Once more the photographer relaxes as the cab goes in a different direction. But it’s not the route to Rose Cottage. Jon Rittenberg is not going home.
Where in the hell is he going?
A few blocks farther on, it dawns on the photographer.
Oh, you sneaky boy . . .
The cab turns into the Vancouver General Hospital complex and pulls up in front of the ER admissions area.
Jon exits the cab and stumbles toward the emergency entrance. He enters the glass doors.
The photographer pulls into a nearby parking space. He kills the engine, checks the time, then watches. From his vantage point he can see through the big windows into the well-lit ER waiting area. He sees Jon Rittenberg make his way to a plastic chair. Rittenberg takes a seat. He hunches forward, dropping his head into his hands. But no one comes to admit him. The photographer begins to wonder if Rittenberg has checked in at all.
Within twenty minutes a small white BMW wheels into the ER turnabout. The BMW stops abruptly in front of the ER entrance. A woman gets out of the driver’s seat. She is heavily pregnant. She rushes in through the sliding doors.
Daisy Rittenberg.
Jon has called his wife to fetch him.
Tricky bastard.
The photographer watches through the windows as Daisy Rittenberg catches sight of her husband, momentarily stalls, then rushes toward him. Rittenberg comes to his feet and hugs his wife. She holds on to him for a long while, stroking his back, then his face. She seems to be sobbing. Her husband places his hand on her tummy. He asks her something. She nods and wipes her eyes. Then she hooks her arm through her husband’s and helps him toward her waiting BMW.
THE MAID’S DIARY
You won’t remember exactly what happened because of the spiked alcohol. You won’t be able to completely forget, either. You’ll spend the next day, the day after, the following weeks, months, years, decades trying to do both. Remember and forget. You both want to know and don’t. And every bit of memory you do manage to pull out of the horror of that night, you’ll also doubt. Because everyone else who was there tells a different story. They say it’s your fault. You’re a liar. You’re a drunk and a whore and you’re being opportunistic and vindictive. You’re unwell in the head. Because it’s just not possible that what you say happened did happen—how could good boys do something like this?
Sometimes, years later, while going about your ordinary business, thinking you’re okay and that you’ve left it all behind, a random scent, a snatch of music, a certain color, will slash a broken shard of memory through your brain. You’ll stop dead in your tracks, feel confused as all your neural circuits waken fight-or-flight hormones into your body—the same neurochemicals that were associated with that night, because as neuroscience will tell you, what fires together, wires together. So while your mind won’t hold the whole picture, you realize your body does. Your body knows. But your body is not communicating properly with your brain in a way that will give you a narrative around that trauma, something you can understand. And you need that narrative in order to become whole again. In desperation you reach for a bottle of wine, or pills, or you doggedly escape into some other addictive behavior, whether it’s long-distance running, or kickboxing, or dieting, or excelling at work, or dangerous snooping, or hiding behind masks and makeup and theatrical roles, becoming an Anonymous Girl. All of it helps you hide from the Monster inside. And when that takes its toll, you try something else. But always, you are running from that faceless Monster. That dark place. And you know what? You can’t run. Because it’s inside of you. The Monster is you.
Then one day you find yourself inside his house.
You see a painting.
You finally find that proof you are not the liar. Everyone else is.
And buried inside that proof is evidence of an even bigger betrayal that slices far too close to your bone. It undercuts everything you thought you knew in your life.
You discover your best friend does not have your back. He’s a liar, too.
And you discover your mother, whose ashes you couldn’t let go, coerced you into getting rid of your baby in exchange for money. Money she might have believed would help you go to college. Money she might have thought would help you put the assault behind you and help you achieve all your childhood dreams. But it didn’t. Her apparent lack of support at the time, her trying to sweep it under the rug, her trying to shield your father from the ugliness of it all—it just did more damage. You almost took your own life and ended up dropping out of school and leaving town instead.
And you know what that feels like, Dear Diary? To see those paintings, to discover you’re inside his house, where he is having a baby that you never can, to find your mother’s signature at the bottom of a gag order in a safe alongside the signature of a woman named Annabelle Wentworth? It feels like a trigger has been pulled and the bullet hits directly in your head. Everything in your brain explodes. That carapace the decades have hardened around you—it’s obliterated in an instant, and all the darkness comes rushing in through the cracks and fills you up so hard and fast you think you are going to burst out of the confines of your own delicate human skin.
You realize you are on your own. You have always been on your own.
How does one deal with this?
I churned it over and over in my mind, then asked myself on these pages—like my therapist suggested—why? Why did my mother do it? Why did Annabelle Wentworth, Daisy’s mother, protect her daughter’s predator boyfriend? Why do women betray other women like this? Are we so co-opted and dependent on some ingrained adherence to a patriarchy? Are we so afraid of “trouble”？
Why did my best “friend” deceive me like this? Why did Boon even approach me in the coffee shop that day long ago? Because I am certain now that it was not fate. He sought me out for a purpose. Was it to save his own soul? Salve his own guilt? Was it all about him?
Whatever the answers, I am now pushed up against the Monster I’ve been trying to hide from. And suddenly I face two paths. Just two choices: Either accept this and allow myself to be violated all over again—remain the Anonymous Girl and hide even deeper behind my masks and coping mechanisms. Or this time stand tall. Fight back. Be seen. No longer the ghost.
If the police and justice are never going to be there for me, I need to find justice myself. And now I have the tools to do this.
So, Dear Diary, what does justice even look like? Does it mean getting even? Spreading the hurt around? Forcing reparation? Demanding a confession, an apology? I’m not even sure. None of those things will take away the damage done. I am then struck by something: If Boon and others had been brave enough to speak up all those years ago, if my mom had told Annabelle to fuck off with her money, if my mom had fought to keep the cops digging, then Jon would have been stopped. Those other guys would have been stopped. Charley would never have been attacked. Maybe there are more now. Maybe there will still be more. This gives me purpose. This empowers and fires me. I don’t need justice. I need to stop him.
And her.
And others like her.
Women like me—we need to show men they will not get away if they try something like this.
“What’s wrong?” Boon asks me as we sit on a log at Jericho Beach, eating sandwiches in the sun and watching a group of swimmers in wet suits dragging bright-pink buoys behind them. The swimmers rise and fall with the swells. It’s a clear day, hardly a breath of wind in the air. Neither warm nor cold. The snowcapped mountains across the water seem bigger, closer. Monstrous, really, due to some trick of atmosphere bending the light. That mountain range stretches north, all the way to my old home, the little world-class ski resort where my mother cleaned rooms and my father processed the shit that forty thousand visitors left behind in the resort each weekend. We used to be able to tell from the stink of the treatment plant whether it had been a good weekend for business.