The hospital psychologist told me I was very articulate.
I drove on in the Jeep, the miles passing. Very early in the morning, I reached New York, passing through a tunnel and emerging into a confusing thicket of streets, narrow and dark save for the few bars that still seemed to be open. Somewhere near a park, I pulled over, locked the doors, and climbed into the back of the car, pulling a blanket over me so I would be hidden from view, like a rabbit in a nest. When I woke up, my head aching, the sun had just begun to rise and I found that I had a parking ticket. I brushed my teeth with a bottle of water from the trunk, spitting into the gutter, and slipped the angry-looking sheet of paper into my pocket. At least the car hadn’t gotten towed with me in it.
People began to appear in the street, most of them looking as if they had been out all night, the men rumpled, the women in sparkling disarray. One of them pointed me toward a convenience store, where I bought a city map, but I was already so impossibly lost that the grid of streets might as well have been a foreign alphabet. As I drove, the streets became canyons, surrounded by buildings that seemed soulless, the dull stone and glass interrupted only by a thumbprint-sized park here and there.
Finally I saw a bridge, a strangely ornate-looking one, and crossed it, half hoping it would take me out of the city but also thinking it might show me why I’d come here in the first place, why I’d thought that getting lost here, disappearing, might be the first step to a new life, might erase the previous twenty-four hours. For the moment, life seemed the same, except that I was now trailing a taxi—the first one I’d ever seen—and had no idea where I was.
On the other side of the bridge, the buildings seemed shorter, more open. I looked up and saw birds turning in wide circles: seagulls. In Centerville, we only saw them rarely, when they were driven inland by storms. But I was certain that was what they were.
Of course, I thought.
The sea.
I stopped to buy a doughnut and began to feel, if not better, then at least slightly more myself. I looked at the map again and followed what seemed to be the main road, even though it was taking me the opposite of the way I’d originally planned to go. I liked it better out here than in the place where the highways and tunnels had first deposited me. The buildings were still crowded together, but in a kind of matter-of-fact, shrugging way that somehow reminded me of home, even though there was no real resemblance.
At last, the road ended, and there I was, staring out at the sand, the boardwalk. Beyond that, I was sure, must be the ocean.
I stopped and climbed stiffly out, rubbing my face. The air had a smell, a feel, that was new to me. I stood still for a moment, then started to walk.
The shoreline, when I reached it, was narrow and dirty, the brown sand strewn with rocks and glass and bottle caps. No one was there; it was still almost too cold to be walking in such a place, let alone swimming. But there it was, the water, dark and rippling and stretching to my right and left as far as I could see. The wind blew my hair into my face as I knelt and touched a wave that had approached me. It seemed softer than the lake water somehow, warmer, darker, gentler. When it receded, it left behind a white foam, which was soon overtaken by the next wave.
Squatting there, I turned my face up to the sun. I imagined the stranger sitting beside me.
There was a dry throb in my chest, and I gripped my hands together, holding them against me, clenching my eyes shut.
Sand stung me, rough against my face.
I wanted you to be different. Oh, I wanted you to be different.
The waves crept forward, touched my shoes, crawled back. My fingers slid up my arms until I was clutching my elbows, holding myself in a tight knot, rocking back and forth, feeling something break open. Like lava released from the center of the earth, it rushed to the tips of my fingers, the roots of my hair.
Heartbroken, I thought. It was a word I’d never thought much of. But it was the right one, and I felt it in the depths of me in a way I never had before. In a way I’d never let myself.
It was like breaking; it was. It was like splitting in half. As if I would pour out of myself and dissolve into the water, spread out in a film of pain.
I opened my lips, making a voiceless sound.
The waves approached me and receded, slowly carving hollows around my feet. I stayed there for a long while, thinking about what I knew, what I didn’t. What, if anything, I could choose not to know.
After a time, I raised my head again. My eyes were dry even though I felt as if I’d been weeping for days.
Slowly, I stood.
I didn’t know what he was, who he was; I never would.
And I chose that, I thought. I chose not to know. Not to carry it with me, let it bind me, chain me up and drag me down and leave me trapped as the years went by, all those moments I would never get back once they were gone. I chose not to forgive him, and I chose not to refuse to. I chose not to look back on the decisions I’d made. They were over. He was gone. Nothing I could do would change that, would let me see him again, ask the questions that would fill this void, this terrible abyss in my center. The truth wasn’t what mattered. An hour from now, I would still be here. I would wake up tomorrow, and the day after that. That was what I had to think about.
There was an empty plastic bottle floating on the water, and I waited until another wave brought it in. I stooped to catch it, then turned and walked away.
By the boardwalk, where the sand was drier, I filled the bottle with the loose grains, tucking it into my sweatshirt. Briefly, I faced the water again.
I missed him, this Daniil. I missed the person I had known. I could admit that. And I did; I did admit it. I could feel his absence.
And if he had been an illusion, then I missed the illusion.
There were voices behind me, and a gull cried, sweeping overhead.
I turned to go.
On the streets past the boardwalk, people were emerging, striding briskly off to work, opening shops with clangs and clatters, lugging grocery bags. In a souvenir store, I bought a postcard to send to Beth and, after a moment of thought, one for John. Then I climbed back into the Jeep—removing another parking ticket, which I stuffed into my pocket—and drove back the way I had come. Looking at the world through my own eyes, moving in my own body. Solid and real.
