The Last Kid Left

by Rosecrans Baldwin

  That evening, around ten o’clock, there was a knock on the Journalist’s door. The Girl stood outside. “I want to talk to you,” she said. “One-on-one.”

  She patrolled the small bedroom. She picked up the coverlet off the floor, folded it in half, and rested it on a chair. “I just want to talk,” the Girl said firmly. Another silence. When she was asked what she wanted to talk about, she didn’t say anything, just stared at the dark TV.

  “I’ve been here before,” she said.

  “This motel?”

  “Mount Washington. With my dad. So how do you get to do this?” the Girl asked. “Your job. Asking people questions.”

  The Girl closed the curtains in the window that overlooked the parking lot.

  The Journalist said she’d gone to school for it, she worked at it.

  “How did you find out about me?”

  The Journalist said it was a big story.

  “Yeah, I know.” She didn’t say anything else for a moment. “He raped me. When I was a kid. I don’t remember a lot of it.”

  The Journalist said she was extremely sorry.

  “He put his dick inside me. He liked to eat me out. Have you ever been raped?”

  The Journalist shook her head.

  “So you don’t know what it’s like. But you’re going to write like you do. My mother didn’t do anything about it.”

  The Journalist was about to ask about this, but was starting to cry.

  “So honestly,” the Girl said, “how can you do your job and live with yourself?”

  The Journalist apologized for crying, apologized for her industry.

  “But you think it’s my fault,” the Girl interrupted.

  The Journalist denied this, but the Girl didn’t believe her. “Of course you do.” Her face was tight and pained, she was dog-tired. Both of them were. Neither seemed to know what would happen next.

  “You think you understand what’s going on,” the Girl said quietly. “You’re just like everybody else.”

  She stood up quickly and grabbed the back of the desk chair, as if reconsidering her plan. Then paused. Accepting something.

  “I’ll tell you everything you want to know, on one condition,” she said. “You have to record it and then write it down just like I say, without changing it.”

  The Journalist inquired if, instead, she could put some of the Girl’s statements into her own words? Otherwise it would be a monologue. The Girl agreed. A minute later, the Journalist had set up her phone on the room’s tiny table and poured them both glasses of water. The Girl sat down. Then, after a brief awkward moment, she started to talk and didn’t stop, aside from short pauses and bathroom breaks, for the next six hours.

  * * *

  Until Emily Portis was eleven, she was ready to accept nearly any responsibility. Country existence was hard, full of activity, particularly where she and her family lived, only eleven miles west of the ocean but nearly two thousand feet above sea level, perched on the side of a mountain.

  And with elevation, with isolation, came responsibility. In the summertime, low bushes flowered with berries to be picked. The rocky soil gave up vegetables, but only with coaxing. In winter the snow could be four feet deep. Everyone needed to do their share; Emily absorbed this truth at a young age. Her family had lived on the land for multiple generations, and gradually she learned that the most important law in country life, to ensure survival, is acceptance—of everything that nature gives or takes away.

  They lived in the lower ruffles of the Langley range. Decades earlier, a set of roads had been carved from the hillsides. Here and there stood buckled houses, feeble old barns, where once upon a time wagons had passed, busily coming and going. During her childhood there were few visitors, few strangers, only the woods teeming with invisible pretty things that sang to keep themselves company, or so it seemed to Emily when she was little.

  She was an energetic, precocious child. She’d feel faint and press her hand to her forehead and collapse to the floor, like she’d seen in old movies. She ran around the house with a pressing sense of self-importance. Often she left rooms announcing, “I need to go now,” before heading off to a next appointment. But she didn’t mind chores, she liked them. Outdoors, she’d applaud to watch Mother20 take something heavy and lift it high above her head. At the age of three, she was taught how to build a fire. She weeded the vegetable gardens while the family dog sniffed at her heels. “I liked feeling older,” she said.

