My Dark Vanessa

by Kate Elizabeth Russell

  Strane groans. He had been braced up on his hands; now he lets himself fall on top of me. His arms snake under my shoulders, his breath in my ear.

  Between breaths, he says, “I want you to come.”

  I want you to stop, I think. But I don’t say it out loud—I can’t. I can’t talk, can’t see. Even if I force my eyes open, they won’t focus. My head is cotton, my mouth gravel. I’m thirsty, I’m sick, I’m nothing. He keeps going, faster now, which means he’s close, only a minute or so left. A thought shoots through me—is this rape? Is he raping me?

  When he comes, he says my name over and over. He pulls out, rolls onto his back. Every part of him is slick with sweat, even his forearms, his feet.

  “Unbelievable,” he says. “This wasn’t where I expected my day to end up.”

  I lean over and vomit onto the floor, the splatter-slap of sick hitting hardwood. It’s beer and bile; I’d been too anxious to eat anything all day.

  Strane sits up on his elbows and stares down at the vomit. “Jesus, Vanessa.”

  “I’m sorry.”

  “I mean, it’s ok. It’s fine.” He pushes himself off the bed, pulls on his pants, and steps around the sick. Goes into the bathroom, returns with a spray bottle and rag, gets on his hands and knees and cleans the floor. I keep my eyes shut tight through the smell of ammonia and pine, my stomach still churning, the bed undulating beneath me.

  When he climbs back into bed, he’s all over me despite my just having puked, and his hands smelling like cleaner. “You’ll be ok,” he says. “You’re drunk, that’s all. Stay here and sleep it off.” His mouth and hands take me in, testing what’s changed. He pinches my stomach where it’s grown softer, and my brain brings up a fractured memory, maybe only a dream—in the office behind his classroom, me naked on the love seat, him fully clothed, inspecting my body with the impartial interest of a scientist, squeezing my stomach, dragging his finger along the tracks of my veins. It hurt then and it hurts now, his heavy limbs and sandpaper hands, a knee prying my legs apart. How can he be ready again? The bottle of Viagra in the bathroom cabinet, puke crusting together a lock of my hair. Him on top, his body so big it could smother me if he weren’t careful. But he is careful and he is good and he loves me and I want this. I still feel torn in two when he pushes inside, will probably always feel this way, but I want it. I have to.

  I don’t get home until quarter to midnight. I come into the kitchen and Mom’s waiting. She grabs the keys out of my hand.

  “Never again,” she says.

  I stand with my arms limp at my sides, messy hair and red-rimmed eyes. “Aren’t you going to ask where I’ve been?” I say.

  She stares at me, into me. She sees everything. “If I did,” she says, “would you tell me the truth?”

  * * *

  I cry at graduation along with everyone else, but my tears are from the relief of having survived what I still think of as my penance. Our graduation is held in the gym and the fluorescent lights make us look jaundiced. The principal won’t let anyone clap as we walk across the stage, says it makes the ceremony too long and it isn’t fair that some students would get loud cheers and others might not get any at all. Browick’s graduation is on the same Saturday afternoon, and during mine, I imagine theirs: chairs arranged on the lawn outside the dining hall, the headmaster and faculty standing in the grove of white pines, distant church bells chiming. I walk across the silent stage to receive my diploma and close my eyes, imagine the sun on my face, that I’m wearing Browick’s thick white gown with the crimson sash. The principal shakes my hand limply, gives me the same “well done” he gives everyone else. The whole thing feels meaningless, but what does it matter? I’m not really here in this stuffy gym with the sounds of squeaking folding chairs and cleared throats, the rustle of programs fanning faces jeweled with sweat. I’m walking across the carpet of orange-dead needles, accepting hugs from Browick faculty, even from Mrs. Giles. In my fantasy she never kicked me out; she has no reason to think ill of me at all. Strane hands me my diploma, standing by the same tree where, two and a half years ago, he told me he wanted to put me to bed and kiss me good night. His fingers touch mine as he passes it to me, imperceptible to anyone else, but the thrill of it sends me airborne into the nothing-nowhere-no-one feeling I’d get when I left his classroom, red hot with secrets.

