the Muck
Negotiation
The End of the Continent
PART TWO: ADULTHOOD
Double-Edged Sword
Thick Walls
Frayed by Tears
The Third Time
Research Shows: Why It’s Hard to Tell
The Crooked Little House
Indecision
The Envy of Others
Telling my Parents
PART THREE: FAMILY
Butterfly Stories
Pocket Knives
What Should You Tell?
A New Kind of Sense
Research Shows: Causes of Pedophilia
Shifting Statutes
Nice to Meet You
Telling a Therapist
Asking
A Well-Reasoned Argument
Telling My Dad
Sources
Acknowledgments
“What matters in life is not what happens to you but what you remember and how you remember it.”
—GABRIEL GARCÍA MÁRQUEZ
I got an extra month of maternity leave when my first child was born, and before I went back to work and Anthony quit his job to stay home with our son, we flew to Albuquerque to visit my family.
In the photos from that trip, my shirt is a collage of wet spots of indiscriminate origin. My baby and I were a sloshing pair, our fluids still intertwined. His incessant screaming and crying did not yet yield tears, but it made us both sweat, and my breasts spurted and leaked, and he was plump and a profuse drooler. After a hard few months with a distressed infant, I found it a pleasure to be in dry, sunny New Mexico where at least liquid evaporated quickly and where there were people who shared our awe for the baby. My parents had been divorced for about a dozen years, but they came together to coo at their grandson. Being in the same room with the two of them eased an ache I hadn’t allowed myself to acknowledge. Anthony and I even felt confident enough to go to a movie alone, to make a visit to an adjoining town.
Mostly, though, our days were quiet, structured around our son’s fledgling sleep schedule. At naptimes, a hush fell over everything. My mom’s house was on the newer side of town, in a development built on a hill, each street sitting above the other so as to maximize views of the Sangra de Cristo mountains to the east. The living room section of her first floor was two stories high, with tall windows and skylights. That’s where we sat during one naptime toward the end of the visit, going through the bags and bins of baby clothes that my mom had collected from clearance sales and second-hand stores. We knelt on the Berber carpeting and sorted the little jackets and jeans and sleepers into piles—yes, no, now, later, to return, to resell.
“So did you hear about Toshi?” she asked me.
The name of my older cousin sent a hot shock through my body. I hadn’t heard it spoken out loud in seven years, since I’d told my parents that he’d sexually abused me during the time he’d lived with us as a teenager. After a few stumbling conversations back then, neither my mom nor my dad had mentioned it again, and I’d ceased talking specifically of Toshi to anyone. I stared at the teddy bear face embroidered on the onesie in my hand and braced myself. “Hear what?”
“He’s been charged with molesting a girl.” She paused. “Or maybe there was more than one. Two?”
I saw an obliterating brightness before I fully understood what she had said, but then: “Oh my God.”
What I recall feeling first was a stomach-plunging sense of clarity, almost vindication. Hoisted up from the depths of my mind was the bundle of questions that had dogged me on and off all my life, and here was some kind of answer: what he had done to me was serious. It fit a pattern; it made a horrible kind of sense. But then guilt washed over me. Articulated thoughts would come later, in the hours and weeks and months to come, but the guilt flooded in immediately.
I had not stopped him.
I had not said anything when he was young enough to change course, and so it had gone on. He was now a full-fledged adult, a middle-aged man, and was still molesting children. After years of figuring Toshi had likely used me out of horny desperation to practice for pubescent girls, I switched to a frantic conviction that there was a trail of victims in his wake. That he was a pedophile.
“I’m surprised your dad didn’t tell you. He’s the one who told me.”
I took this as a dig at my father and bristled, even as I absorbed the slap of the fact: he’d said nothing.
“When did it happen?” I strove to keep my voice level.
“I don’t know exactly. A while ago. I guess it’s taken a long time to go to trial. It’s not clear that he did it.”
“Of course he did it! Mom! He did it to me!”
“I know. It’s awful. It’s really awful.” Her brow crinkled; she looked sad and vulnerable. Whenever I hugged her I was always surprised at how small she felt. Smaller than me.
I continued with my task. Sort. Fold. Store. Sort. Fold. Store. Size 2T. Size 3T. Size 4.
“I’m surprised your dad didn’t tell you, but he probably feels guilty. He always felt so guilty about Toshi, because he helped kidnap him from his mom.”
“What?” Another burst of annihilating white light. My story about myself—my stories, any of them, the new one just forming—was shattered.
“How did it go? Oh, I have no memory. Morris and his wife were already separated, and maybe divorced. And he asked Dad to go over to her place and take him? Or they both did it one night. I can’t remember. But I think he always felt guilty about that.”
“What? How old was Toshi?” My voice was ragged.
“Well, was he two or three? Or wait, it had to be after Haruna was born, so older. I think Morris already had Haruna somehow, even though she was just a baby, and now they were going in for Toshi?”
“Then he would have been about five.” The same age I turned during the year he’d spent sneaking into my bedroom.
“I can hardly remember anything about it. Oh, I have no memory!”
I have no memory. It was a phrase she said often—usually
