Nowhere Girl

by Susan Strecker

  But my parents hadn’t even come into our room after she’d slid off the shingled roof onto the back porch and gone running to Chapman Sharp’s waiting car. I’d pretended to be asleep when she crept into our room at midnight. I lay there, listening as her clothes dropped to the floor. I heard her open the pajama drawer, put her earrings on the dresser, and then walk over to my bed and pull back the covers. I rolled toward the wall, but she crawled in with me and put her mouth next to my ear. “I did it,” she whispered. I sighed as if dreaming. She’d never let me be, but I tried anyway because I didn’t want to hear that a girl who looked exactly like me except for twenty pounds had kissed boy number six and let him lift up her skirt and bear into her.

  I knew what french-kissing was, but I couldn’t figure out why you’d want someone else’s tongue in your mouth, how you kissed if you had a cold, if people with braces like Lita Edelton and Michael Pritchet got stuck together. And, most of all, why anyone would want a boy’s penis jammed in where it didn’t belong. I had a hard enough time using a tampon. I’d walked in on David a few months before as he was about to shower, and I saw him, all of him. His penis had been sticking straight up, and I couldn’t imagine how it could fit inside a girl.

  But that night, alone in my bed while Savannah was out and knowing what she was going to do, I’d wanted to feel what it was like, so I’d put my fingers inside me. It would be years before I’d learn that it only felt good when I rubbed the top part with my index and middle fingers, but that night, having no experience at all, I put one finger up there, my nail cutting the thick part of the labia. It hurt so badly, I yelped. There was no pleasure. None at all.

  “Did you hear me?” she whispered again. She sounded giddy, like she had when our father gave her that cell phone she used all the time even though it was for emergencies only or when she finally got her braces off. Mine were still on, one more reason I’d never kissed a boy.

  “I did it. Can you believe it?” Her feet were freezing against my calves, and she smelled of cigarettes.

  “Wow.” I rubbed my eyes and feigned excitement. “Congratulations, I think. I mean, am I supposed to congratulate you on something like this?” I wasn’t going to get any sleep until I let her tell me every gross detail.

  She kissed me on the cheek, her lips soft, as though they’d been rubbed raw of anything but tenderness. “Yes!”

  “Did it feel good?” In the pale light of the streetlamp, I could see her messy hair, the smudged eye makeup.

  “Of course it did.” She crawled deeper under my sheets. But I knew it hadn’t. I’d felt a stinging pain down there when I was drifting off to sleep.

  “Did you…” I whispered.

  “Did I what?”

  “Have one?”

  But Savannah said she didn’t know if she’d had an orgasm. We had no idea what one felt like, so how could she know? The year before, Mrs. Davenport, our gym and health teacher, had told all sixty-seven girls in the eighth grade that orgasms were like sneezes. “You feel the tingling coming, and then it’s like a miniature explosion.” After a smattering of questions about what an explosion in your privates feels like, the red-faced teacher told us that we’d know it when it happened.

  “Well, are you going to do it again?” I asked her.

  In the light from the streetlamp outside, her eyes sparkled as though someone had thrown glitter at them. “Every chance I get,” she told me, and then she closed her eyes and snuggled up beside me like she used to.

  But I knew what was happening. I knew it more than ever that night. After losing her virginity to Chapman Sharp, the cutest boy in school, in the backseat of his dark-blue Jetta, I knew I was losing Savannah forever.

  Then the phone rang, and I reached across the bed to grab it. The caller ID said it was my mother.

  “Hi, Mom,” I said. “Everything okay?”

  “Sweetheart.”

  She sounded surprised I answered. We didn’t call each other often, and when we did speak, I got the feeling my mother was walking on balloons around me, wearing an imaginary pair of stilettos.

  “Honey, your father and I have something we need to discuss with you.” Patrick must have called them. “He’s on another extension, and we have your brother on call-waiting.” Perfect. A long-distance family reunion.

