Saint X

by Alexis Schaitkin

  If I see some youths clustering outside Perry’s in the Basin I pull up beside them and say, “This is loitering. I’m going to have to write you up.” You should see how some of the toughest ones look like they might soil themselves until I start laughing.

  “Aw, man, don’t do that shit to we!” they say, but they’re not really mad.

  “Do it up, Officer Roy!” they beg when I prepare to drive away. “Please, Officer Roy?” I turn on my lights and my siren and drive off to their cheers. I have a rapport with them, you could say. I watch these kids grow and I play my part.

  Edwin and Gogo—I used to shoo them away from the radio tower when they were snot-nosed little boys. I came up with Gogo’s daddy, God rest his sweet soul. I pulled those two and their hooligan mates over for drunk driving all the time and took them in to sleep it off. I never saw it as punishment. I never wrote them up. I was protecting them from their young stupid selves, like pulling a baby back from the water’s edge. My wife and I couldn’t have children. The island children are my children.

  I must have picked Edwin and Gogo up a hundred times before that night. That’s how I know something happened and they were part of it. Because the ninety-nine other times I pulled them over, on the drive to the station they joked with me and made chitchat. But that time, the night Alison Thomas died, neither one of them said a word.

  EMILY OF PASADENA

  ON MY FIRST DAY OF KINDERGARTEN, after my father took a picture of me on our front steps in my purple overalls and before I climbed onto the yellow bus, my mother prepared me for Cody Lundgren. She squatted so her eyes were level with mine and told me that there would be a boy in my class who was different from other children, and that I must not be afraid of him, but, on the contrary, must treat him with special kindness. With a child’s logic, I assumed this was simply one more part of going to school. In kindergarten, one rode the bus and learned to read (though I already knew how, and was rather smug about it), one had recess and homework, and one was especially kind to the boy who was different. I was a shy child, at once excited and tentative about taking these steps.

  As soon as I stepped into the classroom that morning and saw him, I knew I could not do what my mother had asked. Cody Lundgren terrified me. His limbs jerked. His mouth hung open. Saliva pooled on his lower lip and dripped in glistening cobwebs, darkening his shirt. Worst of all were the sounds he made, viscous gurgles punctuated by high-pitched keening. Every day, while the rest of us learned our numbers or studied butterflies—larva, pupa, fly away—Cody sat with his personal aide, making his sounds and collapsing on occasion into horrible tantrums.

  Then, one Monday in February, Cody Lundgren was not in school. Our teacher, Ms. D’Elia, gathered us in a circle and told us that Cody had died over the weekend. We were each made to say one thing we would remember about Cody. This struck me even then as a poorly conceived exercise, dependent as it was upon five-year-olds possessing the subtlety to craft a pleasant fiction about who Cody had been to us. (Ms. D’Elia was new that year, and more than once I’d overheard my mother on the phone with other mothers describing her as “out of her depth,” which led me to imagine Ms. D’Elia in a yellow bathing cap, performing a synchronized swimming routine, her legs treading furiously beneath the water’s surface.) All of the other children shared the same memory, of the cupcakes Cody’s mother had brought on his birthday. They were not the homemade ones the rest of our mothers packed in Tupperware for our birthdays, but fancy ones from a bakery, with sugar flowers and perfect whorls of buttercream. It was a memory that had nothing to do with Cody, really, and everything to do with his mother’s love for him. When my turn came, I said I would remember how much Cody liked to sing. Every morning during music time, Cody would squawk and moan along to “Funga Alafia” or the Erie Canal song, terrifying sounds of unmistakable pleasure. I would not actually remember this fondly, but I understood that it was the sort of thing Ms. D’Elia had in mind. Next, she read us a picture book, a parable in which a family of mice grieve and heal after one of them is eaten by a cat, and that was that.

  The truth is I was relieved Cody Lundgren was dead. Death meant never seeing someone again, and I was glad I would never again see Cody or hear the yelps and gurgles that so disturbed me.

