Sea Wife - Amity Gaige Page 0,80

doesn’t get to control me anymore.

* * *

—

I run my fingers over the words. His pen made ruts in the page. He pressed down hard when he was angry. I lean my head back, imagining the lightbulb in the closet as sunlight.

You would think, if you hadn’t aired out a family secret by the time you were thirty, you would take it to your grave. But when I turned thirty, I became preoccupied with what had happened to me when I was ten. I became preoccupied with Gil.

My mother and I had lived with the events as an open secret. Once I left for college, the distant past didn’t seem to matter. But sometimes the world around you won’t let you forget. The ordinary landscape becomes a text that demands interpretation: I started seeing Japanese maples everywhere. Japanese maples were Gil’s tree. They were often the pretext for our long drives, “to hunt for Japanese maples.” They come in several colors, but it was the burgundy maples we hunted.

When I was thirty, the world was overrun with Japanese maples. Not only did I see them all over the countryside when Michael and I explored on the weekends, but in Cambridge itself, at innocent corners where I had previously noticed nothing. If Michael was driving, and we passed a Japanese maple, a feeling so ominous would come over me that I would have to roll down the window and hang out into the wind like a dog. Or, on the T, I’d see a young girl staring out the window with a certain tilt of the head and I would feel the unnameable panic. I couldn’t quite remember—that is, I couldn’t remember in time to prepare for the impact—why such ordinary sights were so heavy with meaning.

Maybe it was because I was thinking of becoming a mother myself. After three years apart, two of which I spent in England, as an au pair for a family in Stratford-on-Avon, Michael and I met up again at a Kenyon alumni get-together while we were both visiting New York City. He’d been in exile in Pittsburgh, terrified by the discovery that he literally fit into his dead father’s clothes. The intervening years had been sexually austere for me. Michael jogged my memory. We canceled our flights and embarked on a sexual bender in a cramped New Jersey Hampton Inn. Five years, several cities, his MBA, and a couple long distances later, we tied the knot in a small wedding on the Kenyon campus. A neutral site, but drivable for both families. We relocated to Cambridge, where he got his first job in finance, and I enrolled at Boston College, the very gates of which made me feel holy, as if I were getting married to literature. The comfort of marriage, the unclenching of a safe life, backpacking on the weekends, reading in bed, eating figs in season…Well, you run out of excuses to avoid a thing.

With Michael’s encouragement, I wrote my mother a letter. I told her that I had been thinking about the past, that I wanted to talk about Gil. When I did not hear back, I wrote her a longer, more explicit letter. I asked her to explain why she had never confronted Gil, or if she ever worried that he was a danger to other children. When I did not hear back from that letter, I got in the car and I drove from Cambridge all the way to Schenectady.

Ever since I was a kid, my mother had worked for the same clerk at Schenectady City Hall. From behind an oversize metal desk, she gave out marriage licenses, copies of birth or death certificates, and handicapped-parking permits. You have to remember that she was an eye-catching woman. Tall and straight-backed, with this hair, this wavy, ember-colored hair. In truth, she was a shy, withholding person, but her appearance made her seem much more confident than she was. I suppose she didn’t mind people looking at her, because I think she felt somewhat invisible otherwise.

I thought she was important. Not least of all because she worked for The Government. Schenectady City Hall is a magnificently overdone building, with a full-height portico supported by four columns, marble everywhere, and intricate cornices, a clock tower. Inside, men and