by Lisa Unger
“There was a fight that night, too,” the detective said.
“With her boyfriend,” I said. “She fought with her boyfriend.”
I thought about Gregg and how he had never looked the same after Elizabeth died. Even now, he looks thinner and less golden than he used to. That’s what happens when tragedy touches us. It fades out the colors, takes off the shine. Of course, we all know that the world tends toward destruction, that everything withers and falls to pieces. But we imagine that there’s so much time. When someone we love dies suddenly and tragically, it’s like seeing the curvature of the earth. You always knew it was round, a contained sphere floating in space. But when you see the bend in the horizon line, it changes your perspective on everything else.
I sat silent, waiting for the detective to go on. But he didn’t. He stood in the doorway a second and then walked out. I sensed he was trying to make a point, but I didn’t know what it was. I heard him talking to Lynne and Frank, and I sat there, shaking, until Ainsley walked in.
She had dark rings under her eyes, and her hair was wild. She sat where the detective was sitting and reached out for my hand. Mine looked big and ugly next to hers.
“I can’t go through this again,” she said. “I think I might go home. My parents are coming tomorrow.”
“No,” I said. I didn’t want to be alone here in the room without either of them. “It’s fine. You’ll see. She’ll come back.”
“I can’t sleep,” she said. She put her head down on our clasped hands and started to cry. She was the most sensitive of the three of us. She freaked out at exam time, got edgy when she’d had too much caffeine, cried at sad movies. Ainsley was a delicate spirit, gentle and easily upset. I moved around to her this time and put my arms around her. We sank together to the floor, the chair scraping back. I could hear the low rumble of voices in the other room.
“It’s going to be fine,” I said. “You’ll see.”
She didn’t say anything for a minute. Then she stood, ran her hands through her hair, and wiped her eyes. I grabbed a paper towel from the roll and handed it to her; she blew her nose. Her cheeks were flushed, and her eyes rimmed red. She came back over and moved in close to me.
“I didn’t tell them how late you really came in,” she whispered. “But where were you all that time?”
I couldn’t tell her where I’d been. I couldn’t tell anyone.
10
Dear Diary,
He is an unnatural little boy. But I love him, I really do. He is as pale and beautiful as a doll, with inky hair and eyes. He is quiet, unsmiling, watchful. He doesn’t cuddle really, and I haven’t yet heard him laugh. Still, he belongs to me and I to him. We are rarely apart; he can’t stand to be away from me. And other than my husband and my mother, there is not a babysitter in town who will stay with him. He rages and cries inconsolably until my return, when he goes silent again. Through no choice of my own, he has become my whole world.
After those difficult early months, the rocky road of early parenthood smoothed out some. We normalized, or at least we settled into the new normal of our lives. My mother rented out her house and took an apartment nearer us here. It was clear early on that I could not handle him on my own. With the postpartum depression and his diagnosis as a “high demand” infant, everyone was anxious for us. There had been too many frightening stories in the news that year, women who snap and sink their car into a lake, or drown their babies one by one in the bath. Did they think I was one of those women? I don’t know. But I was rarely unsupported in the first year.
I feel the worst for my mother, who had a lovely life on the beach, and who has given it up for us.
“I’m sorry,” I told her after a particularly challenging afternoon with the baby. Both of us collapsed in a heap after we finally got him down for the night. “I’m sorry we did this to you.”
She put her hand on mine. “Don’t be silly,” she said. “A mother doesn’t stop being a mother when her children are grown.”
“You were so happy,” I said. I thought of her bustling life of tennis clinics and book clubs, days at the beach. “Finally.”
She just shook her head, her blond bob bouncing.
“A mom doesn’t get to be happy when her child is unhappy,” she said. “That’s just the way it is.”
It was the first time she’d ever looked old to me.
