A Good Idea

by Cristina Moracho

  “What is it, Finley? You getting nostalgic? Don’t worry, most of us aren’t going anywhere. When you come back, we’ll be right where you left us.”

  I ignored the Owen-esque note of martyrdom that had crept into Danny’s voice. “Did you ever see her again? Or was it just that one time?”

  “You mean Betty’s ghost?”

  Startled by his matter-of-factness, I nodded.

  “Only that once.” He glanced over his shoulder and out the window, in the direction of the streetlamp he’d claimed illuminated her that night. “I keep an eye out for her, but I don’t think she’ll come back now.”

  I looked at him curiously. “Why not?”

  “Because she got what she wanted.”

  “How can you say that? Calder’s still free.”

  “You’re the one who needed to see him punished, not Betty. He did what she asked him to do. I don’t think she was ever angry at him. That was you. I think she just wanted the drama her death deserved.”

  “Well,” I said, plucking one of the postcards from the rack, “I did my best.”

  • • •

  Dad wanted to go out to dinner that night, do something special, try to shift the focus and celebrate the fact that I was going off to college. I almost said no, and then I thought of my transgressions from the last two months, which were legion, and that the least I could do was sit at a table with him for an hour and eat a bowl of tortellini. He ordered me a glass of wine, and he raised his in a toast.

  “To your freshman year of college. The next chapter in your life, kiddo.”

  I smiled weakly and chimed my glass against his. His subtext was unmistakable. No more fucking around.

  • • •

  I woke in the middle of the night, from a nightmare about suffocating that would become deeply familiar. That was the first time I had it, though, right before I left Williston. While everyone else was binge-drinking on the beach and saying their weepy good-byes, I was gasping for air in my sleep. I sat up in bed, clutching my chest and gulping oxygen as fast as I could, and even after the panic subsided and my heartbeat returned to something like normal, I knew I’d never fall back to sleep, so I went downstairs and turned on the classic movie channel, volume on low. I caught the end of My Darling Clementine. High Noon came on next, and by the time Grace Kelly pulled the trigger at the end, the sky was lightening outside the windows.

  I made coffee in the French press and smoked a cigarette on the back porch, eager for Dad to wake up so I could leave. I got dressed and started loading up the Subaru. I had too much to carry on the bus or the train, so Dad had agreed to let me drive back. He would come down to New York in a couple of weeks, see my dorm room, and take the car home to Maine. Knowing I would see him again so soon made our good-bye less difficult than normal. He told me he was proud of me, which I found hard to believe, but I thanked him anyway.

  When I pulled out of the driveway, “More Than a Feeling” was playing on the classic rock station. I turned it up and headed home.

  • • •

  A couple of days later, I was hunkered down in my bedroom, air conditioner on high—the tail end of August in New York always came as a shock after a summer in Maine—the overhead lights off, a book in my hand that I wasn’t reading. Instead, I was thinking about Owen, and Serena, and even Rebecca, and then berating myself for thinking about them, for not being able to put Williston and its denizens more firmly out of my mind. Mostly I was just staring at the wall and wondering why being back in New York hadn’t solved all my problems.

  The phone rang in the hallway and my mother answered it; a minute later, she knocked on my door.

  “I’m not here,” I said, and she came in anyway.

  “It’s your dad,” she said, holding out the cordless in that way that meant I didn’t have a choice. Warily, I took it from her.

  “Hi,” I said.

  “Finley,” he said, his voice as grave and serious as it had been when he called to tell me about Betty.

  The crying kicked in like a reflex. “What happened?” I managed. “Is it Owen?”

  “Owen’s fine. I need to ask you something, and you need to tell me the truth. Okay?”

  “Okay.”

  Dad cleared his throat. “Your last night in town. Did you go to the party on the beach?” He sounded like he was terrified to hear my answer.

  “No. We went out to dinner, remember? And then we went home and I packed.”

  “You didn’t sneak out later? After I went to bed?”

