After Her: A Novel

by Joyce Maynard

  The dress. The shoes. And perched on his head, like a cake ornament, a small straw hat—the same one we had seen our neighbor wearing in those nighttime dog-walking expeditions—trimmed with a ribbon and a clump of bright red cherries. Standing in front of the mirror now, he adjusted the brim.

  “Do you think his wife knows about this?” Patty asked.

  “There is no wife, silly,” I told her. “It’s just him.”

  Silence. My sister took a while, absorbing this fact.

  “Why does he do it?”

  I had no answer. But I’d already been alive long enough to know there were many things people did that seemed to make no sense. Our father smoking all those cigarettes, when we kept telling him they were bad for his lungs. Our mother coming home from work every night and disappearing into her bedroom with a new stack of library books. And now there was this: our gray-haired and balding neighbor dressing up in women’s clothes. How crazy was that?

  My sister saw it differently. “It’s not that big a deal if you ask me,” she said. “There’s probably a lot of people doing unusual things in their houses at this very moment. We just haven’t seen them.”

  “Unusual?” I said. “Is that what you call it?”

  “Maybe he just wishes he had a girlfriend, but he doesn’t have one,” she said. “Or maybe he just wishes he was a girl.”

  “He’s bad news,” I told her. “He’s a psycho. You shouldn’t go over there anymore.”

  “I don’t see what the big deal is,” Patty said. “Someone putting on girls’ clothes doesn’t hurt anybody.”

  We stood there in the darkness for a moment then, just taking it all in. Mr. Armitage in the mirror. The stars. The silhouette of the mountain against the moonlit sky, and the howl of a coyote in the distance.

  “It’s the people who want to take clothes off girls you should worry about,” my sister said. “Not the ones who put them on.”

  Besides, who was I to talk about a person being bad news, when I’d spent every afternoon for a few months on a beanbag chair in a musty old rec room, being manhandled by Teddy Bascom?

  LATER THAT NIGHT OUR FATHER stopped by. Two o’clock in the morning maybe. Possibly three.

  “You look terrible,” our mother said to him.

  “I knew this was coming, once the rain let up,” he said. “We found another body this morning.”

  Hearing his voice—but only barely—I climbed out of bed and crouched next to the door to listen. This was the spot I always positioned myself, so I could hear the two of them better. For the first time since the murders began, what I heard in our father’s voice from our small dark bedroom was the sound of something like despair.

  “I can’t talk to anyone about this but you, Lil,” he said.

  “They found her on the mountain?” our mother asked him.

  “Tennessee Valley,” he said. “The bluffs. A young couple went out there to catch the sunrise and they found her.

  “Everyone thinks the worst part is examining the body,” he told our mother. “And I’m not saying it’s pretty. But the worst part comes after, notifying the families.”

  This was not a job he delegated to other members of the homicide squad, though he could have. When a young woman got killed, my father felt the responsibility was his, as the officer in charge, to knock on the door.

  In the case of Jean-Marie Doucette there were no living parents. Her mother had died when she and her sister were young, and the father had succumbed to cancer a few months before. Earlier that day my father had made the drive himself, up to Ukiah, where the older sister lived with her husband and children.

  “The strange thing was, her sister knew before I opened my mouth to speak,” our father told our mother. “She doesn’t even live around here, so it’s not like they’re talking about the Sunset Strangler all that much up in Ukiah. But she took one look at me standing on her doorstep—no uniform, and I hadn’t even taken out my badge—and she started to scream.

  “ ‘He killed Jeannie, didn’t he?’ she says. ‘I knew it. Ever since yesterday, I could tell something happened to her.’ Then she was on the floor.”

  Hearing him, I imagined how it would be, receiving news like this about one of my parents. Or Patty. If a vision ever came to me, revealing that one, I didn’t think I could have borne it.

  Now I pressed my ear to the door, holding my breath so the sound of my own breathing wouldn’t drown out the hushed voices of my parents. My mother’s was low and soft, but I could still make out the words.

