The Drifter

by Christine Lennon

  “Don’t be so sure,” said Holly, calling for them at the end of the hall. “Here. I spotted one from 1988.”

  Sure enough, the top row of towering bangs gave it away at twenty paces. Betsy was on the second row from the bottom. It was a different photo than the one in the email, just row after row of faces, each with its own imprint and shards of memories attached. She’d forgotten about her own photo from sophomore year, that shiny forehead, a last glimpse of her long hair, and the shirt with the lace collar that should have been pressed. In the row above her were Caroline Finnerty and Ginny, Virginia Harrington, hazel eyes shining, her hair falling past her shoulders in heavy brunette waves. Betsy and Caroline were so lost in that photo they didn’t hear Stacy approach them from behind.

  “Every time I see the two of you together I expect her to come around the corner at any minute,” she said. Stacy was the first one, the only one, brave enough to mention the missing piece. “It’s got to be hard to be here without her.”

  Betsy and Caroline heard what she said, but they were speechless. Their eyes were locked on the photo. Neither one could tear them away.

  BACK ON THE bus, it was standing room only in the thick, stifling air, since more people had joined the reunion tour. The part of Betsy’s brain that retrieved faces and names from the distant past on demand was on overload. She just nodded and smiled at anyone who looked her way. Once they were parked, the shimmering purple bus door with the celestial scene slid open and spilled forth a clown car’s worth of middle-aged women who were off to find their respective visor-wearing mates in Izod shirts. Lacoste had created a staggering variation of orange and blue stripes, wide-wide-narrow, narrow-wide-narrow, all narrow, all wide, which were all on display here. Betsy fought her way through the crowd on Caroline’s arm, dazed from the heat and the beer, hobbled by swollen feet in her defiantly non-athletic shoes. Gavin had mentioned that Teddy would be in for the game from Savannah, where he was an architect who designed mammoth beach houses for red-faced, Atlanta businessmen and their grandchildren. They had talked about Gavin coming, too, but in the end she knew this was something she had to do on her own. She made a note in her phone of the parking space where Teddy would be tailgating, thinking how much less fun things would have been back then if you were so easily found, textable, traceable, identified by a pin dropped on a tiny, electronic map. She spotted Teddy through the crowd instantly, same rumpled blue oxford, a red cap pulled low to the top of his glasses, a few graying blonde curls springing around the back of it.

  “Betsy Young, in the flesh,” he said. “Jesus, it’s like seeing a ghost.” If any of Gavin’s other old buddies in his immediate company was interested in seeing her, they didn’t show it. Their wide, dark, black glasses concealed any glimpse of enthusiasm for life they might experience until kickoff, when all of the rage and passion they’d been storing up during the off-season let loose. If they’d always been boring, Betsy hadn’t noticed in school. She had interpreted their aloofness as proof that they were special, above it all, but she realized now that it was in fact a kind of smoke screen to conceal that they didn’t have much to say, or at least not to her. They had become exactly like their own fathers, the graying men in khaki shorts with the giant RVs, wearing hats to cover beleaguered hair follicles clinging to their scalps like sparse, windswept scrub on the side of a cliff.

  Whatever trouble she was having with Gavin, she was sure she’d ended up with the best from the lot and was grateful for the renewed perspective. Teddy was a close second. He had come up north for Betsy and Gavin’s wedding with Melanie, and Gavin had seen him a handful of times for fishing trips. Betsy only half remembered his attempts to reach out to her during the blurry days she left Gainesville for good. But she remembered that he tried.

  “Teddy, you remember Caroline,” she said, stepping aside to let them shake hands.

  “How do you forget Caroline?” he said.

  “Yeah, right, scary Caroline,” she said, looking over her giant sunglasses at Betsy. “I was nothing compared to the bitches who run this place now.”

  “I’m fully aware that this will make me sound like a Quaker,” said Betsy. “But do you think these girls are aware that their butt cheeks are hanging out of their shorts?”

  “Sorry, I hadn’t noticed,” laughed Teddy. “That would make me a sad, divorced, middle-aged man, trying to relive his youth. And I am far from it.”

