Nowhere Girl

by Susan Strecker

  “No, Michelle,” my mother said to the doctor. “No. No. No. No.”

  They called each other by their first names, exchanged Christmas cards, and Dr. Bassett came to the Sotto Sopra holiday parties.

  “What happened?” David asked again. Even with the faint smell of pot tangled in the fabric of his sweatshirt, I’d almost forgotten he was there.

  “How?” My mother sounded impatient, as though this was a waste of time.

  “He strangled her,” I said so quietly I almost couldn’t hear myself.

  Dr. Bassett nodded, nearly imperceptibly.

  “He put something around her neck”—my voice sounded programmed—“and he killed her.”

  My mother covered her mouth. “No. God, no. Oh, my baby.”

  I knew what she was thinking—that being violated must have been so much the worse for Savannah because she was a virgin. She called us her twin angels, such good girls, never any trouble. She was so careful not to choose between us, but it was clear Savannah was her favorite, the prettier twin, more charismatic. It was hard not to look at Savannah, not to pay attention to her. She drew you in. And as I watched my mother crumble to the floor, my father and Dr. Bassett trying to comfort her, I wanted to run out of that tiny room, through the electric doors, into the parking lot, down Mareside Highway to Mulbury Street, to that tiny one-way, forgotten lane, grass growing out of its cracks, where broken glass lay along its crumbling curb. The lane that led to the Wolfe Mansion. I’d never been inside. I’d heard it was where kids partied because the cops didn’t like to go there. You couldn’t get a car past the curb; you could only walk single file on the lane. The place was surrounded by tall, knotty pines, I’d heard, and a root system so complicated you had to hold hands not to trip, almost impossible to enter, even on foot. Haunted, they said. I wanted to go there. I wanted to die in that exact spot where my sister had lain, suffocating. We were too late. I’d been too late. I hadn’t looked for her.

  Dr. Bassett came forward and stood beside me like a sentry. I felt her rubbing my back. She was warm and soft, and smelled like powder. “There’s evidence of strangulation, bruising around her neck, and petechial hemorrhaging. We’ll have to do an autopsy, but she was only partially clothed, which can be an indicator of—” But my mother put up her hand, and Dr. Bassett didn’t finish her sentence.

  My father had gone a pale, waxy color I’d never seen before. Someone killed my sister, and he was out there, right now, maybe washing his hands in the bathroom at a turnpike rest stop.

  “Cady.” My mother was coming across the room, her face wasted, her brown eyes fierce. She squatted in front of me. I felt Dr. Bassett quit rubbing my back. “Tell us,” she’d said. “What else do you know?”

  * * *

  I opened David’s back door to see Chandler and Odion at the stove. “It smells good,” I told Chandler, and he pulled me into a quick hug.

  “Lover Boy met someone,” he whispered.

  I’d brought a bottle of Chilean from Greg’s wine cabinet, and I passed it to Chandler. “David?” I asked while he opened the wine. “Where?”

  “That dorky workshop he went to last weekend.”

  “The model car one?”

  “That’s the one,” Chandler said.

  A girl who played with toy cars. Perfect. David came in wearing his microscope glasses on his head, his hair messy like he’d just gotten out of bed.

  “How was it?” I kissed him on the cheek.

  “It was what it was,” David told me. His eyes were red as if he hadn’t slept. “Where’s Gabs? Did she desert us?”

  “She’s on her way back from Hoka Hey training.”

  And then there was a knock on the kitchen door, and when it opened, Brady Irons was standing there.

  “You’re here.” My voice was full of holes, breathy, the pudgy girl with her high school crush.

  Brady was wearing jeans and boots, and his hair was slicked back. It suddenly embarrassed me, standing in David’s kitchen with Brady—Chandler and Odion glancing up blankly.

  “Come in,” I said.

  But as he stepped through the door, he seemed so out of place.

  “Look who’s here,” I said to David, throwing my voice over my shoulder, hoping he’d act hospitable. “Brady Irons from high school.”

  “Hell,” David said. “Great to see you again.” His hair stuck up like a jackknife. “It’s been a while.” He put out his hand.

