The Longings of Wayward Girls

by Karen Brown

  “Why won’t you?” Beth says, whining like a child.

  “I’m busy, Beth. I’m occupied. In the middle of something.”

  “Oh. I see. A groupie? Out-of-town something?”

  Sadie hears a long pause and Ray’s mumbled response.

  “Is it a local something? That Donahue woman? The one that had twenty brothers and sisters?”

  Sadie strains to listen. After that summer, Betty Donahue became someone she saw only in passing from a car window, from a distance at a high school party. Could Ray have slept with Betty in all of those intervening years? She feels an irrational rush of jealousy. Beth’s voice is high-pitched. She rattles out names of other women from town, from her own neighborhood, ones Sadie sees at Park Ave. Pizza, Drug City, Shaw’s Supermarket, pushing strollers down her street. Sadie, her heart thudding, wonders if Ray has somehow had sex with all of these women since he’s been back. She stands in front of the suitcase, naked, and realizes that she doesn’t really know Ray Filley. She’s only seen him a few times as an adult, between his gigs. She remembers him stacking Christmas trees at the store, his hands in bright orange work gloves, his face bearded and different. She was with Craig and Sylvia, before Max was born, and pretended she didn’t know him, convincing Craig she didn’t like the trees, that they should look elsewhere. Once she saw him in line at the drugstore, wearing a wool cap, looking hungover.

  Beth’s voice comes bright, cajoling, up the stairwell. “Is she here now?”

  Sadie sets the suitcase back behind the chair. She takes her clothing with her to the bed, but there is no time to put anything on. Beth’s footsteps are quick on the stairs. Sadie hears Ray clambering after her, telling her to stop it, to come down, to leave it alone. Beth bursts into the room. Sadie can tell from the shock on her face that she didn’t really believe she’d find anyone. Beth’s brown hair is disheveled from the wind. She still wears her pink wool coat and gloves. Sadie notices that Beth’s face is creased and aged, and she wonders, fleetingly, if she, too, looks as old. Beth freezes, one hand on the door.

  “Oh,” is all she says. “Oh well.” Sadie watches Beth’s old face deflate, like Max’s does when he has hold of something and loses it—a toad, a ball, a crab on the end of a string tied around a mussel shell.

  Ray doesn’t say anything. Sadie can see the shadow of him in the hallway. Beth looks at Sadie in the bed and then turns, quickly, and brushes past Ray. She goes downstairs and the slam of the front door echoes up the stairwell.

  Ray steps into the doorway. Sadie stares at him, unsure, the sight of the suitcase awakening a memory that is too distant to access quickly, one that blots out the shock of being discovered in Ray’s bed, that diffuses the desire she felt for him.

  “What will she do?” she asks. “Why did you let her come up here?”

  “She won’t do anything.”

  “She knows who I am.”

  Ray comes into the room and sits on the edge of the bed. He stares at her, his eyes softening. “Does she?” He puts his hand out and touches her face.

  Sadie doesn’t know if she is angry or not. Ray doesn’t seem to think she needs to be.

  Ray leans in and presses his mouth to her forehead, to her cheek, to her lips, parted in an effort to speak. Certainly Beth will tell other women, the way that women do. Sadie herself has done it, even told her husband gossip she’s heard. Didn’t it make her seem better than they were in his eyes? But Ray seems to think otherwise. Sadie wants to dress and leave, and he presses her back into the mattress. “She might come back,” she says.

  “Oh no,” he says. “She’s gone.” He even laughs at her for worrying. “You don’t know Beth.”

  And she doesn’t know her. She doesn’t know any of them, even herself. The bed smells of dust and roses, of Ray’s scent, of her own body beneath the sheets. The suitcase stays hidden behind the overstuffed chair, and she pretends she knows nothing about it as Ray climbs back into bed with her. “Let’s start over,” he says, and the room fills with the sound of his tender encouragements, her shameless, joyful cries. She has no idea where any of this will lead, but she doesn’t want to spoil it with the past.

