seen it.”
Dad said I wouldn’t be happy until Shawn was rotting in prison, that
I’d come back from Cambridge just to raise hell. I said I didn’t want
Shawn in prison but that some type of intervention was needed. I
turned to Mother, waiting for her to add her voice to mine, but she was
silent. Her eyes were fixed on the floor as if Dad and I were not there.
There was a moment when I realized she would not speak, that she
would sit there and say nothing, that I was alone. I tried to calm Dad
but my voice trembled, cracked. Then I was wailing—sobs erupted
from somewhere, some part of me I had not felt in years, that I had
forgotten existed. I thought I might vomit.
I ran to the bathroom. I was shaking from my feet to my fingers.
I had to strangle the sobs quickly—Dad would never take me
seriously if I couldn’t—so I stopped the bawling using the old methods:
staring my face down in the mirror and scolding it for every tear. It was
such a familiar process, that in doing it I shattered the illusion I’d been
building so carefully for the past year. The fake past, the fake future,
both gone.
I stared at the reflection. The mirror was mesmeric, with its triple
panels trimmed with false oak. It was the same mirror I’d gazed into as
a child, then as a girl, then as a youth, half woman, half girl. Behind me
was the same toilet Shawn had put my head in, holding me there until I
confessed I was a whore.
I had often locked myself in this bathroom after Shawn let me go. I
would move the panels until they showed my face three times, then I
would glare at each one, contemplating what Shawn had said and what
he had made me say, until it all began to feel true instead of just
something I had said to make the pain stop. And here I was still, and
here was the mirror. The same face, repeated in the same three panels.
Except it wasn’t. This face was older, and floating above a soft
cashmere sweater. But Dr. Kerry was right: it wasn’t the clothes that
made this face, this woman, different. It was something behind her
eyes, something in the set of her jaw—a hope or belief or conviction—
that a life is not a thing unalterable. I don’t have a word for what it was
I saw, but I suppose it was something like faith.
I had regained a fragile sense of calm, and I left the bathroom
carrying that calmness delicately, as if it were a china plate balancing