  Brady shook it, watching him the same way he had me in the parking lot, like he was remembering something and wasn’t sure if he should say it or not. I was certain it was Savannah. It was always Savannah.

  “Nice place.”

  “I haven’t had time to clean,” David said quickly, stacking a pile of magazines on the kitchen table. It occurred to me he was going to kill me when this was over for not telling him Brady was coming, but in fairness to me, Brady hadn’t told me for sure.

  Brady was holding a bottle of wine, and Chandler took it from him and extended his hand.

  “Chandler Morris,” he said. “Good to see you again.” Then he nodded to the lasagna sitting on the stove. “Hope you like Italian.” Odion stepped forward and stood beside Chandler. “This is my boyfriend, Odion Eze.”

  “Nice to meet you,” Brady said, shaking his hand. There was a beat of silence, and then Brady turned to me. “Thanks for the invite,” he said quietly. It seemed like he didn’t know what to do with his hands, and finally he stuck them in his pockets. “Are you sure it’s okay I stay? I don’t want to intrude.”

  “What? Of course. I invited you, didn’t I?” Suddenly, I felt feverish with the need to keep him there. “You guys have like sixteen years of catching up to do.”

  But David was turned away, scrubbing dirty glasses in the sink as if he cleaned all the time.

  “I’ll open Brady’s wine. I think we’re going to need two bottles tonight.” Chandler winked at me.

  Odion took five plates out of the cupboard. “Come,” he said to me. “We will set the table.”

  “Aye aye, Captain.” But I was worried; I wanted to stay in the kitchen to make sure David and Chandler were being nice. Brady and I had already spent a few afternoons together talking about prison life, and besides my fascination with him, I was starting to feel like I might have a book, even if the murderer was growing on me.

  Chandler brought in the wine, and I tugged on his shirt, leading him to the corner of the dining room.

  “What’s up with David?” I asked. “He’s so grumpy.”

  He glanced in the kitchen. David was putting on pot holders to pick up the lasagna.

  “You really need to ask him, but I’m sure it has something to do with Emma.”

  David and Brady brought in the lasagna, salad, and bread. But conversation was slow and stilted and mostly focused on Odion’s homemade sauce and how good the french bread was even though carbs were supposedly the root of all evil.

  “We’re usually more fun than this,” I said, glaring at David. “I don’t know what’s wrong with everyone.” I felt like I was on a blind date with someone I had nothing in common with.

  “Cady-did,” Chandler said. “Don’t you have any trivia from the book world? Dazzle us with some fun literary facts.” His eyes flickered from David back to me.

  I couldn’t think of anything to say. Brady saved me.

  “You know that saying about there being an elephant in the room?” he asked, wiping his mouth with a napkin.

  Oh no, not now. David had been quiet all night. I didn’t know why he was in such a shitty space, but having Brady point it out wasn’t going to help.

  “What about it?” I said.

  “Do you know where that expression came from?”

  “I bet you’re going to tell us.” Chandler poured more wine for Brady and then lifted the bottle to me.

  Brady took his wineglass back and smiled, revealing those deep dimples all the high school girls had loved. “Kings in ancient Thailand gave exotic wh
ite elephants as gifts to peasants who couldn’t afford to feed them. Instead of telling the king they’d rather be paid with money, they took the gifts without complaint.”

  We all stared at him.

  “Where the hell did you hear that?” David asked.

  Brady dug his fork into the lasagna. “I’m a voracious reader.” He smiled at me. “Now that I know Cady.”

  Brady was mixing his metaphors. An elephant in the room was something that no one wanted to talk about. A white elephant was an unwanted gift. But I wasn’t about to bring that up. I was happy somebody, anybody, was talking.

  “Does anyone know where the phrase raining cats and dogs came from?” I asked.

  David rolled his eyes. “I can see where this is going.”

  “Where?” asked Odion.

  “I don’t know,” I said. “But I really want to.”

  Odion laughed so loud, David had to smile, and Chandler patted my back. Brady lifted his glass to toast us, and I was relieved.