  PART TWO

  SEARCH RESUMES TODAY FOR MISSING 9-YEAR-OLD

  Wintonbury—June 15, 1974

  A massive search for missing 9-year-old Laura Loomis was called off by state police Friday, but will resume at dawn today. The search by more than 800 volunteers was called off about 30 hours after the 9-year-old was last seen walking home from a friend’s. Laura, daughter of Mr. and Mrs. Jonathan Loomis, was given permission to visit a friend who lived on her street. When she did not return by dinnertime, Mrs. Loomis became concerned and called the friend, who claimed Laura had left her house right at 4:30, as instructed by her mother. By this time Mr. Loomis, home from work, began a search of the neighborhood with his wife, both calling their daughter’s name. State police were notified at 6:00 P.M., and volunteer firemen quickly began a search of the surrounding woods and fields, until dark, when a house-to-house search was conducted. No leads have developed, says State Police Lt. William Reed. “Foul play is not suspected,” reports police spokesman Dan Fontaine, “but it has not been ruled out.” Late Friday he said that state police are proceeding with the theory that the girl is “missing and lost.”

  June 12, 2003

  IN GLADWYN HOLLOW THERE’S A walking path. Sadie and the other women consider themselves lucky to have such a thing, neatly paved with black tar like their driveways, cutting between their houses, through their own safe, scenic woods, circling the elementary school’s playing field, connecting one street with another, one neighborhood with the next. It is the start of summer when Sadie and her next-door neighbor Jane Griswold discover that someone has veered off the path and made one of their own leading up a wooded hill through wild blackberry and fern. Their children clamor for the adventure of the new path. Jane hesitates. She is shorter than Sadie, and athletic, her long reddish-brown hair kept back in a messy knot. She parts the overgrowth and peers up, and Sadie stands back with the children.

  “Teenagers,” Jane says. She looks at Sadie, and Sadie knows what she means—teenagers ferreting out their secret places to congregate, to do what they both remember doing when they were that age. Jane says she’d feel obligated to put a stop to what she found, and she doesn’t want to be “Old Mrs. Brunner with her mothball breath and cranky threats,” who used to chase her and her childhood friends out of their neighborhood woods.

  “No,” Sadie says. “Who wants that?” But she eyes the path like a teenager herself, the trampled-down fern, the wild ginger, the canopy of trees. She dreams of that time, being free of responsibility, having only herself and her own desires to satisfy.

  “And we don’t want to encourage the children to wander in the woods,” Jane says. “I mean not with this area’s history.”

  Sadie looks at Jane, surprised. “What do you think they’ll find? Ghosts?” She doesn’t mean to sound angry, but her voice is unnecessarily harsh.

  Jane is equally surprised by Sadie’s tone. “I mean we don’t want them to get lost,” she says calmly, using a voice Sadie suspects she uses when her husband finds his underwear drawer empty or one of her children is throwing a tantrum.

  “Or run into a predator,” Sadie says. “Or the Old Leatherman.”

  She is sorry, instantly, that she’s let herself get carried away.

  “Who?” Jane says. She eyes Sadie with barely masked irritation. The children stand by Sadie’s side, gazing up at her.

  Sadie laughs and tells the story of the Old Leatherman, how he walked a circuit of 365 miles every thirty-four days, and housewives knew the exact day to expect him, the exact hour and minute. “They gave him food, and he lived in caves,” she said. “He wore clothes made of leather patches.”

  They move on down the walking path, and Sadie teaches the children the rhyme:

  One misty, moisty morning,

  When cloudy was the weather,
>
  There I met an old man

  All clothed in leather

  All clothed in leather,

  With a cap under his chin.

  How do you do?

  And how do you do?

  And how do you do again?

  The children and Jane are pacified by Sadie’s story, but Sadie is unsure why she responded so strangely to Jane’s mention of the past. Maybe she is sensitive after years of being mistaken for Laura Loomis. Since she’s become a mother she will sometimes wonder about Laura, the first girl who disappeared and was never found. But she won’t ever let herself think about the other one. She blames Ray Filley, their shared history, for these twinges of memory she cannot control.

