How Will I Know You?

by Jessica Treadway

  After a time she stopped turning in her seat to watch people come in. Her neck hurt from craning, and her eyes hurt not from crying but from puking up the pills, which had broken blood vessels in her skin. Without telling Gil, she’d downed two of the different kind the doctor had prescribed—not the ones for sleeping, but the ones to make her feel calm—after patting foundation onto the fine red lines around her eyes. Next to her on the velour seat, Gil thrummed his fingers on his thighs. She’d offered him a pill, but he refused, and now she felt guilty about this, too. Taking something artificial to blunt whatever she would feel at her daughter’s funeral. Shouldn’t she have remained exposed to whatever presented itself to her, during this hour and the ones to follow, at the meal in the function room at Coleman’s Inn? Defenseless, that was the word: that’s what she should have been, sitting there a few feet away from her daughter’s casket. The idea that she could defend herself against what would rise up inside her was ridiculous. And yet she’d taken the pills and felt obscenely grateful when they kicked in, removing her just a tiny, crucial distance from the words and movements around the bubble that contained her and Gil.

  The children’s choir sang “Ode to Joy,” accompanied on the violin and piano by two members of the high school orchestra. Susanne didn’t know either of them, and she had to look away from the violinist, a long-necked girl with a single braid pulled forward over the shoulder not holding the violin, tears streaking her cheeks as she drew the bow. When the song was over, she didn’t wipe her face or use a tissue to blow her nose but closed the score with a regretful, lingering motion that left Susanne wondering whether it was the occasion or the music that caused her to cry.

  Then Donald Putnam took the pulpit and said, “We’re here today to celebrate Joy. It’s no coincidence that her name is the same as the emotion many of you felt in knowing her. I did not have that pleasure, but in meeting with her parents, looking at the photos they showed me and hearing about her life, I have no doubt she was a very special young woman whose precious time on this earth was taken from her too soon. Only God can judge whoever did this. Police think they have the man. In praying for the soul of the departed child, we pray for his soul, too.”

  Susanne felt Gil moving beside her, and reached a hand out. He wanted to jump up, she saw, and put a stop to it—any talk of the murderer and the circumstances under which Joy died. They had discussed this with the minister, she remembered now, and he’d agreed. Now he was ignoring what they had asked.

  “Wait,” she whispered so only Gil could hear, thinking of how embarrassed Joy would be if her father made a scene. It took everything her husband could muster, she knew, to force himself to sit back against the pew beside her, his rage seething out in a single, extended sigh only she could read.

  The minister moved on, calling Joy’s friends up to give readings or reminiscences. Gil relaxed, and Susanne knew he was glad she’d prevented him from acting on his impulse. One by one, teenagers she’d known since they were Joy’s earliest classmates came forward, most of them nervous in the pulpit, many of their voices too hushed to be heard. But it didn’t matter; what mattered was the number of them, the stricken expressions on their faces, the way they couldn’t seem to help looking at the casket when they were speaking, as if they believed that from inside it, Joy might be able to hear. Susanne thought, with a sadness she could barely acknowledge, about how surprised Joy would have been, and how moved. Every time it seemed the tributes might be finished, another classmate stood and walked to the front. Most read something, heads bent over paper—a poem or a psalm. This made sense to Susanne; it was easier to recite from what was already written than to say something without a script.

  At some point, it occurred to her that she hadn’t seen Harper. She almost turned to look, but caught herself when she realized that she couldn’t be sure of what her own expression would convey to all those eyes aimed at her. A drawback to the pills she’d taken; along with muting her emotions, they diminished her ability to modulate what she showed in her face.