  After finishing dinner and the poached pears and candied walnuts I’d brought but not made, we drank the rest of Brady’s wine during a great game of Fact or Crap. I watched Brady throughout the night, shy at first and then relaxing a bit. I saw him again as a seventeen-year-old kid coming out of fifth period, when I used to pass him on my way to lunch, his books under his arm. Sometimes he’d seem to recognize me, giving me a two-finger salute as though I weren’t a chubby freshman and he wasn’t a high school god.

  After Brady, Chandler, and Odion left, I lingered behind to clean up the kitchen, hoping David would say something about Brady, maybe tell a story about him in high school so I could tell him all the crazy prison trivia he’d given me and how he’d come over for lunch a few times, but he washed the dishes in silence, the kind of quiet I knew not to disturb. When I went to put the wine bottles in the recycling bin in the mudroom, it was overflowing with soda cans and beer bottles.

  “You need to make some room out here,” I called to him.

  He pushed past me, and I watched him try to tear the cardboard of an old pizza box, but it wouldn’t give. The tendons in his neck stood out until finally I grabbed a pair of scissors from the junk drawer in the kitchen, pulled it out of his hands, and cut it in four squares.

  “I could have done it,” he said when I was finished.

  I faced him. “What’s up with you?”

  He turned and walked into the kitchen, and I followed him. “Do you know she still hasn’t given me a reason?” He threw the scissors on the counter.

  Chandler was right. It was always about Emma.

  “Does it matter? I don’t think she’s coming back.”

  As a kid, David could never let anything go. When he asked why it was raining, he wasn’t satisfied with “God is crying” or “Because there’s water in the clouds.” He needed the whole explanation about how the air had to be saturated with moisture, how dropping temperatures bring water vapors that cling together until they’re big enough to form raindrops. He used to take apart our mother’s Timex because he needed to know how watches worked. Of course he needed a reason.

  “I met someone, okay?” he said, picking up the beer he’d uncapped earlier and taking a long sip. “I took her out to dinner in Minneapolis, and she asked me why my marriage broke up.”

  Somewhere between dinner and Fact or Crap, David had taken his glasses off his head and now was his sloppily handsome self, and I could imagine some girl sidling up to him, having no idea what a broken-up mess he was.

  “And you know,” he said, sipping his beer, “I don’t even know. Emma won’t talk to me. Women never talk when they’re done with you.”

  I watched him take another sip of beer. “Emma is Emma,” I told him. “You know how she is. Once she’s made up her mind, there’s no turning back. You need to be dating. It’s good you went out.”

  I thought he was going to be mad, but he took another sip and then set his beer down on the edge of the sink.

  “I fucking hate Thursday nights,” he said.

  The words surprised me so much, I almost jumped back.

  Outside the kitchen window, I could see the lights of a low-flying plane.

  “I love it when you’re here, but then you all have to leave, and everything feels so lonely,” David said. He had green eyes and dark lashes, and I felt sad all of a sudden for my big brother, alone in that house. And then he drew his hand across his face. “Forget it,” he said. “Forget I even brought it up.”

  “No, I won’t forget it. I’m going to find out why.”

  “Jesus, Cady, no. Leave it alone.”

  Dishes were piled on the counters, and dirty laundry was balled behind the couch.

  “I hate what she’s done to you,” I told him. “If you need a reason why she left, other than she’s a tart, I’ll get you one.”

  “Don’t do that.”

  But as soon as I got in the car, I scrolled through my cell to see if I still had Emma’s number. I did.

  CHAPTER

  9

  “We should be raiding Greg’s stash of Dom Pérignon,” Gabby told me as soon as she walked through my front door on Friday.

  “It’s not even noon yet.”

  “So?”

  “What are we celebrating?” I knew perfectly well what we were celebrating, but I feigned innocence, poured her a coffee, and set it in front of her as she slid onto one of the camel-colored leather chairs Greg had ordered from Dubai.

  “Don’t be coy. You know.” Gabby looked fantastic all the time, bright and eager as a teenager, her black hair sexy messy, her coal eyeliner smeared around her eyes, her Mediterranean complexion flawless.

