She prayed that she would wake from this dream. And then she did. Her mother sat gracefully on the hull of an overturned guide boat, her barefoot legs crossed at the ankles. She sipped champagne from a crystal flute. She wore a simple gold bracelet on her wrist. From her distance, Vanessa admired her mother’s gentle, slightly dreamy poise, the way she looked down at the rocky shoreline as if she were remembering something privately amusing, and Vanessa decided that it was the dress that made her look so lovely, a cream-colored, low-necked, beltless frock by Muriel King that hung straight from the shoulders. It was the dress, but even more it was the unselfconscious privacy of her thoughts. What a beautiful woman, Vanessa said to herself. I will look that beautiful someday. I will know how to dress like that someday. I will know how to have thoughts like that someday. Then she saw her father. He was standing on the deck. He was dressed for dinner. His hands were clasped behind his back, and he was rocking ever so slightly on his heels, looking with pride and good-natured satisfaction at his wife down at the shore, as if he had created her, a painting or a photograph he had made. There was nothing impatient about him, nothing distracted—he had taken a moment to stop and look fondly and with profound appreciation at his wife without her knowing or posing or worrying about pleasing him.
But the deck was deserted, there was no one at the shore, there was not even a guide boat, and there was no one walking among the tall pines that surrounded the camp. She had not been dreaming. Her father was dead. And she had indeed committed a dark, unnameable crime. For the first time since forcing her mother to Rangeview and imprisoning her there, Vanessa was truly terrified of what she had done.
Up to this moment, whenever she saw what she had done, she had justified it to herself, rationalizing her rash acts, telling herself that she had no choice, none, they had trapped her, Mother and the lawyers and the doctors, and now they wanted to put her in a cage and keep her there for the rest of her life. Or worse. Those were facts. Everything else was speculation or memory, febrile and unreliable. Since childhood, Vanessa had felt trapped by her parents, as if they were predators and she their intended prey—trapped and then put in a cage for later, when they would have the time and occasion to devour her properly. As a small child, Vanessa could not listen to those old fairy tales being read to her without crying and begging whoever was reading to stop, stop. Those old stories of children put into ovens by stepmothers and wicked witches. Children climbing sky-high bean stalks to the giant’s lair. Children being led by a piper into a mountain cave, never to be seen again. They terrified Vanessa. She could not bear to say or even hear nursery rhymes without feeling her chest tighten and her legs go all watery, making her cry to her nanny Hilda or to the child reciting the rhyme, “Stop! Stop saying that! I hate that! It’s nasty and scary. You’re only doing it to scare me!”
People—her nanny Hilda and the babysitters, other children and their parents, and her own parents and their friends—were impressed by Vanessa’s exquisite sensitivity and smiled down at her and praised it, as if she were the most delicate flower of all and therefore the most precious. But she knew, even as a very young girl of five and six, that her inability to listen to the fairy tales and nursery rhymes that other children loved had its origin someplace else, because the tales and verses made her feel the way she felt when she almost remembered being naked and lifted high in the air by a big man and placed up on the fireplace mantel with a scary hot fire burning below, the big man turning into her father, who disappeared suddenly behind his camera box, covering himself with a black hood, when something made a whooshing sound and a flash of light so bright that for a few seconds she couldn’t see anything and only knew that she was being lifted again by a big man and carried to a sofa that was hard and scratchy on her bare bottom and back, where she was placed just so, her naked legs and arms arranged just so, her head turned just so. She remembered the diamond shapes in the carpet on the floor, dark red against a field of green. And then another whooshing sound and flash of light that made her close her eyes tight, and she kept them closed tight, clenching them like fists, wrinkling up her nose and crinkling her forehead, making herself ugly, until her father carried her to her crib, where he put her nightie back on her and kissed her on the cheek. And then her mother, led to the crib by her father, leaned down and stroked Vanessa’s hair slowly, dreamily, with eyes half closed, smiling, as if she’d never felt anything so soft and lovely before.