  But then there she was, Joy’s oldest friend, slumping her way up the steps toward the altar, a bra strap showing near her collarbone (only Harper, Susanne thought, hating herself for it; only Harper would have a bra strap showing in winter, under a sweater) as she gripped the edges of the lectern and forced herself—the effort was almost palpable in the atmosphere around her—to look up and out at the people in the pews. Good girl, Susanne thought, as Harper pulled a piece of paper from her pocket and smoothed it on the lectern. In a soft and halting voice, she credited her selection to Wordsworth and read, “‘She lived unknown, and few could know, when Lucy ceased to be. But she is in her grave, and, oh, the difference to me!’” She kept staring at the paper after she was finished, and Susanne heard a murmur pass among the pews. Come down now, she told Harper in her mind, and Harper seemed to hear it, because finally she moved to fold the paper back up. “Only Joy, not Lucy,” she said as she descended the altar steps, an afterthought in case someone might not realize. “And there’s an exclamation point at the end.”

  Her heart clutching, Susanne reached to touch the girl’s arm as she went by, but she was obstructed by Delaney Stowell, who bumped into Harper on the way up to speak her turn. Delaney stood straight-backed and confident in the place Harper had just vacated and said, in a voice no one had trouble hearing, “Joy and I knew each other since preschool. But we didn’t really become close until this year. I’m glad we got that chance before she—before what happened.”

  Susanne looked sideways at Gil. Were they finally going to find out why Joy had been hanging out with Delaney these past few months? He didn’t return her glance, but she could tell he was listening as intently as she was.

  “She was so smart,” Delaney said. “Well, you all know that. She helped me study for the SATs, and I did much better than I ever would have done on my own.”

  “I didn’t know they studied together,” Susanne said under her breath and Gil shook his head, but she didn’t know whether it was in agreement or by way of asking her to shut up.

  “I saw her that last day,” Delaney went on, casting her eyes downward in a dramatic sweep. “I saw her right before she died. We went to the pond to go skating, like we did when we were kids.”

  “That’s not true,” Susanne whispered to Gil. “Joy didn’t take her skates.”

  Across the aisle Keith Nance said, “Holy shit, can we be done here already?” He may have intended to mutter it under his breath, but it was loud enough for almost everyone to hear, including Delaney, who ended her remarks without a conclusion and returned imperiously to her seat.

  It appeared that Keith had, in fact, fulfilled his own wish. Susanne waited for Donald Putnam to dispense—from his position of an authority and insight none of the rest of them had access to—a benediction that would somehow include a divine understanding of who Joy had been, who she might have become, and the meaning of her death. Instead, he assured everyone that they’d been forgiven and dismissed them without even mentioning her daughter’s name. Susanne had not realized, until it didn’t come, what she’d been hoping for at the end of the service, which was (let’s face it, she thought, following Gil numbly back down the aisle, a trip she both did and did not want to make) the end of Joy.

  A limo waited outside to take them to Coleman’s, but first she needed a few minutes to herself. There was a line outside the ladies’ restroom, but when people saw who moved to join them, they reached out to guide Susanne forward to the front, the guest of honor of this event and so entitled to pee before anyone else, the only thing they could offer. In the stall she sat on the closed lid and stared down at her hands, grotesquely fascinated by the fact that she was unable to remember the word “fingers.” Finally she put them to her face, and the contact of her own skin against skin gave her whatever it was she needed (was it as simple as the need to feel something? Anything?) to stand again and exit. In the hallway she moved toward raised voices as Harper cried out to D
elaney, “Everything you said up there was a lie. You weren’t her friend. She didn’t help you study.”

  Seeing Susanne approach, Barbara Grove tried to shush Harper, who ignored her. “You’re the one who killed her,” she shrieked, and a gasp passed through the line as Delaney flattened herself against the wall, as if Harper’s words had shoved her. “This is your fault—she never would have done those things, if it weren’t for you.”

  “Freak,” Delaney whispered, but Susanne saw that her characteristic poise had been shaken. Lynette Stowell grabbed her daughter out of the line, gesturing at her husband across the room. Geoffrey Stowell strode up to take his daughter by the arm. She shook off his grip but he grabbed her more firmly, yanked, and whispered something fiercely in her ear that none of the rest of them could hear.

