My Dark Vanessa(18)

I lift my shoulders. “It’s not that important to me.”

“Right.”

“And he didn’t abuse me.”

Ira’s nostrils flare and his eyes harden, a familiar flash of frustration. He turns like he’s going to leave—better to walk away than lose his temper with me—but then he turns back. “Does she even know about him?”

“I don’t go to therapy to talk about that stuff, ok? I go because of my dad.”

It’s midnight. Far-off bells chime from the cathedral, the traffic light switches from red-yellow-green to flashing yellow, and Ira shakes his head. He’s disgusted at me. I know what he thinks, what anyone would think—that I’m an apologist, an enabler—but I’m defending myself just as much as I am Strane. Because even if I sometimes use the word abuse to describe certain things that were done to me, in someone else’s mouth the word turns ugly and absolute. It swallows up everything that happened. It swallows me and all the times I wanted it, begged for it. Like the laws that flatten all the sex I had with Strane before I turned eighteen into legal rape—are we supposed to believe that birthday is magic? It’s as arbitrary a marker as any. Doesn’t it make sense that some girls are ready sooner?

“You know,” Ira says, “these past few weeks while this has been in the news, all I’ve been thinking about is you. I’ve worried about you.”

Headlights approach, brighter and brighter, and sweep over us as the car turns the corner.

“I thought you’d be a mess over what that girl wrote, but you hardly seem to care.”

“Why should I?”

“Because he did the same thing to you!” he yells, his voice bouncing against the buildings. He sucks in a breath and stares at the ground, embarrassed at losing his temper. No one has ever frustrated him as much as I do. He used to say that all the time.

“You shouldn’t care so much, Ira,” I say.

He scoffs, laughs. “Believe me, I know I shouldn’t.”

“I don’t want your help with this. You don’t understand it. You never have.”

He tips his head back. “Well, this was my last attempt. I won’t try again.”

As he starts to walk away, I call, “She’s lying.”

He stops, turns.

“The girl who wrote the post, I mean. It’s a bunch of lies.”

I wait, but Ira doesn’t speak, doesn’t move. Another set of headlights approach and then pass over us.

“Do you believe me?” I ask.

Ira shakes his head, but not in an angry way. He feels sorry for me, which is worse than worrying about me, worse than anything.

“What’s it going to take, Vanessa?” he asks.

He starts up Congress Street toward the hill and then calls over his shoulder, “By the way, the new apartment? I can afford it because I’m seeing someone. We moved in together.”

Walking backward, he watches my expression, but I don’t reveal a thing. I swallow against my burning throat and blink so fast he blurs into a shadow, into fog.



I’m still sleeping at noon when I hear the special ringtone I’ve assigned to Strane’s number in my phone. It inserts itself in my dream, a tinkling jewelry box melody that pulls me out of sleep so gently I’m still half dreaming when I answer.

“They’re meeting today,” he says. “They’re deciding what to do with me.”

I blink awake; my groggy mind fumbles with who he means by “they.” “The school?”

“I know what’s coming,” he says. “I’ve taught there for thirty years and they’re tossing me out with the trash. Just wish they’d get it over with.”

“Well, they’re monsters,” I say.

“I wouldn’t go that far. Their hands are tied,” he says. “If there’s a monster here it’s the story what’s-her-name came up with. She managed to accuse me of something just vague enough to be terrifying. It’s like a goddamn horror movie.”

“Sounds more like Kafka to me,” I say.

I hear him smile. “I guess you’re right.”

“So you’re not teaching today?”

“No, they barred me from campus until they decide. Feel like a criminal.” He exhales a long breath. “Look, I’m in Portland. I wondered if I could see you.”

“You’re here?” I scramble out of bed and down the hallway to the bathroom. My stomach twists at the sight of myself in the mirror, the fine lines around my mouth and under my eyes that seemed to appear as soon as I turned thirty.

“Are you still at the same apartment?” he asks.

“No, I moved. Five years ago.”

A beat of silence. “Can you give me some directions?”

I think of the dishes in the kitchen sink caked with food, the overflowing trash can, the lived-in filth. I imagine him stepping into my bedroom and seeing the piles of dirty laundry, the empty bottles lined up alongside the mattress, my perpetual mess.

You need to get over this, he’d say. Vanessa, you’re thirty-two years old.

“What about a coffee shop instead?” I ask.



He sits at a corner table, at first barely recognizable, a heavyset old man cupping his hands around a coffee mug, but as I move toward him, cutting through the line at the counter, weaving through chairs, he sees me and stands. Then he’s unmistakable—the six-foot-four mountain, solid and safe and so familiar my body takes over, throwing my arms around him and grabbing fistfuls of his coat, trying to get as close as it can. Sinking into him feels the same way it did when I was fifteen—that coffee and chalk dust smell, the top of my head barely reaching his shoulder.