My Dark Vanessa

by Kate Elizabeth Russell

No matter their background, the accused go through the same steps. First, they deny everything. Then, as it becomes clear the din of accusations isn’t going away, they resign from their jobs in disgrace and issue a statement of vague apology that stops short of admitting wrongdoing.

That seems the likely ending to this love story: me dropping everything and doing anything, devoted as a dog, as he takes and takes and takes.

BELIEVE WOMEN.

“If there’s one thing you take away from this class, it should be that the world is made of endlessly intersecting stories, each one valid and true.”

Sometimes it feels like that’s all I’m doing every time I reach out—trying to haunt, to drag him back in time, asking him to tell me again what happened. Make me understand it once and for all. Because I’m still stuck here. I can’t move on.

He says that by believing our lives have endless possibilities, we stave off the horrifying truth that to live is merely to move forward through time while an internal clock counts down to a final, fatal moment.

My breath catches at the thought of being so close to a serious misstep. One wrong reaction on my part could wreck this whole thing.

Sign you’re being manipulated.

“People will risk everything for a little bit of something beautiful,”

I wonder if he really believes that. He touched me first, said he wanted to kiss me, told me he loved me. Every first step was taken by him. I don’t feel forced, and I know I have the power to say no, but that isn’t the same as being in charge. But maybe he has to believe that. Maybe there’s a whole list of things he has to believe.

He pushes into me then, braces his legs against the arm of the couch and groans into my ear. It’s strange to know that whenever I remember myself at fifteen, I’ll think of this.

Somehow I sensed what was coming for me even then. Really, though, what girl doesn’t? It looms over you, that threat of violence. They drill the danger into your head until it starts to feel inevitable. You grow up wondering when it’s finally going to happen.

I open my mouth, the word because poised to come out—because—because whatever happened to you couldn’t have been so bad, because it’s ridiculous for you to demand so much when I’m the one who bore the brunt of him. I’m the one marked for life.

“I just feel . . .” I press the heels of my hands into my thighs. “I can’t lose the thing I’ve held on to for so long. You know?” My face twists up from the pain of pushing it out. “I just really need it to be a love story. You know? I really, really need it to be that.”

I’d rather be dead than go through this again.

An older man using a girl to feel better about himself—how easily the story becomes a cliché if you look at it without the soft focus of romance.

One of my best students. It’s a strange compliment coming from a man who once turned a student into a wife.

I try not to linger on the files; no one specifically tells me not to look, but gorging on the details feels invasive in a way that reading about men and their limp dicks never could.

If I had known you were being abused, the mother writes, especially sexually abused, I never would have— The rest of the sentence is hidden from my view. On the last page of the letter, the mother signs, With oceans of love, Mom. Underneath oceans of love, there’s a drawing of a girl’s crying face, her tears pooling into a body of water, a pointing arrow, ocean.

“I hope you forgive me,” she says.

After a while, she gives up repeating the same lines, knowing there comes a point when they no longer matter, that what I need isn’t absolution but to hold myself accountable before a witness. So when my mother asks me to forgive her, I say, “Of course I do.” I don’t tell her again she couldn’t have stopped it, that it wasn’t her fault and that she didn’t deserve it. I swallow those words instead. Maybe somewhere deep in my belly, they’ll take root and grow.

“What could we have done? We were just girls.” I know what she means—not that we were helpless by choice, but that the world forced us to be. Who would have believed us, who would have cared?

There must be a point where you’re allowed to be defined by something other than what he did to you.

With the sun on my face and a dog at my side, I have so much capacity for good.

You’re here, she says. You’re here. You’re here.