“What do you do for work, Sweetie?” Cher asked. 

I hesitated. “I write.”

“What do you write?”

“Poetry.”

“Hmph, poems.” Cher glanced at me sideways. “What else do you do for work?”

“I’m a graduate student,” I said, though this was technically no longer true. “I was on a dissertation fellowship, but the funding just ended, and I was teaching in the spring, but the semester is over. Now I’m working on final dissertation edits, and I’ll graduate with my PhD soon.” 

This was a long-winded way of saying. Nothing. I do nothing. 

“Don’t worry, Sweetie. You will be working again very soon,” Cher predicted with conviction. 

She looked at me expectantly.

“I do have a job interview next week.”

“What kind of job?”

“A faculty teaching job,” I said. “At a small college.”

“A professor!” she said. “That’s good! What do you teach?”

“Writing,” I said.

“Writing is important,” she smiled and leaned back in her chair.

“Yes, of course, writing is important,” I said. “But I’m not sure this is the right job for me.”

“What do you mean?”

“I taught a course last semester, and I don’t know how to explain it, but I feel like there’s something wrong with the school.” 

Cher looked at me blankly. “Do you have anything else lined up?” 

“No,” I admitted.

“Well, Sweetie,” Cher said. “I hate to break it to you, but beggars can’t be choosers.”

“I know that,” I shot back. “I’ll take the job if I get the offer,” I said. “But there’s something off there,” I insisted. “Something isn’t right.”

Cher didn’t seem to hear me and changed the subject. “Do you have anything else coming up in the next few weeks?”

“I have a friend coming to visit. Then I’m going to see my mother on the fourth of July.”

“Who is this friend?” she asked. 

“Her name is Marream. She’s a friend from school.”

“And how long is she staying?”

“For the summer, I think,” I said. “Why do you ask?”

I was annoyed, unsure about what I was doing in Cher’s psychic storefront parlor. I worried that she was filing away everything I said to her, stockpiling my own words and gestures in the vault of her mind like cards to play against me at a later date. What’s more, I didn’t remember giving her my phone number, so I was surprised when she texted me, asking me to stop by and telling me she had something important to give me. Now, I had been sitting in her office for fifteen minutes, and so far, all she had given me was a line of questioning and questionable advice.

“You’re probably wondering why I asked you to come see me today,” Cher said. I gulped and nodded. I didn’t trust her, but sometimes it did feel like this lady was reading my mind. “There’s something I need to tell you,” she paused for dramatic effect. “You was born to have a spirituality at level 10 and above.” 

“I don’t know what you mean.” 

“As I said, you was born to have a spirituality at level above 10,” Cher repeated the words loudly and slowly. “But right now, you are at a Level 3.” 

I was offended and curious. I leaned back in my chair but didn’t look away from her face. 

She held up three fingers to emphasize her point. “This is a very serious situation. You are in spiritual trouble.”

“What do you mean when you say spiritual?” I asked. 

She looked at me as if I were stupid. “SPIR-IT-UAL,” she said slowly, almost as if she were spelling it out. “Your connection to spirit. Your relationship wit God.”

“I don’t know if I believe in God,” I said. 

“Don’t be silly,” she said dismissively. “God is everywhere.” She waved her hand, gesturing towards the people passing on the street. “But you—you are living for the flesh.” 

Her words hung heavy in the air. 

“Your soul is in danger, and we must build up your spiritual strength,” she said. 

There was a crystal ball on the side table between us. Cher reached down and drew two velvet pouches out of a drawer. She coaxed the contents of the larger pouch into the palm of her hand: a handful of polished crystal stones. One by one, I heard them clink against the wooden surface of the table. 

“There’s seven crystals here,” she explained slowly and carefully, as if speaking to a child. “One for each of your chakras. Do you know what that means?”

Of course, I knew about the chakras. I’d been practicing yoga for nearly a decade and had come to her precisely because I was sure that my suffering stemmed from a blockage or malfunction of my root chakra. 

“Yes,” I said.

“Do you know what color goes with what chakra?”

I did, and I didn’t, but I cautiously began to arrange the crystals in the order of an ascending rainbow: red jasper for the root chakra, orange carnelian for the sacral chakra, green jade for the heart, amethyst for the third eye, and clear quartz crystal for the crown. Even though it was a simple, intuitive exercise, there were two stones I did not know where to place.