  For weeks she’s ignored Ray’s truck parked at the end of her street, his eyes following her car with their plea. She pretends she doesn’t see him in the Vincent school parking lot after her play rehearsal. After sleeping with him at the old house, Sadie longs to be with him again. But, of course, she cannot. She is mortified that Beth came upon her naked in his bed, and she doesn’t trust her not to tell anyone. Once school is out she is busy all day with the children. They have trouble adjusting to the unstructured time, and they’ve quickly become bored, lonely for their school friends. Sylvia spends mornings chewing on her hair and watching television—old shows like The Brady Bunch and I Dream of Jeannie. Sadie is shocked to see Sylvia has inherited her old hair-chewing habit, and she tells her to stop, that it’s disgusting, just like her mother once told her. Still, drawn to the familiar television episodes, she finds herself beside Sylvia on the couch, transported back to her own childhood. Max invents elaborate treasure hunts and whines until they leave the couch to conduct house-wide searches for small clues he’s hidden in unusual places—inside the pocket of Craig’s winter suit coat, beneath the iron dachshund doorstop. Gone are the days when children roamed the neighborhood, knocking on each other’s doors, meeting up in backyards. Playdates must be arranged, but Sadie avoids scheduling them, suspecting she will have to come up with ways to entertain children other than her own.

  She often goes up into her room to hide, to be alone. “We’re bored,” they cry up the stairs to her. “We have nothing to do.”

  Driven to distraction by their demands, Sadie decides one day to try the new path. She tells Max and Sylvia to leave their bikes where the path diverges, which happens to be the Currys’ backyard, close to the slate patio and the carefully arranged cast-iron furniture. She takes the children’s hands firmly in hers, even though Max protests that he can walk himself.

  It is midday. The heat dissolves in the cool woods. The cicada sound lessens. Sadie allows Max to walk ahead with his sister, because as soon as they maneuver past the blackberry’s thorns they discover well-trodden dirt that leads up the hillside, mossy and speckled with sunlight. This dirt path curves through saplings and shade fragrant with pine. The children sing the Old Leatherman rhyme. They come upon large rocks, boulders that appear to have tumbled down off a mountain that no longer exists, or emerged from the leaf-strewn floor of the woods like something from the core of the earth, and she lets them scramble on their surfaces, shows Sylvia how with a small stone she can etch her name and her brother’s name boldly on the flat face. They walk for ten minutes—“No more than that,” she tells Jane later. And just when she thinks she will turn around she sees sunlight up ahead and steps into a clearing—a flat sunny place filled with meadow grass and a pond. Jane is disbelieving.

  “What sort of pond?” she asks.

  Sadie smiles. “Fresh water,” she tells her. “It’s more like a swimming hole, fed by this beautiful running brook.” She doesn’t tell her the rest—how she remembered the pond the moment she came upon it, how the memory of it, fueled by the cicada sound, felt bright and terrible all at once.

  That night as Sadie is serving the children dinner, Craig comes in from work and they begin to tell him about their discovery. He has loosened his tie. His face is red from the stress of the day, from irritation, Sadie thinks. Each day she prays that Beth Filley hasn’t told anyone about what she saw, that someone hasn’t invited Craig to lunch or pulled him aside in some quiet office to break the news to him. She tells the children to calm down—their voices are filled with excitement, Sylvia’s especially. They rise in pitch and vie for attention. Who can tell it the best becomes a competition. Sylvia, older, with more of a vocabulary, wins out. Her father turns to her and holds his hand up, the look on his face vaguely threatening, and she is quiet. Sadie wonders how he has managed to train them to follow his every command, like puppies.

  “One at a time,” he says. He looks up at Sadie and smiles. Look at these two, his expression says. These are ours. The love in his face wrenches her heart.

  “There’s a pond,” Sylvia says. “It’s in a magic glade. And we are going to swim in it.”

  “And I can bring my float,” Max says.

  “And we can pretend no one can find us there,” Sylvia says. “Because it’s a fairy place, protected by their rings.”

  Craig gets a beer from the refrigerator and twists off the top. “Really?” he says.

  He looks at Sadie and raises his eyebrows. She is about to let the children take credit for this imagined world but then Sylvia sees the look on her father’s face. Like Jane, he thinks they are making it all up.

  “Mommy says,” Sylvia tells him defiantly.

  “Yeah, Mommy told us,” Max says.

  He looks then to Sadie, his smile flat and questioning. “Really?” he says again.

  “It’s a beautiful spot,” she says.

  And Craig leans in and presses his lips to hers. “Sounds like fun,” he says, and the topic is closed, and Sadie knows he believes she’s loaded the children in the car and taken them to a new spot, Salmon Brook Park, or Barkhamsted, or one of the other approved swimming places in the area. She lets him believe this—the days with the children while he is at work are her own to fill, however she best sees fit.

