Bringing in Finn by Sara Connell Page A

until twenty-seven needles had been stuck into body, opening pathways that now had stories to tell. The acupuncturist had been as surprised at the revelation as I was and hurriedly handed me a business card: Irena Dashani—the therapist I would work with for most of my time in the UK.
    As part of my healing, I wanted to name what had taken place in that cold, cement-floored room in our basement and then later what had transpired at a friend’s house with her stepfather. If I was going to go back to my family’s house at all, I needed to say what had happened there. I thought if I acknowledged it, if my family could bear witness, I could let go, integrate the experience, move on.

    The more I was dedicated to my self-discovery, though, the more distant I felt from my family and the more my hope that I would ever have the discussion with them diminished. An opportunity came a few years later, however, during a phone call with my father. He’d called after one of our hotel Christmas visits, saying he’d felt me slipping away like the horizon from a ship.
    â€œI’m not okay with just watching you go,” he said. “What can we do?”
    I surprised both him and myself by telling him what I had uncovered in England. I said I wanted to be able to talk about my past with him and my mother.
    â€œI don’t feel as if I can talk to Mom about this,” I said. A rule I’d adopted in the family and pledged allegiance to, though unspoken and without verification, had been not to bring up something that would upset her.
    I heard silence on the line and the faint echo, the hollow sound sometimes present on international calls, reminding me we lived on separate continents.
    â€œNo,” he said. “I don’t think it would be a good idea.”
    But I told her anyway.
    It happened during my next visit, five months later, when I was alone with my parents after returning my sister to medical school. The weather was already hot for May, and my father had cranked up the air conditioner. We drove on a monotonous stretch of highway, tall pine trees and oaks flanking both sides of the road.
    â€œI want to share something—some things—that happened when I was growing up,” I said.
    My father kept his eyes on he road. He already knew the basics of what I was about to say. To my knowledge, my parents never kept anything from each other, and yet I had no idea if my father had told my mother what I was about to relate.

    When I was six, two older neighborhood boys came over to play in our basement and began a game of Simon Says that turned sexual. When I protested, they forced me to touch them. Afterward, they told me I’d done something very bad, that I wasn’t a virgin anymore, and if my parents found out, I’d be sent away, or killed—just like Laurie, a girl on our street who had disappeared suddenly. (I found out later that she was not dead, as they had said, but had been sent to live with her mother in another state. But by then it was too late.)
    And two years later, during a sleepover, Courtney, my best friend in the third grade, and I danced in our underwear for her father, who was drunk. I went to use the master bathroom, and he was waiting for me when I came out, naked aside from a yellow bath towel wrapped around his waist. He shut the door behind him. “I’m going to show you what grown-ups do,” he said, carrying me to the bed.
    â€œHe raped or molested me—I don’t know which,” I said from the back seat of the car, an Oldsmobile sedan my father had taken over from my grandfather when he died. I remembered only snippets from that night: the yellow towel, his arms around me, warm breath on my face, the vastness of the bed. The next clear memory I have is of being back in Courtney’s bedroom, she asleep and I pushing her dresser in front of the door and being unable to stop shaking.
    For several minutes, neither of my parents