But as the baby grew, and I left the pall of depression behind me, things got easier. Was motherhood what I expected? No. Was he the kind of baby I imagined—fat and happy, cooing and nuzzling? No. But that’s life. As parents, we must accept that our children are who they are. We can’t make them into something we want, or be disappointed in them because they don’t meet our artificial expectations. At least that’s what my shrink tells me. Not every child is affectionate, she said. And that’s hard to accept, but accept it you must.
Now my mother lives with us up north in the late spring and summer, and in the winter months near my sister (who, of course, never needs any help because she is perfect in every way). I try not to let her know that every time she leaves, I count the days until she returns. Without her, we are housebound.
When she’s here, my husband and I steal out for secret dates. We go for walks and have romantic dinners where no talk of the baby is permitted. Sometimes we play tennis, or just go to the gym together. And in those stolen hours, we remember how much we love each other, how much fun we’ve always had together. When my mother is away, we have “home dates.” We build fires, and open a bottle of wine. But we talk in whispers, always afraid of waking him. Sometimes it seems like if we enjoy ourselves too much, he wakes up wailing. And then it will be hours of me in his room, walking and rocking until he goes back to sleep.
I know it’s my fault. He is traumatized by his early life, by the fact that it took me a long time to warm to him, to bond with him. And I believe (though my husband disagrees, thinks that I’m being dramatic) it has impacted him in ways that I might never be able to mend. I think about the violence of his entry into this life, a journey that almost killed us both—the drugs, the eventual surgery. It damaged us. But I will try to repair what has been broken; I will spend my life trying to be a better mother than I was the first few months of his life.
My husband wants another baby. He says it’s time. And, of course, that’s all anyone ever says. “Time for another one!” Everyone says this … relatives, friends, grocery-store checkout clerks. It’s like a conspiracy, as though all people who have borne multiple children have had a chip implanted in their brains. Whenever a mother with only one child approaches, this preprogrammed message emits from their open mouths. Have ‘em close, or they’ll never be friends. And I always smile shyly and say, “We’re trying!”
But we are not trying. At least I’m not. I am on the birth control pill and I will stay on it for the rest of my childbearing years. Because there is not enough of me for this child and another one. He wants all of me; I can see that. There is no room inside of me for anyone else.
I am being dishonest with my husband. He doesn’t know about the pills. He thinks I’m tracking my ovulation and that we are both hoping for another child soon. There’s something nice about it, the idea that we might be like normal people, excited and happy to bring another person into the world. That we are making love and hoping that the act is one of creation, and not just pleasure. I can almost feel the tug toward that.
But the thought of another child now only fills me with dread. The day when I see that dark red bloom on my underpants is the happiest day of the month. Isn’t that awful? Everybody hates a woman who doesn’t want another child, as if you’re in some way shirking your biological imperative. I love my child, more than my own life. And more even than that, I love the child I will not bear. I love that child too much to bring him or her into this family with its poisoned gene pool.
I keep this to myself. If my mother sees it, she has not said so. My husband, even while exhausted by our child’s ceasel
ess demands, seems to think our boy is the sun and the moon. If the baby doesn’t smile, doesn’t cuddle, and has only just a few words—“no,” “mama,” “bunny,” and “more”—my husband always has a ready excuse. He’s the strong and silent type, he’ll quip. Or: Not everyone is a snuggle bunny like you, baby. Or: He’s a serious guy, an old soul.
He doesn’t want to see, I know that. I understand. I don’t want to either. So I go along and pretend it’s all right. Only the baby’s pediatrician seems to register concern. Is he always so watchful? Do you find that he smiles much? If he doesn’t have more words at his next visit, we’ll need to address that with a specialist. I just nod and say that we’ll keep an eye on it.
“So,” the doctor always says before we leave. “Are you thinking about another one?”
Before my son was born, I always believed that love was enough to overcome any obstacle. I believed in nurture over nature. But now I know. When I look at my boy, I see my father. My father who was put to death for the murder of five teenage girls. He is long dead, lives on only as the star of my nightmares, and in my child’s eyes.
11
“Hey! Wait up!” Beck’s voice rang out, bouncing around the night. I kept walking, my head down.
