Follow Me

by Joanna Scott

  That September, Arnie Caddeau’s wife passed away in her sleep. The office of Kennedy, Kennedy and Caddeau closed for the day so the lawyers and staff could go to the funeral.

  Even with the group from the office, the family and friends gathered for the funeral were dwarfed by the expansive sanctuary of the church; Sally sat in a rear pew, adding her own private prayers to the eulogies, pleading with the spirit of Arnie Caddeau’s wife to forgive her. The closed coffin glistened in the mottled light shining through stained glass. Arnie sat in the front pew. Watching his shoulders shaking, Sally felt her own impurity so overwhelmingly and understood the inerasable effect of time so completely that for a moment the idea of ending her own life seemed attractive. Yet the lure only served to remind her of eternal damnation, for if she died at this point, whether by her own hand or by natural causes, she wouldn’t have the chance to make reparations. Without reparations, there would be no salvation, not for a woman of such foul spirit. She would be rendered as she herself had rendered, she would be repaid double for her deeds…

  Pestilence and mourning and famine —

  She shall be burned with fire —

  Blood will flow as high as a horse’s bridle —

  Folly is the garland of fools —

  Help!

  Who said that?

  Help me!

  She didn’t want to go to hell. She wanted to disperse like the spirit of Arnie Caddeau’s wife into heaven’s rainbow light, up through the saints crowding the windowpanes, to be freed from the consequence of her mistakes once and for all. But if she was going to be spared, she had to repair the damage she’d caused and help those who needed her help.

  As the organ wheezed into a hymn, Sally watched Arnie’s shuddering shoulders. He was sobbing because he had never stopped loving his wife; he was sobbing from the agony of secret shame. It was terrible to have to sit in the back of the sanctuary and watch him endure his torment alone. Sally wished she could comfort him. He needed her, and so did her daughter and her son, even if they didn’t yet know it. They needed her strength to get through their different losses.

  It was all so confusing. She had always intended to live a righteous life. In the midst of any decision, she’d always thought she was doing what was justified and necessary. But how could she know, how did anyone know what the repercussions would be? Without the ability to see into the future, everyone was like Arnie’s wife, working blindly on a scarf, which for the lucky ones grew longer and longer and for the unlucky ones became tangled in knots.

  Sally was of the unlucky order, having inadvertently tied together strands that should have remained separate. Now it was her duty to untie those strands and rejoin them properly so they were connected in a complementary way, fortified by their place in the pattern rather than lost in a mess.

  She went home instead of following the hearse to the cemetery. She doubted that Arnie would have wanted her at the burial. She made herself a cup of tea and stretched out across the bed. For the next hour she paged through Daytime TV, scanning the recaps of the soaps while tears soaked her cheeks. She thought about how sorry she felt for Arnie’s wife. She felt sorry for Arnie, and she felt sorry for herself. She felt sorry even for those characters on the soaps who were slated to suffer terrible fates.

  She was back at her desk the next day, but Arnie didn’t appear or call in to say when he planned to return. He didn’t show up at the office through the rest of the week, not until the end of the day on Friday, when he came in to collect his mail and begin to catch up on his work. He barely acknowledged Sally at first. Later, though, when she brought him some reports, he caught her from behind and wrapped his arms around her. “My dearest love,” he whispered, burying his face in her hair. There was the familiar stinging guilt in his voice but also a sound that Sally heard as relief. “We’ll be all right?” she whispered back. She regretted inflecting the words with uncertainty and so repeated them firmly, as a statement: “We’ll be all right.”

  “Yes,” he said.

  A promise was contained in that brief exchange. It would take time, but they would learn to give up the furtiveness. They would allow their love for each other to be acknowledged by others, without fear of condemnation. They were too worn out by guilt to worry whether a love that had thrived for years in secret could survive out in the open. It was comforting just to look forward to the future and feel confident of the resolution.

