My mother has always been fearful, double-checking doors are
locked, alarm set. She sleeps with a baseball bat, knives in the top
nightstand drawer. Insists on wooden rods in windows despite locks,
always leaves a porch light on. Long after our German shepherd dies,
she keeps up BEWARE OF DOG signs. She read once that a dog’s bark
deters break-ins so she buys an alarm that sounds aggressively
whenever its sensors are set off. She answers the front door yelling at
a nonexistent dog, “Get back, get back, stay!”

She never censored me from things like other parents did. I’m young
when we watch The Accused with Jodie Foster, that infamous
scene—her body forced against the pinball machine—sears into me
as I sit on the brown living room carpet, sucking on a Fruit Roll-Up
wrapped like a bandage around my thumb. Young also when she tells
me about the woman who lived down the road, how a man snuck
into her house, attacked her, pinned her to the bed. How he stayed
there until the album she had been listening to looped over, heavy
drums filling the space.

One day, I’m sitting with my mother in her bedroom—dark blue quilt
beneath us, Christmas lights glowing in the distance. My mother rests
with her hands in her lap, telling me stories I’ve heard before—about
her childhood friends, affectionately dubbed “the Dewey Street
Gang.” Her voice softens, and she asks if I remember the Kavanaugh
hearing. This surprises me, and I pay closer attention. She doesn’t usually
ask things like this, and I can tell she’s poised, alert. When I tell her
yes, I remember it, she tells me about Bobby, a boy in her
neighborhood, thirteen, a bit older than her. She tells me she never
remembered him pinning her to a bed in a room above a garage until
the hearing testimony. “I told your daddy when I remembered and I
asked him if he thought I’m dirty now, if I’m ruined.”

Some nights my mother plays music until the tall wood-paneled
speakers shake. Diana Ross, the Eagles, Tina Turner. As a child, I
dance around the living room while she sits next to the sliding doors,
looking through CDs or reorganizing VHS tapes on the shelves.
Once the carpet is replaced with white tiles, I wear socks and slide
around, pretending to ice-skate around the couches while we belt “I
Will Survive.” At first I was afraid, I was petrified.

When I drive home after she tells me about Bobby, about that
bedroom above the garage, my head fills with images of thin wrists
eclipsed by hands, a small mouth covered with a palm not much
bigger than hers. It’s almost midnight, days from Christmas. The city
sleeps, plastic candles glowing in windows. Quiet terrors happening
behind closed doors. I try to remember myself at eleven, try to
picture her then, too. That night, I dream about tornados pulling
trees from the ground, about compound fractures, bright white and
bleeding.