By: Fyeo Hale

My mother started asking me the same question as soon as I was old enough to have a conscience, and she kept asking it at least three times a week for my entire childhood.

“Fyeo, did anyone touch you today? No one touched you, right? If someone touches you, you can tell me.”

I thought she was a weirdo. I told her so, in the exact voice a kid uses for a question that seems to come from nowhere and land nowhere. “Mom, nobody touched me. Nobody touched me. Stop asking that. It’s so weird.” Then I went off and did whatever kids do, and a few days later she asked me again.

I have now written a whole book, forty-three chapters of it, and a good part of that book is the real answer to her question. I put somebody else’s name on the cover so she would never have to hear it.

Fyeo Hale is not the name on my driver’s license. I changed the names of nearly everyone in the book, I moved us to different states, I swapped the car I drive for a generic one because mine would have been a giveaway to anyone who’s ever parked next to me, and the dogs don’t go by their real names either, because in a family like mine the dogs’ names would get me caught faster than my face. Then I turned around and narrated the audiobook myself, in the one voice on this earth my mother could pick out of a crowded mall from a single syllable, which tells me everything about how good I am at this.

The reason is one sentence, and I put it at the back of the book where she’ll never get to it. My mother has enough pain in her life. If she read this, all she would feel is guilt and shame. I’ve watched it happen on a small scale. At forty a memory came back to me whole from the third grade, the pediatrician asking her to step out of the exam room, and I called her to ask if it was real. There was a pause on that line I could feel in my teeth. “Yes,” she said. “Why?” I told her. “I knew something was off,” she said. “I felt it, and I didn’t want to leave, and I didn’t stand up for myself. I will never forgive myself for it.” One memory, one phone call, and it took her about four seconds to make it her fault. Multiply that by a book.

I found out why she asked me that question when I was twelve. I came home from school and my father was kneeling at my bedroom door installing the lock I’d been begging for, and he told me to go upstairs and talk to my mother. She was sitting on the edge of her bed. I sat down next to her grinning like I’d won something.

“Grandpa touched me,” she said. “He touched me where he’s not supposed to touch me. He molested me.”

Her father, my grandfather, the coolest man I knew, the one who taught me not to be afraid of bees. “If he touched you,” I asked, “then why is he coming here?”

“He’s my father,” she said. “They’re coming here. They’re family. And he’s changed.” Then, almost in the same breath, “That’s why you’re getting a lock on your door. You need to lock it at night when he’s here to protect yourself. He started with me when I was your age now. Nobody knows. Just your dad, and you can’t tell anyone.”

So I didn’t. I locked my door every night he was in the house and I hugged him hello and goodnight the same as always, because it was my mission not to blow the cover. At fifteen I finally said out loud that I didn’t want him in our house, and she stopped the car and looked me dead in the eye. “Fyeo, enough. If I can forgive him, you can.” And whenever it came up after that, the same sentences, every time. “It’s a sickness. It’s a sickness. He can’t help it. He’s changed.”

The last time I saw him alive I was in college, still pretending I knew nothing, and he mentioned he wanted to write a book about his life.

“Let me write your book,” I said.

He told me he couldn’t write that book while he was still alive.

I’ve thought about that sentence more than almost anything else he ever taught me, and the man cured me of bees. He meant he couldn’t tell the truth and then keep living next to the people it would hurt. He just didn’t think of the third option, which is to tell the whole truth and quietly change your name.

Except I didn’t tell the whole truth. Not about her.

There’s one thing I left out of the book on purpose, with a fake name on the cover and nobody on earth able to trace it back to me. I married my mother. In the book I call my ex-husband Derek, the man I spent seventeen years with, and I never once put the two of them on the same page.

My mother and Derek do the same thing. I used to tell him it was death by a thousand comments, daily. When I do something kind in one direction, I’m failing in another, and they’re subtle and sharp and painful. Derek noticed what I had on one day.

“How come you’re not wearing the necklace I bought you?” he asked.

“I’m wearing this. It’s from my mom.”

“Well, I won’t get you jewelry anymore then.”

So I stopped wearing hers. When she offered me more, I declined and told her I don’t wear jewelry. Possession is love to both of them, and after enough years of it, it’s how I’m wired too. I married a man I could never get it right for, the same way I could never get it right for her, and I stayed seventeen years, and I don’t believe that was an accident.

None of that is in the book. What’s in the book is the mother who filled every yard we ever had with roses she tended herself and turned every house into a home the same relentless way. The mother who drove me to every shift at the vet clinic for months, at fourteen, before I could drive myself. The mother who, the spring I left my marriage with a twin mattress and a few plates, bought my sons mattresses and furniture so they’d have beds at my new place. It also has the nights I sat on the other side of a locked bathroom door begging her to open it. All of that is true, and I wrote it with love, and I still left the other thing out.

So the pen name keeps the book from her. And inside the book, I kept her from the book. Two doors. My family has always been good with doors.

I learned early and I learned well that in our house the worst thing goes behind a door, and then you come upstairs and set the table, because family dinner was every single night, mandatory, all five of us. A pen name is extremely on brand for me. I come from a long line of people who keep the secret and keep the peace and keep the dinner hot. Some days I think it’s the kindest thing I’ve ever done for her. Other days I think it’s the most her thing I’ve ever done, keeping the worst of it behind a door for somebody else’s sake and calling it love. I don’t want to be the next woman in my family who decides silence is a form of care. I also don’t want my mother to spend the rest of her life reading about her daughter at twelve and finding a way to make every page her fault.

I love her, and I’d put another name on the cover again tomorrow.

I’m not under any illusions about the odds of her finding it. This is a woman who once woke me in the middle of the night holding a bag of stick-on earrings and flavored chapstick I’d stolen at Nordstrom and thrown away in the store bathroom’s garbage, and to this day she has never explained how she got them back. Mothers find everything. If she ever does find this one, I hope she gets as far as the part where I say she was right to ask. She was right every single time. I just never answered her.

Today, nobody touched me. That one I can finally tell her without lying.