The Longings of Wayward Girls

by Karen Brown

  Betty said they had never checked to see if Francie left anything under the stone.

  “I thought we were done with that,” Sadie said.

  But she saw that Betty felt the differences beginning to separate them, and that this was something she and Betty still had in common now, and it seemed a little sad and pointless to refuse to play along.

  They weren’t careful about being followed. The bake was still going on, and the kids were everywhere—riding bikes in the street, playing in wading pools, mostly unsupervised. The day was hot but winding down, the sun sitting just above the line of trees. Sadie could hear the parents’ singing, smell the greasy smoke that meant another round of burgers was on the grill as they started up toward the dead end. Betty’s sister joined them, stepping in her jaunty way alongside them, her arms swinging.

  “Where are you guys going?” she asked.

  Betty looked at Sadie, and Sadie shrugged, resigned. It didn’t matter. They didn’t expect to find anything. By the time they reached the stone a small gang of kids, suspicious from the beginning, had descended on them—some on bikes towing others, some walking. Sadie bent down and lifted the stone and uncovered a small folded square of blue paper, and a pair of girls’ underwear.

  In her shock at the discovery, Sadie didn’t care what happened next, only that she and Betty wouldn’t be tied to what lay there in the dirt. She took the letter quickly into her hand and she and Betty backed away. Betty’s sister stepped forward in exclamation and sent one of the little kids for a stick, then used it to pick up the underwear. It was a simple pair, pale and slightly grayed from washing, a small flower attached to the elastic waistband. The kids made joined sounds of surprise—some laughed, others shrieked, “Cooties!” Betty’s sister, holding the stick, lurched at a boy and he recoiled. Some of the kids began running away, making a game of it.

  Sadie and Betty had already walked partway down the street when one of the Schuster boys rode by on his bike, the underwear on the stick held up in the air, like a flag. Sadie imagined her own underwear, tucked in the darkness of her top bureau drawer, exposed against the contrast of sunlight and waving grass, the starkness of the stone, the asphalt, the barbed wire tines, the decaying cedar post. She and Betty exchanged looks. They’d learned from health class about the bright blood that could bloom there at any time, that it could be soon—and it terrified them. Sadie clutched Francie’s letter. The group of kids paraded back down the street, the boy at the lead, looking like the benign children depicted in Joan Walsh Anglund prints, with their chunky limbs, large foreheads, heavy bangs, eyes like dark pinpricks.

  Sadie and Betty snuck back to the Haunted Woods to read the letter at the old maple table where they’d sat earlier, surrounded by empty cans and cigarette butts and casting tentative looks over their shoulders.

  Again, my locked door has been breached. Someone came into my room last night, Francie had written. His breath smelled of crème de menthe. His hands were furry, like a wild beast’s. I am so happy to finally escape this cursed place! Thank you for the lovely bracelet—I will cherish it always. I am leaving you something of mine as well. Until tonight!

  With Francie, it had become difficult to decipher where the fantasy ended. Betty bit her lip. “Is she serious?” she said. “What is she talking about?”

  “She’s going to meet him, that’s the important thing,” Sadie said.

  Betty looked unsure. “Maybe we shouldn’t have set up the meeting.”

  The light had begun to fade in the woods, and she stood up and began to stuff the cigarette butts into the beer cans, to gather the cans up.

  “She’ll know it’s all a fake when he doesn’t show up,” Sadie said.

  “What about the other things she wrote?” Betty said. “Maybe we should say something.”

  Sadie considered the note again. She thought, briefly, about Hans in the field, and she imagined him slipping into her bedroom at night. The idea of his body close to hers in the dark made her flush with warmth.

  “What would we say?” she said. “That the Beast from ‘Beauty and the Beast’ went into Francie’s bedroom? That we have a note that proves it?”

  Betty smiled tentatively.

  Sadie shook her head. “It’s nothing.”

  Then she crumpled the note and dug a small hole in the woods, and buried it. Betty stood nearby, still unsure. “We could just give it to her mother,” she said. But by then the note was gone and the dirt covered over with leaves. They put the beer cans inside a cardboard box and headed back out of the woods. Neither of them could believe Francie had left a pair of her underwear for Hezekiah.

