by Karen Brown
• • •
She drives through the center of town, home to her family, quickly, quickly, taking the three hills at whatever speed she can manage safely, and turns into Gladwyn Hollow, her tires sliding on the sandy shoulder, her heart racing with a strange apprehension. The bit of colorful fabric, so like a girl’s item of clothing; Beth’s odd admission—these things have made her anxious, physically sick. Her street is quiet like an empty movie set, and she calms, tells herself she has only imagined the calling voices, much as she’s imagined everything that has happened without her here. She pulls into her driveway and enters through the front door. It is a Saturday, and she expects to find Craig making breakfast, to smell the waffle batter and the syrup, to discover Max and Sylvia in front of the television. But the inside of her house mirrors the street. She walks from the hallway through the living room to the kitchen and breathes in the smells of her family, climbs the carpeted stairs, calling each of their names.
She pauses in each doorway, notices the space of the rooms, as if the people have only just left and she is a visitor to a preserved place, like a museum. In Sylvia’s room there is a cup filled with water by the bed, her pink purse slung over the doorknob, her bathing suit tossed on top of the bureau. Max’s room reveals the same sense of silence and disorder—clothing hung on the bedpost, his little train cars pushed into a corner. In Sadie’s and Craig’s room the bed is still made from the day before, the spread rumpled as if someone slept on top of it, and abandoned on the rug Sadie sees a pair of women’s leather flats, beautiful shoes that are familiar but not hers.
Kate’s, she thinks. She leaves her house and walks up the tarred road. She rings Kate’s doorbell and knocks, calling Kate’s name, until two police cars appear, gliding like strange fish, and pull up in front of her own house down the street. Someone calls her name and Sadie turns to find Jane rushing through Kate’s side yard toward her, eyes lit with fear. Sadie understands that something more has happened, even before Jane grabs her hand.
“It’s Sylvia,” she says. “Craig woke up this morning and she was gone.”
Sadie stares at Jane, the realization settling, her body going cold. Still, she can’t believe it. “What are you saying?” she says, expecting that when Jane repeats the words she’ll discover they mean something else. But Jane’s face tells her all she needs to know. The voices weren’t calling her, they were calling Sylvia. “This is my fault,” Sadie says.
Jane doesn’t ask her to explain, she just takes her in her arms. “It will be okay. Kate and Craig are looking around the pond. Max is with Maura.”
Sadie looks down the street toward the police cars, and Jane waves her hand. “Let Maura talk to them.”
They head up the path through the woods, the way trampled and cleared by the women’s and children’s passage throughout the summer. Pale light filters down through the trees, although the path keeps its shadows. Jane tells her she was waiting for her. “Kate called me last night. We racked our brains trying to figure out where you’d gone. We called the hospitals, the police. Craig found your cell. They told him he had to wait until this morning, and now this.”
Sadie is mute with fear, but Jane doesn’t really expect her to answer.
“I told Craig you’d just gone off for a bit, to get away. Maybe an old friend, I said. I told him not to worry. Kate was with him at the house.”
At this, Jane glances at Sadie, to see how much she is taking in.
“I can’t believe she’d come this way at night,” Jane adds. They are moving quickly, and she is talking too much and out of breath. “But Max told Craig this is where she was headed.”
Sadie says Sylvia has never been afraid of the woods, that she tells Max stories about fairies and elves that live there, and Jane glances back at her again, and then takes her hand, and they continue on this way, like two girls.
They reach the clearing, and the pond is soft and still, the late-summer insects hovering over the surface. They walk the perimeter and see nothing. Sadie listens, but the calling voices have stopped. She remembers the day she and Betty sought Francie and came upon the pond. She thinks that finally it has come, that this is the payment she will make for Francie’s disappearance—not her mother’s death after all, but this: one child. It is possible that Sylvia is somewhere below, tangled up in a tree branch, captured beneath the surface, but Jane tells her she isn’t there, her face as fierce as Bea Sidelman’s. Sadie hesitates by the pond, watching its calm surface, thinking about how deceptive it is. She looks at Jane, her face a question.
“She’s too smart,” Jane insists.
Sadie doesn’t say anything about Francie Bingham or about how smart she was. They forge on through the pine woods, taking the path Sadie knows, the one she and Sylvia and Anne took the day of the daisy crowns.
