What We Broke
content warning: child sexual abuse
It was the late nineties, and I was the kind of toddler whose face decorated the photo studio at the mall. Loose brunette curls pinned back with ribbon, fingers curling around basket handles, clutching a bunny, its white fur raised. In frilly dresses or dressed like a tomboy in overalls and a pilling sweater. My eyes were big and brown. My dimples, caverns. Now, the photos are rippled with floodwater from our overcrowded basement. Powdered sugar smears down my denim dress, dirt caught in the peeling pigment. Over my face, a yellow film. Wherever I look, my story starts the same. Being molested is my first memory. Everything else I’ve done, everything I am—it will always be in the after.
I was a toddler when two of my teenage brothers snuck into my room and separated my body from my self. They were nice boys, square-jawed and mop-headed. I wasn’t the only one they had assaulted, but I was the only one to tell.
Mom was asking about my mona, our family’s word for vagina. She’d always told us it was the Italian translation, which made any mention of the Mona Lisa difficult for me as I got older. Why would he name it that? I’d sputter. Wasn’t he Italian? My older sister Emily looked at me like it was obvious—he did it on purpose! We had all sorts of euphemisms like that in my family. Our breasts were tittinas, as in tiny tits. Our bikini area was our circle of grace, God’s place, the stretch of skin we should not touch. I don’t know what inspired my mom to ask about sexual abuse, but her questions were pulled straight from Degrassi: Toddler High. My answers were all wrong. Concerned, she showed me a Ken doll.
The memory is familiar, but foreign. I was too young to recall. The story belongs to my mother and to our television. A whispered show me where, the toddler weeping, the trembling hand rising. It bores me. I’m uninterested in being anyone else’s life story. Instead, I imagine myself telepathic. I look at my sisters across the room and feel their stuttering pulse, trace it like a groove in a record, my fingernail following the spiral. I open my mouth, and all our music comes out.
Kindergarten was the year of my broken arm. The farm where I’d spent my infancy was a death trap, empty of animals but packed with the sharp stuff used to maintain them. I don’t remember living there, but we’d never sold the house, so we’d never moved out. When I was growing up, our neighborhood wasn’t yet part of Omaha, Nebraska. It wasn’t even a neighborhood. There were just five buildings on 168th Street, and we owned three of them. The farm, the brick house I shared with my parents and seven sisters, and the blue one to which my five brothers had been banished. Beyond that was our lone neighbor and a farm where they grew Christmas trees. Our territory was cut off by the creek, a trickle of muddy water that my older siblings crossed on a fallen log. Our home formed the border between city and country, a line that’s always been porous in Omaha.
That day, my older sister Emily and I decided to build a fort in the barn attic. She was seven, and I was five. It’s difficult to describe Emily then without seeing her now: a mechanic covered in Tim Burton tattoos, hair intermittently sheared and dyed pink. There’s no trace of the cheerleader within, blonde and shining. The Emily of my childhood could’ve modeled for Suburbs R’ Us.
Our barn’s attic was the kind of place only a child could love, all dust and dappled sunlight with holes in the floor above each stall. They were designed to drop hay down to the hypothetical horses. Emily left to find furniture and tasked me with cleaning. That was an odd choice, to say the least. My childhood nickname was tornado because of my preternatural ability to destroy any room I entered. Emily armed me with a broom and my one-track mind, rarely derailed. There was just one rule: I was forbidden from touching the largest cobweb, which dangled over a hole in the center of the floor.
You can guess where I’m going with this, but I’ll play it in slow motion anyway. The sun shifting through the rafters, my chubby arms lifting the broom, gaze fixed on that glittering lace. The final step, that relentless drop. I landed in hay, and it should’ve been soft, like Bugs Bunny leaving an imprint of his ears in the spun gold, but we stored our hay in metal barrels. My arm slammed into the side. In the stall, tools leered up at me, and I shivered at the rusting spikes of hoes and rakes. It was like the torture chamber in a movie I was too young to see, but my siblings had shown me anyway. I waited for my head to crack open, the ultimate threat in our household—stop wrestling your brothers, you’ll crack your head open! The pain stretched on, and somehow, the sun still shone. I remember the sliver of light silhouetting the barn door, but I don’t remember if I screamed. It seemed I waited there for a hundred years.
