Of course they reconciled. Their breakup lasted a year, and Girl had done everything she could to encourage Mother to resist, but once Stepmother turned her attention back on Mother, she melted like margarine. Girl was expected to understand and welcome her back. It wasn’t that easy for Girl. She never said, “you didn’t just break Mother’s heart, you broke mine, too.”
the basement
It was Thanksgiving. Girl and her children always stayed in her parents’ basement when they visited Mother and Stepmother. Girl preferred the falling-down acoustic tiles overhead and a modicum of privacy to the guest bedroom, where she had to listen to her parents snore and fart in their sleep. She had turned off the fluorescent tube lighting in favor of a shadeless table lamp set on the floor. Dim light from a low angle turned the cobwebs into large looming shadows. Damp air fought the space heater for dominance and won.
Girl woke at 1:00 a.m. She had to pee. She glanced at her phone, as she always did whenever she woke up, whatever the hour. Girl clicked on Facebook to see who, if anybody, had liked her latest picture. She had posted a selfie taken in front of a diorama of taxidermied beavers at the museum. “Me and My Beaver,” she had teasingly titled it.
There was a comment from Jim, the son of Mother’s best friend back from when Girl was growing up. Better than the picture I took of your beaver, it said, followed by something weird about “machine-drive type animations of kids posing and interacting with aquatic animals behind glass.” Girl re-read it and turned off her phone’s screen. She hit the button again, re-illuminating her home page, still open to Facebook, then held the button until the phone turned completely off, buzzing in her hands. Girl ran upstairs to the kitchen powder room and her bowels exploded. Terror made some people throw up, but for Girl, it was always the other end.
She went back downstairs. Girl picked up her laptop and copied the comment to a text file, then deleted the comment from her Facebook page. She deleted the picture as well. Girl looked at her sons sleeping in the dimly lit room—one boy on an old mildewed army cot, the other child on a queen-sized inflatable bed. She retreated to the twin-size foldaway that completed their sleeping island, all pushed together so she could pet their heads if they woke up. Girl put her face close to her oldest son’s cheek and breathed his sleeping smell.
She had hoped for twenty-seven years that this story would never come to light. Girl pulled the thin, department-store quilt over her shoulder and tried to think. The pictures. God, why had she ever let him take pictures? Yes, she’d been thirteen, but she had known better. It wasn’t like she wanted to run for president, but she didn’t want them coming to light now that she was a mother.
Girl tried to type a response to Jim. She used words like shame, missing negatives, and illegal. There were a lot of other words she wanted to type but didn’t. She tried to be fair. Girl had said yes, and Jim was only a few years older than she was, not a grown-up by any means. Girl decided not to send her message until the next day, not until she could read it to someone who belonged to her life now. Girl lay on her back and looked at the dark corners at the edges of the rafters where the ceiling tiles had fallen down. She waited for dawn to dilute the night to gray so she could go home. She wanted to be back in her pumpkin-colored bedroom with her fuzzy, blue blanket, handmade pillows, and people she could talk true to. This was not a story she could tell her mother.
Girl could not get her lungs to fill properly. It hurt to breathe in her pectoral muscles, and in her constricted rib cage. It hurt her skin to remember, and memory made her clammy, damp, and cold. She wrapped her arms around her chest. She watched for daylight and the clicking of digits on the clock as she waited for morning.
Another trip to her parents’ basement a few months later, and once again Girl woke at 1:00 a.m., but this time there was no buzzing phone, only choking anxiety. The untold story still hung in the basement air. She could not escape the girl she had once been.
Girl went upstairs. Stepmother was awake in the living room, watching TV.
“What’s wrong, Girl?” she asked.
“I have anxiety,” Girl said, and haltingly told her the story of the photographs. She thought Stepmother would rage against male abusers, insist on talking to Jim. Girl was as afraid of directing Stepmother’s rage at him as she was scared of her judgment of Girl’s actions. Stepmother was always the voice in her head that told her that she wasn’t good enough.
“That’s all? Some naked pictures? That’s no big deal,” Stepmother said when Girl finished the story. Girl looked at her closely—Stepmother was completely unfazed. No rage, no shaming her, nothing. “Here,” Stepmother said, “take a Xanax.”
“I don’t know what it will do to me,” Girl said. “What if I sleep all day tomorrow?”
“You won’t, but if you do, I’ll wake up with the kids. Just take half a Xanax if you are so worried. And tell yourself, ‘what I am feeling is