  A few months later, my mother and I ran into Cody’s mother at the supermarket. Mrs. Lundgren was tall, with silky black hair, far prettier than any other mother I knew, prettier than I’d previously understood a mother could be.

  “Look how big you’ve gotten!” she exclaimed to me. Her smile was so hard and desperate that I reached for my mother’s hand like a younger child than I was. I left the grocery store with a pit in my stomach, rocked by an emotion so new to me I could not identify it, though looking back I know it was shame.

  * * *

  THIS WAS the extent of my experience with death when my sister’s body was found on an uninhabited cay in the Caribbean, many years ago now. Looking back, the things I remember most clearly from the days after Alison went missing and before she was found are strangely inconsequential. For example, I remember the hunger I experienced on that first day when my parents forgot about breakfast and lunch, and how I felt sorry for myself about it in the banal way any child feels sorry for herself when she finds herself overlooked in a flurry of attention devoted to her sibling. I remember hiding out in the bathroom to devour a Toblerone bar and a tin of mixed nuts I’d scavenged from the minibar. I was hiding because I wanted to see how long it would take my parents to realize they’d forgotten to feed me, so that I could take the full measure of their neglect. Once they did realize, I have vivid memories of the room service food with which I was plied, or soothed, or distracted (I’m not sure what to call it) in the days that followed—cheeseburgers and fries and sundaes and a personal pan pizza with delightful miniature pepperonis. I cleaned my plate at every meal; if my parents noticed this, I’m sure they thought my appetite was unaffected by what was happening because I was too young to grasp the seriousness of the situation, but that wasn’t exactly right. I was terrified during those days, but not because of what might have happened to Alison. Even as the people around me grew increasingly frantic, I was not worried for her. I literally did not understand that what had happened to Cody Lundgren could happen to my big sister. I thought—I knew—that she was playing an elaborate game with us. She was watching it all, the dapper policemen with their braided gold epaulets, the resort staff in a tizzy, the entire spectacle she’d created, from some hidden perch with a smile. No, it was not Alison’s disappearance but my parents’ terror that terrified me. Their distraction and anguish shook the foundations of a world that had, until then, seemed to me absolutely stable.

  Other memories from those days are less distinct. They have the quality of a fever dream—hazy and inconsistent, the swirling world resolving for brief instants into crystalline clarity. I remember lying between my parents at night, my father’s hand on my back measuring every inhale and exhale. His words to the doctor. If you think we’re going to let our daughter out of our sight. I remember the chief of police questioning my parents, and my mother telling him about the blond boy who’d taken such an interest in my sister. As she speaks, my mother’s eyes have a wild, darting quality. The tone of her voice shifts from word to word, turning raw, then affectless, then raw again. I don’t really understand what she is saying, what she is accusing the boy from the volleyball game of having done. I know only that before my eyes my mother is becoming someone I never understood she could be.

  In short, a terrifying knowledge came over me in those days. It was the knowledge that I would never be safe again, because I never had been, not once in my whole life, only until then I hadn’t known it, because I had believed so absolutely in the power of my parents.

  * * *

  THE CHIEF of police questioned me, too. My father sat me on his lap and my mother explained to me that one of the nice men who was helping to find Alison wanted to talk to me. This was the first moment I
remember feeling truly afraid for my sister. I think I understood that if the police were looking to a child for help, something must be very wrong. I felt a familiar prickling in my fingertips, and as I sat in my father’s lap I began to trace letters in the air. A-L-I-S—.

  My mother reached out her hand and placed it over mine, stilling it. “No writing, Clairey. Please. This is important.”

  At the time of our family’s vacation, this compulsion had been with me for several months. I’m not sure how or why it started. I would hear a word, and it would feel absolutely necessary to write it in the air. When my mother lifted her hand away, I tensed my fingers against the need—my sister’s name vibrating in my bones, desperate to get out. Alison. Alison. Alison.

