The Drifter

by Christine Lennon

  “You’re in New York, right?”

  “Uh-huh,” Betsy answered. Betsy must have missed the rest of Gavin’s speech, because the next thing she heard was clapping, and some hoots of approval from Teddy’s fraternity brothers who rushed over and lifted him over their shoulders, threatening to take him out back and throw him in the pool.

  Gavin left the stage, and the actual bandleader took his place, cuing his musicians to play “The Way You Look Tonight.” As the first notes were played, the ceiling of the ballroom slowly retracted, revealing the cloud-flecked night sky and a blazing full moon.

  “Well look who it is,” said Gavin, nodding to Caroline. She stood up and gave him an awkward hug. Betsy looked at him with pleading eyes.

  “Nice speech,” Caroline offered. “Who knew you’d become such a softy?”

  “Nah, I’m still tough as nails,” he said, reaching over to take Betsy’s hand. “You made it! Let’s dance.”

  On the dance floor, filled with older couples swaying to the music, Betsy put her hand on his shoulder and leaned in close to his ear.

  “What the fuck happened to you?” he said through a clenched-tooth smile.

  “I took the bus to the airport. There was an accident on the Triborough Bridge and I missed the plane by, like, three minutes. It was a nightmare. I’m so sorry,” she said.

  “I know you don’t want to be here,” he said. “But it’s important to me, and to Teddy. Try not to pick a fight with Caroline, OK?”

  “Oh, so now I’m picking fights,” she said. “I missed a flight, Gavin. I’m not going to burn the place down.”

  Caroline must have had more catching up to do with the 399 other guests, because Betsy avoided her for most of the night without much effort, until the very end. Gavin went to call a cab back to the Chesterfield Hotel for the after-party, and Betsy ducked into the ladies’ room. Caroline was on a tufted bench in the lounge in a gossipy huddle with two women Betsy didn’t recognize.

  “Well, we’re heading back to the hotel,” Betsy said as she dried her hands with a small, monogrammed towel. “Maybe you’ll get lucky and you won’t have to hold anybody’s hair tonight.”

  Caroline’s friends stared at her blankly.

  “I’m sorry, what did you say?” Caroline asked. She shook her head and squinted her eyes in a pantomime of confusion.

  “You know, like at the Chi Phi house,” Betsy said. “What you said earlier about Melanie.”

  “Oh, right,” Caroline said, even flatter than before.

  There was so much tension between them, Betsy wanted to scream or grab Caroline’s shoulders and shake her, anything to break it.

  “So I’m going home to New York tomorrow, but I’ll see you around,” she said.

  “Yeah, sure. You’re going home,” Caroline said, mocking her for adopting New York as her native ground, yet another way to reject her and where they came from. “See you around.”

  Betsy felt her cheeks burn red as she turned to leave.

  “What was that all about?” she heard one of them ask.

  “Nothing. She’s just someone I knew a long time ago.”

  A FEW MONTHS after the wedding, the gossip about Caroline grew significantly darker. She’d started faking business expenses, going shopping when she claimed to be making the rounds of sales calls. She was missing her sales goals, staying out late, sleeping through appointments, and the slide down the slippery slope ended with a pink slip less than a year into the job. People in Miami said they saw her face on a couple of real estate ads on bus stops around town, and she was selling waterfront condos. In her email, Caroline mentioned that one of her clients, an English banker named Simon, had just closed a deal on a two-bedroom in South Beach. She wanted to keep it professional until the deal closed, but then he called her to say he was coming back to the States for some business in New York and asked her to meet him there.

  Betsy had offered her their air mattress for a few nights on their living room floor, though she knew Caroline wouldn’t take it, and rattled off some restaurant ideas and tourist alternatives in her usual way, determined to prove that she knew the real New York to anyone who might question her place there. She’d suggested meeting for lunch. She could show her around SoHo, maybe go vintage shopping in the East Village, come back to their apartment for a glass of wine (hence the grout excavation).

  Betsy kept her phone on her desk all day as she waited for Caroline’s call. When she didn’t hear from her by seven, Betsy went home, rummaged through the medicine cabinet for something stronger than Pamprin, but came up empty-handed. Then she ordered in Thai food and put on her warmest socks. The phone didn’t ring until 4:00 Saturday afternoon, more than twenty-four hours after Caroline’s arrival, when she called her from a bar. She was there with the Brit and some of his banker friends. It was the first time they’d spoken live without the filter of voice mail.