  “Alibi is now available in Turkish and Thai?” I guessed.

  “Not that,” she said. “But don’t get me wrong. That’s fantastic. Did you know your Facebook post has more than a thousand likes already?”

  “I love my readers,” I said. “I’d die without them.”

  It was still hard for me to believe that so many people cared about what I wrote. Outside, the sun had actually come out after an entire winter of sleet and rain, and it threw spots of light through the maples. Gabby smiled at me over her coffee cup.

  “What?” I asked.

  “Don’t you have something to tell me? About dinner last night?”

  “It looks like Chandler already did.”

  Gabby took a sip of coffee and then set it down. “Your brother, actually.”

  “You’ve been back from your motorcycle thing for twelve hours. When did you talk to David?”

  “He stopped at the library this morning for a book on model car making.”

  “Did he tell you he met someone?”

  For once, Gabby was speechless. “No,” she finally said.

  I unwrapped the tinfoil on a blueberry cobbler I’d made earlier in the week. “Want some?”

  “Who’d he meet?”

  “Some car girl, and now he wants to know why Emma left him.”

  “Emma left because she’s a bitch.”

  As I was getting down plates, Gabby reached over and grabbed a blueberry from the pan.

  “You’re a little savage,” I told her.

  She ate the berry and licked her fingers. “Where does Car Girl live?”

  “Montana or Minnesota or somewhere way out in the middle of the country.”

  Gabby contemplated this. “So have you slept with him yet?”

  “I’m married, Gab—Jesus, no. It was Thursday dinner, that’s all.” I stuck a blob of ice cream on the plate next to a slice of cobbler and slid it over to her. “David was so grumpy I’d be surprised if Brady ever calls me again.” I put down my fork and sighed loudly. “I have to ask you something,” I said tentatively. “And I need you to give me an honest answer.”

  She rubbed her hands together. “You’re going to confess something. I can feel it.”

  “Would it be the worst thing in the world if I did sleep with Brady?” Saying the words out loud was somehow both
relieving and terrifying.

  Gabby reached over and held my hand. “Honey, you’ve been trying for eight years to make Greg love you. If it’s someone else’s turn now, then so be it.” She glanced around at the house we both hated. “This is not what you signed up for. If Greg wanted you to be a housewife and make babies, then he should have mentioned that before you got married.”

  I had a visceral ache for my old gingerbread house, for the way it used to be with Greg when I was a magazine writer. “Maybe it’s not his fault. You know, I never asked him what he thought about my becoming a novelist. And he’s not the one who keeps miscarrying.”

  She waved me off. “Don’t make excuses for his poor behavior. If you’d wanted to be a teacher, would you have asked him permission?”

  “That’s different. They only make like forty grand a year.”

  Gabby pushed our plates away and swiveled my stool so we were face-to-face. “Do you hear what you’re saying? Greg should be happy for you; he should be celebrating your success, not making you feel guilty about it. And sooner or later, he has to stop acting like you lose pregnancies on purpose.” She reached for her fork. “So no. If something does happen with Brady, it doesn’t make you a bad person.”

  I wanted to ask about Colette. She was innocent in all this. But Brady hadn’t acted interested in me at all, so what was the point? “Thanks, Gabs. You always make me feel better.”

  “Don’t thank me yet,” she said seriously. “Now I have to ask you something.”

  I closed my eyes while she talked.

  “Is it okay with you that he’s a prison guard?”

  I opened my eyes. “What? Why would that matter?”

  “Look, girlfriend.” Gabby stabbed a blueberry with her fork and nibbled on it. “I don’t give a shit. I told you that when you first saw him again. What’s in a guy’s pants is pretty much the same, Ivy League or not, but you’re a bestselling author with a Princeton education, and he’s … not.”

  “I hated Princeton,” I told her. “In case you forgot.” I’d found college exhausting, the buzzing library, a roommate who thought having sex in the kitchen at two in the afternoon was acceptable, all those girls who believed fraternities and football games and getting drowned in keg beer was important.