by Karen Brown
“What happened to you?” they say, shaking their heads.
Only Sadie doesn’t ask this question of Ray. She accepts him, as if she’s always known who he is, what he is capable of.
She lies beside him now, unable to sleep. She blames this on the sound of the waves, their tumultuous rushing. On the gentle creaking of the house, its pine-board floors, its cedar supports, its beadboard walls all expanding, absorbing the mist off the water. She hears an old clock ticking in the other room. She hears Pietro’s snores. Ray turns over and faces her. He is awake, too.
“It’s strange,” he whispers, his voice slurred. “But it all seems like it was supposed to happen.”
“What?” she asks. She knows what he means—she feels it too—but will not admit it.
“The old woman in the restaurant,” he says. “You.”
Sadie lies on her back and stares up at the pine ceiling’s knots and whorls.
“Even that girl, Francie Bingham.”
Sadie feels the heavy beating of her heart. “What about her?” she says.
“Those bumbling detectives,” he says. “They tried to blame me for her disappearance, showing me some letter, suggesting it was written to me. And then I’m up at the old house the day after they dragged me down to the police station like a criminal to question me, and there she is looking in at me through the parlor window.”
“Francie? What was she doing there?” Sadie asks. She feels vindicated, suddenly angry. If Ray saw her then, it means that Francie had been avoiding the searchers for three days.
“She must have been hiding out,” Ray says, picking up on her tone. “She must have been using the house. She had on these bright pink shorts with purple flowers. She had mosquito bites on her legs.”
“Did you talk to her?” Sadie turns in the bed to face him.
Ray laughs. “Oh yeah, we had our little conversation. I told her I was going to call the police and tell them where she was. She was pretty clever, hiding out from everyone. I told her she’d gotten me into trouble, and she said she didn’t care.”
“She said that?” Sadie asks, although she can easily picture Francie saying such a thing.
“I told her it was going to storm, that she needed to go home, and I would drive her,” Ray says. But she refused, and he threatened to drag her back, although even as he said it he worried about how it would look.
“They already suspected me,” he says. “You know?”
Sadie sees that he is asking her to understand something, to see his side. But she doesn’t know, doesn’t understand why he wouldn’t bring her back, go to her parents and tell them he’d seen her. She breathes in and out, slowly. “What happened then?”
Ray tells her that Francie ran away, turned and fled into the field. He was almost relieved. He watched her go, knowing he could chase her down and catch her, knowing it now, and wondering if given the chance he would have done anything differently.
“I always figured she kept on running—hitchhiking on I-95, ending up in some other town, with the hippies at the commune in Voluntown, with the runaways in New Haven or New York City. I used to see them all the time on the streets, and I’d look to see if she was one of them.”
Sadie suddenly doubts him. She can’t understand why Francie wouldn’t have been found. The woods were filled with people searching. If she made it to the road and walked along it out of town, she’d have been seen—a chubby girl in bright pink shorts? The second girl in five years to go missing?
“You really think she ran away? That she’s alive somewhere?” Sadie asks.
Ray is suddenly quiet. His tone changes. “What are you suggesting? I saw her alive. She swore she wasn’t going back. She got all upset.”
“What about?” Sadie asks tentatively.
“She told me she put it all in the letter, and I must be dense not to have gotten it. I tried to explain to her that I didn’t know anything about any letters. I didn’t write them, I didn’t receive them.”
Now Sadie knows he is being coy, playing with her. He props his head up in the darkness and she can feel his eyes on her. “Did I?”
Sadie can’t speak. She doesn’t think she can take a breath. But he is looking at her, waiting. “No,” she says finally.
He rolls away from her and tells how when he left the old house that afternoon the rain had come on, and the lightning, and an oppressive semidarkness. He said it was bad driving home. He took his mother’s car, and the leaves were stripped from the trees and blown across his windshield. “Just like this afternoon,” he says triumphantly, assured that the coincidences have meaning. He pulled up the long drive to the house and his mother opened the door, furious.
