Educated

you, Audrey wrote. But when my own mother didn’t believe me, I stopped
believing myself.fn1
It was a mistake she was going to correct. I believe God will hold me
accountable if I don’t stop Shawn from hurting anyone else, she wrote. She
was going to confront him, and our parents, and she was asking me to stand
with her. I am doing this with or without you. But without you, I will probably
lose.
I sat in the dark for a long time. I resented her for writing me. I felt she had
torn me from one world, one life, where I was happy, and dragged me back
into another.
I typed a response. I told her she was right, that of course we should stop
Shawn, but I asked her to do nothing until I could return to Idaho. I don’t
know why I asked her to wait, what benefit I thought time would yield. I
don’t know what I thought would happen when we talked to our parents, but I
understood instinctively what was at stake. As long as we had never asked, it
was possible to believe that they would help. To tell them was to risk the
unthinkable: it was to risk learning that they already knew.
Audrey did not wait, not even a day. The next morning she showed my
email to Mother. I cannot imagine the details of that conversation, but I know
that for Audrey it must have been a tremendous relief, laying my words
before our mother, finally able to say, I’m not crazy. It happened to Tara, too.
For all of that day, Mother pondered it. Then she decided she had to hear
the words from me. It was late afternoon in Idaho, nearly midnight in
England, when my mother, unsure how to place an international call, found
me online. The words on the screen were small, confined to a tiny text box in
the corner of the browser, but somehow they seemed to swallow the room.
She told me she had read my letter. I braced myself for her rage.
It is painful to face reality, she wrote. To realize there was something ugly,
and I refused to see it.fn2
I had to read those lines a number of times before I understood them.
Before I realized that she was not angry, not blaming me, or trying to
convince me I had only imagined. She believed me.
Don’t blame yourself, I told her. Your mind was never the same after the
accident.
Maybe, she said. But sometimes I think we choose our illnesses, because
they benefit us in some way.
I asked Mother why she’d never stopped Shawn from hurting me.