2004, New York, New York

By Yannie ten Broeke

When I press my ID against the reinforced glass, I have to tap several times to get the exhausted triage nurse’s attention. She squints at me.

The buzzer sounds, and I pull open the steel door to Harlem Hospital’s Emergency Department. From the packed waiting area behind me, there are shouts and groans from those who think I’ve skipped ahead of them in line.

Patients on gurneys line the passageways. By his gesticulations, I can see that a police officer is reaching a climactic point in the story he’s relating to an EMT, only to be interrupted when the man wrapped in a nylon net and strapped to the gurney between them urinates.

The unit clerk in the nurses’ station recognizes me and points, “Urgent Care. She’s with the surgical resident. Lucinda, Maria, Louisa - depends who you ask. We put ‘Maria Gonzalez’ on her chart.” She frames each name with hooked forefingers and a side-to-side motion of her head.

There are more police officers in the urgent-care room. They’re closing their notebooks and preparing to leave. I show an officer my ID, and he tells me that Maria will only say her husband threw an empty rum bottle at the floor and that she was accidentally cut by the pieces of glass that splashed up.

“She knows that if he’s arrested, he’ll be deported. We’re going to pick him up right now,” the officer says.

I ask him if he’s so sure that she’s lying, and he nods emphatically, “Oh, yeah.”

As I walk toward the curtain at the back of the room, I notice blood on the floor beneath it and a slow, steady drip collecting in a pool, the edges of it dark and dry. On the other side of the curtain, Maria is lying on her back, her waist-length black hair coiled beneath her head.

Across the tops of her thighs, horizontal rows of stitches form two seemingly continuous lines, beginning on the right leg and ending on the left. The surgeon is tugging roughly on a third smaller gash across her kneecap, perhaps 3 or 4 inches long.

The stitches are increasingly uneven, and the sides of the wound are not aligned properly, giving the appearance of a shirt buttoned up wrong. The surgeon pauses to wiggle her fingers, crack her knuckles, and tell me she lost count of the number of stitches over an hour ago. She says the wounds are deep, so there are internal, as well as external, stitches - hundreds of them.

There are also several shorter wounds that are still open and oozing blood. The surgeon looks me in the eye and slides her finger into one of the shorter wounds. It disappears up to her second knuckle. Without speaking, she is demonstrating to me that it is a stab wound, as surely as the others are slashes.

Maria is from Mexico and doesn’t speak English. My Spanish is terrible and makes her smile, but she understands me. I tell her that I was called by the hospital to help her. I tell her that I want to help her to be safe. I tell her everything she says to me is protected by confidentiality and that no one can make me repeat anything she’d like to tell me - not the police, not immigration, no one. It is my usual rap.

Maria smiles calmly and repeats the story of the freak accident, the broken bottle, the flying glass.

I am there as her advocate. I am there to support her, to counsel her, to help her get answers to her legal and medical questions, to find her a shelter, if she has nowhere safe to go, or even to pilfer snacks from the doctors’ lounge if she’s hungry.

Advocates encourage, but do not make, demands of the survivors of domestic violence and sexual assault we see in emergency departments throughout the city, and we do not doubt their versions of events. But I want Maria to want to tell me what happened to her on this clearly violent night. I want to see her fear, her pain, her motivation to survive, but she just smiles.

I want to move on to my next rap - the one where I rally her indignation. Did he say she deserved it? I want to tell her that she never could. Did he call her foul names? I want to tell her that he was wrong. Did he threaten her? I want to tell her that she is safe, for now. But she won’t let me.

I want Maria to trust me. I want her to be confident in my ability to help her. In my 14 years as a volunteer advocate with Mount Sinai’s Sexual Assault and Violence Intervention Program, Maria is the first and only one not to let me in, and the first who I feel certain will eventually die.

At 5 a.m., four hours after my arrival in the ED, Maria thanks me for my hospitality as two young Mexican men - alternately describing themselves as Maria’s brothers, cousins, friends - very gently and kindly escort her from the hospital.

I wave weakly from the nurses’ station and try to return her wistful smile. She had been so confident in her story that as I watch her slow, painful shuffling, I am almost starting to believe in the malicious properties of bouncing glass.

In the absence of this illusion, I am left with the vision of the man Maria once, and still may, love. He’s in a rage, gripping the neck of a broken bottle and tearing into her flesh.

I see Maria frightened and in pain, wondering if she would die tonight. But she didn’t die, I tell myself, not this night. And then I wonder if that’s why she smiles.

Still, whether she clings to a delusion in which inanimate objects take flight to harm her or accepts a reality in which the man she once trusted mutilates her, Maria lives in a very dangerous place. I hope that she knows it and takes care. I hope that tonight is the very worst of her life. And yet somehow, I know that it won’t be.

Yannie ten Broeke, a freelance writer living in New York, teaches undergraduate clinical psychology.

Posted by Common Ties on Monday, November 19th, 2007 | Email This Post

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