At night, I stay up late talking with strangers on Instant Messenger. I search the same list of key words—lolita, nabokov, teacher—and I message all the men who show up in the results. If they start getting creepy like Craig, I sign off. It’s not about that. I just like how they happily listen while I tell them everything that happened with Strane. You’re a very special girl, they type, for being able to appreciate the love of a man like that. If the men ask for a photo of me, I send an image of Kirsten Dunst from the movie The Virgin Suicides and none of them ever call me out on it, which makes me wonder if these men are stupid or just ok with me being a liar. If they send me a photo, I tell them they’re handsome and they all believe me, even the ones who are clearly ugly. I save all their pictures in a folder titled MATH HOMEWORK so my parents won’t look in it, and sometimes I sit clicking through photo after photo, sad homely face after sad homely face, and think that if Strane had sent me a photo before I really knew him, he’d fit right in.
Mud season turns to blackfly season. The lake ice thaws slowly, first turning gray, then blue, and then dissolving to cold water. The snow in the yard melts, but deep in the woods, drifts still nestle against boulders, crusty snow piles peppered with pine needles and spruce cones. In April, a week before my seventeenth birthday, Mom asks if I want to have a party.
“And invite who?”
“Your friends,” she says.
“What friends?”
“You have friends.”
“That’s news to me.”
“You do,” she insists.
It almost makes me feel sorry for her, picturing what she imagines my life at school is like, smiling faces in the hallways, a lunch table of nice girls with good grades, when in reality it’s me staring at the ground as I walk and drinking black coffee in a diner with a bunch of retirees.
We end up going out to eat at Olive Garden for my birthday, a brick of lasagna followed by a brick of tiramisu pierced with a candle. My present is an eight-week driver’s education course, a gesture that shows Browick is even further behind us.
“And maybe, once you pass,” Dad says, “we’ll find you a car.”
Mom’s eyebrows shoot up.
“Eventually,” he clarifies.
I thank them and try not to act too excited by the thought of the places a car can take me.
* * *
That summer, Dad helps me get a filing clerk job at the hospital in town—eight bucks an hour, three days a week. I’m assigned to the urology archives, a long windowless room of floor-to-ceiling shelves crammed with medical charts that are shipped in from all over the state. Every morning when I arrive, a pile of charts waits to be filed, along with a list of patients whose charts I need to pull, either because they have upcoming appointments or because they died so long ago the chart can now be destroyed.
The hospital is understaffed, so entire days pass without the lead clerk checking on me. Even though I’m not supposed to, I spend most of my time reading charts. There are so many—even if I worked at the hospital for the rest of my life, I wouldn’t be able to get through them all. Finding an interesting one is a guessing game of running my fingers along their color-coded stickers, tugging out a random one and hoping for a good story. You really can’t predict which ones are going to be good. Thick charts can read like novels, with years of symptoms, operations, and complications in blue carbon copy and faded ink. Sometimes the thin ones are the most devastating, a tragedy compacted into a handful of appointments and a red stamp on the front cover: deceased.
Almost all the urology patients are men, most middle-aged or older. They’re men who pee blood or aren’t peeing at all, men who pass stones and grow tumors. The charts have grainy X-rays of kidneys and bladders lit up with dye, diagrams of penises and testicles annotated with the doctor’s scrawl. In one chart, I find a photograph of bladder stones in a gloved palm like three spiky grains of sand. The transcript shows the doctor’s question, How long has there been blood in your urine? and the patient’s answer, Six days.
At lunch, I eat in the cafeteria armed with a book so I have an excuse not to sit with Dad. It feels better with some breathing room between us, because in some ways, he’s a different person at the hospital. His accent becomes thicker, and I hear him laugh at gross jokes that he’d be offended by if Mom were around. Plus, he has a ton of friends. People’s faces light up at the sight of him. I had no idea he was so popular.
