My Dark Vanessa

by Kate Elizabeth Russell

  “I’ll be fine,” I say. “I don’t have any experience with it.”

  I find an efficiency apartment on the peninsula. When I lie in bed, I can watch oil tankers and cruise ships pass through the bay. The job is mind-numbing, and I can afford to eat only once a day if I want to make rent, but I tell myself it’s only for a year, maybe two, until I get my shit together.

  At work, I sort through files with headphones on, and it’s like being back in the hospital archives, the same metal cases and the color-coded stickers, my hair stirred by the air-conditioning. These files, though, contain horror stories worse than cancer, worse even than death. Descriptions of kids found sleeping in beds caked with shit, of infants covered in lesions from being bathed in bleach. I try not to linger on the files; no one specifically tells me not to look, but gorging on the details feels invasive in a way that reading about men and their limp dicks never could. Some kids’ files are multiple manila folders filled with endless documents—court hearings, caseworker narratives, written evidence of abuse.

  I come across one girl whose case comprises ten overstuffed files held together with rubber bands. Pieces of faded purple construction paper and coloring book pages stick out of one of the files, kid stuff. One drawing appears to be a family chart done in a child’s hand; another piece of construction paper reads like a description of what the girl wants in a family. Wanted: a mother and a father, a dog, and a baby brother. At the bottom of the paper, written in huge letters: NO HIPPOCRITCAL PEOPLE PLEASE.

  There’s a handwritten letter on plain white paper tucked behind that, the handwriting small, feminine, and adult. I can’t stop myself from looking. It’s from the girl’s mother, three pages front and back of apologies. Names of different men are listed, explaining who is still in her life and who isn’t, and from where I read the file—standing at the cabinet, prying it open, not wanting anyone to catch me looking so closely—I can see only half the pages.

  If I had known you were being abused, the mother writes, especially sexually abused, I never would have— The rest of the sentence is hidden from my view. On the last page of the letter, the mother signs, With oceans of love, Mom. Underneath oceans of love, there’s a drawing of a girl’s crying face, her tears pooling into a body of water, a pointing arrow, ocean.

  * * *

  Strane visits me in Portland only once. He’s coming down anyway for some development workshop, and I’m too nervous to ask if he plans on staying the night. When he arrives, I give him a tour of my tiny apartment, aching for him to comment on how clean I’ve kept it, the dishes all done and put away, the vacuumed floor. He calls it cozy, says he likes the clawfoot tub. In the living room/bedroom, I make some stupid, thinly veiled comment about the bed. “Doesn’t it look inviting?” I haven’t had sex for almost a year, need to be touched, looked at. Under my dress, I’m bare, soft and smooth, no tights. That’s a sign he is supposed to pick up on. I spent days imagining the sound that would escape his throat when he realized I wasn’t wearing underwear.

  He says we have to get going. He’s made a reservation at a seafood restaurant in the Old Port, where he orders us fisherman’s stew, lobster tail over linguine, a bottle of white wine. It’s the biggest meal I’ve eaten since I last went home to see my parents. While I shovel food in my mouth, Strane watches with a furrowed brow.

  “How’s the job?” he asks.

  “Shitty,” I say. “But it’s temporary.”

  “What’s your long-term plan?”

  My jaw clenches at the question. “Grad school,” I say impatiently. “I’ve told you that.”

  “Did you submit applications for the fall?” he asks. “They should be sending out acceptances around now.”

  I shake my head, wave my hand. “I’m doing it next fall. I still need to get some stuff together and save money for all the fees.”

  He frowns, takes a drink of wine. He knows I’m full of shit, that I have no plan. “You should be doing more than this,” he says. I sense his guilt. He’s worried that he’s to blame for my potential being wasted, which is probably true, but if he feels guilty, he won’t want to have sex with me.

  “You know how I am. I move at my own pace.” I flash him my best spunky-kid smile, meant to reassure him it’s my problem, not his.