Cher lifted the smooth piece of tiger’s eye with one hand and placed her other hand just below my rib cage: “Tiger’s eye is for courage. This is your power center. You are weak here.” 

The blue stone, which I know now to be sodalite, she held at my throat. “You have lost your voice,” she said. “You don’t speak the truth.”

I felt simultaneously affirmed and affronted. I didn’t like being seen so clearly for my weaknesses, but I knew what she said was true, and, in that, there was a sense of relief. 

“Meditate with these stones in this order,” she instructed, tapping her red fingernail against the tabletop. 

She then opened the other pouch and produced two more crystals: a clear quartz point and a jagged piece of yellow citrine. She pressed the crystal point into my left hand and the citrine into my right. 

“Now close your eyes and breathe.”

I closed my eyes and took a jagged inhale.

“Concentrate on your root. Imagine a ball of light glowing at the base of your spine.”

I felt dizzy. Behind the closed curtain of my eyelids, I saw a faint, radiant red glow.

“Do you see it?” Cher asked.

“I think I see it,” I replied.

“Don’t play games,” Cher snapped. “Either you see it, or you don’t see it. Which is it?”

“I see it,” I said. 

“Now breathe into your second chakra—here,” she lay her hand on my lower abdomen. “This is your creativity, your—excuse me for saying it—sexuality. Watch the light travel up, chakra to chakra, until you reach the crown of your head. Do you see it? The light moving up through your heart, into your throat, to your third eye, pouring out of your crown?”

I could see it. The lights were overwhelming. My palms tingled. The crystals in my palms felt very hot and very cold. My head buzzed electric, and I felt dizzy.

“Can I meditate lying down?” I asked.

I could hear Cher’s subtle, disapproving intake of her breath. “Try to meditate sitting up, Sweetie.”

She led me through the exercise three more times, gathering light in each chakra and following the light up through the Sushumna to the top of my head. When this was done, she returned the crystals to their respective pouches and placed them neatly on the table.

“Do this exercise morning and night,” she instructed. “It will raise your vibration.”

Vibration. Cher used that word a lot. I wasn’t sure what she meant by it, but I had the feeling its meaning was supposedly so apparent that to ask for a definition would be to reveal my intellectual weakness. 

“Okay,” I said dubiously. 

“Now,” she said. “Did you bring the money?”

I hesitated. “Tell me again about the candles.”

Cher sighed, “We are going to light nine pillar candles.” She paused, holding her hand waist-high to indicate the height of the candles and estimating their circumference by forming a circle with her thumb and forefingers. The light of these candles will guide your father’s soul through the nine circles of hell and into the light of redemption.”

“Where are they? I want to see them.”

“No, Sweetie,” Cher explained. “The candles will be lit in my church and prayed over day and night.”

“By whom? Where is the church?”

“Healing is an act of faith,” she said. “You must learn to trust in things you can’t see.”

This sounded equal parts reasonable and suspicious. I took a deep breath and reached into my bag. That summer, I carried a small canvas tote embossed with a cartoon bagel and the name of a Jewish deli. In the bag, there was a paperback book. Pressed between the book’s pages was a sealed, white legal envelope that contained $1500—the reduced fee for this “work.” I pulled the money out of the bag and placed it on the table, and Cher slid the velvet pouches, bulging with crystal, towards me.

“Hold the money to your heart,” Cher instructed. “Yes, good. Now, make a wish, pray for release, and blow on it three times.” 

I did this and reflexively made the sign of the cross.

Cher nodded in approval. “In Jesus name,” she said. “Amen.”

I gave her the envelope, and she gave me the crystals. 

As I stood up to leave, Cher tapped me on the shoulder, glanced urgently at my sandals, and said,  “Go get a pedicure, Sweetie. Your feet look terrible.”

***

I was a professional student—accustomed to following instructions. Although I did not understand the nature of her subject matter and was unsure of her qualifications as a teacher, I was still determined to earn an A in whatever course of study I had inadvertently undertaken with Cher, so the next morning, I went out and got my nails done. 

It was an easy assignment, and I walked home admiring my gleaming pink toes. 

The meditations, on the other hand, were more challenging. I found the process physically and emotionally exhausting. I was a longtime yoga practitioner, accustomed to sitting for prolonged periods and “clearing the mind,” but something about the presence of the stones—an increased intensity—made it difficult for me to focus and sit up straight.

