by Karen Dionne
I sit. He sits. I wait.
“Okay if I record this?” He reaches into a green canvas messenger bag and places a digital recorder on the table between us without waiting for my answer. The bag looks new.
“Um, yeah. Sure,” I say, though the thought of him carrying away a recording of our conversation makes me queasy. It hasn’t been easy going from a terrified eleven-year-old so traumatized by what she’d done that she could neither move nor speak to where I am today, which—well, at least I can walk and talk. I’m told I was completely unresponsive to both verbal and physical stimuli when I arrived. I remember I could see and hear, but by the time I thought of what I wanted to do or say, speaking or moving just didn’t seem worth the effort. I know that sounds odd, but that’s the best way I can describe it. I wasn’t bored, because I had no sense of the passage of time. Hours felt like minutes, days like hours, the three weeks I spent trapped in an uncooperative body fed by a nasogastric tube and drained by a catheter morphed into a single, interminable day. I could move but only if someone did it for me; then I’d stay in that position until they moved me again, which I imagine came in handy when it was time to shift me between my wheelchair and my bed.
More than anything, I remember an overwhelming weariness no child should have to know. At times, it seemed like too much effort even to breathe. I was lost in a swirl of thoughts and memories outside my control: I am in the gun room. I lift the rifle to my shoulder. I shoot the lion in the great room. I shoot a zebra and a gazelle. I am a Big Game Hunter, and not an eleven-year-old girl who loves all creatures equally and wouldn’t hurt a fly. “What are you doing?” my mother yells when she sees me. “Put the gun down!” and so I do. There’s a big bang. My mother falls. She doesn’t get up. A scene that has looped in my head for the past fifteen years like a movie reel, unvarying in every detail.
He starts with a series of softball questions, which I lob back easily: What was it like spending my teenage years in a mental hospital (as bad as you’d think, and worse than you can possibly imagine); did I go to school (yes, we had classes, but I haven’t gotten my GED because I’m not planning on leaving, so what would be the point—though I don’t tell him that); do I have friends aside from his brother (none unless you count the spider, and calling our relationship “friendship” is a stretch in view of the way she constantly contradicts me, never mind that golden orb spiders only live for about a year and I’ve lost track of how many generations I’ve befriended); what would I like people to know about me that they don’t already (the perfect opening to tell him I killed my mother, but it’s a little early in the interview for that, so I merely shrug).
He shifts in his chair, signaling he’s about to shift to another topic. I get ready. I am very good at reading body language. In a place like this you have to be.
“Now let’s talk about your early years. Tell me what your life was like before you came to the hospital.”
“Okay if I smoke?” I ask, buying time so I can choose my words carefully from the mental script I’ve prepared. There’s so much riding on this interview. Trevor has to understand that my parents were as happy as any two people could be, that my father would no more kill my mother than Romeo would have killed Juliet. Once I establish that, I can tell him who did. Plus, I really do want a cigarette.
“Um, no. I guess not.” He waves his hand at the haze hanging over the room. “I’ll probably be dead from lung cancer by the time we finish the interview anyway.”
I laugh along with him and shake out a cigarette, then raise my hand and keep it up until one of the orderlies sees me and comes over and lights it for me.
“Before I came to the hospital,” I begin, feeding his exact words back to him, using the listening technique I learned from my therapists to send the subtle message that he and I are on the same page, “my childhood was very happy. My parents were one of those couples who truly loved each other. You know the kind I’m talking about: can’t leave for work in the morning without a kiss—a real one, and not just a peck; holding hands when they walk down the street; sitting next to each other on a sofa when they’re reading or watching television instead of sitting at opposite ends. My sister says our parents were more in love on the day they died than on the day they met, and I can believe it. We were both homeschooled, so we spent a lot of time together. The four of us along with my mother’s sister lived in this amazing two-story log cabin built by my great-great-grandfather on four thousand acres southeast of Marquette back in the timber baron days—but I guess you know that,” I add, thinking of the millions of words that have been written about us.
