The Longings of Wayward Girls

by Karen Brown

  Betty kept up a low mantra. “I cannot believe we are doing this, I cannot believe we are doing this.” They were the only girls there. When they left Rob climbed into the backseat, and Betty was asked to sit up front, and rather than argue, or maybe because she felt chosen herself, Betty complied. Riding this way back down the twilit roads of town, Sadie leaned boldly into Rob and Rob put his arm around her. His shirt smelled faintly of sweat, and Sadie tried not to compare him to Hans and his expensive-soap smell. Up front, Mack slid his hand over the gearshift to Betty’s bare leg, and Sadie watched her knock it away. She gave directions to Mack, and they drove to Hamlet Hill and deposited them at the end of the street. Rob tugged Sadie in and kissed her, long and hard, his aviator glasses pressing into her cheek, his tongue searching the inside of her mouth. He slid his hand between her legs, wedging it there like a brick, lifted Sadie’s own hand and pressed it against the V of his jeans and the swelling there. Sadie felt aroused and sick at the same time. Betty was already outside of the car, waiting by the asphalt curb, when Sadie got out. The car with the boys drove away, the tires leaving a thick, black mark on the road. Sadie and Betty walked in quiet, stunned silence up the hill to their houses.

  “What if they hadn’t brought us back?” Betty said, her voice choked.

  Sadie looked over and saw Betty was crying, her round cheeks wet with tears. Sadie felt her own chest zinging with the nicotine and the beer, the excitement of having been released into the wild, and the relief of returning. She felt a little ashamed when she thought about Rob’s tongue in her mouth, the groping, and so she didn’t think about it. She thought of Francie, wondering if she’d been lured into the car of a stranger, the ways this was accomplished not readily known to children at the time. It seemed inconceivable that someone would choose Francie, in the way Sadie herself had just been chosen, and so instead she preferred to think of her as a runaway. Hadn’t Sadie planned this often enough herself, imagining what she’d bring, how she could live in the woods, how she’d survive on dandelion and wild berries, the hard little apples that grew in the old orchard? She’d drink brook water, build small fires for warmth. In the fall she could eat the hickory nuts that fell in multitudes onto the lawns. She could slip into houses at night and steal Swanson TV dinners.

  In a week Sadie would go to the junior high school, a place foreign to her, its building old and its linoleum marred, an in-between place fraught with unknowns. It seemed that, unless she was found, Francie, like Laura Loomis before her, would have the luxury of avoiding the return to school, the dreaded early-morning alarm, the wait for the school bus in all kinds of weather, the cold vinyl seats and toxic exhaust, the frightening sense of being trapped all day at a desk, unable to use the restroom when needed, to get a drink of water.

  “But they did,” Sadie said. “They did bring us back.”

  Betty wouldn’t look at her. “Is this a venial sin?” she said.

  Sadie stopped walking. “What?” she said. “What are you talking about?”

  Betty stopped too. She stamped her foot, and her long ponytail swished. “All of this,” she said. “Everything we’ve done.”

  She didn’t wait for Sadie to respond. She turned and picked up her pace and left Sadie behind. The Frobels’ sprinkler wet the side of the road. From inside the houses Sadie could hear the clink of cutlery, smell pork chops and Hamburger Helper. She watched Betty let herself in her house, watched it all happen from a distance. In two days she turned thirteen. She felt the widening rift between herself and that world of mown grass and tree canopies, the race of years, their rush to overwhelm her.

  August 31, 2003

  IT IS THE SUNDAY BEFORE Labor Day. Craig tells Sadie to forget the cookout, but a few of the women have already called to ask about the plans, and Sadie insists the tradition will continue. She will head out to Shaw’s to pick up what’s needed. She is heady with exhaustion, with relief, eager to restart her old life. Craig offers to go to the store himself—he raises his eyebrows at her. “What if you run into another friend?” he says. Sadie smiles, then laughs, and Craig sighs, pulls her into his chest, lays the palm of his hand gently on her head, like a benediction. “Take your phone,” he says, and hands it to her, and Sadie accepts it, glances down to see the missed calls, the messages—an archive of Craig’s and her friends’ growing fears in her absence.