I abandoned the exercise and spent the rest of the day avoiding meditation with every possible procrastination tactic. I took a walk, binged half a season of a forgettable TV show, spent an hour on dissertation edits, and then began cleaning the apartment in preparation for Marream’s arrival.

First, I did the dishes. Then, I stripped the bed and carried the dirty linens to the laundromat. I swept and washed the blond wooden floors, then returned to the laundromat to transfer the wet linens into the dryer. Back at the apartment, I cleared the coat closet to make space for Marream to store her things.

The apartment was spacious—nearly 2/3 of a brownstone floor—with ample room for a queen-sized bed, a dresser, a six-foot couch and ottoman, a dining table that my landlord had built by hand to comfortably seat seven people, floor-to-ceiling bookshelves, and a kitchen with a deep work sink and appliances constructed not quite to scale. The bathroom, with a tiny shower tucked in the corner, had a glass-paneled door and walls that did not extend to the ceiling. The apartment was comfortable and well-proportioned but afforded no privacy. 

Marream and I were creatures of habit and solitary like cats, so in preparation for her arrival, I had acquired folding, paper-paneled, Japanese-style room dividers to create separate sleeping spaces. I would sleep on the bed and give Marream the couch, which was cozy and clean and had been purchased but barely used on Craigslist. I retrieved the clean laundry, folded the linens, made the bed, and admired my handiwork. 

My eyes fell on the chakra crystals arranged in ascending order on the nighstand. I sat cross-legged on the freshly made bed, leaned back against a wall of pillows, and took the clear quartz crystal in my left hand and the chunk of raw citrine in my right. I closed my eyes, took three deep breaths, and was almost immediately transported back to my childhood home. 

I recalled, with vivid detail and the smell of old English furniture oil, the weekly housekeeping rituals of my childhood. Every Saturday, my mother divided the house into sectors to vacuum, dust, polish, and scrub. My mother, brother, and I worked as a team—though my father was excused from the ritual. My primary responsibility was to clean the bathrooms, scrubbing the toothpaste from the sink and the soap scum from the tub; wiping down the mirrors with windex; and mopping the floors with a solution of water and bleach. Guests always remarked on the cleanliness of our home, on our teamwork, and work ethic, but to me the house always felt dirty. There was a parade of ants on the window sill. A musty odor in the bathroom. Somehow the pillows always smelled faintly of urine. No matter how much we vacuumed, there was cat dander on the surface of everything, and litter crunched underfoot on the basement floor. Whenever anyone was coming over—a friend from school, a babysitter, a dinner guest—Mom would fly into a panic and Dad would fly into a rage, tearing the kitchen apart and clearing ‘the throwaway place’—that spot on the counter where mail piled up. It was almost frightening, the way we worked to keep up appearances, so that everything was always spotless on the surface. 

Everything was in order, polished, and placed just so. 

My mother was always working. She left for work by seven in the morning and usually got home after five. Sometimes she changed her clothes, but, more often than not, she just put an apron on over her dress and began peeling potatoes in her high heels. There is dignity in hard work, and my mother worked the hot stove as hard a servant. After dinner, I cleared the table and loaded the dishwasher and put things away, while Mom scrubbed the grease furiously in the steaming sink. She always wore rubber gloves and I never saw her take a nap—not once in my whole childhood. 

We always ate dinner together. It was a ritual. I set the table: lay out the cutlery and napkins over the tablecloth, ensured that we had separate bowls for the salad, and filled the water glasses to the brim. It was a formal arrangement, and we all had assigned seats at the table. Mom sat at the head, and my brother sat at the foot of the table. My father sat across from me and studied me intently with his slightly crossed eyes—dark blue like the eyes of our Siamese cat. Dad sat in the seat by the counter, and I sat in the chair by the bannister, and none of us ever deviated from this fixed, social order. Mom sat at the head of the table because it was the most accessible. From there, she could easily jump up when the tea kettle boiled or when it was time to take the roast out of the oven. Corners somewhat hemmed in all the other seats: the counter that extended its long arm into the center of the room, the bannister that overlooked the sunken family room below, the nook by the window. The head of the table was closest to the stove, to the sink, to the working part of the kitchen. 

