You Let Me In - Camilla Bruce Page 0,39

her side. She turns to him, snaps: “You don’t get to have a say in this.” Back to me: “You just say it was a boy if they ask you when we get there.”

“What boy?” I feel utterly miserable. Angry, too.

Mother shrugs. “A boy from school. They won’t ask for names.”

We drive on.

Halfway there, we have to stop so I can throw up. I’m standing by the roadside, retching, holding my hair away from my face. I am wearing an oversized shirt to hide my “condition,” one of Father’s old work shirts, I think. It smells like copper and peppery cologne.

Mother is leaning against the car, looking in the opposite direction. Her sunglasses have huge frames—making her look like she has insect eyes. Father is standing on the other side of the car; in the middle of the road, staring into the horizon. He doesn’t look at me.

* * *

The clinic was as one expects such places to be: sterile, cold, white and silver, softened by a touch of turquoise. No one asked me about the boy. The nurses were kind but impersonal and everyone spoke in hushed voices, as if they—like Mother—just wanted to get it over with.

I remember the cold surface of the operating table, remember the hard mattress in my lonely recovery, the smell of fabric softener from the bedsheets. A woman cried and spoke in Spanish on the other side of the pink curtain separating our beds. A faint scent of roses lingered in the air.

No roses for me, though, but on our way back I was given a box of caramel cupcakes. Father bought them for me in a store nearby the hospital. I didn’t eat them, I was too sick and still in pain. I dozed the whole way home. When we got there, I stuffed the cupcakes under the bed, then I lay back on the bedspread and cried.

Pepper-Man wasn’t there.

I was alone.

* * *

As I said before, I don’t know where this second story comes from, but Dr. Martin wrote about it in Away with the Fairies: A Study in Trauma-Induced Psychosis. It’s one of the things that made your mother so angry with me, I suppose.

They said it never happened, Mother and Olivia, but Dr. Martin certainly thought it had. He had them examine me before the trial, and felt the results proved him right. Something had indeed happened to me; the doctor who examined me was very clear on that. Dr. Martin could never track down the clinic, though. Neither he nor my lawyer could find anyone who would have remembered me. None of this existed in any file.

“Your parents are well connected,” Dr. Martin said. We were talking in “our” room at the hospital, during my trial. “I am sure they found a way to cover their tracks.”

“Why does it matter?”

“It could mean a lot to the jury.”

“Why?” I asked, though even I realized the importance.

“A broken and traumatized woman is no murderer, not in any common sense. You shouldn’t go to prison, Cassie, you should stay here at the hospital.”

“I don’t know if I remember it right,” I argued. “And my daughter isn’t even dead. She is living in the woods, in the mound, still.”

“Exactly.” Dr. Martin smiled a tired smile. “Which only proves my point. Have you ever thought about why there are two stories about what happened in there?” He touched my forehead gently across the table.

I shrugged. I knew what was true, of course. I knew that my Mara was safe and sound, but the other story was still there, made up or not, and Dr. Martin so dearly wanted to believe it. “Can’t both stories be true?” I asked. “Why is it that only because one thing is true, the other thing is not? Why do we always have to decide?”

He chuckled then. “You really are something, Cassie … Don’t you think we need a foundation of truth to measure what’s false?”

“Like science?”

“Just that.”

I didn’t know what to say at first. How could I describe what I felt inside, that “truth” to me was like mercury, always changing, moving—didn’t matter? I could easily hold two strings of truth in my mind and feel them both to be real without getting all confused about it. Now I realize that’s not how most people feel, but then I was far more oblivious.

Truth is such a fickle thing, isn’t it? Subjective and shifting like a living being.

Pepper-Man or no Pepper-Man—that’s just two sides of the same coin.