I pictured that witch fromThe Wizard of Ozwhen they pour water over her. That was my mother. Only it wasn’t water. It was reality. And although she obviously wasn’t saying these words, I heard them in my head as I watched her nervously puttering around the house, chewing her nails and sneaking cigarettes on the back porch that whole day that they found the island but not my sister.
I’m melting.…
***
In September, the year before we disappeared, and after the summer of manipulating wounded men, Hunter went to Costa Rica to build houses, and Emma and I went back to school. It did not take long for Emma to find a new boyfriend, or I suppose for a new boyfriend to find her, but either way, she was with someone new by October. His name was Gil and he was twenty-six and the manager of the deli where we all gathered after school.
I will admit that Gil was very cute. He was tall and thin and had blue eyes and dark hair, and what I remember most about him was that he had an attitude like he didn’t care about anything. Even in our fancy town waiting on spoiled rich kids, making their sandwiches and selling them beer if they had really good fake ID cards, he was above it all. This appealed to Emma. She was so used to everyone falling all over themselves for her, our mother being jealous of her, Mr. Martin being tortured by hisconflicted feelings toward her, and Hunter being obsessed with her—this guy from the deli who didn’t care less about her was intoxicating.
Emma started talking about him on the way home from school. She said he wasreal.I just listened because I did not want to spoil it. If I agreed with her, she might think less of him because she thought less of me in general. If I disagreed, she might start to see that he was really just a big loser being twenty-six and working at a deli with no plans for his future, and that he actually did care, and care very much, about the spoiled rich kids he had to make sandwiches for but that he covered it up with his attitude of not caring. Either way, I did not want Emma to lose interest in Gil. I did not want her to keep coddling Hunter like a little baby and taking all the air in our house so that I could not even breathe.
That was how I had felt—like I was not even worthy of one breath with everything being about Emma. Hunter desperate to have sex with her. Mr. Martin being so worried and angry but also so curious, and Mrs. Martin being so threatened by his curiosity and so insulted by his cruel words, like when he called Emma Lolita all the time. I wished it would all end before it ended very badly.
I got one wish but not the other.
When Hunter returned from Costa Rica, he expected things to be the way they were over the summer. Emma had not been on her social media with Gil, because she did not want Mrs. Martin to find out and Mrs. Martin had some very clever ways to infiltrate Emma’s life. I also think that somewhere inside her, Emma was ashamed of her relationship with Gil the deli manager, and that the shame was part of the attraction. It was hard to understand. If I had what Emma had, I would have used it much better. I would have used it for nothing short of true love or absolute power.
When Hunter came home and found out about Gil, it destroyed him. And whether he had been sincere in his summer of kindness toward her, or just winning the war, it didn’t matter, because the war was on again and it was hotter than it had ever been. Emma came right out and told him that they both needed to date people and try to be friends. She reminded him that they were technically related and that as much as they liked each other, they could never really be together, because the world would think they were monsters. Incestuous monsters. The world is very critical of incest, even though if you believe what the Bible says, we are all blood relatives and so we are all incestuous. I’ve never really understood that. But it doesn’t matter what I understand or don’t understand. It was the first time either of them admitted what was really going on between them, and it made Hunter hate Emma again. And for the rest of the year, our house was a battlefield of insults and slammed doors and cold stares. Hunter told everyone about Gil and Emma. Emma stole his pot and cocaine and flushed them down the toilet. Hunter called her nothing but “whore” again. Emma called him “loser.”
It got so bad that Mrs. Martin asked Emma if she wanted to live with our father, which she refused. I didn’t think I would ever see that day. That’s how bad the war was.
It was so bad that when the letter came from Hamilton in March, telling Hunter he had been reaccepted, no one except Mr. Martin even seemed to care.
But Hunter pulled himself together that spring. He started seeing a very pretty senior from our high school and they acted like they were blissfully in love. He brought her to the house as much as he could so that Mrs. Martin could fawn all over her and Mr. Martin could appropriately not notice how pretty she was, and everyone could feel normal. And everyone could stick it toEmma. When they were at the house, it was like we all stepped onto the stage and put on a play. Over and over and over. I was just in the chorus, but Emma didn’t have any part at all. So by the time summer started to appear on the horizon, Emma made plans to attend a camp in Paris, which I thought was very healthy of her, and I made my own plans to attend a program in England. Sometimes you can win a war by leaving the battlefield before your army gets killed.
That was when Hunter decided to tell Mrs. Martin about the pictures. It must have been, because he executed the disclosure and the actions that followed in a way that was far too damaging to have been unplanned.