The night that it happened, Mom was stationed in her usual position. One moment, she was my prim and beautiful mother—though it was the end of the day, so her curls were just a little bit limp and her clothes just a little bit rumpled and worn. The next, she bit into a tough piece of meat, and her front teeth disintegrated. She spit her teeth out on her plate, her face collapsed, and her mouth was a black cavern with two dark metal fangs where her incisors should be. 

For a moment, it was as if everything else—my father, my brother, the Siamese cat—had evaporated, and it was just my mother and I, looking at each other through a vortex of terror and shame. 

Then my father was rushing around, dictating commands, searching his contacts, and placing calls for emergency dental care. 

Mom covered her mouth with a napkin and ran upstairs to hide under the covers. 

I had never seen my mother lie in bed before eleven pm, just as, it turns out, I’d never seen her real teeth—because someone had knocked her front teeth out of her face a few years before I was born. 

She had been assaulted. In broad daylight. Near my father’s regional offices in Northeast Philadelphia. By “two or three” boys. They hadn’t raped her or robbed her. Instead, they pushed her to the ground and smashed her mouth against the curb. Her front teeth broke and cut through her lip. The remnants had to be surgically removed and were replaced with a fixed dental bridge. 

If you were meeting my mother for the first time—as I did at birth—you would never know that those were not her own straight white teeth, but the prosthetic changed the shape of her face, the curve of her smile. For weeks, her face was a bruise, and she could no longer recognize herself in the mirror. 

It was a crime without a clear motive. Her assailants did not even take her bag. 

Luckily, she was attacked just down the street from Dad’s office, and she called him right away, and even though her mouth was streaming with blood, he understood what she was saying and arrived on the scene before the police. 

My father was always there. He was not afraid of blood and thrived in emergencies.

I sat up straight and opened my eyes with a start. One moment, I was a child, and the next moment, I was back in my Brooklyn apartment. It was again the summer of 2012—a strange and prolonged season—the hot breath of air in the year of the dragon. It was a dynamic moment, everything moving very fast and very slowly in the liminal space between one way of being and another.

And in the midst of it all, Marream was coming to visit. 

***

Marream had given up her apartment in Denver and shipped her possessions—three boxes of papers and books—to her brother in New Jersey. Her plan was to spend the summer on the East Coast—based primarily out of my apartment, visiting with her brother and love interest in New Jersey, and trying to figure out her next move. The problem with this plan was that I lived in a studio apartment and was having a nervous breakdown.

Marream and I loved each other—but not enough to establish clear ground rules. Aside from offhandedly remarking that I would occasionally need some time to myself, we did not establish any expectations or boundaries regarding the rules of the house or the length of her stay. 

All in all, we didn’t have a plan, which was evidence the first day when Marream showed up on my doorstep after a long journey in the boiling heat because, first things first, she needed to smoke.

For Marream, smoking a cigarette was an hour-long ritual. She smoked American Spirits, which were potent and long-burning, paired with a rich and delicious beverage, so smoking always began with making a drink. Sometimes, she smoked with strong black tea made light with cream and sweetened with honey. She had a penchant for mocha lattes, and she drank whiskey—two shots over ice, topped with Diet Coke and lime. 

Sometimes, late at night, I smoked an occasional cigarette with one hand hanging out the window that overlooked the back garden, and I didn’t want to send Marream back out on the street in the heat having just arrived, so I rustled up an old ashtray and fixed her a cup of tea, and no sooner had Marream sat down by the window and taken three puffs of her cigarette than a disgruntled neighbor knocked on the apartment door, complaining about the smoke. 

Marream apologized and put out the cigarette, and we went down the stairs to sit on the front stoop, but within minutes, the neighbor came downstairs to complain that the smoke was traveling up the building—three flights—to his window, and by this time, Marream felt persecuted.

We crossed the street to sit on the bench by the small local gym. This was during the Brooklyn baby boom, and gentrification was in full effect. Fit young mothers glared at Marream as they wheeled by with their blond toddlers on scooters and in baby strollers. 

“From the way these people look at me, you’d think I was a rapist,” Marream paused for comedic effect, “or a murderer.”

When we got back to the apartment, that’s when Marream produced the receipts. A few months prior, I had sent her $8000. I estimated that she would give half to her friend for medical expenses and the other half to keep for herself as a buffer, a little cushion to help her through a lean season—but she didn’t use the money as I had hoped and intended, because unlike me, Marream knew what to do with a black box full of cash. 

