In the first version of her story, Grace Costa says that, on the night after Christmas, in 2012, her ex-boyfriend broke into her house, hid behind her bedroom door, and then attacked her as she and her two grown children—a son and a daughter—were about to eat dinner. In the second version, it’s still the night after Christmas, but it might be 2013, and only her daughter is at home with her. There’s a half-eaten apple on the floor of the kitchen; she remembers asking her daughter if she’d thrown it toward the garbage and missed. She also remembers thinking that she’d left the outside light on and then it was off.
Costa (whose name has been changed) describes the night in disjointed phrases. She cries and then stops. She spirals out from the story into another, and it takes some nudging to get her to return to the original. She knows she somehow got wrapped in a cord, and she comes back to this over and over. It was a phone cord, she thinks. “I don’t know where that cord came from,” she says. Then, later, “I don’t know where he got that cord.” Her hands were bound somehow, and then she fell to the ground. She was inside, and then she was outside. She remembers her ex-boyfriend punching her daughter in the face, blood spurting from her nose.
[For more of this story, written by Rachel Louise Snyder, go to http://www.newyorker.com/news/...om-domestic-violence]
Comments (0)