The First Time She Drowned (25 page)

The light in the room goes in and out of focus—brighter, then blurry like the movement of candlelight. I feel like I’m emerging from a time warp. “Holy shit,” I say.

Liz nods, breathing slowly as if she too has just surfaced.

“How could I have forgotten that?”

“Your mind did what it needed to do. It protected you from something too painful to remember.”

As she says this, I see again the closed door, feel Dora’s adult strength, hear the distant sounds of Matthew laughing and counting, oblivious to my need for rescue. I’d always believed he was the one person who could save me from falling through the Earth, an illusion I clung to long after it had been disproved. Now I realize that I just needed to believe in somebody.

“But why didn’t I tell my mother?” I remember her coming into my room, asking me if I’d been a good girl for Dora.

Liz shakes her head as if to say she doesn’t know. “Maybe you thought she wouldn’t believe you or she would blame you or that she wouldn’t do anything to help you.”

I think of Dora lying about the candy she said she had brought me, telling my mother I had a “big imagination,” setting me up as the liar, letting me know which one of us would be believed. My hatred boils, bigger than me, spilling over my insides. I hate my mother too for believing her, for taking Dora’s word over mine. Still, the idea that she wouldn’t have protected me seems impossible, that a mother, even
my
mother, wouldn’t have saved her own child. “But if I had just told her—”

“Then what? She would have loved you?”

“I don’t know. Maybe things would’ve been different.”

“Maybe. Maybe not. We can’t know.”

“I still should have told her.”

“Cassie.”

“What?”

“This is not your fault. You were a child! You didn’t even have a name for what it was that happened to you.”

I let my head fall against the back of the couch. There is so much more I want to say, so many questions I want to ask, but I’m so drained that my voice feels irretrievable, like it has fallen into a deep well. I struggle through my exhaustion to grasp what has happened and what it means.

Not my fault.

I wonder how long that will take to sink in. All these years I’d had the nagging sense of having done something terrible, of
being
terrible. All this time and I wasn’t to blame. I stare at the ceiling, my hand on my forehead.

“What?” Liz says.

But I don’t know what. There’s so much there, all these dark feelings clamoring to be released and yet, surprisingly, there is also relief in the purging, my whole body like a long-held fist finally unclenching after all the years of keeping this memory locked up tight. And there is some hope too, in the knowledge that it wasn’t me, that I wasn’t the bad one.

I think of James, of how he won’t get this chance I’m having, to understand himself better. My heart aches with sorrow. I glance at the clock, realize that I have been here for almost two hours.

I sit forward again, look into Liz’s eyes. The memory of my mother pulling out of the driveway returns—the sense of
abandonment so pure and true and encapsulating that it is, in some way, the hardest image of all.

“Thank you for being here and, you know . . . helping me,” I manage to say, and the tears fall again.

“Anytime, Cassie,” she says, and now there are tears in her eyes too.

“So what happens now?” My voice is weak and hoarse. “I mean, what do we do with this?”

“I think we just keep doing what we’re doing.”

“Okay,” I say.

Our eyes meet again and something happens, something so fleeting that it’s more like the possibility of something happening. For just one second, I can grasp the idea of a world without terror as its only face, a world where trust is possible. For just one moment, I can imagine.

IT IS STRANGE
to step outside again, like emerging from a movie theater to the shock that the world has continued in your absence. The trees are alive with movement and all across the campus, windows are lit up like rows and rows of little souls. I notice them—all those lights, all the people whose lives they represent. I have been stuck inside my head too long, afraid to look.

I sit with my suitcase in the campus courtyard for hours, just thinking as the night air moves around me. It’s like I’ve been skinned, the way my whole body is permeated by the slightest wind, the way my edges blur with the night. I am completely raw and vulnerable and deeply sad, and for better or worse, fully present to my life for the first time in a long time.

Eventually, I return to the dorm, exhausted. In the hallway, I stop and stare at Zoey’s door. I long to repair things, but I don’t have it in me right now to try. I’m so tired, so fragile. I still have the key code to my original room and I am desperate to lie down and make this day be over. I open the door and stop cold in the entrance.

My mother stands in the bare white space, tall and dark as a shadow in her crow-black coat and high boots. The harsh light of the bare overhead bulb makes her face angular and hard.

“There you are!” she says sharply. “Thank God! Where have you been?”

“I . . .” I try to gather myself. To regain my balance. “What are you doing here? How did you get in?”

