For thirty-nine years I thought the small blue flower on my mother's wrist was a tattoo she got when she was young. Last month a nurse pushed her sleeve up, saw it, and walked out to get security — and everything I assumed about what that meant was backwards.
PART 1
Mom has had that flower for as long as I have been alive.
Inside of the left wrist. Small — smaller than a dime. Faded to almost grey. The kind of thing you stop seeing by the time you are nine years old.
I asked her about it three times in thirty-nine years.
What does your flower mean?
I got it when I was young.
That was the whole answer, every single time, in the same eleven words. No friends, no holiday, no reason she picked a flower. No story of any kind attached to a thing on her body.
By about fourteen I had stopped asking, and by twenty I had stopped seeing it.
I want to be exact about the three times, because I have been over them.
The first I was six, in a bath, holding her wrist with two hands the way children do, and I asked what the flower was for.
The second I was eleven and a girl at school had come in with a stick-on one and I asked whether Mom's had hurt.
The third I was fifteen and being difficult about wanting one of my own, and I used hers as an argument, and she said the eleven words and then said no, and that was the end of that conversation and of the subject.
Six. Eleven. Fifteen.
Every single time, I was a child asking about a pretty thing on my mother's arm. Not once as an adult. Not once at twenty-five or thirty or thirty-eight.
I have had a great deal of time to think about what a woman does with a question like that from a six-year-old in a bath, and the answer is that there is nothing she can do with it except the eleven words.
Last month she went into Merrivale General for a knee replacement and I took the day off and went with her.
She is sixty-six. She had been putting the knee off for four years and she was nervous about the anaesthetic, which is normal, and she made a joke about it in the car that was not funny and that I laughed at anyway.
Nothing about that morning was unusual. We checked in. We did the paperwork. Three different people asked her the same question about medications and she answered all three patiently.
Then a nurse came in to put the line in.
She was chatting while she laid the tray out — something about the parking situation, which is a thing everybody at Merrivale complains about. She took Mom's left arm and pushed the sleeve of the gown up above the elbow.
And she stopped.
I mean completely. Her hand stopped moving. She looked at the inside of my mother's wrist for what I would guess was four seconds, which is an extremely long time to look at somebody's arm in silence.
I said: is something wrong?
She did not answer me.
What she did was pull the sleeve back down over it. Carefully, with two fingers, the way you would cover something rather than the way you would adjust a sleeve.
Then she stood up and said: excuse me. I need to check something.
And she went out of that room considerably faster than she had come into it.
I turned to Mom and said that was strange.
Mom did not answer either. She was looking at the door.
And that is when I saw the thing that has kept me awake for a month, and it was not the nurse.
My mother was terrified.
Not confused. Not annoyed at a fussing nurse. Frightened — properly, physically frightened, in a way I have seen on my mother's face exactly once before, at a funeral in 2009, and which I did not understand that time either.
I said: Mom.
She said: I'm fine.
She was not fine. Her right hand had gone to her left wrist, over the gown, and was holding it.
About five minutes later there were quiet voices in the corridor. Then two hospital security officers came and stood outside the open door, one either side, not looking in.
Then a doctor came in past them.
He barely looked at me. He did not pick up her chart, which I noticed at the time because everybody who comes into those rooms picks up the chart.
He went straight to the side of the bed and his attention went directly to her covered wrist.
I said: what is going on?
Nobody in that room answered me. Not the doctor, not either of the men in the corridor, not my mother.
He said: ma'am, would you mind showing me your wrist?
And my mother hesitated.
Sixty-six years old, in a hospital gown, in a room with her daughter in it, and she hesitated for about three seconds.
Then she pulled the sleeve back, very slowly, and the little blue flower came out into the light.
He looked at it. One second. Two. Three.
The room was quiet in a way that hospital rooms are not.
Then he said: where did you get this symbol?
She said nothing at all.
I said: Mom?
Nothing.
He glanced at one of the officers in the corridor. Then he looked back at her and said:
Do you understand what this symbol represents?
My mother's fingers began to shake.
And I stepped up to the bed and said Mom, what is going on, what haven't you told me — and her eyes filled, and her lips parted, and for about one second I genuinely believed I was finally going to hear it.
Then the doctor turned toward the two men in the corridor and said, quietly:
Please close the door.
One of them pulled it shut, and the latch clicked, and I was on the wrong side of it.
PART 2
I stood in that corridor for fifty-one minutes.
