Page 8 of Coram House

Lola and I met the first day of college. The first five minutes, really. She rescued me then and, like we’re in some fairy tale, I think a part of her believes it’s her responsibility to rescue me now. Our dorm was this massive complex, an old hotel they’d turned into student housing. The two wings—east and west—stretched around in a horseshoe. But the rooms had been numbered by someone with a sick sense of humor. So there I was at eighteen, my first foray into adulthood, and I was already lost and foolish, dragging a massive suitcase and pushing along a cardboard box with my feet. When along came Lola.

She’s not tall, but she’s one of those people who feels tall. Something about the bounce in her step, the wild curly hair bleached blonde just at the tips, the massive gold hoop earrings, and overalls hand-printed with woodblock stamps. She was so the opposite of me in my nondescript jeans, my white tee that I owned seven of.

She’d stopped, smiled at me. “Lost?” she’d asked in a way that made it seem like I was in on the joke.

“Maybe,” I’d said. “The numbers don’t make sense.”

She laughed as she explained how they’d numbered the rooms so odd numbers were in the east wing and evens in the west.

“Here, I’ll show you.”

She took my hand then, such an unusual gesture from someone who was basically a stranger, and I’d felt—not a spark—more like a thunk. The way a magnet feels when it meets its opposite—joined, inseparable. A perfect fit. I’ve never felt love at first sight, not with Adam or anyone else. Love was always something that grew quietly and slowly for me. But those moments—the thunks, the sense that someone is going to be important—that’s the closest I’ve ever come.

Something inside Lola called out to something in me. Not just her intelligence, her wild clothes, the wilder theater crowd she hung out with. No, it was her sureness. About the things she loves, how sure they were worthy of her devotion. How unworried she was about what other people thought she was making with the clay of her life.

I, on the other hand, agonized over all of it. Where to intern. What to do with my love of words. Whether I’d end up as a penniless writer, whether I had anything original to say or was just regurgitating the ideas I found in other, better work. I took a fiction class, but whenever I tried to make something up, I’d just sit and stare at that blank page, paralyzed. I didn’t know then that creating something from something else was an art form too. To take facts and assemble them into a story that made sense. It took me years to realize that too was a calling.

After college, Lola and I had moved to New York together, lived in a one-bedroom apartment the same size as the dorm room we’d shared our sophomore year. Except this had a kitchen and living room crammed in. We’d pursued our dreams in parallel.

When she’d met Kay, an actress in a play her theater company was producing, they’d moved in together, and I’d taken a year abroad. A supremely weird copyediting job at a newspaper in Bangkok. I’d spent the year sending emails back and forth with Lola, regaling her with stories about food—so spicy I’d eaten a napkin on my first day in a desperate attempt to get the chili oil off my tongue. The islands ringed in sand so white and fine it was like powdered sugar. But the truth was, I was lonely, had been relieved to go back to New York.

The plan was to couch surf with Kay and Lola. Their apartment always hosted at least one actor or musician between gigs. I’d wait for a sublet to come up. I already had an entry-level job at the news show lined up.

When I got on the plane and found my row, there was a guy sitting in the aisle seat. Dark wavy hair, glasses, and pale skin, sunburned pink. I paused, looked down at my ticket, and then up at him.

“Lost?” he said, and smiled at me.

The words tugged on me, and the gentleness of his tone too. I felt the strange echo across continents and years. The same words Lola hadspoken to me in that hallway six years earlier. Years later, the four of us would laugh about this. How I’d fall in love with anyone who gave me directions. But even now it gives me a little chill, makes me wonder if I did look at him differently because of that moment. Because his words echoed Lola’s.

“I think you’re in my seat,” I said.

We did the dance, rechecked our tickets, and settled into our seats for the sixteen-hour flight.

“I’m Adam,” he said.

I wonder what would have happened if someone had sat in that middle seat between us. What path my life would have taken and with whom. But no one ever did.

By the end of the flight, I felt that same sense of two magnets clicking together. Thunk.You will be important, I thought. Then, with a thrill because I was twenty-four years old and the world was possibility:What will happen next?I shove the memory into the locked box inside my head and shut the lid. It’s getting crowded in there.

It’s only after listening to Lola’s message that I realize it’s Saturday. I’ve worked through half the weekend without knowing it.

My dreams are becoming eerie, full of empty halls and the feeling of being watched. I know I should take a break, so I drive out to a complex of big-box stores to buy a VCR, which turns out to be a challenge. I have no luck at the electronics store and the acne-faced teenager at Walmart acts like he’s never heard of a VHS tape. I try calling thrift stores with no luck. Finally, I give up and order one online that promises it will be here in three to five days, all along cursing myself for waiting so long.

That night, I eat popcorn for dinner and read, turning pages with one hand so I don’t smear cheesy residue on the brittle paper. By midnight, I’m turning the final page on the last deposition in the box. Then I wash my hands and pour a tall glass of wine. Back at my desk, I close my binder and push aside my notepad.

Most of the depositions had been what I’d expected. The former children of Coram House had been in their thirties and forties by the time they were interviewed, and their memories had dulled over time. Everyone remembers eating and sleeping. Attending classes in theschoolroom. The sting of being slapped. But most transcripts contain very few specific moments. They read more like a summary.

There were terrible stories, to be sure—and some of those were very sharp indeed. Stories of abuse at the hands of the priest and nuns who ran Coram House. But there was a depressing sameness to even the worst ones. I guess that’s unsurprising. Predators tend to find something that works and stick with it.

But not all the testimony feels routine. Karen Lafayette describes a girl being pushed out the window by one of the nuns. Though her account is called into question by the testimony of Sarah Dale, among others. Anthony Fiero talks about a boy who was electrocuted trying to climb under a fence, how he was forced to look at the body, how for years after he had nightmares about his hands turning black. And then there’s Tommy, who sticks in my head like a burr.

Based on what I’d read, many of the children hadn’t remembered the abuse until they’d reconnected with other children from the orphanage in a support group, something I knew the church had made much of during the case. False memories, they’d claimed, painting a few as vengeful liars out to say anything to wring a settlement from the church. The attacks on Sarah Dale had been particularly vicious. But she’d been particularly insistent about Tommy’s death and, after all, even child abusers balk at being accused of murder.

But that’s just how memory works. Something horrible happens and you tell yourself it wasn’t real; you lock it in a dark closet where the nightmares live. You make this true by the force of your will, at least until someone opens that door by mistake. We shape our reality as we live it. So, no, it didn’t seem unbelievable to me at all.

I look down at my binder, now full of questions divided into research areas, starting with the deaths and injuries. The unnamed girl pushed out the window. The boy who crawled under the electric fence. Tommy, drowned in the lake. How many other unrecorded deaths and injuries existed in Coram House’s past? And then, the other side of that question: How many of these could be creations by traumatized children, trained by terror to see monsters everywhere, even inside their own heads?

The wine is overly sweet, but I finish the bottle anyways. Soon the world is pleasantly blurred. In the bathroom mirror, I see my teeth are stained red. I don’t bother changing out of my clothes. The bed is cold. I huddle under the comforter, shivering. Every time I close my eyes, the bed starts to rock gently, like I’m drifting on the water. I think of Tommy with his scraped knees and freckles and I want to shout at him to run, to lift him out of the boat and carry him away.

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