Come, believers. Prayer is better than sleep. - Azan (Morning Call)
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There were bruises on her shoulder for days.
She realized it the next morning, in the shower. Her hand brushed the place where he had grabbed her, and there was a dull pain, and she thought (dully) oh, that's odd. But she wasn't surprised. Not until she turned her head and lifted her arm and saw the row of blue half-moons.
He had gripped her so hard…
The marks were low enough on her arm that she couldn't wear sleeveless tops. It was no problem at work. If her wardrobe changed for a few days, nobody would say anything.
But she found herself covering up at home, too. Wearing loose, dark clothing.
Rachel helped. She already loved the baby, already looked at her and thought, my little girl, but she felt that love deepening, becoming not just Mom's love for Baby, but Lisa's love for her daughter. Rachel: occupied by the present, entertained by the simple and beautiful, possessing a well of deep need. In her presence, it was almost impossible to feel numb or incapable or alone. Now they were allies against the dark.
The problem was work. It got harder after she became a parent. Then it got easier. Now it was too easy. She'd find herself sitting at her desk at 10:30 in the morning, the phone toning in her ear, a legal pad in front of her, thinking: I was just on a conference call. And through some great effort she would remember that she'd been talking to the Joint Commission, or Shep Slattery from the Board, or…
And the notes would be quite in order, and everything would be fine, except she couldn't remember the conversation. She had a sense of saying all the right things, of running meetings, of eating—alone, with people. But that week her experience was limited to arriving at work, making coffee, and driving home at the end of the day with a vague sense of accomplishment. Like she had crossed something off a list.
She didn't feel bad. Just… disoriented.
Last year, she'd gone out with this guy, a soldier back from the Middle East; he never told her which country. While he was over there, he said, he got accustomed to hearing the call to prayer. It happened every day, five times a day, at every mosque in every town. He got so tired of hearing the damn minarets every day. But then he came home and he couldn't measure time anymore. He couldn't sleep, barely ate, never made a date on time, because he was like one of Pavlov's dogs with those minarets.
She figured he was crazy, and eventually she stopped seeing him, and some time after that he went back there and they never spoke again. But she remembered the story. She realized she usually saw House a couple of times a day, his office between ten and twelve, her office between three and five, like that. Then she'd stopped thinking about it, because she didn't like questions that had that kind of answer. But there was no avoiding it now. All of a sudden, there were no bookends to the workday, nothing to nail it down, and it slipped out of her grasp like an eel.
The bruises faded after three or four days, but they still ached sometimes, and she thought about that, too.