We’re here now. Standing together. Two women who survived the same man. Two women trying, each in our own way, to be parents.
We know, better than anyone, that children need protection—and I trust that we will mother them with our eyes wide open.
So do I owe her this, my silence? Is that how I make amends for the terrible things my father did, even if they aren’t my amends to make?
“I don’t know what I’m going to do,” I tell her, and as I head toward the door, Astrid wraps her hand around my arm, tries to pull me back.
I turn my head to look at her, but do not turn my body.
“But we just found each other,” she says. “I’ve thought of you so much, every day, for twenty years. You can’t go. Please—say you’ll call. Say you’ll come back soon.”
I see it again in her eyes. The pleading. The girl I saw in dreams. In fragments of memory. I’d love to spend time with that girl again. I’d love to thank her for showing me how strong I want to be. But that girl is a woman now. And she should have known so much better.
I put my hand on hers and watch as her expression blossoms with hope. Her freckle seems to stare at me. A tiny, other eye. Now I pull her fingers off my arm, hold them as tenderly as you would a friend’s, and I tell her what I know to be true.
“I’m never coming back here again.”
twenty-three
I’m never coming back to Cedar, either.
Ted doesn’t believe me when I tell him that. As I gather my things, he smirks in the doorway of my childhood room. “You’ll be back,” he says.
“I won’t,” I promise him. Promise myself, too. Because even now, there is a part of me that wants to hug him good-bye. Wants to manufacture a closeness between us. I guess it’s hard to stop craving something you’ve wanted for so long. I guess it’s a kind of addiction—grasping for love in the dark.
“Don’t you think we should talk first?” he asks.
I slip my toothbrush into my bag, then close my eyes. My back is to him. He can’t see how hope, how longing—those old, unreliable drugs—crease my lids as I squeeze them shut.
“About what?” I ask.
I give him this chance. He could say the right thing. Prove himself to be human. And then maybe, for a few more minutes, I’d stay.
“About your memories,” he says. “I have so many questions.”
Tears rush to the backs of my eyelids. I give myself a moment. Then two. Three. I don’t dare open my eyes until the tears have receded. Because now I know for sure: to offer him anything of myself—even my anger, my despair, all the questions of my own that will disturb me forever—is to give him more than he deserves. So I walk away. Hear him follow me down the stairs and out the door. Hear Mara shuffle after us, too.
Soon the two of them are in my rearview mirror, the sun sinking into the trees behind them. At the last second, before I drive on and lose them completely, I see Ted wave.
I have to grip the steering wheel, knuckles white, to keep myself from lifting my hand in return.
Eric knows I’m coming home. I called him on my way back from Astrid’s, and he picked up on the first ring. When he realized the magnitude of all I had to tell him, he canceled the rest of his appointments, and we talked until I was close enough to the woods to lose our connection. Eric wanted to call the police immediately, but I asked him to wait. To give me a day, at least, to keep on processing, to figure out which secrets are worth keeping, which people I owe something to. Now, feeling that same old surge of nausea as I drive by the woods, I’m remembering what I already forgot, my realization from a few minutes ago: I don’t owe anything to any of those people. I will have to repeat that to myself until it sticks.
As I near the path to the cabin, my instinct is to look away. But instead I turn, and I drive through the trees, swallowing down the bile that crawls up my throat. Cooper’s truck is still out front, like I hoped it would be. He’s dropping bags of trash into the bed of it, and it’s good he’s already outside. Now