by Wendy Walker
“And then I heard the baby cry. And I heard Bill and Lucy laughing and crying like they were happy now. I went to the hallway so I could hear more, but I didn’t hear anything from Emma. Not that whole night or the next morning. Nothing until the next afternoon.
“That’s when they took Emma back to her room. She tried to sleep, but her breasts got huge and swollen. She asked if she should breast-feed and they said not to bother. Lucy said it wasn’t that good for babies anyway, and Emma didn’t know any better.
“I stayed outside her door so I could get her whatever she needed. ‘Cass,’ she would whisper, ‘it hurts so much!’ I brought her ice packs every few hours to keep on her chest, and after a few days the milk just stopped coming.
“From that first cry, Lucy had that baby all day and all night. When Emma tried to hold her, Lucy said not to bother. She said Emma should rest and study because she had her whole life ahead of her. She said, ‘That’s what we’re here for, my love!’
“‘Cass,’ Emma would whisper, ‘have you seen her today? Is she bigger?’
“Emma cried for hours and hours, missing her baby. ‘I need to hold her! Please! Just for a few minutes!’ she would beg. Lucy always had an excuse. The baby was sleeping. The baby was sick. The baby was getting used to her bed. Emma would hear her cry and she would stand outside their locked bedroom door and yell at them. ‘Please! I hear her now. I know she’s awake! Bring her to me!’
“Emma pleaded with me then. ‘Cass, you have to find out what’s going on. Why they won’t let me see her!’
“So one day, I started a conversation with Lucy. ‘You’re so good with babies, Lucy. How do you know so much?’
“We knew they didn’t have children, because they told us and because there was no sign of any children anywhere. No pictures or baby things. Lucy kissed the baby’s forehead. She smiled and said, ‘God wanted me to have babies when he was making my soul, but then he made a mistake when he was making my body. It’s my cross to bear in this life, Cassandra. Not able to do what I was born to do.’
“Then she bounced Emma’s baby in her arms, and her smile turned happy. ‘Until now, right, my little peanut? My precious angel? My sweet Julia.’
“I told Emma what she said. I told Emma I thought she might be crazy, that she had been mothering us, but now she had a baby and that baby had ignited something inside her. Emma’s eyes got very wide. ‘That stupid bitch named my baby? She gave her the name Julia?’ Emma said she would hate that name for the rest of her life and would never let it leave her lips.
“We were both shaking then. I had confirmed what we both suspected. Lucy had gone crazy, and Bill didn’t know what to do about it. You know how sometimes you have two parts of yourself—one part that wants you to do something crazy and the other part that sees how crazy it is but doesn’t do anything, because it doesn’t want to upset the crazy part? You don’t want to cut yourself in half.… That’s what they were like. They were like one person with two parts. And the Lucy part was stronger.
“That happened in the fall, one year after we left home. By then we both knew something was wrong. The baby was six months old, and she was getting bigger and easier to handle. But still, they would not let Emma take care of her. Lucy held that baby like it was her own. Something just snapped in Emma. She went to their door and pounded on it with her fists. ‘Give me my baby right now!’
“Bill got very mad at her. He yelled from the other side of the door, ‘Go back to your room, young lady, or there will be dire consequences!’
“‘Give me my baby!’ Emma yelled, and pounded again on the door. I was standing beside her, frozen with fear because the situation was escalating and I knew it wouldn’t end well. Emma had fire in her veins but no power. I think the fire made her feel powerful and stopped her brain from working. We heard loud footsteps and then the door opening. Bill was there and he had this look on his face that was beyond angry—he looked like he needed for this to stop or he would lose his mind. I think on the other side of the door, Lucy was pleading with him to get us under control, to make Emma stop asking for her baby, and I think he had no idea what to do about any of this. He couldn’t make his wife stop, so he turned his rage to Emma and he slapped her clear across the face. She stared at him in shock. So did I. And he stared right back, just as surprised as we were by what he had done.
“‘I told you to leave! Why didn’t you listen to me?’ He said this in a pitiful, whiny voice and he even had a tear in his eye. Emma said nothing. She turned and left and I followed Emma back to her room. We sat on her bed. She took my hands in hers and she said, ‘You have to get out of here and bring back someone to help us.’
“We came up with a plan. I told her I would find a way to leave. I told her to start fighting with me and make it look like I left because of her and that I wanted no part of her, so that way when I left, they wouldn’t fear that I would return with help. And that was the plan. That I would come back for Emma and the baby. Emma agreed.
“From September to February, I watched three things: First, I watched the boats. I watched the hours of the day when they passed through different channels safely. Second, I watched when the boatman came and left. Third, I watched the hours when the baby slept during the night and when she needed to be fed.
“Bill kept a small rowboat at the dock. There were oars on the boat, and I thought I could use the boat and oars to leave. I was very stupid.
