My Dark Vanessa(104)

“How much did you know about me at the time?” she asks.

Still far away, I answer, “Nothing.”

“Nothing?”

I blink and she comes into focus, her face so sharp it hurts to see. “I knew you existed. But he said you were . . .” I almost say again nothing. “A rumor.”

She nods. “That’s what he called you at first, too.” She tucks her chin, lowers her voice into an impression of Strane: “‘A rumor that follows me like a black cloud.’”

It’s stunning how much she sounds like him, his exact cadence and the metaphor I remember him using to describe me, the image it always put in my head of him relentlessly pursued by the threat of rain. “So you knew about me?”

“Of course,” she says. “Everyone knew about you. You were practically an urban legend, the girl he’d had an affair with who disappeared after it all came out. But the story was so vague. No one knew the truth. So I believed him at first, when he said the story wasn’t true. It’s embarrassing to admit now, because of course it was true. Of course he’d done it before. I was just . . .” She lifts her shoulders. “I was so young.”

She goes on, explaining how eventually he told her the truth about me but waited until she was “fully groomed.” He called me his deepest secret, said he loved me but I’d outgrown him, we didn’t fit together anymore the way we did when I was Taylor’s age.

“He seemed genuinely brokenhearted,” she says. “This is really screwed up, but he had me read Lolita at the beginning of things. You’ve read it, right? The way he talked about you reminded me of the first girl Humbert Humbert is in love with, the one who dies and supposedly makes him a pedophile. At the time, I thought a man being wounded like that was romantic. Looking back, the whole thing was just deranged.”

I try to pick up my coffee, but I’m trembling too much so it just clatters back down, spills all over my hands. Taylor jumps up and grabs some napkins, still talking as she wipes the table. She explains how she eventually suspected Strane was still seeing me—that she snooped on his phone and saw all the calls and texts, figured out the truth.

“I used to get so jealous when I knew he was going to see you.” She stands over me, sliding a soppy napkin across the table, the end of her braid grazing my arm.

“Did you have sex with him?” I ask.

She stares down at me unblinking.

“I mean, did he have sex with you? Force you? Or . . .” I shake my head. “I don’t know what I’m supposed to call it.”

Tossing the napkins in the garbage, she sits back down. “No,” she says. “He didn’t.”

“What about the other girls?”

She shakes her head no.

I exhale loudly, relieved. “So what exactly did he do to you?”

“He abused me.”

“But . . .” I look around the coffee shop, as though the people sitting at other tables might be able to help. “What does that mean? Did he kiss you, or . . .”

“I don’t want to focus on the details,” Taylor says. “It’s not helpful.”

“Helpful?”

“To the cause.”

“What cause?”

She tilts her head and squints, the same look Strane used to give me when I was floundering. For a moment, I think she’s again doing an impression of him. “The cause of holding him accountable.”

“But he’s dead. What do you want to do to him, drag his body through the streets?”

Her eyes widen.

“I’m sorry,” I say. “That came out wrong.”

She closes her eyes and inhales, holds the breath, and then lets it go. “It’s fine. This is hard to talk about. We’re both doing the best we can.”

She starts to talk about the article, how the goal of it is to bring to light all the ways the system failed us. “They all knew,” she says, “and they did nothing to stop him.” I assume she means Browick, the administration, but don’t ask questions. She talks so fast; it’s hard to keep up. Another goal of the article, she says, is to connect with other survivors.

“You mean in general?” I ask.

“No,” she says. “Survivors of him.”

“There are others?”

“There has to be. I mean, he taught for thirty years.” She cups her hands around her empty mug, purses her lips. “So I know you said you don’t want to be in the article.” I open my mouth, but she continues. “You can be completely anonymous. No one would know it’s you. I know it’s scary, but think of the good it would do. Vanessa, what you went through . . .” She ducks her head, looks straight at me. “It’s the kind of story that has the power to change the way people think.”

I shake my head. “I can’t.”

“I know it’s scary,” she says again. “The idea terrified me at first.”

“No,” I say, “it’s not that.”

She waits for me to explain, her eyes darting.

“I don’t consider myself to have been abused,” I say. “Definitely not the way you all do.”

Her pale eyebrows shoot up in surprise. “You don’t think you were abused?”