  In the morning she digs out the low folding beach chairs, stuffs a canvas tote with towels. Max takes his blue bucket and climbs into his stroller. Sylvia rides her bike. Jane sees her on the walking path and approaches her by the Currys’ backyard just as Sadie parks the stroller and takes Max by the hand.

  “Are you going to let them swim?” she asks. “Aren’t there leeches and snakes?”

  “It’s so peaceful,” Sadie says. “The birds flit around. The kids can splash in the brook and catch frogs. They can swim in the shallows.”

  Sadie admits she plans to swim herself, the water ice-cold and clear. “You can see the sandy bottom. The little fish.”

  Jane shakes her head at her, as if Sadie is making a mistake and she is sorry for her. Sadie smiles at Jane, and turns from her, and leads the children up the path. The pond reminds her of her favorite childhood books—the one about the girl who finds a key to a hidden garden, the one about the kids who find the old summer houses surrounding a lake that has since disappeared, Nancy Drew’s mysterious hidden staircase, the moss-covered mansion, the message in the hollow oak. On the walk up to the pond, Sadie tells her children stories, and she feels as if some part of her that was lost is bubbling to the surface. At the pond, Sadie stretches her legs out in the trampled-down grass. The cicadas’ whine becomes a comforting backdrop. Max splashes with his tube. Soon, she hears Jane’s children rushing past her toward the water, and Jane and Maura Grant come across the grass to stand beside her. Sadie looks up at them, shielding her eyes.

  “Holy shit,” Jane says, finally convinced.

  Sadie laughs. Already her arms and legs are suntanned, her smile serene. Jane and Maura open their chairs and settle down beside Sadie in the grass. Sadie worries that her lost baby and how she is holding up will be the topic of conversation. But it is not. Maura, her face wide and friendly, dotted with freckles, takes out a tube of sunscreen.

  “I remember one time up in New Hampshire we found a place like this,” she says. She begins to tell he
r story, one that involves herself as a teenager, a cooler of Heineken, and a boy who drove his father’s BMW, who broke up with her and went on to Stanford. Jane launches into her own teenage story, and Sadie imagines Lily’s flitting presence, almost walking now, splashing in the shallow brook water, her hair so fair it is white in the sunlight. She closes her eyes and remembers the smell of the bed in the old Filley house, the way Ray’s hands moved over her skin.

  June 20, 1979

  CLARE WATKINS SPENT MANY SUMMER days at Wappaquassett, sitting around the pool with Ray and Beth’s mother, Patsy. She’d have her scripts and her drink and her cigarettes. Sadie usually accompanied her to spend time with Beth, summers the only time they ever saw each other, since Beth attended private school. But that summer Sadie felt uncomfortable being dragged over, forced to be Beth’s playmate. She’d managed to avoid going, until one afternoon her mother, in her bathing suit and sheer yellow blouse, insisted. She wore her sunglasses, even though they were standing in the kitchen.

  “I don’t really even know Beth Filley,” Sadie said.

  Clare Watkins seemed unmoved.

  “Whose fault is that?” she said. “You might have spent more time with her during the school year instead of sneaking off with Betty, like you always do. Or ordering around your little minions.”

  Sadie felt a deep resentment well up. Her mother smiled at her sadly.

  “Don’t you want to spend the day with me?” she said.

  When Sadie didn’t reply her mother’s mouth grew tight. “You have two minutes to put on your suit. Maybe that new one you insisted I buy you?”

  In summers past, Sadie’s mother would sometimes leave for Filley’s without asking her to go. Sadie would wake up late or come in from outside and discover her mother had gone without her. She’d imagine her mother swimming with Beth, or telling one of her funny stories that always involved imitations of friends and neighbors. Deprived of the chance to be in her mother’s company, Sadie would become disconsolate and mope around the house, waiting for her to return. She never ventured to Filley’s alone; fearful her mother had left her behind for a reason, and alert to the possibility of being forgotten, Sadie made it a point to be in her mother’s line of vision, to impress her however she could. Lately, though, as if a switch had been thrown, the roles were reversed—the more Sadie sought to avoid her mother, the more her mother demanded she spend time with her. She went up to her room and slipped on her bikini, thinking about how this situation would have pleased her last summer. She told herself that today would be just as it always was—that she and her mother would sit together in the lounge chair and judge Beth Filley’s diving. That her mother would count to see how long Sadie and Beth could stay underwater.