  Max is taking a nap. Sylvia has been asleep, too, on the couch, but awakens as Sadie prepares to leave and asks to go with her. Sadie has given her a bath, and washed her hair, and combed out the snarls. She has dressed her in her little seersucker sundress, her white sandals with the flowers. Sylvia climbs into the car and notices the suitcase in the back.

  “What’s that?” she says.

  Sadie tells her it’s her grandmother’s. She circles the town so that she passes the old Filley house. The driveway is empty, and her heart stretches tight with longing. Sylvia leans forward in her seat and watches the house recede.

  “That’s the castle house,” Sylvia says excitedly.

  Sadie sighs. “It is.”

  She drives past Vincent Elementary School, where The Night of the Iguana is scheduled to open the following weekend, and she tells Sylvia about attending her mother’s plays, how she would sit in the front row with her father, waiting for her mother to appear onstage. She felt a little afraid, she tells Sylvia, in expectation of her mother. It was always some other woman who stepped out into the lights in a costume, one who lived with different family members and had different problems, who wore outdated clothing, and sometimes a wig, her face altered with heavy makeup. Sadie recognized, as a child, her mother’s long arms, the ring on her finger, a certain timbre of her voice, but all of that only served to confuse her further. She would watch the perspiration build on her mother’s face, listen to her voice lower or raise in entreaty or paralyzing fear. Afterward, she and her father slipped into the makeshift dressing room—usually the art room, where a mirror was propped—and they presented her mother with flowers, roses and orchids, clouds of baby’s breath. Sadie’s mother would gather her in her arms and press her cheek up against hers, the powder, cold and damp, transferred to Sadie’s skin.

  “Oh, I love love love my little girl,” she’d say.

  Everything was abundant and swelling with happiness. Her mother clung to Sadie’s and her father’s hands.

  “When can I go to your plays?” Sylvia asks.

  “When you’re older,” Sadie says.

  “When is that?” Sylvia says.

  “A long time,” Sadie says.

  At some point her mother must have grown weary of pretending, she thinks. She herself has worked hard to be a different kind of mother, to keep her life simple and straightforward and free of secrets, and yet she has found that she could not. Still, she knows she need not follow her mother’s trajectory. She has already learned things her mother failed to.

  She and Craig have decided not to punish Sylvia for sneaking out of the house and wandering off. They’re convinced she now knows to stay out of the woods.

  “I went on an adventure,” Sylvia says from the backseat. She begins to describe the darkness in the woods, how the moon was out.

  Sadie tells her she saw the sequin stars Sylvia dropped. “Weren’t you afraid of animals?” Sadie asks.

  “No,” Sylvia says. “I knew you weren’t at the pond. I went through the field of flowers to the castle.”

  She tells Sadie she wanted to bring Max, but he whined when she told him where they’d be going, and she couldn’t risk alerting her father or Mrs. Curry, who were downstairs.

  “What were they doing?” Sadie asks.

  “Talking very quietly,” Sylvia says. “Drinking.”

  At the edge of the pines, Sylvia says, she paused. She could see the castle house and all the lights lit. She expected to find the man, but she saw someone else moving around inside, passing back and forth in front of the windows.

  “I thought it was you,” Sylvia says.

/>   The woman was throwing her hands in the air. Sylvia wondered if she was dancing, or laughing, and then she thought of the Twelve Dancing Princesses and how they slipped out at night to dance with men in a secret place, wearing out their slippers, vexing their father. Sadie remembers the fairy tale: the princesses dancing all night, exhausting their lovers, then giving them up—like Ray, she thinks. Sylvia says she moved through the field and crept up to the house. The woman was not her mother; that much she could tell. The woman had short dark hair, like her friend Anne’s mother.