  “What was she thinking?” Betty said.

  Sadie took a deep breath. “We can’t tell anyone,” she said.

  That evening, as if enacting a sort of penance, they organized yard games for the neighborhood kids: freeze tag; Red Rover; Mother, May I; What Time Is It? They played until dusk, when they could no longer see each other in the darkness, until the fireflies began their heated blinking, bobbing and elusive along the edge of the woods. The party continued around the pit, the remaining parents circling the fire in their aluminum folding chairs, the lit ends of their cigarettes and their low voices the only indication of their presence. Betty’s sister had the idea that they should all take their positions in the Haunted Woods and do a run-through. Betty and Sadie appointed one of the older girls to be the guide, and they pretended to be the kids being led. “Don’t show any emotion,” they instructed her. “Don’t feel sorry for them when they get scared.” The fluorescent markings showed up perfectly, the boys made the right noises in the trees, the ghosts moaned and shuffled, the sets were garish and surreal in the flashlight’s beam.

  Francie’s set, the empty crib, remained empty. None of the kids had seen Francie all day, and someone thought the Binghams had gone away for the holiday. Even though Sadie knew better, she used this as an excuse not to send someone to get her. She and Betty kept an eye out for her as it grew later, wondering when she would set out to meet Hezekiah, if she would set out at all. Betty’s mother and father got into an argument and decided at the last minute that there would be no sleepovers, and their tentative plan to meet at eleven thirty in Betty’s backyard was thwarted by the stragglers who kept a vigil at the pit. Instead, Sadie went to bed with grass-stained feet, her hair smelling like sun and sweat, all the summers of her childhood becoming this one last night.

  • • •

  The next morning Mrs. Schuster, Francie’s next-door neighbor, came to Sadie’s front door with a birdlike rapping of her bony fist. Sadie was the only one up. She had peered through the living room window first and seen the woman waiting there, her arms wrapped tight around her chest, her hair flattened from sleep on one side.

  She hesitated to open the door, but the woman kept up her urgent knocking, and Sadie’s father and mother were roused. They appeared at the top of the stairwell, her father in his robe, her mother behind him in her sheer nightgown, both of them nursing headaches, her mother disappearing into the bathroom with a moan. Sadie watched as her father quickly descended the stairs, opened the door, and listened to Mrs. Schuster through the storm door screen. Her voice was high-pitched and panicky. Sadie heard her father tell her calm down, Lenore, in a tone that intimated years of neighborhood cookouts and reciprocated dinners with cocktails. The open door let in a clean morning smell, the sound of birds alert and sharp in the maple tree. Mrs. Schuster slipped inside the house, her arms still clasping her chest. She wore a cotton cardigan that smelled of camphor, her hair still in the bouffant style of the sixties. She only had a minute, she said. She had to go to other houses. Sadie’s mother appeared in her robe, and her father summoned Sadie, who pretended to appear from the hallway to the den. She was interrogated, first by Mrs. Schuster, and then by her father and mother, each chiming in with further questions:

  “Did you see anything unusual this morning?”

  “When was the last time you saw Francie?”r />
  “What was she doing?”

  “Who was she talking to? Was anyone around that you didn’t know?”

  “Have you seen anyone around the neighborhood that you don’t know lately?”

  The questions weren’t explained, but they left Sadie’s heart thudding.

  “What happened to Francie?” Sadie finally asked.

  Mrs. Schuster’s eyes grew wet. She put her hand over her mouth, and then she bent down to look into Sadie’s face. “She’s missing, honey.”

  August 29, 2003

  RAY STARTS UP THE TRUCK, and the sound is ominous on the quiet road. The day Francie disappeared some of the searchers found a loose sheet of paper blowing about the cornfields. It had been the letter to Hezekiah that Sadie and Betty had lost in the field weeks before. No one knew who the boy was or where he lived, and all of the neighborhood boys were questioned, the police going house to house. It reminded Sadie, in true Francie fashion, of “Cinderella,” when the prince goes through the village trying to ferret out the young woman whose foot fits the slipper.

