wandered too far, changed too much, bore too little resemblance to the
scabby-kneed girl they remembered as their sister.
There was little hope of overpowering the history my father and sister were
creating for me. Their account would claim my brothers first, then it would
spread to my aunts, uncles, cousins, the whole valley. I had lost an entire
kinship, and for what?
It was in this state of mind that I received another letter: I had won a
visiting fellowship to Harvard. I don’t think I have ever received a piece of
news with more indifference. I knew I should be drunk with gratitude that I,
an ignorant girl who’d crawled out of a scrap heap, should be allowed to
study there, but I couldn’t summon the fervor. I had begun to conceive of
what my education might cost me, and I had begun to resent it.
After I read Audrey’s letter, the past shifted. It started with my memories of
her. They transformed. When I recalled any part of our childhood together,
moments of tenderness or humor, of the little girl who had been me with the
little girl who had been her, the memory was immediately changed,
blemished, turned to rot. The past became as ghastly as the present.
The change was repeated with every member of my family. My memories
of them became ominous, indicting. The female child in them, who had been
me, stopped being a child and became something else, something threatening
and ruthless, something that would consume them.
This monster child stalked me for a month before I found a logic to banish
her: that I was likely insane. If I was insane, everything could be made to
make sense. If I was sane, nothing could. This logic seemed damning. It was
also a relief. I was not evil; I was clinical.
I began to defer, always, to the judgment of others. If Drew remembered
something differently than I did, I would immediately concede the point. I
began to rely on Drew to tell me the facts of our lives. I took pleasure in
doubting myself about whether we’d seen a particular friend last week or the
week before, or whether our favorite crêperie was next to the library or the
museum. Questioning these trivial facts, and my ability to grasp them,
allowed me to doubt whether anything I remembered had happened at all.
My journals were a problem. I knew that my memories were not memories
only, that I had recorded them, that they existed in black and white. This
meant that more than my memory was in error. The delusion was deeper, in