  “Hey, Bets, it’s Caroline.”

  “Hey, what’s up? Where are you?” Betsy noted the slightly scolding tone in her voice and vowed to keep it in check. She could have come to town and not called her, she reminded herself. At least Caroline made a small effort.

  “We’re at some bar. It’s so fucking cold I can’t stay outside for more than thirty seconds at a time. But listen, I’m going back to the hotel for a shower and a disco nap. Can you and Gavin meet us for dinner?”

  Gavin was standing near her in the kitchen and could hear Caroline shouting into the phone, and was shaking his head violently and mouthing, “No, no, no.” He wanted to avoid the drama, and he’d convinced Betsy that she needed to see Caroline alone, without a bodyguard.

  “Uh, no, Gavin can’t make it. But I’ll be there.”

  Betsy agreed to meet her at Union Square Cafe for dinner at 9:00. It was a freezing night but she decided to walk, thinking the sharp air would help her focus and calm her nerves. At the restaurant, she found Caroline at a long table in the back, wearing a dress far too short and spangly that hung loosely on her now bony frame, surrounded by men in sports coats and Brioni shirts with their own impossibly thin dates. Caroline’s once-thick shoulder-length blonde hair now looked more fragile, verging on white at the ends. Wrinkles were starting to grab at the corners of her eyes even when her smile faded. She had the tan skin of an avid runner in the Sunbelt that looked bizarre in this dark, wintry city, even in dim restaurant light. Betsy waved hello—Caroline was never a hugger—instantly regretting that she’d agreed to see her old, it would be fair to say former, friend in a group situation like this. Caroline waved and extended her index finger, as if to say “Just a minute,” and Betsy nodded. It had been seven years. What difference would a minute make? She took a chair at the end of the table between Caroline’s friend and a slightly bloated guy named Damien who had two full bottles of Heineken perched next to his untouched rib eye on the starched white tablecloth.

  “Simon,” said Caroline, grabbing the arm of an only slightly less bloated but much redder in the face man, “This is my long-lost friend, Elizabeth, the one I’ve been telling you about.” She looked at Betsy with a raised eyebrow.

  “It’s Betsy, actually,” she said. Caroline rolled her eyes and mouthed “What the fuck?” before she turned to the man on her left, who was in the middle of what he thought was a hilarious story about a mortgage mix-up at work, and didn’t bother to pause for an introduction.

  “I’m sorry?” Simon shouted over the din at the table, pulling a Marlboro out of the pack and placing it between his lips.

  “BETSY. MY NAME. I’M ELIZABETH AT WORK, BUT MY FRIENDS CALL ME BETSY.”

  Or they would, if I had any friends outside of work.

  “Oh, right, right. She told me that, too. Do you smoke, Betsy?”

  The answer was no, not anymore, but she took one anyway. Outside on the inch-thick ice covering the sidewalk, they chatted for a while about how awful American cigarettes were and how tiny the hotel rooms were in Manhattan. Simon was staying at the Morgan, where the rooms were
dark, ghastly, really, but the bar was open til 4:00 a.m. Simon had his priorities. Halfway through their cigarettes, Caroline, who put all of her weight behind the colossal wooden door and just barely budged it open enough for her to slip through, came teetering out, unsteady in stilettos and shivering in a borrowed wool coat. Betsy took a drag of the cigarette with her left, gloveless hand.

  “There y’all are,” Caroline said. Her eyes darted immediately to Betsy’s ring. Her ‘y’all’ had always been reserved for special occasions, and apparently this was one of them. She linked her arms around fat Simon’s waist for warmth. “I had a feeling I’d find you here.”

  Was this man she was hanging on, deferring to in a way that was so unlike Caroline that she hardly recognized her, really a complete stranger? A client who paid her 15 percent commission?

  “Hey, Nanook of the North,” she said, eyeing Betsy’s Army/Navy store peacoat and extra-thick black tights. “Aren’t you bundled up like an Eskimo tonight? I bet you can still feel your toes, though! I know I cannot feel mine. Last time I was here was a year ago August. People say Florida is hot, but this place was Hades.”

