Nowhere Girl

by Susan Strecker

  Patrick ran to catch up with me. “Stop, Cady.” He pulled at my elbow. “Please stop.”

  So I did. I expected him to tell me all the reasons we had to keep going, but he did something I’ll never forget: he put the basket on the ground and pulled me into a hug.

  “I know,” he said. “I know how frustrating this is. It’s fucking horrible.”

  And then I cried. Standing there leaning against his big chest, I sobbed. I felt sick I cried so hard. I cried and cried in the heat with that empty basket next to us.

  * * *

  Afterward, we ate lunch in Terhune’s café. No one was in there. And they had a nice full salad bar as a result, but they also had a whole table of desserts. Patrick and I decided to eat peach pie with ice cream and skip all the rest. I actually felt happy after my cry. I couldn’t explain it. I felt hopeful and relaxed.

  “Pie is so good when you’re hungover,” I said while we ate.

  “Yeah. It’s the best. Why are you hungover?” He had a spot of vanilla ice cream on his chin, but I didn’t say anything.

  “David and I closed The Ivy Inn last night playing One in a Hundred.”

  “What’s that?” He scratched at the scruff on his chin, but the ice cream still didn’t come off.

  “You watch everyone who walks by and have to decide if you’d sleep with them.” The game seemed so stupid when I said it out loud, but it’d been keeping us entertained in restaurants and airports for years. “Last night, my brother, the horndog, made it to twenty-five.”

  “And you?”

  “Oh God, I can’t tell you that. It’s way too embarrassing.”

  “C’mon, how many hotties?” It sounded strange to hear this giant of a man use a word like that.

  “Um.” I let a peach slip around my mouth before swallowing it. “In a bar full of guys, I couldn’t find one I wanted to sleep with.”

  “No one?” He smiled. “No hotties at all?”

  This was not how I’d thought my meeting with Detective Tunney would go. “That’s not really how it works for me. I have to feel like I’d want to wake up with them without chewing off my arm. Or better yet, without them thinking that sneaking out the window naked would be a better option than facing me in the morning.”

  “Stop it,” he said. “You’re adorable.”

  I scooped up the last of my ice cream. “That’s nice-person speak for chunky.”

  I waited to endure a clumsy silence, but Patrick set his fork down on his plate with some peach pie still on it. “Actually,” he said, his green eyes sparkling, “adorable means adorable.”

  I felt my face burning. “Does Aiden look like you?” I asked to change the subject.

  “Ah, Aiden.” Patrick pulled out his cell phone and scrolled through it. “You tell me.” He turned it toward me, and I saw the cutest little red-haired boy smiling over a piece of half-eaten watermelon.

  He was a carbon copy of Patrick but chubbier and smaller. “Now that’s adorable,” I said. And right when I was about to take the cell to enlarge the picture, it rang. Patrick stood and went to talk over by the window. I could tell from the relaxed tone of his voice that the caller was a girl, and I imagined him waking up with a beautiful, skinny girlfriend with silky hair.

  “That was my researcher,” he said when he put the phone back in his pocket. “She has a list of who left town in the months after Savannah was killed.”

  “What can I do?”

  “Go through the funeral guest list and the yearbooks again.” He put up his hand when I started to say I’d already done that about nine hundred times. “It’s been a while,” he said. “Do it one more time, please.”

  “Whatever you say, boss. So,” I said, not really wanting the answer to my next question, “who were the main suspects way back when?”

  “We had to investigate everyone.”

  “Everyone? Even my family?”

  “Come on. You know this from your books. It’s Detectivology 101. First thing you do is rule out loved ones.”

  “Detectivology?” I thought about all the words I made up for my books. “Is that a real word?”

  “It is now,” he said, laughing.

  “Does that mean at one point I was a suspect?”

  “You were only sixteen.”

  “So what? Children do horrible things to each other all the time.”

  He was chewing on his lip. “Everyone was on the list … including you.”

  “So what made you take me off … the list?”

  “Cady.” He held out his hand, and when I put mine in it, I felt instantly comforted. “No one in your family was responsible for Savannah’s death. Plenty of witnesses saw your parents at the restaurant, getting ready for dinner.”