  Still, she was absorbed by the portion of her life that remained unresolved and hidden from others. She continued to tear through the mail each day looking for a letter from the woman named Sylvia. She grew annoyed by her desire to hear the phone ring.

  She called the county clerk’s office and then declined to leave a message with the stranger who answered. Another week passed without any news. One afternoon in late October, she decided she needed some fresh air. She would have gone to Sam’s for a drink, but it was Sunday and Sam’s was closed, so instead she got in her car, and on a whim she drove out to the pier at Canton Point, where the river empties into the lake.

  It was late in the day and the sun hung low in the sky, burning red through a gauzy mist rising from the lake. There was no one on the pier, though up toward the end someone had left a chair unfolded, with a fishing rod leaning against it, along with an open tackle box and a bucket full of lake water so black with silt that it was hard for Sally to count the wriggling trout. She bent over to look more closely, counted three fish tails, or four, she wasn’t sure, and then saw a filmy eye just beneath the surface staring helplessly. The eye of a small trout, it must have been, though Sally was immediately reminded of the creature she’d seen years earlier in the state park, that water fairy with its expressive face and two tiny hands that had gripped the rock, its humanlike features just an illusion, according to her sophisticated daughter, who blamed her mother’s penchant for irrational belief on her lack of education. Penelope didn’t fully remember what they’d seen in the park, but she was sure her mother was wrong to rely on a fantasy to explain a mystery. Now the dusk was tricking Sally again, coaxing her to believe in something that was impossible and to ignore the usual measures of reality.

  She could have examined the fish in the bucket more carefully if she’d wanted to confirm what she was seeing. She could have reached in her hand and caught the trout and lifted it out of the murky water. Then there would have been no question about its features. But she didn’t look more closely for a reason she’d later explain was perfectly simple: there wasn’t time, she’d say, an easy excuse for the vagueness of her vision and a defense against the inevitable skepticism.

  A minute later she was heading back along the pier when she saw the fisherman come out of the public restroom by the parking lot. She increased her pace and was stepping onto the pavement when she passed the man, a heavy middle-aged man in baggy overalls, with the lower half of his face wrapped in a brown beard. He offered an affable hello, and Sally returned his greeting with a nod. She hurried on so quickly that as he reached his chair and discovered that the entire contents of his bucket had been dumped into the lake, she was already in her car, turning the key in the ignition.

  It took Myra’s sister-in-law Sylvia more than two months to produce a letter verifying that the son of Daniel Werner indeed had been adopted through the Catholic Diocese of Pittsburgh. It was an official-looking letter, on stationery with the watermark of the county seal, and stated that the letter would serve in lieu of the original document, which had been destroyed in the fire of 1957, to affirm that a binding Relinquishment had been voluntarily signed by the birth father, Daniel Werner, in the presence of witnesses from the Werner family and a Notary Public, at the Peterkin county clerk’s office in August of 1949. The original Relinquishment passed the parental rights of Daniel Werner to the Diocese of Pittsburgh, the letter stated. And since the letter did not specifically mention the name of the new parents, Sylvia had gone to the trouble of including a copy of the Decree of Adoption for the same child, who was
identified as the boy legally relinquished to the Diocese in August of the same year. The Decree of Adoption was dated September 9, 1949, and signed by the adoptive parents, Redding and June Boyle.

  Sally couldn’t have guessed that by concocting a story to coincide with her hunch, the entire Werner family was spared from having to acknowledge their complicity in guarding the secret of the murder. And she would never have to learn that her real son was beaten to death by Daniel Werner and then buried by him in an unmarked grave on Thistle Mountain.

  In defense of the Werner brothers, it should be said that they didn’t know the truth about the child’s fate until years after their cousin killed him. Their uncle, who had helped Daniel bury the baby and then given him the money to leave the region for good, had confessed only to their father, Dietrich Werner. Dietrich had immediately confided in his wife. And though she waited until after her husband’s death, she had eventually confided in her sons. So it was an old secret by the time Sally’s brothers learned it, and they received the news as more evidence of the wages of sin rather than as information about a crime that deserved an official investigation.

