In early March, my copy of Lolita goes missing from my nightstand. I tear my room apart searching for it; the thought of losing it has me almost out of my mind with panic. It wasn’t just my copy; it was Strane’s—his notes in the margins, traces of him on the pages.
I don’t really believe my parents took it, but I don’t know how else it could have disappeared. Downstairs, Mom sits alone at the dining room table. It’s covered in bills, a calculator with a spool of paper. Dad’s in town buying sugaring supplies for the upcoming weekends of boiling down maple sap on the woodstove, filling the house with sweet steam.
“Did you go in my room?” I ask.
She looks up from the calculator, her face serene.
“Something’s missing,” I say. “Did you take it?”
“What is it that’s missing?” she asks.
I take a breath. “A book.”
She blinks, looks back down to the bills. “What book?”
I clench my jaw; my stomach tightens. It feels like she wants to see if I’ll say it. “It doesn’t matter,” I say. “It was mine. You have no right to take it.”
“Well, I don’t know what you’re talking about,” she says. “I didn’t take anything from your room.”
My heart pounds as I watch her shuffle the papers. She writes down a list of numbers and then punches those numbers into the calculator. When a sum appears, she sighs.
“You think you’re protecting me but it’s too late,” I say.
She looks up, her eyes sharp, a crack in the cool expression.
“Maybe some of this was your fault,” I say. “Did you ever consider that?”
“I’m not getting into this with you right now,” she says.
“Most mothers don’t let their kid move out at fourteen. You realize that, right?”
“You didn’t move out,” she says sharply. “You went away to school.”
“Well, all my friends think it’s weird that you let me do that,” I say. “Most mothers love their kids too much to send them away, but not you I guess.”
She stares at me, her face drains of color and the next moment it’s swallowed by a flush. Boiling red, flared nostrils, maybe the first time I’ve ever seen in her that kind of anger. For a moment I imagine her leaping up from the table and lunging at me, her hands around my neck.
“You begged us to let you go there,” she says, her voice shaking from the effort to remain calm.
“I didn’t beg.”
“You gave us a goddamn presentation about it.”
I shake my head. “You’re exaggerating,” I say, though she’s not. I did give a presentation; I did beg.
“You can’t do that,” she says. “You don’t get to change the facts to suit the story you want to tell.”
“What does that mean?”
She takes a breath as though to speak. Then she exhales, lets it go. She stands, moves into the kitchen—to get away from me, I know, but I follow her. A few steps behind, I ask again, “What does that mean? Mom, what is that supposed to mean?” To drown me out, she turns the water on full blast and clangs the dishes in the sink, but I don’t stop. The question keeps coming out of me, berating and outside my control, outside myself.
The plate in her hands slips, or maybe it’s slammed on purpose. Either way, it breaks—shards into the sink. I go quiet, my hands tingling as though I’m the one who shattered the plate.
“You lied to me, Vanessa,” she says. Her hand, red from the hot water and slick with soap, turns off the tap and then balls into a fist. Water darkens her shirt as she pounds that fist against her own heart. “You told me you had a boyfriend. You sat there and you lied to me and you let me think . . .”
She trails off and clamps the wet hand over her eyes, like she can’t bear to remember it. That drive back to Browick, her saying, All I care about is that he’s nice to you. Asking me if I was having sex, if I needed to go on the Pill. First love is so special, she said. You’ll never forget it.
Again she says, “You lied to me.”
She waits, expecting an apology. I let the words hang in the air between us. I feel emptied out and stripped bare, but I don’t feel sorry, not for anything.
She’s right; I did lie. I sat there and let her believe what she wanted and felt no remorse. It didn’t even really feel like lying, more like shaping the truth to fit what she needed to hear, an act of contortion I learned from Strane—and I was good at it, able to manipulate the truth so covertly she had no idea what I’d done. Maybe I should have felt guilt afterward, but all I remember feeling is pride for getting away with it, for knowing how to protect her, him, myself, everyone at once.
“I never imagined you being capable of that,” she says.
I lift my shoulders; my voice comes out like a croak. “Maybe you don’t really know me.”
