Nowhere Girl

by Susan Strecker

  On my way out, Greg half waved, or maybe he flipped me off. And this, I thought, backing the Volvo out the driveway, was what made my marriage so hard. The hope and then the taking back of the hope, like an odd tide I kept trying to count on to be the same.

  Gabby was in her roller sneakers when I got there. With her curly hair pulled back in a chignon and rectangular glasses on a chain around her neck, no one would have guessed she’d had sex on the book return box. I knew this because there’d been plenty of times in the past when she’d texted me a selfie of her and Duncan’s bare asses.

  I told her about the bassoon, trying to make it the same as it ever was, even though I felt weird around her now. “I might have to reserve a quiet study,” I told her. “I need to get my first draft to Deanna before she jams one of her stilettos in my forehead.”

  Gabby laughed, and I started to feel at ease again. “Have any of them you want,” she said. “I don’t think they’re being used until the weekend.” I walked quickly beside her as she rolled to her office. I loved the library. There was a hush to all those books that seemed pleasantly cozy and alive. “You know I have a lot of free time here, right?” she asked after she’d closed her office door. It was completely soundproof, and I lay down on the antique chaise longue next to her desk, which reminded me of an analyst’s office.

  “Ah yes,” I said. “Which is why I can’t believe you let Duncan go. Is the deed officially done, or are you still deciding?”

  “It all comes down to the words. It’s over; I just need to set the poor thing free.”

  “That’s too bad,” I said. “I liked him.”

  “You’ll like the next one too,” she said, and I didn’t know if she meant that I usually liked her boyfriends or if she had the next one picked out already.

  “Anyway, back to why I called you here. Besides sex, what’s my favorite thing to do when I’m bored?”

  “Stalk,” I said without hesitation. After more than twenty years of friendship, there wasn’t much I didn’t know about her. “Oh no. Have you been reading the sex offender registry again? Did you find any of our old teachers? I swear to God that bio teacher with the beaker is going to show up on that website one of these days.”

  “There’s something you need to see,” Gabby said. Her voice was too serious for this to be something silly. Maybe the physics teacher I’d had a mad crush on had finally gotten caught sleeping with a student.

  She booted up her computer and typed something into Google. Gabby would have made one hell of a secretary or a transcriptionist. I’d never seen anyone type that fast. She scrolled through a police blotter, highlighted a paragraph, and turned the screen toward me. It took a second before I understood what I was reading.

  “How did you find this?” It was dated five years before.

  “I knew something was going on, so I kept digging till I found it.”

  I turned away. “We shouldn’t be reading this. It’s private.”

  Gabby waved her hand dismissively at me. “Clearly it’s not if it’s out there on the World Wide Web.”

  “You know what I mean. If Brady had wanted us to know about Colette’s … struggles, he would have told us.”

  “Schizophrenia and multiple arrests constitute a little more than struggles,” she said.

  I thought of Colette in the garden, half-dressed, talking to herself, and I felt like I was reading her diary, peeking through a door, watching her cry. “There’s a lot of stuff on the Internet that the world doesn’t need to know.” I was getting a little pissed at Gabby, and I didn’t know why. It wasn’t like she’d made fun of Colette or announced this find at a Thursday dinner.

  “Come on, Cades. You can’t tell me you haven’t been wondering what Brady’s story is. He disappears for half our lives, and now he’s back and all secretive about his girlfriend and shows up at dinner, kissing you, and then backing off and what the fuck…”

  Gabby was right. And if Colette were truly mentally ill, that would explain why he seemed so guarded. He was sad in a way that was more than sad; he was almost apologetic, remorseful.

  “Yeah,” I said. “It was weird when he came out to Ravenswood last week, like he was desperate for company or something.”

  Gabby stopped chewing the gum she always had in her mouth. “You took him to the barn?” She knew that was my haven, my alone place.

  “No.” I tried to make my voice light. “He stopped by. I didn’t know he was coming. Bliss was sick and—” I already said too much. There was no way I was going to tell her he’d been there twice.

