After Her: A Novel

by Joyce Maynard

  “In which case, we wouldn’t have been born,” I pointed out.

  “But for her, maybe, things would have worked out better.”

  Silence.

  “Dad could still call up Margaret Ann,” Patty said. The Dolly Parton record had ended now, but maybe Patty was still thinking about that song. Mostly though, she was thinking about our father.

  Of all the things we’d talked about, I had never told her about that time all those years back when I had left the message on his answering machine about marrying Margaret Ann. Never get over it. Never forgive you.

  It was too late to let him know that wasn’t true. I’d always forgive our father. I just wanted him to be okay.

  “I think it would cheer him up,” my sister said.

  “I don’t even think Mom would mind anymore. Mostly she just wants to be left alone anyways. Plus, they could still be friends.”

  “I wonder if she kept those dresses in her closet,” Patty said.

  THAT NIGHT, AFTER PATTY FELL asleep, I saw the killer. I saw where he was, and it was not that far away.

  He was lying under the stars on the mountain, never mind the coyotes. He was curled up on the floor of the old truck body where I’d waited for Mr. Armitage, wearing that Goodyear Tire jacket I’d seen stashed under the seat, with the Victoria’s Secret catalog open, and the Coke can, and the empty tins of canned meat.

  I saw him again, when morning came, looking out on the hillside at the last of the poppies, the drying grass—spooning chocolate pudding out of a plastic cup, peeing against a tree, smashing a rock down on a field mouse, waiting for some girl to come along who hadn’t heard about the Sunset Strangler or, if she had, decided not to let him worry her.

  When one of the FBI agents passed—and sometimes they did, in their four-wheelers—he huddled low in the wheel well. The special agents were all looking for that red Toyota, or the green Fiat, or some car left too long in a parking spot.

  But you didn’t need your car when you were camping.

  At some point, the Spam and crackers would run out, and the pudding, but when they did, he knew where to go: all those houses that backed up against the hillside, Morning Glory Court. He’d kept his eye on those, from above. He knew who went to work, and when, and in the case of that one woman—the pregnant one, with the little boy—he knew when she took him on his walk, and where she hid the key when she did that.

  It wouldn’t be that hard, popping in for a minute then, to grab a snack from the refrigerator. Nothing wrong with baby food. A little like pudding, when you thought about it.

  For now, he had his cheek pressed up against the metal side of the truck body. One eye squinting through the BB-sized opening surveying his territory: the California poppies, the humming of insects in the grass, the circling crows. He was king of the mountain, or close enough.

  Chapter Twenty-nine

  The summer days crawled along. No more murder victims, but nobody was resting easy. We were just waiting.

  It was early July, and I had put in another one of my long days at the precinct house. Because the officers on duty felt sorry for me, they didn’t give me all that many jobs to do anymore, so I did word search puzzles a lot, and read biographies. I would have liked to work on my stories, but it was too noisy there to concentrate, and anyway, I seemed to be going through a dry spell with my writing. All my imagination had done for me lately was get me into trouble.

  I was supposed to stick around at my job until four thirty, but at three o’clock the officer in charge that day told me to head on home.

  “Why don’t you go do something fun for a change,” she told me. “Take the rest of the day off.”

  On my way back from the bus stop, I started thinking about my sister. With a good chunk of the day suddenly available, I was thinking we could maybe ride our bikes to the mall and squirt a bunch of perfume on ourselves at Macy’s, or go to the mattress store and see how long we could lie on the vibrating bed before some saleslady came to kick us out. As bad as I was at the game, I would even play a game of Horse with Patty if she wanted. I was that happy to get to be with her.

  It was her basketball I saw first when I reached Morning Glory Court. Patty’s basketball, but not Patty. If you saw one, normally, you’d see the other.

  But it was lying in the street. My sister’s precious, regulation-sized, NBA-approved basketball. Rolling down the street, actually—not like a ball in play, in a game, but in slow motion, as if someone had tossed it there, or kicked it.