  “Maura?” Sadie asks.

  “Yes,” Sadie says. “I thought, what if all the mothers from the pond snuck out at night to dance, just like the princesses?”

  Sadie laughs. “Imagine if they all met up there wearing the clothes they put on to go out on Saturday nights, their earrings and necklaces, their pretty sandals.”

  “Yeah,” she chirps. “That’s what I thought!”

  Sylvia says that when she stepped up closer to the window she could only see a big room with a fireplace, the light coming from a crystal chandelier. No other women were visible, and she knew the woman there was not Maura when she came back into the room, her heels clicking. Sylvia says she threw her arms up in the air again, the way her mother does when Max spills his juice.

  “How can you do this?” the woman said. “What are you thinking?”

  Sylvia imitates the woman from the backseat, and Sadie watches her in the rearview mirror do a near-perfect imitation of Beth Filley. Sylvia says she couldn’t see who the woman was talking to. She thought she must be talking to someone in the hall, or in another room. But when no one answered, she wondered if the woman was just talking to herself.

  “You go and ruin everything I’ve done to help you.”

  Sylvia imitates the woman shouting, and then, to Sadie’s surprise, crying.

  Sylvia doesn’t remember everything the woman said. She shouted some things and then whispered others, then she lay back on the floor and cried. “You were supposed to leave with me,” she said. “It was our plan.” When she was quiet Sylvia wondered if she’d gone to sleep, so she stepped up closer to check. She still wanted to find her mother, and she wondered if the woman might know where she was. She peered into the open window.

  “The floor smelled old,” she says. “I could smell the lady’s perfume.”

  Then the woman sat up and looked at her.

  Sadie is stopped at a stop sign, and she turns to look at Sylvia, who is now imitating the look on the woman’s face. “Then she screamed,” Sylvia says. “She kept screaming, and I ran away through the grass and then into the woods.

  “I thought she was a witch,” Sylvia says. “I thought she had changed you and the magician into birds or mice. Maybe she put you in a cage.”

  So Sylvia ran, plunging through the woods, forgetting the path and the little sequin stars, until she reached an open place and a big tree with boughs that dipped toward the ground. She was a good climber—Sadie knew this to be true—and the bark was smooth, the little leaves dark and thick, the branches wide enough for her to walk across. She found a place where the thick branches formed a hollow, where she fit inside, and she huddled there and hid.

  Sadie has told Sylvia stories of tree forts, of the old wagon she and her friends found at the edge of a pasture, its metal wheels sunk into the earth. They climbed up on it and pretended they were traveling west. They built a fort out of the graying wood from a fallen-down shed, stole a bale of hay left over in the field, rolling it over and over to the fort and spreading it out on the ground so that in the winter they might return and find it dry and warm.

  “I thought maybe the tree was one of your old forts,” Sylvia says.

  Sadie tells her maybe it was. She drives down Tunxis Road and stops at the intersection. Sylvia says the witch eventually stopped screaming but that there was rustling in the woods, something thrashing through the ferns, breaking small twigs. She slipped down as low as she could in the tree and heard the thing pass by her, heard it mutter and curse and move farther away, and she imagined the witch limping along, changed now into her real form.

  “I was going to keep running,” she says. “But I thought she might be waiting, and then I fell asleep.”

  Sadie listens to Sylvia’s story, remembers the dirt on Beth’s heels. She doesn’t let herself imagine how close her daughter was to real danger. She thinks she must be traumatized by her experience. “Were you afraid?”

  “No,” Sylvia said. “I like pretending for real.”

  Sadie smiles at her in the mirror. “Yes,” she says. “I know what you mean.”

