked her in the bedroom, stripped her naked, and beat her with a cane while she had to beg his forgiveness for being such a bad wife?. And that was in Northwest, in the smartest six-bedroom house you've ever seen, with two Mercedes in the garage, and they had twin seven-year-old girls that the