  I sat up in bed. My mother never wanted to talk about anything. She was famous for stuffing everything under a rug and walking all over it.

  “Hi, honey,” my dad said. His voice was faint, as if on speakerphone. “Hold on a minute while we get David on the line. If we hang up on you, we’ll call you right back.”

  Then the phone squealed in my ear as if he were pressing buttons, and I heard him say David’s name a few times. Finally, it was quiet, and then everyone was talking at once.

  I leaned back into the pillow and closed my eyes. “Is everything okay?” I asked again.

  My mother sighed. “How’s the new book coming?” She was so good at ignoring me I almost believed I hadn’t asked the question.

  “It’s getting there.” I got out of bed and took the phone downstairs. I grabbed a yogurt out of the fridge, even though I wanted a Pop-Tart. I went to sit on the front steps. I started eating the bitter plain yogurt to get to the prize of sugary strawberries on the bottom, and my mom began talking quickly, like she did when she was nervous.

  “So,” she said. “Do you have any idea why we called you both?”

  I was sure it was about Patrick reopening the case, but I didn’t want to say anything if I was wrong. “Are you moving back?” I asked and heard David gasp. It was so easy to rattle him.

  “Of course not,” my father said too quickly.

  “Hang on a second,” David said, and then I heard water running and metal banging against metal.

  “Good heavens.” My mother sounded irritated. “David, what are you doing?”

  “Sorry,” he said. “I have to water Willow.”

  David had planted one lonely weeping willow tree smack in the center of his lawn the year he bought his house. Our parents had had one in their front yard that David had wanted to uproot when they moved to Florida, but the buyers wouldn’t let him, even though it was an ugly little tree, a runt that never grew properly. My dad had put stakes in the ground with wires attached to the trunk in order to hold it up, and every time there was a big storm, he worried the wind would rip it up. So David had gone to Madden’s Greenhouse in Princeton and asked them for the smallest, frailest weeping willow sapling they had. He’d never told us why he wanted such a sad tree, but I was sure it was because Savannah had loved that little weakling. She always was for the underdog.

  “This call is probably costing us a fortune,” my dad piped in. “Are we ready to talk?”

  “Sorry,” David and I said at the same time, even though we hadn’t done anything wrong.

  “Well.” I could almost hear my mother rubbing her hands together. “We wanted to talk to you kids about…” Kids? “Well, you probably both know that Detective Tunney has reopened the case.”

  I had no idea if David knew. God, I hated it that Emma was so right about us.

  “We think it’s important to talk about what this means to us as a family.”

  This was awkward, because our glue was missing. Savannah had been the light that wound us all together. Without her, we were fragmented pieces, uncomfortable as a whole.

  My mom was tall but small boned and birdlike. Yet there was something fierce about her, something tightly gathered that ran the risk of letting loose. Even on the phone, I could sense it.

  “What does this mean to us as a family?” I asked.

  “Well.” My mom’s voice was too bright. “It can be stressful. It can bring up memories. People in town will be reminded again if word gets out and—”

  “Mom,” David interrupted her. “Do you think people forgot?”

  “All I’m saying,” she continued, “is that you two are fragile right now, and I think it’s better if we don’t get
too involved.”

  “That’s easy for you,” I said. “You’re a thousand miles away.”

  She kept right on talking. “We know this will be stressful, especially for you two, and we’re not sure that’s what you need right now.”

  “Shouldn’t we be thankful Patrick is doing something?” I couldn’t listen to her anymore. “Why do I get the feeling you’d rather leave this alone?”

  “Honey,” she said. “All I’m suggesting is that we let the police do their jobs; there’s no reason to get involved. Your father and I have been talking about this since Detective Tunney called us, and this is what we’ve decided, what we feel is best for all of us.”

  My father cleared his throat and finally spoke. “And it’s better not to talk about it too much. I’m sure Patrick told you both it’s best if this is kept quiet. One thing that stopped the investigation last time was that the town was upset, and they don’t want to disturb people’s sense of safety again. We’ve asked them not to let the reopening of the case be in the news.”

