The town, for a while, speculated, analyzed, calculated, imagined. Everybody wanted a story, a story with an arc, with motives and a climax and a resolution. The story that they wanted—no matter what shape they gave it—made Cassie into some sort of victim: a victim of addiction, or abuse, or of her mother’s, or of Anders’s, or of Rudy’s, or even of mine. A corpse would have made the best story, the headliner, and we could all have been devastated, and shocked, and remorseful, and—too late—loving.
Then, only then, relieved of her carnal, sinning self, could Cassie have been immortalized, apotheosized, duly cleansed and elevated. If she’d been murdered, we’d remember her as sweet Cassie, injured Cassie, neglected Cassie, beautiful Cassie, of the azure eyes and fire-white hair, a Cassie purged by suffering. The town of Royston would have claimed and redeemed her.
But because she hadn’t “met her fate,” as the saying goes, nobody knew what to do with her, with the idea of her—“a troubled girl,” Mildred Bell murmured sorrowfully behind her counter, the best of them—and after a few baffled, rousing weeks of nonsense, they simply turned away.
At school, mostly within days, people moved on to other things: Sierra Franto’s three broken ribs from falling out of the tree outside her bedroom window; Alex Paul’s dad, the undertaker, getting in trouble for mixing up two dead grannies at the funeral home. Mostly it was like Instagram: we’d scrolled on; Cassie was just gone from the screen.
BEFORE THEY LEFT, Cassie categorically refused to see me. I emailed and texted her but she didn’t reply. I was too wary to call her house, for all sorts of reasons, so finally, in the middle of May, after Cassie had been home from the hospital for a couple of weeks, my mother did. Bev picked up the phone.
“It’s so nice of you to call,” she told my mother—in a formal voice, my mother said, as though the two women barely knew each other. “And we are so incredibly grateful to Julia for her help in finding Cassie.” (“You would have thought,” my father observed, “that the woman could have picked up the phone herself to call and thank you, wouldn’t you? For saving her daughter’s life? Just a little thing, after all.”) And then Bev went on, “It’s been a tough time, as you can imagine, but especially for Cassie, who has been quite distressed.” My mother noticed this word and repeated it to me, because she was expecting the word “depressed,” which seemed obvious; but got instead “distressed,” which, while also true, didn’t seem somehow strong enough for the circumstances. “So,” Bev continued, “We’re trying to look forward, to the future—”
“Of course,” my mother said she said, trying to reassure.
“And that means, in some important ways, closing the door on the past.”
“Of course,” my mother said she said again, although somewhat more uncertainly.
“We’re moving away from Royston,” Bev said. “A fresh start is important.”
“Of course. But when?”
“At the end of next week.”
“My goodness.” My mother couldn’t hide her surprise. “But how will that work? Your whole lives—”
“I’ve informed the hospice. They understand, these are special circumstances. We can’t stay in Royston now.”
My mother was surprised by this too: she wanted to ask Why not?, but Bev’s manner was so strained, so strange, that she didn’t dare. “Where are you moving to?” she asked instead, as polite as can be.
“I’d rather not say. Don’t worry, the good thing about my profession is that there’s always work available for someone with my skills.” (“Her profession is death,” my father observed. “She’s not wrong there.”)
“But what about Anders?” my mother enquired. “Surely for a doctor at his level, it takes some time—”
Bev interrupted with a click of the tongue. My mother said she could see in her mind’s eye the disapproval on Bev’s face, the narrowing of her nostrils and the flattening of her lips. A look with which we were all familiar. “Anders Shute will not be moving with us,” Bev said. Plain and simple, that sentence only.
“Just you and Cassie?”
“Correct.”
“Oh dear. I see. If it’s all so quick—I know how busy you must be—but it would mean so much to Julia, to see Cassie,” my mother said. “Before you leave—to be able to reassure herself that Cassie really is okay. Because, you know, it was quite traumatic for Julia, the last time she saw Cassie—”
But already, my mother said afterward, she knew from her own entreating tone that she did not expect Bev to say yes.