Laura Loomis’s mother, Francie’s mother—both waited back at the house while the neighbors searched, tranquilized to calm their frayed nerves, their terror building as hours, then days passed and their children remained unaccounted for. Sadie couldn’t have imagined it then, but she experiences it now, her chest heavy with panic. She calls out Craig’s name. Sadie knows her daughter, quiet and imaginative, and tries to think like her now, a child who once created a bed for a plastic dinosaur out of an old Sucrets tin, a house for a small dime-store doll out of an apple crate. Her drawings, pages of fairy-tale characters, all depict events in a long-running story. Sylvia would walk through these woods having imagined conversations with nymphs and sprites and elves. She and Jane haven’t walked far when she sees something glittering on the path, and she bends down and picks up a sequined star. She scans the path and sees another, then another, and as her eyes adjust to seeing them she realizes there are hundreds of stars scattered among the pine needles like constellations. She stops and smiles.
“Like Hansel and Gretel,” she says. She points, and Jane sees them too, and she lets out a laugh, her loud hoot she uses when one of the children surprises her.
“It’s from her arts and crafts kit,” Sadie says.
She yells Craig’s name again, and this time there is an answering call: “We’ve got her! She’s here! She’s fine!”
Her knees tremble with relief. Jane exhales and finally releases Sadie’s hand. They see Craig farther along the path, his dress shirt bright like a signal flag. He approaches with Sylvia in his arms. She sees Sadie and struggles to be let down. Kate is with him. Sadie sees they are all wearing the same clothing they wore the day before, and she is filled with guilt and regret. She has no idea what went on while she was gone. Sylvia runs into Sadie’s waiting arms. Her body is all bony limbs. Her little fingers are cold, her eyes dark. She seems to be fine, shivering a bit in her T-shirt and shorts, her hair knotted, her arms scratched, but otherwise unharmed. Craig approaches Sadie and nods once, his face stiff with restrained emotion. When she whispers his name he makes a noise that is either a sigh or a groan, she can’t tell which. He wraps his arms around Sadie and Sylvia both.
She apologizes, over and over. She tells him she’s been with old Mrs. Sidelman.
“She knew my mother,” Sadie says. She glances at Kate over his shoulder—this story is for her, too, but Kate is looking away, not wanting to witness their reunion. Bea has planned to call later in the afternoon to apologize for keeping her overnight. But none of this is necessary now.
“Oh, Sadie,” Craig says. “It doesn’t matter.”
Behind the exhaustion in his voice, she hears the place where she fits, her old life waiting and comfortable like a leather glove. His breath smells of bourbon. His face is drawn and lined, his eyes wet. Sylvia tells her in her little high-pitched voice that she was looking for her at the castle house, and Sadie reassures her that she will make the waffles for breakfast, and that she will wash Max’s pillowcase that smells like his tears. They emerge from the woods at the pond to see that women and children from other neighborhoods have just arrived with their folding chairs, their blankets and towels, their stripe
d umbrellas. They rub sunscreen on their children’s shoulders. Behind them three police officers appear from the path. It is the children who spot them first. The women all glance up, their faces marked with astonishment. They sit in a circle and stare at the officers, whose shoes flatten the drying grass, whose buckles and badges flicker in the sunlight. Heads pivot and pivot back, their faces poised for what might happen next. They suspect heart attack, stroke, car accident. All of it a loss they steel themselves against, none of it seeming to fit here at the pond, with the brook’s gurgling and the wind in the leaves.
Craig approaches the officers and reaches out a hand to each. Sadie hears him explain that all is well, and they form a small circle.
“I’m just glad we have a happy outcome,” an officer says. He’s older, gray haired. He wipes his brow. “We’ve searched up here before, all of this Filley land. Days of looking, you know?”
The younger officer beside him nods. “I was a kid then, but I remember the last one. She was in my class at school—funny little thing. So sad for the family.”
“Still live in town. The mother died recently.”
“Saw that in the paper. Brave lady.”
“The other family moved away right after—the Loomises.”