  “Squeezing melons and not their daughter’s neck?” I’d meant it to be funny, but I had a quick, gruesome image of my parents choking the life out of my sister.

  Patrick ignored me and kept talking. “I can’t remember the name of the kid whose house your brother was at, but his mom was home and gave us a sworn affidavit that he was there playing video games. And you were on the phone with 911, calling it in.”

  “Yeah, but isn’t there some rule in detective land like whoever smelt it dealt it?”

  “You watch too many cop shows.” He tapped the Irish band on his right ring finger on the table. “But yes, because you called it in, we had to look at you.”

  “What did you see?”

  “A terrified girl who somehow knew something awful had happened to her sister.” He held his breath for several seconds. “Plus, we subpoenaed your cell phone records.”

  “And? My parents gave me that phone for emergencies. I made exactly one call on it.”

  “I know. But it was the time that you made the call. The medical examiner determined there was no way you would have had enough time to get from the Wolfe Mansion back to Kingswood.”

  “So you really did check me out.”

  “I never wanted you on that list,” he said. “I knew you weren’t responsible the first time I laid eyes on you.”

  I watched a man trimming forsythia on the orchard lawn. “That’s where you’re wrong. If I hadn’t been such a coward, I could have saved her. I knew the minute she was late something was wrong, and I did nothing. I was wholly, singularly responsible. If I’d gone out there instead of—”

  “If you’d gone out there, you might have gotten yourself killed too.” He squeezed my fingers. A cop’s skin shouldn’t have been that soft. “If you hadn’t made that call and went searching for Savannah instead, this could have ended much worse for you. And your parents.”

  “Sometimes I wish he’d killed me too.” I felt the pressure of tears behind my eyes.

  “Stop,” Patrick said. He leaned so far over the table I thought he was going to kiss me. I felt my breath stop. “Don’t ever say that.” He watched me but didn’t smile. “I’m going to do everything I can to catch him, Cady. You know that, right?”

  I put my fork on my plate, the ice cream scraped clean, no bits of peach left anywhere on it. “Me too,” I said. “I’ll die before I stop.”

  CHAPTER

  28

  Before I left for Sound View, I’d gone to Savannah’s grave site every day no matter what—in sleet, when it was so hot even air-conditioning didn’t keep me cool, in two feet of snow. On my last day at the hospital, my parents and I sat in soft leather chairs in Dr. Holley’s office, reviewing the list of shit I had to do to stay off the crazy train.

  CADENCE MARTINO CONTRACTS TO:

  1. Alert an adult if she feels she might harm herself in any way.

  2. Share her “feelings journal” with her parents every Sunday.

  3. Visit her sister’s grave no more than once a week.

  The list went on. I had to promise to continue outpatient sessions with Dr. Holley. And exercise daily. Holley had told me that exercise set endorphins free in my system, and a gym membership had been part of the release agreement, but my eyes stoppe
d at number three. I heard my mother shift on the couch across from me. It was warm in Sound View that day; the radiators were still clanking, and I’d seen a thin sheen of sweat on my father’s upper lip. Holley explained that if I was at Savannah’s grave, I wouldn’t be out forging new relationships. Forging? I’d wanted to spit the word back at that dumb hippie. Who under the age of ninety uses the word “forging”? Inside, I’d felt a kind of panic, as though a tightly woven net that kept me together was unraveling at a speed I couldn’t keep up with. Holley raised his eyebrows.

  “Okay?” he asked.

  I held the list tightly in my hands. I felt chilled in the strange way that scary movies made me cold as though I were ultimately unprotected in the world. I either did this or I stayed at Sound View. The difference was, I realized, running my finger over the white space between the words, the rules had loopholes; these things could be ducked, avoided. My mother had worn a belted yellow dress, too summery for the day, and my father was in a suit, one he’d only worn to church, as though this were a ceremony, a rite of passage in every girl’s life, and they were leaning forward; it seemed like they were holding a collective breath. I suddenly felt sorry for them.

  “Okay,” I said.

  Dr. Holley smiled a gotcha smile and handed me a pen. I scribbled my initials next to all seventeen items and signed the bottom of the page.