  “Let go of me,” she hissed back, but she followed him toward the door leading out to the parking lot. HED DOC, Susanne thought, remembering the license plate known to everyone in Chilton. Yeah, right. Why don’t you start with your own kid?

  But talking to Geoffrey Stowell in her mind was only a way of delaying the questions triggered by what Harper had shouted. She never would have done those things, if it weren’t for you. Which things? Was it possible that Delaney (and not Jason the nursing aide) was the one responsible for Joy’s selling drugs? Why would Delaney need Joy, if she had direct access to her father’s prescription sheets?

  Of course, Susanne thought then, recalling where Joy had been arrested, putting it together. In wanting to expand her business, Delaney would have enlisted Joy’s help to steal meds from Belle Meadow, knowing she had a contact at the nursing home with a key to the cabinet containing painkillers and sedatives.

  She went to find Gil and, in the limo on the short drive to Coleman’s, whispered to him what had happened. For a moment when she finished, she wasn’t sure he’d heard her, or paid attention. But when he reached down to grasp and then squeeze her hand, she understood his message—It doesn’t matter now—and, realizing he was right, she turned to watch through the tinted window the dark day go thudding by.

  Girl on a Swing

  After the service, Tom left Alison in the pew with her mother and slipped through the back of the church after his father-in-law. There’d been some altercation between Delaney Stowell and her father, and Doug had followed them out. In the church parking lot, Geoffrey Stowell spoke close to his daughter’s face—angry, spit-out words, Tom could tell even from a distance. Had Doug pursued them because he sensed there might be trouble—a domestic dispute of some kind? The girl turned away from her father. Tom waited for Doug to issue a warning to the pair, a rebuke for the scene they were creating. Instead, after a short exchange, the three of them parted when Lynette Stowell came out of the church and the family got into a Beamer and drove away, presumably to Coleman’s for the reception.

  Tom considered retreating before his father-in-law could see him, but decided to stand his ground; something about the scene—the interaction among the doctor, his daughter, and the chief of police—didn’t seem right to him. Didn’t make sense, especially on top of the encounter he’d witnessed between them a few weeks earlier, at the town’s annual 5K road race to raise money for the sober halfway house where Helen served on the Board of Trustees.

  Tom had committed to running, even though he would have loved to sleep in on a Saturday, because the race was Helen’s baby; she’d organized the first one years earlier, when she became president of the Police Auxiliary. At the time she’d just received her first-year sobriety medallion, which—though technically it was supposed to be anonymous—she’d made a big public deal about. Doug hadn’t wanted her to (“Why does everybody have to know our business?” he’d said, and Tom understood that he felt embarrassed, not wanting to acknowledge any vulnerability in himself or his family), but Helen herself invoked the name and example of Betty Ford more than once.

  Alison had entered every year since that inaugural race, but this time Tom begged her not to, for the sake of the pregnancy. She agreed, as long as he promised to run in her place. By seven thirty that day they were handing out free coffee and racing bibs to the runners, whose route would take them on the perimeter road around Elbow Pond.

  When Helen blew the whistle to signal the start, Tom took off among the hundred others in the pack. He got through the three-plus miles, hating every minute, and when he crossed at the end he bent over to rub the stitch in his side. Moving away from the other finishers in case he was going to puke, he caught sight of Doug and another man talking intensely, hands waving, behind a stand of pines. Neither of them had run the race (Doug had won it the first five years, then declined to enter after he’d been beaten in the sixth year by an elite cross-country star—female—from Canandaigua). Had they tried to conceal themselves for this conversation? That could hardly be it; anyone glancing in that direction would have seen them. Yet Tom felt he’d stumbled on something clandestine, witnessing the men’s exchange. He moved slightly, surreptitiously, to put himself in better position to identify the other guy. He looked familiar, though he couldn’t quite place him. Then he realized it was Delaney Stowell’s father, the shrink.

