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End Point

Kaye Branch

    “Honey, just get on the couch,” Mary, Simon’s aide, told Lisbeth. “Relax. Shh-shh.”
    Lisbeth didn’t see how she could do anything but relax. The blood was bleeding through her panties, onto her jeans, even though she’d put on a new pad in her bathroom before school started, only a few hours ago. She was too dizzy to care about the blood. She let Mary’s maternal hands lead to the couch in the section of the room called the “peace corner” because allegedly any student could sit there and manifest a feeling of inner peace. Lisbeth didn’t see how she could possibly feel peace so close to the other Elizabeth, who had demoted her to Elisabeth M. or “Elisabeth with an S” because Lisbeth’s mother didn’t believe in nicknames outside of the house. Never before had Lisbeth felt so peaceful anywhere. The pain immobilized her. Her mind couldn’t focus.
    That feeling, lying on the couch, was all she rememberedbefore she woke up in a hospital bed.

**

    Before the hospital bed, there was the hotel room bed.
    It was queen-sized, to big for one allegedly married (though living alone) man who claimed to hate excess. Outside of the classroom, Lisbeth only saw him demonstrate his hated towards anyone who took more than they needed by removing his wedding band before he got into the bed. He seemed to think letting her see it naked would make what he was doing worse. Little did he know, the symbol didn’t mean anything to her anyway. The stone had fallen out of Lisbeth’s mother’s engagement ring. For some reason, she’d stopped wearing her wedding band as well. It didn’t mean she cheated on her husband. Or even thought about it.
    At twelve years old, Lisbeth didn’t believe her mother was capable of having a single impure thought. Why else would she trust him? There had to be a reason deeper than their shared profession- teaching Montessori.
    Lisbeth didn’t believe that Montessori schools would bring world peace and were therefore the most important institutions on Earth, but he did. He believed his work justified his actions. Sometimes he called out Montessori’s name in between orgasms-always his, never hers. He explained that it was because it wasn’t her hotel room. Later, she forgot almost everything- the room and his explanations- yet remembered the screams.
    She also remembered why she’d been singled out. Of the twenty- four students in the classroom, Elizabeth H. and Elisabeth M. were the only two who had mothers who also taught at the school, making it seem logical that they’d get special treatment. Both their mothers assumed that the word “Montessori” had the same effect on pedophiles as cruxifixes- one of which Lisbeth’s mother wore around her neck, just in case- had on vampires: simply seeing it on the school’s sign would repel them. So they were both effectively helpless. Lisbeth only vaguely knew about rape and thought it only applied to women who were held at gunpoint, the same way she assumed that clinical depression only happened to people who were eighteen or older. She identified herself more as a teacher’s pet than a suicidal molestation victim, her real identity.
    Even though she thought it was legal, he kept it a secret. At first Lisbeth thought that he’d alerted Mary and Karl, the assistant teacher, as to where he was taking her, but then she realized only Elizabeth H., who went just as often, knew. If she ever refused him, he could stab her and no one would tell the police where to look, since Elizabeth H. had to keep the same secret. Once they got back, he always explained that he got caught in traffic, two coffees in tow for the other teachers. They always took the coffee and never asked questions, even though they’d driven the same route with no traffic.
    Lisbeth dreaded her turn. After she’d finished her mandatory community service hours at the nursing home with her classmates, he drove her back to the hotel. They were always alone in his car, even though teachers were supposed to take as many students as they could back and forth from the nursing home. He always set the radio to the BBC, the one radio station sanctioned by every Montessori teacher because it was from another country. He said she was lucky. She got the chance to learn from the BBC and there were men who would have made her expose herself in the car, where people could see it and that was illegal. But she wanted people to see it so she could get famous instead of going to the hotel room. She’d make the news for sure. So little happened in NoBo- a sloppy abbreviation for “North of Boston”, which her mother was trying to get her to use to refer to her hometown and the area around it- that a simple car accident would make the news for weeks.
    He’d take her into the lobby of the hotel and chat with whoever was working the desk. Every time he got the chance he did something that annoyed her to no end: he said she was his daughter. Lisbeth had a father. She lived with both parents, unlike Elizabeth H., who had a dumb distant step-father. And he had other children. He loved to tell her: “I was blessed by having all boys.” Lisbeth didn’t even know their names. His wife was Lisa. Elizabeth was his other sexual partner. In the past, there had been others, one named Lily, who was the ideal Montessori prototype, but grew up and was therefore unworthy. He built his schedule around his wife and mistresses, never visiting his sons. Once he even came out and said that women were a curse, yet he surrounded himself with them.
    The contradiction drove Lisbeth to fill reams upon reams of paper, filled with a story that was really an attempt to solve the puzzle. A puzzle that no one ever saw in its entirety. They only felt it groping with an invisible hand.

