by Karen Brown
She tells Sylvia that they will bake her grandmother’s chocolate cupcakes.
“These are the best cupcakes you’ll ever taste,” Sadie says. She finds that she is near tears, imploring her daughter to believe this. The little beaded bracelet is bright on Sylvia’s narrow wrist.
The men will pitch in and line up grills in Sadie’s side yard. They will circle their chairs, the legs gritty with pond sand, while the children play manhunt in the darkness, drawing out the last of the summer, every bit of it coursing through their limbs, the bottoms of their feet stained with tar and grass.
November 20, 2003
IN MID-NOVEMBER AUTHORITIES RESPOND TO an early-morning fire at the old Filley house and discover the skeletal remains of a young girl. Sadie reads the details in the Hartford Courant. There are photos of the house—blackened windows and ravaged stonework, the fields around it flattened by frost. The body is reported to be that of Francie Bingham. Investigators claim that the skull shows blunt trauma but suspect no foul play, speculating that twenty-four years ago she may have simply bumped her head and taken refuge in the then-abandoned house. Somehow, she got trapped in a hidden room and died. Sadie thinks that this version of events may spare Beth from any suspicion, but the cause of the fire is still under investigation. “The house was vacant at the time of the incident,” the article states. “The owner could not be reached for comment.”
Craig is upstairs dressing for work. Sadie hears his shoes hit the wood floor of the closet as he sorts them, looking for his brown pair. It is their anniversary, and Sadie has hired a sitter and planned a special dinner out that Craig knows nothing about. She feels the pleasure, the anticipation of Craig’s surprise. The children sit at the table with their cereal, spooning the brightly colored pieces into their mouths. They know about the plans and every so often glance toward the doorway, waiting for Craig to appear so they can feign ignorance. Behind them frost etches the kitchen windows.
Sadie remembers the day Francie went missing, how she watched Mrs. Bingham swoon onto the dewy grass, the way the officer bent and caught her like a ballroom dancer. Francie’s father stood apart, shaking his head, his hands on his hips, and she and Betty had joked about wood shavings caught in his gray curls. Neither of them discussed the word he called Francie’s mother or the other things Francie had written about in her letters. They were too young to really understand, Sadie thinks. Instead, she lay in bed that night and imagined herself in the arms of a boy she’d invented, a shock of sun-lightened hair over his eyes. A boy she’d always intended to be Ray Filley. She sees Francie’s face again, rounded with joy, the way it looked retrieving the letter from under the stone.
In September she drove back to Hamlet Hill to pick up Bea Sidelman for lunch, past the Schusters’, the Frobels’, the Donahues’ old house where the new owners have painted the door a bright periwinkle, past the house she grew up in with its tree grown too large, encroaching on the roof, with its sagging gutter and weed-filled beds. After lunch, she dropped Bea back off and drove up to the dead end and parked her car. She remembered the story Francie wrote to the boy she thought was Ray Filley. Someone came into my room, she wrote. Sadie has searched for her letters in boxes of her things from childhood, hoping she saved them. But she didn’t need to see the letters again to read beneath the fairy tale, to understand what was really happening at night in Francie’s bedroom. The stone was still there, heavy and pocked with mica, and she lifted it one last time, sifted through the dirt, and imagined she saw the decaying pieces of what may have been Francie’s last installment.
She left the dead end and drove to the Binghams’. The house, a split-level, had shed chips of paint into the hedges. Behind the house the trees were tall, the leaves turning fiery. At the door she was met by a man who said he lived there now. “And the Binghams?” Sadie asked.
“I’m the son,” he said. They spoke through the storm door screen. He was tall and stooped; his eyes took her in and then grew angry. “Look, we get a lot of you people nosing around—psychics, writers, curiosity seekers. It’s been twenty-four years, for God’s sake.”
Sadie shook her head. “No, please. I’m Sadie Watkins. I used to live up the street?”
The man stared at her—she watched his eyes warm with recognition. Then he shook his head. “Well, aren’t we both survivors of tragic circumstances. We should form a club.”
He opened the screen door. “Might as well come in,” he said. “I’m Stephen.”