Instead of keeping the money, Marream gave the money away—in $1000 donations—to non-profit organizations. I appreciated the gesture, and I was frustrated and annoyed because I wanted her to take care of herself, to be safe—and now her she was, on my couch with no money in the bank and nowhere to go. This was a lesson, and Marream was a great teacher because she taught me, among other things, that when you give someone something, you must do so without expectation, for you cannot control how they use it.

Marream rifled through her bag and produced the receipts for these transactions—old-fashioned pink and yellow carbon copies issued by Green Peace and The Smiles Foundation—an organization that provides dental care to underprivileged children. I thought of my mother as I filed the receipts away with the rest of my stolen treasure in the hollow book on the shelf.

After dinner, Marream wanted to smoke again, so to be safe, this time, I led her around the corner to a little public park. We settled on a picnic table in the shadows. I wanted to talk to Marream about the things I was remembering—my mother’s false teeth, the way she spit them out on the plate when I was thirteen. Marream lit her cigarette and took a sip of her drink as I searched for the words—how to say it correctly to make her understand.

“I remembered something last night,” I began slowly. “Something strange.”   

Just then, I heard two short electronic yelps, accompanied by the flash of blue lights as an NYPD patrol car rolled up at the entrance to the park, and two cops got out and approached us on foot to tell us we were trespassing and issued a summons for being in the park after dark.

Our visit was not off to a strong start.

Back at the apartment, I made up the couch as a bed for Marream and hid behind the folding room dividers, which created a visual—but not auditory—buffer and did not have the desired effect of creating the illusion of two separate rooms. 

I arranged the crystals on my bedstand, leaned back on my pillow, and was again transported back through my memories to the kitchen table.

Mom filed a police report, went to the hospital, and scheduled her dental work. The following week, she was called to examine suspects in a line-up, but she didn’t recognize anyone, and no one was ever charged with the assault. 

That’s all I know of what happened, except that something else happened the day Mom’s bridge fell out at the dinner table. Suddenly, her mouth became a black vacancy. Even her voice had changed. It was huskier, duskier, twinged with unspoken truths that slithered out of her mouth with the heavy lisp of a snake. Her face collapsed around that ancient vacancy and told the truth. Bitterness and grief were written all over her face.

I was thirteen years old and had never seen my mother without her mask. 

It was dark in the hall, and I could only see the cavern of her mouth when she told me. It was so long ago. I’ve blocked everything out by the dark shape of her mouth and the shiver of her words as she told me the truth. 

Before I was born, when Mom still had her real teeth, my father wanted to take in a child. They had tried for years to conceive until Mom was convinced she could not bear children, so my father found an agency that placed unwanted and abandoned children with families. Linda was twelve years old when they took her in. Mom didn’t want her, but Dad insisted because was generous and had such a big heart, and Linda was autistic and needed a home. It was the right thing to do. 

I gasped. Of course. I had always known something about Linda. Strange objects haunted my childhood: framed photographs, handmade clay figurines, and whispers. I always believed, on some level, that I had a big sister. 

“What happened to her?” I whispered into the dark of my mother’s mouth.

“She accused your father, and she was removed from the home.”

The house was silent, except for the noisy truth that echoed in and around her words.

“Of course, it was a lie. He never touched her. She was doing it for attention, and no one believed her.”

The hallway was mournful and dark. I could just see Christ’s gleaming limbs hung from the crucifix in the corner. I could see my mother’s face, the void of her mouth, from which issued the vibration of unspeakable truths, finally spoken.

The next morning, my father drove her to the prosthodontist, and Mom had her bridge replaced, and she came home looking more like herself. She never spoke of the assault—or Linda—ever again, but I filed both stories away in my mind. 

I gasped audibly and sat up with a jolt. 

“Are you okay?” Marream called through the paper divider.

“I’m fine,” I lied. “I just had a bad dream,” but I knew what I had seen was not a bad dream. It was a memory. 

***

The next day, Marream and I walked over the Brooklyn Bridge to eat dumplings in Chinatown. The day after that, she fell ill—from the dumplings or the stress of the travel—and she wasn’t quite recovered when it was time for me to visit my mother at the lake for the 4th of July, so I got in the car and drove upstate alone. 