At her father’s funeral at St. James Episcopal Church, when it was Vanessa’s turn to speak, she started to talk about what her father was like as a young man, before he went off to war, when she was the very little girl that Dr. and Mrs. Cole had recently adopted, but somehow she got away from what she’d planned to say. She had meant to describe him as heroic and wise and all-knowing, the way little girls are supposed to remember their fathers, but instead she found herself describing him the way she actually remembered him. She said that he was cold and detached and that he saw people, including his own daughter, as objects to be examined and cut open and repaired, as a thing to be photographed and privately exhibited for his exclusive, secret pleasure. What began as a loving daughter’s eulogy ended as a turgid, blurred accusation that so upset everyone that afterward no one would speak to her. Until the morning two weeks later when her mother announced that she had scheduled a meeting for that afternoon with Whitney Brodhead to discuss her father’s will. When they entered the lawyer’s conference room and Vanessa saw Mr. Brodhead seated at the head of the long table with a sheaf of papers spread before him and Dr. Reichold standing at the rain-sopped window looking down at the street, Vanessa knew that she was just as trapped now as she had been all those years ago, lifted into the air by a big man and placed naked up on the mantel with the fire burning somewhere below, and her father, behind the camera box and hidden under his black cloak, saying, “Humpty Dumpty sat on a wall. Humpty Dumpty had a great fall, and all the king’s horses and all the king’s men couldn’t put Humpty together again….”
Vanessa dragged the guide boat from the waterline at the rocky shore up to the knoll beyond, rolled it over onto the gunnels to dry, and walked quickly to the house. She had been gone longer than she expected and knew that her mother would be thirsty and hungry and would need to use the toilet. The water system for the camp was primitive, but effective—a pipe that ran downhill from a spring behind the cookshack fed a wood-fired water heater in the kitchen of the main building and the several bathrooms. There was an outhouse for the help, of course, but no bathing facilities for them except the lake.
She unlocked and opened the door to her parents’ bedroom and entered. Her mother was seated on a straight-backed chair by the dressing table, just as Vanessa had left her hours earlier, her hands and ankles bound and tied to the chair. The silk scarf had slipped from her mother’s mouth to her chin, and her mouth gaped open. Her head lolled to one side, eyes closed, and her breathing sounded labored and raspy, as if she had climbed a steep hill.
Vanessa hurried to her side and untied her hands and ankles and removed the scarf. “Mother? I’m sorry I took so long, Mother. Are you all right?”
Evelyn Cole’s head wobbled, and she turned, opened her eyes, and looked at Vanessa with a puzzled expression, as if not quite recognizing her daughter. Half lifting the woman from the chair, Vanessa guided her mother with one arm around her waist from the chair across the room to the bed and gently lay her down and covered her with a Hudson’s Bay blanket from the chest at the foot of the bed. “Oh, Mother, I’m so sorry,” she said. “Please, please, please, be all right.”
Evelyn said, “Water. Give. Me. Water. Vanessa.”
Vanessa ran into the bathroom and filled a glass, thinking, Please don’t die. This isn’t what I wanted. All I wanted was not to be trapped by you and Daddy. Then she heard the bedroom door open and close behind her. Rushing from the bathroom, she heard the click of the lock in the door. The blanket lay in a white, black, and red heap on the floor beside the bed.
/> Vanessa yanked on the door latch and shrieked, “Mother! Open this door! I’ll kill you for this!” She ran to the window, shoved it open, and unhooked the screen. In seconds, she was out the window and racing around to the front of the building, where she saw her mother already at the shore struggling to turn the guide boat off its back, unable to do it.
Vanessa approached her mother methodically, calmly. “It’s too heavy for you.”
Evelyn Cole let go of the boat and looked out at the lake as if seeking help. There was no one there. The sun was halfway between the meridian and the far side of the lake, and the water glittered like hammered brass. Her daughter was insane. Her daughter was going to kill her, Evelyn knew it now. She said, “Vanessa, please. Let me go. I promise, I’ll do anything you want.”
“It’s too late, Mother. I don’t believe you.”
