Lauren
Megan didn’t call again, even though I hung around the house for the next few weeks, barely venturing beyond the back deck, and my emails to her Keale address went unanswered. She would contact me by the end of July or the beginning of August, whenever her seminar was finished, whenever she was ready to start planning for the fall, I figured. But eventually the summer wound down, Mom and I packed up the house, made our way to Yarmouth and then on to Simsbury. Four days before classes were scheduled to start, I repacked the Saab and drove to Scofield, rehearsing in my mind how my reunion with Megan would go. Tears, accusations, screaming. Or would it be explanations, laughs, forgiveness?
We were supposed to share an on-campus apartment with four other girls, but by the day before the semester started, she still hadn’t arrived. I kept telling myself that the next time the door opened it would be her, lugging that tired duffel bag, spilling some horrible travel tale, but it never happened. Classes started; our senior year began and Megan still wasn’t there. I waited in a long line at the housing department and eventually explained to a woman in an ill-fitting sweater that my roommate hadn’t arrived, and I didn’t know what I was supposed to do.
She typed some information into a database on her computer and said, “Oh. Megan Mazeros. That’s right. There’s a note here that she contacted us last week about her deposit. It looks like she’s not coming back this year.”
I leaned forward, nearly toppling my chair. “She’s not coming back? At all?”
“I don’t know about that, but it does say she won’t be here this fall.” She made a few more clicks, smiling absently at her computer screen. “It’s a good thing you’re here, then. We have a number of returning students on the waiting list for housing, and if there’s an empty spot in your apartment—”
I stood up. “No, no way. You’re not giving me a new roommate.”
The woman looked surprised, two warm round dots appearing on the apples of her cheeks. “It’s the school’s policy to charge extra for a single room, you know.”
“I don’t care how much it costs.” I seethed. “Add it to my bill, then. But you’re not giving me a different roommate.” This, at least, my parents would understand.
Over the next week, I tracked down everyone Megan knew—some of the Sisters had graduated last spring, but the ones who were still on campus had the same story. All they knew was that Megan was spending the summer with me before heading to her Harvard seminar. No one had heard from her since May, and they were equally shocked that she hadn’t come back.
“Shouldn’t you know where she is?” one of them demanded. “Didn’t she spend the summer with you?”
Of course I didn’t say anything about Megan and Michael or our fight or the boat she’d stolen. It seemed more and more ridiculous every time I thought about it. Three years of friendship, and it was all gone in a night.
I even tried Dr. Miriam Stenholz in the political science department, the tiny, intimidating woman who had taken Megan under her wing last spring and gotten her into the program at Harvard. After our initial introduction, Dr. Stenholz cleared off a cluttered chair in her office and insisted on making me a cup of tea.
She sat across from me, squeezing the tea bag with her spoon, dark swirls staining the water. “It’s very strange that Megan didn’t contact you. Why do you think that is?”
I shook my head, shifting the warm mug from hand to hand without bringing it to my lips. I hated even the smell of chamomile tea. “I haven’t seen her since the beginning of July, before she left for her seminar at Harvard. I don’t know what happened after that.”
Dr. Stenholz stared at me, lowering her cup to her desk. “But she didn’t go to the seminar, of course. There was a family emergency. She told me she went directly from her time with your family back to Kansas.”
I chewed my lip, thinking this through. Megan hadn’t mentioned anything about her family that last night we were together. I was sure of it. If there had been an emergency, she would have told me.
“She was so disappointed, of course, poor thing. After being so excited to receive the scholarship and all those hours of studying...” Dr. Stenholz shook her head. “I can’t think why she didn’t tell you.”
I could think of a few reasons. “Do you think she’s still there? In Kansas?”
Dr. Stenholz’s brows pinched together. “I suppose she must be. I’ve emailed her multiple times—she was supposed to TA for my fall class, but I had to find someone else. When you get in touch with her, will you let her know I would love to hear from her?”
I nodded, setting the untouched tea on the edge of her desk. My next class started in half an hour, but instead I blew it off to get in my car and go for a drive, slowing as I passed all the places I’d been with Megan, as if she might somehow be there, waiting for me. Had there really been a family emergency? But why wouldn’t she have called or emailed or dropped me a note—anything? And if she had gone back to Kansas, who had called the house on The Island from a payphone in Cambridge?