The sky was a white summer haze. Tiger lilies bloomed in fiery stalks by the side of the road, and, at dusk, fireflies decorated the horizon. I remembered the endless drive from Philadelphia to the lake where we summered with my grandparents when I was a child, strapped in the backseat behind my father. I always knew we were close when my father said, “Strawberries, Apples, Peaches, and Plums,” for that was our code for arrival. Then, the glimmer of the lake flashed between the trees, and we would pull up to a row of little cottages, which had since been replaced by a sturdy, modern log home. 

They say that remembering something is almost identical neurologically to experiencing it. When I arrived at the lake house, I was startled to recall that my grandmother occasionally mentioned Linda, always and only to say that the poor child was touched and had always referred to the lake—which spanned over 30 miles—as her swimming pool. 

The lake was deep and cold, fed by melting snows off the mountains and underground springs. My mother and I spent the afternoon swimming. At dinnertime, we drank beer and put corn and burgers on the grill. After dinner, we walked across the street to a neighbor’s screen porch, where we watched the fireworks festoon over the lake. 

It was perfect and idyllic; underneath, I was about to explode.

When we got home, my tongue was loose from the alcohol. 

“I’ve been thinking,” I said. “About Dad.”

“What about Dad?” My mother never shied away from talking about my father. “What about your father?”

“I’ve been thinking about Dad,” I said. “And about Linda.”

“What about Linda?” she said.

“What happened with Linda?”

“What do you mean, what happened with Linda?”

“Who was she? Why did she stop living with you?”

“Where is this coming from?” my mother asked.

“Just curious,” I said. “I’ve been remembering things.”

The firework display had ended in a splendid mushroom of gold, and then the party was supposed to be over, but the neighbors had their own firecrackers and intermittent blasts ripped through the dark night air. 

“Well, Linda came to live with us in the late 1970s. I don’t remember exactly. She lived with us full-time for a few years. Eventually, she was placed in a group home, and after that, sometimes she came on weekends and holidays.

“Why did she stop living with you?” I asked.

“Well, she was old enough to live in the group home, and we thought that would be a more appropriate setting,” my mother said.

“I thought she had accused Dad of sexual misconduct,” I said.

BOOM. It was like a bomb had gone off in the living room.

“Well, that was just ridiculous,” Mom said.

“Sounds pretty serious to me,” I said.

“She had accused other men, you know,” my mother said. “A teacher. And a bus driver. Really?” she asked rhetorically, “A bus driver?” She said in disbelief. “Under what circumstances would a bus driver have had the opportunity to do something like that?”

“Well, you just said she lived with you for three years, so Dad would have had plenty of opportunity.”

“There was no proof,” my mother said. “There was absolutely no proof.”

“I’ve read,” I ventured, “that disabled people are statistically much more likely to be abused than the general population.”

“Linda was Autistic,” my mother said, “But she was very smart, and she knew what she was doing. She knew exactly what she was doing.”

“And what exactly was she doing?” I asked.

“She was doing it for attention,” my mother spat.

“Every therapist I’ve spoken to says that when a child accuses an adult of sexual misconduct, it’s important to believe the child. More often than not, they are telling the truth.”

“Well, Linda wasn’t a child,” Mom said. “And who would believe your father would do such a thing?”

“Mom,” I said softly. “He did it to me. I think he did those things to me.”

My mother took a step back and shook her head.

“I’ve been trying to figure it out, put the pieces together,” I began to explain, but my mother was shaking her head, pressing her hands to her ears. 

“You tricked me,” her voice was thick with accusation, and a firework tore through the night. “How dare you? You tricked me into talking about this.” 

BOOM. 

“It’s not a trick, Mom,” I said. “I’m trying to tell you the truth.”

“Well, I don’t accept that,” she said, crossing her arms over her chest. “I don’t believe you.”

“It’s true,” my voice was a whisper, a hiss. “Why would I lie about something like this?”

“You know what I think?” she said. “I think someone is putting these ideas in your hood.”

BOOM. Everything was bursting—the sky, my heart, the narrative of my life. BOOM. All the lies I had inherited, internalized, entombed. Everything was coming apart, bursting open in great flashes of light—light that cut through the darkness like knives, great searing blades of fire and truth. 

