“The kids never swim where you tell them to swim,” the lifeguard says. He looks at the money and then down at the girl. He shakes a thick finger at her. “You might have an Olympic swimmer on your hands there.”
“I’ll bet you’re right about that,” says the Psychologist, tucking the money back into his wallet. “I’ll bet you’ve seen it all.”
The girl shivers under the towel. She knows they will never come to the beach again. She knows she should apologize, but she has not yet learned how to apologize for things she is not sorry for.
The girl rides back to Allston in the trunk.
*
Again they are home alone. This time skinny black wires—they remind the girl of snakes—connect the Psychologist’s laptop to the TV in his bedroom. The familiar sound comes on and the Psychologist tells her to concentrate on her happy thing, to concentrate harder than she ever has before, to not let other thoughts trespass into her mind. She listens to the bellow of the whales and thinks as hard as she can and then one appears on TV. A whale! Right in front of her! Blue and massive and crashing through the water. The eye of the whale is small and savage and its body is crusted in white shells, a deep-sea monster for sure. The whale disappears and the Psychologist tells her that she lost her concentration, that she made it leave.
She’s naked again, the white electrodes stuck all over her body.
She gets back into the right headspace. It’s like standing on one foot and fixing your sight on a specific thing until you find your balance, except the balancing is happening in her mind. She wants to stop and listen to the whale. She wants to see it spout water and gulp fish, to see what it’s like to be a fearsome creature of the deep (could she ever learn to be a fearsome creature of the deep?), but this time she knows the whale is not there for her.
This girl stays awake at night remembering the sensation of swimming out, away from the sandy coast of Revere Beach, into the cold dark of open water. She keeps rewriting the endings. Keeps telling herself stories.
In one, she joins a band of pirates. In another, she grows gills and learns to breathe underwater. In another, she is picked up by a wealthy couple who have always wanted a child. In another, she drowns.
She stares down at her bare toes. She digs them into the carpet. In his bedroom, these alternate endings are the happy thing she thinks about.
When she looks up, she sees Mr. and Mrs. Carroll, which is not possible. She blinks and they’re still there, frozen in the doorway in their gray guard uniforms. She didn’t hear them come home. She didn’t hear anyone coming up the stairs. Mr. Carroll is holding a six-pack. His shirt is untucked. Mrs. Carroll is reaching for the wall. Her lipstick is a red smear on her mouth. They are still wearing their museum nametags.
They aren’t usually home until after dark, so either the Psychologist has gotten confused about time or Mr. and Mrs. Carroll have changed their schedule. She doesn’t know what is true.
She also doesn’t know how long they’ve been watching and now there is something about their watching, about seeing their expression take on the wrongness of what is happening and reflect that wrongness back at her, that makes her feel like her organs are being rearranged. Her liver and her lungs switch places. Her spleen is in her elbow. Her heart is in her knee.
Mr. and Mrs. Carroll make no move to help her.
The whale vanishes from the screen.
The Psychologist is busy recording new data on his laptop. He doesn’t yet know that his parents are in the room, that they are approaching from behind, slow and slack with shock, and very soon this girl will be sent away.
She sees them coming. She sees the wrongness grow. Piss runs down her legs and darkens the carpet. She feels the hot liquid curve around the edge of her foot.
She sees herself in the trunk of the car. The air was too hot and thick to breathe. It turned to cotton candy in her lungs.
She is going to pass out on the bedroom floor and wake up on a farm. It sounds impossible, but that is what is going to happen.
She will never understand what the Psychologist wanted from her, the nature of his experiment, but she knows what he took and that he kept taking it long after she left Allston.
His parents keep getting closer.
The Psychologist keeps clicking away.
“Look at you, my little monster,” he says. “Look at what I’ve trained you to do.”
33.
A theory on why we stop remembering: there is a part of our story that we do not know how to tell to ourselves and we will away its existence for so long that finally our brain agrees to a trade: I will let you forget this, but you will never feel whole.
*
What is a memory but the telling of a story?
*
In middle school, I went on a field trip to a whale watch at the Stellwagen Bank National Marine Sanctuary. When we saw the first sign of a whale, the spray of white, the great V-shaped tail smacking the water, I screamed in terror and did not know why.
*
In high school, I kicked a boy in the chest when he tried to touch between my legs.
*
It was never my mother in the tunnel. It was always him.
*
Does this mean he’s dead?
*
Ask me if I feel bad for hoping he is. Just ask.
*
When I stop remembering, I’m not in the Mansion. I’m standing in the woods, breathing fast. The land is heavy with silence. The tree branches are reaching toward each other like fingers and through them the sky is the opposite of faded. It is such a deep shade of blue that it almost looks unreal, like a screen that could be split open. I don’t remember leaving the Mansion and walking outside. I don’t remember crossing the yard and moving past the halo of bare trees. The woods feel like shelter.
The ground is damp and the heels of my sneakers are sinking into it. I stand on a mass of tree roots, like a person seeking high ground. The woods smell faintly of smoke. I listen to the rushing sound of the creek. I wrap my arms around the trunk and think of Marcus and feel my heart begin to slow.