Amelia C. Winter

Five-year-old Cassie Hill disappeared from her parents’ motel room in Tampa, Florida on a Thursday night in 2002. It was a rainy night – in reality, yes, it was raining. That wasn’t just a flourish for the TV re-enactment; later, for the film; forever, our private pulp imaginings of the night in question. Her parents went to motel reception because the toilet wasn’t draining. Gone, quite famously, for all of ten minutes, they returned with the desk clerk to find all lights extinguished and the front door banging in the wind. The door, banging – that happened, as well. For so long I believed I’d invented it, but then I read the book, an interview with her father: “the sheets were pulled off the corners of the bed. The front door was banging in the wind. She was gone.” Unless – feeling his way through a dim memory by available light – he was filmmaking, as well. The articles hit print by morning. Her face was on the world’s homepage by midday. By evening, Cassie’s mother was on the news via video link, crying so hard that there were big purple salt-welts under her eyes. But you’ve seen that interview. You’ve wept along like everybody else. It's the rape of the rainforest, God’s breaking heart and everything that wrenches nature away from nature. And I do think of it, too – that Sunday newscast – when I think about my own mother, and all they did to her.

A week later, in a shopping centre - here, on almost the other side of the world - I watched as they ground woodchips into my mother’s face, made her swallow lit cigarettes, forced her retractable umbrella between her jaws with a hero-security guard’s help. I didn’t see everything they did to her; I was hidden behind legs, arms, a whole coalition of hero-shoppers who stood around me, beckoning me back but not away. Through gaps I watched as they broke bottles over her head, lashed her with extension cables, smeared hot sauce into her eyes until it ran out her nose. A man in his fifties, shirtless and beet-red, unpacked a looted ironing board to smash it across her back like a backyard wrestler. These are just images – the more of them I give, the less they seem the sum of their parts. A man doused my mother’s scalp in lighter fluid. A woman tried to turn my face away. I stayed staring. Just like Cassie, I was five years old.

Twenty years later, at her deathbed in a hospice room paid for by the state, my mother and I watched the live broadcast. Led by police from the basement where she’d been forced to carry, birth and raise three children, she collapsed into the waiting arms of her family—Cassie did.

“There you go,” my mother said. “So she’s put on some weight, too.”

“Don’t,” I said. “Do not start.”

My mother smirked. Even bedridden, she was still lither than me. I was at least pleased by how age had puckered her scarring, the way the flesh had laxed and bulged around the joins in her reconstructive work like spider’s eggs in her face. I was drinking from a bottle of six-dollar shiraz from the bottle shop down the street, hiding it in my handbag when the nurses walked past. So when you ask: that’s where I was.

The camera changed angles. “She is fat,” I conceded.

“Eating her emotions,” my mother explained. She cleared her throat. “Google ‘calories in wine’. You remember I learned the hard way.”

“This is lunch,” I said.

My mother sighed. “Soon I’ll be gone,” she said, “and you’ll have nobody to guide you.”

My therapist had counselled me to go and sit with her for an hour – for the sake of closure, he’d said – and when I’d turned on the television to fill the anticipated silence, we’d found this already begun. For all twenty years, people had insisted Cassie was in captivity somewhere. The birthmark was too distinctive to traffick, they asserted, and as for killing, the blessed little girl in the fairy dress was too cosmically precious to die. Today, their faith had been answered. Clever Cassie had fought her way to the kitchen and seized the landline to call the police; the hostage situation had progressed by bullhorns since American noon. Now she was hugging her mother, kissing her, both of them dissociative with joy.

My mother startled. “Where’s her dad?”

“Your memory’s failing,” I laughed. “He died last month.”

My mother had resisted the attack for a little while, but at some point she’d given up, lay still and silent on the shopping centre’s white marble while citizen-heroes pelted her with apples, pears, organic bath bombs. A hero-jewelry shop employee strangled her with a braid of silver necklaces, the gemstones digging into her throat. This was my mother’s element. Before the attack, she’d been a TV model, a Brand Power spokeswoman exalting Thick & Thirsty paper towels before a totalitarian wall of the same. She was good at her job – beautiful but relatable, a rare trait, and she had the very ring and glow of the Domestic until the crowd carved their ragged sigils into her forehead.

Cassie hugged an older brother – the big Aryan ape with the TED talk and the watercolours. Her hair was still a glitter-paste of glass and sweat from the police raid. I hated watching her emote; the way her mouth swerved and gabbled at his ear. A cameraman turned his lamp on to light the red birth-swish over her right eye, deft and iconic as the Nike swoosh. Mine, in the same place, throbbed under its concealer—just knobbed and warped and puddly.

“Oh, look,” my mother said. “She still wears it better.”