“Mom, I remember,” my voice was halfway between a confession and a threat. “I REMEMBER.” And in a flash I did: I remembered hide-and-go seek in the middle of the night, crouching in the coat closet, in the nook in the dining room, and behind the living room couch, but there was nowhere to hide. I remembered sneaking to the front door in the middle of the night and silently turning the key, hoping to escape, knowing there was nowhere to run. I remembered praying the house would burn down. I remembered my father’s cold blue eyes, boring down on me when he woke me up in the morning, when I stood naked in front of him in the bathroom as he dressed me for school.

“Someone is poisoning your mind.” 

In a flash, I remembered my mother weeping like a ghost in the dark corridor of my childhood home, rocking and whispering, “I wish I were dead. I wish I were dead.” And I remembered her recoiling from me in disgust and wrenching me to the sink to wash my mouth out with soap, striking me hard across the face suddenly and without discernible reason because I hadn’t realized I had said something wrong, something I was supposed to say—the truth. 

“You knew,” I stared at my mother in disbelief as the truth rose between us like a terrible dawn. “You knew what he was doing to me and you protected him.”

“Is it that Marream person you are hanging around with?” My mother’s voice was a knife. “That woman isn’t your friend. She just wants you to be as bereft and alone in this world as she is.”

I clenched my left hand into a fist around my rage and then flattened it to a flat, lethal plane. Something electric moved through the left side of my body—a gathering energy—I didn’t know what was happening until the flat of my palm crashed across my mother’s face. 

She looked at me, shocked, aghast, her right palm cupping her cheek.

“He abused me,” I said. My voice was white rage, my body a furious calm. “And you knew. You allowed it.” 

I walked past her and slammed the door to my room. I felt wide awake and oddly calm. I paced in silent circles through the room. Here was the dresser from my grandmother’s house, the drawers filled with centuries of lies and odds and ends: prayer cards, rosaries, sachets of potpourri. On the wall in the corner was a gilt-framed lenticular picture from the 1960s. Looking at it from a certain angle, you saw an image of the Blessed Mother, draped in a veil. If you shifted your perspective, you saw Christ, with one hand gesturing to his Sacred Heart, pierced by a sword and illuminated with the flame of divine love. I closed myself in the midnight room, and the whole world winnowed down to the sound of my phone vibrating in the corner. I didn’t recognize the number, but I answered it anyway. 

“Are you okay, Sweetie?” I was surprised to hear Cher’s voice; she had never called me before. “I’ve been trying to reach you. I had a feeling something was going on with you.”

“It was my father,” I said evenly.

There was a long silence as the line hung full with the sound of our breath.

“That’s what I seen too, Sweetie,” Cher’s voice was full of understanding and remorse. “I was wrong,” she said. “We don’t need to release him from you—we need to release you from him.”

I sank to the edge of the bed, clutching my chest with gratitude and relief. Someone heard me. Someone believed me.

“Where are you, Sweetie?” she asked. 

“I’m upstate,” I said. “With my mother”

“We have to act fast,” she instructed. “Can you come to see me tomorrow?”

“No,” I said. “I’ll be back soon, but there’s something I need to do first.”

***

The next morning, I found my mother stationed on the front porch with a book on her lap. She was wearing a yellow blouse, dark glasses, and wide, lime-green straw hat. The right side of her face was a bruise.

“I’m leaving,” I said.

“When are you coming back?” she asked, closing the book on her lap. She spoke casually, but behind her dark glasses, her eyes were wide, dolorous, terrified. 

“I’m not coming back,” I said, turning away. 

I threw my bags in the car, and soon I was roaring south down the highway—in a tunnel from one place to another—but that image of my mother, dressed so elegantly to disguise her injury—the injury I had inflicted—was fixed indelibly in my mind. There was something familiar—and studied—about it as if she knew what to do because something like this had happened before. The full force of my rage was behind me—like the force of a train barreling forward. I was wild with fear and relief. The road before me was clear and open, and I knew what to do.

There is a preconception that a recovered memory is an entirely new memory—a memory that heretofore the subject had absolutely no recollection of—but this is not my experience. In my experience, the recovery of repressed memory has much more to do with the recovery of words. It wasn’t so much that I had forgotten; it was that I had never spoken of it, and those things we cannot say come to define our limit of what we are able to think, imagine, believe. That’s why vocabulary itself is valuable, for what lies beyond the realm of words is beyond the realm of thought. The memories were always there, but prior to this moment, I was unable to touch those images with words. And now, as I approached Philadelphia, it was as though something that had always been on mute came into full, clear, stereo surround sound. 

