Up to this moment, whenever she saw what she had done, she had justified it to herself, rationalizing her rash acts, telling herself that she had no choice, none, they had trapped her, Mother and the lawyers and the doctors, and now they wanted to put her in a cage and keep her there for the rest of her life. Or worse. Those were facts. Everything else was speculation or memory, febrile and unreliable. Since childhood, Vanessa had felt trapped by her parents, as if they were predators and she their intended prey — trapped and then put in a cage for later, when they would have the time and occasion to devour her properly. As a small child, Vanessa could not listen to those old fairy tales being read to her without crying and begging whoever was reading to stop, stop. Those old stories of children put into ovens by stepmothers and wicked witches. Children climbing sky-high bean stalks to the giant’s lair. Children being led by a piper into a mountain cave, never to be seen again. They terrified Vanessa. She could not bear to say or even hear nursery rhymes without feeling her chest tighten and her legs go all watery, making her cry to her nanny Hilda or to the child reciting the rhyme, “Stop! Stop saying that! I hate that! It’s nasty and scary. You’re only doing it to scare me!”
People — her nanny Hilda and the babysitters, other children and their parents, and her own parents and their friends — were impressed by Vanessa’s exquisite sensitivity and smiled down at her and praised it, as if she were the most delicate flower of all and therefore the most precious. But she knew, even as a very young girl of five and six, that her inability to listen to the fairy tales and nursery rhymes that other children loved had its origin someplace else, because the tales and verses made her feel the way she felt when she almost remembered being naked and lifted high in the air by a big man and placed up on the fireplace mantel with a scary hot fire burning below, the big man turning into her father, who disappeared suddenly behind his camera box, covering himself with a black hood, when something made a whooshing sound and a flash of light so bright that for a few seconds she couldn’t see anything and only knew that she was being lifted again by a big man and carried to a sofa that was hard and scratchy on her bare bottom and back, where she was placed just so, her naked legs and arms arranged just so, her head turned just so. She remembered the diamond shapes in the carpet on the floor, dark red against a field of green. And then another whooshing sound and flash of light that made her close her eyes tight, and she kept them closed tight, clenching them like fists, wrinkling up her nose and crinkling her forehead, making herself ugly, until her father carried her to her crib, where he put her nightie back on her and kissed her on the cheek. And then her mother, led to the crib by her father, leaned down and stroked Vanessa’s hair slowly, dreamily, with eyes half closed, smiling, as if she’d never felt anything so soft and lovely before.
At her father’s funeral at St. James Episcopal Church, when it was Vanessa’s turn to speak, she started to talk about what her father was like as a young man, before he went off to war, when she was the very little girl that Dr. and Mrs. Cole had recently adopted, but somehow she got away from what she’d planned to say. She had meant to describe him as heroic and wise and all-knowing, the way little girls are supposed to remember their fathers, but instead she found herself describing him the way she actually remembered him. She said that he was cold and detached and that he saw people, including his own daughter, as objects to be examined and cut open and repaired, as a thing to be photographed and privately exhibited for his exclusive, secret pleasure. What began as a loving daughter’s eulogy ended as a turgid, blurred accusation that so upset everyone that afterward no one would speak to her. Until the morning two weeks later when her mother announced that she had scheduled a meeting for that afternoon with Whitney Brodhead to discuss her father’s will. When they entered the lawyer’s conference room and Vanessa saw Mr. Brodhead seated at the head of the long table with a sheaf of papers spread before him and Dr. Reichold standing at the rain-sopped window looking down at the street, Vanessa knew that she was just as trapped now as she had been all those years ago, lifted into the air by a big man and placed naked up on the mantel with the fire burning somewhere below, and her father, behind the camera box and hidden under his black cloak, saying, “Humpty Dumpty sat on a wall. Humpty Dumpty had a great fall, and all the king’s horses and all the king’s men couldn’t put Humpty together again….”
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.