  When he’d stepped on a twig that cracked under his sneaker, both Doug and the doctor looked up, and Doug called him over with a half-assed wave. “You know Geoff here, don’t you?” Tom shook the shrink’s hand. “Best son-in-law I ever had,” Doug said, clapping Tom on the shoulder, and Tom delivered his scripted line: “Only son-in-law, too.” Stowell laughed—a forced heartiness if Tom ever heard one—and said he had to get going.

  “Us, too,” Doug said, as the shrink beeped open a BMW with his remote.

  “What’s his deal?” Tom asked, after Stowell peeled out and up toward the hill’s summit, the location of Chilton’s most expensive homes. Just before it turned, Tom caught the vanity plate: HED DOC.

  “Nothing.” His father-in-law shrugged, and Tom thought for a moment that the look Doug gave him was a nervous one, but then he figured he’d misread it. What did Doug have to be nervous about, especially when it came to Tom? It was the other way around. Always had been, always would be. “Just never hurts to be nice to a guy with a Beamer. Right?”

  Tom had agreed, though he tended to hate Beamers and the people who drove them. Now, standing in front of the church after Joy Enright’s funeral, watching Geoffrey Stowell peel out with his wife and daughter, Tom hated him. When Doug turned to come back to the church and saw Tom watching, a wrinkle of something—fear?—passed through his father-in-law; Tom could see it in the sudden, slight jerk of his breath, which no one else except Alison and Doug’s own wife would have recognized.

  Tom asked, “What’s the deal with her?” referring to the psychiatrist’s daughter, who’d obviously been upset by something following the funeral service. At the last minute he caught himself from using his and Alison’s nickname for Delaney, Snake Girl.

  Doug shook his head. “No idea. The father testifies for us sometimes, is how I know him. Headshrinker stuff.” He moved his index finger in a circle at the side of his head. “He’s supposedly one of the best.”

  “One of the best with a fucked-up daughter,” Tom said, and Doug shrugged to concede the point before people started flowing out of the church. Alison and Helen came over, hooked to each other by the coat arms. Alison had cried through the entire service; her mother kept handing her new tissues and tucking the used ones in her purse.

  At Coleman’s, the function room grew crowded as people milled around the platters of lunch food. It had the atmosphere of a party, though the noise was subdued. Joy’s parents sat together at a table in the corner, not eating despite the fact that they had been brought many plates piled high with salads and sliced meat and desserts.

  Tom found seats for Alison and her mother, then moved toward the food table to take a place in line, scanning the room for Snake Girl. Doug was in the hallway shooting the shit with Hal Beemon, and Tom assumed they were congratulating themselves on the quick
arrest of Martin Willett, which Tom knew Doug would take credit for without mentioning that his original information had been handed to him by his son-in-law.

  He was wondering if Geoffrey Stowell had dropped his daughter off at home, rather than bringing her to the reception, when he glanced out the window and saw Delaney sitting by herself on a rickety swing set at the edge of Coleman’s back lot. One of the swings had fallen apart, but the other held together enough for a teenage girl to sit in as she smoked and stared at the frozen ground beneath her. The sight reminded Tom of paintings he’d seen on school field trips to museums, portraits of young women gazing into the distance.

  Girl, on a Swing, with Cigarette, he thought, checking to make sure Doug and Hal were still engrossed in their conversation, then slipping out the back door to approach her.

  “Hey,” he said, and Delaney looked up warily, clearly displeased by having her solitude interrupted. “You get put in a time out?” He was surprised when he recognized that she was tamping down a smile—something he hadn’t seen the day she came into the shack to buy candy for breakfast and called him a perv, or any of the times he followed her and her friends to the mall or the abandoned condos.

  She held up a new cigarette for him to light, and when he told her he didn’t smoke she said, “Lame excuse. You should carry one anyway, for situations like this.” But she produced a Bic from her coat pocket and lit it herself, then dragged deep and exhaled a plume of smoke and breath they both watched dissolve in the cold, hard air.