On my first day, when he went around introducing me to what seemed like every single person, I asked him, “How does everyone know you?” He just laughed and said, “Helps if you’ve got your name on your shirt,” pointing to the phil embroidered above his breast pocket, but it’s more than that—even doctors smile when they see Dad coming, and they never smile, and some people already knew stuff about me, how old I am, that I like to write. They still think I go to Browick, which makes sense. I assume he told everyone when I was accepted, and he wouldn’t have gone around announcing it when I was kicked out.
Dad and I really don’t have much to say to each other, which is ok. In the truck, he keeps the radio turned up so it’s too loud to talk, and once we’re at home, he settles into his chair and turns on the TV. In the afternoons he likes to watch shows from when he was a kid, The Andy Griffith Show and Bonanza, while I go for long walks with Babe around the lakeshore and up the bluff to the cave where the abandoned cot still sits rotting. I try to stay out of the house until Mom gets home. Not that being with her is any easier, but when they’re together, they forget about me, and I can slip up into my bedroom and shut the door.
Dad tells me I should start saving now for college textbooks. Instead, I blow my first two paychecks on a digital camera and, on my days off, take self-portraits in the woods, wearing floral dresses and knee socks. In the photos, ferns brush my thighs and sunlight streams through my hair, making me look like a wood nymph, like Persephone wandering her meadow, waiting for Hades to come. I draft an email to Strane with a dozen JPEGs attached and hover the mouse over “send,” but when I imagine the ruin that could come to him, I can’t do it.
Midsummer, he appears in the form of a chart waiting to be filed, included in an archive shipment from western Maine. strane, jacob. born november 10, 1957. Inside are the records of the vasectomy he had in 1991, notes from the initial consultation appointment, written in the doctor’s handwriting: 33 y.o. patient is unmarried but insistent in not wanting children. There are notes from the actual surgery, from the follow-up appointment: Patient was instructed to apply ice to the scrotum once a day and to wear scrotal support for two weeks. At “scrotal support,” I slap the chart shut, mortified at the phrase even if I’m unsure exactly what it means.
I open it again, read it all the way through—his vitals, his stats, six foot four, 280 pounds. His signature in three different places. I pull apart two pages stuck together by a decade-old ink blot and imagine the pen leaking onto his hands. I can see his fingers, his calluses and flat, bitten-down nails. How they looked resting on my thigh the first time he touched me.
The story of his chart is undramatic but still surreal, his recovery described as him holding a bag of ice to his groin. I try to picture it—he had the surgery in July, so the ice must have been melting and there would’ve been wet spots on his shorts, a sweating glass of a cold drink beside him, an orange bottle of painkillers that clicked as he tapped them out into his palm. At the time, I was how old? I count in my head: six, a first grader, barely a person and nine years away from being in bed with him, squirming under his hands as he told me to calm down, that I couldn’t get pregnant, he’d had a vasectomy.
I want to steal the chart, but when they hired me, I had to sign pages of confidentiality agreements, bolded statements about the legal consequences of sharing medical records. I make do with visiting the chart every day, pulling it out from its spot on the bottom shelf and transcribing the notes into my journal, underlining the phrase unmarried but insistent in not wanting children. It makes me think of
the only part of Lolita I truly hate, the passage where Humbert imagines first having daughters with Lo, then making granddaughters with those daughters. It makes me remember, too, the thing I’ve almost forgotten—him asking me to call him Daddy on the phone while he jerked off on the other end.
But these thoughts are like water-smoothed stones I pick up and study with cool eyes, then let fall back into the lake. In the quiet of the hospital, the oscillating fan stirs my hair as the thoughts sink to the bottom of my brain and disappear beneath the muck. I close the chart, pick up another stack, file it away.