Sadie hadn’t ever been in the Binghams’ house. The carpet was threadbare gold shag. She went up a short set of stairs to the living room, still decorated in a 1970s style, with long low couches and heavy drapes. “Pretty mod, huh?” Stephen said. He stood in the center of the room and invited her to sit down. “I’m just staying with my father,” he said, absolving himself of the condition of the decor.
All around the room were the wooden carvings Sadie remembered from Francie’s letters. The late-afternoon sun came in through the picture window and lit up the polished curves and edges of the wood. Shoe tree, she’d written. It stood in the corner, as tall as a coatrack, the trunk like a young maple, the branches spiraling out, laden with carved shoes of all varieties—ladies’ pumps, work boots, dress flats, elegant wing-tips. Sadie went up to the tree and ran a finger down one of the carved tongues, the laces. Behind her Stephen gave a dry laugh.
“Yeah, he was talented,” he said.
“Francie told us about these,” she said.
Stephen’s mouth flattened. “I never really met anyone who knew her,” he said. “Other than family.”
Sadie sat down on one of the couches in a patch of sunlight. Stephen sat down on the other across from her. Between them stood a coffee table on top of which sat a large wooden gun that seemed formed out of whorls and waves, dips and eddies comprising the barrel, a seagull perched on a floating log riding a current. “Water gun,” she said, smiling.
Somewhere in the house was the father, with his paws and crème de menthe breath, stretched out for a nap in a bedroom down the hall, or taking a shower, or sitting out back in the last bit of sun on the porch. Sadie didn’t ask where he was.
Instead, she said, “About Francie?” and Stephen nodded, eyes eager.
So Sadie told him all she could remember about his sister. Stephen listened, leaning toward her, his long face in his hand. Sadie made Francie into the girl she might have been. There wasn’t anyone to challenge her version. She attributed aspects of her own creations—the plays, the Haunted Woods—to Francie. She told Stephen about their childhood games, the way the neighborhood used to be. She said that he might even find the ruins of the last Haunted Woods in the pasture behind the old Donahue house—the crib, the maple table and chairs, all of it abandoned there, left to molder. Stephen took her then down the dark hallway to Francie’s room and showed her how it, too, hadn’t changed—the pink bedspread, the stuffed animals, the porcelain figurines lining her bedroom shelves staring down with their frozen, wise looks. Sadie hadn’t come to the house for this. She wasn’t sure why she’d come, except to see the father, confront him, and maybe tell him she knew why Francie had run off, why she’d chosen to believe a mysterious boy might save her. She wanted to divide the burden of guilt, hand him his part. But when there finally was a shuffling in the hall and the father appeared in the shadow of the doorway in his wool sweater, Sadie was leaving and had already decided to say nothing. Stephen held the door for her, and the autumn wind buckled the screen and brought the smell of burning leaves into the house. He smiled, grateful. They shook hands as if making a pact to adhere to the story she had told.
Back at home, Sadie shakes out the newspaper, takes a sip of her coffee. Sylvia tells Max that she will trace his hand and help him draw a perfect turkey when they get home from school. Sadie tells them it is almost time to go, to finish eating and brush their teeth. There may be snow before Thanksgiving, and then it will be Christmas, and they will go to Filley’s for their tree.
/> She’s seen Beth’s white car, occasionally, so Sadie assumes she is still in town, but as far as she knows Ray Filley never returned to the old house. In October, when she took the children to pick out pumpkins, and Indian corn to hang on the front door, she casually asked the woman behind the register about the family. She seemed hesitant to gossip until Sadie told her she was an old friend. Then the woman smiled and lowered her voice to share, a little too happily, Sadie thought, that Beth had spent some time in Silver Hill—the psychiatric hospital in New Canaan.
“The son,” she said. “I heard he ran off this summer—with a married woman.”
Sadie didn’t need to feign surprise. “Really? Who?”
The woman shrugged and placed Sadie’s purchases in a bag. “It’s a mystery.”
Sadie decided she deserved the annoyance she felt at the rumor, since she’d been the one to prompt the woman to talk. She took the bag from her and thanked her, called to Max and Sylvia to carry their pumpkins to the car. She drove back home, accepting that Ray was gone from her life forever, that her assumption that he’d only been using her as a stand-in for her mother was correct.