  She straightened her chair so we were facing each other. “Then how the hell did he find it? I can’t even get there with my GPS.”

  I really didn’t want to get into it right then. “So how about me kissing Brady again?” I said to change the subject. “It was so … blah.” I couldn’t think of a better word.

  I was glad her office was soundproof. I lay back down on the lounge and tried to conjure up that feeling I’d gotten in Tanta’s class, the corpse pose feeling.

  Gabby rolled her eyes. “I know you’ve been in love with him since you were fourteen, but maybe he’s not the right guy anymore. None of us are the same as we were when we were kids. What about Greg? Did you feel something for him after yoga?”

  “Actually, yes.”

  “Why are you so dressed up?” Gabby touched my silk top.

  “I went to see Larry, remember?”

  “You dressed up to see a serial killer?”

  “Well, I’m not going to dress like a slouch,” I told her, and we both laughed that laugh we’d shared since we were girls, running around in the world holding on to each other when life sucked the worst.

  CHAPTER

  36

  The phone rang, and in my strange predream state, I thought it was Colette calling to ask for help, but when I got into the hall so I wouldn’t wake Greg, I saw that it was past midnight and it was Patrick.

  “Hello?”

  “Hey.”

  “What’s wrong?” I asked immediately.

  “Cady, I have to talk to you, and it’s not about Savannah.”

  “It’s not?” It was May, and the nights were still somewhat cold, so I stood in my nightgown in the vast hallway, chilly and uncomfortable.

  “Well, it’s indirectly about Savannah. But really it’s about me.”

  “Okay.” I dragged the word out, waiting.

  Patrick said, “I’m outside.”

  “What? Where?”

  “In the street.”

  Out the window, I saw his Suburban parked on the other side of the road. “Patrick, that’s weird,” I told him.

  He laughed a little. “I know. I was coming home from work, and, well, you can go back to bed if you want,” he said amicably.

  “No.” I was trying to stage whisper. “I’m coming out. And I’ll bring cookies.”

  I’d made the cookies earlier that night when I’d gotten back from the library and Greg had still been hard at it on the bassoon. I held the cookies in one hand as I struggled to pull on the boots I’d worn when I’d gone riding with Brady that time. I thought about that day a lot, and I hoped, with the weather warming, it might happen again.

  Patrick’s truck was clean, but on the floor of the passenger side was a Nerf football that must have been Aiden’s.

  “Hey,” I said. It was warm in the truck, and Patrick had Ray LaMontagne on low. He was clean shaven now and had on a dark suit.

  “Hey.” He smiled at me and turned down the radio. I passed him the cookies. Greg wouldn’t eat them anyway; he was into the gluten-free craze and had never gone near butter or sugar. “Thanks.”

  “Take two,” I told him. “Hell, take the plate.” He took three, and then I put the plate on my lap. I had pulled on Greg’s overcoat, and underneath, I could feel my nightgown, soft against my skin.

  Patrick bit into one of the cookies.

  I tried to be patient while he chewed, but finally I said, “Patrick, te
ll me.”

  He lowered his cookie. “I fucked up.”

  I could feel my heart go fluttery in my chest. “Okay.” I waited.

  He took a deep breath in, stared out at the empty street, and said, “I knew, Cady.”

  The cookies felt heavy suddenly on my lap. My heart beat wildly like I might go into cardiac arrest. “Knew what?” My voice sounded see-through.

  He spoke levelly, and I could tell he was trying to keep calm. “I knew something wasn’t adding up with Savannah’s case. I kept trying to tell Fisher, but he didn’t want to hear it. He wanted this case to go away as fast as possible.” He held on to his half-eaten cookie, and the streetlight across his face made the green of his eyes stand out. “And I was new to the squad—a fucking rookie, really—lowest one on the totem pole. And everyone was afraid of Fisher; I mean, he did some fucked-up things. I knew that, and I also knew I wasn’t supposed to tell; no one told. It was like I went in as this really hopeful kid, and all my ideals were getting tromped on.” He brought the cookie to his mouth but didn’t take a bite. “And so I was trying to balance, you know, what to say and how to keep my job, because I’d always wanted to be a cop.”