“That’s the thing,” Bev said. “My Cassie’s had a very traumatic time, and anything that might bring it back is, well . . . I’m sorry, but I have to say no. I know you’ll understand.”
“Of course,” my mother said again, although she said to me that she didn’t understand for a second. “What about your trauma?” my mother said to me. “It’s miraculous that you found her. And dreadful that you had to see her in that state.” She shook her head.
I could tell when we had this conversation—in the kitchen, making dinner, like so many of our conversations, me washing lettuce at the sink, she browning cubed beef for a stew—that my mother was shaken. You could see it in the mad energy with which she poked at the meat.
“I can’t fathom it,” she said. “None of it makes any sense to me.”
My mother didn’t know, then, everything that had happened, or at least that Cassie had told Peter had happened, in Bangor, and afterward. I tore at the lettuce leaves as I dropped them into the spinner, turning my back to her. I didn’t know whether it would be a betrayal to tell her what I knew. “What doesn’t make sense?” I asked instead.
“It makes you wonder,” she said. “What you don’t know. What’s happening all around you, that you can’t see.”
We were both quiet a minute, at our tasks.
“I ask myself, Julia, my precious daughter, do I not have any idea what your life is like? Or who you are?”
“Don’t be silly, Mom.” But she wasn’t entirely wrong. I too was newly aware of the aloneness of each of us, of how little of our selves and lives was shared, even as we shared rooms and hours and conversation. I had known Cassie all my life, knew her gestures and expressions and the timbre of her voice, knew the way her mind worked and her sense of humor and the ways we were alike and the ways we were not. Weren’t we secret sisters, umbilically linked? But I had taken my attention from her, and so quickly, it seemed in retrospect, she had changed, things had changed. Days had unfolded, one after the other, months in which I had remained, or considered that I had remained, the same Julia—although who knew, really?—and in those days, while I moved in familiar paths, Cassie’s life had altered beyond recognition, behind a scrim, behind the doors of the little house in the cul-de-sac, until what I thought I knew I did not know, and the person I thought I recognized, grew, behind her skin, alien to me. I was oblivious Goya at the Spanish court, and she the French Revolution.
I hadn’t known what she was thinking, what she experienced; but still, atavistically, I had known how to find her—she was not so changed as that. What I hadn’t anticipated was that she did not want to be found. That the last look she would give me was full of rage.
In the kitchen with my mother, she at the stove and I at the sink, I had for the first time the adult apprehension that my mother too was afraid of this abyss, not as it related to Cassie but as it related to me, to my mother and me. I understood that she had thought to have known me—flesh of her flesh, brought into the world from between her thighs, always beside her, and still, somewhere, inside her—and that she feared, now, maybe for the first time, that she didn’t know me at all. I turned and took her in my arms—she was no longer bigger than I was; in fact, I was the taller of us two—and embraced her, and kissed her soft cheek, and whispered in her ear, again, “Don’t be silly, Mom.” And then, “There’s nothing to be afraid of.” So many times my mother had said these words to me, had made this gesture of love and reassurance; but this
was the first time I did it for her. And the first time too that I understood these words might not be true.
PETER SAW CASSIE one more time. Not on purpose, and not really to speak to, but he saw her. A couple of days after Bev had shunned my mother, Peter was with his father at Target at nine o’clock at night, after his track meet, picking up dog food, bulk paper towels, and a new charger for his phone. They ran into Cassie and Bev in the wide aisle between makeup and home goods. Pale as milk, Cassie pushed the cart, he said, dwarfed by its red plastic lattice, and her mother practically interposed her body—the voluminous, swishing, scented body—when he approached. They had a pile of white bath towels in the cart, he said, and a gold can of hairspray. He noticed this. Cassie said hi, but she didn’t move out from behind the cart, and her eyes, he said, were dull. He thought she was probably on medication, sparrow thin, drifty in her movements. Bev, who had never liked Peter, smiled hard and bright.
