All We Knew But Couldn't Say

by Joanne Vannicola

  “What’s wrong?” I asked, unable to cope with that frenetic energy much longer.

  Martha poured the beers and drank half a cup before she wiped her mouth with the back of her hand. “Okay, I have to tell you something, something really important, and I’m afraid,” she cried. Tears ran down her cheeks, not just a few tears, but streams. We both drank.

  “What is it? Why are you crying?”

  “I’m so scared you’re going to hate me. I can’t lose you.…”

  “You’re not going to lose me,” I said, tapping my feet under the table, not certain I wanted to hear, but wishing to get it over with — whatever it was. She had been my drama teacher, coach, friend. I’d shared my bed with her in Toronto. I knew many of her secrets, the ones she’d confided in me, even when I was only twelve and she was twenty-eight. Adult tales about dates and sex, or her history and family. Even with her lack of boundaries, I had learned a lot from her. I loved her, even if she pushed my buttons or crossed the line sometimes.

  “It’s about Clint.”

  “Clint?” I took a large swig of flat beer and then filled my glass up. Martha cried so much it was almost uncomfortable, but in the pub no one really cared.

  “It’s more about your mother, and Clint, and you.” She knew I didn’t like to talk about my mother, so whatever it was, it had to be bad. “Remember the night of the accident?”

  Of course I remembered. How could I forget? It had been Martha and my mother who sat with me after it happened.

  “It wasn’t what you thought. And I should have told you sooner. Please forgive me.”

  “Just tell me.”

  “Your mother was having an affair with him. I knew and never told you. It wasn’t how it seemed …” Martha confessed. I tried to pay attention but felt like I had just been kicked, like that twisted knot in my gut had ruptured. I didn’t want to cry; Martha was crying enough for the two of us. Instead, I drifted, disconnected from my limbs like I did when I had flashbacks, floating away, half there, half not. I tried to stay present, to listen, but I felt like I was suffocating.

  “She used to tell me how much she was into him. I told her to leave him alone, that she shouldn’t act on it. I mean, she was your mother.”

  I didn’t know what to say. My heart was in my throat.

  “I’m sorry. I told her to stop. The night of the accident, he was at a party and kids were spreading rumours about him and your mother, making fun of him. He went to see her, just left the party in a panic. He was drunk. He told her other teenagers knew about them.”

  The tears fell from her face while she rocked and talked obsessively, without breathing, without any space for me to speak. Even if I could have spoken.

  While she talked, I envisioned Clint at our apartment with my mother. I focused on the word affair. Affair? Really? My mother? A teenager? That wasn’t an affair. I wanted to scream, but all I could do was sit quietly, trying to reorder my reality. I couldn’t fathom my mother doing that with Clint. It had never, never occurred to me, at all.

  “I wanted to tell you for so long and I know I should have. I don’t know why I didn’t tell you.”

  Martha had known my mother was seducing him while I lived there as a thirteen-year-old. She knew and kept it a secret. So it was safe to tell me after my mother had left Montreal? Why now? I wanted to know, but couldn’t ask. I couldn’t stomach the conversation, calling sexual abuse an affair. Clint was still a minor under the law; more than that, he was my first love. My mother seduced my first boyfriend. I was shocked silent by all the deception.

  Clint was cutting himself and trying to tell me without speaking the words; I just didn’t know. I didn’t recognize it, which was odd because I had done the same things he had — stuffed everything down, raged inappropriately. I tried to tell, too, but I couldn’t find the words. There was no way to describe her manipulations. My mother was a master. A trickster. We were just kids. I’m sorry, Clint. I just wanted to see him, not listen to Martha.

  I stared at her for a while. She stared back.

  “There’s something else I have to tell you,” she said. “Sorry, I just need to go to the washroom first. I’ll be right back.” She stood up, tucked her chair in, and disappeared.

  I took a big sip of beer and rubbed my temples. I didn’t think there was much more I could bear. My mind was racing. Was it about Martha, or more about Clint and my mother? I looked around and wanted to run, felt as if everyone were staring at me, which they were not. I got up and walked toward the entrance of the pub and deeply inhaled the outside air before I went back to my seat.