“It’s all right. I’d like to hear it in your own words.”
“Okay, then.” I take a drag on the cigarette while I consider the best way to direct the conversation where I want it to go, then tap off the ash into one of the thin aluminum ashtrays scattered around the room that are meant to be disposable but that the hospital never throws away because we’re a state-run facility and chronically underfunded.
“My parents were wildlife biologists, as I’m sure you also know. Our property was surrounded by tall cliffs on three sides and a large lake on the fourth, very isolated, very pristine. My parents used to say that living and working in this amazing ecological microsystem was like heaven on earth. And because my father’s parents owned the area my mother and father were studying, and my parents financed their own research, they didn’t have to answer to anyone, so how they conducted their work and what they chose to study was entirely under their control. My father’s focus was amphibians, while my mother studied black bears. They used to joke that my mother had twice as much testosterone as my father—because of their choices, you know.”
Trevor smiles and writes my parents’ joke in his notepad. “So, which did you prefer? Frogs or bears?”
“I loved anything that moved,” I answer diplomatically, though the truth is, amphibians really don’t do much for me, while I’m as crazy about black bears as my mother ever was, and always will be. “I used to go with my parents on their rounds. One day I’d be slogging around the ponds and creeks draped in mosquito netting and wearing hip waders like my father, collecting water samples and counting tadpoles and scooping up frogs, and the next, I’d be crouching alongside my mother in her observation blind watching a five-hundred-pound black bear nosing around our bait station a few feet away.”
“It sounds idyllic.”
“It was.”
I can’t quite tell if he genuinely means this, or if he’s challenging me to prove it. I hope I’m not overselling my childhood, and he thinks my memories are colored by wishful thinking and time. If anything, those years were more idyllic than I’ve described, as magical as a fairy tale: wild and beautiful surroundings, a hunting lodge as splendid as a castle in the middle of a mysterious, impenetrable forest; intelligent and loving parents who treated me like a princess, involving me in their work as if I were their peer while giving me the freedom to explore, learn, grow.
“So, you were comfortable wandering the woods by yourself?”
“I was. Tramping around the woods on my own was no different for me than the way a city kid learns to navigate the subway.”
He nods as if I’ve confirmed something important, though I can’t imagine what, then pulls his messenger bag toward him and digs through it and comes up with a plain manila folder.
“I want to show you something. This is a copy of the police report. No photos,” he adds quickly. He riffles through the folder and pulls out a piece of paper and lays it on the table between us. “Right here.” He taps the middle of the page. “This is where it talks about your disappearance.”
Of course, he’s zeroed in on the most sensational part of my story, though if he’s hoping for a scoop, he’s exactly fifteen years too late. Anyone can google my name along with “missing girl” and find plenty of articles about my disappearance, from tabloids to the national news. MIS
SING GIRL FOUND! and MIRACLE GIRL SURVIVES TWO-WEEK WILDERNESS ORDEAL—RETURNS TO CIVILIZATION UNABLE TO SPEAK, and my personal favorite: REAL-LIFE MOWGLI SAVED BY WOLVES?
“The report says that by the time police arrived, you’d already gone missing,” he prompts, as if I don’t know the details of my own story. “They set up a search, but by then the ground was too trampled to know which way you’d gone. Then that night, it snowed, which wiped out any chance of picking up your trail in the morning. Still, they searched for days—helicopters, tracking dogs, the works—though as more and more time went by, everyone had to admit that you were most likely dead.”
“Right. Until two weeks later, a passing motorist found me lying beside the highway,” I cut in, trying to hurry things along so we can move on to the topic I came to discuss.