I pulled up in front of the L-shaped house in the suburbs. I took the key out of my pocket—the same key I had used as a child—and unlocked the front door, but I was afraid to go inside. There was something so frightening, so grotesque about the familiar rooms: the blue carpet in the bedroom, the yellow wallpaper in the kitchen, the depression glass displayed on the credenza, the dark, bearded portrait on the wall. Suddenly, everything seemed to have assumed a new meaning, a dark—as Cher might say—vibration. 

I couldn’t go in, so I walked around the block and eventually discovered that I had wandered to Jeanette’s house. Jeanette was a friendly neighbor and a mothering presence, and out of instinct or desperation, I walked up the path and knocked on her laundry room door. Jeanette happened to be standing right there, readying the dogs for a walk. 

The dogs pulled on their leads and leaped up to greet me as she opened the door. 

“I need help,” I said.

She was surprised to see me, taken by the gravity of my presence. I’d never come to her for help before.

“Of course,” she said. “Anything. What do you need?”

“I need to go into my mother’s house and get something, but I’m afraid to go in alone.”

“What are you afraid of?” she asked.

“I’ve been remembering things,” I said. “Well, not so much remembering things as finding the words to say things I’ve never said before.” I had never spoken about what had happened, and without an audience, and so it was like it had never happened at all.

“He raped me,” I whispered.

“Who raped you?” she gasped.

“My father,” I said. “My father raped me.”

Jeanette didn’t say anything but didn’t flinch, pull away, or look the other way. Her eyes were clouded with sadness and clear with understanding.

“There’s something in the house that belongs to me. I have to get it, but I’m afraid to go in alone.”

I must have sounded like a crazy person. I know I looked crazy in my green dress and stormcloud earrings. I was appalled, ravaging, avenging. 

 “Of course,” she said. “I will go with you. Whatever you need.”

We walked together down the suburban sidewalk, flanked by nearly identical colonial houses painted in slightly different colors, barely perceptible variations on the themes of monotony and conformity. 

The house I grew up in had a slate patio with loose stones in several shades of blue and red. The front porch was carpeted in an ancient low-pile astroturf, and a large spider had spun an intricate web between the leaves of rhododendron bushes. It was all so familiar and so grotesque that I could barely breathe. 

Jeanette stood beside me as I turned the key in the lock. The door yawned open. It was summer, but the blinds were drawn, and the hall was dark. I swept into the dining room and retrieved the key from a teacup in the china closet. Then Jeanette followed as I flew up the stairs, past the sorrowful Jesus that hung on a giant crucifix on the landing. As in the gospel, his side was pierced, but this pale replica also had broken knees that had been plastered back together after an accidental fall. He bowed his head as if in shame as I stormed down the hallway to the closet in the guest room. I threw open the door and started pulling the pillows down from the top shelf. 

The black box was in my hands.

“I’m afraid she’ll hide the money,” I explained, though I knew I wasn’t making sense even to myself. 

Jeanette followed me into my childhood bedroom. She watched quietly as I put the key in the lock and threw open the box. 

I didn’t look at her to register the expression on her face. I was too busy transferring handfuls of cash from the black box into my canvas shoulder bag. I showed Jeanette the suicide note, the one written on a card with two little children dressed in adult clothes, the little boy kissing the little girl on the cheek. Everything about it disgusted me. All I knew was that I had to get the money before my mother came home—not because I was afraid she would take it or spend it—but because I was worried she might hide the key away somewhere else or transfer the cash to a safety deposit box that required her signature. 

The money had controlled me long enough. It was my responsibility. It was my inheritance. It was mine to deal with—and I would do the right thing with it if it killed me, even if I didn’t know what the right thing was.

Jeanette’s face fell when she read the suicide note. There was compassion and confusion in her eyes, and I cannot see what she saw. I see the scene only from my own perspective: the black box laid open on the bed, the cat out of the bag, the truth laid bare. I was out of the closet, and I left the box there—bald, open, a black gaping statement—for my mother to find when she returned the following week. A complete sentence, a threat.

I then carried the canvas bag of stolen money out of the house and into the car. I rolled down the windows and drove back to Brooklyn. A feral woman on the verge of a revelation.