Lisa Gardner - Catch Me

Pain. Wracking cramps, eye-rolling diarrhea, my face bursting with sweat, but I promise, promise, promise, no tears rolling down my cheeks.

“I just don’t know what to do,” my pretty, shiny mommy was telling the doctor. “I turned my back for only a moment, and next thing I knew, she was eating a lightbulb. I mean, really, Doctor, what kind of child eats a lightbulb?”

Good girls are brave. Good girls are tough.

“It’s just so hard, sometimes, being a single mom. I mean, I’d just popped into the kitchen to make her favorite peanut butter sandwich, and well, I was doing laundry and trying to pick up all the toys in the family room and clean the bathroom. And yes, a lightbulb had burned out, so I’d gotten one down to replace it, but I never thought for a second, never imagined…I’m sorry, I’m sorry. I don’t mean to cry. I just haven’t slept in so long. You have no idea how active she is and impulsive and…And now this and we don’t have insurance and, and…I’m sorry, can I just sit down for a minute?”

Good girls are brave. Good girls are tough.

The doctor patted my mother’s shoulder. The doctor told my mother everything would be all right. The doctor told my mother she was doing the best she could and he understood completely.

I rolled over, held my stomach, and vomited more blood.

Wanted to talk. Wanted to find my voice, but my tongue was swollen and my cheeks hurt and my throat burned.

Another nurse standing beside me. Wiping my mouth with a cool cloth, touching my forehead with gentle fingers. I stared at her. Dark eyes, dark hair. Kind face. Speak. I wanted to. I tried to open my mouth. Could feel the urgency of it, the desperate need to. Had to speak, had to speak.

Not about the lightbulb, not about the peanut butter.

Something else I had to say. If I could just say…

Good girls are brave. Good girls are tough.

I opened my mouth.

The nurse turned away. Across the room, as if sensing my intent, my mother glanced over the doctor’s shoulder, met my gaze, and triumphantly smiled.

I WOKE UP IN THE BLIND-DARKENED ROOM of my Cambridge rental. Pulse pounding. Hair damp. Gray tank top glued to my sweat-plastered skin.

Words were still on the tip of my tongue. The words I never got to say back then, the words it took me years to slowly but surely remember:

Baby’s crying.

That’s what I’d wanted to say. What I’d felt a desperate urge to tell the doctor, the nurse, someone. Except in theory, I didn’t remember a baby. In theory, my mother only had me.

Baby’s crying.

Down the hall, I thought now. And for a second, I could almost taste a name, feel it like a scent in the air, a ghost of a ghost of a memory. A baby girl. Down the hall. Crying.

I squeezed my eyes shut. Pressed the heels of my hands into my eye sockets as if that might help. To remember. To forget?

I never knew. All these years later, I never knew.

My mother hurt me. I knew that. She was not well. So sick, in fact, that after that last incident, she was sent away permanently. A mental institute I guess, because that’s where sick people generally went, and jail would’ve involved a trial, and that I would’ve remembered.

My mother went away. That’s what Aunt Nancy told me the first day in the hospital, and I never brought it up again. Mentioning my mother’s name risked summoning the demon. So I never asked and Aunt Nancy never told.

Something bad had happened. Worse than usual. And I knew what it was. Deep down inside, I understood that I knew everything, that in fact I remembered everything. But I didn’t want to remember what I remembered. So I didn’t. By a conscious or subconscious act of will, I took the past, boxed it up, and put it away, never to be seen again.

Maybe not the best coping strategy. And not without consequences. Turns out, when you wall off pieces of your mind, you can’t control everything that disappears. To this day, I have haphazard recall at best. Time escapes me, days, weeks. Entire conversations with best friends, the vital last lecture that happened right before the final exam.

Jackie and Randi used to tease me I’d forget my own head if it wasn’t attached to my shoulders. I’d laugh with them, but often self-consciously. Jackie had really called me on the phone last night, we’d talked for two hours, and I’d forgotten all of it? Randi had told me all about her first date with local heartthrob Tom Eastman, and I couldn’t recall a single detail?

Small glitches in the operating system, I’d tell myself. I mean, given the amount of resources I’d dedicated to wiping eight entire years from my general consciousness, some errors were bound to occur. Besides, no matter how much I screwed up, forgot, genuinely overlooked, those occasions were still better than the few times I started to remember.

Recall was most likely to happen when my anxiety spiked. Then the past would leak out in my dreams, snippets from an old movie reel, where once upon a time, a thin crazy mother lived in a tiny dirty house with her thin lonely daughter. And the mother fed her daughter shattered glass and slammed her fingers in kitchen drawers and pushed her down steep flights of stairs because little girls needed to be brave and tough.

Until one day, the little girl grew to be so brave, so tough, that she won the war.

That, I felt in my bones. My mother did something. But I won the war.

And I didn’t ask about my mother anymore, because in my heart of all hearts, I understood that answer might tell me everything I still wasn’t prepared to know.

Baby’s crying.

Girl. Stuffed bear. White ruffles, pink polka dots. Sugar and spice and everything nice…

Don’t remember. Block it out. Shove it away. Nothing good can come from the past, especially a past like mine. Not to mention, at this stage of the game, what would be the point?

A hunted woman doesn’t need closure. A hunted woman needs battle skills.

I stood abruptly, glanced at the clock in my shadowed room, and calculated the time remaining until 8 P.M., January 21. Zero hour. When my own killer would finally come calling.

Seventy-eight hours to go.

I put on my workout clothes, grabbed Tulip’s leash, and prepared to run.

MY FATHER LIVES IN BOSTON. Only argument Aunt Nancy and I ever had was about him, so again, another topic rarely broached and even less frequently considered. But yes, I have a father. Rich guy. On his fifth, sixth wife, last I heard. I have siblings, too, half siblings I guess. I’ve never met any of them, and I have no illusions my father is any more of a parent to them than he is to me.

My dad has a sperm donor approach to fatherhood. Meet a young pretty girl, knock her up. If she’s young enough, pretty enough, surgically enhanced enough, maybe marry her, too. Until of course, the next young pretty thing comes along, in which case, hey, he’s a guy; he can’t help himself.

I guess he met my mother while on vacation at the grand old Mount Washington Hotel in Bretton Woods. She was seventeen and working as a housekeeper. He was thirty and looking for entertainment. According to Aunt Nancy, my mother told him she was pregnant. He didn’t marry her, but sent money. Sperm donor, check writer. See, a hell of a guy.

He never followed up on my care. At least that’s how the story goes. Lost touch with my mother in the very beginning, which surprises me a little. Not that he’d let me go, but that my mother would let him go. Maybe she tried. But she would’ve been a mountain mouse and he’s some big city finance guy, came from money, makes even more money, has a long and enduring value system wrapped up in his own self-importance. She probably never stood a chance.