Sadie holds Sylvia and listens to the police officers talking, the occasional static buzz coming from their radios. Jane is beside her, an arm flung protectively over her shoulders, as if she hasn’t forgotten that Sadie, too, was lost.
Craig steps up to the pond and looks down into it. His reflection wavers on the surface.
“This is where you’ve been bringing the children?”
Sadie suddenly sees the trampled-down grass, the pond’s dull reflection, the scattered toys and paper cups. The women instinctively cover their stretched-out suits, their bug-bitten legs, smooth down their unruly hair with its neglected roots.
“You know there might be fertilizer runoff here,” he says to no one in particular. “Contaminants.” He suggests they collect a sample and send it to the EPA for analysis.
The officers nod in agreement. “There’s a perfectly good pool in town,” one of them says, his voice bouncing off the ring of pines. The women stare back at him as if they’ve been reprimanded. They glance to Kate, who moves among them, smiling, offering her calm expression. They’ve never seen her at the pond before, and as is often the case when seeing people you know in unexpected places, they don’t all recognize her.
“Was that Kate?” someone asks Sadie.
Their unusual entourage makes its way to the path and down into Kate’s backyard. Kate remains quiet. She gives Sadie a look that Sadie cannot decipher and slips her hand around her wrist, a soft, firm grip.
“Everything has worked out,” she says, as if she can hardly believe it.
The heat is rising in waves from the asphalt. Entire families, alerted by the police officers’ cars, have gathered with Maura and Max on Sadie’s front lawn. A pack of children on bikes pedal past from another neighborhood, emissaries sent to see what’s happening here. Craig and Sadie and Sylvia approach, and Maura rushes toward them to scoop Sylvia up in her arms. Max buries his face in Sadie’s lap. Sadie thinks the group of them there, poised on the green grass, must look like a tableau. She glances up the street and sees Kate at the end of her walkway turn to head into her house. She has forgotten to mention her shoes.
Sadie imagines Kate descending into her Christmas basement. She’ll throw the switch and all the houses will flame into life, the people inside them placed just so lit up on display, each scene so carefully manipulated: the wife carrying the turkey to the table; the father heading up the caroling party; the little girl on the rug by the fire, coloring; the boy on the couch wearing a cowboy hat, watching television, his legs jutting out, just reaching the end of the cushion. But Sadie imagines that when Kate goes down today, she will discover that the mothers and fathers and children in her village will have shifted position, moved into other rooms, other houses, stepped out into their snowy yards to stand together without her intervention.
August 15, 1979
THE PARENTS DECIDED THE HAUNTED Woods was no longer appropriate, and the event was canceled. No one wanted to go into the woods anyway, fearful of Laura’s and Francie’s ghosts. Larry Schuster claimed he’d seen their spectral presences on the swings in his backyard. Others had their own Francie sightings—sometimes alone, eating a sundae at the local Farm Shop restaurant, or with Laura Loomis, riding the Tilt-A-Whirl at the Sacred Heart Church’s Strawberry Carnival. Reports had come in from as far away as Ohio and Florida of girls matching Francie’s description. It had been over a month and the local search—conducted by the police, fathers and grandfathers, volunteer firemen packing thermoses of coffee and ham-on-rye sandwiches—had nearly halted, the group that met each morning dwindling to a few bitter loners who trampled the yellowing fields arguing about the fallout of the Three Mile Island accident. The focus had shifted to the children who were not missing, who needed new school clothes and shoes. Sadie’s mother dropped Sadie and Betty off at the town center the Saturday before Labor Day, and Sadie was allowed to pick out new outfits at the Youth Centre, the Weathervane, to place them on hold so that her mother could return to pay. They didn’t need to be reminded not to talk to strangers, to stay together. Her mother threatened them both with a pointed finger before taking off in the Cadillac, and Sadie had made fun of her after she’d gone, not knowing, then, how little time she had left with her.
The stores were located in the outdoor mall. Sadie and Betty had worn their jean shorts and midriff tops. They picked out their school clothes and went into Drug City, where Francie’s picture was taped to the door now, alongside Laura’s, her expression wistful, apologetic. I’m so sorry I’ve caused all this trouble, her face said. Sadie pretended not to see it, but Betty stared at it, and then when she saw Sadie watching her, she looked away. It had become something they didn’t discuss—a firm block of coldness between them. They left Drug City and Sadie saw the same Mustang trolling the parking lot.