And then two weeks ago she retrieved the mail and spotted the plain white envelope, the familiar handwriting. She was afraid to open it—afraid to feel anything for him. She took it down to the basement in the laundry basket, the subterfuge ridiculous and unnecessary. In the glare of the overhead bulb she slipped the letter from the envelope and read it.
I feel I owe you an explanation, he wrote, for this summer—for that other summer. I know you have the suitcase, so you must suspect what happened between me and your mother, what had been happening all summer long. It was easy to meet until Francie went missing, and I was taken in and questioned in connection with her disappearance. Then Clare got nervous, afraid we’d be caught. We would talk about running off together, but it was all talk—until the afternoon she agreed to meet me at the old house like usual, and she showed up with her suitcase. She’d known about my parents’ plan to send me away before I did. If Francie hadn’t appeared we might have actually done it. I didn’t tell you the whole story about that day. Francie saw us both—your mother and me. She was there, staring in the window. We went to the back door and tried to reason with her, but it seemed to only make things worse. Clare and I agreed we had to keep silent when Francie ran off—for my sake as well as hers. She left the suitcase at the old house, and I spent the rest of the summer at school in New Hampshire living with one of the teachers, waiting for my chance to sneak away—but of course, classes began, and then it was too late. I never saw your mother again.
Ray might have been young—just a teenager—but Sadie didn’t doubt that he loved her mother. She leaned back against the washing machine and heard Sylvia and Max cross the kitchen floor above her head. She heard the refrigerator open. “What do you want?” Sylvia asked her brother, and Max rattled off all the things he couldn’t have: “Ice cream! Orange soda! Beer!” Sadie heard Sylvia laugh. “No, no, and no!” This was a game they played. “Apple!” Max cried. She heard the refrigerator door close, heard them cross the kitchen again and enter the den, the sound muffled by the carpet.
Sadie returned to Ray’s letter, which shifted to that past summer. He told how all those years ago he’d hidden the suitcase below the floorboards in the bedroom closet, how when he’d moved back into the old house the first thing he did was recover it.
I didn’t look inside right away, he wrote. The lock was jammed, and I admit I was afraid to open it—afraid of what I’d find.
Sadie thought of the letter in her hand—how she’d felt the same way about opening it—and she smiled sadly.
But that day you were supposed to meet me seemed like the right time. I can’t describe how I felt, looking at your mother’s old things. Everything was jumbled. I remembered her wearing the dress once to my parents’ house—but the clothes are all out of date now. I saw that she’d packed for a little weekend away, maybe lying to her husband about where she was going, sneaking off with me to a motel. The grandness of our plan, my great love, her tragic death—none of it had been real. She hadn’t died over any of that.
Sadie understood that he, too, had blamed himself for her mother’s death. He had come to see her differently and forgotten she was a mother, with a home and a child of her own, and a husband who may or may not have been attentive enough, and a percolator on the stove like his mother’s, and recipes cut out of the newspaper and women’s magazines, and a bottle of Chanel No. 5 on her bureau, and that at night she tucked her daughter into bed, and maybe read her a story, “The Elves and the Shoemaker,” or “The Ugly Duckling,” stories that held some moral message about beauty coming when you least expected it and the duty of selfless service. He’d forgotten about Mrs. Watkins and had become involved with someone named “Clare,” whose thighs and breasts and mouth no longer signified mother, just woman, and whose body, opened to him, became an object he could covet.
I didn’t want you to find out, Ray wrote. I’d been stupid, leaving the suitcase in the room, so I decided to put it back under the floorboard in the closet. The sky was building with clouds that day—it stormed later, remember? And the sun slipped out from behind a cloud and lit up the space below the planks where the suitcase once sat. I could see the light coming in below, too, between the cracks of the panels—the hidey spot—and something else, a bunch of old clothes. I thought maybe something had fallen out of the suitcase.
Sadie remembered the look in his eyes when he’d answered the door, imagined him prying open the sealed-up space, finding what was in there.
I had to call Beth, but she became hysterical when I asked her what was in the hidey spot. Still, I managed to piece together what had happened—that she’d followed me to the old house the afternoon I met Clare. That she’d hidden in the barn and watched Clare arrive with her suitcase. Beth saw Francie too. She couldn’t believe we let her run off into the woods. After Clare and I left, Beth chased Francie down with the intention of bringing her back—to clear my name, to absolve me of any crime. Francie stumbled and hit her head. This is possible. By then it would have been raining and wet. The woods are filled with stones. Beth said Francie wasn’t moving—she thought she was dead.
