“And all your mother’s scary stories?”
“Exactly. I used to come in here and sleep next to Mum all the time.”
There was a lump in my throat, a pebble. I couldn’t swallow. “I used to do that with my mum, too.”
• • •
SHE FELL ASLEEP. I stayed at her side, looking down at her face, which in repose was yours exactly. I wanted to touch her, to stroke her hair, to do something motherly, but I didn’t want to wake her or alarm her or do something wrong. I have no idea how to be a mother. I’ve never taken care of a child in my entire life. I wished that you would speak, that you would tell me what to do, what to feel. As she lay beside me, I think I did feel tenderness, but I felt it for you and for our mother, and the second her green eyes flicked open and fixed on mine, I shivered.
“Why are you always watching me like that?” she whispered, half smiling. “It’s really weird.”
“I’m sorry,” I said, and rolled on to my back.
She slipped her fingers between mine. “It’s OK,” she said. “Weird’s OK. Weird can be good.”
We lay there, side by side, our fingers interlaced. I listened to her breathing slow, then quicken, and then slow once again.
“You know, what I don’t understand,” she whispered, “is why you hated her so much.”
“I didn’t . . .”
“She didn’t understand either.”
“I know,” I said. “I know she didn’t.”
“You’re crying,” she whispered, reaching over to touch my face. She brushed the tears from my cheek.
I told her. All the things I should have told you, I told them to your daughter instead. I told her how I’d let you down, how I’d believed the worst of you, how I’d allowed myself to blame you.
“But why didn’t you just tell her? Why didn’t you tell her what really happened?”
“It was complicated,” I said, and I felt her stiffen beside me.
“Complicated how? How complicated could it be?”
“Our mother was dying. Our parents were in a terrible way
and I didn’t want to do anything to make it worse.”
“But . . . but he raped you,” she said. “He should have gone to prison.”
“I didn’t see it that way. I was very young. I was younger than you are, and I don’t just mean in years, although I was that, too. But I was naive, completely inexperienced, I was clueless. We didn’t talk about consent in the way you girls do now. I thought . . .”
“You thought what he did was OK?”
“No, but I don’t think I saw it for what it was. What it really was. I thought rape was something a bad man did to you, a man who jumped out at you in an alleyway in the dead of night, a man who held a knife to your throat. I didn’t think boys did it. Not schoolboys like Robbie, not good-looking boys, the ones who go out with the prettiest girl in town. I didn’t think they did it to you in your own living room, I didn’t think they talked to you about it afterwards and asked you if you’d had a good time. I just thought I must have done something wrong, that I hadn’t made it clear enough that I didn’t want it.”
Lena was silent for a while, but when she spoke again her voice was higher, more insistent. “OK, maybe you didn’t want to say anything at the time, but what about later? Why didn’t you explain it to her later on?”
“Because I misunderstood her,” I said. “I misjudged her completely. I thought that she knew what had happened that night.”
“You thought that she knew and did nothing? How could you think that of her?”
How could I explain that? That I pieced together your words—the words you said to me that night and the words you said to me later, Wasn’t there some part of you that liked it?—and I told myself a story about you that made sense to me, that allowed me to get on with my life without ever having to face what really happened.
“I thought that she chose to protect him,” I whispered. “I thought she chose him over me. I couldn’t blame him, because I couldn’t even think about him. If I’d have blamed him and thought about him, I’d have made it real. So I just . . . I thought about Nel instead.”
Lena’s voice grew cold. “I don’t understand you. I don’t understand people like you, who always choose to blame the woman. If there’s two people doing something wrong and one of them’s a girl, it’s got to be her fault, right?”