  I bent to pick it up. Called out to Patty once. Then I was running.

  Our back door, which we kept locked now, was open. So—when I reached the kitchen—was the door to the refrigerator. No time to check what happened there; I was headed to our room, calling out my sister’s name again, hearing nothing.

  For a second, it looked as if our room was as I’d left it. Record player, posters, basketball trophies, bunk bed, books. The picture of my sister and me, on the cable car in San Francisco, and another with our father from the night they gave him his medal for valor.

  Then I saw it, on the floor by the window. My sister’s basketball shoes, lined up side by side. The laces were gone.

  IT HAD ALWAYS BEEN PATTY who could climb that mountain fast, but that afternoon I ran harder than I knew was possible. I had no plan. No karate-champion boyfriend at my side and no pink revolver in my pocket, not that I would have known how to shoot it anyway. I just knew I had to find my sister. I had to get to the killer. Ten minutes of running, and I had reached the place I knew I’d find him.

  He must have been leaning on the truck, but in the shadows, behind a bunch of weeds, so I could only hear, not see him.

  “Hey, little girl,” he said. “I was waiting for you.”

  In the many years since that afternoon, I have tried to remember how I felt at that moment, and how it was I could have stood there as I did then, less than a basketball court’s distance from the Sunset Strangler, and not run away from him. If I felt fear (and how could I not?), it had been eclipsed by a more compelling concern.

  “Where’s my sister?”

  “Girl with the basketball?” he said. I still couldn’t make out his face in the shadows, but I could see him shaking his head. “Somebody should do something about that kid’s teeth.”

  He took a few steps away from the truck body then, to where I could get a clear glimpse of him for the first time: a man no longer young, with thinning hair and an oversized belly (out of shape, but not fat)—clean-shaven, oddly enough, and wearing a rumpled jacket.

  He had been eating something. A jar of pureed peaches, from the looks of it. I could make out the face of the Gerber Baby on the label. He set this down on the hood of the old truck body, or what was left of it, and let out a long, low growl, like the sound a bear might make, when it came out of hibernation.

  “Last time I looked,” he said, “your sister was out taking a walk with the neighbor’s pooch. I paid a visit to your neighborhood today, as you may know. I like to keep an eye on you. From what I read in the paper, you’re something of a troublemaker.”

  He scratched his belly (also not unlike an animal) and bit into a Happy Face cookie that resembled the kind Jennifer Pollack made for Karl Jr.

  “Nice cookie,” he said. He was reaching for something on the ground beside him now. The wire.

  “My father knows I’m up here,” I said. “He’s on his way.”

  “I don’t think so.” He paused a second. “Farrah.”

  Where I was standing, there must have been a space of thirty feet that separated us—me in my old red sweatshirt, the killer with a hand on the one headlamp of the truck that was visible through the weeds, staring out like a glass eye. Now he was moving toward me with that wire. Taking his time, but coming my way.

  I could hear the sound of birds, and the insects buzzing over the wildflowers. I could see crows overhead. (Maybe there would be vultures soon.) I looked around in search of FBI agents or park rangers. Observ
ing this, the killer shook his head.

  “One passed this way a while ago,” he said. “They aren’t due back for”—looking at his watch now—“a good hour.”

  THIS WAS WHEN I SPOTTED her. But he didn’t. She was coming up behind him, but soundlessly, the way we’d practiced in all our afternoons of being Charlie’s Angels. My sister.

  I stood frozen. The killer was moving closer. I seemed to have forgotten how to move, much less to run. But behind the killer, I could see Patty, creeping closer. Moving in, but not so fast he’d hear her. If he was taking his time, so would she, but she was narrowing the space that separated the two of them.

  He was ten feet away from me when he hesitated for a moment, and a look came over his face, as if receiving some divine message, and he needed to consider it. He stood motionless for a moment, and for that moment I was afraid he’d felt the presence of my sister. But no.