  I felt frozen, a little sick. Finally, I said, “Why’d he want it to go away?”

  “The mayor, the city council, all those people that wanted this to be a stranger case didn’t want it to be someone any of us knew. The perfect town of Stanwich.” He said this with derision. And when he turned toward me again, his face was red. “I’ve always wanted to be a cop. I don’t know if you always wanted to be a writer, but I always wanted to be the guy who people admire. I wanted to be at the scene of an accident, pulling children out of burning cars. I wanted to save people like your sister.”

  I saw close up that Patrick had small creases on the sides of his eyes and very full lips like kids have, and I felt something like tenderness wash over me when he spoke, even as I was holding my breath, even as I didn’t want to know this secret he was revealing.

  “And when I came up against city hall, literally city hall, when they were all talking about cold casing it, putting it in the basement, and I was standing in that fucking conference room trying to fight it and they kept raising their voices at me, they kept telling me why I was wrong, I kept on trying to tell them, ‘No, we’ve missed something; there are things we could still explore,’ but they’d taken me off the case, and they said it wasn’t my business anymore.” He swallowed. “And then they threatened me.” Patrick sat there staring out the windshield at our dark neighborhood for so long I thought he was done. When he spoke again, his voice was low. “I had a new wife at home. That was before Darlene got into drinking so bad, and I thought we were going to make a family, and my dad was dying of melanoma, and I didn’t know he had that life insurance plan that has set my mom up so well. I was picturing having to take care of my mother, and you know Darlene didn’t have a job; she’d gotten kicked out of nursing school for stealing pills. And I needed to keep it together.” He looked down at the cookie as if asking it for answers. “Anyway, that’s a lot of shit-poor excuses. The fact is, I didn’t buck the system.” I saw that though he presented himself as a tough guy, Patrick was a teddy bear inside. “I caved.” He swiped at his eyes. “It’s always our business. I know that now. When we know something isn’t going down the way it’s supposed to, it’s our job to not stop until we make it right.” I had the strange urge to hold him. “But the only excuse I have is that I was young, and I didn’t know what to do.” His green eyes went dark. “I didn’t feel like I had a choice. One mistake left everything so fucked up.”

  I thought about that day in the park with Brady. One mistake that changes your whole life.

  “Did you have a choice?” Patrick watched me as I spoke. “Wouldn’t they have just gotten rid of you? And then it would have been almost impossible to get a job somewhere else.” I couldn’t quite believe I was seeing it that way. But I was. Somewhere deep in me in that place where empathy lived, I understood.

  “I guess they would have canned me,” he admitted. “But if I had it to do over,” he continued so low I almost couldn’t hear, “I wouldn’t do it like that again. Especially now with Aiden. I’d show him what it was like to stand up for what you believed in. Because if someone did to Aiden what happened to Savannah…”

  I felt myself reach down and open my window. I needed fresh air. Outside, it smelled of wet spring leaves. Our house was dark, save that light I’d left on in the kitchen when I went to get the cookies. It looked sort of forlorn, massive, and dark, like a ship no one wants to sail. “You know what I think it’s about?” I turned to Patrick, and he raised his head. “I think it’s about second chances and moving forward.” I thought of how books needed to move forward. Too many flashbacks and novels got stuck in the past rather than continuing with the real-time story. “We’ve got a second chance now,” I said. “And we need to focus on that.”

  I’d never seen anyone look at me quite like Patrick was. I imagined it was what doctors feel like sometimes when they give the right remedy, when the person who was once ill comes back feeling well again.

  “You’re an incredible woman,” he finally said.

  “No,” I told him. “I’m human. And I’m a really good baker, so eat the cookies before I start feeling bad about myself.”

  He grinned. “Jesus Christ,” he said, lifting a cookie as if in a toast. “Are you sure you can forgive the mistakes I’ve made?”