Sadie found her heart beating fast in her chest. She’d never believed Ray had any more to do with Francie’s death than she did—though she accepted that each of their omissions played a role. In any event, neither of them had saved her from Beth—whose story Ray seemed to feel a need to defend. Sadie could imagine Beth, fueled by her obsessive love for her brother, her fury at his being implicated in Francie’s disappearance, at his plans to run off with Clare, taking up a rock as a weapon to prevent Francie from running off. But Ray chose to believe Beth’s story.
She’d tried to protect me, he wrote, and had made things worse. She said she dragged the girl all the way across the meadow, back to the old house. That day I opened up the secret room and called her she was desperate to explain herself—said she was coming over to talk to me, to make me understand. But I understood enough—I didn’t want to hear any more. You see, she had to have put her there. No one else knew about it, Ray wrote. Just the two of us. And now you.
And then farther down he’d written an apology of sorts—one darkened with threat: I’d made a mistake, and then another mistake, and I saw that everything I’d done had been wrong. But you weren’t innocent in all of this either, were you? Someone agreed to meet that girl in the woods.
Sadie felt the accusation binding her to him.
I meant what I said on the beach, he wrote. I knew who I had. I knew who you were.
He signed it, Hezekiah.
After she’d read the letter she felt strangely calm. She stood in the basement under the bulb, listening to the washer move through its cycles, until she heard Craig, home from work, his footfalls on the floor above, the children’s shouts of greeting, his “Where’s your mother?” She folded the letter neatly and placed it i
n the bottom of the laundry basket. Later, once the children were in bed and Craig was dozing in front of the television, she took her mother’s old suitcase off the top shelf of her closet and put the letter with the others hidden in the suitcase’s silk pocket.
Sitting at her kitchen table, Sadie scans the article about the fire again. She thinks if not for the efficiency of the local fire department the old house might have burned to the ground, erasing any outward evidence of the past, depriving the Binghams of resolution, of an end to the waiting that Laura Loomis’s family still endures—if any of the family even remain. Sadie doesn’t try to imagine Francie’s last days in the narrow room, if, as the investigators suspect, she became conscious and discovered herself a prisoner there. But she realizes that Beth does imagine them, has for years—that she knows exactly what it would have been like, and even the destruction of the house would not allow her an escape from the memory of being trapped there herself.
She feels an overwhelming need to call someone from her old neighborhood, but other than Bea Sidelman, there is no one. Betty has made it her life’s practice to avoid Sadie, but Sadie imagines her now with the newspaper open to the same page, thinking the same thing about calling her and deciding against it. They are all alone with the stories they have never told, and even now, given Francie’s death, there is no real forgiveness. Sadie will not interfere with Stephen’s and his brother’s grief. She may tell one of the neighborhood women with whom she has made it a point to keep close—not all of the story, of course, just the part about the letters she wrote as a girl, which they may, in their way, forgive her for, perhaps confessing their own small childhood sins in the process.
Just after Sadie received the letter from Ray a Realtor’s sign went up in front of the Currys’ house, and they all watched as the rooms emptied out, saw the dismantling of the basement through their own windows—the evergreen swags, shards of colored glass, metallic bows, white false snow from the basement all set out in a trash can by the curb. There was an ad in the Yankee Flyer for the little houses, the electrical wiring, the miniature sets of furniture. When Kate and Walt Curry’s divorce was final Sadie learned that Kate’s son had not been in Europe after all, examining insects for an academic thesis, but that he’d died the winter before of an “undisclosed illness.” Maura called her and told her, and then said that they couldn’t have known. Sadie agreed but still felt the flutter of doubt, the dark brushing of its wings. Kate cared for all of their children and they’d never once asked her about her son. Didn’t they all wonder and say nothing? Isn’t this just as much a betrayal? She called Kate and left a convoluted message, expressing her condolences, but Kate never called her back. Her beautiful shoes still sit in the dark recesses of Sadie’s closet. Someone has seen her at Shaw’s Supermarket, her hair dyed a new color. Someone else says she has gotten an offer with a firm in New York City, or was it Boston? She will be spending part of the winter at a friend’s villa in Tortola.