  He farted. Then grinned.

  I looked at my sister. Knowing Patty, I was afraid she might burst out laughing when the sound came out of him, but she was totally silent. The look on her face was one I knew from watching her play basketball, times she took a foul shot, and every muscle in her body was called into service for a single purpose. Making the basket.

  “Sorry about that, wench,” he said. “Nobody’s perfect.”

  HE WAS MOVING CLOSER NOW. He had almost reached me.

  “No point running,” he said, looking almost regretful. “I’d catch you. No point thinking you can get away. I’ll always be out there watching you.”

  As in my visions—but this was real now and happening—he raised his arms above him, with the wire taut between his outstretched hands. Two more steps . . . one . . . and he would lower it around my neck.

  The world went white.

  IT WAS PATTY WHO BROKE the stillness, but not with a gunshot.

  (Later, I would ask her, “Did you plan this? How did you know it would work?” “I just knew I had to do something,” she said. “That was all I could think of.”)

  She timed it perfectly. One second before and she might have been too early. A few seconds later, it would have been too late.

  “Penis!” she yelled. “Penis. Penis. Penis.”

  She was playing our old game, of calling out every shocking word we knew, at the top of her lungs in that big voice of hers. A bigger voice than I had ever known her to possess.

  The killer whirled around. Now he could see my sister plainly, but she was out of reach, and calling out more words, a string of them. Every word I ever taught her, all those days on the mountain.

  Penis! Vagina! Intercourse! Butt!

  Toe jam. Pubic hair. Foreskin. Balls. Sanitary napkin!

  He looked confused. Disoriented. Whatever scenarios the killer might have envisioned (the arrival of the police, a helicopter maybe, a sharpshooter, a mountain lion even), this was one that had never occurred to him.

  He stood there motionless. For a split second anyway, which was enough.

  He still had the piano wire in his hand. But where a second earlier his body had bent toward me, with his arms poised to descend around my throat, now he had turned in the direction of my sister’s surprisingly insistent voice.

  Her throat seemed stretched to meet the sky, like a coyote in the moonlight, and her eyes were closed, with the words still spilling out of her.

  Pee. Poop. Snot. Fart. Testicles.

  Nipple. Butthole. Breast. Boob.

  I can still see my sister’s face as she stood there, with her head thrown back as if in song. Singing to save her life, was how she looked. To save mine.

  Penis. Penis. Penis.

  Vagina. Intercourse.

  She knew the F-word, but some part of her held that one back.

  THE KILLER HAD SEEN HER now. He hesitated, then took a step toward me. He took a step back, toward Patty. Then back to me. He appeared to be deciding which of us to go after first. The one closest to him, who was too terrified to make a sound, or the tall one behind him whose yelling was so loud the whole mountain must be hearing her.

  But I was closer, and it appeared that whatever words my sister was calling out into the air, he had regained his balance enough to lower the wire around my neck and start to tighten it.

  Only now my sister was diving for him. In her hand, she held the BB gun.

  Fire this baby at close range, our father had told us, and it can take out a person’s eye.

  She had the barrel against his eye socket. She fired. The blood spurted everywhere.

  The man screamed, and dropped the wire. Hands over his face, he took off down the mountain. I breathed again.

  THE SPECIAL FORCES TEAM PATROLLING the mountain that day had heard my sister’s yelling. They arrived a few minutes later. By that point, the man was gone.

  It was hard for me to speak at first, I was shaking so hard. Patty was doing better, but she had injured her vocal cords. When she opened her mouth to tell the officers what happened, no words came out.

  A little later, I could explain, or tried to. There were the contents of the truck body to show them, of course, and the piano wire he’d abandoned on the ground, there where we stood.

  “He was eating baby food he stole from our neighbor,” I said.

  He took my sister’s shoelaces.

  There’s his Coke can.