  “Hey, Betsy, do you think any of these girls wear giant T-shirts over their bathing suits when they’re in the hot tub like we did?” said Caroline.

  “Watch your use of pronouns, Car. There was no ‘we’ in the hot tub, because, you know . . .”

  “Yes, I know that you thought you were going to get the clap from some residue left behind.”

  “Doesn’t the chlorine kill all of that stuff?” asked Teddy.

  “Not according to my mother,” said Betsy. “Anyway, I don’t think any of the girls I’ve seen today would get in a hot tub. It would ruin their blowout,” said Betsy.

  “Anybody want a beer?” Caroline nodded hello to the grumpy semicircle of men protecting the cooler, poured one into her cup, and started a roundtable discussion about the Florida quarterback at the time, Tim Tebow, and his alleged virginity.

  “So did Remi start that preschool? You know, the labor camp one where they all have ‘jobs’?” asked Teddy.

  “Oh, yeah. She started this year,” said Betsy, surprised that Teddy and Gavin had spoken so recently.

  “And Gavin? How’s he?”

  “Well, it sounds like you could answer that question as well as I could.”

  “I remember that night I saw you together at Weird Bobby’s, before you took off for New Orleans,” he said, shaking his head. “I thought, ‘They’re going to hate each other’s guts, or they’re going to get married. Nothing in between.’”

  “Or both?” added Betsy, with a weak smile, but she quickly regretted it.

  They could hear the distant sound of the marching band through the crowd.

  “If you ask me, you got lucky. Really lucky,” he said. “It just works that way for some people. But if I talk anymore about feelings, they’re going to run me out of town. Maybe even the state.”

  “It’s true,” Betsy said. “It’s Florida. Men who talk about their feelings would be happier elsewhere.”

  “Speaking of, I’m headed back to Tampa to see my folks before I fly back home tomorrow. You want to skip the recap on the bus ride home and come along?” said Teddy.

  “Oh Lord, yes, please,” said Caroline, who had given up on trying to sully Tebow’s reputation and returned to the conversation. “You’ve had enough of this by now, right? No need to barrel back down memory lane when the mascara starts to run. Blood, sweat, and tears, am I right?”

  After making plans to text Teddy after the game, they made the long ascent to the upper deck. Once inside the stadium, they wound their way through the crowd, up the endless ramp to the very top. By the time they were out into the stadium, the dizzying height, the roar of the crowd, and the heat conspired against her. The two friends sat pressing their shoulders against their sweat-drenched seatmates. At the end of the first quarter, a halting, commercial-interrupted bore of a game, Betsy made her confession.

  “Caroline, I just realized, once and for all, that I don’t really like football,” she said, at almost a whisper.

  “Holy shit! Are you serious? Do you seriously hate football?” her voice escalated slowly, and Betsy started to remember why they were friends. She stood up.

  “Wow, you hate football?” Caroline was practically yelling.

  “You are an ass,” said Betsy, trying to suppress her smile, pulling on her arm to get Caroline to sit back down on the hard aluminum bench. The fans around them started to boo, yelling at Caroline to sit down, and Betsy made a run for the exit while the people in the surrounding seats launched trash at her. Caroline followed her out, cackling with laughter over their loud jeers. They sprinted down wh
at seemed like thousands of concrete stairs, like a low-security jailbreak, and burst back into the vast parking lot. They made their way across the street in search of someplace familiar, only to realize that all of the old places had been replaced with slicker, more polished but somehow sadder versions of their predecessors, kind of like Times Square. She was devastated to discover that Bagelville was long gone, replaced by a Schlotzsky’s. She wondered what happened to Tom. The old vegetarian restaurant in the Victorian house had been converted into a plantation-style bar with shady outdoor seating, outfitted with fans that sprayed a delicate mist of cool vapor on its inebriated patrons. There was over an hour wait for a table at the hostess stand, but Caroline being Caroline had talked her way into two empty seats at a table in the far corner of the wide patio occupied by a couple of meek grad students who didn’t have the balls to tell her she couldn’t sit down, directly under a mister with an unencumbered sight line to the TV. By the third quarter, Caroline was giving Charles, the smaller one with the recessed chin, dating advice, and Betsy was showing Albert photos of Remi on her phone.

