Unspeakable Things

“She was the only one who didn’t pretend I was normal.”

Cass feels very warmly toward her aunt Jin. Like many YA protagonists, Cass stubbornly clings to her self-identification as a quirky kid and revels in the conviction that she is different from and more interesting than her peers. While her parents and sister try to downplay the visual of her shocking scar, Aunt Jin embraces the scar and joins Cass in using dark humor to refer to it.

“If he kept drinking—this didn’t happen very often, but it happened—he’d look at me or Sephie in a way that felt like a monster had found your hiding spot, and Mom would say it was just best if we went to bed early and stayed there until the next morning.”

The abusive home environment of the McDowell family is deeply upsetting. The tense mood pervades the house and contributes to Cass’s perpetual feeling of being hunted in her own home. The unsettling atmosphere lends itself to her dad’s character development; he is described in such predatory terms that his daughters believe he may be a murderer.

“It wasn’t the first time he’d told me I should be a writer, but sometimes teachers had to say gooey stuff about their students so they didn’t feel like they’d wasted their life choosing education.”

Cass appreciates her teacher’s praise, and just as she uses a minor interaction with Gabriel as fuel for a long fantasy about their romantic life, she uses a compliment from a teacher to fuel a fantasy about her career aspirations. However, she is so beaten down by abuse at home that she views any praise with suspicion and doubts her teacher’s motivations. Pessimism clouds a lot of this 12-year-old’s worldview.

“I supposed that’s how the lions successfully hunted the antelope, just lurked around the watering hole until the weaker, fleshy animals couldn’t stand it anymore and came for a drink.”

Cass employs the metaphor of lions hunting prey to describe her home life. In this scene, she wants to leave her room to get a glass of water but fears what will happen if her dad notices her. She knows that her dad is sexually abusing her sister and that her turn is next.

“I’d die if he ever came all the way up those stairs. It was a true thought, truer than any I’d ever had, and suddenly I wanted to write about it, not in a way that people would know what I was saying but like in a message in a bottle, a secret code that Dad couldn’t crack.”

Cass is terrified by what she believes to be the inevitability of her dad turning his attention on her. Her anxiety manifests as her relying on her books as a kind of talisman to protect her. The simile of “like in a message in a bottle” conveys the sense of childish adventure and desperation that she evokes when trying to think of ways to save herself.

“Mom would be devastated if she discovered that I’d wasted her thoughtfulness. ‘Thanks.’ She smiled but didn’t hug me. She’d never hugged Sephie or me, not that I could remember. But the thought of her saving cookies for me was as good as any embrace.”

Cass unknowingly throws away frozen Thin Mints that her mom saved for her. At some moments, Cass seems very immature, or very much her age. At other moments, such as this one, Cass demonstrates tremendous maturity and recognizes that regulating her emotions is necessary to protect her mom’s feelings.

“We locked the door and Sephie used the toilet while I brushed my teeth, and then we switched. The TV was still blaring when we opened the bathroom door. We swapped a worried look with each other before bolting up the stairs. I checked Sephie’s room with her, and then she did the same for me.”

Cass and Sephie live in perpetual fear of their father. They must tag-team simple actions like preparing to go to bed in order to keep each other safe. The severity of their home life is emphasized by the casual descriptions of this extreme measures; Cass’s narration is resigned and matter-of-fact.

“When we’d first been asked to bartend, both of us had been so proud. The job wasn’t too hard. Two fingers of whiskey, the rest pop or water. We received quite a few compliments, but as the day wore on, the praise felt more like probing fingers. It was nice of Sephie to take the bullet on that one and offer to bartend today.”

Cass and Sephie are forced to bartend their parents’ orgies. The nature of their abuse is so extreme that they were initially inculcated to feel proud of their roles. The simile “like probing fingers” conveys the invasive, uncomfortable nature of the girls’ relationship with the partygoers; they are violated in more ways than one.

“I was maybe nine, and Dad disappeared into his and Mom’s bedroom with a woman named Kristi. She was married to someone else back then, I can’t remember his name, I just knew that she made me sad. She was one of those people who laughed too loud and hung on Dad like a tree monkey and carried herself like she lived in the smallest corner of her body.”

Cass’s dad is a serial philanderer, and her early recollection of him brazenly cheating on her mom demonstrates the casual ease with which he views women as objects. The similes of “like a tree monkey” and “like she lived in the smallest corner of her body” emphasize Kristi’s dehumanization and debasement.

“It was worth it every time, because the inside of that barn looked like a movie set. It smelled like salt and sweat and musk and powdery incense, but you could roll from one end to the other on a bed of pillows. I didn’t think about what was done on the pillows.”

Cass’s observation reveals the strange combination of knowledge and naivete that Sephie and Cass possess. The notion that it looks like a movie set and that the pillows look fun to roll on are childish things to observe, but Cass is also world-weary enough to know what takes place on the pillows that she does not want to touch.

“Whenever something funny goes on around town, I check on Goblin. Stopped by Connelly’s house, too, the band teacher? Pure fruit. There’s a few other stops I made for protocol, and they turned up nothing. I’m telling you, the boys are lying for some sorta attention. You know how Hollow boys are. No dad around, a mom who smokes in front of the television and chows down Twinkies all day.”

Bauer’s small-town prejudice is deeply ingrained. Victim-blaming is enabled by the notion that someone’s prior circumstances, such as their socioeconomic status, determined the reason for something happening to them; this dehumanizing idea strips the person of any agency.

“When Mom finally looked at me, I saw I’d guessed wrong. Her eyes weren’t sad. They were ghostly, big scary windows on an abandoned house. Looking into them gave me chest pains.”

