My Dark Vanessa(118)
One of my best students. It’s a strange compliment coming from a man who once turned a student into a wife.
*
After graduation from Atlantica, Bridget moves back to Rhode Island and takes the cat. I apply to every secretary/receptionist/assistant job in Portland, and the State of Maine is the only one to call back. It’s a filing clerk job in child protective services, ten bucks an hour but really more like nine after union dues. During the interview, a woman asks how I’ll handle reading descriptions of child abuse all day every day.
“I’ll be fine,” I say. “I don’t have any experience with it.”
I find an efficiency apartment on the peninsula. When I lie in bed, I can watch oil tankers and cruise ships pass through the bay. The job is mind-numbing, and I can afford to eat only once a day if I want to make rent, but I tell myself it’s only for a year, maybe two, until I get my shit together.
At work, I sort through files with headphones on, and it’s like being back in the hospital archives, the same metal cases and the color-coded stickers, my hair stirred by the air-conditioning. These files, though, contain horror stories worse than cancer, worse even than death. Descriptions of kids found sleeping in beds caked with shit, of infants covered in lesions from being bathed in bleach. I try not to linger on the files; no one specifically tells me not to look, but gorging on the details feels invasive in a way that reading about men and their limp dicks never could. Some kids’ files are multiple manila folders filled with endless documents—court hearings, caseworker narratives, written evidence of abuse.
I come across one girl whose case comprises ten overstuffed files held together with rubber bands. Pieces of faded purple construction paper and coloring book pages stick out of one of the files, kid stuff. One drawing appears to be a family chart done in a child’s hand; another piece of construction paper reads like a description of what the girl wants in a family. Wanted: a mother and a father, a dog, and a baby brother. At the bottom of the paper, written in huge letters: NO HIPPOCRITCAL PEOPLE PLEASE.
There’s a handwritten letter on plain white paper tucked behind that, the handwriting small, feminine, and adult. I can’t stop myself from looking. It’s from the girl’s mother, three pages front and back of apologies. Names of different men are listed, explaining who is still in her life and who isn’t, and from where I read the file—standing at the cabinet, prying it open, not wanting anyone to catch me looking so closely—I can see only half the pages.
If I had known you were being abused, the mother writes, especially sexually abused, I never would have— The rest of the sentence is hidden from my view. On the last page of the letter, the mother signs, With oceans of love, Mom. Underneath oceans of love, there’s a drawing of a girl’s crying face, her tears pooling into a body of water, a pointing arrow, ocean.
*
Strane visits me in Portland only once. He’s coming down anyway for some development workshop, and I’m too nervous to ask if he plans on staying the night. When he arrives, I give him a tour of my tiny apartment, aching for him to comment on how clean I’ve kept it, the dishes all done and put away, the vacuumed floor. He calls it cozy, says he likes the clawfoot tub. In the living room/bedroom, I make some stupid, thinly veiled comment about the bed. “Doesn’t it look inviting?” I haven’t had sex for almost a year, need to be touched, looked at. Under my dress, I’m bare, soft and smooth, no tights. That’s a sign he is supposed to pick up on. I spent days imagining the sound that would escape his throat when he realized I wasn’t wearing underwear.
He says we have to get going. He’s made a reservation at a seafood restaurant in the Old Port, where he orders us fisherman’s stew, lobster tail over linguine, a bottle of white wine. It’s the biggest meal I’ve eaten since I last went home to see my parents. While I shovel food in my mouth, Strane watches with a furrowed brow.
“How’s the job?” he asks.
“Shitty,” I say. “But it’s temporary.”
“What’s your long-term plan?”
My jaw clenches at the question. “Grad school,” I say impatiently. “I’ve told you that.”
“Did you submit applications for the fall?” he asks. “They should be sending out acceptances around now.”
I shake my head, wave my hand. “I’m doing it next fall. I still need to get some stuff together and save money for all the fees.”
He frowns, takes a drink of wine. He knows I’m full of shit, that I have no plan. “You should be doing more than this,” he says. I sense his guilt. He’s worried that he’s to blame for my potential being wasted, which is probably true, but if he feels guilty, he won’t want to have sex with me.
“You know how I am. I move at my own pace.” I flash him my best spunky-kid smile, meant to reassure him it’s my problem, not his.
After dinner, he drives me home, but when I invite him in, he says he can’t. It cuts me straight down the middle, my guts spilling all over the passenger seat. All I can think about is how in a month I’ll be twenty-three and then someday thirty-three, and forty-three, and being that age is as unfathomable as being dead.
“Am I too old for you now?” I ask.
At first he shoots me a glare, sensing a trap. Then he sees my wide-open face.
“I’m serious,” I say. It’s the first time he’s really looked at me all night, maybe the first time since that night in my Atlantica apartment, when he confronted me about Henry confronting him, when he might’ve raped me, I’m still not sure.