It was Memorial Day weekend, and on that weekend, Emma and I were with our father and Witt. Mr. Martin was away on a golf trip in Florida, which he did every year with his old roommates from Hamilton. That left Mrs. Martin alone with Hunter.
When we got back, Hunter told Emma that he had used his time alone with our mother very well. He told Emma that while they had breakfast on that Sunday morning, he broke down with Mrs. Martin. He could no longer keep his secret. He couldn’t stand for her to have bad feelings toward him, thinking he had taken those pictures of her lovely daughter. Then he dropped the nuclear bomb and told her that it was his father who had taken the photos. He had even saved a screen shot from his father’s phone proving it. Mrs. Martin confronted her husband when he got back later that evening and—just like that—the war had proliferated from Hunter and Emma to our mother and stepfather.
But that was not the end. Hunter had more bombs to drop, and as it turned out, he was just waiting patiently, his finger hovering over the biggest red button of them all.
I had the same feeling then that I had on the island, and that I had again after my return home. A force was in motion and nothing could stop it. There were so many lies. There was so much at stake. I wanted to jump out of my skin, every one of those times, and run away to a place that was calm and where things were still. After that Memorial Day weekend, I could feel the force pushing against our backs. I became that force on the island, and again when I came home. But I didn’t want to be a force. I wanted to be a girl. I could never be a girl with Mrs. Martin as my mother. And it made me want to go to her room and strangle the life out of her.
TWENTY
Dr. Winter
The necklace. That was the only thing they’d found belonging to the girls. The forensics team had taken numerous samples from around the house, towels in the laundry bin, hair from furniture. It would be days before any DNA analyses could be completed, the fragments of fingerprints found on random objects and hidden surfaces analyzed.
But they knew Emma had been wearing that necklace the day she disappeared. She wore it every day, as a reminder to Cass that their mother loved her more.
Abby sat at the bar at the motel in Damariscotta, sipping on a neat glass of scotch. The team would stay there for days, canvassing the town, poring over records at the town hall, and searching the seven acres of woods on Freya Island. It was past midnight now, and they had all gone to bed after a long, emotional day. All except for Abby.
Thoughts from the day were spinning in her head. Images of the island, the house, the rooms and the woods had all brought Cass’s stories to life, and they played out now as the alcohol took control. They had gone through every drawer and cupboard,finding the schoolbooks Cass had described, the ballet video, the book of lullabies. They had sifted through the garbage, finding remnants of white fish and rice pudding and an empty carton of milk. Abby could see Cass and Emma sitting at that table, suffering through a meal, pretending to be happy, obedient. She could see them, too, before they saw what was happening with the baby, feeling part of a family, feeling loved. Laughing, at ease. And in the woods, by the trail to the dock, Abby could see Cass waiting for the boatman, prepared to love him and hate him and then hate herself when she was done.
That was what Cass had described. But now, as Abby sat alone, staring out at the ocean from the small window behind the mirrored wall of bottles, she allowed herself to wonder.
There were questions about Cass’s story. The boat found drifting in the harbor way up north, out of gas, two days before she returned. The answers on the psychological examination that were on the cusp of being too perfect—not to the computer that scored it, but to Abby, who had read it line by line herself, looking for the truth.
It was not easy to escape from a narcissistic mother. She knew this from her research, and she knew this from her life, and the life that had created her mother, and on and on into the past. And into the future.
Something always happened when Abby thought about her mother this way, in the context of the cycle she had studied and written about. She had been told stories about how her mother had been neglected and abused as a child. Her father had tried to make Abby and Meg understand. It’s easy as a child to pass judgment: “Why can’t she just stop? Why can’t she just be normal?” But that was like asking the sky not to be blue or the earth to beflat. And so empathy sometimes mixed with the anger she felt at what her mother had done to her and to Meg, and it made her feel sick to her stomach. It was much easier when the anger could roam freely, without this rude interruption.
And what about Cass, then?Abby thought. Did she feel this way?
Is that what made Cass go back to her mother’s house?she asked herself.Then why is she trying to break her into pieces?This hardly seemed like the best time for revenge, if that’s what she was doing. Abby couldn’t blame her for wanting this, for wanting to see her mother suffer. After all, her mother had created a home Emma had needed to leave. And it was the leaving that brought them to this island where they were forced to remain, where Cass was forced to bear years of servitude to her captors as the loyal daughter, and where Emma lost her own daughter right before her eyes.