2017
One of the front desk clerks called out sick, leaving Inez stranded on a sold-out Saturday night, so I abandon the concierge desk to help her. When I was first hired eight years ago, it was for a front desk position, and I still remember the basics. Inez has to teach me the updated computer system, her voice rising into a question as she explains the sequence for making a reservation, checking in a guest. I can’t tell if she’s nervous around me or merely annoyed. If I say something self-deprecating after screwing up, she exhales a quick succession of “you’re fine, you’re fine, you’re fine.”
The hours fly by despite my brain fog, or maybe because of it. The bartender brings me a dark and stormy and Inez breaks into a grin when I offer her a sip, the two of us crouching behind the desk as we pass it back and forth. I forget how it can be to work alongside someone, the camaraderie that emerges when dealing with customers: the repeat guest who insists we have put her in a different room this time, even though we let her come around the desk and see her reservation history and that it’s always been room 237; the couple who brushes off our warning that the cheaper street-facing room will be loud and then an hour later comes to the lobby upset about the noise. Inez is good at dealing with the complainers, bats her eyes and clutches her hand over her heart as she says, “I am so sorry. I am just so sorry.” She lays it on so thick it throws the guests off guard; they almost always end up assuring her that it’s ok, no big deal, and when they leave, Inez mutters a string of obscenities under her breath.
“I thought you were just the boss’s daughter,” I say, “but you’re actually good at this.”
She squints at me, deciding whether to be insulted.
I add, “You’re better than I am. I can’t fake sympathy,” and her face melts into a smile, won over by the flattery.
“When people are angry, they’re looking for a fight,” she says. “You act submissive, they back off.”
“Yeah, that’s the same strategy I use with men.” I look to see her reaction, if she’ll smirk in recognition, but her brow only furrows, vaguely confused.
I watch her click around on her computer, the screen lighting her face. She’s seventeen but looks much older, airbrushed makeup and flat-ironed hair ending in a perfectly blunt line. Wearing a string of pearls and a white silk blouse under her suit, she appears put together, already better at being a woman than I am.
“You’re very insightful,” I say. “You seem mature for your age.”
She gives me a sideways glance, her guard still half up. “Uh, thanks.” She turns back to the computer, hunches her shoulders so I can’t see the screen.
At nine thirty, after the rush dies down, a man approaches the desk—fortysomething, handsome, short. His reservation is for one night, a Jacuzzi suite facing the garden courtyard. He’s requested a special turndown to be waiting upon his arrival: dimmed lights, bubble bath, rose petals on the bed, champagne on ice.
As I check him in, I tell him everything is ready and waiting in the room. “Assuming you still want the turndown,” I say, glancing around the lobby. He seems to be alone.
The man smiles at Inez. Even though I’m the one checking him in, he hasn’t stopped smiling at her since he stepped up to the desk. “That’s perfect,” he says.
He pockets the key card, heads back toward the elevators. Inez turns to file his registration slip, and I watch the man pause halfway across the lobby, hold out his hand. A woman rises from one of the wingback chairs. She glances over her shoulder at the front desk, locks eyes with me, and I see she’s not a woman at all. She’s a teenager in Converse sneakers and an oversized sweater with sleeves that fall past her wrists. While they wait for an elevator, the man nuzzles his face into her neck and the girl hiccups a laugh.
“Did you see that?” I ask Inez after they get on the elevator. “The girl he was with. She looked fourteen.”
She shakes her head. “I didn’t see.” She looks down the list of check-ins, all highlighted green. Everyone’s in their rooms; we can relax. “I’m going to eat,” she says.
I think of the done-up room, the rose petals on the bed, the churning bath bubbles, the girl’s uneasy giggle as he pulls the baggy sweater off her body. As Inez heads for the kitchen, I picture myself making a key and going up to the room, bursting inside, digging my nails into the man as I yank him off the girl. But what would that do other than cause a scene and get me fired? She looked willing, happy. It’s not like he was dragging her up there. Standing behind the desk, I swallow the last of my drink and watch Inez come back with a plate of pasta. She shovels it into her mouth as she walks, flecks of red sauce on her white blouse.