  Betsy understood this as the dig Caroline intended. She had been in New York and not bothered to call. Betsy’s next move had to be defensive, retaliatory.

  “Well I, for one, am surprised that you didn’t pull one of your mom’s furs out of storage for the occasion,” said Betsy, surprised by how angry her voice sounded. “I know how you love the scent of mothballs and Shalimar.”

  Betsy noted the tiniest wince in Caroline’s face as she pretended to wipe a stray ash from her eye.

  Back inside, Caroline waved Betsy into the ladies’ room, and again into a shared stall to chat about her bar crawl with Simon while she scooped bumps out of a brown vial with the tip of his hotel key. That explained the $600 worth of uneaten food on the table. She offered some to Betsy, which she declined just to prove a point of some kind. She was mad at Caroline for not calling sooner, even though the two were practically strangers now, and drugs weren’t going to change anything. Caroline shrugged off the snub and then rattled on about Miami, how South Beach was still totally happening, no matter what people were saying about it being over, about how Hurricane Andrew was, like, ages ago. They went back to the table, where the men were settling the check. All of them tossed their credit cards in a pile and asked the long-suffering waiter to choose one at random onto which he’d charge the entire bill. This was the favorite game of a certain young, moneyed population in town, and it made Betsy squirm with discomfort, recognizing that her own card would be swiftly declined under the burden of that one uneaten dinner. Betsy offered to pay for her wine, but the men batted her hand away. As if, their eyes said. They piled into cabs to ride the twelve blocks to a forgettable bar in the West Village and she agreed to one more drink with the fancy accent dickheads before calling it a night. Inside, after a single round, she got up to leave.

  “Afraid you’ll miss something good on TV?” said Caroline as Betsy shoved her arms into the sleeves of her stiff coat. “Don’t worry. I’m sure Gavin’s keeping your spot on the couch warm.”

  “Oh, Caroline, it’s been a pleasure,” said Betsy, tossing down a twenty-dollar bill for her watery vodka tonic, the rage creeping into her shaking hand. “It’s nice to see that some things, including your hostility, never change.”

  “I don’t want your money,” Caroline said, throwing the twenty back at her.

  “No, Caroline, really, you keep it. Buy a scarf. Maybe some blizzard appropriate footwear? You don’t want frostbite. You’ll need your toes back home in the land of eternal sandal season.”

  Betsy bolted for the door, blood burning in her cheeks. Caroline came barreling after her.

  “Betsy . . .” Caroline shouted. Betsy spun around to confront her.

  “So that’s it, right? We haven’t had a real conversation since Ginny . . . since Ginny . . .” She couldn’t get the words out. She stopped and started again. “I haven’t spoken to you for more than thirty seconds since Ginny died, and this is how it’s going to be,” said Betsy, refusing to stop until they were outside the door and she could enjoy watching Caroline freeze some more. She’d thought of Caroline so many times when she was back at home in Venice with her mom, and in the early months, even years, in New York, when she felt so alone and nearly ached for Ginny.

  “Oh, are you talking about Ginny’s funeral? When you hid in the back like a big, fat baby? Please spare me your sanctimonious bullshit, Betsy. Our best friend died and you stood in the back of Nana Jean’s dining room propped against the wall like you were the corpse. And then you took off,” Caroline said. “You just left town! Totally bailed. You couldn’t be bothered with the sun-dried idiots back home anymore, right?” said Caroline, eyes flashing, more the Caroline she knew in that moment than at any other during the night. Betsy searched those eyes for recognition, for softness, but they were hard and glassy and cold and filled with years of spite.

  “I had to! I had to get out of Gainesville, Caroline. I couldn’t deal,” she said, fighting her tears. Caroline was not going to see her cry. “Ginny was gone and I didn’t know how I was going to go on.”

  For a split second, Caroline’s body looked like it was starting to relax with forgiveness, with understanding. Then her shoulders crept closer to her ears and she steeled herself against the wind.

  “It’s all about you, right? Ginny’s fucking murder didn’t affect me at all, did it? I was the one who found her body. You didn’t stop to think that you weren’t the only one in pain, did you? You don’t even realize what a joke you are. You and Gavin playing house, and now you’re married? You married the guy I bought pot from in college. Well played, Elizabeth. Even your name is a joke.”