Whenever I talked back as a child: ‘Cassie couldn’t have had a mouth like that.’ When I started refusing to eat, it was ‘I bet Cassie eats whatever he gives her.’ Once, when I was seven, as she was driving me home from school, she turned to me and announced she’d had a breakthrough with her psychologist. “I’ve realized I hate you,” she slurred, eyes shining. “What do you think of that?”

I turned the TV up, ignored her. My mother’s tiny, horrible face contracted. She gripped her bedrail. “My stomach hurts,” she said.

“So call the nurse.”

“What, to feed me pills with those deli gloves, been in a million other mouths?” She pretended to gag. “They don’t change them between bedpans.”

“They definitely—”

“Not even to finger each other. They love it.”

I lunged toward her bed-desk. Before I could hit the buzzer her withered claw was around my wrist, gripping it with her cancer-strength.

“I will tell them,” she hissed, “that I called because there’s a stranger in my room. That I’ve never met you before in my life. I’ll be very convincing.”

“Expect nothing from me.”

“I never have.”

“Then keep telling me about your pain,” I said, digging my nails into her ricepaper flesh. “Please. I’m only glad you’re in it.”

My mother laughed. “Mutually, darling. Mutually.”

Her every expression was a monster mask. I pulled my arm away. The television was its own cold space - I pried the RGB apart with my eyes and put it back together. Still hugging. The wine, which I drank in determined gulps, was thin and bitter as vinegar. Something about it was going to help me win, here.

What had I done to her that day? I was a blonde child, a pretty child. I had a pink dress with ruffles and a darling little face with a birthmark just like the one on TV. Due to an ill-chosen pair of sunglasses, my mother fit the trafficking narrative. They fell upon her in seconds. A hero-hairdresser stood on my mother’s neck, gripping her nose with curling tongs. A McDonald’s clerk wandered over from his booth to watch, smoking a durry in the temporary martial law. All did what they thought was right; in the process, what the police report described as ‘a kind of festival’ had broken out. Could anyone truly blame them?

On the television, a shout of triumph sounded across the lawn. The cameramen stampeded. The police were frogmarching her captor out the front door, a man about five-foot-two with a nosebleed in his beard and semen stains on his track pants. He stared at the ground with a wildly inappropriate white-collar shame, like a man arrested for embezzlement. The police on either side of him, awash in their own historicity, beamed like Cassie’s future husband would in their wedding photographs. I don’t know why I turned to my mother. She watched with a distension moving under her dry upper lip; she was working her gums with her tongue.

“Well,” she said. “He looks like he’s been very lonely.”

“What does that even mean?”

“Like a sad little boy. Your father.” She must have seen my expression. She tried to cluck her tongue, but she didn’t have the strength. “Fine, go on, what do you think he looks like?”

The footage replayed in slow motion, the camera’s pressurized gaze exposing each shamed tip of his head. She wasn’t wrong. In my baby pictures, my father wore the same look, the sign of his coming departure: not remorse, but a deep embarrassment, so deep it didn’t even seem inadequate. Every time the doors of the police van slammed, the walk began again. I tried to think of twenty years. Tried to think of the bed where he’d done what he did to her—unthinkable—over and over. Where she’d probably even birthed them. Tried to think of the dust loosing down from the rafters onto her children whenever he went to the fridge for a beer.

I didn’t know how to hate him. Only Cassie.

“He’s just some asshole,” I murmured.

My mother had knotted her hands in her lap, was inspecting them with disgust. “You speak so bravely against the condemned. I can’t imagine what you’ll say about me.”

I exploded. “You think you’ll get a eulogy? There won’t be a funeral! I don’t have the fucking credit!”

For a while, then, my mother just breathed.

I didn’t break. I watched the television. Her breathing was the least interesting thing in the world to me. The commentators, two older white men, were now superimposed over the footage and talking about sentencing; in the darkness between them, my mother’s pale reflection was inclusive of the crossword books on her bed-desk, the custard cup discarded on her lap. Oh, fuck you, I thought. It was the crosswords that enraged me now. Playing the nurse-choir to sing Poor Woman Never Gets No Visits. Everything here was part of the act, the stage-props to her final martyrdom, like her need to vacuum only while simultaneously making me dinner as a child: just to show me how hard I was working her. The huffing, the sighing. When did she start doing fucking crosswords? I’d never seen the bitch do a crossword in her life—

And suddenly it was there in the room, like a table. On the television, the two men chatted parole precedents. My mother was actually going to die.

I watched her, there, in the cheap LCD. Her reflection seemed to be on the other side of the screen: a burn-in effect, or bad tuning. She was still breathing. Helplessly, I was waiting for her to cry – so I could ignore her, I supposed – but she only seemed to lose some muscles in her face. Her cheeks shrank. Her chin sharpened as she swallowed. She nodded a little.

“Well?” she said. “Do something, at long last. Say something. Finish me off.”