  When their sister had arrived in Tauntonville, the Werner men feared that they would be unfairly accused of abetting the crime, and they demanded that Myra Werner deal with the problem Daniel had made for them. When Myra heard that Sally thought she’d located her son, she must have decided that this would be a convenient solution. With her sister-in-law’s help, she assembled the proof that Sally sought. Between the false account of a Relinquishment and a copy of Abraham Boyle’s real Decree of Adoption, she made sure that her brother wouldn’t be held accountable for a murder that had happened by accident, when he was helplessly drunk. And Sally would never go looking for her son’s grave.

  Because Sally understood the necessity for sturdy proof in this important matter, she compared the papers to similar legal documents on file at Kennedy, Kennedy and Caddeau. And then she drove to Pittsburgh and made an appointment with the adoption agency of the diocese. After an initial meeting with the assistant director, she spoke with the woman who had sent the copy of the Decree of Adoption to the Peterkin clerk’s office. Sally wasn’t allowed to see the file, but the woman assured her that there could be no mistake with the document. The date was correct? Yes, the date was correct. And the names? It was an official document signed by a judge, the woman reminded her. Of course it was accurate. But were there, by chance, any other two-year-old boys in the care of the agency at the time? The woman perused the record of adoptions: there was only one adoption involving a two-year-old boy for the period from January of 1947 to December of 1950, and that boy was Abraham Boyle.

  By the time she was in her car leaving Pittsburgh, Sally believed that she’d found what she was looking for. Just as the letter from Sylvia had said, the child relinquished by Daniel Werner of Tauntonville, Peterkin County, in August of 1949 was the same child adopted by the Boyles of Pittsburgh that September. And he was the same young man whom fate had brought to the city of R. He was the same young man who had taken to opening the unlocked front door of Sally’s house and calling, Anybody home?

  Actually, he hadn’t come around for several months, not since her daughter had returned to college. Sally inquired about him in her phone conversations with Penelope. Her daughter, who thought her mother had taken a dislike to Abe, responded vaguely, and Sally wondered if this indicated that her daughter’s interest in him had waned. When Sally came right out and asked, Penelope explained what should have been obvious: she was busy with her studies, and he was busy with his work. When Sally asked if she was dating someone else, her daughter snapped back, telling her mother not to pry.

  Since her daughter didn’t want to be subjected to questions, Sally was left to search Penelope’s bedroom at home for any information that might lead her to Abe Boyle.

  It was the first week of November on a gray Tuesday, the clouds were thickening ahead of a storm, and with the shade drawn the room was dark, reminding her of entering the room early on winter mornings to wake Penelope for school. She switched on the light and immediately was struck by the stillness of the room. In her daughter’s absence she dusted and vacuumed the bedroom every week, but now its neatness seemed to give the room an artificial quality, as though it had been arranged as a model of an earlier time rather than as a place Penelope still returned to between semesters. The smoothness of the quilt, the waxy white edges of the windowsill, the posters of rock singers Sally didn’t recognize, the pens standing in a cup on the desk, the paperbacks on the shelves — everything remained too firmly in place, glued and bolted down so that years later visitors could come and see the typical bedroom, circa 1974, of a typical American girl.

  The arrangement of the room was misleading. When occupied, it was messy, with tank tops and bell-bottoms piled on the floor, unmatched sandals cluttering the closet, papers and books stacked in a teetering tower on the little table beside the bed. Sally missed the dishevelment of her daughter’s life. She missed the windswept, breathless presence of the girl as she spun from the kitchen down the hall, the radio blaring one of those screechy tunes that Penelope loved. She missed the noise of her daughter’s life, the laughter and rush of it.

