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Prologue
NOT ONLY IN dreams but also in quiet moments when I was alone with my own thoughts, I would often hear a baby’s cry. She sounded frightened, and I was confident she was calling for me. It was terrifying because when my mother had suffered a miscarriage and she and my father had lost their chance to have a son, she had gone into a deep depression and often thought she heard her baby’s cry. My parents had already set up a nursery for the baby they intended to name Asa Heaven-stone, after one of my father’s ancestors who had fought in the Civil War. Daddy always wanted his Asa.
I had a different reason to imagine a baby’s cry. I was afraid to tell anyone what I heard and have it get back to my father, but most of all, I didn’t want to admit even to myself that a part of me was out there and would never know who I was and, perhaps more important, who she really was.
“Be still, my heart,” I would whisper.
“Don’t listen to the wind,” I would tell myself.
If I was awake when I heard the cry, I would slap on my earphones and listen to my iPod or hurriedly turn on the television. Sometimes, I would simply start humming some song aloud. I would do anything to distract myself.
If I was dreaming, I would moan and then wake with a start and listen hard to be sure it had been only a dream.
The silence comforted me.
But it didn’t make it all go away.
I knew what every mother knows.
It never goes away.
It only gets louder, and nothing would drown it out—not all the radios, all the televisions, or all the iPods in the world.
Birthday
“SEMANTHA! WHAT THE hell are you doing on the floor?” my dorm roommate, Ellie Patton, asked. She stood in our bathroom doorway with her hands on her hips, gaping at me with her black pearl eyes so enlarged that she resembled someone with serious thyroid problems. I realized she must have been standing there for a while calling to me and was getting upset at my not responding.
I was surprised she was up so early. Everything about her was usually frantic and last-minute. We had been together at Collier for my three years of private high school, but this was the first time she had caught me doing it.
For the last three years, I woke up on the morning of my daughter’s birthday and secretly lit a candle. I would hear my sister, Cassie, whispering in my ear, reminding me of the date as well, not that I needed her to do that. Lately, however, I was even seeing her stepping out of a shadow or smiling back at me in a mirror.
Usually, I was home on my daughter’s birthday because it occurred during a spring break. However, this year, the break occurred two days after her birthday, so I was still at Collier, a private high school for girls just south of Albany, New York.
I hadn’t expected to be sent to a private high school outside Kentucky, but Daddy had chosen Collier for me because it was so exclusive, which really meant very expensive and well supervised. My therapist in
Kentucky, Dr. Ryan, had recommended it. It had a small but beautifully maintained campus. The main building was neoclassical and resembled a government office building, something you might expect to find in Washington, D.C. There were three dormitory buildings that looked like anything but dormitory buildings because of their elaborate landscaping and porticos. They looked more like private estates.
Our dormitory housed only twenty girls, and none of our classes had more than fifteen students in it. Some of my public-school classes had had nearly forty in them. It was impossible here to avoid being called on to answer a question or have your homework checked. Every teacher was well acquainted with all of his or her students, their work histories, and their families. The story circulated was that they had reports on us that rivaled FBI reports on terror suspects.
The school had a beautiful, technologically modern theater; two playfields, one for field hockey and one for softball; and a spanking-new gymnasium. The library was stocked with computers and had a separate audiovisual room for viewing information or listening to music. Our cafeteria reminded me of an upscale restaurant. The chairs were large and cushioned, and the tables were polished, rich, hard walnut.
Once a month, the school held a formal dinner for us during which the dean of students, Mrs. Hathaway, delivered a report concerning the student body’s overall performance and her expectations for the weeks to come. Attendance was mandatory. Every violation, whether of rules or of the property, was described, and the violators were sometimes publicly chastised. Contrary to what she hoped, however, making it onto what the students called Hathaway’s Hit List was viewed as some sort of accomplishment, a respected act of defiance. I had yet to make the list.
Few private schools gave their students as much personal attention, which meant there were more eyes on us all day and all night than in most other private schools. The restrictions on our comings and goings were also far stricter than at other schools. Our privileges were directly tied to our grades and our on-campus behavior, as at other schools, but at Collier, there was a hair trigger on punishment. It wouldn’t take much to put one of us in a cage, and, of course, smoking, drinking alcohol, or doing any drugs were reasons for immediate expulsion and forfeiting all of the money your parents had spent, and they had spent a great deal.
There was even a rumor that our rooms were bugged and our phone calls monitored. Supposedly, our parents received weekly reports about our behavior and our work. Some even thought it was a daily report. Most of the girls believed the rumors, because almost all of them had given their parents cause to worry about them. It was almost a requirement for admittance that we were not to be trusted or believed. The game played with incoming first-year girls was how quickly one of us could get them to reveal their embarrassing secrets, something that explained why their parents would want to pay so much more money for them to attend Collier.
The secret I revealed was probably the most boring for them. Ellie told me I was one of the longest holdouts, one of the most difficult to break, because I wasn’t as desperate for their friendship. Finally, I revealed that I had been seeing a therapist regularly because of family tragedies and there was concern that I could have a nervous breakdown. Or, as my father put it to Mrs. Hathaway, “She’s as fragile as a blue-jay egg.”
Of course, nothing was ever said about my pregnancy and my giving birth, but when some people my age hear that you have deep-seated psychological issues serious enough to require regular therapy and you’re on the edge of falling into a nervous breakdown, they look at you as if you have leprosy. I felt confident, however, that many of the others had been sent for counseling at one time or another as well. One or two looked and acted as if they had recently been released from a clinic, in fact. But unlike me, they felt that secret was too sensitive to reveal. They probably invented something else or told only part of their story. Ironically, they’d admit to getting pregnant and having an abortion before they’d admit to having been in psychological counseling for years, but that was not true for me. The Cassie living inside me wouldn’t let me do that.
Even while I had attended my private high school, I’d had periodic sessions with Dr. Ryan, when I was home for either an extended weekend or on holiday. It was really my father’s younger brother, my uncle Perry, who insisted that my father arrange that in the first place.
