of times before I understood them. Before I realized that she was not angry, not blaming me, or trying to convince me I had only imagined. She believed me.
Don’t blame yourself, I told her. Your mind was never the same after the accident.
Maybe, she said. But sometimes I think we choose our illnesses, because they benefit us in some way.
I asked Mother why she’d never stopped Shawn from hurting me.
Shawn always said you picked the fights, and I guess I wanted to believe that, because it was easier. Because you were strong and rational, and anyone could see that Shawn was not.
That didn’t make sense. If I had seemed rational, why had Mother believed Shawn when he’d told her I was picking fights? That I needed to be subdued, disciplined.
I’m a mother, she said. Mothers protect. And Shawn was so damaged.
I wanted to say that she was also my mother but I didn’t. I don’t think Dad will believe any of this, I typed.
He will, she wrote. But it’s hard for him. It reminds him of the damage his bipolar has caused to our family.
I had never heard Mother admit that Dad might be mentally ill. Years before, I had told her what I’d learned in my psychology class about bipolar disorder and schizophrenia, but she had shrugged it off. Hearing her say it now felt liberating. The illness gave me something to attack besides my father, so when Mother asked why I hadn’t come to her sooner, why I hadn’t asked for help, I answered honestly.
Because you were so bullied by Dad, I said. You were not powerful in the house. Dad ran things, and he was not going to help us.
I am stronger now, she said. I no longer run scared.
When I read this, I imagined my mother as a young woman, brilliant and energetic, but also anxious and complying. Then the image changed, her body thinning, elongating, her hair flowing, long and silver.
Emily is being bullied, I wrote.
She is, Mother said. Like I was.
She is you, I said.
She is me. But we know better now. We can rewrite the story.
I asked about a memory. It was from the weeks before I’d left for BYU, after Shawn had had a particularly bad night. He’d brought Mother to tears, then plopped onto the sofa and turned on the TV. I’d found her sobbing at the kitchen table, and she’d asked me not to go to BYU. “You’re the only one strong enough to handle him,” she’d said. “I can’t, and your father can’t. It has to be you.”
I typed slowly, reluctantly: Do you remember telling me not to go to school, that I was the only one who could handle Shawn?
Yes, I remember that.
There was a pause, then more words appeared—words I hadn’t known I needed to hear, but once I saw them, I realized I’d been searching my whole life for them.
You were my child. I should have protected you.
I lived a lifetime in the moment I read those lines, a life that was not the one I had actually lived. I became a different person, who remembered a different childhood. I didn’t understand the magic of those words then, and I don’t understand it now. I know only this: that when my mother told me she had not been the mother to me that she wished she’d been, she became that mother for the first time.
I love you, I wrote, and closed my laptop.
* * *
—
MOTHER AND I SPOKE only once about that conversation, on the phone, a week later. “It’s being dealt with,” she said. “I told your father what you and your sister said. Shawn will get help.”
I put the issue from my mind. My mother had taken up the cause. She was strong. She had built that business, with all those people working for her, and it dwarfed my father’s business, and all the other businesses in the whole town; she, that docile woman, had a power in her the rest of us couldn’t contemplate. And Dad. He had changed. He was softer, more prone to laugh. The future could be different from the past. Even the past could be different from the past, because my memories could change: I no longer remembered Mother listening in the kitchen while Shawn pinned me to the floor, pressing my windpipe. I no longer remembered her looking away.
My life in Cambridge was transformed—or rather, I was transformed into someone who believed she belonged in Cambridge. The shame