I OPENED AUDREY’S MESSAGE. It was written in one long paragraph, with
little punctuation and many spelling errors, and at first I fixated on
these grammatical irregularities as a way to mute the text. But the
words would not be hushed; they shouted at me from the screen.
Audrey said she should have stopped Shawn many years ago, before
he could do to me what he’d done to her. She said that when she was
young, she’d wanted to tell Mother, to ask for help, but she’d thought
Mother wouldn’t believe her. She’d been right. Before her wedding,
she’d experienced nightmares and flashbacks, and she’d told Mother
about them. Mother had said the memories were false, impossible. I
should have helped you, Audrey wrote. But when my own mother
didn’t believe me, I stopped believing myself.*1
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