She blinks, registering both what I said and what I haven’t. “Maybe you’re right,” she says. “Maybe I don’t.”
Wiping her hands, she leaves the sink of dirty dishes, the broken plate. On her way out of the kitchen she pauses in the doorway. “You know, sometimes I’m ashamed that you’re my kid,” she says.
I stand for a while in the middle of the kitchen, my ears following the groan of the stairs as she climbs, my parents’ bedroom door opening and closing, her footsteps directly above me, the creak of the metal frame as she gets into bed. The walls and floors here are so thin, the house so cheaply built, you can hear anything if you listen hard enough, a constant threat of exposure.
I plunge my hand into the sink and grope blindly for pieces of the broken plate, not caring if I slice myself open. I leave the shards lined up on the counter, dripping water and soap suds. Later, when I’m lying in my own bed still checking myself for hurt—was it so bad, what she said to me? it feels worse than what I deserved—she tosses the shards into the trash and I hear the clatter of ceramic from all the way up in my attic bedroom. The next day I find Lolita back on my bookshelf.
Charley’s mom gets a job in New Hampshire, the third time they’ve moved in four years. On her last day at school, she sneaks beers in her backpack and we drink them behind the grocery store, our burps echoing against the dumpsters. After school, Charley gives me a ride home, still buzzed, running every red light on our way out of town while I laugh and lean my head against the window, thinking, If this is how I die, it wouldn’t be so bad.
“I wish you weren’t leaving,” I say as she turns onto the lake road. “I won’t have any friends without you.”
“There’s Jade,” she says, peering at the dark road, trying to avoid the potholes.
“Ugh, no thanks. She’s the fuckin’ worst.” My bluntness surprises me; I’ve never shit-talked Jade to Charley before, but what does it matter now?
Charley smirks. “Yeah, she can be. And she does kind of hate you.” She stops the car at the top of my driveway. “I’d come in, but I don’t want your parents to smell beer on me. Though you probably smell like it, too.”
“Wait a sec.” I dig through my backpack for the toothpaste I began carrying around once I started smoking cigarettes. I suck a little bit into my mouth, swish it around.
“Look at you.” Charley laughs. “Surprisingly screwed up and brilliant.”
I hug her for a long time and, in my giddiness, want to kiss her but control the urge, force myself to climb out of the car. Before I shut the door, I duck down and say, “Hey, thanks for not letting me leave with that guy at the bowling alley.”
She frowns, trying to remember. Her eyebrows lift. “Oh, right! No problem. He was clearly going to murder you.”
As she backs out of the driveway, she rolls down the window and calls, “Keep in touch!” I nod and call back, “I will!” but it means nothing. I don’t have her address or new phone number. Even later, with Facebook and Twitter, I’ll never be able to find her.
For a while, Jade and I try to hang out, trudging alongside each other to the grocery store during lunch, trying to convince the other to shoplift and growing incensed when she won’t. One morning, I’m in the cafeteria before first period, scrambling to finish my algebra homework, when she marches up to me.
“So I saw that guy Craig at the bowling alley on Saturday,” she says.
I look up. She’s smiling, can barely keep her lips closed. She looks like she’s about to spill out all over the place.
“He said to tell you that you’re a cunt.” She waits, eyes wide, for my reaction. I feel my face burn and I imagine hurling my algebra book at her, knocking her over, yanking on her brassy bleached hair.
But I just roll my eyes and mumble something about him being a gun-loving pedophile, then turn back to my homework. After that, Jade starts hanging out with a popular group, the kids she was friends with in middle school. She dyes her hair brown and joins the tennis team. When we pass in the hallway, she stares straight ahead.
Rather than deal with finding a new place to sit in the cafeteria, I give up altogether and start spending lunch period at the diner in the strip mall. Every day I order coffee and pie while I read or finish homework, imagining that I look mysterious and adult sitting in a booth all by myself. Sometimes I feel men looking at me from their counter stools, and sometimes I meet their gaze, but it always ends there.