“The night I tried to escape, I waited until the baby had been fed and they were all asleep. I went down to the dock and got on that boat and untied it from the post. It was dead quiet and freezing cold. All I could hear was the sound of the water splashing against the sides and my heart beating fast. I was scared and excited and again, had that feeling of being powerful because I was taking charge of my life and getting away from these crazy people and saving my sister and her baby. It was also so hard to leave Emma, to leave the baby, like I was leaving a piece of me behind. So I just kept thinking about how I would return, maybe even that same night if I got lucky, with help. With someone who would save us.
“I grabbed the oars and started to use them to steer the boat. I had watched Bill do it sometimes when he didn’t want to wait for Rick. He would make it through that part of the current that pulled things back to the island, and then all the way into the harbor until he disappeared from my sight. But it was so much harder than I thought. I didn’t know to sit backwards. I didn’t know how to put the oars in the rings, and they were so heavy and the current was so strong against them. One got pulled right out of my hand and fell into the water and was carried away. Then the whole boat started to drift alongside the island toward the west, where those rocks were. The boat was totally out of my control. I went from side to side, pushing the water, pulling on it with the one oar that was left. The boat would spin a bit, then just keep on going with the current. I felt this panic like my head was going to explode. I knew if we headed toward the west end of the island, I would get stuck in the rocks. And that’s just what happened. The boat got lodged between two rocks. I pushed with the oar. I got out and tried to shove myself from the rock with my hands. My feet kept slipping. I don’t know how long I tried before I heard the motor, and saw the lights of another boat. Then I saw the face of the boatman. I saw Rick and his stone-cold stare.
“He didn’t say anything to me. He tied a rope around the boat and started to drive away with it, his boat pulling Bill’s. I screamed at him to help me. ‘They won’t let us leave!’ I yelled as loud as I could. ‘They won’t let us leave!’ But he just drove off, taking the boat with him. Leaving me alone on the rocks.”
Abby hit pause and wrote down the time of this piece of the recording. Cass had started to cry then. Abby asked her what she was feeling and she said she was remembering the despair, the feeling of self-loathing at her stupidity, her immaturity. She said she also felt rage, and that she had learned that rage is powerful and it can make you do stupid things. Listening to it now, some t
ime gone by and Cass not right in front of her clouding her mind with the wonder of her return, it felt out of place with the story. Cass hadn’t done anything worthy of self-loathing. She had risked her life trying to escape and save her sister.
She pressed play again.
“I’m so sorry! God, I’m so stupid! I wanted to believe that I could save us! I wasn’t thinking!”
That was when Owen rushed to her side to hold her. “No, Cass. No! It’s not your fault. You were so young!”
“I thought I could bring us home!”
Abby remembered the rest of it. When Cass calmed herself down, she finished the story of that night. How she watched the rowboat get pulled back to the dock. How she watched the Lucky Lady disappear back into the harbor. How she sat there for a long time, given the cold—twenty-two minutes, she said—shivering and thinking through her options, even through the tears and the despair and the disbelief. She said she thought to herself that the land was right there, and how far could it be, really? A few miles? She said she almost jumped in. “Maybe I would make it. Maybe I wouldn’t drown or get hypothermia.”
Then she considered hiding in the woods, making a fire, trying to signal a boat by yelling and screaming. She thought about making words with rocks or grass that someone could see from a helicopter. But she said she had only a few hours and she did not have a saw or matches. And although she was strong, she said, she was not that strong.
Her third option was to go back to the house. Climb into bed. And see who the boatman really was, inside his heart or inside his conscience. If he said nothing, she would make a new plan. If he told them what she’d tried to do, she knew she would be punished. In the end, she got too cold to stay outside any longer, so this was what she decided to do.
They got sidetracked then, with details about the birth, the baby, the rowboat and currents. She gave more descriptions of lobster boats, their markings, their sizes, the color of the buoys they collected the lobsters from. Abby couldn’t refute the importance of any of that. Finding the island was the priority, period.
Still, she had gotten up then and began pacing the Martins’ bedroom. She had so many questions of her own. Obvious questions like what happened after that first attempt to escape? And how did it help Cass understand the boatman and know he would help her eventually?
Other questions were more subtle, entering her mind in faint whispers. The description of Lucy and Bill, the analogy to the fractured self, the crazy and the sane parts battling for dominance—it was sophisticated, beyond Cass’s years, wasn’t it? Or maybe the trauma had forced her to learn about the psychology, to deconstruct her captors.
And why had she insisted that her mother stay with her during the interviews? She was not a minor, and it went against the Bureau’s practices. She kept saying she couldn’t tell the story without Judy in the room.
And what about her odd demeanor, the way she told her story with such precision, adding in depictions of her emotions like she was sprinkling salt on a plate of food?