  In the gym, I clutch my diploma as I walk back to my chair. Shoes scuffle on the floor. The principal shoots a glare at the lone parent who dares to clap.

  After the ceremony, everyone spills out into the parking lot and takes photos, positioning the camera so the strip mall isn’t visible in the background. Dad tells me to smile, but I can’t force my face to listen.

  “Come on, at least pretend to be happy,” he says.

  I part my lips and show my teeth and end up looking like an animal ready to bite.

  All summer I work at the auto parts warehouse, filling orders for starters and struts while classic rock radio blares over the white noise of the conveyor belts. Twice a week at the end of my shift, Strane waits for me in the parking lot. I try to dig the grit out from under my fingernails before climbing into the station wagon. He likes my steel-toed boots, the muscles in my arms. He says a summer of manual labor is good for me, that it’ll make me value college all the more.

  Every so often, anger hits me, but I tell myself what’s done is done—Browick, his role in my leaving, all of it in the past. I do my best not to feel resentful when I remember what he used to say about helping me apply to summer internships in Boston, or when I see his Harvard robes hanging on his closet door, left there from the Browick graduation. Atlantica is a respectable choice, he says, nothing to be ashamed of.

  At work on a Friday afternoon in the warehouse, Jackson Browne plays while I start on a pallet of chassis parts. The man filling orders in the next section belts out a line of song as “The Load-Out” gives way to “Stay.” My utility knife slips as I tear open the plastic wrap, leaving a six-inch slice on my forearm that, before the rush of blood, is gently parted skin, a painless peek through the curtains. The man in the next section glances over, sees me with my hand clamped over the wound, blood seeping through my fingers and dripping onto the concrete floor.

  “Shit!” He scrambles to unzip his sweatshirt as he runs over. He ties it around my arm.

  “I cut myself,” I say.

  “You think?” The man shakes his head at my helplessness, cinches the sweatshirt tighter. Sooty warehouse dust lines his knuckles. “How long were you going to stand there before you said something?”

  The days Strane picks me up from work, we drive around like teenagers with nowhere to go, and when he drives me back home, he drops me off at the top of the dirt road. My mother asks me where I’ve been and I tell her, “With Maria and Wendy.” The girls I used to sit with at lunch, the ones I haven’t spoken to since graduation.

  “I didn’t realize you were such good friends,” Mom says. She could push further, ask why they never come inside when they drop me off, why she’s never even met them at all. I’m eighteen and moving to Atlantica at the end of August, which I’d point out if she dared question me. But she never does. She says ok and lets it drop. The freedom leaves me adrift, unsure of what she knows, what she suspects. “I don’t want to pull those old books off the shelf,” she says when her sister calls to hash out something that happened when they were kids. There’s a wall around her; I build one around me.

  Strane asks if I’m still angry. We’re in his bed, the flannel sheets damp beneath our sweaty bodies. I stare at the open window, listening to the sounds of cars and pedestrians, the perfect stillness of his house. I’m tired of him asking me this, his insatiable need for reassurance. No, I’m not angry. Yes, I forgive you. Yes, I want this. No, I don’t think you’re a monster.

  “Would I be here if I didn’t want this?” I ask, as though the answer were obvious. I ignore what hangs in the air above us, my anger, my humiliation and hurt. They seem like the real monsters
, all those unspeakable things.

  2017

  At my next session with Ruby, before I even sit down, I ask if she’s been contacted by anyone looking for information on me. I called Ira last night asking the same thing, while his new girlfriend hissed in the background, “Is that her? Why is she calling you? Ira, hang up the phone.”

  “Who would be looking for information on you?” Ruby asks.

  “Like a journalist.”

  She stares, bewildered, as I take out my phone and pull up the emails. “I’m not being paranoid, ok? This is actually happening to me. Look.”