In my mind, I saw a woman who had been curled up on the forest floor stand up, brush the leaves from her dress, rub the decades of sleep from her eyes, button her cracked leather shoes, look around. See the road. Walk toward it.
Eventually, I found a highway that ran north and turned onto it, making my way out of the city and sailing on through the suburbs, like a leaf blown on a harsh breeze. I didn’t belong in this place; I might not belong any place. But I would keep looking. I held the wheel steadily, listening to the radio, following the road as it unwound through the trees.
As the sun climbed overhead, slowly warming the car, I remembered a day in mid-summer, many years earlier, when my brother and I had been children. We’d been playing in the woods on the state game lands, a place where people liked to dump their garbage—not the ordinary kitchen bags, but big things, sofas and metal barrels and washers and dryers. We would jump on the things, push them together to make castles and cabins, hide under them. On this day, we were chasing each other when my brother suddenly stopped, shocked, and looked down at his shoe. A nail, long and sharp and rusting, had pierced right through the sole, biting deep into his skin. Frightened, I had picked him up, my older brother, struggling to carry him on my back until we reached the small, scorched-looking yard of a neighbor we had never met. The mailbox had an American flag painted on it, and there was a fake deer on the porch that had been used for target practice. An angry-looking dog watched me through the window as I knocked on the door.
After a minute, the neighbor appeared, a large man with thick glasses and a beard. His two front teeth were missing, and I would later learn that I didn’t know him because he had spent ten years in pris
on, something to do with a fight that had ended badly. Too young to have any idea that I should be frightened, I stood there, looking up at him. Before I could explain, he saw the blood on my brother’s shoe and closed the door behind him. In one smooth motion, he lifted my brother from my back and arranged him in his own arms, speaking in gruff murmurs, carrying him down the driveway. By the road, I took his hand—large, rough, with black grease written into the skin—and pulled him west, toward home. Together, we set off down the quiet road, walking the long mile, our three figures casting joined shadows. I touched a scar that crossed his fingers. The sun came through the trees, as it always does, light interrupted by darkness, darkness interrupted by light.
PINE GROVE FURNACE
POW INTERROGATION CAMP
During WWII, the US War Dept. operated this secret facility a mile north along Michaux Rd., one of three such sites in the US. Military intelligence relating to topics such as weaponry development and Axis operations was gained from thousands of German and Japanese prisoners. Originally a farm serving the iron industry, 1785–1919, the site was converted to Civilian Conservation Corps Camp S-51-PA, 1933–42. After the war it became church Camp Michaux, 1946–72.
—Historical marker
Gardners, Pennsylvania
ON THIS SPOT WERE FOUND THREE BABES IN THE WOODS
Nov.-24-1934
—Roadside sign
Gardners, Pennsylvania
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
This book is rooted in many moments, but perhaps none so much as the evening in 2004 when I sat at a table at the Philadelphia organization Women in Transition, attending one of the training sessions required to become a volunteer for the local domestic violence hotline. The trainer handed out a sheet of paper that listed many forms of intimate-partner violence—not only physical mistreatment (punching, kicking, shoving), but also psychological, sexual, and financial. When I looked at it, a number of things came into focus for me in a way they never had before. Like many and perhaps most of us, I had previously understood “domestic violence” to refer only to the things I saw on TV and the shorthand images in the newspaper: the clenched fist, the cowering woman. But that isn’t all family violence is, and my own life, at least, has benefited from that understanding.
Seven years later, I sat down one day and suddenly started writing the story of a young woman—one who had somehow been badly injured—who stood in a threadbare gray coat at the edge of a frozen lake. Eventually, I decided this would be a novel about domestic violence that contained neither clenched fists nor women who were only depicted as cowering. Whatever else it may be, I hope it’s that.
The fact that the book ever reached publication is due to the patience, insight, and wonderful championing of the manuscript by Taylor Sperry, my editor at Melville House (who also helped come up with the title), and Stacia Decker, my incredible agent, who was offering feedback years before the draft was anywhere near ready for prime time. It also owes its existence to early encouragement and feedback from freelance editor Lauren Jolie LeBlanc, Amelia Keene, Rikin Shah, Jessica Howley, Tori Roth, Emily Marr, Elinathan Ohiomoba, Merryl Lawry-White, Brooke Dunbar, Gautam Hans, and Stephen St.Vincent, although any flaws in the story are my own doing. Many of my colleagues at the AIRE Centre, the Center for Democracy & Technology, and Human Rights Watch also offered warm words during the travails of the drafting and revision process, as did Eli James. My grandparents, parents, and extended family cheered me on during this project as during so many others.
The details about the prison camp are largely drawn from the work of local historians I’ve never met but for whose years of research I am extremely grateful. Some of the information they have gathered is available online at http://www.schaeffersite.com/ michaux/.
Writing a novel in my spare hours while working full-time was in many ways an isolating experience, but friends such as Rachael Barza, Lauren Rogal, and Katie Ishibashi got me through it. Alison Stigora, fellow artist, nature-lover, and asker of deep questions, has also offered love and support at many critical junctures—and, many years ago, explored the woods of Pine Grove Furnace State Park with me when I briefly worked at the general store there.
Lastly, this story owes a vast amount to my women friends who are profoundly thoughtful about their faith and its meaning for their personal lives. They are forever teaching me what goodness is.
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