“Come on,” she yelled. “Give me a break.”
I kept moving faster and faster, digging in deep. I had my headphones on, so I could pretend that I didn’t hear her, that she wasn’t behind me.
I walked along the path that led away from campus. It brought you up to the edge of The Hollows Wood, where the school had created and maintained paths through some of the state-owned acreage. There was a two-mile, four-mile, and eight-mile loop that wound through the woods or down along the banks of the Black River, or up to the highest elevation in The Hollows, a scenic lookout over a steep drop into the river below called Bird’s Eye Rock.
Up there, you could see the whole town of The Hollows and into the foothills of the Adirondack Mountains. I had watched brilliant sunsets and soaring eagles, a fire that raged through a warehouse on the edge of town. I had smoked dope up there with Beck. But usually I went up there alone when the world was pressing in and the weight of all my secrets was crushing me.
It was the one place in the whole world where I could just be myself, with no eyes watching. And that’s where I was headed, even though it was dark and cold. It was where I wanted—no, needed—to be. Beck would never follow me there, I thought. But she did.
After the detective left, and Lynne and Frank returned to their hotel, I was more than a little grateful for the distraction of Luke’s poem. Otherwise, I’d have just lain there staring out the window at the moon and ruminating on all the dread possibilities. The doctor had warned me about too much down time, where that catastrophic thinking of mine had room to grow, expand, wrap around me like a strangling vine.
So I took the card and key from my jacket pocket and reread the poem, held the old key in my hand. I was surprised to find myself hoping for a challenge, something to occupy my busy brain, but it didn’t take me very long to figure out Luke’s poem. After all, mad genius or not, he was still an eleven-year-old boy who would sit in his room and play video games all day if he could. How creative could he really be?
I opened my laptop and started searching: “Hollows, New York, Suicide.” The first listing on the search engine was for The Hollows Historical Society Web site.
I already knew that there were lots of supposedly haunted places in The Hollows. So many that the historical society offered a “haunted tour” in the weeks leading up to Halloween as a fund-raiser for preserving some of the town’s oldest buildings. And people came from all over to creep themselves out.
For weeks, there were small white buses carting people around the town. There were walking tours, Segway tours (oh my God, really?), and kiddie tours that ended with hot cider and pumpkin muffins at the Old Mill. There was even a stop on our campus. (Naturally, the fraternity boys lived for this tour.) Once upon a time, our college used to be a convent, and our dorms were the cloisters where the nuns had lived.
In the early 1900s, one of the young novices managed to get pregnant. She was apparently able to hide it for the duration, and then died trying to give birth by herself. The baby was given away for adoption. Residents of the Marianna dormitory had, for decades, claimed to see her wandering the halls, looking for her lost child. It’s the last stop on the tour. As the guide dutifully tells the sad tale, the Delta Phi boys inevitably turn up draped in sheets and smelling of beer, and walk by, moaning. It’s usually good for a big laugh from the tour group, who are apparently quite aware of the silly nature of the whole thing but enjoy it anyway.
I scrolled through The Hollows Historical Society Web site, scanning their list of haunted sites—complete with an album of photos, creepy music, and a well-written history of each location. It took me about five minutes of reading to find the place on which Luke had based his lousy poem.
Within its walls,
For a hundred years,
People have learned and prayed and died.
Now, some believe, a tortured soul is trapped inside.
I read about a small, dilapidated building, erected in 1901, that sat sad and abandoned in the old cemetery down by the high school. It had lived several lives, first as one of the original schoolhouses in The Hollows, later as an Episcopal church, then finally as the office of the cemetery caretaker and a storage facility for the equipment needed to keep the grounds.
During the 1918 influenza pandemic, it had been used as a makeshift hospital, and five people died there. There was a colorful description of each of the five ghosts—a man, a woman, and three children. They wandered about at night: the children who happily play among the tilting headstones, the woman who is searching for something, forever looking behind trees, and the man who stands stock-still always beside the same grave.