  On summer mornings, before her father joined the police force, when he still worked as a contractor for hire, Emily would bring him his large mug of coffee, black with five sugars, and he’d pour some for her into a tiny cup, and they’d sit together on the porch while he told her about the history of her family, which had lived for many generations in that region. How, for example, up in the high field, under the branches of an old maple tree that once was struck by lightning and still bore the scars, there were three graves dug next to one another, no markers, containing three ancestors who had died in a terrible fire, Father said.

  By and large it was just the three of them for company and conversation. Mother was big on the importance of conversation, stories, songs to sing.21 On proper language, she was particularly strict. There were differences between “may” and “can,” and other important things to know, such as when a young lady should say “please,” “thank you,” or “may I be excused?”

  Only occasionally were there visitors, other children for Emily to play with. Mostly, she was alone with Mother and Pointer, a collie mix. In the summer of 2003, Mother was forced to kill Pointer. Emily was four years old as of that March. It was hot and muggy on the evening that Pointer suddenly turned up acting crazy. He’d killed something in the woods; he ran dizzily toward them across the meadow with froth on his lips.

  “He went for us,” Emily remembered her mother saying, out of fear, when Father got home that night. He’d quickly reached his boiling point, a look of rage beyond control; a look that meant the possibility of violence.22 “He almost bit her,” her mother had said loudly, into the face of her incensed husband, while she hid her daughter behind her legs, just in case.

  That night they buried Pointer beneath the maple tree, under layers of brown silt that had washed down from the creek.

  It was the first of two times in her life that Emily has seen her father cry.

  For all of her childhood, love and duty were not very different things. There was sporadic violence, frequent beauty. Each fall Father hunted deer. He trekked down near where their woods blended into the national forest. A few times he let her join him, and she was proud and eager, so happy to be included. Father rarely got angry when he was hunting; plus she loved getting up in the dark, she loved the toasty quiet inside the truck when it was cold out, the sips of coffee he allowed her from his thermos cup, or a segment or two from the oranges23 he carried. They stuck to old game trails. They never saw another person. “It was honestly the best thing to do in the whole world,” she recalled, “at least that I could imagine at that age.”24

  If Emily Portis belonged to the forest, growing up, it was because her father, the master outdoorsman, had showed her how. He had the ability to take the reality around them and make it magical with make-believe. When there were empty barns to explore, an abandoned hunting camp to lie down inside and imagine themselves king and queen, tickle each other across the old quilts he’d brought for their royal bedding.

  One afternoon, she remembered, they found a salamander in the camp, black with orange spots.25 Father said it was a species called the fire salamander, because it could set fires with its tail, so dangerous that even the forest elves stayed away.

  And some nights, good nights, in the depth of a cold winter, Father would lie down at home after a long day’s work and ask the forest elves to massage his back. Emily would run to another room, remove her socks, then come back and jump on top of him. He’d say, “The elves, the elves are here!” and Mother would laugh from he
r chair beside the woodstove, often sewing26 clothes for the entire family.

  They were truly an American family of old, homesteaders still alive, with little interest in television, the internet, or anything too tied to the grid. Occasionally the three of them watched old movies on a clunky VCR, but usually they made their own amusements, high above the glittering town.

  And at the end of the night, before sleep, they would kiss delicate fairy kisses, Emily and Father, lips to lips; and Father and Mother would kiss with lips; and the daughter would kiss Mother on the lips, too.

  And all these things, and more besides, the sky above and the valley below, constituted the life of Emily Portis before the months and years to come when her mother got sick, when her mother disappeared. Around April of 2006, Mother started to go away for weeks at a time, to seek neurological betterment at different treatment centers27 around New England. And returned home barely improved. Eventually, she vanished within the old house itself, sequestered in a back room, before she was sent away completely. And Emily and her father were left alone.

  * * *

  The sickness that came to define the life of her mother was not interesting enough to Emily to warrant relating to this Journalist in detail.