* * *
I was dealing with another disappearance that fall, too—Joe Natolo was gone. I’d called him my first night back in Scofield, hoping to put the awkwardness of our summer conversation behind us and pick up the pieces again. Maybe he would want to grab a bite and catch up and help me unravel the mystery of Megan. And sure—I would have happily gone back to his place, stripped off my shirt and shorts, and slid into the sheets that probably hadn’t been changed since I left in the spring. But instead of hearing his voice on the other end of the line, I’d received a tri-tone alert and an accompanying message by a mechanical woman: The number you are trying to reach is no longer in service. I dropped everything, rushed out to the Saab and drove into Scofield, laughing at my frenzy. There was some obvious, uncomplicated explanation, because that’s how Joe was—obvious and uncomplicated. I’d probably dialed the wrong phone number in my hurry, or Joe had forgotten to pay his phone bill that month. When I knocked on the door to his apartment, he would say, “Hey, there,” and I’d fall into his arms and tell him the whole terrible story of Megan and that summer and wait for our conversation to become kissing, for day to blend into night and night to blend into day.
But Joe’s car wasn’t in his usual spot, and new curtains, white with royal blue fleurs-de-lis, hung in his windows. There was a flowerpot on the windowsill, the dangling limbs of a fern reaching out to the sun. No one answered when I knocked on his door, so I descended the steps and rang the bell on the detached house. A friendly, frosted blonde woman opened the door, an apron tied around her hips.
“Joe Natolo,” I said, unable to form a sentence, the name itself a question.
She smiled at me, shaking her head. “I’m sorry, dear, he moved out a few weeks ago.”
As she began to shut the door, I blurted, “I’m sorry, I don’t know if this is inappropriate or something, but do you know where he’s moved to? I need to see him.”
She shook her head, her eyes kind. “He mentioned something about a job in Minnesota. No, Michigan. I think it was Michigan.”
Minnesota. Michigan. I was going to be sick, right here on the front porch of Joe’s landlord. Former landlord. “Did he leave a forwarding address? I mean, for his mail and things?”
She frowned. “I don’t know that he ever got mail here. But that would be something to check with the post office, I think.”
I checked with the post office, and I checked with the machine shop where Joe had worked, and I tracked down leads for a Cathy Natolo, the mother I’d never met, like I was some kind of private investigator. She lived in the Philly area, Joe had told me, but 411 didn’t have a number listed for a Cathy or Catherine Natolo anywhere in the vicinity. I called Michigan information and found forty-seven Natolo surnames, eight beginning with a J. I called the first five, and then I stopped. What was the point? Joe Natolo knew exactly where I was. He could have reached me through the switchboard at Keale at any time. I wouldn’t have been particularly difficult to locate, if he was interested in trying.
That fall, as I stumbled through my classes and returned each night to my unshared bedroom, it was impossible not to imagine the two of them together somehow—Megan and Joe, the missing pieces of my life. I missed Megan’s openmouthed snores, her infectious laugh, her crazy stories. I missed those nights with Joe, the two of us wearing only our underwear, eating Pasta Roni straight from the pot. They’d both disappeared as surely as if they’d been plucked by an alien hand reaching down from a hovering spaceship. And if I allowed myself, even jokingly, to entertain that possibility, how much more likely was it that they were simply somewhere together, their connection reestablished, their bond forged over stories of me?
More and more, I thought back to my last night with Megan, wondering how it could have been different. Maybe if I hadn’t let her out of my sight, she never would have wandered off with my brother. Maybe if I’d actually let her tell me about it, I would have understood the why beyond the how and the what. Maybe I would have forgiven her by now, and we would be back in our twin beds at Keale, gossiping about our suitemates and getting sloppy drunk once in a while and telling each other our best and worst truths and lies.
* * *
I didn’t even take pictures that fall, except for the odd digital snapshot for the Sentinel. Instead, I spent hundreds of hours in Phil Guerini’s darkroom, developing the pictures I’d taken over the summer—Lizzie in her sunflower-print dress with her tiny saltwater sandals, Mom and Kat in side-by-side lounge chairs, the wide brims of their hats shielding their faces. Dad and Michael standing next to each other on the pier, silhouetted against the sunset. Michael and Peter helping the boys light fireworks. Lizzie and Annabelle waving the burning ends of sparklers in the air. A shot of Dad and Uncle Patrick and Aunt Sue, all sitting on the sand, empty beer bottles stationed around them. Ten feet to the side was Megan, her knees drawn to her chest, her chin resting on her knees. This was right before she’d left the beach, then, right before she and Michael had wandered off together. Once they were developed, I boxed up the prints and wedged them into a dusty spot under my bed.
I wanted to forget everything that had happened—the summer of Mom in her wig with her painted-on eyebrows, the summer of Kat’s miscarriage, the summer of Megan and Michael, the summer I’d lost everything.
