theory, I didn’t remember a baby. In theory, my mother only had me.
Down the hall, I thought now. And for a second, I could almost taste a name, feel it like a scent in the air, a ghost of a ghost of a memory. A baby girl. Down the hall. Crying.
I squeezed my eyes shut. Pressed the heels of my hands into my eye sockets as if that might help. To remember. To forget?
I never knew. All these years later, I never knew.
My mother hurt me. I knew that. She was not well. So sick, in fact, that after that last incident, she was sent away permanently. A mental institute I guess, because that’s where sick people generally went, and jail would’ve involved a trial, and that I would’ve remembered.
My mother went away. That’s what Aunt Nancy told me the first day in the hospital, and I never brought it up again. Mentioning my mother’s name risked summoning the demon. So I never asked and Aunt Nancy never told.
Something bad had happened. Worse than usual. And I knew what it was. Deep down inside, I understood that I knew everything, that in fact I remembered
Maybe not the best coping strategy. And not without consequences. Turns out, when you wall off pieces of your mind, you can’t control everything that disappears. To this day, I have haphazard recall at best. Time escapes me, days, weeks. Entire conversations with best friends, the vital last lecture that happened right before the final exam.
Jackie and Randi used to tease me I’d forget my own head if it wasn’t attached to my shoulders. I’d laugh with them, but often self-consciously. Jackie had really called me on the phone last night, we’d talked for two hours, and I’d forgotten all of it? Randi had told me all about her first date with local heartthrob Tom Eastman, and I couldn’t recall a single detail?
Small glitches in the operating system, I’d tell myself. I mean, given the amount of resources I’d dedicated to wiping eight entire years from my general consciousness, some errors were bound to occur. Besides, no matter how much I screwed up, forgot, genuinely overlooked, those occasions were still better than the few times I started to remember.
Recall was most likely to happen when my anxiety spiked. Then the past would leak out in my dreams, snippets from an old movie reel, where once upon a time, a thin crazy mother lived in a tiny dirty house with her thin lonely daughter. And the mother fed her daughter shattered glass and slammed her fingers in kitchen drawers and pushed her down steep flights of stairs because little girls needed to be brave and tough.
Until one day, the little girl grew to be so brave, so tough, that she won the war.
That, I felt in my bones. My mother did something. But I won the war.
And I didn’t ask about my mother anymore, because in my heart of all hearts, I understood that answer might tell me everything I still wasn’t prepared to know.
Girl. Stuffed bear. White ruffles, pink polka dots.
Don’t remember. Block it out. Shove it away. Nothing good can come from the past, especially a past like mine. Not to mention, at this stage of the game, what would be the point?
A hunted woman doesn’t need closure. A hunted woman needs battle skills.
I stood abruptly, glanced at the clock in my shadowed room, and calculated the time remaining until 8 P.M., January 21. Zero hour. When my own killer would finally come calling.
Seventy-eight hours to go.
I put on my workout clothes, grabbed Tulip’s leash, and prepared to run.
MY FATHER LIVES IN BOSTON. Only argument Aunt Nancy and I ever had was about him, so again, another topic rarely broached and even less frequently considered. But yes, I have a father. Rich guy. On his fifth, sixth wife, last I heard. I have siblings, too, half siblings I guess. I’ve never met any of them, and I have no illusions my father is any more of a parent to them than he is to me.
My dad has a sperm donor approach to fatherhood. Meet a young pretty girl, knock her up. If she’s young enough, pretty enough, surgically enhanced enough, maybe marry her, too. Until of course, the next young pretty thing comes along, in which case, hey, he’s a guy; he can’t help himself.
I guess he met my mother while on vacation at the grand old Mount Washington Hotel in Bretton Woods. She was seventeen and working as a housekeeper. He was thirty and looking for entertainment. According to Aunt Nancy, my mother told him she was pregnant. He didn’t marry her, but sent money. Sperm donor, check writer. See, a hell of a guy.
He never followed up on my care. At least that’s how the story goes. Lost touch with my mother in the very beginning, which surprises me a little. Not that he’d let me go, but that my mother would let
I guess the cops in upstate New York called him first, after the incident. My mother had his name listed as the emergency contact, though no phone number. Police, however, are a bit more skilled than mentally ill twenty-five- year-olds, so within a matter of days, they tracked him down. He was not in the country, however. Paris, London, Amsterdam. I don’t recall.
He bounced them to Aunt Nancy, who did the honors of assuming responsibility for a niece she’d never met. Even then, she ran a business, the call came out of the blue, so it took a few more days while she made it from the wilds of New Hampshire to the even deeper wilds of upstate New York.
Those days remained hazy for me. I remembered waking up in the hospital. I remembered being surprised that I was alive. Then I remembered feeling deeply, deeply disappointed.
A social worker sat bedside. She had black hair cut in a short bob that showed off a sharp, angular face. Not a kind-looking person. Not maternal. She looked hard and spoke in a clipped voice.
The doctors had removed my appendix, maybe some other things. Apparently, spending years eating small doses of glass and rat poison was not good for various internal organs. But I was healing well, she’d assured me. I’d be just fine.
And again, I was so deeply, deeply disappointed.
I never spoke to her. Or the nurses. Or the doctors. They had betrayed me. They had forced me to live. I’d hated them for that.
Eventually, my aunt had arrived. She’d taken my hand, and that quickly I went from being my mother’s child to being my aunt’s niece.
That was the best thing that had ever happened to me.
Aunt Nancy was my mother’s older sister by six years. She had silver-gray hair cut Brillo short. Premature gray hair ran in the family, I was told. Like blue eyes and strong jawlines. But the gray color suited my aunt, brought out her steel blue eyes, her high cheekbones. My aunt could care less. If my mother was obsessed with male attention, then my aunt was equally obsessed with keeping men at arm’s length.
When their parents died in an auto accident-in New Hampshire you’ll notice lots of signs advising you to brake for moose; you really should- my aunt took over the parenting role. My mom was a wild one, even back then. And my aunt was the responsible one, even back then. Needless to say, their relationship was strained even before my mom got knocked up by a wealthy Boston financier.
They went their separate ways until one day, the phone rang and my aunt learned about an incident, a niece, and yet one more unexpected life change.
Like any kid, I never appreciated my aunt, until one night, my own phone rang with news of an incident, a tragedy, an unexpected loss. And I turned to my aunt for guidance, because given a choice between being my mother’s daughter and being my aunt’s niece, I’d take niecedom any day of the week.
My aunt is brave. My aunt is tough.
Fuck chewing shattered glass.
Run a bed and breakfast with little help and no health insurance in the mountains of New Hampshire, where in