“Some last-minute errands,” she brayed. “So much to do before we go!” And then she pushed Cassie and the cart forcefully into the pet-food aisle—like a kidnapper, Peter said—and that was that. Cassie wore bedroom slippers, the fluffy sheepskin kind. He was hurt that she didn’t look back.
“Like she was a hostage,” he said again. “Like she wasn’t herself.”
Whatever that meant.
FOR ALMOST a year, Anders Shute didn’t go anywhere. He stayed in the little house in the cul-de-sac—he rented it from Bev, I guess, until she sold it the following spring—and when, rarely, you saw him at Bell’s or the Rite Aid, he would stretch his thin lips into a smile and incline his head slightly by way of greeting, and move on.
The community broadly surmised, from his presence, that he hadn’t done anything wrong, that whatever had transpired in the little house could be summarized simply as “things didn’t work out” or “Bev and Cassie needed a new start.” But wasn’t Anders Shute the source of all of Cassie’s despair? Hadn’t he destroyed her as surely as Leo the pit bull had savaged her hand? We didn’t say this to our parents, and if they had any such thoughts, they didn’t express them within our hearing.
Maybe too Anders was an innocent—ill favored, strange and cold, but no more than these unfortunate things. Maybe, Peter and I wondered, it was all about Bev, angel of death. What was true and what wasn’t, in Cassie’s history? Had her father even been named Burnes? Where had Bev come from, and now where had they gone? Wherever they’d moved to, in such haste, it wasn’t because they had “people” there—as far as we knew, as far as Cassie knew, Bev had no people. And for that matter, maybe wherever they’d gone, they weren’t Bev and Cassie Burnes any longer. For months afterward, I’d Google their names and nothing would come up, nothing at all about a life after Royston, as if they’d simply ceased to exist. I hoped that Cassie might write to me, or call, or text, but she never did.
BY MIDSUMMER, Royston had stopped talking about her altogether. Once school was out, kids took up lifeguard and camp-counselor jobs, went on bike trips or to summer school, turned their attention to Jodie’s mother’s breast-cancer diagnosis, the factory fire at Henkel. The grown-ups had nothing more to say, and so said no more, and then the silence around Cassie grew quieter than the grave, as if Cassie had never existed at all.
Peter and I talked about her a lot, at first, as we held hands and finally as he came to see our friendship as love, the way I’d seen it all along. But we spoke of her less with each passing week. Even between us, who knew as much as anyone knew, we could say only so much before we turned in circles.
Peter was convinced that Bev Burnes had changed their names, that Cassie, wherever she’d gone, was no longer Cassie Burnes. He believed, upon reflection, that Bev was a lifelong fantasist, a con artist, spinning one story after another; and her decade in Royston just one episode in a series of dramas. In his version, there’d never been a Clarke Burnes, and Cassie’s football coach in Bangor was pure, strange coincidence. “Imagine that poor guy,” Peter said, “with this crazed kid in a beanie on his doorstep, one Monday at dawn, out of the blue. What does that feel like?” I wondered whether Arthur C. Burnes had spoken to his wife, Anna Maria, about it, whether they’d talked about Cassie, whether she was still alive to them somehow.
Peter thought that Bev had had a different name to begin with—did we even know where she was supposed to have grown up? Rochester, New York? Lancaster, Pennsylvania? Outside Wilmington? Why did nobody know for sure, and why had nobody noticed that they didn’t know? Peter thought that Bev was like one of those grifters on crime television, a made-up name, a false identity, out delivering death across the country with her bag of morphine and oxycodone and fentanyl—the angel of mercy, so-called. Maybe, he said, Bev never even knew who Cassie’s father was. Potentially, Cassie wasn’t even Bev’s child.
“You’re going too far,” I said; and he said, “Why? It happens.”