  It was only with my family and occasionally with Greg that I could let myself feel that boiling rage that was so often barely below the surface, and it was rising now. I wanted to hang up the phone and flee. I had that claustrophobic feeling I used to get in high school after Savannah died, even though I was alone. “Do you think you could do that, try not to get too involved with all this?”

  Savannah had been killed. And Malcolm Fisher put her in cold storage because he didn’t want to ruffle any more feathers in this snooty town, where everyone wanted to believe in the lie of safety in suburbia. And now, after all these years, Patrick Tunney had the good graces to get her out of the basement, where she never belonged. And my parents were telling us not to get involved?

  No one spoke. The tension was like an electromagnetic field that seemed to stretch taut and timeless through space from one of us to the next. “I don’t want to forget about Savannah,” I wanted to tell them. “I can’t, and there’s no way in hell I’m going to.” I finished my yogurt instead.

  “Oh, sweetie, I can tell you’re mad.” My mother knew me better than I thought. “Please.” She sounded desperate. “Will you two please trust us on this?” I’d almost forgotten David was on the line.

  “Fine,” I said, but I was furious. I wondered vaguely what I had agreed to by not saying what I really felt. How odd it was that we could talk about such meaningless things during our weekly phone calls, and yet we couldn’t discuss the one thing that was sitting among us: Savannah, and the possibility that maybe we were going to finally find out who stole her from us.

  CHAPTER

  24

  I had never been on Gabby’s motorcycle. When we were teenagers, she begged her mother for a scooter. I think it was Savannah being gone that finally convinced her mom. The two of us had been so miserable. But the second day she had it, we’d gone downtown to Dairy Queen and crashed it into the side of the brick building. We’d been wearing helmets, so our worst injuries were scrapes on our knees, but it was enough to make me never want to be on two wheels again. There was something about that moment of surprise, the brick coming straight at me and not being able to do anything about it, that was too terrifying. I didn’t even like to ride bicycles now. I stuck to horses. I could communicate with horses, read them. They weren’t inanimate objects whose brakes could fail like Gabby’s scooter’s had.

  I revealed this in articles. I also told the interviewers other things, like I hated sleeping alone when I was on tour, was afraid of the dark, thought milk tasted the way Band-Aids smell, and had almost a million frequent-flier miles. I thought if I gave fans some inside scoop on my life, they’d be satisfied enough, and I wouldn’t have to talk about Savannah. I’d given so many interviews over the years, both in print and on TV, that I assumed anyone who followed my work or knew me personally understood certain things about me.

  So when Brady knocked on my front door on a Wednesday morning, carrying two helmets, I thought maybe he’d lost his mind. I was trying to research everything I could on hypnotism. I should have told Deanna that writing while on deadline was off limits, but she would have said, “Publish or perish,” and it would have given me one more reason to hate her.

  “You’re coming with me.” Brady set the helmets on the counter.

  So he wasn’t mad at me for talking about personal things with Larry Cauchek. “Where are we going?” I tried not to be embarrassed that my hair was a mess, I was wearing an ancient torn Columbia T-shirt of Greg’s, and my yoga pants came from the dirty laundry pile.

  “How about the shore?” he asked.

  Normally, I would have been thrilled at the idea of being alone with him for that long. I hadn’t seen him since the prison, even though I’d texted him twice asking when I could interview Larry again. Both times he’d written back, “Never.” And now that I finally had a chance to hang out with him, the helmets were ruining it all.

  “What’s with the helmets?”

  He picked up the purple one and passed it to me. “We’re not seventeen, and this isn’t a scooter.” So he had read my interviews. “You’re going to love my Triumph. I’ve never crashed, and it’s a beautiful day. Plus, you need to stop writing. You need a break. It’s important to have some fun.”

  I felt like someone was trying to choke me and offer me candy at the same time. “Sorry. I have to write a magazine article.”