* * *
After Christmas, Mom and I went back to Washington with Dad to visit with MK and his new girlfriend, Rebekah, a Georgetown graduate. They were both working for one of the top law firms in the city. Mom said that Rebekah had all the marks of a politician’s wife, which was the highest praise she could offer. She looked like a female version of MK—tall with thick dark hair that was often slicked back into a low ponytail or chignon. I never saw her that winter without three-inch heels, even when we walked through snow and on icy sidewalks.
On my last night in town, I went with MK and Rebekah to a Georgetown alumni party. When Rebekah excused herself to the bathroom, MK told me that she was the real deal. “This is it for me,” he swore. “No more dicking around.”
“Oh, by the way,” I said. “Megan sends her love.”
I was satisfied when he nearly spat out his drink.
Twenty minutes later, I was bored and on my way to drinking too much from the punch bowl when I saw Braden Leavitt smiling at me from across the room. I raised a hand to wave, and he began making his way toward me.
It was one of those funny moments in life where time slowed down, where things became sharp and clear. Still, if Joe Natolo had walked into the room right then, I would have fallen into his arms and demanded to know where he’d been and escaped with him two minutes later to kiss in the stairwell. But Joe was gone, and Braden was there, and I had the feeling that my life was about to go in a completely new direction.
“Lolo Mabrey,” Braden said, taking my hand and holding it to his lips, like he was some kind of courtier, and I was some kind of lady. I gave him a clumsy curtsy.
“Lauren,” I reminded him.
“I know.” He smiled. “That’s not the kind of thing a person can forget.”
* * *
Brady came to Scofield for Valentine’s Day and took me out to dinner at a new Chinese place in town, and we ended up back in my unshared room, moving quietly so we didn’t alert my suitemates to his presence. I visited him in Washington over spring break and he took me to too many Smithsonians and the jazz club where we’d first reconnected. Most nights we talked on the phone, long, lazy conversations that started nowhere and went nowhere and left us wanting more. In the past, I would have spent those nights in the darkroom, the smell of chemicals sharp and familiar. Or I would have spent those hours with Megan, the two of us telling stories or listening to music or doing nothing at all. Or I would have spent them with Joe, knowing that we were operating on borrowed time. It was different with Brady—he was levelheaded and mature, smart and compassionate. He was studying immigration law; he cared about the things my family professed to care about but didn’t unless it was an election year and a sound bite was needed.
“You’re so funny,” he said once, when I’d told him a story about the Mabreys, one of the pieces of my life I was carefully doling out, one by one, trying not to scare him away. “So funny and so different.”
I laughed. “I’m trying to figure out if that’s a good thing, being different.”
“How could it be anything other than a good thing? You’re just being you.”
* * *
I was already pregnant when I graduated that spring, although you couldn’t tell in my oversize black gown, whipped side to side in the wind of a storm that was just about to blow through Scofield, sending the whole commencement crowd running for cover.
But there was no hiding it from anyone at the end of the summer when I married Braden Leavitt in a little chapel on Georgetown’s campus with only our immediate families present. Mom had a hard time smiling; it wasn’t the wedding she would have planned for me. There was no dress shopping, and since my feet were swollen, I wore a pair of white Converse tennis shoes with the laces out.
Stella was born when we were still in DC, and Emma when we moved to Rhode Island a few years later. Brady’s job meant long hours, at best average pay and a sense of satisfaction that more than made up for it. Before long, our lives were so crazy and so full that I hardly thought about Megan Mazeros at all.
Megan
The full impact of what I’d done didn’t hit me until that spring, when I should have been graduating from Keale, when I should have made definite plans about my future. I wondered if Lauren had graduated, if she’d figured out what came next in her life, or if she’d let her mother do that for her.
I didn’t call Miriam again until that summer, a full year after I’d promised to keep her updated.
“Oh, my God,” she said. It felt horrible to hear the relief in her voice. “I was so worried.”
“I’m sorry for everything,” I whispered, holding back the tears that threatened to come.
“I don’t understand why you need to be sorry for anything. Do you want to come back? I can make some phone calls, and we can get you enrolled for the fall. I’ve been here long enough that they won’t refuse me anything.” This was probably true.
“No,” I said quickly. “I just need a bit of a favor.” I told her about the boxes I’d left in Keale storage, full of books and winter clothes and the mementoes I’d kept from my childhood.
“Of course. Do you want me to bring them to you?”
“No,” I said too quickly. I couldn’t imagine Miriam in my cramped apartment, teeming with roommates, every surface littered with our junk. “Maybe you could just keep the boxes for me for a while? Like, in your garage or something, if that’s not too much trouble?”