  “Oh, I’m the joke? It’s twenty degrees. You’re wearing a fourteen-inch dress, coked out of your head with a fat, old, beet-faced man you don’t even know,” said Betsy, tears falling despite her efforts. “And the saddest part is that in the morning I’m the only one who will remember the shit you’re spewing. Why don’t you go back to Miami and get fired a few more times? Prove that you’re the one who isn’t the joke. Or I guess Mommy can’t shit-can her only child, right? How’s that for job security?”

  “We’re done, Betsy,” began the last words Caroline shouted while Betsy scrambled across the ice for a cab. “And if it weren’t for Ginny defending you and your self-righteous bullshit, we’d have been done a long time ago.” Betsy watched through the back window of the cab as Caroline stood there, shaking in the cold, defiant, her hair suddenly wild in a gust of wind as the driver pulled away.

  CHAPTER 19

  THE FOLDER

  February 17, 1998

  Gavin was already asleep by the time Betsy came home, tears partially frozen on her eyelashes, angry, buzzed, and miserable from the unholy mix of red wine and vodka she’d consumed with Caroline. She flung her coat on the back of a chair, pried off her boots, and chucked them into a basket near the door. She sat down on the sofa in the dark and replayed the events of the evening in her head. Betsy hadn’t expected much from Caroline, but she had considered the idea that calling her before this trip to New York was, at least in part, an olive branch. It had been over seven years since Ginny died, since they’d spoken at any length, and to get her message out of the blue with the news she was coming to town seemed a little like a flare shot from across enemy lines, a call for a truce. They’d had that weird exchange at Teddy’s wedding. Betsy and Gavin didn’t invite Caroline to their wedding. Ginny, their peacekeeper, was long gone, and though history and experience hadn’t erased Betsy’s bitter memories of Caroline completely, they’d been blurred around the edges, worn by time, and she was beginning to remember the good in her, or if not the good, exactly, at least the fun parts. Betsy realized, too, that Caroline seemed like an amateur compared to the ice queens she had met at work. While Betsy hadn’t endured much hazing herself, per se, the stories of interoffice torture, the chewing up and
spitting out of assistants, were legend. Rumor had it that one of her colleagues, a beleaguered assistant to the head of Impressionist Art, was driven to the edge of her sanity so many times that one day she snapped and urinated on a pear before she sliced it and presented it to her boss on Tiffany porcelain. A few times, Betsy had been allowed to stand in an officious-looking line on the side of the room and accept phone bids. Despite her effort to cajole Australian bankers, Hollywood producers, or budding tech entrepreneurs into opening their wallets, she typically came up empty-handed. Jessica, however, was a master. Once, she charmed an eccentric heir and notorious recluse to pay nearly a million dollars for a stamp. Betsy’s proximity to such major-league manipulators had bolstered her confidence, and Caroline seemed stuck in the minors.

  She went to the kitchen to pour herself another vodka, with plenty of ice and a couple of olives, by the light of the refrigerator. Then, almost reflexively, she walked over to the metal desk she and Gavin kept in their “home office,” a repurposed dining alcove lined with DIY bookshelves, flicked on the vintage lamp that they had found on the street, and opened the large file drawer to look for the folder.

  It was tucked in the back of the drawer, behind her tax records, a few shockingly thin manila folders with the critical mementos of her life—her birth certificate, a handful of letters from her father dating back to 1982, random ticket stubs. It had been two years since she’d searched for it, and even then it was only to stuff in an interview clipping with a screenwriter who claimed Scottie McRae was the inspiration for his popular, cult slasher movie, with a ruthless killer who posed as a sensitive singer/songwriter, like a bloodthirsty Bob Dylan. But she thought of the folder often, daily, for a while, and then not once in the past year.

  The newspaper clippings, from The Tampa Tribune, the Orlando Sentinel, anything Kathy could find in those early days after Ginny’s death, were yellowed and crumbling now. There was a flurry of renewed interest in 1995, around the time of McRae’s sentencing hearing. From these clippings she’d created a person, a composite character, a face, and a story to associate with the figure who haunted her, even behind bars and with all of that time stacked up against him.