  After dinner, he drives me home, but when I invite him in, he says he can’t. It cuts me straight down the middle, my guts spilling all over the passenger seat. All I can think about is how in a month I’ll be twenty-three and then someday thirty-three, and forty-three, and being that age is as unfathomable as being dead.

  “Am I too old for you now?” I ask.

  At first he shoots me a glare, sensing a trap. Then he sees my wide-open face.

  “I’m serious,” I say. It’s the first time he’s really looked at me all night, maybe the first time since that night in my Atlantica apartment, when he confronted me about Henry confronting him, when he might’ve raped me, I’m still not sure.

  “Nessa, I’m trying to be good here,” he says.

  “But you don’t need to be good. Not with me.”

  “I know I don’t,” he says. “That’s the problem.”

  This, I realize, is where it was always going to end up. I gave him permission to do the unspeakable things he always craved, offered up my body as the site of the crimes, and he indulged for a while, but in his heart, he’s not a villain. He’s a man who wants to be good, and I know as well as anyone that the easiest way to do that is to cut out the thing that makes you bad.

  With my hand on the door handle, I ask if I’ll see him soon, and he says yes so gently I know he’s letting me down easy. His eyes dart away like I’m evidence of something he wants to forget.

  Years pass without him. My dad has his first heart attack; Mom finally earns her degree. On a summer afternoon when I’m home visiting, Babe has an aneurysm while running across the yard; she drops as though she’s been shot, and Dad and I try to save her as though she were human, pumping on her chest and breathing into her snout, but she’s gone, her body cold and paws still wet from the lake. I leave CPS and go from one administrative assistant job to another, loathing the work, the sterile offices, the paper clips and Post-its and Berber carpets. When I find myself googling “what should you do if being at work makes you suicidal,” I snap out of it, realize this way of keeping myself alive could end up killing me, and get a front desk position at an upscale hotel. It’s low pay but an escape from the fluorescent-lit breakdown brewing within me.

  There are men who never turn into boyfriends, who peer behind the curtain and see the mess of me—literal and figurative: the apartment with a narrow path through the clothes and trash leading from bed to bathroom; the drinking, endless drinking; the blackout sex and nightmares. “You’re kind of screwed up,” they say, at first with a laugh in their voice, an attitude of maybe this will be fun for a while, but as soon as I slur out the story—teacher, sex, fifteen, but I liked it, I miss it—they’re done. “You’ve got serious issues,” they say on their way out the door.

  I learn that it’s easier to keep my mouth shut, to be a vessel they empty themselves into. On a dating app, I meet a man in his late twenties. He wears cardigans and corduroys, has a receding hairline and thick chest hair that peeks over the neckline of his shirt, a look-alike of Strane. Through our first date, I pulse my feet, shred my napkin. With our drinks only half drunk, I ask, “Can we cut the bullshit and go have sex?” He chokes on his beer, looks at me like I’m nuts, but says sure, of course, if that’s what you want.

  On our second date, we see a movie with a plotline about pedophile priests. Through the two hours, he doesn’t notice my clammy hands, the little whimpers that escape my throat. Usually I’m good about researching movies beforehand in case there’s something that might send me reeling, but with this one I wasn’t prepared. Afterward, as we walk down Congress Street toward my apartment, the man says, “Men like that know how to pick the right ones, you know? They’re real predators. They k
now how to scan a herd and select the weak.”

  As he says that, I see a scene of me, fifteen and wild-eyed, separated from my parents, running in a panicked gait across a tundra landscape while Strane sprints after me, gathering me in his arms without breaking stride. An ocean roars in my ears, blocking out the rest of the man’s thoughts on the film, and I think, Maybe that’s all it was. I was an obvious target. He chose me not because I was special, but because he was hungry and I was easy. Back at my apartment, while the man and I have sex, I leave myself in a way I haven’t in years. He and my body are in the bedroom as my mind wanders the apartment, curls up on the couch, and stares at the blank TV.