“The door was unlocked. And what do you mean, what am I doing here? Of course I came right away. I got that strange collect call from you and . . . after the way you treated me the last time we talked, I knew something was wrong. You weren’t yourself.”

I stiffen, remembering our last conversation, how she blamed me for the affair, hung up on me when I wouldn’t come running.

“I got worried you’d fallen into some kind of trouble with that friend of yours.”

“I’m not in trouble.”

“And then when I got here, your door was cracked open and your room was bare . . . I didn’t know if . . . Jesus, you look terrible.” She notices my suitcase. “Oh good, you’re already packed. We’re on the same page then.”

I look down at my suitcase. It seems a lifetime ago when I packed it. “What are you talking about?”

“It’s my fault for letting you come here when you weren’t ready. You’re obviously not well.” She grabs her purse off the bed. “We can discuss things on the road. I hate driving late at night.”

Her energy is overwhelming. I’m so exhausted, need everything to slow down. “I called you because James died,” I say.

“James?” She looks at me, confused. “Who’s James?”

“My best friend in the hospital,” I say. The tears choke at the back of my throat. I wrap my arms around myself, in need of layers. “He killed himself.”

“Oh, that’s terrible,” she says. She sits down on the bare mattress and holds her hand to her mouth. “I’m sorry to hear that.”

My throat tightens. Part of me longs to sit down beside her and weep, make it all go away. It would be so easy. To just pretend. But another part of me repels the idea.

“Mom,” I say. “There’s something else.” I know I need to tell her what I remember. The words have been sitting there my whole life, buried, waiting to come out.

She looks up at me. I can feel the longing, the pleading in my eyes. She frowns. “Let me get my keys and we’ll go. Whatever it is, you can tell me in the car.” She digs hurriedly into her purse. “You know, Matthew thinks I’m crazy, taking you home after all you’ve put us through—”

“Mom—”

“—but I know you’ve changed. I know you’ll be a good girl. I always thought your father was the cause of your troubles, and if he actually has the balls to go through with this divorce, he’ll be gone soon.”

“Mom.”

“Not that I think he does . . . have the balls. I mean . . . he’s bluffing, don’t you think? I think he is.”

“Mom!”

She looks up. Her eyes are both penetrating and impatient. My voice dries up. I don’t know how to say this, these words that will change everything. It’s all right there and I know that once it’s out, she’ll finally see that it was never me, that I was never the problem, that there was this other horrible unspoken thing between us.

“There’s something I never told you,” I say. “About . . . Dora. Something that Dora did to me.” I can feel Liz inside of me, holding me up.

“What do you mean? What . . . something?” Her hands fall into her lap and her body goes very still except for her mouth, which starts twitching. She stares at me, eyes wide and unblinking. Then she looks toward the door, toward the window, her eyes darting desperately, seeking escape.

“She . . . molested me,” I say. The words sound so strange said aloud. I don’t want to take ownership of them, don’t want that word attached to me. I hate that there is still a shame in it for me right now, that even as my mind knows the shame belongs only to Dora, my body still carries it, feels tainted by it.

I watch my mother’s face, seeking in her eyes the absolution and reassurance that the child I once was still needs.

She looks at the floor. And then out the window. She does not look at me. When she speaks, her voice is flat and far away. “Your grandmother always hated her, you know. She said Dora messed with Uncle Billy when we were kids. But I don’t remember anything like that.”

I stare at her, shocked, horrified. I think again of Billy. The game of pool. How I’d fled the basement in terror when he’d reached for the ball that had landed in my lap. How Billy ran after my mother on Thanksgiving, begged her to listen to him, told her he was worried about me.

“So you knew what she was?” The sickening memories of Dora rush back in. “You knew what she was and you let her into our house?!”

“I only knew what they said,” she says innocently.

An ancient scream shrieks in my head, trapped and shattering my brain from the pressure.

She knew. She fucking knew.

I want to smash something, break something. Of course the goddamn room is bare.

All those years. All that damage. And my mother sitting so fucking innocent on the bed, expecting me to understand.

I try to calm myself. Everything is so tight, up in my throat. I hear Liz telling me to slow down, to breathe. I push my pain not away but to the side. Right now, I need something from my mother.

“Well, do you believe me?” I say, because somehow in this moment, this is most important, that she should bear witness, that she should not be allowed to leave me alone with this again. I stand, braced, defiant.

She doesn’t say anything, but when I look into her eyes, there is such pure sadness there that I can see that she knows it’s true, that she does believe me, even if she can’t bring herself to say so.