“Please, Vanessa. Please don’t kill me. I’m your mother, Vanessa.”
“No, you’re not.” They stood facing each other across the upturned boat. “I don’t want to kill you, for heaven’s sake. I just want…,” she began and left the sentence hanging.
A few seconds of silence passed. “What do you want from me, Vanessa?”
Vanessa took a deep breath. “I want…I want you to be a good girl. That’s all. While I figure out what to do with you.”
Vanessa took her mother firmly by the elbow and guided her slowly back up to the house. When they reached the deck, Evelyn said, “I’ll be good. I promise. I’ll do whatever you ask.”
“Hubert St. Germain is coming soon with supplies. I’m going to have to keep you locked up and quiet while he’s here.” Vanessa glanced back and checked the glimmering horizon for Hubert’s boat. No sign of him yet.
“Please don’t tie me up again. I swear, I’ll stay out of sight and will be quiet as a mouse. Please, Vanessa.” The ropes had burned Evelyn Cole’s wrists and bare ankles, and the scarf over her mouth had made her feel as if she was suffocating. She meant it, she would do exactly as Vanessa wished. She would stay in the bedroom with the door closed while Hubert was at the camp, and she would not call for help. Vanessa would have to come to her senses eventually. She couldn’t be mad. She couldn’t be capable of killing her own mother. “Vanessa,” she said, and waited until Vanessa’s gaze came back to her. “I am your mother.”
“Stop saying that!” They stood at the closed door of the bedroom side by side. “Come,” she said and held out her hand. “Let’s go in now.” With her free hand Vanessa turned the key and pushed the door open.
“You don’t understand. You’re my child, Vanessa. I’m your mother.”
“Stop saying that! I’ve got to think. I’ve got to think about what’s next.”
“I’m afraid, Vanessa. I’m afraid of what you’re going to do next. Please, remember, you’re my child.”
“Don’t say that again.”
“Vanessa, you are.”
“What are you trying to say?”
“I’m trying to tell you the truth.”
“Right. If you want to tell me the truth,” Vanessa said, drawing her mother into the room and leading her to the chair, “you can tell me who my real mother was. And my real father. Not that it matters much now.”
“I’m your real mother,” Evelyn said simply.
Vanessa turned and looked closely at her. She looked away again. “No. No, you’re not. My real mother never…a real mother wouldn’t treat her daughter the way you’ve treated me,” she said. She put her hands on Evelyn’s shoulders and pushed her down into the chair and gathered the strands of rope from the floor. “A real mother wouldn’t steal her daughter’s inheritance and try to have her locked up in a mental hospital. A real mother would fight tooth and nail against anyone who’d try to do that. A real mother would protect her daughter.”
“It’s true, Vanessa. You are my child.”
“Oh, no, I’m not. Because a real mother wouldn’t lie about it for thirty years. She wouldn’t tell her daughter she was adopted if she wasn’t.”
“Daddy didn’t want you to know. Because he was ashamed of me, and angry. For a long time he was very angry. And I was scared. Scared that, if you did know the truth, other people would find out.”
“I don’t know what you’re talking about. What…what is the truth?”