  I stop replying to his texts, never see him again. I tell myself he was wrong. At fifteen, I wasn’t weak. I was smart. I was strong.

  I’m twenty-five when it happens. Walking to work, wearing my black suit and black flats, I cross Congress Street and there he is, standing with a dozen kids in front of the art museum, teenagers, students, mostly girls. I watch from a distance, clutching my purse to my side. He leads the students into the museum—it must be a field trip, maybe to see the Wyeth exhibit—and he holds the door as they file in, one girl after another.

  Just before he disappears inside, he glances over his shoulder and notices me in my dowdy work clothes, faded and old. For years I wanted nothing more than his eyes on me, but now I’m too ashamed of my own face, its fine lines and signs of age, to take a step closer.

  He lets the museum door close behind him and I go to work, sit at the concierge desk and imagine him moving through the rooms, trailing the bright-haired girls. In my mind, I follow along behind, don’t let him out of my sight. This, I think, is probably what I’ll do for the rest of my life: chase after him and what he gave me. It’s my own fault. I was supposed to have grown out of it by now. He never promised to love me forever.

  The next night, he calls. It’s late, on my walk home from work, when the only lit-up windows downtown are the bars and pizza-by-the-slice places. The sight of his name on the screen makes my knees give out. I have to lean against a building when I answer.

  The sound of him grabs me by the throat. “Did I see you?” he asks. “Or was it a ghost?”

  He starts calling weekly, always late at night. We talk a little about who I am now—the hotel job, the never-ending parade of boys, my mom’s pursed-lip disappointment in me, my dad’s diabetes and bad heart—but mostly we talk about who I used to be. Together we remember the scenes in the little office behind the classroom, at his house, in the station wagon parked on the side of an old logging road, the rolling blueberry barren where I climbed on top of him, the chickadee call and apiary drone drifting in through the open car window. Our details pool together. He and I re-create it vividly, too vividly.

  “There’s a reason I haven’t allowed myself to remember all this,” he says. “I can’t let myself lose control again.”

  I see him in the classroom, sitting behind his desk. His eyes move across the girls seated around the seminar table. One girl looks up, catches him staring, and smiles.

  “We can stop,” I say.

  “No,” he says, “that’s the problem. I don’t think I can stop.”

  When he moves away from remembering me and begins to talk about the girls in his classes, I follow him. He describes the pale underbellies of their arms when they raise their hands, the tendrils that escape their ponytails, the flush that travels down their necks when he tells them they’re precious and rare. He says it’s unbearable, the way they drip with beauty. He tells me he calls them up to his desk, his hand on their knees. “I pretend they’re you,” he says, and my mouth waters as though a bell’s been rung, signaling a long-buried craving. I roll onto my stomach, shove a pillow between my legs. Keep going, don’t stop.

  2017

  The week before Thanksgiving, Janine’s article is published, but it isn’t about Strane. One contextual paragraph toward the beginning mentions Taylor and the online harassment she suffered. The rest is about a teacher at a boarding school in New Hampshire who abused girl students throughout his forty-year career. Eight victims are profiled in the article, their real names used. There are photos of them now and back when they were students, scans of their teenage diary entries, the teacher’s love letters. Through the years, he used the same lines on all the girls, the same pet names. You’re the only one who understands me, little one. The headline of the article cites the boarding school’s name—recognizable, prestigious, and guaranteed to generate clicks. It’s hard not to be cynical, to assume that’s what it all came down to.

  Browick publishes the results of their internal investigation into the allegations against Strane, using the sort of impenetrable language that seems intended to mask truth: “We conclude that while misconduct of a sexual nature may have occurred, the investigation found no credible evidence of sexual abuse.” They put out an official statement reiterating the school’s commitment to fostering an academically strenuous yet safe and nurturing environment. They will be voluntarily updating the faculty sexual harassment training. Here’s a phone number for any concerned parents. Feel free to call with any questions.

