From The New Yorker: “No Visible Bruises: Domestic Violence and Traumatic Brain Injury”

EXCERPT: “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.

Local newspapers said the police arrived when she was on the ground. She was down, then up. Maybe down again. Thrown against the car, hard. Punched. Strangled. She was trying not to black out. There was blood, and that cord, and her daughter. The police weren’t there, and then they were. The night comes in flashes, an image at a time—apple, blood, cord—but the pieces never fit together into a whole. Instead, they hang untethered in her mind. “I don’t remember much of anything half the time,” she says.

Costa has a mild brain injury from that night, though she does not recall this exact diagnosis. She also has vertigo, hearing loss, poor memory, anxiety, headaches, ringing in her ears (which she describes as a constant “electrical signal”), and a hip that causes her to limp sometimes, which she believes came from being hurled against her car. In light of her other injuries, she hasn’t had her hip treated.

Read the full article at The New Yorker.