* * *
At home, deep in the woods, in the middle of nowhere, the internet is my only way out. Online, I search endlessly, googling different combinations of Strane’s name and Browick, in quotations and without, but find only his faculty profile and something about him volunteering at a community literacy program in 1995. Then, in mid-March, a new result appears: he won a national teaching award, attended a ceremony in New York. There’s a photo of him onstage accepting the plaque, a big grin on his face, white teeth shining through black beard. I don’t recognize his shoes and his hair is shorter than I’ve ever seen it. Embarrassment creeps up my spine as I realize he probably wasn’t thinking about me at all in that moment. There isn’t a single moment when I’m not thinking about him.
At night, I stay up late talking with strangers on Instant Messenger. I search the same list of key words—lolita, nabokov, teacher—and I message all the men who show up in the results. If they start getting creepy like Craig, I sign off. It’s not about that. I just like how they happily listen while I tell them everything that happened with Strane. You’re a very special girl, they type, for being able to appreciate the love of a man like that. If the men ask for a photo of me, I send an image of Kirsten Dunst from the movie The Virgin Suicides and none of them ever call me out on it, which makes me wonder if these men are stupid or just ok with me being a liar. If they send me a photo, I tell them they’re handsome and they all believe me, even the ones who are clearly ugly. I save all their pictures in a folder titled MATH HOMEWORK so my parents won’t look in it, and sometimes I sit clicking through photo after photo, sad homely face after sad homely face, and think that if Strane had sent me a photo before I really knew him, he’d fit right in.
Mud season turns to blackfly season. The lake ice thaws slowly, first turning gray, then blue, and then dissolving to cold water. The snow in the yard melts, but deep in the woods, drifts still nestle against boulders, crusty snow piles peppered with pine needles and spruce cones. In April, a week before my seventeenth birthday, Mom asks if I want to have a party.
“And invite who?”
“Your friends,” she says.
“What friends?”
“You have friends.”
“That’s news to me.”
“You do,” she insists.
It almost makes me feel sorry for her, picturing what she imagines my life at school is like, smiling faces in the hallways, a lunch table of nice girls with good grades, when in reality it’s me staring at the ground as I walk and drinking black coffee in a diner with a bunch of retirees.
We end up going out to eat at Olive Garden for my birthday, a brick of lasagna followed by a brick of tiramisu pierced with a candle. My present is an eight-week driver’s education course, a gesture that shows Browick is even further behind us.
“And maybe, once you pass,” Dad says, “we’ll find you a car.”
Mom’s eyebrows shoot up.
“Eventually,” he clarifies.
I thank them and try not to act too excited by the thought of the places a car can take me.
* * *
That summer, Dad helps me get a filing clerk job at the hospital in town—eight bucks an hour, three days a week. I’m assigned to the urology archives, a long windowless room of floor-to-ceiling shelves crammed with medical charts that are shipped in from all over the state. Every morning when I arrive, a pile of charts waits to be filed, along with a list of patients whose charts I need to pull, either because they have upcoming appointments or because they died so long ago the chart can now be destroyed.
The hospital is understaffed, so entire days pass without the lead clerk checking on me. Even though I’m not supposed to, I spend most of my time reading charts. There are so many—even if I worked at the hospital for the rest of my life, I wouldn’t be able to get through them all. Finding an interesting one is a guessing game of running my fingers along their color-coded stickers, tugging out a random one and hoping for a good story. You really can’t predict which ones are going to be good. Thick charts can read like novels, with years of symptoms, operations, and complications in blue carbon copy and faded ink. Sometimes the thin ones are the most devastating, a tragedy compacted into a handful of appointments and a red stamp on the front cover: deceased.
Almost all the urology patients are men, most middle-aged or older. They’re men who pee blood or aren’t peeing at all, men who pass stones and grow tumors. The charts have grainy X-rays of kidneys and bladders lit up with dye, diagrams of penises and testicles annotated with the doctor’s scrawl. In one chart, I find a photograph of bladder stones in a gloved palm like three spiky grains of sand. The transcript shows the doctor’s question, How long has there been blood in your urine? and the patient’s answer, Six days.