“Lying beside the highway unable to move or to speak,” he adds, which I’ll grant is a fairly dramatic detail. “And yet aside from that and a few scratches and bruises, physically you were in remarkably good shape. But here’s the thing, Rachel. I grew up in the Upper Peninsula. I know what the weather is like in early November. Temps below freezing at night, and with that fresh snowfall there’s no way you should have survived those two weeks on your own. Yet somehow, you did. I know you couldn’t remember anything at the time, but what about now? Is there anything at all that you can tell me? What did you eat? How did you keep warm? Where did you sleep?”
He looks so hopeful I’m tempted to make something up to satisfy him and his future readers. It occurs to me that I could tell him anything and no one could contradict me. Unfortunately, those days are as much a mystery to me now as they were then. Plus, I really hate when people don’t tell the truth.
“Sorry, no. I still don’t remember a thing. My therapists tried to help me get my memories back. I think they saw me as a personal challenge. I was this mystery girl, this wild child who turned up two weeks after she went missing with no idea of where she’d been or what she’d been doing. But eventually, we had to accept that those days are gone for good.”
“But are they really? Don’t scientists say we retain everything we’ve seen or heard? Those memories must be rattling around in your brain somewhere.”
“Well, yes. Technically, that’s true. I meant my memories are gone in the sense that I can’t access them. Believe me, we tried. The thing you have to understand about memories associated with childhood trauma is that the brain processes these differently than normal ones, sometimes burying them so deeply a person doesn’t even realize that the reason they’re struggling as an adult is because of something that happened to them when they were a child.”
What I don’t tell him is that I don’t want to remember those days, and never did, which no doubt was a big factor in my therapists’ collective failure. If whatever happened during that time was so disturbing that my brain felt the need to erase it, I don’t want to know.
“Could you just take a look? Please? Maybe reading the report will jog something loose.”
I take the folder he’s holding out to me, even though reading the details of that day is just about the last thing I want to do; basically, I’m throwing him a bone because he drove a hundred miles to interview me and we both know I haven’t given him much. I scan the pages quickly, feigning interest until I come upon a line drawing of a child next to a picture of a massive rifle, and then I really am interested. I read the associated paragraph:
After the daughter was recovered, the M.E. examined the girl and found no evidence of bruising on her limbs or torso consistent with having fired a Winchester Magnum. Given the size of the weapon relative to the girl’s height and weight as well as the lack of physical evidence, the M.E. ruled that the daughter did not fire the rifle.
My heart pounds. I place the folder carefully on the table and wipe my hands on my jeans and stick them under my legs to stop them from shaking. I don’t understand. I shot my mother. I killed her—I know I did. I’ve seen myself standing over her body with the rifle so many, many times.
And yet there’s no reason to think that this paragraph is anything other than fact. Whoever wrote this report couldn’t have made this up. The details are too specific. Too easy to disprove. Even I can see that the rifle in the picture—which is not the Remington I see in my visions—is so big, it would have been all but impossible for the eleven-year-old me to pick it up.
Given the size of the weapon relative to the girl’s height and weight as well as the lack of physical evidence, the M.E. ruled that the daughter did not fire the rifle.
It’s impossible. Yet the truth is right in front of me in black and white.
I didn’t kill my mother. I couldn’t have. According to the police report, I never even fired that rifle.
THREE
I close my eyes, sway, grab the edge of the table to keep from passing out. My throat is so tight I can barely breathe. Fifteen years. Fifteen years in a mental hospital serving a self-imposed life sentence for a crime I didn’t commit. It’s crazy. Nuts. Insane. I feel like a fool. Two sentences in the middle of a police report I never read prove my entire life has been shaped by a lie. Defined by it.
Memories of those wasted years crash over me in waves.
—It’s my twelfth birthday. I’m sitting cross-legged on the floor of a padded cell strapped into a straitjacket. My arms ache and my nose itches and I have to pee. My voice is hoarse from yelling for help. By the time an orderly slides back the viewing slot in the door, I have wet and soiled my pants.