  The chief of police smiled at me. I drew away from him. I did not like being smiled at by strangers. He asked me if I knew anything about what my sister had been doing, if I had seen anything out of the ordinary.

  What did I know? I knew my sister came and went, was there and not there. I knew that eyes followed her wherever she went. I said nothing and hid my face in my father’s chest. He smiled weakly at me and told me what a good job I had done, how brave I had been, which even at that age I didn’t believe. A dish of vanilla ice cream with a maraschino cherry was brought for me. I hated how the bright red bled onto the ice cream, but I ate.

  * * *

  ON THE third morning after Alison’s disappearance, my father announced with unconvincing cheerfulness that he was taking me swimming. I’d been holed up in my parents’ hotel room all that time, and I understood that he’d decided this would be good for me. I changed into my swimsuit, buckled my jellies, and out we went. When we stepped onto the marble pool deck, a hush fell over the other guests. I looked at them looking at us and gagged. I had the distinct sense that they knew something about us we didn’t, and that if they looked at us long enough we would have to know it, too.

  “It’s okay,” my father said, nudging me forward.

  We were not in the water long, twenty minutes at most. My father gathered me in his arms and tossed me into the air. We raced the length of the pool. We did underwater flips and handstands—my father pushed himself into an elegant plank, toes pointed. I see now that we were trying to respool time. If only we could forget what we were beginning to know, maybe we could play ourselves back to when this vacation was just a vacation. When we got out of the water, my mother would wrap me in a fluffy white towel. Look at you, sea monkey, Alison might say.

  A few hours later, there was a knock on the door of my parents’ hotel room. When my father opened it, I saw the chief of police standing very still in his uniform with the braided epaulets. A cartoon was put on the television for me, and my parents went out into the hall with him. Sometime after that, they must have told me what he told them: that Alison had been found, that she was gone. But I don’t remember that part. I remember those epaulets, how they seemed like something from a beautiful story.

  * * *

  WHAT IS known about the night Alison disappeared: At approximately 8 P.M. she was seen walking from the swimming pool to the hotel bar by an elderly security guard named Harold Moses. At the bar, she met the blond boy, a fact confirmed by the boy and three other witnesses. Alison and the boy went to the staff parking lot and smoked a joint together. At 8:45 P.M., he returned to the bar without Alison. At approximately 10:15 P.M., Alison returned to the parking lot, where Edwin Hastie and Clive Richardson picked her up in Edwin’s car, a 1980 Vauxhall Astra, eggplant in color, and the three of them drove across the island to the Basin. They spent two hours at a local watering hole called Paulette’s Place, where my sister was seen with the two men, smoking pot and drinking rum and dancing. Several patrons at Paulette’s Place confirm that she departed with the men at approximately 12:45 A.M.

  At 1:30 A.M., a police officer named Roy Cannadine pulled the Vauxhall Astra over on Mayfair Road for erratic driving. Only Clive and Edwin were inside. Officer Cannadine did what he always did with the young men who could frequently be found weaving down the island’s roads late at night. He drove them to the eggshell-blue prison to sober up for the night. In the morning they were released, the car keys returned, and they set off on the two-mile walk to fetch the car from the side of Mayfair Road. They arrived at work on time.

  * * *

  CAN YOU see it? A bar, PAULETTE’S PLACE painted in white on a driftwood sign out front. Dancing and drinking and a haze of cigarette and pot smoke and, in the middle of it all, a russet-haired girl. She dances with the men. She drinks the drinks they hand her.

  When she leaves with them, they tell her they are taking her someplace special.

  “It’s a surprise,” they say.

  “You’ll love it.”