  On the way home, I sat in the backseat, watching the world pass. It was a gorgeous Sunday; everything was thawing and warming up, the maple trees were sprouting buds, and I saw dandelions on the edges of the byways. I felt unleashed, let loose, the landscape seemed so spacious. There were things on the list I would obey. Seeing Savannah’s grave once a week wasn’t one of them. How would I hear her? Besides the dreams, that was when Savannah talked to me, on those afternoons I sat under the red maples. Not words, exactly—it was as though she occupied my thoughts, turning them into a Savannah way of thinking. I could hear her spilling laughter, the mischievous way she seemed to take an idea and run with it. The idea didn’t have a chance of escaping. And I didn’t, either.

  Savannah had stayed away from Sound View; that wasn’t a place for her. She wouldn’t have come anywhere near those wasted girls, the whitewashed corridors, and the terrifying nurses. And now, driving home, panicking about how I would get to the graveyard without my parents knowing, I felt her. She seemed to occupy me as I sat in the car. And I realized with relief she wasn’t going to wait for sleep or cemeteries. She’d disregard all boundaries and come to me anytime she liked. The cemetery, I knew as we turned into our driveway, wasn’t as important as I thought it had been.

  * * *

  Still, there was something beckoning about a cemetery. And even now, almost seventeen years later, I felt myself drawn there. Two days after my meeting with Patrick, I’d woken in a sloggy, half-dreaming state and had the insistent feeling that I should go to Savannah. It had been raining since that unnaturally warm day at the orchard, and now the morning bloomed sunny and clear. After Greg left for work, I drove under that canopy of old maple trees past the field where the same chestnut horse had been grazing for more than a decade.

  A well-meaning but annoying counselor at Sound View had told me that grief doesn’t go away, it just gets different, and going to the cemetery was a kind of barometer for that. Sixteen years of living without my sister and grief felt exactly the same, a quicksand that sucked me down day after day, but never deep enough to kill me. That would have been far too kind. I would have taken different, even if it had meant worse. This much sadness was too much sorrow, a headache that wouldn’t go away no matter how much aspirin I swallowed. An itch that wouldn’t be tempered no matter how much I scratched. An arrhythmia that kept my heart racing and my breath short but wouldn’t give me the respite of death. As I drove between the stone pillars, I remembered how, before I could drive, I used to walk the three miles to the cemetery.

  I parked underneath that same maple. Savannah’s gravestone was surrounded by regulation-length grass so green it could have been Astroturf. My dad’s parents had bought fifteen plots when they got married, wanting to keep the Martinos together after death. My sister was there alone.

  I closed my eyes and asked her silently why I kept having the same dream about her. Was she really trying to tell me something? A clue about who killed her? That she missed me? Or was it the random firing of synapses that invaded my sleep every night? “Come back to me,” I said aloud, opening my eyes. “What are you trying to say?” But there was no answer. The skies didn’t open. No divine thought entered my head. There was no sign, great or small, from Savannah. The sun was strong, too strong for the beginning of May, and I felt suddenly exhausted. And then I heard the twig crack behind me. When I turned, I caught sight of a black hoodie weaving between the graves. I could tell by the build it was a big man, and he wasn’t so much running as speed walking, like he was trying to get out of there without seeming like he was in a hurry. It was such an odd sight, a man scurrying away from a row of headstones. “Hey!” I yelled after him, but he slipped between a group of graves that I knew from wandering the grounds belonged to an extended family of fourteen who had all died in a house fire on Christmas in the early 1950s. I chased the guy in the hoodie, but he had seemed to disappear into the ether. It was as if the trees that lined the cemetery were in collusion, hiding him, and he was gone. I half believed he was an odd figment of my imagination brought on by grief.