I drank, but it was the last gulp left in the bottle.

“I’d better leave,” I said, and did.

Two months later my mother was ashes in a bag, and I was a drive-by figure in a grey hoodie heaving her like a murder weapon into a Red Rooster dumpster. In the scheme of things, it seemed a worse fate for her to remain with me.

You know what happened afterwards. Cassie raised her children Catholic, as she’d already done secretly in the basement: she’d found God in a little leather Bible, and confirmation of His grace in the police-light into which she’d emerged. She wrote a book, did a speaking tour. She found her lipstick colour, looked beautiful in dresses; she cried in interviews, and I trembled, too. When they made the movie, Cassie praised the performances and never once objected that not every rape had been forcible, like they’d depicted it—didn’t mention that sometimes she’d pretended he was her father, because it was better than what he was. Thankfully, the listicles did this for her.

She’s got a show of her own, now. They don’t air it over here. I download it from two fellow seeders through a Russian tracker. It’s a daytime-cable talk-thing where she interviews ex-P.O.W.s and the wrongly-imprisoned for insights into mental survival. The conversation is secular, but the set is angelic – all backlighting and swooping white curves – as if she and her guest were broadcasting live from their shared eternal reward. Her guests recount torture, mock-executions, months alone in a lightless cell. This is supposed to humble us, I think. At the end of every episode, Cassie turns to the camera and addresses the audience directly. “Go for a walk,” she’ll say. “Go, get up right now if you can and go for a walk. Ring up an old friend and have them walk with you.” When she says things like that, you can tell someone else wrote it. She doesn’t have ‘old friends’; she has no more ‘old friends’ than I do. I love her, I suppose.

Yesterday, I decided to follow her advice. I went for a walk to the local café, bought a drink for cover and sat down to watch the people. I listened in on their conversations, guessed their coffee orders slightly better than chance, tried to remind myself that Humanity was out there waiting for me, I could join it anytime I liked. A pair of lesbians allowed me to pet their terrier. The barista said I had a lovely smile, which I didn’t believe but appreciated on principle. I went across the street to go and sit in the park, a Sunday surging with families, but as I was passing the playground, a child fell over between her mother and father and seriously skinned her knee.

The entire crowd convulsed. Other parents came running with fistfuls of band-aids; a woman announced the antibiotics in her bag like a hue-and-cry. A jogger, stopping mid-route, forced his ergonomic water bottle into the mix. Watching the swarm, drinking my skim latte with hands that were suddenly shaking, eyes blind with venom, I knew – at least for me – there was no hope in hell.

I’ve seen so many therapists over the years. It’s too much backstory. It takes newspaper clippings and more sessions than bulk-billed to get current, and by then they’re treating it as textbook trauma, printing me tickets to EMDR. I can never tell them the truth.

As they were tearing the last char of her hair out of her scalp, as they were stomping on the backs of her knees, my mother cried out “she’s my daughter, she’s my daughter,” over and over and over.

I said nothing. It seemed a non-sequitur. The world of adults was a logical one, and I assumed whatever my mother had done to deserve this, me being her daughter or not was irrelevant. But the attacks began to drag, and for a moment my mother seemed to wriggle free of the things being done to her to create a clearing between us, across the white marble. On all fours, she stared into my eyes and accused me. “You’re my daughter! Aren’t you?”

Immediately, the crowd moved to defend me. A woman stepped forth and hid me behind her handbag. I felt a new, warm presence at my side: a well-shaven, good-smelling man had knelt down to speak to me.

“She isn’t your mummy. Is she, Cassie?”

His voice was like microfiber cloth. Across the marble, a proud father had brought his teenage son forth to kick her in the ribs. With his fingers, the good-smelling man took the tears out of my eyes; my birthmark fluttered and lived under his touch.

“Cassie,” he cooed. “She’s not your mummy, is she?”

I didn’t know who ‘Cassie’ was, but anyway I shook my head.

My mother didn’t see it; I don’t think she did. She mustn’t have, because she just kept saying it, over and over again. “You’re my daughter! Aren’t you, sweetie? Aren’t you, darling? You’re my daughter!” As they pummelled her, as they throttled her, as they poured juice and milk and ketchup and curry sauce on her head until it ran off her in thick swinging ropes, as she scrambled for purchase on the tiles and as they stomped on her hands and even with her mangled voice, she kept screaming it. “Aren’t you, darling? You’re my daughter! Aren’t you? You’re my daughter, aren’t you, sweetie? You’re my daughter! Aren’t you? Aren’t you?”

Like I said, I didn’t see everything they did to her. Some things were hidden from me—many things, even. But I did see the moment her eyes fell from mine, the moment she surrendered: the moment she stopped asking, she had her answer, my face serene and blank and new inside the crowd.