With or Without You: A Memoir by Domenica Ruta

spiritual good, an act of random, senseless animal lust, a divinely inspired transgression.…
    I’ve tried so many ways to make sense of my experience. Obliteration was the one that worked best. Pretend it never happened at all.
    It didn’t happen. It didn’t happen. It didn’t happen. It didn’t happen. It didn’t happen. It didn’t happen. It didn’t happen. It didn’t happen. It didn’t happen. It didn’t happen. It didn’t happen. It didn’t happen. It didn’t happen. It didn’t happen. It didn’t happen. It didn’t happen. It didn’t happen
.
    Until one day it really didn’t happen.
    I don’t remember many of the details now. But that can happen to any memory, toxic or not. If you can remember anything, it’s already wrong. The image or event has changed, just as you have—minutely, chemically, through the passage of time between then and now. Something happens to you, and then it’s gone. It becomes a memory that becomes shrapnel. Shards of experience still hot with life singe the brain wherever they happen to get embedded. Sometimes I swear I can feel the precise location of my memories like warm, tingling splinters under my scalp. Pictures with no sound, feelings with no pictures, the lost and found, mostly lost.
    There are times when these memories, distilled into words and uttered in my own voice, sound so strange to me
—it didn’t happen
—that I begin to doubt everything from the laws of gravity to the spelling of my own name.
    MY MOTHER SHOWED UP at the campground a few days later in a Checker cab with her new boyfriend, Michael. The cab was a late model from the seventies, one of the last of its kind ever made in America. Michael had planned to retire the car from the road, but my mother rescued it from the junkyard. She drove the Checker around in circles, showing it off.
    “This is the car Nikki will ride to the church on her wedding day,” she bragged. She’d already had it painted white in preparation. The car would survive another couple of months before it went the way of every other vehicle she tried to own. My mother and her cars—it was always a doomed, unrequited love.
    Kathi stepped grandly out of her big white boat. “I’m getting a hotel room” were the first words that came from her mouth. Mum hated camping. It reminded her too much of my competitive, outdoorsy father, who is famous for dragging his women and children on long hikes that he times with a stopwatch. My mother was driven mad by more than thirty minutes in nature. “The trees are nice, but after a while I just want to take a long, hot shower and order room service,” she said, flicking her cigarette into the campfire. She ate the s’mores I made for her, then started gathering her things to leave. It was clear she was going to glide away in that huge white car and leave me behind. I panicked, started crying, complained about my chronic stomachache, which, for some reason, always aroused her sympathy.
    “Nikki’s sick, Michael. You mind driving us all back to Danvers?”
    “No problem,” he said, and grabbed a case of beer for the road.
    We stopped for gas on the ride home. It was dark by then and the lights of the gas station were glowing a bilious green. When Michael got out to pump, my mother turned around in the seat and began gushing to me. “He loves me, Nikki. And he loves you, too! He told me he did. You know he’d buy you anything you want. Just ask him.” She leaned her head out the window and said to Michael, “Honey, buy her a prize.” Then to me, “Anything you want. He won’t say no to you. He loves you so much!”
    I pointed to the cashier’s vestibule, where a strand of little stuffed unicorns with clasping feet was hanging on a plastic ribbon in the window. Michael got back in and gave me the unicorn. I clamped it to my finger and waved it around weakly. I tried to smile but I couldn’t. Kathi turned away with a disappointed expression.
    “She said she loves you,” my