I want to say what I thought during those fifty-one minutes, because I have to, and because everybody who hears this story thinks the same thing and they are all wrong in the same direction.
I thought my mother was being detained.
I thought the flower was a mark she had put on herself, or been given, that connected her to something — that somewhere in the seventies my mother had been part of something and it had followed her for forty years, and that a nurse had recognised it and my mother was about to be arrested in a hospital gown before a knee operation.
I stood in a corridor and reorganised sixty-six years of a woman I have known my entire life into the shape of somebody with a past.
I have had to apologise to my mother for those fifty-one minutes, and she has told me twice that there is nothing to apologise for, and I am going to keep apologising.
Because here is what was actually happening on the other side of that door.
The two officers were not there to stop my mother leaving. They were there to stop anybody else coming in.
That is what that is. It is called a protective standby and it exists in the policy at Merrivale and at every hospital in this state, and the entire purpose of the closed door is that nobody outside can hear.
The doctor did not pick up her chart because the chart was not the point.
He asked her where she got the symbol because he is required to ask an open question and record the answer in her own words rather than tell her what he thinks he is looking at.
And he asked whether she understood what it represented because that is the question you ask when you do not know whether the person in front of you knows what is on their own body.
Some people do not. That is the part I did not know and that I have thought about more than anything else since.
The nurse's name is Rennie Vos. She is thirty-four and she has been at Merrivale for six years and she recognised it in two seconds.
She pulled the sleeve back down before she left the room for one reason, which she told me herself, four weeks later, when I went back to that hospital specifically to find her.
She covered it because there was a second person in the room and she did not know who I was.
For all Rennie Vos knew at that moment, the woman on the bed was there with somebody she needed protecting from.
I was standing three feet away with a coffee and a parking ticket, and a stranger looked at my mother's wrist and quietly took the decision to assume I might be the reason.
I have not been able to get past that and I do not think I want to.
I asked her whether she gets it wrong.
She said yes. She said she has done that four times in six years and been wrong three times, and that the three wrong ones cost a nurse forty minutes and an awkward conversation, and the one right one is the reason she still does it.
Then she told me the thing that I have repeated to about nine people since.
She said: the training isn't about learning what the marks mean. There are dozens and I can't remember most of them. The training is about not talking yourself out of it.
She said the natural thing — the thing every single person does, including nurses, including police — is to look at something odd and immediately build a reason for it. It's probably an old tattoo. It's probably a coincidence. She's here with her daughter, so it's probably fine.
She said: you can do that in about a second and a half and it feels like being reasonable.
PART 3
They let me back in at twenty past one.
The doctor introduced himself properly this time — Hessel Ayim, and he had been a consultant at Merrivale for eleven years — and he asked my mother, in front of me, whether she was comfortable with me being told.
She said yes. She said it in a voice I did not recognise.
Then he left, and it was the two of us in a room with a knee operation that had been postponed to Thursday, and my mother told me a version of it.
Not all of it. She has never told me all of it and I have stopped expecting to be given all of it, which is a thing her therapist and I have discussed and which I now understand is not the same as being lied to.
She was nineteen when it started and twenty-two when it stopped.
She was not from around here. She grew up four hours north and I have been to that town twice in my life, both times as a child, and I now know why we did not go a third time.
I have gone back through my childhood since, which everybody does and which is mostly not useful.
But there are four things.
She never wore short sleeves to anything official. Doctors, banks, school meetings, my parents' evenings — long sleeves, in July, and I put it down to her being cold-natured, which she also is.
She would not let anybody take her left hand. Not in a rough way — if you reached for it she gave you the right one, every time, and I was in my thirties before I noticed, and I only noticed because my own daughter did the same thing to her.
She has never once been able to sit with her back to a door in a restaurant. We all knew that. It was a family joke.
And when I was seventeen and about to go away, she asked me a question that made no sense at the time. She asked whether I knew what I would do if I ever needed to leave somewhere quickly.
I said Mom, it's a college.
And she said: I know. But do you know what you'd do.
I am not going to describe what those three years were and my mother would not want me to. There is nothing in this account that anybody needs for any reason.
What matters for this story is one afternoon in 1982.
She got out at twenty-two, and the way she got out is that a stranger asked her a question.
A woman in a laundromat in Hallow Creek, on a weekday afternoon, looked at my mother's wrist while they were both waiting on machines.
And she said: do you need somewhere that isn't where you are?
That is it. That is the whole rescue.
