The Maid's Diary(68)

Then one day you find yourself inside his house.

You see a painting.

You finally find that proof you are not the liar. Everyone else is.

And buried inside that proof is evidence of an even bigger betrayal that slices far too close to your bone. It undercuts everything you thought you knew in your life.

You discover your best friend does not have your back. He’s a liar, too.

And you discover your mother, whose ashes you couldn’t let go, coerced you into getting rid of your baby in exchange for money. Money she might have believed would help you go to college. Money she might have thought would help you put the assault behind you and help you achieve all your childhood dreams. But it didn’t. Her apparent lack of support at the time, her trying to sweep it under the rug, her trying to shield your father from the ugliness of it all—it just did more damage. You almost took your own life and ended up dropping out of school and leaving town instead.

And you know what that feels like, Dear Diary? To see those paintings, to discover you’re inside his house, where he is having a baby that you never can, to find your mother’s signature at the bottom of a gag order in a safe alongside the signature of a woman named Annabelle Wentworth? It feels like a trigger has been pulled and the bullet hits directly in your head. Everything in your brain explodes. That carapace the decades have hardened around you—it’s obliterated in an instant, and all the darkness comes rushing in through the cracks and fills you up so hard and fast you think you are going to burst out of the confines of your own delicate human skin.

You realize you are on your own. You have always been on your own.

How does one deal with this?

I churned it over and over in my mind, then asked myself on these pages—like my therapist suggested—why? Why did my mother do it? Why did Annabelle Wentworth, Daisy’s mother, protect her daughter’s predator boyfriend? Why do women betray other women like this? Are we so co-opted and dependent on some ingrained adherence to a patriarchy? Are we so afraid of “trouble”?

Why did my best “friend” deceive me like this? Why did Boon even approach me in the coffee shop that day long ago? Because I am certain now that it was not fate. He sought me out for a purpose. Was it to save his own soul? Salve his own guilt? Was it all about him?

Whatever the answers, I am now pushed up against the Monster I’ve been trying to hide from. And suddenly I face two paths. Just two choices: Either accept this and allow myself to be violated all over again—remain the Anonymous Girl and hide even deeper behind my masks and coping mechanisms. Or this time stand tall. Fight back. Be seen. No longer the ghost.

If the police and justice are never going to be there for me, I need to find justice myself. And now I have the tools to do this.

So, Dear Diary, what does justice even look like? Does it mean getting even? Spreading the hurt around? Forcing reparation? Demanding a confession, an apology? I’m not even sure. None of those things will take away the damage done. I am then struck by something: If Boon and others had been brave enough to speak up all those years ago, if my mom had told Annabelle to fuck off with her money, if my mom had fought to keep the cops digging, then Jon would have been stopped. Those other guys would have been stopped. Charley would never have been attacked. Maybe there are more now. Maybe there will still be more. This gives me purpose. This empowers and fires me. I don’t need justice. I need to stop him.

And her.

And others like her.

Women like me—we need to show men they will not get away if they try something like this.

“What’s wrong?” Boon asks me as we sit on a log at Jericho Beach, eating sandwiches in the sun and watching a group of swimmers in wet suits dragging bright-pink buoys behind them. The swimmers rise and fall with the swells. It’s a clear day, hardly a breath of wind in the air. Neither warm nor cold. The snowcapped mountains across the water seem bigger, closer. Monstrous, really, due to some trick of atmosphere bending the light. That mountain range stretches north, all the way to my old home, the little world-class ski resort where my mother cleaned rooms and my father processed the shit that forty thousand visitors left behind in the resort each weekend. We used to be able to tell from the stink of the treatment plant whether it had been a good weekend for business.

“What do you mean, ‘What’s wrong?’” I bite into my avocado sandwich. Boon has come to meet me at the beach during my lunch break before I go to another job. He’s worried after my call.

“Kit, you phoned and said you had to see me. I’m sorry I couldn’t come right away. But I’m here now. What in the hell is going on?”

I take another bite of my sandwich and chew slowly. From our log I can see across the water to where the Glass House is. I imagine Beulah Brown next door, training her binoculars toward me and Boon on our silvered log.

“I feel bad for Beulah,” I say. “Her son is a freak, too. Beulah spying on her neighbors is one thing. But Horton—he’s creepy. I don’t trust him.”

“You’re changing the subject now.”

I glance at him. He holds my gaze. I don’t smile. This is it. I’m going to cross this line. Our friendship will never be the same. Which is laughable that I even consider this—our friendship never was what I thought it was.

“You remember how we met, Boon? In that coffee shop?”

He frowns. He looks nervous. “Yes, why?”