  Drunk and high but most of all naïve, she lets the twisting in her stomach push her forward when it should hold her back. They drive to the beach beyond the black rocks at the edge of Indigo Bay, where a boat is waiting. They bring the boat into Faraway Cay slowly, and she hops out into the knee-deep water and smiles, for the sea is warm and lovely and she knows that she—her thighs exposed to the starlight, the hem of her skirt soaked by the gentle waves—is lovely in it. They tell her there is a waterfall at the island’s center, and they set off for it on foot. She still thinks they are having a good time.

  “Not far now.”

  “Keep walking.”

  Their voices, though still friendly on the surface, have a coldness to them. No, she tells herself. She is just imagining it. Everything shifts so quickly that by the time she understands what is happening, it is too late to think about what to do. (Anyway, what could she do, way out there?)

  They pull her into the scrub. She struggles at first, but one of them slaps her across the mouth. After that she is too afraid to fight. More than this, she knows there is no point. They have wanted what they wanted since the first time they saw her on the beach at Indigo Bay in the white tunic she thought made her look so very fetching. They untie her halter top, shove her denim skirt up, yank her panties down. Maybe this was their plan all along. Or maybe the night has gotten away from them. Maybe as they thrust against her, pressing her body against the hard roots of a manchineel tree, the ground littered with its sour, rotting fruit, they experience no pleasure, only terror, because it dawns on them that, having done this, they cannot allow her to live. When it is over, they dump her naked body in the waterfall. On the boat ride back to the mainland, they toss her clothes into the water, never to be seen again.

  Or perhaps it was a terrible accident. They are carousing at Rocky Shoal when she trips and hits her head against one of the sharp volcanic rocks for which the beach is named. Or she stumbles into the sea and they realize too late that she is in no condition to swim. They panic. They do the first thing they can think of; they heft her lifeless body from beach to car to boat to cay.

  One might imagine it differently. One might imagine it any number of ways, really, the details shifting, the outcome the same. Clive Richardson and Edwin Hastie were taken into custody.

  * * *

  THE NIGHT after Alison’s body was found, I took off my clothes to change into my nightgown and saw that my shoulders had begun to peel. Mere days ago, my sister had rubbed aloe on my sunburned skin. If I concentrated on the memory, I could still feel her fingertips. Now I was shedding that skin. Soon there would be nothing left of me that she had touched.

  For the first time since she disappeared, I cried. I was an only child now, hopelessly insufficient. I picked at the skin, wanting the new sadness I would feel when all of it had flaked away. I wanted all the sorrow I could gather.

  * * *

  A FEW days later, as my parents went busily about arranging the funeral and the transportation of my sister’s body back to New York, the chief of police arrived with the shocking news that Edwin Hastie had been released and that Clive Richardson, while still in custody, was being held not as a suspect in my sister’s death, but on charges related to drugs and paraphernalia t
hat had been uncovered during the investigation. Despite the circumstances surrounding Alison’s death, the chief of police explained, they did not have sufficient evidence to charge the two men, and they could not hold them if they could not charge them. Apparently it had been determined that the window of time between when witnesses saw Clive and Edwin leave Paulette’s Place with Alison and when Officer Cannadine pulled them over on the side of Mayfair Road was not adequate for them to have traveled to Faraway Cay and back.

  As you would expect, my parents were incredulous. I remember sitting with my mother on their bed, her patting my back with increasing vigor and turning up the volume on the television as, out on the balcony, my father argued more and more loudly with the chief of police.

  “Explain to me, if you can, how you can be so sure the window of time was inadequate,” my father said. He paced back and forth, hands jammed in his pockets.

  “In the course of our investigation we have conducted numerous simulations, with boats leaving from every feasible location. The window of time during which the men in question were unaccounted for simply is not sufficient.”

  My father snorted. “How can you be so sure about that window? How can you be so confident it wasn’t half an hour longer, or even more?”

  “We have three witnesses corroborating the time of their departure from Paulette’s Place. The witness who next saw them is one of our own officers.”

  “How convenient for you.”

  “I can assure you his testimony is his own.”