My Dark Vanessa(62)
I shake my head; I tell her the truth. “He didn’t.”
Dad comes back then, his face sweaty. He hefts a duffel bag full of books over one shoulder and, as he’s looking for something else to carry, notices Mom and I in our standoff, my hand still pressing the Polaroid to my chest. To Mom, he says, “Everything ok here?”
There’s a beat of total silence, the dorm at midmorning empty except for us. Mom lets her eyes slide away from me. “Everything’s fine,” she says.
We pack up the rest of my room. It takes four trips to bring everything down. There’s a moment before I get in the truck when my feet burn to run—across campus, down the hill into downtown, to Strane’s house. I imagine breaking in, climbing into his bed, hiding beneath the covers. We could have run away. I said that to him last night before I left his house. “Let’s get in your car right now and drive off.” But he said no, that wouldn’t work. “The only way to get through this is to face the consequences and do our best to live through them.”
As Dad lifts the last garbage bag into the truck bed, Mom touches my shoulder. “We can still go tell them,” she says. “Right now, we can go in—”
Dad opens the door, hoists himself into the driver’s seat. “You ready?”
I jerk my shoulder out of Mom’s grasp and she watches me climb into the cab.
The whole drive home, I lie across the back bench seat. I watch the trees, the silvery underbellies of leaves, the power lines and signs for the interstate. In the truck bed, the tarp covering all my stuff flaps in the wind. My parents stare straight ahead, their anger and grief palpable enough to taste. I open my mouth to let it all in and swallow it whole, where deep in my belly it turns into blame.
2017
Mom calls as I’m walking home from the grocery store, my bag weighed down with pints of ice cream and bottles of wine. She asks, “Do you want to come home for Thanksgiving?” sounding exasperated, as though she’s asked me this many times before when we haven’t spoken about the holiday at all.
“I assumed you would want me to,” I say.
“It’s up to you.”
“Do you not want me to come?”
“No, I do.”
“Then what is it?”
A long pause. “I don’t want to cook.”
“You don’t have to.”
“It won’t feel right if I don’t.”
“Mom,” I say, “you do not have to cook.” I adjust the grocery bag on my shoulder and hope she can’t hear the clanking bottles. “You know what we should do? Get some of that frozen fried chicken that comes in the blue box. We can just eat that. Remember how we used to have it every Friday night?”
She laughs. “I haven’t had that in years.”
I walk down Congress Street, past the bus depot, the statue of Longfellow staring down every passerby. I can hear the news playing in the background of the phone call: a pundit’s voice, then Trump’s.
Mom groans and the background noise is gone. “I mute him whenever he comes on.”
“I don’t understand how you can watch that all day.”
“I know, I know.”
My building comes into view. I’m about to wrap things up as she says, “You know, I saw your old school in the news the other day.”
I don’t stop walking, but I stop thinking, stop looking. I walk past my building, cross the next street and keep going. I hold my breath and wait to see if she’ll push further. She only said your old school, not that man.
“Well anyway,” she says with a sigh, “that place always was a hellhole.”
In the wake of the article about the other girls, Browick suspends Strane without pay and opens another investigation. This time the state police are involved, too. Or at least I think these things are true; they’re morsels I’ve picked up from Taylor’s Facebook posts and the comment section of the article, where pieces of seemingly legitimate information hide among rumors, rants, and hand-wringing. People screaming, IT’S SIMPLE, JUST CASTRATE ALL PEDOPHILES; others giving a more subdued benefit of the doubt, stuff like, Shouldn’t we all be innocent before proven guilty, let justice run its course, you can’t always trust these accusations, especially when they come from teenage girls with their vivid imaginations, their emotional unreliability. It’s head spinning and endless, and I don’t really know what’s going on because Strane hasn’t told me. My phone sits silent for days.
It takes all my self-control not to reach out. I write him texts, delete them, and write them again. I draft emails, bring up his number and poise my finger to call, but I won’t let myself. Despite the years of deferment, of allowing him to lecture me on what’s true, what’s puritanical hysteria, and what’s blatant lie, I do still have a grasp on reality. I haven’t been gaslighted into senselessness. I know I should be angry, and though that emotion sits on the other side of the canyon, far out of reach, I do my best to act as though I feel it. I sit and stay quiet, let my silence speak while I watch Taylor share the article again and again, captioning it with raised-fist emojis and words that read like nails in a coffin: Hide all you want, but the truth will always find you.
When he does contact me, it’s an early-morning call, the phone ringing beneath my pillow, sending a vibration across the mattress that sounds in my dream like the drone of a motor on the lake, the rough muted hum I’d hear when swimming underwater as a speedboat passed. When I answer, I’m still in the dream, tasting lake water, watching the sunrays cut through the dark, all the way to the rotten leaves and fallen branches, all that endless muck.