My Dark Vanessa(73)

“Well, I don’t know what you’re talking about,” she says. “I didn’t take anything from your room.”

My heart pounds as I watch her shuffle the papers. She writes down a list of numbers and then punches those numbers into the calculator. When a sum appears, she sighs.

“You think you’re protecting me but it’s too late,” I say.

She looks up, her eyes sharp, a crack in the cool expression.

“Maybe some of this was your fault,” I say. “Did you ever consider that?”

“I’m not getting into this with you right now,” she says.

“Most mothers don’t let their kid move out at fourteen. You realize that, right?”

“You didn’t move out,” she says sharply. “You went away to school.”

“Well, all my friends think it’s weird that you let me do that,” I say. “Most mothers love their kids too much to send them away, but not you I guess.”

She stares at me, her face drains of color and the next moment it’s swallowed by a flush. Boiling red, flared nostrils, maybe the first time I’ve ever seen in her that kind of anger. For a moment I imagine her leaping up from the table and lunging at me, her hands around my neck.

“You begged us to let you go there,” she says, her voice shaking from the effort to remain calm.

“I didn’t beg.”

“You gave us a goddamn presentation about it.”

I shake my head. “You’re exaggerating,” I say, though she’s not. I did give a presentation; I did beg.

“You can’t do that,” she says. “You don’t get to change the facts to suit the story you want to tell.”

“What does that mean?”

She takes a breath as though to speak. Then she exhales, lets it go. She stands, moves into the kitchen—to get away from me, I know, but I follow her. A few steps behind, I ask again, “What does that mean? Mom, what is that supposed to mean?” To drown me out, she turns the water on full blast and clangs the dishes in the sink, but I don’t stop. The question keeps coming out of me, berating and outside my control, outside myself.

The plate in her hands slips, or maybe it’s slammed on purpose. Either way, it breaks—shards into the sink. I go quiet, my hands tingling as though I’m the one who shattered the plate.

“You lied to me, Vanessa,” she says. Her hand, red from the hot water and slick with soap, turns off the tap and then balls into a fist. Water darkens her shirt as she pounds that fist against her own heart. “You told me you had a boyfriend. You sat there and you lied to me and you let me think . . .”

She trails off and clamps the wet hand over her eyes, like she can’t bear to remember it. That drive back to Browick, her saying, All I care about is that he’s nice to you. Asking me if I was having sex, if I needed to go on the Pill. First love is so special, she said. You’ll never forget it.

Again she says, “You lied to me.”

She waits, expecting an apology. I let the words hang in the air between us. I feel emptied out and stripped bare, but I don’t feel sorry, not for anything.

She’s right; I did lie. I sat there and let her believe what she wanted and felt no remorse. It didn’t even really feel like lying, more like shaping the truth to fit what she needed to hear, an act of contortion I learned from Strane—and I was good at it, able to manipulate the truth so covertly she had no idea what I’d done. Maybe I should have felt guilt afterward, but all I remember feeling is pride for getting away with it, for knowing how to protect her, him, myself, everyone at once.

“I never imagined you being capable of that,” she says.

I lift my shoulders; my voice comes out like a croak. “Maybe you don’t really know me.”

She blinks, registering both what I said and what I haven’t. “Maybe you’re right,” she says. “Maybe I don’t.”

Wiping her hands, she leaves the sink of dirty dishes, the broken plate. On her way out of the kitchen she pauses in the doorway. “You know, sometimes I’m ashamed that you’re my kid,” she says.

I stand for a while in the middle of the kitchen, my ears following the groan of the stairs as she climbs, my parents’ bedroom door opening and closing, her footsteps directly above me, the creak of the metal frame as she gets into bed. The walls and floors here are so thin, the house so cheaply built, you can hear anything if you listen hard enough, a constant threat of exposure.

I plunge my hand into the sink and grope blindly for pieces of the broken plate, not caring if I slice myself open. I leave the shards lined up on the counter, dripping water and soap suds. Later, when I’m lying in my own bed still checking myself for hurt—was it so bad, what she said to me? it feels worse than what I deserved—she tosses the shards into the trash and I hear the clatter of ceramic from all the way up in my attic bedroom. The next day I find Lolita back on my bookshelf.



Charley’s mom gets a job in New Hampshire, the third time they’ve moved in four years. On her last day at school, she sneaks beers in her backpack and we drink them behind the grocery store, our burps echoing against the dumpsters. After school, Charley gives me a ride home, still buzzed, running every red light on our way out of town while I laugh and lean my head against the window, thinking, If this is how I die, it wouldn’t be so bad.