So I suppose whatever was trapped inside Caroline Neary eventually got out after all.
There were other parents who, when the breach was upon their children and they knew they couldn’t escape it, tried to keep it at least contained, usually with disastrous results.
When we were in the sixth grade, Polly and I had heard about Lionel Kirkpatrick, whose parents, unwilling yet to see their precious boy go breach, had locked him in the basement to keep him from running wild. Over the course of the night, Lionel had ravaged the space, trying to get out. It cost the Kirkpatricks ten thousand dollars in repairs, including a new water heater, because Lionel had somehow toppled the existing one and flooded the basement. In the morning, they found him asleep, curled on top of a pile of boxes, a castaway on an island in two feet of water.
Another thing, from just the previous year: Amy Litt had gone breach and had come to school one morning with bandages all over her fingers. She, unashamed, explained to us that it was like the Bible story of Noah. Her father had found her sleeping naked in the street one morning after breach. He was a righteous man, and he felt a curse had befallen him for having accidentally seen his own daughter without clothes. So the next night he had shut her in the basement, just as Lionel Kirkpatrick’s parents had done to their son. Except Amy Litt’s destruction was of a more self-?directed variety. All she had wanted was out. When her father had gone down to check on her in the morning, he found the concrete walls smeared with blood and his daughter huddled in the corner, shivering with pain. She had ripped all her fingernails out in trying to claw her way to freedom.
The Kirkpatricks restored their basement, and nine of Amy Litt’s nails eventually grew back—so these unfortunate occurrences, like most things, were reversible with time. But they served as admonitions to the parents of our town not to stand in the way of the natural course of events, no matter how ugly or shameful.
I know this now—and I raise my child to understand it as well. Some parents in our neighborhood do everything they can to keep their children away from violent images. And then, when something terrible happens, like murder or rape or genocide—well, then a conversation has to be had with these young innocents to explain that, yes, goodness is sometimes a fiction, like Santa Claus, and that humanity is, underneath all the cookie baking and song singing, a shameful and secret nastiness. Me, I’m going to raise my son differently. What he will be made to know is that there is violence in everything—even in goodness, if you’re passionate about it.
But he already knows that. It’s why he pulls hair, why he bites what he loves.
*
But those were parents who had intervened against the wishes of their children. Their stories were different from mine. I was a half-breed. I wasn’t some wild creature. I was good. I was daylight and homework and logical answers. I was no tide to be puppeted by the moon. I had my mother’s blood. Maybe the night before had been an aberration. You didn’t have to give in to every impulse that stirred your blood. You could be better.
I decided, whatever I had become, not to go outside the next night. I was determined not to yield to whatever disease was growing inside me.
When it got dark, I found my father reading in the living room.
“Good night,” I said.
He looked at his watch.
“It’s early,” he said.
“I know. I’m worn out.”
“Good Christmas, Lumen?”
“Good Christmas, Dad. Good Christmas for you?”
“Great Christmas. Among the best.”
He was a sweet, oblivious man. He was the kind of man you wanted to be good for. How could you want to damage such a man with the truth of things?
So I had to hide it from him—whatever it was. Up in my room, I shut my door and put my desk chair in front of it. I had seen people do this in movies, though my door didn’t seem any more secure for it. Through my window, I could see the moon through the tree branches, low on the horizon.
My skin was itchy all over. I was feeling ragged and burned. There was a fan in my closet that was meant for the hot summer months—but I got it out and plugged it in and sat in front of it with my eyes closed, the air making me feel like I was moving at high speed, on my way to someplace grand and dramatic.
Once, when I was much younger, I had asked my father what my mother had done all those nights when everyone had gone breach around her. He laughed and took me onto his lap, and this is what he said: “Do you want to know what she did? She sewed rag dolls. She was the most amazing seamstress, your mother. The dolls she made, they were exquisite. She became known for them all over town. Children would come by her house and stand beneath her window, and she would throw dolls down to them.”
I always loved that story, and it wasn’t until I was older that I began to wonder why none of my mother’s rag-doll creations were still around. And then, later, my father’s story became even stranger to me because of its resemblance to something I read in Little Women. Still, I treasured the image of my mother sitting beneath a lamp at night sewing dolls, and I wondered what comparable thing I could do.
I put my headphones on and listened to some music at volume level seventeen—I normally wouldn’t allow myself any volume over ten for fear of ruining my eardrums. But there was a bustle in my head that needed drowning out.