“Sounds pretty crazy in there, huh?” the agent said.
The special juvenile hearing happened one week after they found Gretchen and Abby at the beach house. Abby had wanted to sneak out and see Gretchen and find out if the exorcism had worked, but her dad had nailed her window shut and padlocked her door. When she wanted to go to the bathroom, she rang a bell and her mom left the bathroom door open and waited outside.
An investigator from SLED came to their house and sat in the living room and asked Abby questions: How did they get to the beach house? Where did she get the GHB? Who else was involved? He pretended to be concerned about her, he pretended that it was all for her own good, but Abby remembered what happened when she tried to tell the truth to Major, and Father Morgan, and the Langs, and she didn’t say a word. After half an hour of her silence, he stopped acting like her friend. He took her parents aside and, speaking loudly enough for Abby to hear, told them how she was going to ruin her future if she didn’t start cooperating.
Too late, Abby thought.
When they finally let Abby back inside the courtroom, her parents looked harrowed. Abby thought the judge was going to let her say something, but it quickly became clear that no one expected her to say anything. They were going to make all the decisions about her life and she would never even get a chance to speak.
The lawyer for the Langs was talking about a residential treatment facility for at-risk teens in Delaware, he was saying something about a restraining order, he was talking about how many years Abby would have to live on a locked ward, when a man who looked like an accountant came in and whispered something in the judge’s ear. The judge held a quick conference in his chambers for everyone except the Rivers family. Abby sat next to her parents, numb and cold, the courtroom empty except for the three of them and a bailiff, waiting for everyone else to come back and pack her away and ship her up north, and her shoulder hurt and her ear ached and she was glad because at least she could still feel something.
The judge returned and said there was someone who needed to speak, and the Langs’ lawyer looked exasperated and made a big show of slapping down his legal pad; Gretchen’s mom was crying and Mrs. Lang’s jaw was clenched, and a few minutes later the rear doors opened and the exorcist was led in by three cops. He wouldn’t meet Abby’s eyes. Abby felt it all end. Now he’d tell everyone about Andras, and Abby approaching him, and how they planned it, and she would sound crazy. Now they were going to put her on drugs. They would send her to Southern Pines. He was going to make it all so much worse.
And then the exorcist saved her life.
He confessed to everything. He said Abby was at the beach house trying to save Gretchen. He said he’d forced her to steal the fetus for his own satanic rituals. He said he’d abducted Gretchen. He’d shot Max. He’d bought alcohol for minors. He’d coerced Abby into the whole thing. She was under his influence. He was an acolyte of Satan. He was out of control.
A conference was held in front of the judge’s bench for everyone but Abby, and then it was all over. They had to send someone downstairs to get shackles in the exorcist’s size.
When Abby and her parents got home, someone had broken two of their windows and sprayed “Babykiller” on the front door. Abby’s name hadn’t appeared in the papers, but everyone knew what she’d done. A week later, her mom told her they were moving to New Jersey. There was a shortage of nurses there. Her dad sold the Dust Bunny without even telling Abby he’d put an ad in the paper. And then Charleston was gone, like it never happened.
They got her a therapist in New Jersey, but Abby refused to talk to him. She knew that the longer she stayed silent, the more she was worrying everyone—but what good would talking do? Nothing she could say would change what had happened. They ate in the only booth of a Chinese take-out place on Christmas Day, and she slept through New Year’s. January came. It was the first time Abby had seen snow. Her parents managed to rent a condo and sold their house at a loss. Abby thought about calling Gretchen. She wanted to know if her life was normal again, she wanted to know if she was okay, she wanted to know if anything good had come out of all this, but she was forbidden from contacting the Langs and so she didn’t talk to anyone, and every day was the same as the day before.
February. The longer she didn’t talk, the easier it became to stay silent. She tried to write Gretchen a letter, but it sounded thin and fake. She wrote a letter to Glee and another one to Margaret; both came back marked “Return to Sender.” She had gone to the library and looked up the Charleston papers. The case against the exorcist was falling apart because no one would testify. Glee and her family couldn’t be located, and Gretchen’s parents just wanted everything to be over. He was sitting in jail, but eventually they’d have to figure out what to do with him.
Abby’s parents were eager to move on. They had gotten Abby into Cherry Hill West. She could make up tenth grade in summer school and start as a junior in the fall.
“I know you’re smart enough to do that,” her mom said when they got home.
Abby didn’t say anything.
Both her parents were working now. Her dad had found a job in the Garden Center at Wal-Mart and her mom worked in an old folks’ home. Every day, they went to work and Abby stayed behind. They talked about making her see a new therapist, but they were so busy rebuilding their lives that they never got around to it.
Every day, Abby had assignments to get her up to speed for summer school, but the work didn’t take her long. There was a neighbor who made sure she didn’t leave the house, so mostly she watched TV. Before noon, there was Family Feud, Wheel of Fortune, and The Price Is Right. In the afternoons she lost herself in All My Children, The Bold and the Beautiful, Santa Barbara, and Another World. But more and more mornings, she missed The Price Is Right altogether and only dragged herself out of bed in time for the afternoon shows.