—I’m fifteen. I’m lying on my back on a narrow gurney counting the fluorescent lights that pass overhead as I’m wheeled down a long hallway. My arms and legs are buckled into leather straps. My therapist has promised that this will be the last electroconvulsive therapy session I will need. I don’t believe her.
—Last week. I’m so doped up after yet another random medication change, all I want to do is sleep. An orderly wakes me up anyway and drags me out of bed to stand in line in front of the nurses’ station with the other patients waiting for meds. Outside, the sky turns red and then green. Crickets chirp, while somewhere down the hall a violin plays. I dig at my arms until they bleed, trying to quiet the ants that are crawling under my skin.
“Are you all right?”
So many years. So much humiliation. So much suffering. All of it for nothing. I want to scream, smash my fist into the wall, rip up the police report and throw it in Trevor’s face, climb onto the table and announce to the room that I don’t belong here, and never did.
“Rachel? Are you okay? Talk to me.”
He looks genuinely worried. I can imagine how I look to him: pale, sweating, shaking. He probably thinks I’m about to have a heart attack. Maybe I am.
“Actually,” I say, “I’m not okay. I’m sorry. Must be a reaction to my new meds. Can we finish this later? Maybe by phone?”
“Of course. Do you want me to call someone? Is there anything I can do?”
“I’ll be fine,” I lie. “I’m just a little dizzy, is all.”
“If you’re sure . . .”
“I’m sure.” I force a smile, put out my hand. “Thanks for understanding.”
Of course he’s disappointed, but I can’t help that. He shakes my hand, turns off the recorder and gathers up his things, gives me his card, says it was a pleasure talking to me, hopes I feel better soon, promises to check back in a few days to see how I’m doing, tells me to call in the meantime if I remember anything important or if I just want to talk. Meanwhile, all I can think is Hurry up, leave, go. The second the door closes behind him, I cross my arms on the table and lay down my head.
Given the size of the weapon relative to the girl’s height and weight as well as the lack of physical evidence, the M.E. ruled that the daughter did not fire the rifle.
How could I not have known this? Why do I not remember? When I came out of my catatonia, I told everyone I killed my mother. Why didn
’t anyone think to tell me not only that I didn’t kill her, but that I couldn’t have? I could have spent my teenage years at the lodge, gone to a university, gotten a degree, carried on my mother’s research, fallen in love, gotten married. Instead, I’ve accomplished absolutely nothing, giving up my future in exchange for my parents’—a sacrifice I now know was entirely pointless and without cause. The perfect storm of misunderstandings and wrong assumptions that brought me to this moment makes me physically ill. After no one believed me when I came out of my catatonia and told them I killed my mother, I stopped talking about it. My aunt and sister never asked what was keeping me at the hospital because they thought my therapists were addressing my issues. My therapists didn’t know the reason for my lack of progress because I never told them I still believed I killed my mother. And round and round it went. A tragedy of errors.
And yet . . . I know with absolute certainty that if I were to close my eyes right now, I’d see myself standing over my mother’s body with the rifle. I have no idea why my brain conjures up this image, why I see it over and over, why my visions feel so real when, clearly, they are not. I understand that children sometimes think they are to blame when something bad happens; “magical thinking,” it’s called when two unrelated events are conflated in the child’s mind and become inextricably linked: “I was mad at my mommy and she got in a car accident, so it’s my fault she got hurt.”
But I wasn’t three or four or five. I was eleven—an intelligent, perceptive, well-educated, way-more-mature-than-most-kids-her-age eleven—certainly old enough to understand the relationship between cause and effect. Something must have happened to make me think I killed my mother. Maybe I came into the hallway after my parents were dead and picked up the rifle and stood looking down at their bodies. Maybe my poor traumatized brain took that snippet of genuine memory and twisted it until I became convinced that I pulled the trigger. Maybe . . . I can understand my brain wiping out my memory of that terrible day in order to protect me, but why would it replace the truth with something so much worse?