At lunch, I eat in the cafeteria armed with a book so I have an excuse not to sit with Dad. It feels better with some breathing room between us, because in some ways, he’s a different person at the hospital. His accent becomes thicker, and I hear him laugh at gross jokes that he’d be offended by if Mom were around. Plus, he has a ton of friends. People’s faces light up at the sight of him. I had no idea he was so popular.
On my first day, when he went around introducing me to what seemed like every single person, I asked him, “How does everyone know you?” He just laughed and said, “Helps if you’ve got your name on your shirt,” pointing to the phil embroidered above his breast pocket, but it’s more than that—even doctors smile when they see Dad coming, and they never smile, and some people already knew stuff about me, how old I am, that I like to write. They still think I go to Browick, which makes sense. I assume he told everyone when I was accepted, and he wouldn’t have gone around announcing it when I was kicked out.
Dad and I really don’t have much to say to each other, which is ok. In the truck, he keeps the radio turned up so it’s too loud to talk, and once we’re at home, he settles into his chair and turns on the TV. In the afternoons he likes to watch shows from when he was a kid, The Andy Griffith Show and Bonanza, while I go for long walks with Babe around the lakeshore and up the bluff to the cave where the abandoned cot still sits rotting. I try to stay out of the house until Mom gets home. Not that being with her is any easier, but when they’re together, they forget about me, and I can slip up into my bedroom and shut the door.
Dad tells me I should start saving now for college textbooks. Instead, I blow my first two paychecks on a digital camera and, on my days off, take self-portraits in the woods, wearing floral dresses and knee socks. In the photos, ferns brush my thighs and sunlight streams through my hair, making me look like a wood nymph, like Persephone wandering her meadow, waiting for Hades to come. I draft an email to Strane with a dozen JPEGs attached and hover the mouse over “send,” but when I imagine the ruin that could come to him, I can’t do it.
Midsummer, he appears in the form of a chart waiting to be filed, included in an archive shipment from western Maine. strane, jacob. born november 10, 1957. Inside are the records of the vasectomy he had in 1991, notes from the initial consultation appointment, written in the doctor’s handwriting: 33 y.o. patient is unmarried but insistent in not wanting children. There are notes from the actual surgery, from the follow-up appointment: Patient was instructed to apply ice to the scrotum once a day and to wear scrotal support for two weeks. At “scrotal support,” I slap the chart shut, mortified at the phrase even if I’m unsure exactly what it means.
I open it again, read it all the way through—his vitals, his stats, six foot four, 280 pounds. His signature in three different places. I pull apart two pages stuck together by a decade-old ink blot and imagine the pen leaking onto his hands. I can see his fingers, his calluses and flat, bitten-down nails. How they looked resting on my thigh the first time he touched me.
The story of his chart is undramatic but still surreal, his recovery described as him holding a bag of ice to his groin. I try to picture it—he had the surgery in July, so the ice must have been melting and there would’ve been wet spots on his shorts, a sweating glass of a cold drink beside him, an orange bottle of painkillers that clicked as he tapped them out into his palm. At the time, I was how old? I count in my head: six, a first grader, barely a person and nine years away from being in bed with him, squirming under his hands as he told me to calm down, that I couldn’t get pregnant, he’d had a vasectomy.
I want to steal the chart, but when they hired me, I had to sign pages of confidentiality agreements, bolded statements about the legal consequences of sharing medical records. I make do with visiting the chart every day, pulling it out from its spot on the bottom shelf and transcribing the notes into my journal, underlining the phrase unmarried but insistent in not wanting children. It makes me think of the only part of Lolita I truly hate, the passage where Humbert imagines first having daughters with Lo, then making granddaughters with those daughters. It makes me remember, too, the thing I’ve almost forgotten—him asking me to call him Daddy on the phone while he jerked off on the other end.
But these thoughts are like water-smoothed stones I pick up and study with cool eyes, then let fall back into the lake. In the quiet of the hospital, the oscillating fan stirs my hair as the thoughts sink to the bottom of my brain and disappear beneath the muck. I close the chart, pick up another stack, file it away.