She was lying in bed one March morning, staring at the ceiling and trying not to think about anything at all, when a horn honked outside. She heard it beep once, then twice, then a third time. Abby ignored it, but it kept on blaring, eating into her brain, bleeep bleeeeep bleeeeeeep, refusing to leave her alone. Finally, she trudged into the living room and knelt on the sofa to look out the window and see who the hell was out there. Her heart gave a single, low kick.
Mrs. Lang’s white Volvo was idling out front.
Thick billows of exhaust plumed from its dripping tailpipe and the rising sun hit its fogged-over windows and made them burn gold. In a trance, Abby dragged on her jacket, stuck her feet in a pair of sneakers, and opened the front door, fully expecting the car to have disappeared.
It was still there. She shuffled down the sidewalk on numb feet; the closer she got, the more real it became. She could hear its engine idling. She could see a vague shape behind the wheel. She could feel the frozen handle underneath her fingers. She heard the door clunk open. Warm air swirled out and she smelled hibiscus and rose.
“Hey!” Gretchen said. “Want a ride?”
Abby’s brain couldn’t put the pieces together.
“You always drove me everywhere,” Gretchen said. “I figured it was time to return the favor.”
Behind Abby, a condo door opened.
“Abby?” Mrs. Momier, their next-door neighbor, called. She was standing on her front porch, arms wrapped around herself, looking worried. “You’re not supposed to be outside.”
“Come on,” Gretchen said. “I’m wanted in, like, at least two states by now. Get in.”
Abby slid into the Volvo and slammed the door. The heaters were on high, drying the skin on her face and pulling it tight. Gretchen ground gears as she shifted from neutral into first, and the Volvo shuddered and jerked, then the smell of burning motor oil came through the vents as she pulled onto the street and shredded into second gear.
“I called but they wouldn’t let you come to the phone,” Gretchen said. “I wrote bu
t I never heard back. I couldn’t wait anymore, so I borrowed my mom’s car and here I am.”
Abby looked at her. Gretchen’s face was greasy and a pimple was forming next to her nose. Her hair was sticking up in the back and the car smelled like she’d slept in it. But her eyes were clear and her chin was up as she overhanded the steering wheel to the left and they pulled out of the condo parking lot.
“I’m not sure how long we have,” Gretchen said. “I called from the road to let them know I was all right, but I’m sure they’re spazzing. Because when I say I borrowed my mom’s car, I guess the technical term is that I stole it.”
She pulled into a Blockbuster Video parking lot and the Volvo jerked to a stop. The engine gave a death rattle as they rolled into an empty space. Gretchen yanked the emergency brake, then turned in her seat to face Abby.
“Someone else was living my life,” Gretchen said. “And all I could do was watch. I saw myself getting my friends drunk and telling them lies, and sleeping with Wallace, and feeding Margaret poison, and I can’t remember much of anything except flashes.”
A Blockbusters employee in a bright blue and gold shirt walked past to unlock the store, giving them a bored glance through the windshield.
“I’d wake up and have no idea where I was or how I got there,” Gretchen said. “Where the cuts and bruises came from. I remember your face, and smearing something across it, and I remember listening to you cry and feeling happy, and I remember Good Dog Max . . .”
Gretchen’s voice cracked.
“All winter,” Gretchen said, “after the beach house, everything hurt so bad and I felt like it would never stop. Something was wrong inside of me. I was empty and ashamed and I knew I was broken in a way that could never be fixed. I needed to hit the reset button and start over. So a couple of days before Christmas I went into my parents’ bedroom and got my dad’s gun, and I carried it with me all day until it was warm; and I taught myself how to turn the safety on and off, and how to open it and put in the bullets, and how to pull back the hammer. And then I sat on my bed for a long time, and finally I just couldn’t think of any reason not to do it, you know?”
Abby couldn’t move. Outside, a customer walked up and dumped videotapes into the Blockbuster return slot, sending them rattling down the chute.
“I put it in my mouth,” Gretchen said. “It tasted like poison, and I was so scared, and I had to pee so bad, and I had my finger on the trigger and I could feel exactly how much pressure I needed so I could stop feeling this way all the time. Then I realized you’d think it was all your fault, because you always think everything is all your fault, and I knew I had to explain to you that I was pulling the trigger because I was a fuck-up, not because of anything you’d done. So I decided to write a note telling you that it wasn’t your fault, and then the note turned into a letter, and somewhere between pages five and eight I didn’t want to kill myself anymore.”
Gretchen shoved her hands into Abby’s. They were warm and wet.
“You keep rescuing me and I don’t know why,” Gretchen said. “But every day I tell myself my life must be worth something because you keep saving it. They can’t keep us apart. I don’t care what happens. You never stopped trying to save me.
“I love you, Abby. You’re my best friend, and my mirror, and my reflection, and you are me, and you are everything I love and everything I hate, and I will never give up on you.”
Behind them, a police car cruised by slow. Gretchen stopped talking while they watched it pass.