  She takes the phone, begins to read. “I don’t understand—”

  I grab it from her hand. “Maybe it doesn’t seem like a big deal, but it’s not just emails, ok? She’s been calling me, harassing me.”

  “Vanessa, take a breath.”

  “Do you not believe me?”

  “I believe you,” she says. “But I need you to slow down and tell me what’s going on.”

  I sit, press the heels of my hands against my eyes and try my best to explain the emails and calls, the unearthed blog I finally managed to delete, how the journalist still has screenshots saved. My brain is jumpy, won’t stay focused even for the length of a sentence. Ruby still gets the gist of it, though, her face opening up in sympathy.

  “This is so intrusive,” she says. “Surely this isn’t ethical on the part of the journalist.” She suggests I write to Janine’s boss, or even go to the police, but at the mention of cops, I grab the arms of my chair and yell out, “No!” For a moment, Ruby actually looks scared.

  “I’m sorry,” I say. “I’m panicking. I’m not myself.”

  “That’s ok,” she says. “It’s an understandable reaction. This is one of your worst fears coming true.”

  “I saw her, you know. Outside the hotel.”

  “The journalist?”

  “No, the other her. Taylor, the one who accused Strane. She’s harassing me, too. I should show up at her work, see how she likes it.”

  I describe what I saw last night as dusk began to fall, the woman standing across the street, how she stared up at the hotel, right into the lobby window I was looking out of, staring at me, her blond hair whipping across her face. As I talk, Ruby watches me with a pained expression, like she wants to believe me but can’t.

  “I don’t know,” I say. “Maybe I imagined it. That happens sometimes.”

  “You imagine things?”

  I lift my shoulders. “It’s like my brain superimposes onto strangers the faces I want to see.”

  She says that sounds difficult and I shrug again. She asks how often this happens and I say it depends. Months will pass without it happening at all, and then months where it happens every day. It’s the same with the nightmares—they come in waves, brought on by something not always easy to predict. I know to stay away from any books or movies set in a boarding school, but then I’ll be blindsided by something as benign as a reference to maple trees, or the feeling of flannel against my skin.

  “I sound like I’m crazy,” I say.

  “No, not crazy,” Ruby says. “Traumatized.”

  I think about the other things I could tell her, the drinking and smoking to get me through the day, the nights when my apartment feels like a maze so impossible to navigate I end up sleeping on the bathroom floor. I know how easily I could make my most shameful behaviors add up to a diagnosis. I’ve lost entire nights to reading about post-traumatic stress, mentally checking off each symptom, but there’s a strange letdown at the thought of everything inside me being summed up so easily. And what’s next—treatment, medication, moving past it all? That might seem like a happy ending for some, but for me there’s only the edge of this canyon, the churning water below.

  “Do you think I should let that journalist write about me?” I ask.

  “That’s a choice only you can make.”

  “Obviously. And I’ve already made up my mind. There’s no way I’m agreeing to it. I just want to know if you think I should.”

  “I think it would cause you severe stress,” Ruby says. “I’d worry the symptoms you described would become even more intense to the point where it would be difficult for you to function.”

  “But I’m talking on a moral level. Because isn’t it supposed to be worth all the stress? That’s what people keep saying, that you need to speak out no matter the cost.”

  “No,” she says firmly. “That’s wrong. It’s a dangerous amount of pressure to put on someone dealing with trauma.”

  “Then why do they keep saying it? Because it’s not just this journalist. It’s every woman who comes forward. But if someone doesn’t want to come forward and tell the world every bad thing that’s happened to her, then she’s what? Weak? Selfish?” I throw up my hand, wave it away. “The whole thing is bullshit. I fucking hate it.”

  “You’re angry,” Ruby says. “I don’t think I’ve ever seen you truly angry before.”

  I blink, breathe through my nose. I say I feel a little defensive, and she asks defensive how.

  “I feel backed into a corner,” I say. “Like all of a sudden, not wanting to expose myself means I’m enabling rapists. And I shouldn’t even be part of this conversation at all! I wasn’t abused, not like other women are claiming to have been.”

