Russell Banks - The Reserve

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.