What's Become of Her

by Deb Caletti

It’s so compelling, though. He leans forward, studies it once more. It’s the two of them, Isabelle and Henry, hiking.

  Hiking, of all things! Before these images appeared, the expensive dinners started up again on the Visa, along with the big grocery bills. There were gas purchases on the mainland, too, with two nights at the W hotel in Seattle (resulting in a few romantic-weekend, standard-tourist-fare shots on ShutR—the Space Needle, the Pike Place Market, et cetera). But these images are the most disturbing thing to appear. This pair of boots next to another pair of boots. This overhang on a gravel trail with, sure, a lovely spread of sea below. A lovely spread of sea below, below, below…

  The boots are the largest cause of his recent distraction; they trouble him and refuse to leave his mind, because what is Isabelle thinking and feeling right then inside of them, knowing what Weary is sure she now knows? What questions haunt her as she stands at that ledge? It is not difficult to imagine what she might think and feel. It would be impossible to go on that hike without your heart aching, without a small trickle of fear rolling down your spine. Her boots would crunch a rhythm of did he, didn’t he, did he, didn’t he. She would notice that Henry was strangely unaffected by the trail and its height, unblinking at the fact of hiking itself. This lack—it would wiggle and creep under her skin.

  She would keep the mood cheerful. She’d avoid any argument. She would wonder, not for the first time, why this man spends his life studying another man who had very complicated relationships with women.

  Empathy is as easy for Weary as it appears to be for Corvus frugilegus, who will console a friend after that friend has been in a fight, setting beak to beak, body to body. The boots distress Weary, the same as Corvus will become distressed when a close member of his flock is, fearful when a beloved is fearful. Weary grieves for Isabelle and the way her old life is gone, as Corvus appears to grieve when coming upon a dead comrade. He will call out to the others, and they will all poke and prod the corpse, cawing with emotion. Seemingly, they will reflect on the scene and attempt to understand the manner of demise. They will bury the body with grass or twigs. They will gather, even, for what appears to be a funeral.

  A healthy Corvus will aid a crippled one, and this is also what he tries to remember when he looks at those boots. He feels all those things as he leans forward and studies that image: distress and fear and grief and compassion. And, more. More, because, like Corvus, too, he is not just a kind and generous animal. When crows circle that dead body and determine that foul play was involved, they never fly over that area again. If they know the perpetrator, they will scold and mob. The birds, on occasion, murder one of their own for reasons that mystify scientists.

  When Weary looks at that other pair of boots next to Isabelle’s, he is not mystified.

  He is sure, very sure, those crows have their reasons.

  The mosquito is back. It buzzes and flits across the light of the computer screen and then lands. It is heedless, but Weary smacks that bastard hard with his palm. Blood splats everywhere. It’s all over Isabelle and all over Henry. Blood actually smears down their pixel faces, down to their pixel footwear, as he tries to clean the screen with a wad of tissue. God, it’s gruesome. Honestly, it’s hard to look at.

  Chapter 17

  Isabelle finds a single boot, but then needs to hunt for the other one under the bed. There it is, a bit dusty, and lying next to one of Henry’s dress shoes. It’s fall, and the tourists are gone, and it’s an orangey crisp autumn day, all pumpkin-spice and knit sweaters and wood smoke and burning leaves in the air. A month has passed since that night at The Bayshore, a month of nights with the rod of Joe’s pullout couch across her back, since she couldn’t bear Jane’s concerned, confused eyes on a full-time basis. In those weeks, she raided the Coronas and handmade mac and cheese in Joe’s fridge, and stayed up late talking to him about her conflict over returning to Henry, and Joe’s recent breakup with the entitled Danielle. They caught up on Joe’s family, and on Maggie’s passing; he reminded her of the time when she was seventeen, when in a moment of teen rebellion she called Maggie a bitch, and Maggie grabbed her and hit her, and she went to Joe’s house to stay for the night. She’d forgotten all about this. How is it possible, this forgetting? It just is. But he reminded her of good things, too. Maggie running the food drive. Maggie yelling louder than anyone at the high school football games.