“Beth had said she’d cover for me, but she’d taken off. I wasn’t supposed to leave the house,” he said. “I think my parents really thought I did something to that girl, that if I was seen around town people would become more suspicious.” Ray laughs darkly. “I wanted to tell them I’d just seen her, but I couldn’t.”
It was only July, but they made arrangements for him to return to school early, to live off-campus with one of the teachers, to work in the boathouse.
“Shipped me off,” Ray said. Then, musing, “Sometimes I think I might have imagined her.”
Ray is quiet. He shifts in the bed and the springs squeak. Sadie wants to pretend to be asleep, but there is the troubling problem of her mother’s suitcase, and she has to ask.
“Why did you go to the old house that day?”
“I was looking for her,” Ray says. “I wanted to clear my name.”
“For Francie,” Sadie says.
“Of course,” Ray says. “Who else?” He rolls away from her then, as if he is settling in for sleep.
Sadie wonders if she should tell him that during sex he called her by her mother’s name, but she realizes that utterance may be the only confession she will have from him.
“And yet you let her go,” Sadie says.
“I know,” Ray says. “I know. I shouldn’t have.”
The room is dark, the darkness calm, like Emma and Pietro, two people who fit together.
“But don’t think you aren’t responsible, too,” he says, and his voice shifts—a different, darker note. “You know more than anyone, don’t you?”
“What do I know?” she whispers.
The sound of the water becomes less urgent, the tide withdrawing, more like a long intake of breath.
“What she was running from,” he says, his voice heavy with sleep.
Sadie feels her eyes fill with tears that spill over her face to wet the pillow. If he hears her he doesn’t say anything.
“I’m sure I don’t have to tell a man as experienced and knowledgeable as you, Mr. Shannon, that everything has its shadowy side?” she says.
But Ray is quiet. Maybe he has already fallen asleep.
July 6, 1979
IT HAD BEEN ANOTHER DAY of heat and humidity when the police took Ray in for questioning. Sadie had wanted to go to Betty’s but her mother had forbidden it. She had her arm looped around Sadie’s chest and held her close.
“You aren’t going anywhere alone,” her mother said.
The fathers who had all participated in the search now resignedly took their briefcases and suit coats and headed in to work, each Eldorado and Continental Mark III joining the procession from the neighborhood into Hartford, and Sadie’s mother dragged Sadie over to the Filleys’. Patsy opened the door, her face swollen with tears. Beth was behind her, crying in her pajamas, her face covered by her hands. Sadie’s mother told Sadie to go to Beth, and she took Patsy’s arm and they went outside onto the patio. Sadie imagined this was what it was like after someone died. She wondered if Beth was remembering Laura Loomis. She approached her and patted her shoulder. “It will be okay,” she said.
Beth lowered her hands and glared at her. “Not if your bitch of a mother can help it,” she hissed.
Sadie jerked back. She removed her hand.
“My
brother had nothing to do with that fat little girl’s disappearance,” she said. “Now we’re ruined. He’s ruined for life.”
Sadie sensed that Beth had obtained this last part from Patsy. But she was confused about her mother being implicated—before this summer Beth had always loved Sadie’s mother, and Sadie had always been put out about it. Now that she sensed Beth might be an ally against Clare she became more interesting. “My mother is a bitch,” Sadie said. “You’ve got that part right.”
“You don’t know the half of it,” Beth said.
Sadie gave her a wry smile and stared at her wet face. “Is there anything I can do?” she said. Beth turned away and Sadie heard her thump up the stairs and slam her bedroom door. She stood in the foyer at a loss. She went into the den to watch television until Beth came back down an hour later. Her face was blotched, but she was dressed, and her hair was brushed. She seemed to have made an attempt to pull herself together.
“Do you want some lunch?” she said.