  “No, I tried to sleep, but I had a bad dream so I watched movies in the living room until you woke up. Why? Dad, what happened at the party?”

  He sighed, relieved that I was genuinely clueless. “Calder’s missing.”

  My gut went cold. “What are you talking about?”

  “The last time anyone saw him was that night, on the beach, at the party.”

  “I wasn’t there,” I said. “I swear, I wasn’t there. It wasn’t me.”

  “Okay, Finley, I believe you. It’s going to be okay.”

  • • •

  Calder had gone to the beach party. There were dozens of teenagers there, getting drunk in the dark and in the shadows around the bonfire, couples wandering off, kids arriving in one group and leaving with another, depending on who was still sober enough to drive. The police were having a hell of a time putting together a complete list. But several people saw Calder there, and were surprised that he’d shown up at all; this was, of course, the same beach where Betty had died, and suspicion had been growing steadily since his outburst after her funeral. No one at the party knew that Owen had already been down to the sheriff’s station and told them everything he’d seen, even Leroy’s lending a hand.

  I spent the rest of the day on the phone, trying to reach anyone back in Williston who might know what had happened. I tried Owen and Emily and even Serena, but it was Rebecca I finally got on the line. She’d been at the bonfire—but drunk, of course—and Calder had been there, but sort of on the fringes. He didn’t talk to many people, just drank a few beers and looked at the water until, she said, it started giving people the creeps. Then she and Danny had slipped away for a while—I asked why, since it had gone so badly the first time, and she said she was leaving for Amherst in a few days, so she thought why not—and when they came back, Calder was gone. He hadn’t said good-bye to anyone, and nobody remembered him leaving. He was there, and then he wasn’t. It didn’t seem like a big deal until the next morning, when his car was still parked by the beach and he was nowhere to be found.

  “He just vanished,” she said.

  I imagined the scene at Charlie’s, drunken theories and speculations offered in tones not quite as hushed as intended. Maybe he’d had too much to drink and gotten in the water—Rebecca said there had been a few brave skinny-dippers—or maybe he’d wandered off, from the beach into the woods, gotten hurt and was lying helpless on the forest floor. Maybe one of the other kids at the party knew more than they were telling. The same story the cops had once tried to use to explain Betty’s death and the reappearance of her body—that she’d OD’d on drugs and whoever was with her had panicked and buried her—was being told now about Calder.

  But then Dad broke the story in the paper—that hours before Calder disappeared, a witness had finally come forward and confessed to seeing him drown Betty. Always a master of subtext, Dad managed to imply, without making any outright accusations, that someone at the sheriff’s department had warned Leroy before anyone could pick Calder up for questioning.

  The accusations would come later, in the letters to the editor, after the arrest warrant was finally issued, after it finally dawned on everyone that the police were looking for a murder suspect, not a missing person, and that it was their beloved mayor who had, in all likelihood, helped him get away. Eventually, Leroy resigned, citing the need to
spend more time with his family and focus on the search for his son.

  I told Dad he should run in the special election, but he just laughed.

  With Leroy out of office, the Halyard was able to reopen, but through Dad I learned that Emily had taken over running the diner, and that Owen was, at last, applying to colleges, all of them outside the state of Maine. By the time Silas got out of prison, Owen would be long gone.

  I never mentioned it to Rebecca, or my father, or anyone else, but I did wonder if Serena had been at the party that night, if she’d finally found the opportunity she’d been waiting for. It would have been so easy—slip a little something into his Solo cup, lead him away from the crowd. If he passed out close enough to the water, the tide would come in and do the rest. I didn’t doubt that she could do it, or that she was clever enough to realize how perfect the timing would be, that if Calder disappeared right after Owen went to the police, even the most biased cops in Williston would think Calder was running. What I’ve never asked anyone, what I’ve never tried to learn, is whether Serena knew about Owen’s revelation. When Betty disappeared, all I wanted were answers, but this time I knew better. I knew I didn’t want to know.