  Joe had been sweet, warming up burritos for her in the microwave, leaving the light on when she was out with Henry, giving her space when they were on the phone at all hours. Joe said stuff like He seems like a nice guy, and patiently listened to all the ways Henry was being Henry again, but even better—contrite, sincere, believable, open. Finally, though, Joe booted her out of the nest.

  If you’re going to do it, do it a hundred percent, he said. It was something Mr. Hopper, his old wrestling coach at Parrish High, might have told him, and Joe is as overly generous as Isabelle by nature, but she listened to him anyway, and here she is now, snagging that boot with her fingertips and she lays sprawled on the floor. Joe or no Joe, she is a believer in a hundred percent.

  When Henry suggested this hike last night, Isabelle pushed Virginia’s name out of her head. Pushed: Oh, God. That sounds awful. Isabelle pretended a hike up a mountain was just a hike up a mountain, and that nothing bad had crossed her mind. Henry is so sensitive, he’s like a decaying tooth that recoils at the slightest hint of cold.

  Which means there is a lot of pretending that a lot of things don’t cross her mind. She admits things have been difficult since she moved in with both Henry and his past. It’s difficult to untangle what’s her and what’s him and what’s his strange history, pressing in on all sides. Dr. Mark’s elephant in the room is not so much an elephant as two once-breathing women. Isabelle can almost smell their perfume following her as she goes about her day. As she and Henry make dinner, Virginia sets the table. As she and Henry drive to a restaurant, Sarah sits in the back. On a beach walk, Virginia follows without making prints in the sand, and while they make love, Henry uses some technique, something just a bit too rough for her own liking, that she wonders if Sarah liked.

  When there’s this weird space that comes up between them, Isabelle is sure that it is her, failing at this. She doesn’t want to fail, because he’s trying so hard. She doesn’t want to fail for a million of her own reasons, too, some practical, some buried so far down she has no idea they’re even there. She has decided to trust and commit, and those are not fifty or sixty percent words to her. Those are a hundred percent words.

  Henry is being kind and supportive, loving. He tries to be lighthearted, even when his fat legal bill arrives in the mail. I want to make your life easier, he told her, and so, in spite of her protests, he insisted on looking over Island Air’s finances and made a suggestion list of mutual funds for her mother’s house money, since he’s invested like a pro in the past. He also gave her a joint credit card, so that they might feel a further sense of a combined future. Isabelle appreciates all this, but it feels a little like he’s jamming right up into her, rooting around in her private family business, even demonstrating a lack of confidence in her choices. Admittedly, it’s also been helpful. The boy that built rocket ships with LEGOs has a mind for numbers, along with a love of words. His investment plan sounds like a wise one. She’s tucked the credit card in her purse and they use it when they go out to dinner together.

  Also challenging? Jane and Eddie, who are acting like the protective parents she never had. Jane’s on high alert since Isabelle returned to Henry. Why is he with you every minute now? Are you ever alone? Why does he hover in the background every time I call? Eddie says goodbye to her on Fridays with a Watch your back. He’s not joking, either. I don’t like the guy, he says. He gave her a printout of one of the articles she already read, one that appeared after Sarah died. It features Virginia’s sister Mary and a few of Virginia’s other friends reminding the public that she, too, met an uncertain end. This is almost like love comin
g from Eddie, who still needs help turning on the computer.

  They are an enmeshed family. Joe plays the unflinching sibling and tells them to lay off. When Henry comes to pick her up from work one day, Jane stares him right in the eyes. It’s an animal move. It’s a beast of nature making a statement to another beast of nature. Henry would not go back there after that. When Isabelle confronted her, Jane apologized. I’m sorry, she said. I get it. I do. I can see why you’d want to be with him, after everything you’ve been through. But it was a laden concession, based on a desire to be supportive, not on true support. We just worry about you, is all.

  Fly as a team, grounded as team—sometimes a team stood too solidly behind you. Sometimes you wish your team would just butt out. She gets it—Eddie and Jane have known her since she was a child, they care about her, but they don’t know Henry.