  Ray turns to her. “Do you know it was old Mrs. Sidelman who told the police she used to see me in the woods. ‘Lurking in the woods,’ she said. Those were her words on the police report.”

  Sadie wants to say that Mrs. Sidelman was partly right in accusing him, that it was a version of him that caused Francie’s disappearance.

  But then she would have to tell him everything, how she remained silent, even when the police drove up the street to his house and put him in the back of the cruiser to take him in for questioning. Everyone had seen the cruiser head up the street. The neighbors had all been gathering every day on the Binghams’ front lawn, and the lawn was littered with cigarette butts. The fire engines and buses of searchers who moved like ribbons through the pastures were parked on Wadhams Road. Sadie remembers Ray’s face in the backseat as the car drove by her house, how he looked out the window, directly at her where she stood with her parents on the front lawn. At the time, the weight of her guilt convinced her he was staring straight into her. She wonders now whether that steady look was for her mother.

  Ray turns the truck onto Shore Road. They’ve only gone a short way when the headlights light up a woman walking along the sandy shoulder. Sadie recognizes the waitress at once.

  “It’s Emma,” she says as they pass her.

  Ray pulls the truck over.

  “Why did you do that?” Sadie asks. “She’s going to think you’re some stranger. She’s going to be scared to death.”

  Ray opens the truck door and calls out. “Hey, Emma! It’s us, from the restaurant.” And then he sings a bar of “Cecilia” out into the darkness.

  “You just did that to make me mad,” Sadie says. “You think I hate your singing, and you did that to bother me.”

  Emma walks up to the passenger window. “Hey,” she says in her soft voice. She brushes her hair back.

  “Need a ride?” Ray asks.

  “I’m not sure,” Emma says. “I was expecting a ride from someone and he’s not here. I’m a little worried.”

  Sadie thinks that the boyfriend has ditched her. Certainly it isn’t a husband. But then Emma says it is her husband, and that he is always on time, and she thinks something must have happened to him. Sadie wants to tell her that (an hour away) her husband is saying the same thing about her. Instead, she scoots over and Emma climbs in. Sadie feels the sweat of her body, the heat radiating from her abdomen.

  “Sorry it’s so hot,” Ray says. “No air conditioning in this thing.”

  The wind whipping into the truck makes it difficult to talk. Emma leans forward and says she likes the fresh air, and that the truck is a fine relic. Sadie thinks the wording is a bit dramatic—it’s an old truck. There is nothing particularly valuable or meaningful about it. She’s run off with a man who drives a junker, and somehow that hasn’t mattered to her until now. Her hair blows over her eyes. Emma holds hers back with her hand, her tattooed arm balanced on the door frame. They drive down Shore Road and take a left where Emma points, and then down a narrow lane among cottages with little name plaques on the front—Eeny, Meeny, Miney, and Mo, Winkin, Blinkin, and Nod—past a tennis court and a little general store. They pull up to a small cottage, pale blue, with an outdoor shower, and a clothesline, and the open water right behind it. The cottage is dark, and there isn’t a car in front. All down the tar lane the cars are parked haphazardly in front of other cottages with beach towels flapping on lines, different colors with small painted porches, all of them dark. Sadie sees a candle flicker inside one. And then someone approaches them as Emma climbs out. He has a camping lantern, and the light swings back and forth as he walks.

  “None of us have any power,” the man calls to her. “Someone hit a power line up the road.”

  Emma puts one hand to her mouth, the other to the mound of her stomach. “Oh.”

  “Do you have a flashlight?” Ray asks. He climbs out of the truck, walks up to the bottom of the steps. Sadie sees Emma turn to talk to him, but she can’t hear what she says over the crashing of the waves on the beach.

  Ray comes back to the truck and leans in. “I’m going to help her light some candles,” he says. “Now she’s all freaked out about the wreck.”

  “Okay,” Sadie says.

  Ray looks at her, waiting. “Are you going to come in?”

