start blaming their parents for what was wrong with them? Frankly, I was really, really tired of that song.
“It’s kind of hard, Caroline, trying to remember anything from so long ago. I mean, stuff from my life alone, to say nothing of yours. I remember specific moments, but whole years are just . . . lost.”
She nodded. “Yeah.”
“But why do you need Steve’s and my corroboration anyway? You said you know this happened.”
“I guess it’s that I need to feel I have allies in my brother and my sister, that I’m not alone in what I need to do. If I don’t confront Mom—and Dad too, I guess—I’ll never get past all this. I have to tell them about what I remember. And that it was wrong.”
“Oh, God.”
“Laura, you don’t know.
“She came into my room one Saturday. I had just started third grade, and I was sitting at the window, looking out at the leaves. It was fall, and they were really beautiful. She asked me why I didn’t go outside. I said I wanted to be in. I said, Look at the leaves, they’re so pretty and they’re dying. She got sort of impatient and started messing around with the stuff in my room, rearranging it. Then she said I had to go out, that I was just mooning around and there was no reason for it, it was a perfectly beautiful day. I said again I didn’t want to, and I asked why the leaves had to die, why did things have to die, and she grabbed my arm and started pulling me out of my room. And I remember I yelled help, I yelled help really loud, and she just went berserk. She started slapping me and kicking me and saying to shut up, just shut up. And then she ran into her bedroom and slammed the door and started sobbing—I could hear her all the way in my room. I went and knocked at her door, and then I went in, and she was lying on her side holding a pillow up against her stomach. She said I made her do these things, why did I make her do these things? I remember I tried to get on the bed beside her, I was so sorry, and she lifted up her head and said in this awful, low voice, ‘Get out of here.’ I went back to my room and stayed until dinnertime, and when I came out it was like nothing happened.”
“But . . . where was I that day?”
“You were gone somewhere,” Caroline said. “Probably over at a friend’s house; you were a good girl with a lot of friends. You were forever going over somewhere and baking with someone and then bringing home stuff for the family. Look what I made! Little Miss Martha.”
I pictured myself standing in Sally Burke’s kitchen, laughing and licking chocolate-chip cookie dough from beaters while Caroline sat at the edge of her bed staring at her hands, afraid to move. “Oh, Caroline. I don’t see how you can stand any of us. I can’t believe I was oblivious to all this. That we all were. Didn’t anybody ever even—why didn’t you tell Dad?”
She shook her head. “Well, as I told you, Mom had me convinced that the bad things she did to me were my fault. She truly did. I was so ashamed of the fact that there was something in me that made her behave in this terrible way. I knew she wasn’t like that to you or Steve, so it had to be my fault. I did try to tell Dad one day, but it was useless. You know how it is; you can’t say anything bad about Mom to Dad. I’m sure he thought I was making it up. He probably thought I’d gotten in trouble for something and had been mildly punished in some way or another, then had exaggerated wildly about what happened. I was prone to drama, as you recall.”
I refrained from correcting the tense. “But . . . didn’t you have marks or something?”
“I had bruises every now and then. But so did you. Only yours came from another place.”
“Well, I just . . . I have to say, Caroline, if all that had happened to me, I think I’d just walk away from our parents. Cut off relations.”
“Don’t be so sure. I have a friend, a guy I met at my group counseling session. And once a month, on the