Evelyn looked up at her daughter’s anxious face and sighed. This was a conversation that she had longed for and had imagined having a thousand times, but now that it was actually taking place she was very frightened, and for a few seconds she wanted to end it, wanted to say, No, you are not the child I bore before your father and I were married. You’re some other woman’s child. You are not the baby all grown up that I conceived one drunken spring night at a Williams College mixer. She wanted to say, You’re not the child whose father I could not name, a college boy whose face I could not remember the next morning, when I stumbled still drunk down the stairs of the fraternity house and out the door into bright sunlight, my party dress stained and half buttoned. You are not the baby I bore in North Carolina that fall at the home for girls like me, girls whose parents could afford to send them into hiding for six months and claim they’d gone abroad for a semester to study French or Italian or music appreciation, returning to college and proper society in the spring, slim and fresh faced and all but virginal again. Evelyn Cole did not want to tell her daughter that her parents had paid to keep the baby, their grandchild, in the home, which was in fact a posh private orphanage in Asheville, North Carolina, while Evelyn finished her junior and senior years at Smith, where she was courted by the very promising Carter Cole, a Yale man from a distinguished old New England family, a well-born man bound for medical school and inherited wealth, a man who, to the delight and relief of her parents, did indeed marry her. And one night a year later, when he was interrogating his bride about her past sexual experiences, as he often did that first year of their marriage, demanding to hear every last detail, wanting to peer into her sexual past as if it were a set of pornographic photographs, she broke down and finally told him everything she could remember about that terrible party at the fraternity house at Williams College. He had known that his bride had not come to him a virgin—she couldn’t lie about that, he was training to be a doctor, after all—but now he learned that her past, and thus his own, was further tainted by the birth of a child, a little girl who was three years old, a child never put up for adoption and old enough now to be aware of a little of her own mysterious and illegitimate origins, thanks to the sentimental indiscretions of Evelyn’s parents, who had made semiannual visits to the home to visit the child and make sure that she was receiving adequate care, who had indulged themselves by staying with the child alone for hours each time they visited.
“I have no memory of that,” Vanessa declared. “None.”
“Daddy was always afraid that you did. You were so precocious a child, so intelligent, that he kept waiting for it to come out. He was afraid that somehow you knew I was your real mother, and it would become known to other people. And he didn’t want that.”
“But I didn’t know! I have no memories of any visits from Grandma and Grandpa way back then. All I remember of the orphanage are the big lawns and my room there. I remember the bars of my crib and the lawns outside. Nothing else. No people. Not even other children. Except for my crib and the endless lawns, all my earliest memories are of you and Daddy and the house in Tuxedo Park and the apartment in the city and the Reserve. Were there other children?”
“At the home? There were only a few, maybe two or three. Little babies waiting to be adopted. It was very exclusive,” Evelyn said. “Vanessa, I really am thirsty. May I please have a glass of water?”
“As long as you stay in the chair where I can see you,” Vanessa said and went into the bathroom where, watching her mother in the mirror, she filled a glass at the sink and returned with it. She handed the glass to her mother, who drank it down and asked for another. When she came back with the second glass, Vanessa said, ??
?But I don’t understand. Why didn’t Grandma and Grandpa let me be adopted when I was a little baby? Was there something wrong with me? Something that made it so nobody wanted me?”
“Lots of people wanted you. You were beautiful and intelligent and charming. They wouldn’t sign the papers.”
“Who? The people who ran the home?”
“Your grandparents. My mother and father. They would come back from North Carolina and tell me how beautiful you were, as if to punish me. Over and over. And how they were just waiting for the right people to come along and adopt and raise you. I think they meant that. Your grandparents were proud. Proud of their bloodlines. As you know. And even though no one knew for sure who your real father was, they knew he was at least a Williams boy. Which was something, I suppose. They wanted to be able to choose who would adopt you. So they just paid to keep you there and never signed the papers. I don’t know what they were thinking, what they were hoping would happen, because nothing could happen. Except that you would grow older and eventually grow up there.”
“What about you? You could have signed the adoption papers.”
“No. I was only twenty when you were born, and I didn’t dare go against my parents. And then later, by the time I was of legal age, I was engaged to marry Daddy. By then I was so used to keeping it a secret that I didn’t want to think about it.”
“‘It.’ You mean me. So why did you and Daddy finally decide to adopt me? I mean, I was safely out of sight way down there in North Carolina, out of sight and, at least in your case, out of mind. You could’ve left me there to rot, if you’d wanted to.”
“It was your father’s idea. Well, no, it was my idea. Under his conditions. Once we realized that we weren’t going to have any children together, I begged him to let me take you from that place and raise you as our child. He agreed, but only if I promised to say that you were adopted and never revealed to anyone, not even to you, that I was your real mother. My parents were happy to go along with it. And so were the people who ran the home. In the end, everyone got what they wanted. Which was to save face. Everyone got to save face. Even me.”