  • • •

  That fall I went to class and studied and spent the weekends getting drunk at the obligatory parties. Once in a while I woke up to my roommate, Kate, crouched next to my bed, gently rubbing my shoulder to bring me out of whatever nightmare I was having. She’d ask if I was okay, and I would lie and say yes, and she was gracious enough to leave it at that. I missed Owen, and Serena, even Danny a little, but I held fast to my conviction that I never wanted to speak to any of them again.

  One day in November, not long before Thanksgiving, I was lying in bed working on an essay about Double Indemnity. Propped up on half a dozen strategically arranged pillows, my kitten mug of coffee within reach, I was approaching, dare I say it, contentment. I was listening to the Sonics on my headphones so I didn’t hear the phone when it rang, but Kate answered it and tapped my leg to get my attention.

  “It’s for you,” she said.

  I pressed the receiver to my ear without thinking. “Hello?”

  “Finley?”

  “Yeah?”

  “It’s Caroline.”

  As frozen as I felt at the sound of her voice, my expression must have changed dramatically. Kate hastily excused herself, closing the door behind her.

  “Caroline?”

  “I hope it’s okay that I’m calling. Your dad gave me your number.”

  “It’s fine,” I said after a moment. “Where are you?”

  “Still in Arizona.”

  “How are the horses?”

  “They’re okay. I’m doing a lot better, but I’m not really in any rush to go home. How’s college?”

  “It’s good,” I said. “I’m trying my best not to fuck it up.”

  “You know, Cassie finally came home.”

  “No shit?” I said.

  “I couldn’t believe it either. Apparently she just came home one day. Right when the weather was starting to turn.”

  “I guess she’s not as stupid as we always thought.”

  Caroline laughed. “Yeah, I guess not. It’s a good thing she turned up when she did. My parents have been talking about moving away from Williston.”

  “I can’t say I’m surprised.”

  “And I know that Calder’s missing, but they won’t answer any of my questions about it. So I thought, maybe—”

  “I don’t know what happened to your brother, Caroline. I’m sorry.”

  “You’ve got your theories, right?”

  “That’s all they are.”

  “Just tell me, then. What you think happened.”

  I sighed and put down my laptop. “Fine. You want to know what I think? I think your dad got word that Owen had gone to the police. I think he knew Calder would never hold up if there was a trial, and that this time the charges would stick. So I think he moved fast, and got Calder the fuck out of town before he could even be brought in for questioning. My best guess is that your brother’s in Canada somewhere, and that maybe someday, when enough time has passed, he’ll come back. But in the meantime, I wouldn’t expect any postcards from him.”

  I left out the last bit of my hypothesis. Calder had only been seventeen when he killed Betty; any lawyer the Millers hired was sure to be formidable and ruthless. Owen’s testimony had been the only evidence. It was hard to imagine that Calder would have spent more than a handful of years in jail. I didn’t think it was an easy choice—a manslaughter conviction versus permanent exile—but even now, I’m still uncertain that, in the end, the decision was Calder’s. After all, Leroy had to protect himself, too.

  Caroline was quiet for a minute. “I don’t understand,” she said finally. “How can somebody just vanish like that?”

  “I used to ask myself the same question,” I replied, not unsympathetically. “And then I realized it happens all the time.”

  EPILOGUE.

  THE MILLERS DID move away, and Caroline went off to boarding school when she left rehab, instead of joining them wherever they went. Calder never turned up, not that anyone expected him to, and though I was nine out of ten that what I’d told Caroline was true, I did wonder, sometimes, if Serena had gotten to him after all. And once in a great while I thought about Owen, whether he’d slipped onto that beach unnoticed, and killed Calder as some kind of self-assigned penance. Owen was smart, smarter than anyone in Williston probably realized, and I knew him. Stone cold. If he’d wanted to kill Calder, I had no doubt he could have, and gotten away with it, too. Maybe it was the reason he’d decided to go to the sheriff at all—make Calder into a murder suspect again, so everyone would assume he was a fugitive, and no one would look all that hard for a body. For all I knew, Owen had made up the whole story. If I’d seen him again, looked him in the eye and asked him directly, I probably could have learned the truth. But, like I said, I didn’t want to know.