  I walked by the embarrassingly large granite memorial for Mathew and Steven Harris, teenage brothers who’d died in a drunk-driving accident a few years before Savannah. A thin layer of pollen tinted Savannah’s headstone a golden yellow, and I brushed it away with my sleeve and flicked away a spot of bird poop. Other than that, her stone and the area around it were pristine. My parents had been paying Stony Lane Cemetery $40.95 a month to keep the grave clean. I’d found the invoice years before when I’d gone through my mother’s desk, looking for something sharp enough to cut myself. I’d needed a small fix—a pen, an earring, anything that would puncture my skin enough to release the pain I could feel bubbling under the surface, and I remembered the strange, almost floating sensation I had when I’d seen Savannah’s name in the subject line, as though for one odd moment she were alive, incurring expenses on bills in my mother’s desk.

  The caretakers tended to the flowers my mother had planted in front of the grave, but I saw now that someone had left a bushel of purple flowers with yellow centers behind it, as though hiding them. Up front, depending on the time of year, were tulips and daffodils, gladiolas, lilies, bright, cheery flowers that seemed to sing silently when you walked by. And, of course, daisies. But the little bushel, which was still in an earthenware container, appeared untamed, like the wild roses that grew along the seaside paths Savannah and I used to see when we took bike rides in the summer. Once upon a time, Savannah’s headstone had been adorned with photographs, trinkets, statues, and daisies, loads and loads of daisies, because everyone knew they were her favorite. After her death, classmates kept up a steady stream of memorabilia. But all that had stopped by the time I went to college. Teenagers have short memories.

  I walked to the flowers and touched their petals. There was no card attached and nothing to give away who’d left them. I pulled one from the bunch and held it to my nose. It smelled like earth and leaves. And it had the springy middle of a buttercup. I went searching for the caretaker, Mr. Wiley, an old, half-deaf man who took unnatural pride in the graves. While I walked, I heard a woodpecker somewhere to the north and the whir of a motor. When I found Mr. Wiley, he was sweeping out the little shack where he kept the watering cans and gardening tools. I had to shout to ask about the flowers, and in the end, he simply came with me down the dirt road so I could show them to him. “Nope,” he said, rubbing his chin and talking too loudly. “Can’t say as I know a thing about these, my dear.”

  Sitting in my car in the sun and searching for flowers on my phone, I finally found a thumbnail picture simi
lar to the wilting flower on my dashboard. Clicking on it, a photo of the Anemone thalictrum flower filled my screen, the common name for it, rue flower. Wikipedia told me it’s closely related to the buttercup, and the purple variety is really pink. A pretty flower with a melancholic title, it had been named after Shakespeare’s Hamlet. Ophelia clutched the flower after she went mad because she could not marry her love. Unable to shake the spooky feeling I got from reading about the rue flower, I started my car and drove west on Mareside Highway.

  * * *

  When I got to David’s house, I found him in the kitchen with three computers open and a pencil tucked behind his ear. “Hey there, big brother.”

  He had on an oxford shirt and nice pants. Deep wrinkles around his eyes were making him look more and more like our father. He hugged me quickly and kissed my cheek. “What a nice surprise.”

  The screens were all filled with letters and numbers that meant nothing to me. “Whatcha working on?”

  He tossed the pencil on the table. “A billionaire in New York wants me to create an app to track his daughter’s school bus.”

  “That’s brilliant. Think how many hours it could have saved Mom from waiting at the end of the driveway.”

  “Everything all right?” he asked, saving documents on each computer one by one.

  “Yeah. Can’t complain.” I went to his fridge, hoping he’d stopped by Sotto Sopra for some of Chef Todd’s homemade chocolate puddings. All these years later, he kept on making them for us. “I was just at Stony Lane.” We never called the cemetery by its name or referred to Savannah when we were talking about it. “Have you been there recently?”

  “Not for a while.” A shadow crossed his face, and I knew I’d upset him.

  “There were some flowers at her grave I’d never seen before.”

  “Maybe Mom had them delivered. Have you called her?”

  My mother and I hadn’t talked much in the years since she and my father had moved. We’d grown so far apart, it was like we were shadows passing for mother and daughter. We shared almost nothing, so busy in our respective lives that even when we talked every week, I had nothing to say. “I thought I’d ask you first.” Shit. Chandler and Emma weren’t kidding. We really had no idea how to talk to each other. I opened the crisper drawer and grabbed a bunch of grapes. “Who do you think put them there?”