  “Hey.” Martha had a tissue in her hands. She took a swig of her beer and sat back down.

  I said hey back before she carried on.

  “I have to tell you. I tried to help when you were younger, tried to listen to your mother, thought it would help if I did,” Martha said while I swallowed and my jaw locked. “Your mother told me that she … she told me that she was sexually attracted to you when you were a little girl. I told her it was sick, but she told me. She also told me how she used to tell your father that you girls had done something wrong, to make him mad, so he would beat you, so she could watch. It excited her!” Martha was crying so hard I thought she might choke, but I couldn’t move, had glue in my mouth. My mother was a monster.

  “I told her she needed to let you go, to let you leave, live somewhere else. I tried to help,” Martha finished.

  I said nothing, just stared blankly ahead.

  “I’m so sorry. I should have told you. I should have told you sooner and — do you forgive me?” Her eyes were puffy and red from the waves of tears. “Please. I’m sorry. Forgive me.” She rocked gently.

  “Okay,” I said. I could not look at her any longer while she pleaded. I said okay because it was the only way to get away from her pain, because I couldn’t breathe. Because I didn’t know what else to do in that moment and because I was used to emotionally taking care of her, of adults. I hadn’t had any time to process what I had been told, let alone forgive a woman who had deeply betrayed me, who knew such dark secrets, who had colluded with my mother in keeping them for so long.

  “Thank you. I’m so sorry. I don’t know what I would have done otherwise.”

  “I have to use the toilet.” I got up and rushed to the washroom, bent over the toilet, and wretched.

  The rest was a blur, saying goodbye, getting home. Martha had done nothing about the beatings when we were children, about my mother being attracted to me. How could she accept that admission from my mother and do nothing? Telling me then would have been just as useless as telling me at the age of eighteen. Going to the authorities and telling them would have been the right thing to do.

  I couldn’t make sense of it, only knew that I felt exposed, ashamed. And I felt guilt that my mother had sexually abused Clint, that he nearly died. Part of me thought, in that moment, that it was my fault. I believed I had some ownership or power. If he hadn’t been my boyfriend, my mother never would have met him. If I had never brought him home, if I, if I. If. Only.

  I tried to piece together different versions of that night until I finally understood what the truth was.

  Steffin was one of the culprits. He was at the party where Clint had been before he drove to my mother’s apartment. Steffin and the other guys were jeering, taunting Clint with the jingle “Clint’s dating Mrs. V.” It was child’s play, but it wasn’t play, and they had set something into motion that could not be taken back. He was already drunk when he hopped into the car and drove to my mother’s place in a panic, believing that everyone knew.

  Clint told me his version on the phone later, after I gathered my courage and tracked him down by calling all the people with his last name from the phone book until I found him. His voice was tentative yet friendly at first, almost giddy, as if we were teens again. But then I felt her, my mother, as if she were right there with us, as we had always felt that magnetic pull, and while he spoke to me I felt her stari
ng at me, could almost hear her voice in my head trying to stop the conversation we were about to have. But she could not. She had silenced us for so long. He knew why I had tracked him down.

  “She used to give me presents and somehow it made up for it,” he said with false confidence.

  “Made up for what, Clint?”

  Then he confirmed everything I had imagined, everything I deep down knew.

  “If it had happened in this day and age she would have been put away, called a pedophile. I was a boy. She bought me beer, she fed me, took me out, she gave me money. It was hard to say no, and it’s not like your mother was attractive to me. I went to a party that night, and I was upset because some of my friends knew somehow, or thought they knew. They were all saying your mother and I were sleeping together. And I panicked and drove to your mother’s place. She wanted me to leave, but I was so drunk I cut myself and tried to get her to drive me home. I told her that my mom needed the car, but she wouldn’t drive me. She pushed the car keys into my hand after giving me a mickey of rum while I was there, and I drank the whole thing. You sure you want to know this, Joanne?”

