I didn’t want to believe that the solid history of my childhood could unravel altogether, simply at our whim. “It doesn’t happen very often,” I replied. “We know these people.” I was ready to blame Anders Shute: his appearance in their lives, his seduction of Bev; his sinister interest in controlling Cassie, which might have evolved in any number of ways. She’d never confided anything specific either to Peter or to me, but something had been wrong in that house. We both knew that. Why not believe, as Cassie had believed, in the reality of Clarke Burnes? Why not believe for Cassie, as Cassie had believed for her vanished cat, Electra, that she was living another, better life somewhere nearby, eating her meals off silver plates and destined for a beautiful future?
I want fiercely to believe it, for myself as much as for her. All our stories are more or less made up, after all. What doesn’t seem imaginary—what feels most real—is my nightmare about Cassie and the poisoned cloak, my sense that this is what it means to grow up. Whatever choices we think we make, whatever we think we can control, has a life and a destiny we cannot fully see. That I can sense the way the plot will go, that I could, on that Saturday morning in April a couple of years ago, save the life of one Cassie Burnes—it’s only an illusion I cling to. What will be will be, irrespective, not because fate is unassailable but because none of us ever sees face-to-face: through a glass darkly is the best we can manage.
LAST NIGHT at supper, my parents started up the college conversation again. This coming fall it will be time for me to apply. We sat perspiring around the kitchen table with the windows open to the slight breeze and the sunset casting shafts of light and shadow across the garden, the maples in silhouette against the bloody western sky. We could hear tree frogs and the distant sounds of the Saghafi kids in their pool (“Marco . . .” “. . . Polo”). My father raised the subject: we need to plan some college visits for August, before school starts.
He tipped back in his chair—which annoys my mother, who thinks each time that he will fall and who resents the scuff marks on the floor—and spoke without looking at me, as much as to say my reply was a matter of complete indifference to him. “Any thoughts?”
“I want to act,” I said, which wasn’t new, of course, but new for me to put this ambition first.
“Of course you do, sweetie.” My mother sliced seconds of quiche unasked and slipped them onto our plates. “But that’s not how you choose a college.”
“Why not?”
“Sure, Carole, why not?” My father banged down on all four chair legs and wielded his fork. “If she wants to act, what’s wrong with that?”
“You don’t get a degree in acting,” my mother said.
“Maybe not,” I said, “but I can choose what places interest me based on whether they’ve got good theatre programs.”
“What’s so appealing about acting?” my mother asked. She wants me to be interested in politics, or science; she sees it as a woman’s obligation, even now. To her, acting is passive, secondhand—you’re saying lines that somebody else wrote, and pretending to be somebody you’re not.
“Come off it, Carole, give the girl a break.”
“I’m not hassling, I’m genuinely curious.”
“Do I really have to explain?”
“Give it a try,” my mother said. She had on her interested-grown-up expression, her eyebrows raised, a slight, forced smile on her lips.
“You can’t say it’s culturally irrelevant.” I was aware that I sounded defensive. “There’s nothing our culture cares about more.”
“Than the theatre?”
“Than acting. Okay, TV, movies, whatever. It’s what we Americans do.”
“You’ve lost me there,” my dad smiled. “I’m an American, and I’m a dentist. I care about teeth.”
“You know what I mean.”
“No, really, dear. Explain it to us.”
“I just like to act, okay? Won’t that do?”
My father patted the back of my hand on the table. “Of course it will,” he said. “Your mom’s being a bully. We know you love it, and that’s fine.” He paused. “She just wants you to think about why. Because maybe there’d be other things, I don’t know, alternatives, that might be as interesting for you to consider. Not instead, you know, but in addition.”
“Like curing cancer, you mean?”
He laughed. “Kind of like that.”
I shook my head. We changed the subject.
How could I have explained that it all seems like acting, like theatre, to me? Each of us puts on our costumes, our masks, and pretends. We take the vast, inchoate, ungraspable swell of events and emotions that surrounds us and in which we are immersed, and we funnel it into a simplified narrative, a simple story that we represent as true. Like: I love avocadoes but detest Brussels sprouts. Or: I’m great at English but no good at math. Or: I’m a loyal friend who’ll do anything for the people I love. Or: I know you so well I can anticipate your every move. Or: I know myself, and this is what it’s like to be me.
But we don’t really know anything at all, except how the story should go, and we make believe it’s our story, hoping everything will turn out okay. The difference is that onstage, or in a film, we acknowledge the artifice, we accept that we’ve made a world that excludes what we ignore. Like gods, we invent a world that makes sense.
IN THE FILM of Cassie’s life, she recovers from her grief (because everything she went through can be summarized as grief), and Bev is restored to her as Cassie once and for a long time believed Bev to be—the plump, geeky, intensely loving mother who is her staunch ally in a lonely world. In the film, Cassie begins again, in a high school in Stamford, Connecticut, or in Atlanta, Georgia, or in Portland, Oregon, a new chapter, in which she can be anyone she wants to be, popular and successful and undamaged and free, heading to her immaculate future.
In this new life, where the darkness of the Bonnybrook is forever forgotten, she swims, glides perfectly through long golden afternoons in crystalline water, like the water at the quarry. The bottom is never murky, or treacherous, and she knows she will never drown. And when we see that film—if they ever make it, if it’s ever released—we’ll say: Yes, of course. This is what it means to be a young woman; this is the true story, this beautiful vision: Cassie’s calm strokes and their gentle ripples; her ribboning white-blond hair; the smooth, dappled green water overhung, along the shore, with branches; the boulders of tawny stone; immense, above, the blue, blue sky. This is what we will never forget.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
MY HEARTFELT GRATITUDE to my wise and generous editor, Jill Bialosky, and to the amazing team at W. W. Norton; and also to Ursula Doyle, Charlie King, and everyone at Fleet/Little, Brown UK. Infinite thanks to Sarah Chalfant and Andrew Wylie, my agents, extraordinary champions and stellar human beings.
My loving thanks, too, to dear family and friends for support through thick and thin: to James, my love and first reader; to Lucian, for keeping us laughing; and to Livia, my second reader, whose perspective and suggestions were invaluable.
Thanks also to Louise Glück for her poem “Midsummer,” an inspiration.