the hoarse cries that her tiny lungs could give. Jenny watched, her teeth chattering, holding my hand for dear life.
My daughter, not even yet two, squeezed through the gap in the gate and climbed the steps of our neighbor’s farmhouse on hands and knees. She was far in the distance now, but we both saw the door open, light pouring down onto the wet baby, and a friendly pair of hands lowering to her open arms.
Isn’t she a marvel, my girl?
Maybe Jenny had no voice in my memory, but she nodded. Something about her amazed expression made me feel anything was possible. Perhaps I could have seen this part of my daughter’s story anytime, but it felt as if the magic came from having Jenny beside me. She made me believe I could do anything.
I threw up my arm and pushed the storm and all its darkness away. Jenny shielded her eyes from the light of heaven. I don’t know if she saw the same lakeside celebration that I did, with lanterns in the trees and a smiling moon, or heard the fiddler and the laughter of the dancers, or smelled the crocus scattered in the grass and the pinecone fire nearby. That may have been my personal idea of paradise, but her eyes widened and she gasped in a breath and lifted my hand in hers, pressed it to her heart.
Your turn, I told her. Take me to your hell.
I thought she might hesitate, but she pressed her fingers to the back of my hand in a deliberate gesture and we were at once in her memory instead of mine.
Jenny was sitting with her parents in the Prayer Corner, reading from pages torn out of her journal, and she was staring at her mother’s shoe, the one extended in the air as Cathy sat cross-legged. I was standing in the center of the circle, looking down at Jenny’s head.
The scene appeared to be frozen, perhaps at the most dreaded moment, the way I had stalled myself before my daughter could find safety.
I reached down and on the back of Jenny’s hand I wrote a Y: Yes, I’m with you.
Jenny blinked and the scene began to move. Cathy’s left shoe was gently bouncing as she swung her leg, a nervous habit that I had noticed many times in my days living in Jenny’s house.
Dan stood by his chair, holding Jenny’s diary. He gripped several pages at once and ripped them out in a savage motion. Holding them under his daughter’s chin, he said, “Read.” And when she hesitated he said, “Take them and read.”
Jenny obeyed, took these ravaged fragments of her writing in her hands and began to read from the first word on the top page. “. . . don’t know, but I don’t think God did that.” I could see that she was humiliated and disgusted by this punishment, but she kept reading. “Not the God I believe in. Could we really worship different Gods?”
Dan matter-of-factly jerked the page from her hands and thrust his finger at the next page down. Jenny read, “I dreamed I was walking down a staircase at school and a guy who looked like the guy from that movie we saw in history class walked right up to me and put his hand under my blouse—” When Jenny paused, her father ordered, “Go on.”
Dan took his seat in the tiny circle of chairs, looking smug, but Cathy, arms folded, legs folded, bounced her foot anxiously.
“Read,” Dan ordered his daughter. “Or should I have your mother read to you?”
Jenny held herself stiffly. Her mother’s shoe stopped in midair. Then everything froze again.
It’s your memory, I told her. Change it. Tear it down.
Jenny shuddered, but then lifted her gaze to her father and time began again, though I suspected Jenny was creating a new version of her nightmare.
“Why would you do that?” she asked her father. “Why would you threaten your own wife with that kind of humiliation? I was the one who was in trouble.”
Dan looked at her blankly as if she were speaking another language.
Jenny turned to Cathy. “And why do you let him do that to you? Would you really have read my dream out loud if he asked you to? Do you want me to think that’s how husbands should treat their wives?”
I could feel the loathing flood out of Jenny as she began to cry—her tears made little blue pools on her diary pages, words became watercolor clouds and lakes.
Jenny