“Look, it’s Mack,” she said. And before Betty could reply she’d raised her hand and called to him. The car made a wide arc and slid alongside them.
“Well, well,” Mack said. He had on a work shirt with his name stitched on the pocket. Rob sat beside him, fiddling with the radio dial. They each had a can of beer cradled between their legs. Rob glanced up.
“Look, it’s Sadie Mae and Betty.”
Sadie was slightly flattered that he remembered their names.
“Can we ride around and do nothing with you?” she said.
Betty’s eyes widened. “We’re getting picked up in twenty minutes. Your mom is coming.”
But Sadie suspected that she would not, that she would be passed out in her bed, taking her afternoon nap, that they would be stuck at the outdoor mall with the kids from their school, the ones giggling and gathering once again by the fountain, the ones who would head over to the movie theater to see Meatballs, the boys holding the girls’ hands in the air-conditioned dark. She was tired of being on the outside of things. She wanted her own place to fit.
Sadie knew Betty wouldn’t let her go alone, that she would be forced to slide into the backseat with her, and she was right—Betty climbed in beside her. The car was old but clean. There was a cooler on the floor, and Sadie asked if they could have a beer, and she and Betty shared one. Betty grimaced, her eyes watering, and Sadie did her best to keep her face passive, her eyes dry. They bummed cigarettes, and Mack drove around town, up and down the streets that they’d known since childhood—the road the bus took to school, the one that led out to the reservoir, the one that took them past the historic homes of early town founders, past the Filley produce stand, the stalls filled with summer squash, tomatoes, the fields waving late-summer flowers. They kept the windows down, and the breeze blowing in and the smell of the pasture grass made Sadie sleepy and dazed. Every so often Rob would turn around and ask them something—how old they wer
e, where they went to school, questions adults asked children to make small talk. Sadie told them they went to private school, that they were sixteen.
“Don’t you want to know my favorite color?” she said.
Rob turned in his seat and smirked. “What’s your astrological sign?”
Rob and Mack had graduated from high school the year before. One of them worked at the local gas station, the other at a company that put up aluminum siding. They lived at home with their parents. In ten years they didn’t know what they’d be doing.
“No hopes and dreams?” Sadie said.
Betty leaned over and whispered, “Losers,” in Sadie’s ear.
“I heard that,” Mack said, looking up into the rearview mirror.
They pulled into Penwood Park and took the narrow road that wound up through the woods, around the lake. Betty leaned over to Sadie and whispered in her ear.
“Is this the park where the girl was raped?”
“Don’t worry,” Rob said, swiveling to look back at them. “We’ll protect you from the rapist.”
Betty grabbed Sadie’s hand and sank her nails in.
Mack drove up to a clearing where they parked alongside a group of other cars—Chevelles and GTOs and Road Runners, cars that looked poised at a starting line, their paint jobs shimmering in the sun. Mack and Rob got out, their bodies unfolding from the car to reveal their height and bulk—broad shoulders, low-slung jeans, men more than boys, Sadie noted. Rob opened the door to the back and stared in at them.
“You two just going to stay in there?”
Sadie and Betty slid out and leaned against the car, their arms folded over the skin exposed by their midriff tops. In three years Sadie will meet up with Mack again and discover that Rob died in a car wreck in Hamden, and she’ll ride on the back of his new motorcycle to a motel on the Berlin Turnpike. But that day she and Betty just moved to a picnic table in the shade. Rob and Mack leaned on the car hood drinking and joking with the other boys, who cast occasional looks over at Sadie and Betty, but for the most part ignored them. Sadie listened to the discussions of who would run in the demolition derby at Riverside, who would race who that night on Dudley Town Road. She heard one boy ask Rob if they’d stolen Sadie and Betty from the middle school playground. There was nervous laughter, and the boy, who was met with stony silence, became absorbed in his beer. Sadie decided that Mack and Rob, as older boys who had achieved some fame in their world—through car racing and drinking, through fistfights and a general disdain for the accepted paths mapped out for them by their parents—were not to be questioned. She felt a keen sense of having been chosen, as if these boys sensed the same potential in her.