Eventually, my sister Anna peered through the crack. At three years old, she couldn’t open the door, but she rested a hand against the wall and called my name. Get Mom, I wailed. She blinked dimly. Anna, I screamed again, and finally, finally, she listened.
Mom carried me across the field, back to the house. I remember the gold of the long grass, the broad expanse of the hill. In my memory, it’s all in a wide shot, Mom’s red hair, me clinging to her back, weeping, the hardscrabble plains. When we got home, my parents said my arm wasn’t broken and sent me to bed.
The ache didn’t stop. The next day, I stomped off to my Catholic elementary school, arm resting in the straps of my plaid jumper. I used to fall asleep in my uniform at night and wake the next morning, slipping off my dirty underwear and walking bare-assed to Mom’s car, to class, where I read under my desk and played war at recess. There was this one kid in the opposing army, mousey with blonde hair and glasses, like Stuart Little. Stuart hit me on my injured arm, which, as I’d told the teacher’s assistant, already hurt. The teacher’s assistant didn’t care. Coincidentally, she was also Stuart’s mother. She sent me back to the playground, insisting everything was fine.
After school, it hurt too badly to wear my backpack. I dragged it behind me by a single strap. It snaked through the manicured grass and tripped me on my way to the car. Again, I fell, but this time, I cried until Mom agreed to take me to the doctor. As I’d thought, my arm was broken.
The funny thing about being molested before you’re old enough to remember is that you feel the need to prove, even to yourself, that it happened. I used to write about being assaulted all the time. I’d tilt the limited memories in the sunlight like a mirror, then chase them across the ceiling like a cat. I remember little, and I was told even less. My sisters say they were forbidden to speak to me about our shared experiences. Still, I’ve always known. The truth was like a grain of sand caught in my gut, and I grew around it until it was a pearl, rattling in the pit of my stomach. My teachers couldn’t hear it, and my parents wouldn’t listen. After years of carrying their own noisy burdens, they had mistaken the sound for a heartbeat.
I’m still not sure what happened after I told my story. Mom’s favorite answer is I don’t remember, like she, too, was turned young by the trauma. She says they took the boys to therapy and moved them out of the house. I remember my father screaming at a locked door, shoving a chair beneath the knob. I listened from the living room, hands in my lap. Years later, I cried looking at a photo of those hands because they were mine, mine exactly. I recognized the toddler’s thin cuticles and doughy knuckles, already clenched, her fist curled tight as dandelion buds on the playground. I wanted to peel it open. With my thumb, I’d find her lifeline, stop at the start, press with my nail until it split, a dent in the skin. Now, her day of the week panties would always read Sunday, and no one would ever need to open her drawers. I’d tuck her in somewhere safer than her bed, a forest where even the ground was soft. I’d hold her, and I’d hold her, and I’d hold me, but still. Someone else’s hands would always come first.
After I broke my arm, my younger sister Anna and I got matching pink suede coats. One day, I struggled to shove my cast into the fur-lined sleeve. Every kid in my class had signed it, their names crooked, letters just learned. It was only once I’d managed to put the coat on that I realized it was Anna’s. The sleeve stuck. In the living room, Mom gave a great heave. She recruited my sisters to hold me around the waist, braced her feet, and yanked, straining, barely holding back her wheezy laugh. When the coat finally came loose, the cast popped off with it. It was intact inside the sleeve. We went back to the doctor to get a new one, but he didn’t take the old cast back. I kept that shell for years after. Unlike the green one they later cut off, this cast was perfect, seamless, my special-made exoskeleton. I could almost slide my hand back inside, whole.
Lia Hagen (@lia_hagen) is a terminally optimistic writer from Omaha, Nebraska. Her poem “Thanksgiving” was shortlisted for the 2024 Bridport Prize in Poetry, and her short story “Love Line” won a 2024 Next Generation Short Story Award. Her work has appeared in The Minetta Review, Button Poetry, and Eunoia Review.