  “Just don’t tell her you love her, Charles,” said Caroline. “Trust me, she’s walking all over you.”

  Out of some sense of obligation to the past, they ordered a massive plate of chicken nachos and a couple of bourbon and Cokes.

  “Ah, bourbon on a hundred-degree day. I feel like I’m twenty again,” said Caroline.

  “If that means you feel insecure about your thighs and sticky from sweat, so do I,” said Betsy. They sat in silence, pretending to watch the game, half listening to the conversations between the people two decades their junior that surrounded them.

  “I don’t even remember what we were fighting about, you know, before everything went to shit,” said Caroline, not meeting Betsy’s eyes. She paused for a minute.

  “Actually, that’s a lie. I remember all of it.”

  “I do, too,” said Betsy. “We pretended that it was about guys and my leaving the sorority and all of that. But there was more.”

  “I think I probably felt rejected, like you were leaving us behind. Like you thought that we were stupid and you were too wise for all of it. And maybe I thought on some level that you were right. But then you literally disappeared,” said Caroline. “You just left me here.”

  In the two decades she’d been gone, it had never occurred to her that Caroline needed her help.

  “I was desperate to leave, even before everything went down,” said Betsy. “And then, you know, the drama just expedited things. I couldn’t take it. I couldn’t do it without Ginny.”

  “You know, I called you on the day McRae was executed,” Caroline said. “But I couldn’t leave a message.”

  Betsy remembered being pregnant with Remi, her walk up Central Park West on that awful morning in Dr. Kerr’s office. “It was Remi’s birthday. As in, the day she was born,” said Betsy. “I was kind of busy anyway.”

  “Part of the problem was that I was jealous,” said Caroline. “I was the one who was supposed to get out of here first. I was the one who was on to bigger things. But you and Gavin just sailed into the sunset, like Danny and Sandy in that fucking flying convertible. And all of a sudden I was Frenchy, standing on the ground with some freaked-out hairdo waving a fucking hanky. I was the one who was supposed to get out. You were the one who was supposed to sell real estate in Miami. We got it all wrong.”

  Betsy stared at the bottom of her empty cup.

  “I’m sorry,” she said, finally.

  “Sorry for what? You didn’t stop me from going. I stopped myself. In the end, I just couldn’t do it. I don’t know . . .” Caroline said.

  “I’m sorry, but you got it all wrong,” said Betsy, averting her eyes. “You were Rizzo.”

  “What?”

  “Frenchy was way too nice. Rizzo was the mean, slutty one. You were Rizzo.”

  Caroline took a beat.

  “I was totally Rizzo.”

  And for the second time that day, the two friends laughed so hard that Betsy nearly peed herself, and then had to wait in an endless bathroom line, standing helplessly while a quarter inch of beer slop on the unmopped floor seeped above the soles of her sandals and between her toes.

  CHAPTER 25

  LONG DRIVE HOME

  September 25, 2010

  By the end of the fourth quarter, Betsy was all but sober. The beer and nostalgic Jack and Cokes had done nothing but fog her brain and dull her senses, and she was covered with the salty, sticky residue of dried sweat. As Teddy predicted, they were ready to head back without saying goodbyes, so when he texted them the location of his parking spot, they hopped into the first bike cab they could flag down. A sinewy nineteen-year-old with a couple of missing teeth towed them through the crowd to a lot next to the baseball field.

  “Should we ask one of these shirtless wankers what the final score was?” asked Caroline, gesturing to a pack of skinny college boys who had their T-shirts tied around their foreheads.

  “Nah,” said Betsy. “I don’t care.”

  The last time she went down that street, she was sitting on Gavin’s handlebars. She wondered if Remi was in her pj’s yet. She called Gavin, who picked up after the first ring.

  “You survived,” he said. She could hear Remi in the tub in the background.

  “Yes, but just barely. I’m with Caroline on the back of some guy’s bike,” she said.

