‘Snow,’ I call. ‘Are you in there?’
There is no answer. I can feel my heart hammering in my chest.
‘If you don’t open this door I’m fucking breaking it down,’ I say. My voice has a thread of panic running through it.
Still she doesn’t answer.
Dread is like an icy claw around my heart. I stand back and start kicking the door. After three kicks it smashes open. I switch on the light and find her naked and cowering in a corner. Her fists are covering her mouth. Above her fist, her eyes are large and wild. Her hair is messy and strands fall over her face. She stares at me without any recognition. As if she is not even looking at me.
What the fuck! It is an incredible shock to see her reduced to something so feral, but another part of my brain takes over. Calmly, it deduces where the sound has come from. She has been scratching the side of the bathtub with her fingernails.
I take a step forward and she presses her back into the tiles, a look of sheer terror on her face.
I lift my hand. ‘It’s jus
t me, Snow. Shane.’
She stares at me without comprehension.
I very slowly get on my haunches, and when it looks like that that action does not spook her, I get on my hands and knees and start a half-shuffle, half-crawl towards her. ‘It’s me,’ I urge softly. ‘I’m not going to hurt you.’ I stop a foot away from her.
‘What are you doing here, Snow?’ I ask in a conversational tone, as if I was asking her to pass the salt.
‘I feel cold. So cold,’ she says, and indeed her teeth are chattering.
‘Here, let me warm you,’ I say without making any move towards her.
‘No,’ she whispers. ‘Nobody can warm me. I saw them again tonight.’
‘Saw who?’
‘The bastards who did this to me.’
‘What did they do, Snow?’ I ask, the blood in my veins turning to ice.
‘This,’ she says, and opens her thighs. She makes a fist with her small hand and is about to hit her own exposed sex when I grab it and stop her. I stare at her.
‘No,’ I say. ‘You can’t hurt that. That’s mine.’
She doesn’t fight.
‘That’s yours?’ she asks in a small voice.
‘That’s mine, Snow. I don’t care what happened before this, but that is now mine.’
‘I was a virgin and they didn’t even use a condom,’ she sobs.
‘Oh Snow,’ I say, and feel tears start prickling my own eyes. The sensation is novel. I haven’t cried since the day I found out they slit my father’s throat. I blink the tears away quickly and gather her into my arms. At first she thrashes and hits out instinctively, but I hold her tight.
‘I got you,’ I tell her. I got you, babe. No one will ever hurt you again.’
‘Something terrible happened to me in that hotel room, and I cannot tell you about it because it was too horrible.’ Her body shakes with emotion.
I hold her tightly. ‘It’s not your fault this happened to you. Nothing you did made you responsible for your assault. Shhhh … Shhh … Shhhh’ I whisper in her ear until her struggles cease and she is limp in my arms.
I slip one hand under her knees and the other around her back and carry her back to my bed. I lay her down, and when I try to disengage myself she clings desperately to me, so I sit on the bed and hold her. After a while she starts sobbing.
‘Break open, Snow. Cry all you want. You deserve compassion from yourself. You are always being compassionate to others. Now be compassionate to yourself. You deserve this moment of grace. You’re OK. You’ll always be ok. You have nothing to be ashamed of. This world is a better place because you are in it.’