Laura van den Berg - Find Me

They aren’t usually home until after dark, so either the Psychologist has gotten confused about time or Mr. and Mrs. Carroll have changed their schedule. She doesn’t know what is true.

She also doesn’t know how long they’ve been watching and now there is something about their watching, about seeing their expression take on the wrongness of what is happening and reflect that wrongness back at her, that makes her feel like her organs are being rearranged. Her liver and her lungs switch places. Her spleen is in her elbow. Her heart is in her knee.

Mr. and Mrs. Carroll make no move to help her.

The whale vanishes from the screen.

The Psychologist is busy recording new data on his laptop. He doesn’t yet know that his parents are in the room, that they are approaching from behind, slow and slack with shock, and very soon this girl will be sent away.

She sees them coming. She sees the wrongness grow. Piss runs down her legs and darkens the carpet. She feels the hot liquid curve around the edge of her foot.

She sees herself in the trunk of the car. The air was too hot and thick to breathe. It turned to cotton candy in her lungs.

She is going to pass out on the bedroom floor and wake up on a farm. It sounds impossible, but that is what is going to happen.

She will never understand what the Psychologist wanted from her, the nature of his experiment, but she knows what he took and that he kept taking it long after she left Allston.

His parents keep getting closer.

The Psychologist keeps clicking away.

“Look at you, my little monster,” he says. “Look at what I’ve trained you to do.”

A theory on why we stop remembering: there is a part of our story that we do not know how to tell to ourselves and we will away its existence for so long that finally our brain agrees to a trade: I will let you forget this, but you will never feel whole.

* * *

What is a memory but the telling of a story?

* * *

In middle school, I went on a field trip to a whale watch at the Stellwagen Bank National Marine Sanctuary. When we saw the first sign of a whale, the spray of white, the great V-shaped tail smacking the water, I screamed in terror and did not know why.

* * *

In high school, I kicked a boy in the chest when he tried to touch between my legs.

* * *

It was never my mother in the tunnel. It was always him.

* * *

Does this mean he’s dead?

* * *

Ask me if I feel bad for hoping he is. Just ask.

* * *

When I stop remembering, I’m not in the Mansion. I’m standing in the woods, breathing fast. The land is heavy with silence. The tree branches are reaching toward each other like fingers and through them the sky is the opposite of faded. It is such a deep shade of blue that it almost looks unreal, like a screen that could be split open. I don’t remember leaving the Mansion and walking outside. I don’t remember crossing the yard and moving past the halo of bare trees. The woods feel like shelter.

The ground is damp and the heels of my sneakers are sinking into it. I stand on a mass of tree roots, like a person seeking high ground. The woods smell faintly of smoke. I listen to the rushing sound of the creek. I wrap my arms around the trunk and think of Marcus and feel my heart begin to slow.

A bird with a yellow chest flies from one branch to another, on the run from something. The ferns have left little wet handprints on my jeans.

Now it’s like this: you look at yourself in the mirror and watch your reflection take off a mask. You look hard at all the wrongness in this new face, you look hard at the ways that wrongness has shaped it, and you have to decide if this new face is something you can live with.

If you decide no, you dissolve into yourself. If you decide yes, a small thing inside you is set free.

In the Mansion, there are animals all around us. I’ve seen the scurry of whiskered rats, snakes in the grass, possums with spindly white tails stalking the backyard after dark. I’ve seen birds in the trees, the ones that sit hunched on the broad low branches, buzzards or something related. There are alive things in the house too. I keep hearing the tick tick tick of nails on the floor, a scraping in the walls. It’s only a matter of time before one gets stuck inside.

In Charlestown, Ms. Neuman was always setting out cages for mice. Once they were in the cages, she would feed them cheddar cheese with poison inside. If Marcus and I found a trapped mouse sniffing at the bars, we carried the cage outside and let it go.

In the living room, when a raccoon gets stuck inside the trap door, Nelson says it will make a great tool for an experiment. The four of us stand around the closed trap door, having been drawn into the room by the sound of the animal’s thrashing. I can feel the raccoon racing around beneath us. I can feel it slamming against the walls. A pulse, an aliveness, rises from the floor.

“You probably aren’t aware that the history of animal experimentation goes back to the Greeks,” Nelson tells us, sensing our hesitation. “That the rhesus monkey helped find a vaccine for polio? That heart valve replacement surgery was tested on dogs?”

I can see that Nelson thinks of the Mansion as a kind of Hospital, its inhabitants the patients, and I do not need another Hospital or another doctor trying to pry his way inside. I’ve had it with scientific inquiry.

“We should let it go,” I say.

“Yes,” says Marcus, who has always had sympathy for trapped things. “I vote to let it go too.”

“Who said anything about voting?” Nelson stands on the trap door and crosses his arms, unwilling to give up his prize. Earlier he was outside. His pants are streaked with fresh mud. “You just got here. You don’t know how things work.”

Somehow, in the middle of all this, Darcie continues with her remembering.

“I was in a basement,” she says, loud enough to get our attention. We stop arguing about what to do with the raccoon and look at her. She’s pulling feathers out of her wings. “I was living down there. I couldn’t get away. I was tied to something.”

“When?” I ask her. I don’t know if she means the basement downstairs or some other place, if she was in a basement before Nelson found her on the side of the road in Cordova. The raccoon is whining now, a shrill plea.

“Sometime before. I think.” Darcie’s eyes widen and she looks like she’s about to tell us more, but then she stops and sinks down into the velvet chair, her wings bursting over the arms. She’s holding fistfuls of feathers. There are bald spots on the ridges of her wings.

“See!” Nelson claps his hands. “She’s remembering. She’s getting fully cured.”

Marcus and I look at each other. We’re not sure we like this idea of what it means to be cured.

“Oh no,” Darcie cries. She drops the feathers and pushes her face into her hands. “Oh no.”

A Real-Life Ghost Story, I think. That’s what she’s remembering now.

The animal claws around inside the trap door. The floorboards shudder. Darcie runs upstairs and into the bathroom. We chase after her and find her sitting in the rusted tub and rubbing her arms like she’s washing herself, even though there’s no water.

“Don’t kill it,” she says when she sees us huddled in the doorway. She leans back in the tub and rests her black-soled feet on the porcelain edge. “Don’t you dare kill it.”

“But what about progress?” Nelson asks.

She closes her eyes and shakes her head. For the moment she is the one with the power.

We decide to leave the raccoon alone for now.

* * *

That night, there are no games. No drinking, no copping and robbing, no hiding, no tunnel. Instead we vanish into our separate corners. Darcie stays in the bathroom, pretending to wash herself in the tub. Nelson retreats into the attic and soon after I hear the bowling ball rolling across the floor, the clatter of pins. The raccoon stays locked inside the trap door, thrashing. Marcus and I are in our room. I’m reading on the mattress. He’s sitting silent on the floor.