  “Yes,” I said quietly.

  “Okay. She made me leave. She told me I had to go and I did. Maybe your mom didn’t want people to know what she was doing to me. I shouldn’t have been driving.”

  I inserted a few apologies between his sentences. As he spoke, it was as if I had been with him in the car, a phantom passenger. I’d imagined the crash countless times over the years, how he must have been scared, in the dark, driving quickly down a dangerous mountain road, drunk, hitting the lamppost with such force it cracked his face open and left him in a coma, left him with a scarred and new face. I had whispered in his ear so many times, I’m sorry, from hundreds of miles away. I should have gone to visit after Martha and my mother sat me down to tell me about the accident. I didn’t because we were broken up and I just believed that it was the best thing to do, because they said not to visit.

  “She took me to a hotel once, before the accident. She wanted to have sex with me. I was drunk. I remember her on the bed, naked, and she tried …” He recounted the story as if he had been waiting to get it off his chest, this confession, though it wasn’t his crime.

  “You were a boy, Clint,” I said, not sure if people had ever told him that. I didn’t ask, didn’t ask how he dealt with those feelings or memories. I didn’t want to hold it all, only to know, to really hear it, from him. But the details were hard to listen to.

  Had she been found out, she might have gone to jail. My mother had put the keys in his hands and told him to drive, to leave the apartment so no one would know he had been there. I had learned enough.

  Clint used to say, “Your mother knows we kiss. She asked what we do together. I told her we kissed, that was all. Your mother’s sick.”

  I didn’t know how to pick up on the cues then. I should have recognized them, but I was too close, couldn’t fathom that my own mother would have sex with my boyfriend.

  I wasn’t ready to hear what Martha told me, but it didn’t matter to her. She needed to confess, needed forgiveness. There was no thought about how the telling would impact me. Martha was a trusted adult who had known about my mother’s pedophilia and had done nothing. And while my mother was the orchestrator, the perpetrator of the crimes, Martha was a bystander. Clint was right that my mother would have been charged had it been current day, but so, too, would Martha.

  I decided to leave Montreal. The city brought tragedy.

  Lou was so angry, and rightfully. I was leaving her without a roommate, without rent. And I couldn’t tell her what had happened, but said I had to go when the festival ended.

  I rented a van and took off with a hired mover who schlepped my belongings for me. I went back to Toronto and found a bachelor apartment in the classifieds of a newspaper, a small walk-up off of Broadview, across from the park. I loved it, with its built-in Murphy bed and claw-foot tub. It was home. I would finally live alone, though it took weeks to get a phone because at the time, Bell Canada wouldn’t rent a phone line to a minor. I had to argue with them endlessly about the need for a phone. Nothing was ever simple, not even getting a phone when under the age of nineteen in Ontario. I had to scrap for everything in the world, but that was okay because I was a scrapper.

  I literally took to brawling on occasion; if I felt threatened or saw other girls or children being threatened, a beast came out of me I didn’t even know existed. Once a man was so closely following me on the street, I felt him. After a block I dropped to the ground on all fours and loudly growled up at him like rabid dog. He retreated, looking at me like I was crazy, which I likely was. Another night I was at a lesbian bar, mixing booze with drugs. I didn’t make it off the dance floor on my own, and I was just as wild when some men tried to pick me up from my nesting place on the concrete floor. It was instinctive, my response to perceived physical threats by men, which triggered everything in me, reminded me of my father. Every nerve in my body was hard-wired to expect danger. This protective internal beast often kept me safe, but it sometimes created more trouble than I could manage.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

  “JOANNE, ARE YOU AWAKE? Do you know how you got here?” asked a woman staring at me from above. I was in a bed, wrists bound to bars that gave off a metallic taste and smell that made my stomach flip. The room slowly came into focus.

  My voice cracked and I coughed. “I’m thirsty.”

  “Here.” The woman brought a cup of water to my lips.

  I took a sip through the straw and coughed a bit more. I was in a hospital, again, seemed to be fated to hospitals for some reason or another.