They went into the kitchen. Here the walls were lime green. The floor was checkered black and white. A bowl of oranges sat on the counter. Beth took out a jar of pickles, opened it, and began to eat out of it, one pickle after another. Her eyes glazed over. Then she realized what she was doing and stopped.
“Want one?” she said. She held out the jar. She wore a macramé bracelet, and her arms were tanner than Sadie’s.
“Where do you think Francie is?” Beth said. She had gotten down a jar of peanut butter and was unscrewing the lid, her face scrunched up with the effort.
Sadie never considered telling Beth about the pond and the floating object. She shrugged. “No idea,” she said.
“What about those letters from some boy?” Beth said. “What is that all about? What boy would write to her?”
“Seems kind of weird,” Sadie agreed.
Beth made two peanut butter sandwiches. She took out some potato chips. “Do you like chips on it?” she said.
“No, thank you,” Sadie said.
Beth dropped a handful of chips on one of the sandwiches, placed the piece of bread on top, and pressed it down. She handed Sadie a paper plate with a sandwich, and chips and pickles on the side. She half-filled two glasses with Hi-C and then topped them off with Smirnoff she took from another cabinet—a large bottle she unscrewed expertly and then returned so quickly that Sadie barely had time to register surprise.
“This whole disaster calls for a drink,” she said. She lifted the glass and took a sip. Sadie had no choice but to do the same. She took a bite of the sandwich, the peanut butter thick in her mouth, and swallowed the drink, harsh and awful. Beth looked at her and smiled.
“You’ll get used to it,” she said. “If you’re anything like your mother.”
She and Beth had poured another drink after that, and maybe another one, the two of them lying out in the yard under the trees, the pasture land rolling away from them, the gladiolas and peonies in the garden wilting in the sun. Sadie asked why Hans wasn’t considered a suspect, and Beth laughed, a harsh little sound.
“Oh, your boyfriend’s father picked him up right after your little make-out session. Drove him all the way home to Stamford, so he has an alibi.”
Sadie felt her face redden, but Beth was still looking up at the sky and didn’t notice.
Occasionally they’d hear bits of their mothers’ conversation, and then the phone would ring, and Patsy would drag the phone on its long extension outside, and they’d hear her talking to Beth and Ray’s father, intermittently crying, and screaming into the receiver. Beth would raise her head up and glance down at her mother, her face lit with fear. Sadie’s mother gathered her cigarettes to go and let Sadie stay with Beth to keep her company. “You’re my sweet, generous-hearted girl,” she whispered before she left, her breath smelling of gin. When she tried to hug Beth, Beth pulled back and made a face over Sadie’s mother’s shoulder.
Sadie had laughed after she went. She’d made fun of her mother, and Beth had joined in.
“I’m so sorry I don’t like her anymore,” Beth said. “It makes me sad not to like her.”
“I’m not sorry,” Sadie said. “She’s vile.”
“You really have no idea,” Beth said. She stared at Sadie, a long, intense look. “I just wish things could go back to the way they used to be.”
Sadie still didn’t know what had made Beth turn against Clare, and since she liked it better this way, she didn’t ask. She didn’t want to seem as if she cared. They lay back in the dry grass and felt the thunderstorm return, the leaves overhead whipping up, the gray clouds rolling in.
“It’s like Rip Van Winkle,” Sadie said. “Maybe Francie is playing nine-pins with the strange little men. Maybe she will sleep for twenty years and suddenly reappear in the neighborhood looking like her mother, with wide hips, graying hair, and the beginnings of a double chin.”
Beth told Sadie twenty years was too late. “We need to find her now,” she said. “Oh where oh where is that piggy little girl? If I knew where she was I’d drag her back and make her tell the truth!”
And right then Sadie, not drunk, just tipsy, almost told Beth everything. She felt the urge to confess bubble up, a feeling like knowing the answer in school. She saw herself explaining about the letters and clearing Ray’s name entirely. But Beth’s eyes were lit with a dangerous intensity, and Sadie felt suddenly afraid of her.
