I didn’t hear the man until he was nearly on me, his footsteps hitting the earth with solid thumps. I whirled around, terrified, bracing myself for whatever might be coming—an arm around my neck, my knees knocked from under me. He was about ten feet away, close enough that with a determined lunge he could reach me. Under the shadow of his baseball cap, only his mouth was visible, his breath coming hard.
“Get the fuck away!” I screamed. The only weapon I had was the Coke can, and I lobbed it in his direction, the liquid arcing over the grass, the can coming to rest by his feet.
The man stopped, and I saw him for what he was: a runner in a tank top and spandex shorts, white sneakers. A key hung from a cord around his neck. “What the hell? Are you crazy?” He took a few steps to the side and then continued his run, muttering “bitch” as he passed me.
I was back in the Algonquin ten minutes later, the chair wedged under the doorknob, sitting with my back to the exterior wall, arms wrapped around my chest, sobbing.
* * *
I woke to someone pounding on the hotel door, the knob rattling. I grabbed one of my tennis shoes for protection. “What do you want?”
The voice that answered was female and gruff. “It’s after eleven. You’re supposed to be checked out. You’ve got five minutes before we come in.”
I moved the chair and opened the door. The woman was about my mother’s age, dark hair twisted into a messy knot on top of her head. She wore a heavy utility apron with her name, Krystine, written in permanent marker on the pocket.
“Check out time was eleven,” she repeated more slowly. And then she looked at me, her expression softening. “Are you okay?”
* * *
Krystine let me shower and gather my things, and when I headed past the desk in the front lobby half an hour later, she nodded at me silently and didn’t demand any extra payment. I struggled down the sidewalk again with my duffel bag, heading in the direction of the university. I made it as far as the entrance to Boylston Hall, where a sign indicated REGISTRATION FOR PEW SCHOLARS.
There was a bench across from the hall, and I sat on it, collecting myself. I didn’t have to register until four, and that was still hours away. Occasionally, students went in the building in groups of one or two, exiting with maroon folders. These were my peers in the program, the other promising young scholars of tomorrow. They looked healthy and happy, ready to discuss philosophy and culture and literature. They didn’t look damaged or frightened or insecure. They didn’t have bruises in the shape of fingerprints on their forearms, or look like they’d spent the night cycling from one nightmare to another. They looked normal, like I used to be.
At four o’clock, I left the square and returned to the hotel.
* * *
I stayed in the Algonquin for the next five weeks, paying day to day. I kept my head down when I passed men in the hallway and, back in my room, I wedged the chair beneath the doorknob, my low-tech security system. Most of the time I slept, and in the evenings I tuned in to one of three television stations, finding the comedies unfunny and the dramas unrealistic. Once a day, I ventured out for food, usually passing near campus with my plastic bags of half sandwiches and potato chips and soda. Although school was out for the summer, there were all kinds of special programs and groups on campus, and I watched the students curiously, like they were visitors from another planet. What were they reading? What were they learning? What was it like to sleep through the night? What was it like to be that happy?
The night I was supposed to register for my seminar, I’d found a payphone near the hotel and called information for the phone number of Miriam Stenholz. She answered on the third ring and seemed thrilled to hear from me. “Tell me all about everything,” she’d said, and I hesitated before launching into the story I’d rehearsed that afternoon while I watched students enter and exit Boylston Hall.
Something happened, I explained, trying to sound sad and resigned, which wasn’t that difficult in my current situation. There had been a family emergency, and I would be heading back to Kansas for the rest of the summer.
“For the rest of the summer?” she repeated. “You don’t think you could return to the seminar at all, only a little late? I could make some phone calls on your behalf...”
“It’s not the sort of thing that will be better in a week,” I told her. “And I should probably go, because things are just... I mean, it’s pretty bad.”
I could read the disappointment in her silence. She was probably thinking it had been a mistake to recommend me for the seminar when any of the Sisters would have been just as good and more reliable, too. Finally, she asked, “Will you call me later, when you have an update?”
I promised that I would, knowing I probably wouldn’t. Maybe when I was back at Keale in the fall, I would tell her everything, all the things I could hardly acknowledge to myself, everything that began and ended with the Mabreys.
In the public library, I created a new email account and wrote to Mom every few days, long, newsy accounts of the seminar I wasn’t attending. Good for you, kiddo, she wrote back sometimes. And then: Your dad would be so proud. She signed her emails always XOXO, Mom.
What kind of horrible person lied to her own mother?
I called Lauren three times at the number on The Island—once at lunch and twice around dinner. Mrs. Mabrey had answered each time, and the silence around her was deep, her words echoing as if she were standing in an empty space. Where was everyone else?
On the first two calls, I hung up without saying anything. The third time, I cleared my throat and asked to speak with Lauren. I was going to tell her what had happened—just give her the information and back away. There was a silence on the other end of the line, and I tried again. “Is Lauren there?” My heart was pounding—of course Mrs. Mabrey would recognize my voice.
Her response was icy, and I had the feeling that she knew it was me the other times, too—maybe she’d only been waiting for me to speak. “Don’t call here again,” she said, her voice sharp and authoritative. “Do you understand? You’ll regret it if you do.”
