When the Stars Go Dark

by Paula McLain

No one is coming to save me. No one can save anyone, though once I believed differently. I believed all sorts of things, but now I see the only way forward is to begin with nothing, or whatever is less than nothing.

I have myself and no one else. I have the road and the snaking mist. I have this tortured moon.

If you think about it, most of us have very little choice about what we’re going to become or who we’re going to love, or what place on earth chooses us, becoming home. All we can do is go when we’re called, and pray we’ll still be taken in.

How sadness and shame are

more than feelings; they’re an illness, a terrible cancer that spins through the world taking lives in a hidden cyclical way that might never end.

“Things have been hard on you. I know that. You’ve had to be tough to get through it, but toughness isn’t the same as strength, Anna.”

“Nature demands our respect, Anna. It has a brutal side for sure, but if you can learn its language, there’s peace to be found, and comfort too. The best kind of medicine I know.”

There’s an old ghost story about that, I remember, how the devil steals souls by asking for them openly. He isn’t a thief, but a master manipulator. The real danger, or so the story goes, isn’t in the devil himself, but in not knowing you have a choice to turn him away.

That’s the saddest piece as I see it, and have over and over. How some victims don’t have even a whisper of no inside them. Because they don’t believe the life they have is theirs to save.

There were a thousand different ways to be silent, I knew.

“There’s death in life, Anna, things too impossible to bear. So many things, and yet we bear them.”

“How do we bear them?” I finally asked. “Those impossible things.” His hand was still and warm on mine, warm and steady and alive. He hadn’t moved an inch from my side. “Like this, sweetheart.”

I got a strange feeling about him that was more than a little familiar. It wasn’t anything he said, really, or anything he did. Just a heat he gave off that sent me backward, toward closed-off moments I’d left behind, people I never talked about.

“It’s not what you carry, but how you can learn to carry it. You need to heal yourself. Your child self too, Anna. Make room for her. Find a way to let her in.”

I’d never been very comfortable with holidays. Celebrating typically meant chaos to me, the grown-ups in charge even more distracted and erratic than usual, giving themselves permission to cut loose even more than they did every day.

“You’re a good helper,” my mom said every once in a while, and when she did, it felt like the sun coming out from behind a large dark cloud.

No matter how resilient children can be, or how wanted, loved, and nurtured they are by their new parents, the original wounds of abandonment and rejection aren’t just magically healed. Grit and inner strength don’t altogether heal those wounds, either, because the parenting piece is primal.

All the scars I still carry, she carries, too. Trust issues, attachment trouble, identity problems, feelings of emptiness, isolation, alienation, and despair—cracks in the soul that can’t be

mended. I’ve seen it. I’ve lived it. How anyone with a hole inside them will search on and on, sometimes all their lives, for ways to fill it.

“That must be another reason Gray and Cameron connect. Losing a parent changes you, no matter how it happens.”

a eucalyptus branch stretches against the glass, making the clustered green-gray leaves look magnified, pearled with raindrops. Hap had always called them gum trees. Once he told me there are seven hundred varieties of gum tree in Australia alone and that they can make their own fog, a blue haze that’s created when their compounds vaporize in warm air.

Seven hundred

varieties of a single genus and counting, and yet human lives seem destined to repeat the same terrible patterns over and over, as if there is...

The sensitive readers, they have a certain look. You can almost smell it on them, that they need books to feel okay.”

Rainer Maria Rilke,

I am too alone in the world, and not alone enough to make every minute holy. I am too tiny in this world, and not tiny enough just to lie before you like a thing,

shrewd and secretive. I want my own will, and I want simply to be with my will, as it goes toward action, and in the silent, sometimes hardly moving times when something is coming near, I want to be with those who know secret things or else alone. I want to be a mirror for your whole body, and I never want to be blind, or to be too old to hold up your heavy and swaying picture. I want to unfold. I don’t want to stay folded anywhere, because where I am folded, there I am a lie.

I scan Jane Eyre feeling uneasy for some reason, as if I’m peering into Cameron’s diary, or trespassing on sacred ground. Books can be incredibly personal to people, even holy.

This one seems to be for her, worn soft and dog-eared, full of underlined passages and pencil marks—a coded map to her soul. I

The experience of being violated is often so overwhelming and annihilating, particularly for children, that the only way to survive it is for victims to leave their bodies. Not fight or flight, but complete dissociation. If the abuser happens to be a caregiver, someone who is supposed to be safe and loving, the experience of shutdown can be even more dramatic and far-reaching. What we can’t bear to know or feel, we often find a way to hide from ourselves, and hide well.

Even if Cameron’s memories hadn’t been forced to the surface like this, the damage has been simmering for years and has no doubt found other ways to erupt, in feelings of shame or hopelessness,

drawing her unconsciously to people and situations that echo or approximate the original pain. I’ve seen it over and over, how a trauma survivor’s story finds a way to tell her instead of the other way around.

It makes me hurt for her, this girl I’ve never met but know. She survived violence, betrayal, and terror, the theft of her soul. She survived the smoking, buried shame and the silence, and years of forced amnesia. But can she survive what’s...

The world needs an army of

Wandas—strong, sarcastic, unafraid women who say what they think and act straightforwardly, without apology or permission. Women who roar instead of flinch.

“Because everyone wants to be looked for, whether they realize it or not.”

“Yes.” Emotion vibrates along an invisible string between us. “But then for some kids—one in ten,

maybe, though it might be closer to one in four—really hard stuff happens to them, in their own family, or by an acquaintance whom that family trusts. Trauma, neglect, abuse, manipulation, coercion, exposure to violence. And they don’t have the tools to process it, or the words to talk about it. So silence follows. Forced complicity. Shame. Soon what you’ve got is thick black tar, and when the light shines through…” I let my sentence trail, knowing he’s probably realized I’m not talking just about my cases through the years, that some of what I know, I’ve lived first.

And every psychopath, sociopath, sadist, alcoholic, narcissist piece of shit anywhere can see it and comes running. And when the two find each other, they click. They recognize each other on some deep level. It’s like they speak two variations of the same language.”

It wasn’t prayer, exactly, but something Eden had emphasized over the years. When things got hard and you felt shaky, she liked to say, you could hit your knees wherever you were, and the world would be there to catch you.

I’d had too many mothers, and not enough mothering. Eden was the closest I’d ever gotten to feeling like a real daughter.

I’d done something terrible and on purpose and I couldn’t take it back just because I felt sorry. Sorry wouldn’t find her. Sorry was maybe the loneliest feeling of all, I understood, because it only brought you back to yourself.

When we pass from this life, our essence keeps going, keeps moving.”

“There are things that change us fundamentally on this side, too, like loss and trauma. Just think about it. We know trauma changes the brain. Why

wouldn’t it affect our energy? Of course it would. It does. You’re the right person to help now, Anna.”

“Some people find those needles, though, don’t they? I think it’s going to work out somehow. You were drawn here after all. The universe doesn’t do random.”

What is all the suffering for if not so we can see how alike we are, and not alone? Where will the mercy come from, if not from us?

“Is knowing so important? If something makes it this far, through everything the universe has thrown at it, maybe we should just say thank you.”

He didn’t say yes or no. Growing up in strangers’ houses, I was adept at reading faces and guessing feelings, projecting myself into others, but this never worked with Hap.

Here was the tallest, straightest tree I would ever know. When he turned back around, I said, “Thank you.”