“Yes, but I’m happy to—”
“Thank you,” I whispered, hanging up the phone before she could undermine my resolve with her generosity. I fought the urge to call her back and unload everything—the rape, the fight with Lauren, my frantic trip back to the mainland, the job where I earned just enough in tips to break even.
But I wasn’t going to complain, because this was what I had chosen. This was my life now.
Sometimes, at parties where I’d had too much to drink from the keg or the punch bowl, I told stories about Lauren. I changed her name and didn’t mention the political connection, but the rest was true: the monthly clothes allowance that would have paid my rent, the estate in Connecticut, the private island off the coast of Maine.
“Get out of here,” someone would say. “A private island? Who the hell has their own island?”
And I would laugh along with them, like it was the funniest thing in the world, these silly rich people and their silly rich lives.
* * *
Eventually, I ordered my transcripts from Keale and a few years later, I finished my courses at a state school, attending class during the day and waitressing at night. I met Bobby on one of those nights, when he came in with a group of fourteen for a birthday party, and I flirted with him in the same family-safe way I flirted with men, women and children alike. That was part of the schtick of being a waitress, the difference between a lousy tip and a decent one, between just making rent and having something left over at the end of the month. As a rule, I didn’t pay attention to men in the restaurant. It was a rare week when one of them didn’t leave me a note on a receipt or a business card that I promptly crumpled and tossed into the trash.
When I saw him a few weeks later at a gas station, filling his Toyota across from my crumbling Cabriolet, he said, “Hey! You’re that waitress.”
I raised an eyebrow. “Lucky guess.”
“No, from the lobster place. Remember my family? Aunt Harriet turned ninety-three. You sang her ‘Happy Birthday.’” He was wearing a Red Sox cap, and he took it off, gesturing to his hair, as if that might make him more recognizable. “I wasn’t wearing a hat that night.”
I smiled. “Now that you mention it, I do remember Aunt Harriet.”
He was watching me, and the gas was pumping slow, and I thought we might be stuck smiling at each other for a very long, very awkward time, until he blurted, “Do you like Shakespeare?”
“Do I like Shakespeare?” I repeated. “That’s a nonsequitur.”
“Smart and pretty,” he said, and I blushed.
I said, “I mean, he’s not on my top-ten list. But yeah, I like Shakespeare.” The gas nozzle clicked, and I transferred it from my car to the holder, wondering if I could leave before my interest in other white, male, dead authors could be probed.
He leaned against the gas pump. “That wasn’t the best way to ask what I wanted to ask. What I meant to say was I’m Bobby. Short for Robert, but Bobby has basically stuck, even though it might be ridiculous for someone who is thirty-one. Which I am.”
I nodded, moving slowly backward toward the driver’s door.
He was talking faster, trying to outpace me. “And you probably know there’s a Shakespeare in the Park thing going on this Saturday. I think it’s Much Ado about Nothing. Something light, you know. A comedy. Guy gets the girl, girl gets the guy.”
“Right,” I said, opening the door to my Cabriolet.
“So a big group of us are going, and it would be great if you came, too. I mean, I think it would be great. Obviously we don’t know each other that well...”
“Obviously.” I couldn’t stop myself from grinning. “Well, maybe I’ll bump into you there.”
“Wait! I mean, it’ll be a madhouse. There will be people milling around everywhere. I couldn’t risk your not finding me. So if you decide to come, and no pressure, whatever you want, I’ll be at the wine stand by the entrance half an hour before the show starts. If you don’t come, it’s cool. If you do come, that would be even better.” He tapped the top of the gas pump twice, as if signaling an end to his soliloquy.
“Thanks, I’ll think about it.” I gave him a short wave and stepped into my car. There was an embarrassing beat while the starter choked and before the engine finally came to life, but then I was pulling away, and in the rearview mirror I saw that Bobby no-last-name had a hand raised, like a goodbye or maybe a benediction.
I went—and not quite on a whim. I worked Saturdays, every Saturday, year in and year out, because the parties were bigger and the tips were higher, and that was how it went in the restaurant business. But I found someone to cover for me, and I met Bobby at the wine tent, because I figured, what the hell? I was twenty-seven years old, and I thought the ugliness was all in my rearview mirror. Other than a drunken kiss here and there on New Year’s Eve, I’d kept my distance from men ever since Michael Mabrey.
Bobby and I dated and broke up and dated and broke up and then we finally moved in together. He asked me to marry him three times, until I asked him not to ask me anymore. “This is good,” I said, gesturing around the little house we rented, a ten-minute walk from the Merrimack River. The ratio of books to people was extremely skewed, but there was enough room to breathe. “Maybe it’s even better this way.”
He said he couldn’t promise never to ask me again.
I said I wasn’t going anywhere.