**

    “It would have been a ga-url,” a nurse with a thick Boston accent said, standing at the nurses’ station. Allegedly, nurses were some of the busiest people on Earth, yet this group bucked the trend, finding time to gossip on the clock, with Lisbeth in earshot.
    “My friend, Carol, she had a kid when her other kid was fourteen,” the other nurse said. “They could’ve passed them off as sisters.”
    “Mum’s in her forties. There’s gotta be some reason she hasn’t had another kid.”
    “Well, since her twelve-year-old got herself knocked up, good for her.”
    And that was how Lisbeth found out she’d been an expectant mother.
    She really should have told someone, Lisbeth’s pediatrician said, time and time again. But Lisbeth’s period, though it started early, was a complete mystery to her. When they started, she thought they would stop, soon. And then they had, without warning. She knew that sex lead to babies, but she thought she’d have to do it more times. That was what he said, when inspired by a movie she saw late at night, in the throes of depression-induced insomnia, she asked why he never brought a condom.
    Lisbeth was exactly eight weeks along when she miscarried and almost let it kill her, the one thing she thought she wanted. Lisbeth’s mother brought a calendar to her hospital bed and counted weeks until what would have been the baby’s due date. The due date was in the second week of October, right before Lisbeth turned thirteen.
    Drowsy on medications, Lisbeth rolled her eyes and her mother smacked her lips with delight. “Oh, those October babies,” she said.
    They asked Lisbeth to name the dead fetus, like they’d asked her to name the stuffed cat she’d gotten for her most recent birthday. Her mother suggested Autumn, since the baby would have been born in autumn and her mother had no desire to give that name to an actual, living baby or, even, as she later demonstrated a cat. Previously, Lisbeth had planned to name her first daughter Cheyenne, the daughter she’d have as an adult in California. She’d even written “Cheyenne” a few times on the edge of a worksheet, having no lined paper since it was banned from Montessori children. But that just seemed wrong for an October baby in New England. Cheyenne was a child who would never see snow.
    It was a snowy winter when Lisbeth miscarried. The snow drifts from a blizzard weeks ago endured when Lisbeth passed out on the playground, where they forced her to go after the couch. He’d told them he just thought it was a cold, his justification for making her get off the couch rather than calling an ambulance or at least sending her to the nurse. Nothing bad could happen to her, one of his girls, as he called all his female students. They’d found a snow-filled oasis.
    Lisbeth wanted a break from the snow. She decided to name the fetus April Rose. She imagined the name on the table of a file, one with limited space that would force the labeler to butcher April’s last name from “Madden” to “Mad”. She’d be “Mad April”.
    Back at school, people were getting suspicious, so Lisbeth’s parents let her stay home an extra few weeks. The damage wasn’t lasting, but they advised her to stop having sex and reminded her that her hospital stay wouldn’t have happened if she’d crossed her legs, like a lady. She never named the father. He’d sent her a card and stopped asking for sex. Still, he didn’t visit. Only Simon, devoutly Catholic mother in tow, came to see her in the hospital, after the bleeding stopped. Lisbeth knew he owed her more than a sloppy signature on a greeting card, which was identical to the one on her school records for the next two years. Her liberation started with that realization.

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