  I took a cookie off the plate, and we sat there eating together. “I always wondered what Atlas would look like,” I said, thinking about going to see the statue of the titan at Rockefeller Center every year when my parents took us ice-skating before Christmas, “if he let go of the globe and stood up straight. After all, the earth floats; he doesn’t need to carry it.”

  Patrick smiled while he chewed. “Actually,” he said, “he was carrying the celestial spheres.”

  I quit eating my cookie. “What?”

  He took another bite. “You don’t think I read Greek mythology? The titans are my kind of dudes.”

  I laughed. “They are your kind of dudes,” I said. “Come to think of it.”

  “But it’s true,” he said, wiping his mouth of crumbs. “Those celestial spheres have been fixed in place for so long, old Atlas is putting his back out for no reason.”

  “Yeah,” I agreed with him. And then I reached over and patted his leg, and Patrick did a funny thing: he squeezed my hand. We sat there, two old friends who shared a horrible memory, holding hands in front of my big lonely house.

  * * *

  It was after two when I let myself in the front door, and I knew I wouldn’t sleep. In my office, I pulled out the yearbooks and guest book and started cross-referencing.

  Going through Savannah’s funeral book was like wading through thick mud. I counted forty-four girls from our sophomore class. Only three either hadn’t signed in or weren’t there. All the sophomore boys had signed in, as had most of the junior class. I wasn’t surprised. Everyone knew Savannah. Everyone loved her. Our school had 360 kids, and I counted 333 names that I either knew or recognized from the yearbook.

  There were four names I didn’t know, all boys. I scribbled them on the back of a receipt I’d found in my desk drawer and said each one aloud, as if hearing them would tell me if they were the one. Anderson Rider. McPherson Michele. Thomas Small. Sam Bennington. I looked the names up in the yearbook and found that three were in the AV Club with David. When I didn’t see Sam Bennington listed on any of the sports teams or in any clubs, I immediately began to create an image of him. A loner with greasy hair who loved my sister and was so angry he couldn’t have her he’d done something horrible to her one November day. I rechecked the yearbook. Savannah had a thing for lacrosse players, so I went back to the boys’ lacrosse photo and noticed the girls’ lacrosse team picture underneath it.

  Listed below Alice Adamson was Sam Bennington. She wasn’t an animal-abusing, angry teenage boy bu
t a beautiful senior with red hair and dark eyes. Jesus. No wonder it was hard for cops to find killers. I flipped through the yearbook one more time and found the boys who’d been crushed out on Savannah and the girls she’d hung out with. In one shot, I saw her with one of those upperclassmen girls she used to hang out with, Brittain Wylde, out on the café lawn, their arms around each other. Savannah had her eye on someone to the left. The person’s head had been cut off in the picture, but I could tell by the build and the giant silver belt buckle that it was a boy.

  Going through the yearbook still took my breath away. To see my sister so easily standing with Brittain, the upperclassman queen bee, reminded me of how cool she was and how none of her older friends even knew my name. I made myself turn the page, but the most acutely unpleasant thing about going back through the guest book and the yearbook was that, besides remembering the shock of losing Savannah, I had to feel again what it was like to be that awkward, chubby, sixteen-year-old girl who was always being eclipsed by her twin.

  * * *

  As the sun rose, I finally slept in my office and dreamed I was in the cemetery. My limbs felt thick as if they were made of clay, and someone was saying, “Quit playing. You’re making me nervous.” It was a boy’s voice, and I knew my sister was with him. His voice was gentle, kind. Suddenly, though, it changed to high pitched and panicky. “Oh shit. Jesus Christ. Come on—no, really, come on.” And the sheer panic of it, the fact that I couldn’t open my eyes, that I couldn’t move, created such terror that I was pulled into consciousness. I woke to Greg coming through the doorway, coffee in hand.

  “What the hell?” he asked. “What happened?”

  I wiped spit off my chin. “What do you mean?”

  “You were screaming,” he said. “You were saying Savannah’s name.”

  Greg’s skin was nicked, and blood came through a tiny piece of toilet paper. “I had a bad dream,” I said, flopping back down. I was so utterly exhausted I didn’t think I could ever get up again. My eyelids felt like lead.