But there was only one brief sentence about the caretaker who in 1995, as Luke so eloquently put it, drank a bottle of whiskey and ate the barrel of his gun. Another caretaker had never been found, and now it was the people of the historical society who through volunteer efforts maintained the graveyard.
Of course, the Web site had an agenda to run, to make things sound scary enough to attract but not frightening enough to repel. So the mention of the relatively recent suicide was brief and underplayed. It was as if only old ghosts were permitted to wander The Hollows, harmless shades who passed hundreds of years ago. The spirits wandering around The Hollows were just harmless tricks of light, and the wind through the trees, and the idea that maybe, maybe there might have been something moving in the dark. Certainly nothing real or terrifying, nothing horrible enough to keep people away, only enough to draw the curiosity seekers in. A suicide, the ghost of the man who in terrible psychic pain committed suicide, is not among the featured, harmless Hollows shades.
Why did he do it?
What secret did he hide?
But, of course, there are no secrets anymore. Not in the electronic age, where we lay everything bare or it is laid bare for us. Every ugly thing on earth is just a few keystrokes away. That’s why you must be so careful.
As I continued to move through the listings on the search page, I found a news item about the man who committed suicide in the graveyard shack, Harvey Greenwald.
He was a wretched man, a crooked golem with a deeply lined face, and wet, wide blue eyes lashed thick like a girl’s. It would be easy to say he was a convicted pedophile, a porn addict, facing yet another accusation, because according to the newspaper article I found online, he was all of those things.
But he was also a husband, a father of two young girls. I know, from bitter personal experience, that there is always so much more to people than what is written about them in police reports and newspaper articles. They never get it quite right, as if the retelling of a life makes it less than what it is—or was. He was a good man, his wife was quoted as saying. What they say about him, it isn’t true. It can’t
be. He left a note with a brief single sentence: I’m sorry.
In the articles about the investigation, a familiar name kept popping up: Detective Jones Cooper. He was Dr. Cooper’s husband, and he’d also been the lead investigator on Elizabeth’s disappearance. It was odd to see his name. I remembered him; he’d made me nervous. He’d asked a lot of questions of me, seemed to think I was hiding something. Of course I had been.
Ainsley had taken an Ambien, turned on her whale sounds, and donned her lavender-scented eye mask in a hale effort to get some sleep. It had been hours since Lynne and Frank had left, both of them looking dazed and worried. I didn’t see any of the vitriol between them that Beck had so often described. They seemed to share a sad and tender connection. He kept a hand on the small of her back as they left the room. I’d seen him take a strand of her silken blond hair, she touch his tattooed arm. Beck’s name was tattooed around one of Frank’s wrists, in linked letters that looked more like a tribal pattern than anything else; Lynne on the other. They didn’t seem like people about to get divorced. I could see why Beck found them so confusing. We hate our parents for having their own lives, don’t we, for making decisions for themselves that don’t seem to take us into account. They’re not people, not really. They’re parents; how dare they live and love and die without us?
I looked out the window to see that the snow, which had fallen earlier, had all melted away, and the precipitation had stopped. But I didn’t have my bike to ride over to the cemetery. That’s what you were supposed to do, right? Go to the place and find the next clue? I kept looking for the key with my fingertips, feeling the warm metal now and again like a touchstone. What would that key unlock? What was the secret that Harvey Greenwald hid? What kind of an agenda was Luke running? And why did I care?
My friend was missing. My homicidal father wanted to talk. I had big problems that needed attention. Still, I felt that same urgency to play Luke’s game that I had when we were playing chess. Maybe, like in the chess games we played, he was way ahead of me—his moves already planned, and my demise already assured. Still I couldn’t keep myself from playing. I wanted to know what Harvey Greenwald’s secret was. I wanted to find that next clue. In that moment I wouldn’t have been able to tell you why. Maybe I just wanted to win. Or maybe, really, I was just looking for a distraction, a temporary escape from the ugly things looming. Or maybe, even then, I sensed that this scavenger hunt was more than just a child’s game.