“Do you remember fourth grade?” Abby asked. The words felt awkward in her mouth. “My birthday party at Redwing Rollerway?”
Gretchen thought for a minute.
“My mom made me give you a Bible,” she said.
“No one came,” Abby said. “I was so humiliated. Then you showed up at the last minute and saved the day.”
The cop made a second pass and this time stopped behind them, his engine idling.
“What happened in the beach house?” Abby asked. “It all feels so real, but everyone keeps saying I made it up. I need to know if it really happened or if it was all just unicorns.”
Gretchen put a hand on either side of Abby’s face and pulled them together until their foreheads were touching.
“It wasn’t unicorns,” Gretchen said. “I need you to tell me everything. Because you’re the only person I can hear it from without going insane. I need to know it all.”
Abby started to talk. She was still talking when a second police car showed up, and she didn’t stop when they put the two of them in the backseat. She kept on talking while they waited for her mom to show up at the police station, and she was still talking when they got home.
After some arguing, Abby’s mom called the Langs, and Mr. Lang bought a ticket to fly up the next day. That night Abby and Gretchen slept in Abby’s bedroom and kept talking all night.
They stopped briefly when an exhausted Mr. Lang arrived the next morning and launched into a tirade about what was going to happen to Gretchen and Abby if he had anything to say about it. Abby’s dad waited until he ran out of steam and said:
“I think enough harm’s been done, Pony. Why don’t we leave it here. Let the girls write. If they can pay the bill, let them call. Can’t you see this is tearing them up inside?”
Abby and Gretchen kept talking all the way to the airport, and then Abby went home and wrote Gretchen a letter, and that night at 11:06 her phone rang. They kept on calling, and writing letters, and making each other mix tapes with ornate covers they drew in silver and gold paint pens or made out of wrapping paper, recording messages to each other between the songs, mailing each other their high school yearbooks to sign, mailing each other rolls of toilet paper with stamps on the wrappers to see if the postal service would deliver them (they did), sending each other giant birthday cards, collages, weird candy, squirt bottles of Bartender’s Friend artificial foam, ridiculous keychains, inappropriate Hallmark condolence cards for no good reason, and Abby sent Gretchen a corny postcard whenever the Cherry Hill West volleyball team went out of town.
They kept talking for years.
And She Was
The exorcist wound up sitting in jail for eight months, but ultimately no one would testify, so they threw a bunch of minor charges at him and commuted his sentence to time served. He walked out and disappeared. Abby always meant to write him a letter. She started a few, but she never knew where to send them; and after a while, like it always does, life happened, and the fall of 1988 began to fade.
It was little things at first. Abby missed a phone call because she had an away game. Then one time Gretchen didn’t write back and never made up for the missing letter. They got busy with SATs and college applications, and even though they both applied to Georgetown, Gretchen didn’t get in, and Abby wound up going to George Washington anyways.
At college they went to their computer labs and sent each other emails, sitting in front of black and green CRT screens and pecking them out one letter at a time. And they still wrote, but calling became a once-a-week thing. Gretchen was Abby’s maid of honor at her tiny courthouse wedding, but sometimes a month would go by and they wouldn’t speak.
Then two months.
Then three.
They went through periods when they both made an effort to write more, but after a while that usually faded. It wasn’t anything serious, it was just life. The dance recitals, making the rent, first real jobs, pickups, dropoffs, the fights that seemed so important, the laundry, the promotions, the vacations taken, shoes bought, movies watched, lunches packed. It was a haze of the everyday that blurred the big things and made them feel distant and small.
Abby returned to Charleston only one time. The year she landed her first real job, she got the call everyone gets twice in their lives, and she packed a dress and drove out to New Jersey and sat in the church and stood in the graveyard and w
ished that she felt something besides tired.
The plan was to stay with her dad for a couple of days, but the first night she woke up from a dream she couldn’t remember, and she knew she had to see Charleston again. She bought a ticket before her dad was even out of bed.
It wasn’t until she was checking into the Omni downtown (now called Charleston Place) that she realized why she’d come. From there it was just a couple of phone calls before she was pulling her rental car up in front of the Franke Home visitors entrance, and a perky girl was telling her that he was leading a tai chi class in the Wellness Center. Abby walked over and looked through the window and waited for the exorcist to finish teaching repulse monkey pose to a roomful of eighty-somethings.
After class he helped his elderly students pick their bones up off the floor and then he was standing in front of Abby again for the first time in over ten years. He looked the same, only now he sported a hard little pot belly and wore a baseball cap to hide that he was balding. He was wearing baggy Joey Buttafuoco pants and a tank top.
Abby stepped forward and stuck out her hand.
“Hi, Chris,” she said. “I don’t know if you remember me.”
Reflexively he stuck out his hand, but clearly he didn’t.
“Did I teach one of your parents?” he asked.
“I’m Abby Rivers,” she said. “I came here to apologize for ruining your life.”
He looked confused for a minute, and just as she was about to fill him in, he remembered.
“I was the—” she began.
My Best Friend's Exorcism Page 28