She pressed play again.
“I’m so sorry! God, I’m so stupid! I wanted to believe that I could save us! I wasn’t thinking!”
That was when Owen rushed to her side to hold her. “No, Cass. No! It’s not your fault. You were so young!”
“I thought I could bring us home!”
Abby remembered the rest of it. When Cass calmed herself down, she finished the story of that night. How she watched the rowboat get pulled back to the dock. How she watched the Lucky Lady disappear back into the harbor. How she sat there for a long time, given the cold—twenty-two minutes, she said—shivering and thinking through her options, even through the tears and the despair and the disbelief. She said she thought to herself that the land was right there, and how far could it be, really? A few miles? She said she almost jumped in. “Maybe I would make it. Maybe I wouldn’t drown or get hypothermia.”
Then she considered hiding in the woods, making a fire, trying to signal a boat by yelling and screaming. She thought about making words with rocks or grass that someone could see from a helicopter. But she said she had only a few hours and she did not have a saw or matches. And although she was strong, she said, she was not that strong.
Her third option was to go back to the house. Climb into bed. And see who the boatman really was, inside his heart or inside his conscience. If he said nothing, she would make a new plan. If he told them what she’d tried to do, she knew she would be punished. In the end, she got too cold to stay outside any longer, so this was what she decided to do.
They got sidetracked then, with details about the birth, the baby, the rowboat and currents. She gave more descriptions of lobster boats, their markings, their sizes, the color of the buoys they collected the lobsters from. Abby couldn’t refute the importance of any of that. Finding the island was the priority, period.
Still, she had gotten up then and began pacing the Martins’ bedroom. She had so many questions of her own. Obvious questions like what happened after that first attempt to escape? And how did it help Cass understand the boatman and know he would help her eventually?
Other questions were more subtle, entering her mind in faint whispers. The description of Lucy and Bill, the analogy to the fractured self, the crazy and the sane parts battling for dominance—it was sophisticated, beyond Cass’s years, wasn’t it? Or maybe the trauma had forced her to learn about the psychology, to deconstruct her captors.
And why had she insisted that her mother stay with her during the interviews? She was not a minor, and it went against the Bureau’s practices. She kept saying she couldn’t tell the story without Judy in the room.
And what about her odd demeanor, the way she told her story with such precision, adding in depictions of her emotions like she was sprinkling salt on a plate of food?
And why was she always counting the time and numbering things? Every story had been broken down into distinct parts, and moments had been clocked to the minute in her head, by counting to herself. She did not have a watch or a phone. It was as if she needed to keep everything organized in her mind.
A memory was before her. Two girls playing with a tea set in a yard. A gingham tablecloth lay across the grass. The tea set was still in a basket.
It was Abby’s sister, Meg, there with Abby. Meg was three years older and she was explaining why she needed to play with Abby’s tea set. “There are four reasons,” Meg said. Abby tried but couldn’t remember them now, the reasons. She wasn’t even certain this memory was real. They couldn’t have been more than six and nine. Were they even younger? It didn’t matter what the reasons were. It was about the numbering. There are four reasons.
Abby got up from the table and poured a scotch, drinking it as she leaned against the kitchen counter.
Meg had done that all through childhood. She was remembering it now. There are two reasons for this.… There are six things I like about that.… There are three things I eat for breakfast. When had she stopped doing that?
Abby downed the scotch and poured another. She needed sleep tonight.
How did she not know this about Meg, her sister, her only sibling and now the only family she had left in the world? Did she still count and number things? Abby had been there a few months ago. Meg, her two daughters, her husband, two dogs—had a seemingly normal life (although far too rural for Abby’s taste) in Colorado. She tried to remember the things they had done together. The hot, buggy hike in the mountains. Shopping for school clothes for her nieces. They’d gone to a movie. Abby could see that Meg was a good mother, that her daughters were loved. That was not her concern.
One evening they went out alone, as they always did on this annual reunion. During the rest of the year, there were phone calls and e-mails, Christmas and birthday cards and Facebook posts with cute photos and heart-shaped emojis. But those were not moments to open the door to the past.
The conversation always began with the benign updates. “How’s work? How are the girls?” And before their father died—“Have you spoken to Dad?” He spent his final years in Florida with his second wife, playing golf and tending to her rather substantial needs.
But it never took long for the path to wind into the trees, where the questions became more intimate and the answers harder to find. This last visit had focused on Abby. “Are you seeing anyone? When are you going to give someone a chance?”
From there, the path continued into the woods until it disappeared entirely, leaving them lost in the darkness of the past. “You know too much, Abby. That’s the problem.” Meg was convinced that Abby’s research and, arguably, her obsession with their mother and her theories on narcissism were preventing her from just living—from falling in love with someone, from trusting someone. “You have to move forward. Don’t let her ruin your life from the grave.”
Abby always listened, nodding occasionally, looking sincere. It wasn’t about whether Meg was right or wrong. The only thing that mattered was the impossibility of her prescription.
Had there still been counting? Abby couldn’t remember. The last time she’d thought about this thing with her sister was when she was writing her dissertation.
She set the glass down on the counter.