I didn’t want to believe that the solid history of my childhood could unravel altogether, simply at our whim. “It doesn’t happen very often,” I replied. “We know these people.” I was ready to blame Anders Shute: his appearance in their lives, his seduction of Bev; his sinister interest in controlling Cassie, which might have evolved in any number of ways. She’d never confided anything specific either to Peter or to me, but something had been wrong in that house. We both knew that. Why not believe, as Cassie had believed, in the reality of Clarke Burnes? Why not believe for Cassie, as Cassie had believed for her vanished cat, Electra, that she was living another, better life somewhere nearby, eating her meals off silver plates and destined for a beautiful future?
I want fiercely to believe it, for myself as much as for her. All our stories are more or less made up, after all. What doesn’t seem imaginary—what feels most real—is my nightmare about Cassie and the poisoned cloak, my sense that this is what it means to grow up. Whatever choices we think we make, whatever we think we can control, has a life and a destiny we cannot fully see. That I can sense the way the plot will go, that I could, on that Saturday morning in April a couple of years ago, save the life of one Cassie Burnes—it’s only an illusion I cling to. What will be will be, irrespective, not because fate is unassailable but because none of us ever sees face-to-face: through a glass darkly is the best we can manage.
LAST NIGHT at supper, my parents started up the college conversation again. This coming fall it will be time for me to apply. We sat perspiring around the kitchen table with the windows open to the slight breeze and the sunset casting shafts of light and shadow across the garden, the maples in silhouette against the bloody western sky. We could hear tree frogs and the distant sounds of the Saghafi kids in their pool (“Marco . . .” “. . . Polo”). My father raised the subject: we need to plan some college visits for August, before school starts.
He tipped back in his chair—which annoys my mother, who thinks each time that he will fall and who resents the scuff marks on the floor—and spoke without looking at me, as much as to say my reply was a matter of complete indifference to him. “Any thoughts?”
“I want to act,” I said, which wasn’t new, of course, but new for me to put this ambition first.
“Of course you do, sweetie.” My mother sliced seconds of quiche unasked and slipped them onto our plates. “But that’s not how you choose a college.”
“Why not?”
“Sure, Carole, why not?” My father banged down on all four chair legs and wielded his fork. “If she wants to act, what’s wrong with that?”
“You don’t get a degree in acting,” my mother said.
“Maybe not,” I said, “but I can choose what places interest me based on whether they’ve got good theatre programs.”
“What’s so appealing about acting?” my mother asked. She wants me to be interested in politics, or science; she sees it as a woman’s obligation, even now. To her, acting is passive, secondhand—you’re saying lines that somebody else wrote, and pretending to be somebody you’re not.
“Come off it, Ca
role, give the girl a break.”
“I’m not hassling, I’m genuinely curious.”
“Do I really have to explain?”
“Give it a try,” my mother said. She had on her interested-grown-up expression, her eyebrows raised, a slight, forced smile on her lips.
“You can’t say it’s culturally irrelevant.” I was aware that I sounded defensive. “There’s nothing our culture cares about more.”
“Than the theatre?”
“Than acting. Okay, TV, movies, whatever. It’s what we Americans do.”
“You’ve lost me there,” my dad smiled. “I’m an American, and I’m a dentist. I care about teeth.”
“You know what I mean.”
“No, really, dear. Explain it to us.”
“I just like to act, okay? Won’t that do?”
My father patted the back of my hand on the table. “Of course it will,” he said. “Your mom’s being a bully. We know you love it, and that’s fine.” He paused. “She just wants you to think about why. Because maybe there’d be other things, I don’t know, alternatives, that might be as interesting for you to consider. Not instead, you know, but in addition.”
“Like curing cancer, you mean?”
He laughed. “Kind of like that.”
I shook my head. We changed the subject.
How could I have explained that it all seems like acting, like theatre, to me? Each of us puts on our costumes, our masks, and pretends. We take the vast, inchoate, ungraspable swell of events and emotions that surrounds us and in which we are immersed, and we funnel it into a simplified narrative, a simple story that we represent as true. Like: I love avocadoes but detest Brussels sprouts. Or: I’m great at English but no good at math. Or: I’m a loyal friend who’ll do anything for the people I love. Or: I know you so well I can anticipate your every move. Or: I know myself, and this is what it’s like to be me.
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