  And then, too, there was the day when a detective, Ray Prince, flew in from Boston and came to their house. Ricky Beaker was like the hostess with the company VP, chest puffed out as he stood on their doorstep next to Detective Prince. Detective Prince and Tiny weren’t there to talk to Henry, which was the most horrifying thing. They wanted to speak with her. The nearest Isabelle had ever gotten to a life of crime was her appearance in traffic court for a speeding ticket. This happened in Seattle, and she was driving too fast only because Evan crashed his bike and broke his ankle.

  “We won’t take much of your time,” Detective Prince said. “We just have a few questions.”

  “I told Detective Prince, here, you might live with the guy, but you got a strong moral code,” Ricky Beaker said. “Remember how your mother used to report speeders on the loop? And didn’t she start that local amnesty chapter, in the early eighti—”

  Isabelle was so shocked and horrified that the police were on her porch that she slammed the door on Ricky Beaker and Detective Prince, nothing she’d have ever thought was in her good-citizen repertoire. In elementary school, she’d been taught that police officers were your friends. They’d even gotten a coloring book featuring a policeman reaching toward a cat in a tree and a policewoman helping an old lady cross a busy street.

  When Henry got home and heard what happened, they threw some things into a bag and went to Seattle for an impromptu “romantic” weekend, much of which was spent with Henry in their room at the W hotel, on the phone to his attorney.

  It’s strange the way a life can turn. She’d been shocked when she first found out Evan had once been arrested for marijuana possession. Now pot is legal in their state and she’s living with a man that some people believe is a murderer.

  Jesus. It’s best to not think it straight out like that.

  “Ready?” Henry calls.

  “Just a sec!”

  Henry appears in the doorway as she tosses on her sweatshirt.

  “Are you going to be warm enough in that?” he asks.

  —

  “It’s breathtaking.”

  “Literally, for me,” Isabelle says, puffing on the incline. Henry was wrong about needing more than a sweatshirt, which she now has tied around her waist, but he is right about the beauty. As they make their way up the trail of Mount Independence, every tree that’s able is bursting color. It’s early morning, so a few sparse wisps of fog still linger like second thoughts in the valley below.

  “The mist…‘How it hangs upon the trees. A mystery of mysteries!’ ”

  He is cheerful. The poem sounds almost cheerful, too, for that creepy, morose Poe. She wishes that of all the poets in the world, he’d have chosen someone else to be fascinated by. Poe is another specter that whispers from the corners.

  Now Isabelle concentrates hard on the burn in her chest and the pull of her thighs and the orange fire of the leaves. She tries to focus on her protesting hamstrings. Because, when her concentration slips, there is Virginia. How else could it be, on a hike like this? Isabelle pictures the photo that’s in all the newspapers, the photo Virginia’s friends released to the press after Sarah disappeared. Virginia, with her narrow pixie face and fragile cheekbones. She looks tragic, but maybe this is only because you know her fate.

  “Wait. Look at this! Stop a sec, I’ve got to take a picture.”

  “No complaints on this end.”

  Below, the world is spread out like a Thanksgiving feast; it’s all fall bounty. There is the great, shimmering sea, and little humps of islands, and the swish-strokes of deep green and orange from the trees. Admittedly, it’s hard to focus on the feast amid the fact of below. It is far down. There are big, rough rocks the whole way to the bottom. Isabelle considers what those jagged boulders might do to your soft head and to your fragile construction of bones. She’s been up here plenty of times, plenty. With friends and boyfriends, when there was fried chicken someone’s generous mother made, when there was beer and sun lotion, bare shoulders and even a small boom box. It’s never been a place she thought of as dangerous. Only fun, only beautiful. But, look—it’s all of those things.

  Henry is twisting that long lens, and there is the sha-kunk of the shutter. Now he aims it down. How can he bear it? He has told her the story of that horrible day, how Virginia seemed to toss herself off out of nowhere, how he desperately tried to climb down to save her. The CPR, the calls to mountain rescue—the wait, and then the way she stopped breathing before they arrived…The investigation by the park service, the grief of her friends and family…How can he not look at every slope for the rest of his life and see Virginia tumbling, banging, crashing, screaming? Yes, it was years and years ago, but how is this possible?