  “You’re afraid.” Brady watched me. He was wearing all leather, and he looked so hot it made me feel sort of faint.

  “Not really afraid…” I started lamely.

  “You’ll have the time of your life, I promise.” He set the purple helmet on my head. “I’ll have you back by dinner.”

  His eyes were so bright and his smile so big it was hard to say no. In a weird way, I felt like I owed him for the Larry interview. Or maybe I was just crushed out.

  I took the helmet off and held it in my hands, glancing at the clock. It wasn’t even noon. I couldn’t imagine spending seven hours on something that terrified me. But then I thought about the feature I was supposed to write, and I envisioned my hands around Brady’s waist.

  “Oh, what the hell,” I said. “I’m in. Let me get changed first.”

  In my room, I frantically riffled through my closet for something to wear and finally decided on a pair of jeans, a suede pullover Gabby had given me when she got back from her trip to Utah, and a pair of boots I’d bought for a book tour out west that I’d never worn. On the way back to Brady, I thought about how afraid some of my students had been of riding horses back when I used to give riding lessons in the summertime. Everyone was afraid of something. Maybe it was okay to push past that once in a while.

  Brady was waiting for me outside, holding the purple helmet like an offering. I tied my hair back in a ponytail and put it on. It was too tight, and I wondered if Colette usually wore it.

  “It’ll be easier if I get on first, and then you slip on behind me,” Brady told me.

  I did as he said and tried to relax into the hot, black leather seat. When he started the engine, it sounded like a jet taking off. Not being able to talk to him for two hours disappointed me, and as I was considering changing my mind, I heard his voice. It took me a moment to realize there were speakers inside the helmets.

  “Ready?” he asked, his voice clear and crisp.

  “Yes,” I yelled over the roar of the motor.

  He ducked away. “Use your regular voice. I can hear you fine.”

  “Sorry.” I felt awkward. “I think I’m ready.”

  The motorcycle was a lot wider than I remembered Gabby’s scooter being, and I didn’t feel unbalanced at all. The wind was warm, and the sun was bright and high in the sky.

  “When I lean,” Brady told me, “lean with me, okay?”

  “Okay,” I said.

  “You’ll want to lean away from me, but you have to keep your body in rhythm with mine. Can you do that?”

  “Yeah,” I said. “I can do
that.”

  When he wasn’t talking, asking questions about how work was going, and what I thought of the weather turning nice so quickly, a mix of classic rock and alternative music came through the speakers. Despite the fact that we must have been going close to seventy, I found the warmth and the music and the vibration of the engine hypnotic. Gabby and I went to Massage Envy in Princeton once a month, but hot stones on my back weren’t nearly as relaxing as this. And after a while, I did something I never in a million years thought I would: I let my head rest against Brady’s back.

  It was easier, too, to ask him things when we rode. Not seeing his face gave me some kind of license I wasn’t sure I could explain. I asked him about his family. His father, he told me, was a fourth-generation military guy. Captain in the army. He missed Vietnam by a few years, so he hadn’t seen combat but wanted to. And his mother did custom embroidery for high-end boutiques out in California, and that’s where they’d moved after his dad retired.

  “Why did you stay?” I asked.

  “I didn’t,” he said. “After graduation, I traveled.”

  “Where?”

  “Everywhere,” he said. “I got a dirt bike and went up the Trans-America Trail, through Canada, down the center of the country to Mexico and Guatemala.”

  So that’s where Brady Irons had been. “Why did you come back?”

  “Because of all the places I’ve lived, this is the only one that ever felt like home.”

  Then he was quiet for a long time. I wanted to ask him more. I wondered why, with four generations of military men in front of him, he hadn’t joined too. But something stopped me, and I let myself listen to the murmur of the road and feel the bike’s vibration.

  I didn’t know how much time had passed when Brady pulled up to Bliss Ice Cream on the boardwalk in Cape May. Savannah’s horse, Bliss, was named after this place. We got off the bike and put our helmets on the seat.