I dropped the phone and ran back to the hotel, as if I could outrun all the hatred I’d heard in her voice. Your son raped me, I thought, nearly falling over my own feet. He raped me, and you let him get away with it.
They were all a bunch of monsters—Michael and his mother, and the rest of them by extension, and that included Lauren, too, for sneering at me that night, for suggesting that I was a slut who just couldn’t control herself, that I was only jealous of her.
And because they were monsters, they could get away with anything.
* * *
In the middle of August, when the seminar I wasn’t attending came to an end, I took a bus from Cambridge to Westport, a little town in southern Massachusetts. Mom and Gerry met me there in a rented Ford Taurus and we spent a week in a cottage overlooking Buzzards Bay. It was unimpressive after The Island’s endless amenities, although Mom pronounced it “paradise” at every turn.
Gerry wore the Harvard sweatshirt I’d bought him from a street vendor in Cambridge, and Mom beamed at me, proud by association. “Did you ever think, back when you were waiting tables at the diner, that your life would turn out like this?” she asked, squeezing me in a tight hug.
I almost told her everything then; it had been exhausting to maintain the lie all week, to be yet another fake version of Megan Mazeros. If only Gerry hadn’t been there—but that was a lie, too. My shame was rooted more deeply, already part of who I was.
They hugged me goodbye at the bus station that weekend, and I promised Mom that I would call when I was settled in at Keale. Then I sat for a long time on a bench while travelers hurried around me, listening to departure calls.
There was no way I could room with Lauren again—I knew that. I needed to talk to the housing department to figure out new arrangements. Was it possible that Laure
n had already done this? But even the thought of running into Lauren—bumping into her in class, in the library or on one of the footpaths—made me break out in a cold sweat. How would I make it there a full year without breaking down, without screaming at her that her brother was a rapist, without letting my shame spill out at every moment? I was scheduled to take a full load of classes, but I hadn’t even been able to contemplate taking a single seminar at Harvard. Most days, I’d slept for at least twelve hours and zoned out in front of the television for another three or four, and still I felt unbearably tired.
No, I couldn’t go back to Keale. I couldn’t brush off everything that happened that summer and sit in class and pretend I was the same person I’d been before. That night, I took the last bus back to Cambridge, and in the morning, I called Keale from the phone booth outside the Algonquin.
* * *
It would be months before I told the truth—or at least, a part of it—to my mother.
When I did, she railed at me over the phone. “Are you crazy? You’ve got three years under your belt. You’re so close. And all that money spent...”
“I might finish someday,” I said, vaguely, not believing it myself.
“At least come home, then,” Mom pleaded, as if Woodstock, Kansas, still fit that description. “There’s always a place for you here.”
“Mom,” I said, fingering the coils of the phone cord. “I’m sorry, but no.”
By that time, I had moved out of the Algonquin and into an apartment I shared with three other girls, all waitresses and part-time students. It hadn’t been hard to find a job or slip back into the routine of restaurant life. I spent my afternoons and evenings at The Sea Shack in a white shirt and black pants and thick-soled shoes, tucking my tips into the money belt I wore clipped around the inside of my waistband, an old trick I’d learned at the Woodstock Diner. The shifts kept me so busy that I hardly had time to think at all.
Still, sometimes when I was bussing tables or taking orders, I would catch a glimpse of someone who reminded me of Lauren—glossy dark hair, a confident set to her shoulders, an unabashed laugh. Other times, I froze when I thought I saw the back of Michael’s head at the bar, and it would all come back—the hand on my neck, how easily he’d pushed me onto my back, the pine needles pressing into my skin—and I would step outside the service entrance, taking a few deep breaths.
That’s all behind you, I promised myself.
None of the them can ever hurt you again.
Lauren
The day after Megan left, when everything was still in chaos on The Island, a Coast Guard official found our fishing boat floating in the bay, not far from Yarmouth. Save for a few inches of water, it was empty. There was no sign of Megan or any of her belongings.
“She must have tied a sloppy knot,” Uncle Patrick decided—everyone else was in Yarmouth with Kat by then, and it was only his family, Lizzie and me left on The Island. “It probably just floated loose.”
It made sense—Megan wouldn’t have known how to tether the boat properly. If she’d left it and made her way to Cambridge, she was probably right now settling in with her roommates and attending her first seminar. On the other hand, since she hadn’t left so much as a note, and she hadn’t called, there was no way to know if she’d made it at all. I had nightmares, those first nights after she left, thinking of Megan sinking to the bottom of the Atlantic, her curls fanned out from her head like seaweed. But when I woke, I was angry again, stung by her absence, the fragments of my family she’d left behind.
That horrible night, down at the pier, Mom had taken me by the shoulders and given me a bone-rattling shake. At the end of the pier, Kat was curled on her side, one bare foot dangling close to the water, waiting for the police cruiser that would take her to the hospital in Yarmouth. “Where did Megan go?” Mom had demanded. “What’s she going to do?”