  “You do the best you can, Anthony,” she said. I heard the sound of ice in someone’s glass. A refill. “Nobody can blame you that they haven’t got him.”

  “I should have secured those bluffs,” he said.

  Then I heard a sound I’d never heard before, more unnerving than an ambulance or a fire truck or the howl of a coyote in the night. It was the sound of our father, not quite weeping, but close.

  “I’ve failed these women,” my father said. “I failed everyone I love most in the world, Lillian,” he said. “This includes you.”

  The strong voice that spoke then, oddly enough, was that of our mother, though whatever it was she said came out too softly to hear. If words existed that could comfort my father that night, it’s hard to imagine what they might have been.

  AFTER HIS CAR HAD BACKED out of the driveway, I just lay in my lower bunk, looking up at the slats of Patty’s bed above me, listening to the soft, comforting sound of my sister’s breathing, and thought of climbing the ladder and getting in beside her. Outside, I heard the howl of a coyote again—the new moon brought them out—and shivered. It felt as if the whole rest of the world was falling apart, and all I wanted was to hold on tight to the one person who wasn’t going anywhere.

  All my life, I’d seen my father as the one who’d always rescue us, but now it came to me, he needed us to rescue him.

  Chapter Twenty-six

  Patty and I learned the details from the front page of the Marin Independent Journal the next day: Jean-Marie Doucette, age twenty-seven, had come to the beach at the end of the Tennessee Valley trail right around sunset. Back when she was a child, her father used to take her and her sister there. She had returned there to scatter his ashes into the Pacific Ocean.

  The paper didn’t say much about this part, but it appeared from the oddly worded statements of her surviving sister that there must have been some kind of disagreement between the man’s daughters about the ashes, which ultimately led to Jean-Marie going alone down the mile-long stretch of trail from the Tennessee Valley parking lot to the bluffs where the killer had apparently found her.

  At the point he grabbed hold of her, Jean-Marie had not yet thrown the ashes over the bluff. The Baggie containing them was found a few feet away from her body, along with a copy of Jonathan Livingston Seagull. The killer would have had no interest in taking a book, but no doubt he’d taken her shoelaces.

  That night in bed, the feeling came over me again. It crept over my skin, like a chill, or a fever. Then a different set of pictures appeared, like a movie in my head, and everything else in the room disappeared—bunk bed, Cat Stevens, the sound of the refrigerator, the sound of an owl, the sound of my sister’s breathing.

  There was a girl standing on the bluffs at Tennessee Valley—that spot our parents used to take us when we were little that used to be an old fort, with bunkers still carved into the rock, where teenagers probably came to smoke pot and have sex, with graffiti covering the walls.

  June loves Billy. Vic and Pam, ’72. Seth is a Homo. Only now I saw, it wasn’t me standing there. It was a young woman—just a girl, really, with long brown hair tied in a ponytail, wearing a stretched-out sweatshirt. I couldn’t see her face, because her back was turned. She was facing the ocean.

  Lower down on the trail, but heading her way: the man. He had spotted her down on the beach—picked her out among the others there (a mother holding a baby in a frontpack, her husband throwing a tennis ball
to their dog; a man and woman holding hands; another woman, sitting alone on a piece of driftwood, also pretty, but she was blond, and her hair was cut very short). Jean-Marie was the one he’d followed up the trail, and now he had almost reached the spot where she was standing. There was a heaviness to his footsteps as he approached. He was closing in.

  She was holding something, a box. The ashes of her father that her sister hadn’t wanted her to scatter here. Close as they were, they’d argued over that.

  The girl looked out at the ocean—the dull gray waves and somewhere far out on the horizon, some kind of tanker heading out to sea. She made a sighing sound, as if all the air was coming out of her, and a single syllable: Oh.

  It was dolphins she saw—three of them—coming close enough to shore that she could see their funny dolphin faces that looked as if they were smiling.

  I didn’t want to watch this, but I had to.

