II
Mary Kate approaches me from behind, sneaking up behind me where I sit at the computer keyboard in a foreign city, in exile, trying to find a way of beginning Chet Spiro’s last newspaper column. My whimsy or delusion is that I will write something conclusive or illuminating or both and zap it off to Diana who will read it back to me, and the world, over the airwaves. I am vaguely aware that, the fact that I think of this as whimsy notwithstanding, it speaks to the level of extremity that I have reached: to the degree that I am becoming, entirely undramatically, unhinged.
The touch of Mary Kate’s fingertips on my shoulders is, of course, lighter than ever.
“I never thought you would continue this silliness for a dozen years,” I hear her say.
“I couldn’t see any way out,” I try to explain. What I think that I mean by this is that, once I had created the modality of Chet’s column and brought Mary Kate to life for millions of readers, I was not up to the job of simply doing away with her.
“But that was my excuse,” she says. I am confused.
“I mean, I couldn’t see any way out. What I was hiding from you was so dark. And it was even darker because of the hiding, because I wove webs and webs around it and hid it all from you.”
“So you lied to me.”
“From the first day I met you.”
“You could have told me. You could have told me everything.”
“You think so,” she says. She is kneeling on the floor behind me as I type, kneeling upright directly behind me so that I cannot look around to see her face, pressing her lips into the nape of my neck, her hot breath a kind of proof against my skin. “You think so, but you don’t know.”
“What don’t I know?”
“You don’t know that by the first time you saw me I was already just a lie. To all the world. From the very first day of kindergarten, I was already—“
“They had already raped you.”
“Raped? I don’t know if I would say raped.”
“What? You were five years old, Mary Kate!”
“But I kept going back. And I kept spinning lies about it. As if I was trying to protect it. Protect what we were doing in that shed.”
“You were just trying to protect yourself, Mary Kate. Trying to hold it at bay.”
“Trying to find a face to put on for the world each day.”
“Imagine a five-year-old girl having to do that, just to survive.”
“I was so afraid somebody would find out. Bruce’s father told us he didn’t want to have to tell anybody about the things we were doing, but if I ever stopped coming to the shed to talk to him he would have to tell.”
“To talk to him.”
“That was how he put it.”
“So you kept going to the shed.”
“Again and again. And I went later, too, even when Bruce’s father was gone.”
“You went back?”
“I went back. Easter Sunday. I had been over a year without being touched like that. It was so hideous. And yet there was this horrible compulsion to be in that moment again. I snuck out on Easter Sunday.”
“And you met Bruce in that shed again?”
“I went into the shed again. I was eleven years old. I went into the shed and I took off all my clothes and I lay down on the ground. I waited two hours for Bruce to come to me but he never showed up. I don’t know why I thought he would.”
“You hadn’t arranged anything?”
“Not a word. But the next day in school I told him: ‘I waited for you in the shed yesterday.’”
“What did he say?”
“He said, ‘We shouldn’t.’ I said, ‘I have to.’”
I am weeping, but otherwise silent, as I type.
“There was nothing in the world that could match the power and the intensity that I could feel in that shed. Even when all I did was lay there with my little knees apart and my eyes closed, there was a sense in which I was in control. It was so horrible. So evil. So unfair, to give that kind of hideous power to a little girl.”
“And take everything else away from you.”
“Everything.”
“You had no power at all.”
“No power at all,” Mary Kate repeats, in a deadened monotone, her breath still hot against my neck. “No power at all.”
“Was that the last time you went?”
“Not even close. After that we established a password, and it was almost always me who initiated it then. It gave me the only feeling of being in control that I ever had.”
“What was the password?”
“It was ‘Easter Sunday.’”
“When did it stop? Did it ever stop?”
“It was going to stop. The last time was going to be the Easter Sunday before Rachel was born that Christmas.”
“So that is true? Rachel is Bruce’s daughter?”
“That was going to be the last time.”
“You let me believe she was my daughter.”
“Let you believe? No, Stanley. I needed you to believe. I couldn’t let Bruce be her father. It was finally what I needed to cut it off.”
“Thank you, Kate.”
“Thank me for what?”
“For Rachel.”
I can feel her now, drying her wet eyes in the back of my neck.
“I’m sorry I lied to you.”
“You must have felt like you had no choice. Were you ever going to tell me the truth?”
“Every morning I woke up trying to summon the courage and clarity to tell you. Every night I went to bed wondering if I had missed out on some available opportunity. My need for rationalization to continue and to protect the craziness was a powerful thing. When I was diagnosed with the cancer there were days when I actually believed that I was getting sick because I had destroyed my healthy soul by living a bunch of lies, by trying to stretch my skin over multiple narratives of my life.”
“I don’t think there is anything in the medical textbooks about that.”
“Well, trust me, it’s very toxic. The problem was, once Rachel was on the scene, the idea of telling you became even more of a double-edged sword.”
“Why?”
“Even when I could convince myself that I would be giving something to you by being honest with you, which was far from an easy thing to convince myself about, I had to face the possibility that I might be taking something away from Rachel, if there was any chance she was going to lose you as her father.”
“I would never have let go of Rachel.”
“I was so entangled in a web of evil and deceit, Stanley. And there was always this threat that Bruce would meddle in Rachel’s life.”
“Did he?”
“Not exactly.”
“Meaning?”
“He extracted a price for his silence.”
I remember now that, every Easter Sunday her last few years, Mary Kate would arrange things so that she would end up driving out to her folks’ place “to spend the day with her family.” It always seemed odd that she went alone, but I didn’t want to question it, since I never much wanted to go.
“Easter Sundays.”
“Exactly. He begged me. He finally was able to see me as an adult woman, with a child, and all of a sudden I was the key to his being able to straighten himself out.”
“Maybe.”
“I don’t know. But I know it didn’t work for me.”
“I’m sorry, Kate.”
“No. I’m sorry, my sweet.”
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