Title: The World Turned
Upside Down
Author: CGB
(c.giles@curtin.edu.au)
Category: The Sopranos
(Dr Melfi)
Rating: PG - 13
Archive: If you have a
Sopranos archive please tell me about it!
Disclaimer: Much respect
to Mr Chase and HBO
Spoilers: Up to Big Girls Don't Cry.
Summary: "I know
where you're going with this," she says.
Set in the early second
season after Tony tells Dr Melfi that it's safe
to come out of hiding
but before she takes him on as a patient again.
-------------
"You woke up this
morning, the world turned upside down" -
Alabama 3
-------------
She's touching her face,
as if she's expecting lines there, grooves in
the patterns her fingers
follow.
Her fingertips are cold.
She slips her hand beneath her jacket and
places it on her belly.
When it is warm again she trails it down the
side of her face,
relentlessly pushing her hair behind her ear.
You are giving yourself
agency, she reminds herself. You are telling
your body that your
hands are instruments of protection.
There are other hands,
his hands, that suggest other things, that
remind her of what hands
are capable of.
There is his hand
grabbing her wrist. There is his large hand, tight
around her wrist,
holding her down.
She started touching her
face then. She was in a hotel in New
Hampshire and she was
too scared to call her mom. The woman in
the room next door
played The Supremes. "Everywhere I turn, seems like everything
I see, reflects the love
that used to be... "
After he grabbed her
hand she sat in the car, unable to move,
staring at the rear-view
mirror. The keys sat in the ignition half
turned, and the radio
was on. She turned it off again, rubbed her
wrists and made star
bursts with her hands to get the blood flowing.
He said it was OK and
she knew she was supposed to understand
that, to understand the
connection he makes with her when he tells her to
trust him.
But she sat in the car
with her hands cold and her wrist aching
where he grasped it too
hard. She knew then and she knows now that she can't
outrun her life. She's
been trying since she was ten.
She drove the car back
to her practice and changed the furniture
around. She made phone
calls and Deborah's mother told her that
Deborah cut her veins
open and bled to death in the bath.
In the bathroom mirror
she studied the lines in her face glistening
under smeared
tears.
She's scared but
Deborah's dead.
She wiped her nose and
splashed water on her face and called Elliot.
*
There was a time when
they didn't live far from here. She was ten
when they heard gun
shots nearby and her mother pushed her and
her two brothers under
the table. Pete and Nicky cried. The look on
their mother's face was
worse than the sounds of gunfire and
screaming. Her mother
held them against her shoulders.
Jennifer bit her lip,
too scared for tears.
When the shouting had
stopped and the blue flash of the sirens no
longer lit up the
kitchen sideboard, her mother insisted they were
moving out.
"We're going,"
she told their father. "Whether you come with us or
not."
*
"Your mother was a
strong woman," Elliot says.
"I know where
you're going with this," she says.
"You didn't want to
see her afraid. You always thought she could
protect you but even she
knew she couldn't. You saw that."
Hand across her eyes,
fingers down the side of her face.
"I can look after
myself."
"And you
should."
*
When she got home again
she was surprised to find it just as she
had left it. No drawers
opened or upturned. No locks broken or
forced. Glass in the
windows intact.
She found nail scissors
and cut her fingernails. She ran short nails
through unwashed hair,
thinking about unseen dirt and oils traveling
from her fingers to her
follicles.
She washed her hands.
Once. Once again.
*
He tried to kiss her
once and she wasn't scared. He's twice her size
and she wasn't scared.
When the Crime Victims
Unit sent her a boy for counselling who had
been mugged at gunpoint,
she asked him if he was still scared. He
said he wasn't afraid
because he knew now these things would
happen and he would come
out the other side.
"I want to be all
these things," she tells Elliot. "I want to be
professional. I want to
help people. I want to be strong."
"You do," he
says. "And you are."
Hair tucked behind her
ear, finger tips sliding along the rim of her
glasses.
She touches her face,
and yes, she's still there.
She's still there.
Fin