  I didn’t make it back to Williston for a couple of years, and by the time I did, Owen was long gone, off studying literature at Berkeley. Based on our last exchange, I was worried Emily might run me out of town, but she’d taken up with one of the margarita-drinking divorcees who hung around at Charlie’s, and her misanthropic facade was wearing thin around the edges. Nonetheless, I kept my visit short. I still do when I go up, staying just long enough to take the Subaru for a drive, visit Danny at the trader, and put flowers on the beach where Betty died. Sometimes I’ll go with my dad to a softball game, where I inevitably find myself searching the dugout for Owen and wishing I could watch him go to bat one more time.

  I got my own place in the East Village at the end of freshman year, a studio apartment roughly the size of my old bedroom in Williston, on 5th Street between Avenues A and B. I slept on a used futon and all my furniture was made out of particleboard, but I put flowerboxes on the windowsills, burned sage to fight off the smell of cat urine encroaching from the hallway, and hung a framed reproduction of the Laura one-sheet above the TV. I used throw rugs to cover the buckling floors and kept a picture of Betty and me on the refrigerator next to the postcard I bought from the trader that final day in Williston. Those two items were the only indication I had ever lived anywhere but New York. These days they’re still hanging on my fridge, albeit in a slightly nicer apartment, where I pretend not to notice they’ve started to fray around the edges.

  One afternoon at the beginning of sophomore year, I found a small package from my father stuffed into my mailbox. He still sent every issue of the Messenger—the police blotter remained my guilty pleasure—but this envelope had some extra weight to it. I tore it open as I climbed the four flights to my apartment and read the note he’d scribbled on a Post-it.

  Found this while cleaning out your old bedroom. Maybe one day you’ll tell me about it. Love, Dad.

  It
was Betty’s college application, still unopened.

  I sat at the card table I had set up in my tiny kitchen, armed with a pack of smokes and a bottle of whiskey, and finally pulled the little tab that split open the envelope. Most of the contents were standard—transcripts and teacher recommendations sealed neatly into their own envelopes, forms filled out with Betty’s basic information. Her name, her birthdate, her address. Finally, I came to what I thought would be her admissions essay, though it turned out to be something very different altogether.

  November 15, 1997

  It’s harder for me to write this than I thought it would be. Not because I’m having second thoughts, or because the grim nature of the content has given me pause, but because words have never been the best way for me to express myself, and in this particular situation I have no choice. Let me be more specific—my own words are not my strong suit. Give me an audience and a script, and I can reveal myself perfectly. I can recite a monologue written hundreds of years ago or reenact a scene from a film you’ve never heard of, and you’ll understand me better than if you read this letter a hundred times. If I’d been allowed to play Ophelia, I could have shown everyone just how close I am to feeling my own sanity slipping away. For months now, I’ve felt like I’m disappearing. I wish I could have made myself feel seen one final time. But right now the written word is all I have to work with, so I’ll do my best to make myself clear.

  The unlights have been relentless in their efforts. Every day they cast their long shadow over me, and at night I hear them scratching at the walls of my bedroom. I’m exhausted from fighting them, and the prospect of battling them forever is so daunting. Over and over, I let them win. Pills wear off. Sex is brief. I just want some peace. I know I’m weak, and that’s okay. Not everybody can be a fighter.

  This letter is meant, more than to illuminate my motivations, to ensure that no one else is implicated in what happens to me. No one should be punished, as no one is to blame—no one but me, of course. The will and desire were all mine. All I lacked was courage, and so a friend of mine was kind enough to carry out the details. I hope that Calder Miller will not have to suffer for the compassion he has shown me in agreeing to carry out my wishes. It brings me some measure of relief to know that once I’m gone there will be a tiny bit less suffering in the world, and I hope in time others can share that sentiment.