And why was she always counting the time and numbering things? Every story had been broken down into distinct parts, and moments had been clocked to the minute in her head, by counting to herself. She did not have a watch or a phone. It was as if she needed to keep everything organized in her mind.
A memory was before her. Two girls playing with a tea set in a yard. A gingham tablecloth lay across the grass. The tea set was still in a basket.
It was Abby’s sister, Meg, there with Abby. Meg was three years older and she was explaining why she needed to play with Abby’s tea set. “There are four reasons,” Meg said. Abby tried but couldn’t remember them now, the reasons. She wasn’t even certain this memory was real. They couldn’t have been more than six and nine. Were they even younger? It didn’t matter what the reasons were. It was about the numbering. There are four reasons.
Abby got up from the table and poured a scotch, drinking it as she leaned against the kitchen counter.
Meg had done that all through childhood. She was remembering it now. There are two reasons for this.… There are six things I like about that.… There are three things I eat for breakfast. When had she stopped doing that?
Abby downed the scotch and poured another. She needed sleep tonight.
How did she not know this about Meg, her sister, her only sibling and now the only family she had left in the world? Did she still count and number things? Abby had been there a few months ago. Meg, her two daughters, her husband, two dogs—had a seemingly normal life (although far too rural for Abby’s taste) in Colorado. She tried to remember the things they had done together. The hot, buggy hike in the mountains. Shopping for school clothes for her nieces. They’d gone to a movie. Abby could see that Meg was a good mother, that her daughters were loved. That was not her concern.
One evening they went out alone, as they always did on this annual reunion. During the rest of the year, there were phone calls and e-mails, Christmas and birthday cards and Facebook posts with cute photos and heart-shaped emojis. But those were not moments to open the door to the past.
The conversation always began with the benign updates. “How’s work? How are the girls?” And before their father died—“Have you spoken to Dad?” He spent his final years in Florida with his second wife, playing golf and tending to her rather substantial needs.
But it never took long for the path to wind into the trees, where the questions became more intimate and the answers harder to find. This last visit had focused on Abby. “Are you seeing anyone? When are you going to give someone a chance?”
From there, the path continued into the woods until it disappeared entirely, leaving them lost in the darkness of the past. “You know too much, Abby. That’s the problem.” Meg was convinced that Abby’s research and, arguably, her obsession with their mother and her theories on narcissism were preventing her from just living—from falling in love with someone, from trusting someone. “You have to move forward. Don’t let her ruin your life from the grave.”
Abby always listened, nodding occasionally, looking sincere. It wasn’t about whether Meg was right or wrong. The only thing that mattered was the impossibility of her prescription.
Had there still been counting? Abby couldn’t remember. The last time she’d thought about this thing with her sister was when she was writing her dissertation.
She set the glass down on the counter.
There was a case study she’d read while doing her research. The daughter of a mother with severe pathological narcissism had developed a coping mechanism, called an “affectation,” to create order in a world that was disordered. She had found a way to manage the radical and unpredictable affections of her mother that included a methodical organizing of everything in her life. She kept track of things with numbers. “Three reasons for liking the piano.… Two ways I like to wear my hair.”
She also assigned a gender to everything—colors, numbers, letters of the alphabet. A was female, B was male. There was no sequential sense to the assignments—they were unique to her imagination. D, E, F, G and H were all male, for example. But then X, Y and Z were all female. Red and orange were female. Blue and green male. On and on it went, the ordering of static, benign objects and concepts to calm the storm that was stirred inside her from the faulty attachment to her primary caregiver—in that case, the mother.
The girl had not developed a personality disorder, and had gone on to have a healthy family of her own. The research concluded that she had escaped the cycle, and it posed the query as to whether this affectation had been the reason.
Abby’s thoughts shifted back to her sister, Meg. She had not escaped their mother’s wrath entirely. There had been years of drug use and men and debilitating anxiety. But she had found her way out.
It was the aspect of her research that had most fascinated her—the cycle of the illness and how children escaped it. It was as if the human soul within them was fighting to the bitter end to survive, to find a way to hold on to
this instinct to love and be loved—because that was the very thing that got lost with this illness. Some developed OCD traits like Meg, controlling other aspects of their lives to replace the chaos with the parent.
Others sought out adult relationships that were codependent—the spouse they knew would never leave them, or serial relationships where they could conquer and move on, proving to themselves over and over that they had the power to get what they needed from other people. The serial monogamist, the playboy, the “slut” (though Abby so hated that word). Meg had done all of these, the counting of things, then the cycling through men when she was younger, then settling down with a man who worshipped her.
And what had Abby done to escape? Meg would say she rejected things that were too feminine, things that represented their mother. Makeup, short skirts, high heels. She would say that Abby lived behind an invisible shield—that she didn’t let anyone in who could hurt her or disappoint her.
But Abby had a rule against self-diagnosis, so she let these thoughts pass through her as she always did.