“Seems like you’re doing better,” Dad says.
That’s how we talk about Strane now, Browick, everything that happened—evasive references. This is the closest anyone ever comes to mentioning it. Dad keeps his eyes on Babe back onshore, doesn’t look over to check my response. I notice he does that a lot now, avoids looking at me, and I know it’s because of what happened, but I tell myself it’s because I lived away at school for two years, because I’m older, because what father wants to look at his teenage daughter in a saggy swimsuit.
I say nothing, stare down at the damselflies. I do feel better, or at least better than I did a month ago when I left Browick, but admitting it feels too much like moving on.
“Might as well get this over with.” He stands, dives into the water. When his head pokes back up, he lets out a whoop. “Judas Priest, that’s cold.” He looks toward me. “You getting in?”
“I’ll wait a few minutes.”
“Suit yourself.”
I watch him move through the water back to shore, where Babe waits, ready to lick the droplets off his shins. I close my eyes and hear the water lapping against the sides of the float, the dee-dee-dee calls of the chickadee, the wood thrush and mourning dove. When I was younger, my parents used to say I sounded like a mourning dove, always sulking, always so damn sad.
When I dive in, the cold is such a shock that for a split second I can’t swim, can’t move, my body careening toward the green-black bottom, but then—the gentle pull back to the surface, my face turned upward, toward the sun.
As I walk across the yard to the house, my stomach sinks when I see Mom’s car in the driveway. Home from work, she’s picked up a pizza. “Grab a plate,” Dad says. He folds his slice in half, takes a big bite.
Mom drops her purse onto the counter, kicks off her shoes, and notices me in my swimsuit and with wet hair. “Vanessa, for god’s sake, get a towel. You’re dripping all over the floor.”
I ignore her and inspect the pizza, globs of sausage and cheese. Even though I’m so hungry my hands are shaky, I make a face. “Yuck. Look at that grease. Disgusting.”
“Fine,” Mom says. “Don’t eat it.”
Sensing a fight, Dad moves out of the kitchen, into the living room and the escape of the TV.
“What should I eat instead? Everything in this house is inedible.”
She touches two fingers to her forehead. “Vanessa, please. I’m not in the mood.”
I throw open a cupboard door, take out a can. “Corned beef hash that’s”—I check the date—“two years expired. Wow. Yum.”
Mom grabs the can, throws it in the garbage. She turns, goes into the bathroom, and slams the door.
Later, when I’m in bed with my notebook, writing down the scenes that never stop replaying in my head—Strane touching me for the first time behind his desk, the nights I spent at his house, the afternoons in his office—Mom comes up with two slices of pizza. She sets the plate on my nightstand, sits on the edge of the bed.
“Maybe we could take a trip down the coast this weekend,” she says.
“And do what?” I mumble. I don’t look up from my notebook, but I can feel her hurt. She’s trying to pull me back into being a kid, back when she and I never needed to do anything, when we’d just get in the car and head out, happy to be together.
She looks down at the notebook pages, tilts her head to see what I’m writing. Classroom and desk and Strane repeat over and over.
I flip over the notebook. “Do you mind?”
“Vanessa,” she sighs.
We stare each other down, her eyes traveling my face, searching for the changes in me, or maybe for a sign of something familiar. She knows. That’s all I can think whenever she looks at me—she knows. At first I was scared she would contact Browick or the police, or at least tell Dad. For weeks, every time the phone rang, my body braced itself for the inevitable fallout. But it never happened. She’s keeping my secret.
“If nothing happened,” she says, “you need to figure out a way to let it go.”
She pats my hand as she gets up, ignores how I jerk out of reach. She leaves my bedroom door open halfway and I get up to shove it closed.
Let it go. When I first realized she wasn’t going to tell anyone, I was relieved, but now, it’s started to flatten out into something like disappointment. Because the deal seems to be, if you want me to keep this secret, then we have to pretend it never happened—and I can’t do that. I’ll remember everything as hard as I can. I’ll live inside these memories until I can see him again.
The summer stretches on. At night, I lie in bed and listen to the loons scream. During the day, while my parents are at work, I walk the dirt road and pick wild raspberries to cook in pancakes that I drench in syrup and eat until I feel sick. I lie in the yard, facedown in the crabgrass, and listen to Babe lope around in the lake, looking for fish. The spray of water droplets on my back as she shakes herself dry, her nose nudging the back of my neck as though to ask if I’m ok.
I choose to think of this as the lull in my story, a period of banishment that tests my loyalties but will ultimately make me stronger. I’ve accepted that I cannot contact Strane, at least not any time soon. Even if my parents weren’t checking the caller ID and phone bill, I imagine lines being tapped, emails monitored. One phone call from me and he could be fired. The cops could show up at his door. It’s strange to think of myself as that dangerous, but look at what already happened—I barely opened my mouth and brought us to the brink of disaster.
All I can do is suffer through. Paddle the canoe into the middle of the lake and let it drift back to shore, read Lolita for the millionth time and scrutinize Strane’s faded annotations. Stare down page 140, when Humbert and Lo are in the car the morning after they have sex for the first time, where a line is underlined in what looks like fresher ink: “It was something quite special, that feeling: an oppressive, hideous constraint as if I were sitting with the small ghost of somebody I had just killed.” Think of Strane driving me back to campus after the first night at his house, how closely he studied me when he asked if I was ok. Scrawl in my notebook, “Jailbait” means having the power to turn a man into a criminal with just one touch.
I dread August, because once the Browick move-in date passes, I can no longer pretend there’s a chance this will fix itself, that I might wake up that morning to the truck packed, my parents crying out, “Surprise! It’s all been worked out. Of course you’re going back!” On the morning of move-in day, I wake to an empty house, my parents both at work. A note on the kitchen counter tells me to vacuum, do the dishes, brush Babe, water the tomato and zucchini plants. Still in my sleep shorts and T-shirt, I throw on sneakers and take off into the woods. I run straight up the bluff, underbrush scraping my shins. When I reach the top, gasping for breath, I look out over the lake, the mountain, that long, low whale’s back rising from the earth. The endless woods interrupted only by a wisp of highway, big rigs gliding like toys on a track. I think of stepping into an empty dorm room, the sun draped across a bare mattress, finding someone else’s initials carved on the windowsill. I imagine a new class taking their seats around the seminar table while Strane looks on, thinking of me.