And all I could manage was that I figured she’d gone to Harvard a day ahead of schedule because she wanted to get away from The Island. She’d been packing; she’d been upset. The words from our fight rang in my ears. Well—not our fight, exactly. Megan had just listened; I’d done all the talking. But there was no way I was going to have this blamed on me. “Ask Michael,” I spluttered. “He’s the one—”
Mom had reared back her hand like she was going to slap me, but her hand whizzed emptily to the side of my face. Still, it stung—a phantom slap. So Mom knew about Megan and MK, or she suspected. Either way, it was unfair that I should bear the brunt of what they’d done.
“Ask him,” I repeated, darting out of her reach. “Ask your golden boy what he did.”
I whirled around, looking for him, but MK wasn’t down on the beach with the rest of us. Even when the cruiser arrived and Kat was hooked up to some monitors and whisked away with Dad and Mom and Peter, he didn’t make an appearance. Later, walking back to the house with Lizzie in my arms, tears dried on her cheeks and hair, I spotted him sitting on the railing of the gazebo, looking out over the cliff at the water.
It had been the plan all along for him to leave on the seventh, but still, it felt like a cowardly move. It was easy for him to set into motion a chain of events and then disappear, leaving the rest of us to pick up the pieces. We had stayed away from each other except for mealtimes, although it was difficult to tell who was avoiding whom, or if it was in fact a mutual evasion. On the day he left, I called my goodbye from the deck, not looking up when I heard the motor start and not relaxing until the hum faded into the day, lost in the sound of waves and seagulls.
Kat spent a week in the hospital—first recovering from the miscarriage, then some internal bleeding from the D&C and an infection that was slow to heal. She refused to go back to The Island, insisting it was the cause of all her problems. If she’d just stayed home in Connecticut, after all, if she’d just been able to relax without all the chaos, her baby would be alive.
“It wasn’t The Island’s fault,” Peter fumed on his last night with the rest of us, Kat and Lizzie’s bags packed and waiting at the door to be lugged down to the pier. He glared at me from across the dinner table. “It was your friend, that bitch. If she hadn’t taken the boat, this would have all been different.”
I didn’t say anything because there were no words that would bring back their baby. The morning after everything had happened, I’d seen Jordana haul Kat’s bloody sheets and towels to the burn barrel, and by afternoon she’d scrubbed down the hallway and stairs, erasing smears of blood from the hardwood. There had been too much blood, even before they discovered the boat was gone. No, Megan hadn’t caused Kat’s miscarriage, but she had managed to drive a wedge firmly between the Mabreys.
“You,” Peter continued, pointing a finger at me. His face was unshaven and there were deep hollows under his eyes. “You should track her down. She should pay for this, somehow. At the least, she should be arrested for theft.”
Dad cleared his throat. “The boat was found.”
“That doesn’t change the fact that it was stolen in the first place,” Peter huffed.
“She’s at Harvard,” I reminded them. “I don’t think she’s hiding or anything.”
Mom looked around the table, taking in each of us—Peter, Lizzie drowsing in her high chair, Dad, me. “We will do no such thing,” she announced. “None of us will contact that girl. Is that understood?”
I started to object. That girl. That girl who had spent half the summer asking Mom if she wanted more tea or a blanket or something to eat. That girl who I had shared everything with, who I was rooming with again in the fall.
Dad said, “Sounds reasonable,” with a nod at me.
I didn’t protest, but inside I scoffed. My parents could make all the official pronouncements they wanted, but there was no way they could enforce them. Of course I would talk to Megan again. But as the days passed, the silence between us grew deeper and more profound. It was the longest we had had
gone without talking, or emailing or calling, in almost three years.
* * *
By the middle of July, it was just Dad and Mom and me on The Island, three people who had never spent any significant amount of time with each other. Dad was on his laptop or cell phone, and the conversations I overheard dealt with the budget and staffing and subcommittee business. Still, I was sad when he left, since it would be only Mom and me for the rest of the summer, moving politely around each other on an island that seemed to be haunted by the ghosts of our family members.
Without Megan, I missed Joe more sharply than I had the rest of the summer. I wanted him there in the mornings when I woke up, realizing I would have to face the day alone. I wanted him when I sat on the end of the pier, the loneliness in the air like a crushing weight on my chest. If I couldn’t talk to Megan, at least I could talk to Joe. Maybe I could explain to him all the things I wanted to explain to her.
Finally, I did call him, holding my breath while the phone rang once, twice, three times.
“Hello,” he said, and he was so Joe, so himself, I almost cried in relief. I imagined him in his apartment, yesterday’s dishes crusty in the sink, the mattress still dented with the shape of his body.
“It’s Lauren,” I said.
“Oh, hey. Are you back already?”
Tears stung in my eyes. “No—I’m still out here. I was wondering—” The words I’d rehearsed so many times dried in my throat. “Why don’t you come out here? Just for a few days?”
“Come to Maine? Isn’t your family there?”
“No. It’s only my mom and me.”
“I mean...” The pause told me everything I needed to know. “You know I’m working, right? I’m on the schedule for the week, so I can’t just...”
“Forget it,” I said quickly. “It was a stupid idea.”
He didn’t disagree. “But you’re coming back soon anyway. School starts in August, doesn’t it?”
Here We Lie Page 28