My Dark Vanessa(85)

In the gym, I clutch my diploma as I walk back to my chair. Shoes scuffle on the floor. The principal shoots a glare at the lone parent who dares to clap.

After the ceremony, everyone spills out into the parking lot and takes photos, positioning the camera so the strip mall isn’t visible in the background. Dad tells me to smile, but I can’t force my face to listen.

“Come on, at least pretend to be happy,” he says.

I part my lips and show my teeth and end up looking like an animal ready to bite.



All summer I work at the auto parts warehouse, filling orders for starters and struts while classic rock radio blares over the white noise of the conveyor belts. Twice a week at the end of my shift, Strane waits for me in the parking lot. I try to dig the grit out from under my fingernails before climbing into the station wagon. He likes my steel-toed boots, the muscles in my arms. He says a summer of manual labor is good for me, that it’ll make me value college all the more.

Every so often, anger hits me, but I tell myself what’s done is done—Browick, his role in my leaving, all of it in the past. I do my best not to feel resentful when I remember what he used to say about helping me apply to summer internships in Boston, or when I see his Harvard robes hanging on his closet door, left there from the Browick graduation. Atlantica is a respectable choice, he says, nothing to be ashamed of.

At work on a Friday afternoon in the warehouse, Jackson Browne plays while I start on a pallet of chassis parts. The man filling orders in the next section belts out a line of song as “The Load-Out” gives way to “Stay.” My utility knife slips as I tear open the plastic wrap, leaving a six-inch slice on my forearm that, before the rush of blood, is gently parted skin, a painless peek through the curtains. The man in the next section glances over, sees me with my hand clamped over the wound, blood seeping through my fingers and dripping onto the concrete floor.

“Shit!” He scrambles to unzip his sweatshirt as he runs over. He ties it around my arm.

“I cut myself,” I say.

“You think?” The man shakes his head at my helplessness, cinches the sweatshirt tighter. Sooty warehouse dust lines his knuckles. “How long were you going to stand there before you said something?”



The days Strane picks me up from work, we drive around like teenagers with nowhere to go, and when he drives me back home, he drops me off at the top of the dirt road. My mother asks me where I’ve been and I tell her, “With Maria and Wendy.” The girls I used to sit with at lunch, the ones I haven’t spoken to since graduation.

“I didn’t realize you were such good friends,” Mom says. She could push further, ask why they never come inside when they drop me off, why she’s never even met them at all. I’m eighteen and moving to Atlantica at the end of August, which I’d point out if she dared question me. But she never does. She says ok and lets it drop. The freedom leaves me adrift, unsure of what she knows, what she suspects. “I don’t want to pull those old books off the shelf,” she says when her sister calls to hash out something that happened when they were kids. There’s a wall around her; I build one around me.

Strane asks if I’m still angry. We’re in his bed, the flannel sheets damp beneath our sweaty bodies. I stare at the open window, listening to the sounds of cars and pedestrians, the perfect stillness of his house. I’m tired of him asking me this, his insatiable need for reassurance. No, I’m not angry. Yes, I forgive you. Yes, I want this. No, I don’t think you’re a monster.

“Would I be here if I didn’t want this?” I ask, as though the answer were obvious. I ignore what hangs in the air above us, my anger, my humiliation and hurt. They seem like the real monsters, all those unspeakable things.





2017




At my next session with Ruby, before I even sit down, I ask if she’s been contacted by anyone looking for information on me. I called Ira last night asking the same thing, while his new girlfriend hissed in the background, “Is that her? Why is she calling you? Ira, hang up the phone.”

“Who would be looking for information on you?” Ruby asks.

“Like a journalist.”

She stares, bewildered, as I take out my phone and pull up the emails. “I’m not being paranoid, ok? This is actually happening to me. Look.”

She takes the phone, begins to read. “I don’t understand—”

I grab it from her hand. “Maybe it doesn’t seem like a big deal, but it’s not just emails, ok? She’s been calling me, harassing me.”

“Vanessa, take a breath.”

“Do you not believe me?”

“I believe you,” she says. “But I need you to slow down and tell me what’s going on.”

I sit, press the heels of my hands against my eyes and try my best to explain the emails and calls, the unearthed blog I finally managed to delete, how the journalist still has screenshots saved. My brain is jumpy, won’t stay focused even for the length of a sentence. Ruby still gets the gist of it, though, her face opening up in sympathy.

“This is so intrusive,” she says. “Surely this isn’t ethical on the part of the journalist.” She suggests I write to Janine’s boss, or even go to the police, but at the mention of cops, I grab the arms of my chair and yell out, “No!” For a moment, Ruby actually looks scared.