  Sylvia tells her she awoke when the birds had gathered around her in the branches and something scurried near her head. It was dawn. She felt sore from sleeping in her sitting position. She could see where the woods thinned out and the sun just lighting up the meadow grass. She was there when Mrs. Curry crossed the meadow, and she watched her carefully, wondering if she was the one in the woods last night. She rose slightly to see better through the leaves, and something shifted under her feet. She stepped out of the hollow, onto the wide branch, and peered down. Inside the place where she’d been sitting was a small knapsack with a tarnished clasp, a camping dish, a spoon.

  “What kind of knapsack?” Sadie asks, now incredulous.

  Sylvia says it is like the one she used to take to the pool—lined with plastic so her wet bathing suit could be carried home. “It had hearts on it, but it was really old and falling apart.” When Sadie asked she described what she found inside—a bracelet made of tiny colored beads strung on elastic; a few changes of clothes, shorts and T-shirts, each item filled with holes, as if bugs had crawled inside and eaten through.

  “And letters,” Sylvia says.

  A sudden breeze shifts through the open car windows carrying the smell of the field they have just driven past, of wildflowers and manure.

  “What do you mean letters?” Sadie asks.

  At the bottom of the knapsack, Sylvia says in her chatty voice, was a packet tied with a thick piece of yarn. Some of the writing she couldn’t read because the paper was torn, and the handwriting was messy.

  Sadie looks back at Sylvia in the rearview mirror, and their eyes meet—Sadie’s dark and startled, Sylvia’s earnest and wide with excitement.

  She had gone through all the letters when she heard her father calling her name, and she put everything but the bracelet back and climbed down from the tree and went to wait for him on the path. Her father had come, and Mrs. Curry.

  “And then you,” Sylvia says. “Mommy.”

  She is going to draw the story of the boy who wrote the letters, of the castle house where he must have once lived, of the girl who was, like her, unafraid of the woods. Sadie tells her that would be nice.

  “Maybe we can go back there,” Sylvia says. “And I’ll show you.”

  Sadie imagines going at night, following the little sequined stars. She tells Sylvia, “Maybe.” She isn’t sure how much of Sylvia’s story could possibly be true, is half-afraid to find out.

  The parking lot at Shaw’s is hot, overbright, and the stunted trees planted in the medians blow in the wind that is kicking up and promising rain. Sadie opens the car door and opens Sylvia’s door to let her out. She takes Sylvia’s hand in hers and they stand there together beside the car. Sylvia pulls a small beaded bracelet out of her dress pocket and slips it on her wrist.

  “Is it okay if I keep it?” she says.

  Sadie, remembering the day she made the bracelet with Betty, finds she cannot speak and must simply nod her head.

  Inside she pushes her cart across the waxed linoleum. The air-conditioning is cool, the store filled with music, with the squeak of the cart wheels. She and Sylvia move through the aisles and find hamburger and hot dog buns, pounds of ground beef, packages of hot dogs, three watermelons. She buys dozens of eggs for the children’s egg toss, cucumbers for her cucumber salad.

  She reaches out to touch her daught
er’s blond head and thinks how much she was like Sylvia when she was little—how her games, her pretending, are all replicated in her child. She sees, too, how closely she has patterned her own life after her mother’s—joining the Tunxis Players, the affair with Ray. How alike they are in other ways beyond her control—the miscarriages, the grief. She admits to herself that once she discovered the suitcase it was as if her mother’s ghost had thrown up one more dare. Clare made plans to leave Sadie and her father, to run off with a schoolboy. As incredible as it seems, sorting through the packed clothing Sadie had admired her mother’s nerve, saw her leaving as an attempt at happiness, as an act of bravery against the world that told her how she must always behave. At the time, Sadie thought she was seeking the same thing. But she wonders now why her mother would flee the people who loved her, as if their love wasn’t enough, why she made her last flight one from which she could never return. Sadie sees how narrowly she has missed falling from the same precipice. She feels her longing for her mother like a crushing burden, left for her to lug about alone for all these years. She is relieved to have saved her daughter from that weight. She can parse out memories to her—create a version of Clare that is both made-up and true.