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 the core of my mind, which invented in the
very moment of occurrence, then recorded the fiction.
In the month that followed, I lived the life of a lunatic. Seeing
sunshine, I suspected rain. I felt a relentless desire to ask people to
verify whether they were seeing what I was seeing. Is this book blue? I
wanted to ask. Is that man tall?
Sometimes this skepticism took the form of uncompromising
certainty: there were days when the more I doubted my own sanity, the
more violently I defended my own memories, my own “truth,” as the
only truth possible. Shawn was violent, dangerous, and my father was
his protector. I couldn’t bear to hear any other opinion on the subject.
In those moments I searched feverishly for a reason to think myself
sane. Evidence. I craved it like air. I wrote to Erin—the woman Shawn
had dated before and after Sadie, who I hadn’t seen since I was sixteen.
I told her what I remembered and asked her, bluntly, if I was
deranged. She replied immediately that I was not. To help me trust
myself, she shared her memories—of Shawn screaming at her that she
was a whore. My mind snagged on that word. I had not told her that
that was my word.
Erin told me another story. Once, when she had talked back to
Shawn—just a little, she said, as if her manners were on trial—he’d
ripped her from her house and slammed her head against a brick wall
so hard she’d thought he was going to kill her. His hands locked
around her throat. I was lucky, she wrote. I had screamed before he