  “Do you understand that someone could have been in a relationship similar to yours and consider it to have been abusive?”

  “Sure,” I say. “I’m not brainwashed. I know the reasons why teenagers aren’t supposed to be with middle-aged men.”

  “What are the reasons?” she asks.

  I roll my eyes and list off: “The power imbalance, teenage brains not being fully developed, whatever. All that crap.”

  “Why didn’t those reasons apply to you?”

  I give Ruby a sidelong look, letting her know I see where she’s trying to lead me. “Look,” I say, “this is the truth, ok? Strane was good to me. He was careful and kind and good. But obviously not all men are like that. Some are predatory, especially with girls. And when I was young, being with him was still really hard, despite how good he was.”

  “Why was it hard?”

  “Because the whole world was working against us! We had to lie and hide, and there were things he couldn’t protect me from.”

  “Like what?”

  “Like when I got kicked out.”

  When I say that, Ruby squints, her brow furrows. “Kicked out of what?”

  I forgot I hadn’t told her. I know the phrase “kicked out” hits hard and gives the wrong impression. It makes it sound as though I had no agency in the situation, like I was caught doing something bad and then told to pack my bags. But I had a choice. I chose to lie.

  So I tell Ruby it was complicated, that maybe “kicked out” isn’t the right way to describe it. I tell her the story: the rumors and meetings, Jenny’s list, the last morning with the packed classroom and me standing at the chalkboard. I’ve never told it with such detail, don’t know if I’ve even thought about it this way before—chronologically, one event leading to the next. It’s usually fractured, memories like shattered glass.

  At a couple points, Ruby interrupts me. “They did what?” she asks. “They what?” She’s appalled at things I’ve never paid attention to before, like how Strane was the one who pulled me out of class for the first meeting with Mrs. Giles, the fact that no one reported it to the state.

  “What, like child protective services?” I ask. “Come on. It wasn’t like that.”

  “Any time a teacher suspects a child is being abused, they’re mandated to report it.”

  “I worked in child protective services when I first moved to Portland,” I say, “and the kids who ended up in that system had been through actual abuse. Horrific stuff. What happened to me wasn’t anything like that.” I sit back, cross my arms. “This is why I hate talking about it. I end up making it sound way worse than it actually was.”

  She studies me, deep lines in her
forehead. “Knowing you, Vanessa, I think you’re more likely to minimize than exaggerate.”

  She starts talking in an authoritative tone I’ve never heard before, practically scolding. She says it’s humiliating what Browick forced me to do. That being instructed to demean yourself in front of your peers is enough to cause post-traumatic stress, regardless of anything else I went through.

  “Being forced into helplessness by one other person is terrible,” she says, “but being humiliated in front of a crowd . . . I don’t want to say that it’s worse, but it is different. It’s severely dehumanizing, especially for a child.”

  When I start to correct her use of “child,” she amends herself: “For someone whose brain wasn’t fully developed.” Then she meets my gaze, waits to see if I’ll challenge my own words. When I don’t, she asks if Strane stayed on at Browick after all that, if he knew what happened in that meeting.

  “He knew. He helped me plan what I was going to say. It was the only way to repair his reputation.”

  “Did he know you were going to get kicked out?”

  I lift my shoulders, unwilling to lie but unable to say yes, he knew, he wanted it to happen.

  “You know,” Ruby says, “earlier you described this as something he didn’t have the power to protect you from, but it sounds like he was actually the cause of it.”

  For a moment my breath gets knocked out of me, but I recover quickly, shrugging like it’s nothing. “It was a complicated situation. He did the best he could.”

  “Did he feel guilty about it?”

  “About having me kicked out?”

  “That,” she says, “and making you lie, take the fall.”

  “I think he thought it was unfortunate but something that had to be done. What was the alternative, him going to prison?”

  “Yes,” she says firmly, “that would have been an alternative, and it would have been a just one because what he did to you is a crime.”