It was not hard to answer the questions and be found sane. It was not hard to also alert Dr. Winter to the extreme emotional stress I was under, both from my experience on the island and my obsession with finding my sister. “I have trouble sleeping.” “I can’t stop thinking the same thought over and over.” “I have trouble concentrating.” These were all answered with a yes.
Mrs. Martin was not only happy because the professionals were looking into my sanity; she was also happy because she was able to trust me again. I could see it on her face and from the amount of time and attention she gave me that afternoon. We went shopping for clothes. We got manicures. We went out to lunch. She talked more about town gossip and I pretended to care about all of it. She talked to me about being a woman, about my future and the things we needed to do for me, like getting a tutor and taking a vacation together, maybe to a spa in Florida. And at random moments, she would stop what she was doing and stare at my face. Her hand would cup my cheeks and she would shake her head and say how gorgeous I had become and how lucky she was to have me back.
And in everything she did and said to me, there ran an undercurrent of sympathy. I was crazy. Poor, crazy Cassandra.
Mrs. Martin has a switch. It goes on and off depending on how she feels about you. If you adore her and are on her side, and if you make her feel good or look good to others, she trusts you and so she loves you. If you are a threat to her in any way, or competing with her for anything she wants or needs, she despises you and will dedicate herself to destroying you. In between, there is a neutral position in which she is indifferent. You have been fully neutralized, meaning you can never harm her. And you have nothing to offer her that she wants or needs. You cannot make her appear good or bad. You cannot make her feel good or bad.
It was easy to see the position of her switch with my father. After the custody fight, after she’d won, it was in neutral. My father would always love and desire her. He could not take anything from her. And she had beaten him publicly and won her daughters. She did not think at all about my father, except for that brief incident when I tried to leave her house and live with him. She took care of that with a pair of scissors—cutting off Emma’s hair to punish me, and I was punished because when Emma had to go to school like that, I felt her humiliation way down in my stomach, worse than if my own hair had been cut off. I always wanted my father to find a beautiful woman and marry her just to see my mother flip her switch to loving him again. She would have loved him to death, or at least until she won back his desire and could trust him again. But he was too close to see any of this.
It was very different with Mr. Martin. My mother never rested in her efforts to keep his desire, because it was always in jeopardy. Emma was a constant reminder of this, and as she got older, it got worse and worse. Mrs. Martin didn’t really love anyone, not the way I think of love. So I use that word more to describe how she acted toward people. Her switch for Mr. Martin was always on love.
With Emma, she could go back and forth in a matter of minutes. Emma made her feel proud because she was so desirable. The love switch was on. But then she would catch her husband looking just a little too long at Emma, and especially Hunter and Emma when they were together, and the switch flipped to hate. Emma was a proficient operator of Mrs. Martin’s switch. She had studied the circuit board for years and it came to her like her first language. It was effortless. Maybe even subconscious.
Before I disappeared, I spent most of the time in Mrs. Martin’s neutral position. I had no power to help her or hurt her and she was too busy dealing with the threat of Emma, the lightning rod, to even notice me. When I returned, things were all mixed up. First, when she thought I was crazy but no one else could see it and they were all believing me and feeling sorry for me, she hated me. I could feel it, even through her plastic smiles and bony hugs. But now—now that she was the dutiful mother whose long-lost daughter was mentally disturbed and in need of help, now that the things I said were not a threat to her, she could love me again, and this was a great relief to her.
“I know you were in your room that night,” she kept saying that day. “You weren’t hiding in Emma’s car. You didn’t go with her to the beach, did you? You’ll remember when you get well.” She said this with a smile while our nails were drying.
I knew when this was over, the switch would move again. And that it would move for the last time.
Later that day, Richard Foley’s boat was identified. The owner of the boat ran a commercial dock in New Harbor, leasing slips and watercraft—long-term rentals for local residents and lobstermen, and seasonal rentals for the tourists and vacationers. The boat had been found six days before that off the coast near Rockland over thirty nautical miles north of the dock where it was from. But it was not until day four of my return that the dock owner put the pieces together and contacted the FBI. He said his wife saw the story and the picture of Richard Foley on a news show that morning. They had been renting a boat to Foley for five years, but under a different name. He paid cash, even for the six-thousand-dollar security deposit.
I could barely contain my excitement, and my fear. I knew they would find the island now and I could taste the vengeance that was growing closer. But this news had done nothing to upset my mother, and I was beginning to think that nothing would. She had grown stronger without us here, without Emma constantly chipping away at her fa?ade of perfection. And even though I had been proved sane, she had convinced herself that people doubted me because I had taken the test in the first place. And so there was just as much fear as excitement.
There was also something else when I heard the news about Richard Foley being identified and his boat being found. It was so easy to answer that one question. Were you and the boatman intimate? But there had been nothing easy about it, and I could not chase the memories from my brain when I heard the news, and when I heard his full name.
I was Richard Foley’s lover for 286 days. I will say very little about this because it is still mixed up in my head. When I think about it, I feel sick in my stomach with shame and disgust and also from the knowledge that there is evil in the world and that evil can dress up as love so convincingly that it blinds you to the truth. Those are all very sickening things and I don’t like to feel them.