I had them laminated in a scrapbook. Something Dr. Frank and Aunt Helen discovered years ago.

“Did your family love you?” Dr. Frank continued to press. He was relentless today. I was less certain of this Dr. Frank, and I started pacing again.

“I don’t know.”

“You don’t know, or you don’t want to know?”

“I… I don’t know.”

“Did you love them?”

“My mother and siblings,” I said instantly.

“Really?” He cocked his head to the side. The shrink’s quintessential pose. “Danielle, you have spent so much time and energy on their deaths. If you truly love them, why not invest a little time and energy on their lives? That’s what they’d want you to remember, don’t you think?”

“But I loved him, too,” I heard myself whisper.

“I know.”

“I tried so hard to make him happy.”

“I know.”

“I thought, that night, if I did what he wanted, if I just made him happy, it would be okay.”

“What did he want you to do, Danielle? You are a grown woman now, a nurse with professional expertise. Don’t you think you can finally say it out loud?”

But I couldn’t. I wouldn’t. There were things no child knew how to put in words. They didn’t have the vocabulary to match the experience. A dime if you’ll touch Daddy’s penis. A quarter if you’ll suck. What could a little girl say about that?

I worked now with two- and three-year olds who stuffed and regurgitated food in a desperate attempt to share. They didn’t know the term “oral sex”; they could only demonstrate the terrible violation, filling their cheeks with applesauce, then spitting it out while their mothers yelled at them for making such a mess. The children were honest in their desire to communicate. It was the adults who screwed everything up.

“She didn’t save me,” I said tonelessly. “But then, she didn’t even save herself.”

“Who, Danielle?”

“My mother. She told me to go to my room. She told me it would be okay. She told me she would take care of everything.”

“What would she take care of, Danielle?”

“They started fighting. I could hear them yelling from my bedroom. He was drunk. You could tell he was drunk. He was always drunk.”

“And then?”

“I don’t want to go to the cemetery this year. I don’t see the point.”

“What happened that night, Danielle? You went to your bedroom. What happened next? Tell me what happened next.”

“He killed them,” I said bluntly. “I tried to make him happy, but he killed them. Then he sang to me, so I would know it was all my fault.”

“You didn’t kill your family, Danielle. A nine-year-old girl cannot stop a grown man. Surely at this stage of your life you realize that.”