While she eats in the back office, a man comes up to the desk and says he has a reservation. I search the system as he looms over me with crossed arms, his face all overgrown eyebrows and gin blossom nose. He heaves a sigh, wanting to be sure I’m aware of how annoyed he is, how incompetent I am. Do you realize there’s a girl getting raped upstairs, I think, and there’s nothing anyone can do about it?
“There’s no reservation under your name,” I say. “Are you sure you’re at the right hotel?”
“Of course I’m sure.” He produces from his pocket a folded piece of paper. “There, see?”
I look it over and see it’s a confirmation for a hotel in Portland, Oregon. When I point out his mistake, apologizing as though it’s somehow my fault, the man gapes at the paper, then at me, and then at his wife, who sits across the lobby surrounded by their bags.
“We flew up here from Florida,” he mumbles. “What are we going to do?”
The city is booked up for the night, yet I manage to find them a room at a hotel by the airport, and the man, too stunned to thank me, ushers his wife across the lobby, back to the valet, who brings around their rental car. As they drive off, I let my body slump against the desk. My head falls into my hands. Deep breath.
When the phone rings, I pick up without opening my eyes, recite the hotel’s greeting.
“Hi there,” the voice says, hesitant and female. “I’m looking for Vanessa Wye.”
I open my eyes and look out across the quiet lobby. Inez emerges from the back office and gestures to me—one second—as she heads toward the staff bathroom.
“Hello?” The voice waits. “Is this Vanessa?”
I reach for the phone switchboard, the red button to cancel the call.
“Don’t hang up,” the voice says. “This is Janine Bailey, from Femzine? I sent you a couple emails hoping we could connect. I thought I’d try you at work in a last-ditch effort.”
I hold my finger against the “cancel call” button but don’t press down. My voice cracks as I tell her, “You already tried calling me. You left a voicemail.”
“You’re right,” she says. “I did.”
“And now you’re calling again. This time at my work.”
“I know,” she says. “I realize I’m being pushy, but let me ask you a question. How much have you been following this story?”
I say nothing, unsure what she means.
“Taylor Birch—you know Taylor, don’t you? She’s really been through hell these past few weeks. Have you seen the abuse she’s been subjected to? The men’s rights activists, trolls on Twitter. She’s gotten death threats—”
“Yeah,” I say. “I saw something about that.”
There’s a click, and then her voice is louder, closer, like she’s taken me
off speakerphone. “I’m going to be straight with you, Vanessa,” she says. “I know your history. And while I can’t force you to come forward, I want to make sure you understand how much your story could help Taylor. I mean, you really have the opportunity to help the entire movement here.”
“What do you mean, you know my history?”
Her voice jumps half an octave as she says, “Well, Taylor told me what she knew . . . rumors, details Jacob Strane shared over the years.”
My head jerks back—years?
“And, well . . .” Janine lets out a laugh. “Taylor also sent me a link to a blog? That she said was yours? I gave it a read. Couldn’t stop reading it, really. Captivating stuff. You’re a wonderful writer.”
Stunned, I type the old URL into my browser. After everything that happened in college, I made the blog private, inaccessible without a password. Now it loads with every post visible, reverted back to its default public setting. I can’t remember the last time I checked to make sure it was locked—it could have been sitting out in the open for years. Scrolling down the page, I see “S.,” my transparent code for Strane, scattered across the blocks of text.
“It shouldn’t have been accessible,” I say as I bring up the login screen, try to remember the decade-old password. “I don’t know what happened.”
“I’d like to reference it in the article.”
“No,” I say. “I can say no, right?”
“I’d prefer to have your permission,” she says, “but the blog was public.”
“Well, I’m deleting it now anyway.”
“And you’re free to do that, but I took screenshots.”
I stare at the computer screen; the password recovery options tell me to check my old Atlantica email address that I haven’t had access to for years. “What are you saying?”
My Dark Vanessa Page 23