Cass’s mom pretends that she is okay with her dad’s “swinging” lifestyle, which is really just justification for him to cheat on her and brazenly sleep with other women while she fulfills the stereotypically female role of taking care of his life. Cass is deeply affected by her mother’s emptiness, and her eyes metaphorize this struggle.

“I could see parts of her scalp through her thinning hair as she pushed at the dough. I wondered if she felt as pretty as Kristi, or the other women who Dad slept with right in front of her.”

Cass becomes more and more aware of her mom’s pain and the effects of her dad’s philandering. However, it is necessary to note that while Cass frequently ponders how her dad sleeping with other women affects her mom, she never considers how his sexual abuse of her sister affects her mom. Does this mean that she does not know what her husband is doing or that she refuses to acknowledge it? Or does Cass not want to consider how Sephie’s abuse affects their mother?

“As the last girl to the party, I still hadn’t found where I fit. I wasn’t built to be the quiet one, but Barb had taken the role of funny. That was usually my bit, but she’d arrived first. That left me mostly lurking in the background, but Lynn had liked my present the best, so that was something.”

Cass is an awkward kid, but she demonstrates considerable awareness of social dynamics. She laments that her closest friendships have fallen victim to the inscrutable circumstances of middle school power struggles. Faced with the indomitable task of being a cool girl at a sleepover, she resigns herself to being the daredevil who runs up to Connelly’s house and picks a flower.

“‘The trick of life,’ she said, ‘is that you can’t hold the pain for too long. The magic, either.’”

Cass’s mom accepts her husband’s philandering and is resigned to the fact that she cannot escape her marriage to an abusive liar. She tries to find solace in small ways and practice gratitude when she can. The juxtaposition of “magic” and “pain” offers a contradiction between what she tries to find in marriage and what she actually encounters.

“It was dangerous to talk to Dad when he was like this, though. He wore his anger like knives, and you didn’t want them aimed at you. There was a sweet spot when he first started drinking where he’d drop that armor. It was a small window, maybe half an hour where he forgot everything he’d been cheated of.”

Cass is terrified of her dad, who is always abusive but is sometimes manically energetic and sometimes manically angry. The simile of “wore his anger like knives” conveys the pain and fear that his emotional dysregulation produces. This description conveys the awareness that is necessary for survival in this kind of household.

“I’d let Clam touch my neck, but his hand on my boob was too personal. I could feel the poison of it leeching into my skin, then my muscles, and if I didn’t pour it all back on him, it’d set up permanently in my bones.”

Cass refuses to let Clam do to her what her dad does to Sephie. She understands that sexual abuse is not a mere one-off but rather leads irrevocably to long-term damage. She finds the strength to fend him off and reclaim her sense of agency.

“Even with Dad’s mood, I always found the road passing under me exhilarating. It reminded me I could go anywhere when I got older, explore bottomless blue-green oceans, climb icy snow-capped mountains, drink tea with monks. The irony of being reminded of the size of the world through a hole in the floor of a rusted-out van was not lost on me.”

Books and the idea of escape are necessary for Cass to maintain her sanity. As she rides in the van with her dad, she imagines escaping from her small town and making meaningful connections. Her capacity for imagination gives her hope that she has a future.

“It’s the metronome he brings with him when he attacks. Teddy and Clam heard it same as me. A clicking like an old clock while he’s touching you, the sound just about worse than what he’s doing with his hands. Click. Click. Click.”

One of the boys from the Hollow describes the sound of the attack. The juxtaposition of horrific action with the common sound “like an old clock” contributes to the unsettling sense that this abuse is more common than it should be.

“Whenever we traveled, packing up the chuggy old VW van, Dad grew happy, and when he was in good spirits, life was the best. Maybe this time he’d hold on to his joy permanently, a jar of fireflies that he could keep alive forever.”

Cass metaphorizes her dad’s potential happiness as a jar of fireflies, a whimsical vision that she recognizes as inevitably ephemeral. Her dad’s abuse is exacerbated by the fact that he is not mean all of the time; his rare moments of being in a good mood make the mean times harder to handle because his daughters never know what to expect.

“For starters, I didn’t know what to do with the hot little rock that settled in my belly every time Mom shut me up like that. I didn’t know what to do with a dad who hunted me and Sephie. I didn’t know what to do with my fear that he was now helping Sergeant Bauer stalk boys, or at least looking the other way as Sergeant Bauer did.”

Cass feels tremendously powerless. Her mom’s refusal to acknowledge her daughters’ suffering or stop her husband from abusing them is physically painful to reconcile, and she feels that she is forced to carry this knowledge like a “hot little rock.”

“That glimpse of kindness almost convinced me to talk, to spill everything I knew, about all the boys being on my bus route, that the bus went right by where Bauer was staying, that the attacks must have started about the same time Bauer was kicked out of his own house, Bauer, whose dog tags made that clicking sound when he was excited, that same sound that Ricky said the man who attacked them made. I was even going to tell him about Dad and how our situation wasn’t urgent like Gabriel’s, but if they had extra time, could they see if my dad was helping Bauer do something with boys and basements and also please save me and Sephie before my dad came up those stairs?”

Cass recognizes that her home life is unacceptable, but she never feels safe enough to confide in an adult. She cannot trust in institutions to protect her and her sister, and she fears that the institutions she cannot trust will also fail to protect Gabriel. Bauer’s standing as a member of the police force complicates her ability to trust in law enforcement since she knows Bauer is a criminal.

“We’d squash down our own feelings and experiences to create the maximum amount of space for his stories of how terrible his life was. We’d do it today, we’d do it tomorrow, we’d do it forever.”

Cass recognizes that she must tell the truth about her home life if she ever wants to escape the cycle of abuse. She realizes that she, her mom, and Sephie are stuck, and if they ever want to be free, she must be the one to seize this opportunity and offer a lifeline to her mom and sister.