Eight words from a woman whose name my mother never learned and never saw again, in a laundromat, on a Tuesday, over the noise of two machines.
I have asked my mother about that woman more than about anything else in this entire story, because I wanted her to be somebody. A social worker. A former something. A person with training.
My mother does not think she was. She thinks she was a woman in her fifties with a basket of towels who had seen a wrist before and asked.
That is worse and it is better and I have not decided which.
Because if she was a professional, then the answer to all of this is more professionals.
And if she was a woman with a basket of towels, then the answer is that anybody can do it, at any time, for free, and almost nobody ever does.
My mother said yes.
She has told me that she does not know why she said yes that day, having not said it on any other day, and that she has thought about it for forty-four years and has no explanation.
I have one, but it is mine and not hers, and it is that nobody had ever asked before.
Forty-four years. My mother is sixty-six years old and she has been out for twice as long as she was in, and she raised me, and she was a dental receptionist for twenty-nine years, and she has a bad knee and a fondness for a particular brand of biscuit and she is the least dramatic person I have ever met.
And the whole of it turns on one afternoon in a laundromat and a woman with a question.
PART 4
Now the part that made me sit down on a hospital floor.
In 1994, my mother told it once.
Twelve years after she got out. She was thirty-four, I was seven, and she drove ninety minutes to a legal aid office on her own on a Tuesday and sat in a chair for four hours with a woman called Faye Brunner.
Anonymously. That was her condition and it was not negotiable. Her name went nowhere.
She described everything she could remember and she has told me that it was the worst day of her adult life and that she was physically sick afterward in the car park.
Nobody was ever arrested. Not then and not since and not now — the men she described are dead or seventy-eight and there is no case anywhere and there never was going to be.
I asked Dr Ayim about that in the second week, because I had got it into my head that something ought to happen.
He said something I did not want to hear at the time.
He said: Ms Halvard, I do this eleven or twelve times a year. In eleven years I have seen one prosecution. That is not what the flag is for.
I asked him what it is for, then.
And he said: it's so that when a woman comes into my hospital, somebody in the building knows what they are looking at before they ask her to lie down under anaesthetic with her arms strapped to a table.
Then he said: your mother was about to be put to sleep by strangers in a room with the door shut. That is what we were preventing.
I had to go and stand outside for a while after that.
Nothing was ever in a newspaper. Nobody ever contacted her again. She got in her car and drove ninety minutes home and cooked dinner for a seven-year-old, and she concluded — entirely reasonably, and for the next thirty-two years — that it had gone into a drawer and died there.
She was wrong.
Somewhere in those four hours, Faye Brunner wrote down a description of a small blue flower tattooed on the inside of a wrist, and what it meant, and who used it.
That description did not stay in a drawer. It went into training material.
It is in the material that Merrivale General uses. It is why a thirty-four-year-old nurse called Rennie Vos, who was two years old in 1994, looked at my mother's arm for two seconds last month and knew exactly what she was looking at and exactly what to do next.
My mother has been in a document since 1994 that she does not know exists.
She saved herself twice and she only ever knew about one of them.
I told her that in the room on the Thursday, after the knee, when she was groggy and I probably should have waited.
She did not say anything for a long time. Then she said: so it worked.
And I said yes.
And she said: I thought I'd wasted a day.
Thirty-two years. She had carried around, on top of everything else, a small private belief that she had put herself through the worst afternoon of her life for nothing.
I wrote to Faye Brunner in the spring. She is seventy-three and retired and lives about six hours away, and she wrote back in eleven days, on paper, in an envelope.
She does not remember my mother. She wants that said plainly and she said it in the second line.
She took, by her own estimate, somewhere over four hundred statements in that period and she remembers perhaps a dozen faces and none of the names, and she said she has made peace with that because remembering all of them would have finished her by forty.
What she does remember is the flower.
She wrote: I remember the first time somebody described that one to me, because I asked her to draw it and she did it with her left hand and it took her a long time.
She is not certain that was my mother. She thinks it might have been. She was very careful to say she is not certain.
My mother is left-handed.
PART 5
Now my aunt.
Margit is seventy-one and lives two hours away in Verrin County. She is my mother's older sister and she has been in the same room as us perhaps four times in my entire life, and I had always been told, vaguely, that they were not close.
Somebody at that hospital telephoned her, because she was the emergency contact on a form my mother filled in in 2011 and never updated.
She arrived at half past two.
I was in the family waiting area with a coffee I was not drinking. My mother was in a chair by the window in a gown and a cardigan a nurse had lent her.
