“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.
“I’m sorry,” I say. “I’m panicking. I’m not myself.”
“That’s ok,” she says. “It’s an understandable reaction. This is one of your worst fears coming true.”
“I saw her, you know. Outside the hotel.”
“The journalist?”
“No, the other her. Taylor, the one who accused Strane. She’s harassing me, too. I should show up at her work, see how she likes it.”
I describe what I saw last night as dusk began to fall, the woman standing across the street, how she stared up at the hotel, right into the lobby window I was looking out of, staring at me, her blond hair whipping across her face. As I talk, Ruby watches me with a pained expression, like she wants to believe me but can’t.
“I don’t know,” I say. “Maybe I imagined it. That happens sometimes.”
“You imagine things?”
I lift my shoulders. “It’s like my brain superimposes onto strangers the faces I want to see.”
She says that sounds difficult and I shrug again. She asks how often this happens and I say it depends. Months will pass without it happening at all, and then months where it happens every day. It’s the same with the nightmares—they come in waves, brought on by something not always easy to predict. I know to stay away from any books or movies set in a boarding school, but then I’ll be blindsided by something as benign as a reference to maple trees, or the feeling of flannel against my skin.
“I sound like I’m crazy,” I say.
“No, not crazy,” Ruby says. “Traumatized.”
I think about the other things I could tell her, the drinking and smoking to get me through the day, the nights when my apartment feels like a maze so impossible to navigate I end up sleeping on the bathroom floor. I know how easily I could make my most shameful behaviors add up to a diagnosis. I’ve lost entire nights to reading about post-traumatic stress, mentally checking off each symptom, but there’s a strange letdown at the thought of everything inside me being summed up so easily. And what’s next—treatment, medication, moving past it all? That might seem like a happy ending for some, but for me there’s only the edge of this canyon, the churning water below.
“Do you think I should let that journalist write about me?” I ask.
“That’s a choice only you can make.”
“Obviously. And I’ve already made up my mind. There’s no way I’m agreeing to it. I just want to know if you think I should.”
“I think it would cause you severe stress,” Ruby says. “I’d worry the symptoms you described would become even more intense to the point where it would be difficult for you to function.”
“But I’m talking on a moral level. Because isn’t it supposed to be worth all the stress? That’s what people keep saying, that you need to speak out no matter the cost.”
“No,” she says firmly. “That’s wrong. It’s a dangerous amount of pressure to put on someone dealing with trauma.”
“Then why do they keep saying it? Because it’s not just this journalist. It’s every woman who comes forward. But if someone doesn’t want to come forward and tell the world every bad thing that’s happened to her, then she’s what? Weak? Selfish?” I throw up my hand, wave it away. “The whole thing is bullshit. I fucking hate it.”
“You’re angry,” Ruby says. “I don’t think I’ve ever seen you truly angry before.”
I blink, breathe through my nose. I say I feel a little defensive, and she asks defensive how.
“I feel backed into a corner,” I say. “Like all of a sudden, not wanting to expose myself means I’m enabling rapists. And I shouldn’t even be part of this conversation at all! I wasn’t abused, not like other women are claiming to have been.”