“‘Give me my baby, you stupid old bitch!’ She was yelling things like that. Rick just stood there looking out at the ocean. The boat was drifting into the harbor, and I knew it would soon get pulled into that place on the west side of the island. It was quiet like the night I tried to leave, only the water lapping against the boat and the wood dock creaking as it rocked back and forth. I couldn’t believe what was happening, even though I knew what was happening.
“Then Bill held up a piece of paper. ‘She’s not your baby, Emma. She’s our baby. “Certificate of Live Birth. Baby girl, born to Lucille Pratt and Bill Pratt.”’ He was reading from the document, a birth certificate he said he had made and filed with the town hall in Portland. That’s what he said. Rick started the boat. Emma screamed like I’ve never heard her scream before. I didn’t know until that moment how much she loved her baby. How hard she must have been suffering. ‘I’ll come back with the police! I’ll prove she’s not yours! I’ll prove it!’ She waited for a reaction but there was none. The boat just kept moving. And then I realized what they were going to do.
“‘Emma!’ I screamed at her twice. The first time I screamed, ‘They won’t be here when we come back! They’ll be gone. With your baby! And with that piece of paper, they could go anywhere!’
“Emma looked at me, horrified. Then she climbed onto the edge of the boat and jumped into that freezing-cold water. The thing about the cold water is that when you are in it, your heart starts to pound wildly, like out of control, and then you can’t breathe well. It feels like you have an elephant on your chest, and I could see Emma already struggling as she tried to swim.
“I screamed the second time, this time just her name. ‘Emma!’ But she didn’t look back. She just kept swimming and gasping for air through her heavy chest and pounding heart. Rick steered the boat around. We weren’t more than twenty feet from the dock by then, but against the current, and Emma swam to it and climbed up the side of the dock. Bill and Lucy looked at her, at both of us, with this sort of smug expression. Like we were naughty children who deserved to be punished. Emma ran toward Lucy and her baby, soaking wet and shivering, but Bill grabbed her by both arms. She was like a wild animal, thrashing against him, her long wet hair sending pellets of icy water all over the dock. ‘Give me my baby!’ Lucy squeezed the baby tighter and tried to block the sight of Emma, of her own mother, from her eyes.
“Bill started screaming back at Emma. ‘I’m so sick of you girls! You selfish girls who don’t know what’s right!’ There were more things—horrible, crude things—about girls and sex and babies, and I realized that tolerating us to keep Lucy happy with the baby had worn out his patience. He was sick of this world where ungrateful girls have babies all the time and his precious wife could not. He started to push Emma back toward the edge of the dock. She looked at me, and then the ocean, and then he just gave her a shove and she was back in that water! She came up from beneath the surface and swam again to the edge of the dock and tried to climb out. But Bill wouldn’t let her. He kicked at her fingers with the toe of his boot until she let go and went back in the water.
“She did it three times. I could see her lips turning blue, her fingers red with blood. She was hysterical, not thinking straight. She was screaming from the water. Bill was screaming from the dock. I was screaming from the boat. And then, Bill did the most horrible thing. I couldn’t believe it when I saw it with my own eyes. He went to Lucy and took that little girl, that baby, from her arms. She said nothing at first. I think she thought he was going to take her up to the house. But he didn’t! He walked to the other side of the dock and he held that baby over the side by one arm, dangling her in the air. And he said, ‘I swear to God, I’ll let her drown!’ Emma couldn’t say the words from her frozen mouth but she was shaking her head, thrashing it back and forth. She tried to swim toward them, but Bill then lowered the baby to the edge of the water. We all could see that she would sink beneath the black surface before Emma could get there.
“When the boat came close enough, I jumped onto the dock and reached in for Emma. I grabbed her arm and pulled her to the edge, and then back onto the platform. She was so heavy that she could barely help me. I pulled at her shirt, her pants, pulling her to the edge of the wood planks and then rolling her until she was out of the water. ‘We’ll stay,’ I said. ‘We’ll stay and we won’t cause any trouble. I promise! Please!’ Bill cradled the baby, who was screaming so loud by then, and walked away from the edge where he was standing. He gave the baby to Lucy, who stood silently, watching. Looking back, I think she knew Bill would never have dropped that baby, her baby, into the water and let her drown, because she had been silent. But it didn’t matter whether he would or he wouldn’t. All that mattered was that we had no way out. If we left without that baby, we would never see any of them ever again.
“But it was more than that thought that made me say those things about staying. There were two thoughts. The second was this—when Bill was dangling that baby over the water, and when he was kicking Emma’s hands off the dock, making them bleed, I looked at Rick, at the expression on his face. It was something I had not seen in the year and a half since we’d been there. His face sort of flinched, and I imagined him on the deck of that boat in Alaska, watching those men attack that woman. And I knew then that I would be able to make it out of there.”
Cass stopped speaking. That was it—the whole story—and she had nothing more to say about it. Abby clutched a pen in one hand, the notebook in the other. She could not remove her eyes from her subject. Cass had told this story start to finish without looking up once. Was she concentrating? Was she afraid to see the look of disbelief on her mother’s face?
The room felt as though it were being swallowed by the silence.
“Can I get something to drink?” Cass asked. She was eerily calm, given the story she had just told.
No one moved. They were waiting for Abby to agree or disagree. She was thinking now about the way Cass had told it—and the ones before it. The counting of things. The precision. And today, the lack of emotion.
“Abby?” Leo said, pulling her back into the silent room.
“I’m sorry. Yes, let’s take a break.”
Everyone started to rise from the sofas and chairs.
Abby smiled and did the same, her eyes fixed on Cass. She had been so consumed with Judy Martin, the narcissistic mother who’d driven her children to run away—only now that was not the story being told. So, the narcissistic mother who’d done … what, exactly?
She watched Cass stand and run her hand several times over the front of her shirt, smoothing the wrinkles. She noticed, too, how her eyes would look down and away like she wanted to hide. And the numbering of things, the affectation Abby had come across in her research years before, and had seen in her own sister.