  “I was called in to give an assessment,” the woman said.

  I tried to pull my hands free. “Why are these things on my wrists? Take them off.”

  “I’ll get security to remove them, but I need to know you aren’t going to hurt anyone or yourself.”

  Is that a joke? “But why are these on?” If you don’t take these off …

  “You don’t remember?”

  “It wasn’t my fault,” I said.

  I had gone to a lesbian bar the night before, drinking and dancing. I’d collapsed on the dance floor after taking too many pills mixed with alcohol. I was brought in after fighting the ambulance driver. I hadn’t wanted to go to the hospital.

  “My name is Alice.”

  She had short spiked hair and blue eyes and wore a necklace in the shape of a woman’s body and swirly earrings with little green stones in the centre of each. Her voice was soothing. “Why don’t you tell me what happened last night?”

  “I didn’t mean to hurt myself or hit that ambulance guy. I don’t like being held or restrained.” I paused. “I wasn’t trying to kill myself. I would have found a better way — jump in front of a subway, or knife or something more … lethal.”

  The mattress under my body was hard and my lungs felt constricted, sore. “I promise not to hurt you or myself. Can I get these off, please?” I knew the rules. Don’t fuck with authority when your hands are bound; you’ll lose.

  She looked into my eyes, maybe looking for the rabid girl. I was tempted to scream but I knew it wouldn’t be one of my brighter moves so I tried to control my panic. She was soft, gentle. I needed to figure out if she was a wolf, but mostly I needed the restraints to be removed.

  “Please …”

  “I’ll be right back.” Alice left me alone and then returned with a security guard, who undid my wrists and waited with us. I didn’t say anything, just grabbed my arms and hands, rubbed my wrists. The guard made me uncomfortable and I wouldn’t break eye contact with him.

  “You can leave now,” Alice told him, as if reading my mind.

  Security turned and walked out of the room.

  “Are you going to commit me? I don’t need that. I need to be out. My mom tried to have me committed not too long ago.”

  “What happened with your mother?”

  I didn’t w
ant to say, just enough for her to know I wasn’t “bad,” wasn’t the horrible child my mother tried to make me out to be. I forgot that she was a stranger who knew nothing, but I was so used to being seen as a bad girl that I thought it was visible somehow, my badness. Deflection was my mother’s art, her craft; she was very good at getting people to believe I was a horrible daughter.

  Say something else. The voice inside my head was amplified. I could hear the phrase repeat itself over and over loudly, SAY SOMEHTING ELSE.

  “I … had a … an eating problem, but I wasn’t living at home anymore. Why should she get to do something like that to me, have me committed?” Parental control should cease when a mother sends a child packing. I just didn’t know what to tell Miss Alice.

  “I’m grown enough. I’m eighteen now.”

  “You want to tell me more?” Alice asked, her voice soothing.

  I didn’t want to say more. Speaking never led to anything good, but I had a sudden urge to hold her even though I didn’t know her. There was something warm about her, softness in a place with sharp angled walls, diseased and depressed people. I pretended Alice was a warm blanket, but I didn’t dare reach out to touch her for comfort. Instead I answered, hoping she would see me.

  “Are you okay?” Alice asked after a long silence.

  “Yeah. Believe it or not, I was just trying to have a good time. I haven’t been back long in Toronto and I went to a bar to have fun.” And then I decided to say the words. “I’m a lesbian, ya know, and I’m okay with it.” I was defensive, trying to see if she would prefer not to talk to me. “Normal” people often got weird with these types of things.

  “I’m a lesbian, too.”

  “Oh … well … you don’t look like a lesbian.” I was caught off guard, didn’t realize lesbians might be everywhere. I had seen gay women only in bars, not in the light of day where ordinary people had ordinary jobs. It was a first and I was a fool, a young uninformed fool with a big mouth. “Oh, sorry … I didn’t mean that in a bad way or anything, just that the lesbians I’ve met all don’t dress so … work-ish.” Idiot. “Oh, that sounds stupid, you’re a doctor.…”