  “Of course you are,” he said.

  “Can you put Remi on speaker?” she asked.

  “Hi, Mama!” The sound of her voice sent electricity down her spine.

  “Hi, sweetie! Can you say hi to my friend Caroline?” She put the phone on speaker.

  “Hi! Daddy says ‘Go Gators,’” a small voice squeaked on the other end of the phone.

  “Oh yeah? Well don’t believe everything your daddy says,” said Caroline.

  “Nice to hear your voice, Car,” he said.

  “You, too, Gavin.”

  “Listen, Teddy’s giving us a ride to Tampa and I have to pay attention or we’ll ride right by his parking spot.

  “Bye guys, I love you,” she said. “I’ll see you tomorrow, Rem.”

  “We love you, too.”

  Caroline put her hand on her friend’s knee and gave it a squeeze.

  “Well, well,” Caroline said, nodding in approval. “He turned out alright, didn’t he?”

  “Hey, I’m as surprised as you are,” said Betsy.

  They found Teddy standing next to his mom’s Camry.

  “Nice wheels, Ted,” said Caroline. “Clearly, it’s your midlife crisis car.”

  Caroline took the passenger seat, as usual, and Betsy slid in the back, forgoing the seat belt in favor of perching on the edge of her seat, her head poking over the console that divided Caroline and Teddy, like a kid. The traffic out of town was stop-and-go for miles, which allowed for plenty of time for a recap of the day’s events, who was divorced, who had a lingering drug problem, and to Betsy’s horror, who among their peers had negotiated an open marriage to cope with eighteen torturous years of sexual fidelity.

  They’d made it to Lake Panasoffkee before anyone mentioned Ginny.

  After Betsy hung up the phone at Miss June’s bed-and-breakfast, back in New Orleans on the day they found Ginny, she lost track of the details. Gavin went upstairs to pack their things while June tried to console her, though she couldn’t understand the extent of her loss. Instead of stopping in Gainesville, they drove to Ocala, to Ginny’s Nana Jean’s house. Betsy found her on the porch when they pulled into her driveway. She took Betsy into her plump, pale arms and the two of them wept together on the wicker glider.

  They returned for the funeral, and then she tried to go back to school, but Betsy didn’t remember much about the days she spent back in Gainesville after Ginny’s funeral. She packed her clothes and filled a Dumpster with all the things she no longer wanted. She remembered loading a suitcase and book boxes into Kathy’s car, and then standing in the
Embassy Suites parking lot with Gavin, worried that she’d be left alone with their secret, that she’d never see him again. She drove away and never came back.

  “I can’t believe this is the first time you’ve been in Gainesville since Ginny died,” said Teddy to Betsy.

  “You mean since Ginny was killed,” said Caroline, anger building quickly in her voice. “That really pisses me off. When people say she ‘passed away’ or ‘died’ like she fell asleep and tiny angels swooped down and flew away with her tidy little soul. Or that she fought some noble battle with a terminal illness. She was murdered. And before she was murdered, she was raped. And the freak that did it ate a lobster dinner the night before he was executed, courtesy of the state of Florida.”

  Caroline paused. Teddy looked stricken. Betsy inched back into the seat, trying to hide in the corner of Teddy’s mom’s car.

  “I mean, it was sixteen years after the fact,” said Caroline. “He got sixteen more years after Ginny was dead. And that’s justice?”

  “I’m sorry, I . . .” said Teddy, but he couldn’t find the words.

  “No, it’s alright,” said Caroline, putting up her hand in defense. “It’s not your fault that it’s been twenty years and I can’t get over it.”

  Betsy wanted to disappear. She’d read the press about the lobster tail and cheesecake he ate before he was executed. There was no shortage of details. As the story goes, McRae filled endless legal pads with details, page after page of his dense, looping cursive, line after line filled with song lyrics and childish illustrations of the visions that came to him in the night. Sitting cross-legged on a steel locker, in his six-by-nine-foot cell, he’d written his apologies. It would never be enough. She had read and reread all of it, but never found the answers she wanted. It would never bring Ginny back.