“Maybe the dead end is an alien landing place, and she’s been taken off as a specimen,” she said instead.
Beth stared at her, her eyes suddenly vacant. “You’re the most imaginative person I’ve ever met,” Beth said. “But you’re a drunk now, too.”
“No, I’m not,” Sadie said, but when she stood up she nearly tumbled over. Beth began to laugh and point at her.
Then Ray’s father’s car pulled into the long driveway, and Beth jumped up and ran down the hill, falling and stumbling, calling, “Ray! Ray!” and Sadie was left alone to watch Ray emerge from the car, sullen in his wrinkled shirt and madras shorts. Beth threw herself into his arms, and he shrugged her off of him. He looked up the hill at Sadie, and then the two of them went into the house. Sadie was left to walk home, the grass and then the tar road tilting and spinning, the wind from the storm whipping the leaves off of the trees, the rain starting up and soaking her through her clothes. She threw up, once into the sewer grate in front of Mrs. Sidelman’s house, and again in the row of pine trees that separated the Donahues’ from the Frobels’, and hoped that no one noticed. She told her mother she had a stomach flu, and her mother chastised her for walking home alone.
“You aren’t allowed to be out by yourself,” she said. “We don’t know what nutcase is stealing little girls.”
“I’m hardly little,” Sadie said, irritated.
Her mother sighed. She led Sadie upstairs to her own room and pulled back the satin comforter and told her to get in bed. She brought her ginger ale and set it on the nightstand, and then stretched out beside her, and smoothed her forehead like she used to when Sadie was little. Sadie lay there smelling her mother’s scent on the pillow, thinking about the pond, and the still water, and the way the insects landed and stirred it, the way the current moved the mysterious object out near the center, raising it up, spinning it about.
August 30, 2003
SADIE ISN’T SURE WHAT HAS awakened her until she hears the foghorn again, a low, mournful sound that seems to enter her body with her breath. The shade flaps gently against the window. The room appears around her, gray at first, then lighter so she can make out the pale painted walls—the leaves of a tree, the birds in its branches, the white crib in the corner. Emma has put them in the nursery. She sits up and slides out of the bed. Ray is asleep, his arm thrown back over his head, his face averted. She puts on her clothes, furtively, and steps over to the crib, and touches the bumper pads, the little knitted blanket draped over the rail. She touches the painted tree, the leaves, the birds and their feathers so real she imagines she mi
ght feel their smoothness, their little beating hearts. Behind the tree, painted in the distance, is the cottage she stands in, and beyond that the sound. These aren’t store-bought images stuck to the wall with adhesive like hers. These have been painted by a gifted artist—Pietro or Emma, or the two of them, working together.
In the mornings at her house Max wakes first, padding into her room to tug at the bedsheet, often climbing up into the bed with her after Craig has left for work. Max slips into the curl of her body and falls back to sleep, and then Sadie will go downstairs to make coffee, and Sylvia will come down holding Max’s hand.
“Why doesn’t he sleep in his own bed?” she’ll say. “He needs to learn.”
Sylvia is envious of Max, and yet she is still the little mother. She makes sure Max has his favorite bowl for cereal—the blue one with Thomas the Tank Engine on the bottom. She helps him pick out clothes that match. Sadie imagines that this is what is happening now, while she is away. She thinks away, rather than gone. Children adjust; she knows that. Craig will be there to help, and Sylvia will be happy to have her father make her breakfast. She looks a bit longer at the mural on the wall, at the crib, the changing table, the little stack of diapers, the tiny nightgowns folded on a shelf. She knows the bliss that went into setting everything out, putting the crib together, arranging the furniture. She knows how impossible it feels to get rid of all of these things. You do not know how to take it all down again, to give it away. That isn’t something you imagine you’ll have to do. She remembers the old crib in the basement of the house she grew up in, the little appliquéd bears on the headboard, and she wonders how long her mother, too, dreamed of more children.