Gerry and Mom came out to visit every summer, and we flew there every other year for Christmas or Thanksgiving, alternating with Bobby’s family in Boston. It was fairly uncomplicated, and the visits always seemed too short.
I had given Bobby pieces of my life over the years, like little offerings, the most I had to give at any moment. I told him about my dad dying, and how I’d left Kansas and, later, how I’d left Keale, leaving out most of the specifics. He wasn’t an incredibly curious guy; what I told him was always enough to satisfy him at that moment.
“I’m just not that complicated,” I always said, shrugging.
He professed to love that about me, my sweatshirts and jeans and Converse, the curls that sprang out from my ponytail at the end of the day.
But of course, inside I was as tangled as a root ball.
* * *
I went back to school for my master’s degree in counseling and ended up in a course about sexual assault. I learned all the things to say to victims, all the things not to say. It was a strangely clinical way to learn about everything I had been feeling for more than a decade, and stranger still to use the techniques to counsel myself.
Before too long, I could recognize them on sight, the young women and sometimes young men who came into my office. What they wanted to talk about was always something else at first—trouble with registration, struggles with a particular course that was holding them back. I answered questions, directed them to the appropriate avenues. And then sometimes I asked, “Was there anything else? I’ve been told I’m a good listener. In fact—” I would lower my voice, glance to the office door that gaped open a few inches “—I’m actually paid to listen.”
Sometimes, it came out right then. The abusive boyfriend who had left a trail of finger-shaped bruises up both arms. The controlling partner who demanded that she be home by five o’clock sharp, which meant that night classes were out of the question. The suspicious boyfriend or girlfriend who demanded a response to a text within two minutes. Sometimes, it stayed locked inside them, the pain lingering in smiles that never reached their eyes.
I learned a new vocabulary—survivor, not victim. I had been, for a very long time, a victim. In a way, that was easier. I got to wallow in the details, to feel sorry for myself, to keep my mouth shut. Being a survivor required a different level of courage.
* * *
I was at work in 2013 on the day Lauren’s father died, a fact I received from the NPR station that played like white noise in the background of my office. According to the report, he’d passed away suddenly—a heart attack, only hours after addressing Congress. For the next week, I was a news junkie, Googling for an obituary and tributes, reading through the entries in an online guest book. “Senator Mabrey worked tirelessly for our country.” “Blessings to his family.” I watched clips of his funeral on the news and then, later, found a longer video on YouTube, posted by one of his constituents. Michael Mabrey had delivered the eulogy from the pulpit of First Congregational Church in Simsbury, and I watched with my fist in my mouth, remembering how I’d attended church there with Lauren’s family, sitting next to her in a pew in my corduroy skirt and scuffed boots. Michael talked about how wonderful his father had been, a provider, an honorable person, someone who fulfilled his promises, someone who cared about the citizens of our country.
“Sounds like a political speech,” Bobby commented, listening from the other side of the room with a stack of essays spread out on the table in front of him.
I nodded, not able to speak.
In the audience of mourners, I saw them all lined up in a pew—Mrs. Mabrey with her cropped hair, a black veil partially shielding her face. Kat and Peter and a grown-up Lizzie, gangly, with a brush of acne on her chin. There were two girls with them, twins, their features decidedly Asian. Then Michael and his wife, Rebekah, tall and dark-haired, with their lookalike boys in matching dark suits and ties. And Lauren, always lovely Lauren, with her husband and two girls, sweet in their navy dresses. A united family, a united front.
Imagine if I had said something that night on The Island.
Imagine if I had tried to unravel one of those threads.
* * *
A month later, I read that Michael had been appointed to fill his father’s congressional seat until the end of the term in 2016. Just like that, the man who had raped me was a senator of the United States of America. Inside, I raged and seethed, forming long internal monologues about political cronyism and nepotism, but the real problem, of course, was that Michael Mabrey was a rapist, and he would never have to pay for what he did to me.
The nightmares had started again after that, the ones where he came up behind me. The location kept changing, though—sometimes it was in the parking lot of the grocery store, other times I heard footsteps behind me in a deserted stairwell. I carried my pepper spray like a talisman; I took a one-unit self-defense course on campus so many times that I was asked if I was available to coteach in the future.
Maybe now would be a good time, Miriam had written me when Michael Mabrey took office. She was retired by then, and the postcards she sent me were from places so exotic I could hardly imagine them. This one was from Bali, where she said she wouldn’t mind staying for the rest of her life, wrapped in a sarong.
But I’d held on to my secret longer; I’d been waiting and waiting for the girl I was to catch up with the woman I’d become, for the two sides of me to become one brave and whole person.