There were fourteen people in that room. Two families waiting on other patients. A volunteer at the tea trolley. A man asleep in the corner with a coat over him.
Margit came straight through and did not say hello to either of us.
She crossed that room, took hold of my mother's left wrist, and pulled the cardigan sleeve down over it.
Then she held on to it.
And she said it at full volume, in front of every person in that waiting room:
You kept it covered for forty years. Don't you dare uncover it now.
Nobody moved. The volunteer stopped with a cup halfway to a saucer.
I said Aunt Margit, and she did not look at me. She has never once in thirty-nine years given me the courtesy of being irritated by me.
She leaned down closer to my mother's face and said: get dressed, we're going home. Well?
And my mother sat in that chair with her sister's hand on her wrist and did not answer, and did not stand up, and did not pull her arm back either.
Here is what that was.
In 1983, a year after the laundromat, my mother told her sister.
She told her once, in a kitchen, at twenty-three years old, because Margit was twenty-eight and married and settled and was the only family member my mother believed might be able to hear it.
And Margit told her never to speak about it again.
Not out of cruelty. I want to be fair, and my mother is fairer about it than I am. Margit was twenty-eight in 1983 in a small town and she was frightened, and what she reached for was the only tool she had ever been given, which was silence, and she handed it to her sister as though it were help.
It was not help. It was forty-three years.
The reason my mother said eleven words to me three times in thirty-nine years — I got it when I was young — is that she had already tried once, with the person most likely to listen, and had been told to stop.
You do not try a second time. That is the whole thing about all of this. People do not keep asking. They ask once, of the person they think is safest, and if that person says don't, then the answer is settled forever and everybody spends the next four decades thinking it was never raised.
Margit drove two hours to that hospital, at seventy-one, to say the same sentence a second time.
That is what she came for. Somebody had telephoned her and told her the hospital had seen it, and she got in a car.
My mother did not go home with her.
She sat in that chair and said nothing for what I am told was about eleven seconds, and then she said, to her sister, in a perfectly ordinary voice:
No. I'm having the knee done on Thursday.
That is all she said. She did not argue with her and she did not accuse her of anything and she has still not, to my knowledge, ever raised 1983 with Margit directly.
She just declined, at sixty-six, in a waiting room, in front of fourteen strangers.
Margit drove home.
The knee was done on the Thursday. It went well. She is walking better than she has in six years and she is unbearable about the stairs.
She has been seeing somebody in Coldbrook since March, which was her own idea and which she told me about afterward rather than before, and I have learned not to ask how it is going.
I asked her once, in the second week, why she never told me.
And she said: because you'd have looked at me differently.
I said: Mom, I've looked at you differently every day since that room.
And she said: I know. That's the bit I was right about.
Then she said the other thing, which is the reason I have written any of this down.
She said: nobody ever asked me, love. Not once, in forty-four years, except a woman in a laundromat and a girl in a legal aid office who was paid to.
Three times I asked her about that flower. Three times in thirty-nine years, and every one of those times I was a child asking what a pretty tattoo meant, and every one of those times she gave me the answer that closes the subject.
I never once asked her as an adult.
I do not know what she would have said. She says she does not know either.
But the flower was on the inside of her wrist, facing her, every day of my entire life, and she never covered it, not once, not in a photograph, not at my wedding.
She was not hiding it.
She was carrying it around in plain sight for forty-four years, waiting for somebody to ask her the right question, and the only two people who ever did were strangers.
I asked her, in June, whether she wanted it removed.
There is a scheme. It is free, it takes several sessions, and Merrivale gave her the leaflet without her asking, which she said was the most useful thing anybody handed her that entire month.
She thought about it for eight days.
Then she said no, and she gave me a reason I did not expect and have not been able to improve on.
She said: if I take it off, then the next nurse doesn't see anything.
I said that she is sixty-six and out and safe and it is not her job to be a teaching aid.
And she said: no. But I'm in the book now, love. That's the only useful thing I've got out of the whole of it.
She had that flower for forty-four years as a thing that had been done to her.
It took her about a month, at sixty-six, to decide it was hers.
She has agreed to let Rennie Vos photograph it properly for the training file, with a scale, and to record two minutes of audio in her own voice, anonymously, describing what it meant.
May you like
She is doing it in the autumn, after the physio finishes.
She has told me she is dreading it and that she is going to do it anyway. Then she made a joke about the parking at Merrivale, which is a thing everybody there complains about.
