My Dark Vanessa. Kate Russell Elizabeth
a few minutes.”
There’s the rustle of blankets as he sits up in bed and moves the phone from one ear to the other, and for a moment I think he’s about to say no. But then, in the half whisper that turns my bones to milk, he begins to tell me what I used to be: Vanessa, you were young and dripping with beauty. You were teenage and erotic and so alive, it scared the hell out of me.
I turn onto my stomach and shove a pillow between my legs. I tell him to give me a memory, something I can slip into. He’s quiet as he flips through the scenes.
“In the office behind the classroom,” he says. “It was the dead of winter. You, laid out on the sofa, your skin all goose bumps.”
I close my eyes and I’m in the office—white walls and gleaming wood floors, the table with a pile of ungraded papers, a scratchy couch, a hissing radiator, and a single window, octagonal with glass the color of seafoam. I’d fix my eyes on it while he worked at me, feeling underwater, my body weightless and rolling, not caring which way was up.
“I was kissing you, going down on you. Making you boil.” He lets out a soft laugh. “That’s what you used to call it. ‘Make me boil.’ Those funny phrases you’d come up with. You were so bashful, hated talking about any of it, just wanted me to get on with it. Do you remember?”
I don’t remember, not exactly. So many of my memories from back then are shadowy, incomplete. I need him to fill in the gaps, though sometimes the girl he describes sounds like a stranger.
“It was hard for you to keep quiet,” he says. “You used to bite your mouth shut. I remember once you bit down on your bottom lip so hard, you started to bleed, but you wouldn’t let me stop.”
I press my face into the mattress, grind myself against the pillow as his words flood my brain and transport me out of my bed and into the past where I’m fifteen and naked from the waist down, sprawled on the couch in his office, shivering, burning, as he kneels between my legs, his eyes on my face.
My god, Vanessa, your lip, he says. You’re bleeding.
I shake my head and dig my fingers into the cushions. It’s fine, keep going. Just get it over with.
“You were so insatiable,” Strane says. “That firm little body.”
I breathe hard through my nose as I come, as he asks me if I remember how it felt. Yes, yes, yes. I remember that. The feelings are what I’ve been able to hold on to—the things he did to me, how he always made my body writhe and beg for more.
I’ve been seeing Ruby for eight months, ever since my dad died. At first it was grief therapy, but it’s turned into talking about my mom, my ex-boyfriend, how stuck I feel in my job, how stuck I feel about everything. It’s an indulgence, even with Ruby’s sliding scale—fifty bucks a week just to get someone to listen to me.
Her office is a couple blocks from the hotel, a softly lit room with two armchairs, a sofa, and end tables holding boxes of tissues. The windows look out at Casco Bay: gulls swarming above the fishing piers, slow-moving oil tankers, and amphibious duck tours that quack as they ease into the water and transform from bus to boat. Ruby is older than me, big-sister older rather than mom older, with dishwater blond hair and granola clothes. I love her wooden-heeled clogs, the clack-clack-clack they make as she walks across her office.
“Vanessa!”
I love, too, the way she says my name as she opens the door, like she’s relieved to see me standing there and not anyone else.
That week we talk about the prospect of me going home for the upcoming holidays, the first without Dad. I’m worried my mother is depressed and don’t know how to broach the subject. Together, Ruby and I come up with a plan. We go through scenarios, the likely ways Mom will respond if I suggest she might need help.
“As long as you approach it with empathy,” Ruby says, “I think you’ll be ok. You two are close. You can handle talking about hard stuff.”
Close with my mother? I don’t argue but don’t agree. Sometimes I marvel at how easily I deceive people, doing it without even trying.
I manage to hold off checking the Facebook post until the end of the session, when Ruby takes out her phone to enter our next appointment into her calendar. Glancing up, she catches my furious scroll and asks if there’s any breaking news.
“Let me guess,” she says, “another abuser exposed.”
I look up from my phone, my limbs cold.
“It’s just so endless, isn’t it?” She gives a sad smile. “There’s no escape.”
She starts talking about the latest high-profile exposé, a director who built a career out of films about women being brutalized. Behind the scenes of those films, he apparently enjoyed exposing himself to young actresses and cajoling them into giving him blow jobs.
“Who would have guessed that guy was abusive?” Ruby asks, sarcastic. “His movies are all the evidence we need. These men hide in plain sight.”
“Only because we let them,” I say. “We all turn a blind eye.”
She nods. “You’re so right.”
It’s thrilling to talk like this, to creep so close to the edge.
“I don’t know what to think of all the women who worked with him over and over,” I say. “Did they have no self-respect?”
“Well, you can’t blame the women,” Ruby says. I don’t argue, just hand her my check.
At home I get stoned and fall asleep on the couch with all the lights on. At seven in the morning, my phone buzzes against the hardwood floor with a text and I stumble across the room for it. Mom. Hi honey. Just thinking of you.
Staring at the screen, I try to gauge what she knows. Taylor’s Facebook post has been up for three days now, and though Mom isn’t connected with anyone from Browick, the post has been shared so widely. Besides, she’s online all the time these days, endlessly liking, sharing, and getting into fights with conservative trolls. She easily could have seen it.
I minimize the text and bring up Facebook: 2.3k shares, 7.9k likes. Last night, Taylor posted a public status update:
BELIEVE WOMEN.
Turning onto the two-lane highway that takes us to Norumbega, Mom says, “I really want you to get out there this year.”
It’s the start of my sophomore year of high school, dorm move-in day, and this drive is Mom’s last chance to hold me to promises before Browick swallows me whole and her access to me is limited to phone calls and school breaks. Last year, she worried boarding school might make me wild, so she made me promise not to drink or have sex. This year, she wants me to promise I’ll make new friends, which feels exponentially more insulting, maybe even cruel. My falling-out with Jenny was five months ago, but it’s still raw. The mere phrase “new friends” twists my stomach; the idea feels like betrayal.
“I just don’t want you sitting alone in your room day and night,” she says. “Is that so bad?”
“If I were home, all I’d do is sit in my room.”
“But you’re not at home. Isn’t that the point? I remember you saying something about a ‘social fabric’ when you convinced us to let you come here.”
I press myself into the passenger seat, wishing my body could sink into it entirely so I wouldn’t have to listen to her use my own words against me. A year and a half ago, when a Browick representative came to my eighth grade class and played a recruitment video featuring a manicured campus bathed in golden light and I started the process of convincing my parents to let me apply, I made