It’s not enough. I want her fury, the outrage of a mother. I want her to know what Dora took from me, what she took from both of us, what my mother allowed her to take.

“She said you wouldn’t believe me. She told me you didn’t . . . love me.” My voice breaks. “She told me I was—bad.”

A lifetime of pain sits out in the open, dug up like a casket, the two of us staring into it. And yet, I have learned through Liz that in the uncovering of the past lies the hope of healing it. I look at my mother,
pleading with her to come with me, to be with me now at least, even though she could not be with me then. To find the courage.

Her hands tremble. She stands up, then sits again as if realizing there is no way to escape from this. I watch the entirety of it hit her, the understanding of what this means, the guilt at having failed to protect her child, for having deemed her own needs greater. She shakes her head, stops and repeats the gesture. She looks up at me, stunned and helpless. A small gasp or sigh escapes her. Her hands go to her neck, to where the chain that Dora gave her still hangs. She wraps her fingers around its heart and closes her eyes, rocking her body slowly like a little girl. She looks up at me, dazed, lost. Then something in her eyes changes. Her face snaps shut like a purse.

“We really should get going. It’s late and I hate driving tired.”

I stop, stare at her.

“Now where the hell did I put those keys?” She digs back into her bag and then suddenly dumps the entire contents onto the bed. “My God, will you look at all this crap! Can you believe me?” She looks up at me and smiles, sheepish and dazzling. The sun comes out in her face. “Here’s the credit card! Maybe we should go charge the hell out of it tomorrow, huh?” She waves it in the air. “Take that, Ed!” She laughs brightly. Then she pulls the keys out from beneath the pile. “Aha!” She holds them up to me, beaming, insisting I play along like usual.

All I can do is watch. All that sunshine, so grossly out of place here.

She tilts her head, making one last plea. Then she puts her smile away, stuffs her belongings into her purse and places it on
her lap. She presses her knees tightly together, her eyes on the floor.

“I’m sorry, Cassie,” she says. She looks up at me, composed, matter-of-fact. “Dora was like a mother to me. My memories of her are the only good memories I have of my childhood. I can’t let you take that away from me.”

I stare at her, expecting the scream again, the murderous impulse. Instead there is only a shock of clarity and the feeling of something shutting quietly but firmly, like the small click of elevator doors. I rise above the moment to see the whole. I recognize how unnatural it is for a mother to protect herself instead of her children, to continue to do so even now. There is no pain in this realization and that surprises me too. That facing the truth of who my mother is hurts less than holding on to the illusion that she could ever give me what I needed.

I think of how my whole life I believed it was my fault that my mother didn’t love me. How I must have done something terrible to push her away. How I felt deep down, despite all my protests, that there must be something so awful at the very core of me that even my own mother wanted me to disappear. Now I see that it wasn’t me. It wasn’t even because of Dora. It was something bigger and deeper and, in some way, simpler than I ever realized. For all the time I spent in the mental hospital it was actually my mother who was—still is—ill.

A kind of pity moves into me as I look at her on the bed. I imagine the little girl she was, fighting, like I once did, to survive amidst monsters. Only in her case her brain was unable to survive intact. And now in her desperation to stay afloat, she continues to pull down everyone who would try to love her.

“I’m sorry too, Mom,” I say. “I’m sorry for all that happened to you.” I step back and hold the door open. She stands up and comes over to me, touches my cheek with her hand.

“You were always a good girl, Cassie,” she says. “You always were.”

I look into her eyes and I know that underneath the sickness, this is truly what she believes. And I know, too, that she can’t hold that, can’t stay here, won’t believe it tomorrow. Her opinion of me will continue to change, depending on her state of mind, depending on what she needs from me in the moment, depending on how willing I am to sacrifice my truth for her pretend.

I am not willing.

She steps through the doorway.

“Good-bye, Mom,” I say.

She turns and looks at me, startled. “What do you mean? You’re coming with me.”

“I can’t,” I say. “I just can’t.” Not now. Not ever. Not because I don’t still love her in some way, but because I have to start loving myself.

I close the door, make sure the lock clicks into place, and sit down on the bare mattress, listening to my mother bang angrily on the door until she tires, as if it is only a matter of wood between us. As her footsteps finally move down the hall, it happens so slowly that I’m not sure if I’m imagining it, but I start to feel the current releasing me, like a roller coaster easing gradually into the gate.

I look down at my suitcase and imagine Zoey across the hall.

And then I think again of James.