  I was aware now of a length of wire, spread taut between the man’s two hands. He was walking toward Jean-Marie, raising the wire over her head, and bringing it down over her neck. Pulling tighter.

  She only had time to get out this one sound—though it could be the squawk of a seagull. Not even human. More like a bird.

  I saw the wire tightening around the skin of her neck. I saw the man’s hands. The girl again—frantic now—pushing them away, or trying to. Then the man’s hands, pulling on her hair the way a cowboy would hold tight to a set of reins. She tried to kick, but he was stronger than she was.

  The couple with the baby, down below on the beach, looked up for a moment. Just for a moment, it seemed they’d heard something. Sun in their eyes, they turned away again. No sound then but the roar of the ocean, those squawking gulls. And anyway, with the air cut off from her lungs, no more sound came out of the girl now.

  The couple turned to go.

  His back to me, so did the killer.

  I saw the black shoes again, making their way down the bluff. The wrong shoes to wear in a place like this. The dirt gave way a little under them.

  I saw a car. Dark blue maybe, but it was hard to say, in the growing darkness. I saw the hand put the key in the ignition, and the shoe on the gas pedal. Chubby fingers, turning on the radio. That song again, “My Sharona.” His voice singing along. Always get it up . . . for the touch . . . of the younger kind.

  I sat up in my bed. Put my feet on the floor and stood up. Looked around the room.

  Then I saw it, plain as the face of Mike Brady on the television screen through Helen’s window. Plain as the face of Teddy Bascom in Alison Kerwin’s rec room, leaning over to unbutton my shirt. Plain as my own in the mirror, where I stood now, shivering.

  It was the face of the killer.

  It came to me so clearly then—lying there in my bunk bed, staring up at the slats on my sister’s bunk, listening to the sound of her breathing over the voice of Cat Stevens. Once it did, the whole thing seemed so obvious and clear, I wondered why it had taken me so long.

  Mr. Armitage was the Sunset Strangler.

  PART TWO

  Motor run, my motor run

  Chapter Twenty-seven

  In my forty-four years of life, here is something I’ve learned about thirteen-year-old girls. I know this as somebody who used to be one long ago, and used to be the sister of one, and the friend of others, and the ex-friend.

  Thirteen-year-old girls live in two different worlds. They exist like citizens of two distinct countries—and though these two places are as different as Croatia is from Papua New Guinea, or Mercury from Saturn, they float between the two as effortlessly as a person might from one side of the Golden Gate Bridge to the other, when it’s not even rush hour, or from North Beach to Morning Glory Court. More easily than that particular journey, come to think of it.

  Partly, a thirteen-year-old is still a child, capable of finding joy in setting grass on fire in a tin can or thrill in the sight of a neighbor answering the ring of the doorbell and opening the door to discover no one there, only a rustle in the bushes. Thirteen-year-old girls can actually believe that the reason they won’t get to marry John Travolta is because he’s got a girlfriend already, and that Peter Frampton’s getting a haircut qualifies as a tragedy, and that receiving a call from a particular boy—or a particular girl for that matter—is the most wonderful thing that ever happened. Thirteen-year-old girls believe in heroic fathers and wicked stepmothers. They believe the words to songs, and the advice of other thirteen-year-old girls, and that the first boy they love, they will love forever.

  Their bodies (mine at thirteen, anyway) may resemble those of boys more than the bodies of women. But inside the bodies of these girls, something is going on, unlike anything that exists in the bodies of boys, the bodies of men. Their breasts swell of course. The uterus fills with blood. The longing for touch may feel, to a girl of this age, as real as fire.

  And then there are all those eggs—a girl’s lifetime supply, she’s told—tucked inside her ovaries from the moment of her birth, just waiting for the rest of her to catch up, so she might incubate them. A thirteen-year-old girl knows this: her body can make a baby now. Only what would she ever do with one? A part of her still likes to play with dolls. A part of her is fascinated by her own amazing new talent. Another part: appalled.