  She remembered an afternoon when Father was outside in the yard, repairing a chain saw. Mother was in the garden. Emily was in the kitchen. Heavy gray clouds hung over the valley. Her parents had been fighting, continuing an argument from the previous evening. Mother had stopped in the broccoli row. She was talking to herself, but her daughter couldn’t make out what she was saying. Her mouth moved faster, her voice became louder. Soon she was shouting things at the sky. Father put down the chain saw. He slapped her so hard that she sat down heavily on the ground. Emily saw everything. She ran outside. Her father turned on her quickly. “Do not help her,” he commanded. Fires banked in his eyes. While Mother looked at Emily with blushing anguish, that also seemed to verge on a kind of strange excitement, and called her by name.

  “Don’t,” Father said to her. “You did this to yourself.”

  Naturally Emily rushed to her mother, but Father yanked her away by the arm, pulling so hard it felt like her shoulder had been dislocated. She shrieked, but he didn’t let go.

  “Come here, Emily,” Mother urged. She froze. Her mother would not stop staring, she started grinning at her. There was a smell of frenzy in the air, like the day Pointer died. Mother smiled wider, her tone was colder. “I said come here. Right now.”

  Emily whispered “no” and squirmed away from her father’s grasp.

  “Of course you don’t want to,” her mother said. “Father is absolutely right. He’s always right.” At which point she brushed the dirt off her arms and walked into the house.

  Beginning that afternoon, the garden overgrew. The illness that previously seemed like Mother’s way of being, her tics and worry, began to flourish. Entire days she wouldn’t get out of bed, then multiple days in a row. There were crying bouts, gloomy silences, mysterious absences, before she’d reappear around the house and fuss noisily, scold and grasp at her daughter, before she retreated into her room again.

  No exhortations from Emily made any difference.28 Doctors visited the house, to no avail. She’d find her mother in the middle of the barn, doing nothing, or weeping silently in the kitchen, leaned against the wall with the phone cord wrapped around her fingers.

  There were discussions, family meetings, no more fairy kisses exchanged. Their previous existence was becoming more difficult to recall. Soon Father was on edge all the time, unpredictable, his temper flared unexpectedly. While Mother was consistently her new self, lethargic, refusing to engage, unwilling to speak to any of them. “She didn’t even change her clothes anymore,” Emily said.29

  She remembered she sought out Father in the winter, one night while it snowed. He was chopping wood out by the barn. He sank the axe into the stump. “She’s sick,” he said, and clapped his leather gloves together. “We need to let her rest,” he said. Emily thought about this for a moment before she asked, “Am I going to get sick?” Her father laughed. “You and I will be fine. The most important thing is we stick together.”

  * * *

  One Sunday night in February, when Emily was eight years old, there were fireworks above the valley for no good reason. At that elevation, the explosions were directly in front of their front yard, red and blue like flowers in the sky.

  She and Father watched from the door. It was so exciting. “I don’t know why this is happening,” Father said repeatedly.

  And once the fireworks finished, they circulated back upstairs, to the master bedroom, his bed, to resume going over the prior week’s events, moments that had gone well and those that failed, so that Emily could improve herself. He’d say, “Do you recognize what you did wrong?” For example, one time she forgot to lock the back fence; five or six hens had wandered out and didn’t come back. “How do you think that makes me feel, when you forget something that’s so important to me?” he said. “It makes you sad,” she said. “What kind of sad, do you think?” Occasionally she’d be bad and say things like, “Well how am I supposed to know?” Then he’d reprimand her, but he’d be chuckling a little, and would say something like, “Please don’t talk so loudly. I want you to think.”

  From those years she remembered many exchanges along similar lines, when the two of them would lie in the bed on Sunday evenings in their pajamas, atop or under the quilts; conversations full of quizzes, coaxing, jokes, underpinned by moral lessons a girl needed to learn to grow up smart and strong. But they also played games, which always led eventually to the exercises that were intended to relax Father, where she helped to masturbate him, and eventually learned to masturbate him without any help, and on occasion he would “relax” her also, as he said, both with his hand and his mouth.