  Sadie wants to wait in the truck. She watches Ray go into the house, sees the candles being lit through the windows—one placed on a table, another on what looks to be a kitchen counter, the rooms beyond the windows lighting up, and Ray and Emma there inside as if they belong together. Sadie knows this is what has hardened her against Emma from the beginning. She is the kind of girl Ray dated—the type she saw with him the few remaining times he came back to the neighborhood after the Francie incident. He’d be with a girl with long hair wearing a man’s T-shirt, a pair of washed jeans so pale they looked white, who wore rings on all her fingers, jangly bracelets, and a paisley scarf in her hair. She would be dreamy eyed, one languid arm draped out the car window.

  Sadie, on the other hand, was smart and secretive. She was good at facades. She wore the suburban costumes assigned to her, even as a teenager—corduroys and clogs, turtlenecks and Fair Isle sweaters. She still does. Ray has no reason but one to have chosen her out of the innumerable women he might choose as a single man accustomed to living in Florida, a state where minimal clothing is necessary and women are always tan. Sadie recognizes this now, and sees, suddenly, her mistake in believing he loved her. Only one woman alive looks so much like her mother.

  He comes out onto the porch and lets the screen door bang shut. Sadie can hear the sand grinding under his boots. Then he steps down and comes back up to the car.

  “Why don’t you come in?” he says. “We can sit with her for a little while until her husband gets back.”

  “What if he doesn’t come back?” Sadie says. She gives him a small smile. “What if he’s run off with some girl he knew from his old neighborhood?”

  Ray stares at her. His face is the same as she pictured it all those years when she didn’t see him. Older, with lines around his eyes, but the same. He is still slight and boyish, though his body has filled out to that of a man. He wears the same sloppy clothes.

  “Really, Sadie?”

  She wonders if she’s always been this heartless—then thinks about Francie and knows the answer is yes. But now she tries to consider Emma in her fragile state, alone and pregnant, worried about her husband, and she opens the truck door and gets out. She is tired, as if she’s reached the end of an exhausting day with the children and she wants only to sit down for a minute to rest. She has no fresh underwear, no hairbrush. She thought she’d be back for dinner. The porch steps bend under her weight. The cottage is tiny, a playhouse. Inside the candles flame wildly, blown by the wind that comes in through the screens facing the water. Emma is on the phone, an old-fashioned type with a spiraled cord. They hear her describe her husba
nd’s car (Subaru, maroon) and her husband (five feet nine inches, one hundred and sixty pounds, brown hair). His name is Pietro Rovella, and he doesn’t speak much English. She is worried because of the accident, she says. And then she listens and nods and hangs up.

  “They say it was a truck that hit the pole,” she says.

  She rises from the table. “You don’t have to stay.”

  Sadie says they don’t have anywhere they need to be. “But if you’d rather we leave—”

  “Of course not—I’m glad for the company.”

  Ray sits down on the end of the couch and Sadie sits beside him. The candle nearby lights up his eyes, burnishes his hair. Emma sits in a wing chair and folds her legs up. Sadie can tell it is her chair, the place where she always sits. Emma says they are sending someone over to talk to her about her missing husband, to take her statement.

  “Was he at work?” Ray asks. “Maybe he got held up.”

  “Pietro works from home,” Emma says. “Sometimes he goes out and explores and gets lost. That might be what happened. Maybe he went to the movies in Niantic and got caught in the traffic. Lots of reasons why he didn’t make it to the restaurant.”

  They finally introduce themselves. They make awkward small talk, unable to really answer any questions truthfully, Sadie taking over and creating, with some of her old resourcefulness, their false history. She wonders if they should leave before the policeman arrives and asks them their names, and then she wonders if the police have gone to talk to Craig. But she is very sleepy, and sitting on the couch beside Ray—his warmth, his smell—she forgets herself and closes her eyes. She opens them once, and hears Ray and Emma talking, but their voices lull her back to sleep, and she doesn’t wake until she feels the wind, colder now off the water, and senses that Ray has gotten off the couch. She sees him at the little table with Emma, and a man in a police uniform. The man’s badge glows in the sputtering candlelight. He is a short man with a round chest. He writes things down and nods, and Sadie pretends to be asleep when she hears him ask Ray who he is, and who she is, and hears Emma interrupt to tell him they are friends of hers, that they came to give her a ride when her husband didn’t show up.