  A thirteen-year-old girl hates her mother. Loves her father. Hates her father. Loves her mother. What is she supposed to do?

  Thirteen-year-olds are big and small, thin and fat. Neither. Both. They have the smoothest, most perfect skin, and sometimes, overnight, their faces are a mess. They may weep over the sight of a dead bird and appear heartless at the funeral of a grandparent. They’re tender. They’re mean. They’re brilliant. Dumb. Ugly. Beautiful.

  Now comes the sex part. Sex is sickening and scary and irresistible. A thirteen-year-old doesn’t want to think about sex. She thinks of nothing else.

  Everything’s a drama to her. She feels things ten times more than a fifteen-year-old girl, or a ten-year-old. When she bleeds—or in my case, when she doesn’t—she is the possessor of the most powerful secret. How can it be a person can walk around, as if nothing unusual is going on, when right between her legs, there’s all this blood flowing out of her? Nobody says anything. She alone knows.

  She looks in the drawers of the people for whom she babysits, in search of sexual paraphernalia—peels back the wrapper on a condom and blows it up like a balloon, then stuffs it in her pocket to destroy the evidence—and if she finds a blouse or a dress that interests her, belonging to the wife of the couple for whom she is babysitting some Friday night (or a piece of lingerie, more likely), she may even try it on.

  She lies. One day she tells a girl at school that she’s the world’s first test tube baby. (She has pulled her underpants up higher than normal over her waist, so when she lifts up her shirt, she can point to her bare skin and prove it. See, no belly button. Being thirteen years old herself, the other girl believes this story.)

  She sends a note (anonymous, naturally) to an unpopular boy in her class in which she tells him that she knows he wet his pants that time on the bus, coming home from the field trip. She is that mean. But she is also capable of great kindness. On that same bus trip, she sat with the cerebral palsy girl, the one who drools.

  A thirteen-year-old girl possesses special powers. The same girl who can believe the messages of a Ouija board or the declarations of friendship of someone who, one day later, will walk past her in the cafeteria without speaking may also at rare moments possess the wisdom of a full-grown woman or even a sage. Though it’s not wisdom, precisely: more like an eerie animal ability to know and hear what nobody else can, a gift of feeling—feeling having overtaken all else—that a few more years of life in the world, or even just a few more months of it, will transform into a distant memory.

  When she taps in to it—and this is an erratic event at best—hers is a different kind of knowledge from the kind the mothers and grandmothers have acquired that comes from lessons learned
, years lived on planet Earth. The knowledge thirteen-year-old girls carry comes from a whole different galaxy, more like it: from some other sense besides the accustomed five, or maybe the heightened acuity of those five combined, but not yet numbed or deadened as they so often become, later. (When the business of daily life catches up with her. When she learns to tamp down all the big feelings, deaden her nerve endings, just to get through the day.)

  The knowledge a thirteen-year-old possesses is more like the ability to register a high-pitched sound audible only to dogs, or forms not visible without the aid of 3-D glasses—the gift a blind person may have not simply to recognize when a person enters a room, however soundlessly. But to know who that person is. And whether to trust him.

  But she will also trust people she shouldn’t. Many of those.

  In her mixed-up world, she hungers for whatever’s simple, which draws her to song lyrics, pop stars, brand names, astrological predictions. She longs for heroes, and for villains, and when none appear before her, she creates them, or passes the roles on to the most obvious candidates. A model in the pages of Seventeen, maybe, or the star player on the Boston Celtics. A singer whose album she’s memorized. (Every song. She mouths the words, in front of the mirror.) It could be a selfless nun, feeding starving children in Africa. Anne Frank. Amelia Earhart. Charlie’s Angels.

  This girl needs big drama, and danger, and if life fails to offer those, she sets up situations where she can locate those things. This could be nothing more than starting a fight with a girlfriend, or launching a rumor that a boy in her social studies class (she can’t stand him; she thinks about no one else) is in love with some other thirteen-year-old girl she knows, about whom she harbors feelings in which roughly equivalent levels of confusion exist.