  Whether her mother knew what was going on upstairs, Emily couldn’t say for sure.

  As a girl and young adolescent, there were moments from her life that stood out like hallucinations, acid trips, mirages of pain. In sixth grade, early October, one weekend she and Father climbed the first leg of Tuckerman Ravine on Mount Washington; the same mountain the Girl and Boy would visit years later. She was eleven. At the time, her mother had gone away for two weeks to a clinic in Cambridge. Father took her up to hike Mount Washington as another one of their outdoor adventures. At first Emily had feigned sickness. In the end she didn’t have a choice. A mile from camp, a storm broke out. They ran the rest of the way. The rain fell in torrents. She remembered diving straight into her sleeping bag, starving and cold. But the dinner they’d planned was inedible without fire, and they lacked dry wood, and Father hadn’t brought the stove. So they ate ketchup by the packet. They ate the donuts that were for breakfast. It was actually sort of fun. He was in his sleeping bag, too, when he started fantasizing about food. It was a game they used to play when she was little; he’d have these crazy ideas for made-up cheeseburgers. Gasoline burger. Dog-fart burger. Eventually she fell asleep, when it seemed like nothing would happen. When she woke up, the sun was out. He’d built a fire to dry their clothes. They roasted marshmallows for breakfast, packed their bags, and hiked back down to the truck.

  But on the way down, her stomach started to cramp. A terrible feeling, Emily said, when she looks back and diagnoses what was probably a case of poisonous rejection—to realize, however unconsciously, that Father hadn’t wanted to touch her the night before. That perhaps she wasn’t wanted anymore in that way. Questions in her mind like, Who was she? What was she? Who would ever love her now?

  Five minutes into the drive home, her breakfast had curdled. She threw up marshmallows all over the truck’s front seat. And for the rest of the drive home she dove deeper into the immeasurable dark pools of her mind.

  * * *

  Also in sixth grade, Emily started running. She did “weirdly well” in her first 5K, placed first in her age group. It was an indoor track meet, a Sunday morning in February. The
boldness of winning made her giddy. Her coach drove her home afterward and dropped her off a quarter mile below the house; the hill had more than a foot of unplowed new snow.

  Twenty minutes later, by the mailbox, she found her father lying on his back, unconscious. He must have slipped in the snow and hit his head. Church bells rang in the valley. There was a smell of wood smoke. She stared into his face. He was still alive, breathing lightly. His hair was full of melting snow. She touched his cheek. The tip of his nose had turned yellow from the cold. It was a stressful year,30 and the relaxation exercises had become more elaborate, with more serious tests of trust. The Mount Washington camping trip was an anomaly. More than ever, trust was vitally important. If he couldn’t trust her, their entire world would come apart. Who’d pay for Mother’s treatments? He liked to hold her between her legs during ejaculation. Beginning in the summer, he had started to penetrate her vaginally. He’d apologize profusely for it afterward, his lack of control, he was furious with himself. And each time he said it would never happen again—unless she wished. Afterward, back in her own bed, she’d lay coiled as tight as possible, and chew on her red knuckles, and dive down into her hatred, even through the floorboards to where her mother was downstairs, the woman she blamed.

  Six months later, Emily ran in her first indoor track meet, and her coach drove her home, and she found her father collapsed in the snow. She had stared down into his pale face, thinking many things, then trudged up to the house to call an ambulance.

  Their final Sunday evening together came that summer, the August before seventh grade. That Sunday, a cool night, just when he’d pulled her toward him by her hips, she decided she’d had enough, whipped around and bit him, truly sank her teeth deep into his arm. She drew blood. He recoiled and fell backward on the rug. He looked terrified, she remembers. He burst into tears. It was the second time, she said, that she’d seen him cry.