  As I read, I imagine Strane in sexual harassment training, irritated he had to sit through it at all—none of it would have touched him—along with the other teachers who saw me, the one who called me Strane’s classroom pet, Ms. Thompson and Mrs. Antonova, who recognized the clues but didn’t protest when those clues were used as evidence of an emotionally troubled girl. I imagine them sitting through the training, nodding in agreement, saying yes, this is so important; we need to be these children’s advocates. But what have they done when faced with situations in which they could actually make a difference? When they heard of the camping trips the history teacher took each year with his students, when faculty advisors brought students into their homes? All of this feels like performance, because I’ve seen how it plays out, how quickly people lift their hands and say, It happens sometimes, or Even if he did do something, it couldn’t have really been that bad, or What could I have done to stop it? The excuses we make for them are outrageous, but they’re nothing compared with the ones we make for ourselves.

  I tell Ruby I feel like I’ve moved from grieving Strane to grieving myself. My own death.

  “Part of you died along with him,” she says. “That seems normal.”

  “No, not part,” I say. “All of me. Everything about me leads back to him. If I cut out the poison, nothing will be left.”

  She says she can’t let me say that about myself when it’s so obviously untrue. “I’ll bet if I met you when you were five years old,” she says, “you would have been a complex person even then. Do you remember yourself at five?” I shake my head. “What about eight?” she asks. “Ten?”

  “I don’t think I remember anything about myself that happened before him.” I let out a laugh, rub my face with both hands. “That’s so depressing.”

  “It is,” Ruby agrees. “But those years aren’t lost. They’ve just been neglected for a while. You can recover yourself.”

  “Like find my inner child? Oh god. Kill me.”

  “Roll your eyes if you need to, but it’s worth doing. What’s the alternative?”

  I shrug. “Continue to stumble through life feeling like an empty husk of a person, drink myself into oblivion, give up.”

  “Sure,” she says. “You could do that, but I don’t think that’s where this is going to end for you.”

  I go home for Thanksgiving and Mom’s hair is cut short, ending above her ears. “I know it’s ugly,” she says. “But who am I trying to impress?” She touches her fingers to the nape of her neck, where the hair was shorn with a buzzer.

  “It’s not ugly,” I say. “You look great, truly.”

  She scoffs, waves her hand at me. She’s not wearing makeup and the bare skin makes her wrinkles seem like part of her face rather than something she’s trying to hide. There’s a shadow of an unwaxed mustache on her upper li
p and this suits her, too. She seems relaxed in a way I’ve never seen before. Everything she says preceded by a long pause. The only thing that worries me is her thinness. Hugging her, she feels outright frail.

  “Are you eating enough?” I ask.

  She seems not to hear me, staring over my shoulder, her hand still resting on the back of her neck. After a moment, she opens the freezer, takes out the blue box of fried chicken.

  We eat the chicken and thick slices of grocery store pie, and drink coffee brandy mixed with milk in front of the TV. No holiday movies, nothing heartwarming. We stick to nature documentaries and that British cooking show that she texted me about. While we lie on the couch, I let her wedge her feet under me, and I don’t kick her awake when she starts to snore.

  Inside and outside, the house has gone to hell. Mom knows but has stopped apologizing for it. Dust bunnies line the baseboards and laundry spills out from the bathroom, blocking the door. The lawn is dead and brown now, but I know she’s stopped mowing in the summer. She calls it “gone to pasture.” She says it’s good for the bees.

  The morning I’m set to drive back down to Portland, we stand in the kitchen, drinking coffee and eating bites of blueberry pie straight out of the tin. She peers out the window, through the snow that’s started to fall. An inch has already piled up on the cars.

  “You can stay another night,” she says. “Call out of work, tell them the roads are too bad.”

  “I have snow tires. I’ll be ok.”

  “When was the last time you took your car in for an oil change?”

  “The car’s fine.”

  “You need to stay on top of that.”

  “Mom.”

  She holds up her hands. Ok, ok. I break a piece of crust off the pie and break that into crumbs.