She turned a page in her notebook. She didn't write anything. There was nothing to write and no one who was going to read it and the act of writing in front of them would probably make things worse. But she needed to do something with her hands so she turned the page and smoothed it flat and kept her breathing as even as she could manage.
She didn't see the first woman move toward her.
She felt it — the displacement of air, the shift of weight on the bench, the half second her body registered before her mind caught up. She turned her head and the woman was already close and there was no time to do anything useful with the warning.
The notebook was grabbed from her hands.
She reached for it immediately. Both hands, reaching, because it was the only voice she had and without it she was not just mute she was completely without any means of communicating anything to anyone and the thought of being without it in this place was more frightening than almost anything else that had happened today. But the reaching was the wrong response because it apparently communicated something the women in that cell had been waiting for and what followed happened quickly and with the coordinated efficiency of a group of people who had made a collective decision without needing to discuss it out loud.
She was pulled off the bench and she hit the concrete floor hard and the impact went through her shoulder and her cheek and she had barely registered the cold of the floor before the first kick landed in her ribs and she curled instinctively, knees pulling up toward her chest, arms coming over her head, her body moving into the position it remembered from being a small girl in a small dark place even though she hadn't needed that position in years.
She could not scream.
She had never been able to scream.
The sound she made was the one she always made when pain demanded a sound from her throat that her throat could not produce — that low broken vibration that had no name and no language and communicated nothing to anyone who didn't already know her well enough to understand what it meant.
Nobody in that cell knew her at all.
The kicks continued and then something else happened that was sharper and more specific than a kick — a hot tearing sensation along her left side below her ribs that was immediately and unmistakably different from blunt impact. She pressed her hand against it and looked down and saw the dark spreading stain against the fabric of the dress she was still wearing because nobody had offered her anything else to change into.
She pressed harder against it.
The women stepped back from her. Not because anyone told them to or because remorse had arrived suddenly among them but because blood apparently communicated a stopping point that further escalation did not need to pass.
Elena lay on the concrete floor and breathed and pressed her hand against her side and looked at the ceiling of the holding cell which was grey and stained and had nothing to offer her. From somewhere outside the cell she could hear the ordinary sounds of a police station going about its business — voices, footsteps, a phone ringing and being answered — and none of those sounds were coming toward her.
She waited.
Nobody came.
The infirmary smelled strongly of antiseptic and underneath the antiseptic something older and more institutional that the antiseptic had been trying to cover for years without success. Elena was on a narrow cot by the wall when the doctor arrived and he was young and clearly exhausted in the deep structural way of someone who had been working consecutive long shifts and had arrived at a place beyond tiredness into something more functional and more flat.
He looked at the wound first. Then at her face. Then at the chart the officer had handed him on the way in.
"Elena Brenette," he said, reading off the chart, not looking at her when he said it.
She nodded.
He looked at the chart again and she watched his face as he read whatever was written there about why she had been brought in and what she had been charged with and whose name was attached to the case. She watched the small shift that happened in his expression — not dramatic, nothing she could point to specifically, just a slight change in how he was holding himself in relation to her. A decision being made that she wasn't going to be party to.
He cleaned the wound without warning her when things were going to hurt and closed it without explaining what he was doing and worked with the brisk efficiency of someone completing a task rather than treating a patient. When he was finished he noted something on the chart and told her to keep it dry and not pull the stitches and walked out without looking at her face again.
The officer who had brought her to the infirmary was leaning against the wall with her arms crossed and looking at her phone. She glanced up at Elena once and then looked back at her phone and said to nobody in particular that it was always the same with these cases, someone from nothing trying to attach themselves to a powerful name, and she shook her head slightly and kept scrolling.
Elena lay on the cot with her hand pressed carefully over the bandaged wound and looked at the small high window in the infirmary wall. The same kind of window as the apartment — small and set high and letting in a thin strip of daylight that did nothing useful for the room below it but was at least evidence that the outside world still existed. She looked at that strip of light and thought about her notebook somewhere on the floor of the holding cell and about the fact that she had no pen and no paper and no way to write her name or her story or any single true thing about who she was to anyone in this building.
She had nothing.
Not her name. Not her voice. Not the only substitute for a voice she had ever had.
Just herself. Just the knowledge of who she was sitting inside her chest where nobody could reach it and nobody could take it and nobody could hand it to a police officer on a charge sheet or dismiss it as fraud or put handcuffs on it and walk it through a door.
She pressed her hand against her side and felt the dull throb of the wound and breathed carefully around it and told herself the thing she had been telling herself since she was old enough to understand, in the dark.
My name is Elena Brenette. The dark is just a phase, it will pass, it has to pass . She was still here. She was going to keep being here.
The strip of light moved slightly as something passed outside the window.
She watched it and waited..