  “There’s his blood.” I pointed to a place on the ground, near where my sister had got my attacker in the eye. (Aware, as I did so, of the blood now soaking through my shorts. My own.)

  The agents wrote down everything I told them. They said they’d be in touch with our parents. They took us back to our house—my second ride in an ATV in the space of a few weeks.

  WE SAT DOWN THEN, TO tell them in detail what had just taken place. But who was I, after all? The girl already identified in the pages of the San Francisco Chronicle as a problem child. The girl who, just weeks before, had pulled a similar prank on the mountain, with a phony call to her own father suggesting the killer was after her, and a threatening anonymous note to her neighbor. What did it mean that there was piano wire on the ground? Everyone knew the killer used piano wire. Easy enough to get your hands on a length of it.

  As well as she could with her voice gone, Patty corroborated my story of course—acting out how the killer came after me with the piano wire, but this was dismissed as the word of a young girl, loyal to a fault, and desperate to protect her older sister.

  It was our challenge that day to convince the police who questioned us that we had been alone on the mountain with a vicious serial killer and yet had succeeded—as two young girls, with only a BB gun to defend ourselves—to vanquish him. We both knew it would be impossible to explain the part where my sister had yelled out the shocking words as a means of distracting the killer (and besides, this would only have confirmed the agents’ assessment of me—and now both of us—as crazy, and obsessed with sex). In fact, it had been the sound of my sister’s yelling that had initially alerted the agents who had first arrived on the scene that afternoon. They’d heard her voice, calling out the shocking words, but evidently they remained under the impression that what Patty had been calling out was the name of a popular comic strip. Or, depending on interpretation, a kind of nut.

  They believed none of our story. When the agents came back to our house later that night—a visit for which they’d requested that both our parents be in attendance—it was to deliver the news that in light of our father’s many years of devoted service in law enforcement, they were willing to drop the charges of reckless and dangerous nuisance on the part of a juvenile (an offense that could in other circumstances have led to as much as six months in a detention center). Instead, given that I had an obvious mental problem, my parents were under orders to get me psychiatric help.

  One of them handed my father a card containing the name of a psychologist who specialized in treating juvenile delinquents and adolescents with substance abuse problems.

  After they left, I went into my room, t
he room I shared with Patty. (Voiceless, still. We didn’t know this yet, but that day her vocal cords were permanently damaged. Her condition was later diagnosed as severe vocal nodules, and though she would eventually speak again, she was never again able to speak above a husky whisper, or to call out on a basketball court—over here, over here—or to sing. Not that she had ever been a particularly great singer. Just a loud and joyful one. Especially when the person she was singing along with was Dolly Parton, or Dean Martin, or our father.)

  WHEN I WOKE UP THE next morning, I knew the killer was gone. I alone knew this, because I could feel it. As strongly as I had sensed his presence on the mountain, all those weeks before, I felt his absence from it now. Wherever he was—and he was out there—it was someplace else.

  Chapter Thirty

  I stopped over at the Pollacks’ house. I said I’d come to return a book I’d borrowed—not My Secret Garden; I wasn’t about to admit to having taken that one. This was the autobiography of a former Olympic ski racer who’d become a quadriplegic after an accident. Some weeks earlier, on my way to my sweeping job at the police precinct, Jennifer Pollack had given me the book, explaining that she thought the story would inspire me, and remind me that even when things look really hopeless, they can still get better. Look at Jill Kinmont: they turned her book into a movie, and now she makes art with a paintbrush in her mouth.

  The real reason I had dropped by the Pollacks’ was because they had stopped calling me for babysitting jobs. The new baby was due soon, and I’d been hoping to help out with Karl Jr. and make some money for back-to-school shopping. But they hadn’t called me in weeks now—not since my picture was in the paper in another article about what was now called the “alleged attack” on my sister and me, and my fake call for help.

  “I was wondering if you might like me to watch Karl Jr. sometime,” I said to Jennifer now. “So you could get ready for the baby and stuff.”