  Move away from the ledge, Isabelle! Jesus! Maggie says, and this time Isabelle listens.

  “I like you there. It gives perspective,” Henry says.

  Too bad. She steps back, away. Henry is not doing anything wrong. He is not hovering around behind her with his hands raised, ready to shove. His eyes are not narrowed with evil. There is not some black cloud over his head. But it’s what he isn’t doing that turns some unsettled earth inside her. He isn’t keeping Isabelle away from the edge. He isn’t aware of what she might be feeling right now. He’s just taking pictures, like a cliff is just a cliff.

  Isabelle starts to sweat. She feels like she could be sick, although it’s probably just the heat and exercise. They are the only two people on the trail. It would be so easy, she understands. No one would even hear you as you fell. What was in Virginia’s mind, when both feet were suddenly no longer on the ground?

  Henry looks happy, snapping away. And then he turns and sees her.

  “What?” His voice is terse.

  “What do you mean?”

  “What’s wrong?”

  “Nothing.”

  “Nothing?”

  “Yes! Nothing. I’m fine.”

  “Why are you over there?”

  “Over here? There’s no over here. We’re on this tiny little path. There’s only here and more here—”

  “Fuck.”

  His whole face changes. He turns right around and stomps back down the trail. They haven’t even gotten to the top yet. His lens cap still sits on a rock. His boots spit gravel like furious tires on a dirt road.

  Isabelle doesn’t follow. She just stands there. She turns hiding-mouse quiet. Stunned-deer still. This is her learned response with perhaps dangerous humans, and certainly with angry ones. Her heart thumps. She waits until it seems safe. Then she takes Henry’s lens cap and puts it in her pocket.

  She follows him down, keeping several paces behind. She feels that tiptoey guilt, too, the shame that says his anger is somehow her fault. She’s turned five, trying to hide in her room after she has done bad things she can no longer remember. What can a child do to make an adult get that frightening? No idea. And while she cannot recall the bad thing, she vividly remembers the frightening adult. She remembers the hot sting of the slap, the yank of her hair as her head was pulled back, the large, twisted face, the fear that she’d be small and alone in the world forever unless she could make her mother
like her again.

  There is no closet to hide in on Mount Independence. She’s a grown woman, but try telling that to her stubborn psyche. Knowing these things and changing these things are on different orbits. She doesn’t even truly believe she can rid herself of certain responses, even with a hundred years of therapy. Guilt and paralysis in the face of other people’s anger is now set into the folds of her brain, as fixed as her eye color. She can’t mobilize an aggressive defense because that arsenal is boarded up and locked.

  Her own anger, God, what would that even look like? She pictures a mushroom cloud, atomic, cinematic fury. What a joke, though. She’s been furious and people haven’t even noticed. After Evan, friends said, God, you must be livid, and she’d agree that she was. She wanted to be livid. She must have been, but she also guessed that livid did not feel like being the last human in a ruined landscape.

  Midway down the trail, Henry stops. He shakes his head, runs his hand through his hair. His eyes catch hers and plead.

  “Fuck,” he says again, but this time the word is a sigh, not an arrow. What a useful, multipurpose word fuck is. It doesn’t deserve its bad reputation, Isabelle decides. It’s practically friendly. Look, now it’s saying, This is hard, this place we’re both in.

  Henry holds out his hand. She takes it. She doesn’t want to, actually; she doesn’t even want to get back into the car with him right then. She wants to be an entirely different person living in another country. But she also wants things to be okay. The need for okay—Jesus, it gets a person into the worst and most long-lasting messes. Henry also wants things to be okay right then, she’s sure, because he says, “Isabelle, I’m sorry.”

  And then his face softens. The worst has passed. The child her would have chanced coming out of her room then, would have sat at the dinner table and eaten the peas even if her stomach was still full of dread.

  “Henry, come on…What do you expect? It’s going to cross my mind. Of course it is. Look where we are!”