  And yet there she was uselessly straightening a spiral notebook on the desk. Sally couldn’t resist — it was in her nature to try to put the clutter of the world into some sort of respectable order. After all the mistakes she’d made in her life, she preferred to keep the floor clean, the blankets tucked tightly around the mattress. To Sally, the freedom young people claimed as a right was perilously close to chaos. She wanted to know what to believe. When she was sure of something, she wanted to remain sure.

  In contrast to Sally, her daughter seemed drawn to things that were uncertain and unresolved. Here and there in the room, in corners that hadn’t been touched by Sally, there was evidence of the girl’s tolerance for confusion. The titles of the books she read, for instance — Ends and Odds and Words in Commotion. What did any of it mean? Sally could predict that these books held no answers. And what use did she have for riddles that couldn’t be solved?

  Her daughter was intent on learning about things that seemed to bear no direct relation to her life. It didn’t matter to her that she was radiant and talented and could have become one of those glamorous celebrities whose photos Sally admired in the glossies. Penelope wanted to get herself educated and then put her education to practical use. She was too brainy for her own good.

  Sally had to acknowledge that a life of glamour was not in the cards for her daughter. While she wasn’t ready to admit that it was a naïve and empty ambition, she did see that Penelope wasn’t interested in such things. And really, Sally was proud of her girl, proud of her smarts, proud of her determination to go out and find her own way. She was building a life for herself that Sally couldn’t have imagined. Penelope wasn’t afraid, like her mother was, of finding herself in the midst of a situation that she couldn’t control. She trusted her own ability to handle any unpredictable challenges life delivered.

  Sally had lost track of how much time had passed since she’d been in the room. She’d forgotten that she was looking for Abe’s address. Instead, she was enjoying the feeling that her apprehension of her daughter was being expanded just by pondering the things she’d left behind. Her strong and capable daughter. Why, look, here was an essay she’d written for school, twelve typed pages about the poetry of Samuel Taylor Coleridge. Sally couldn’t remember ever reading a poem by Samuel Taylor Coleridge, but her daughter had written a long essay, for which she received a big red A, along with a nice compliment from her teacher. Now, that was something. And here was a set of index cards upon which she’d jotted quotations from the Constitution. How could her daughter know so much! Her desk drawer was stuffed with notes she’d taken during lectures. Her old calculator had functions that Sally couldn’t begin to figure out. She could see how much Penelope knew just by sifting through the mess in her desk drawer. And
it was amusing to find things like a take-out menu from a Chinese restaurant, with circles around steamed dumplings and kung pao chicken. There was a plastic keychain with the name of a moving van company on it. There was a box of thumbtacks and a chain of paper clips. And there was a small folded sheet with printed information.

  At first glance, she thought the sheet explained how to work some sort of machine. But as she was stuffing the paper back in the crowded drawer, she happened to notice that the instructions included medical terminology. She unfolded the paper, smoothing out the creases, and looked more carefully at what she realized was a sheet of information from a medical lab. She had to read the sheet twice to understand that it included results of a mail-in pregnancy test.

  She stared at the word positive. Why were there so many letters in the word? It was the wrong word, it didn’t belong in her daughter’s drawer. She wanted to rip up the sheet from the medical lab and throw it away. She also wanted to pick up the phone and call her daughter and demand an explanation. But she mustn’t be harsh with her. She knew what it felt like to be caught by surprise in this way. And really, when Sally considered it, the notion that her daughter had left this piece of paper for her to find wasn’t implausible, for how could Penelope not want to be comforted by her mother, to be soothed and told that everything would be all right? But maybe she had gotten things mixed up. How many girls were tricked into panic by a false-positive result? There was no reason to worry, and she’d know to be more careful in the future. Everything would be all right. But what if the result was a true positive, and the man involved was Abe? Then everything would not be all right. Nothing would ever be right again. If Abe was involved. If there was an accidental pregnancy. If it was too late. A brother with a sister. A terrible tangle of mistakes, and it was Sally’s fault.

  Sally Werner.

  That whore.