by Wendy Walker
I grow quiet.
“Are you all right?” he asks.
I nod and smile.
And then he does something miraculous. He reads my mind.
“We loved the beach, my wife and I,” he says.
Ex-wife, I think. But I don’t correct him. It’s a habit. That’s all it is.
Isn’t it?
“After it got so hard to have kids, we stopped going. Because all of a sudden there were kids everywhere at the beach. They were in the surf with their fathers who threw them in the air. They were building sand castles. They were chasing seagulls. I’m sure they had always been there, but after we couldn’t get pregnant, the nicer the beach day was, the harder it was to stomach what was missing for us on that beach.”
I’ve gathered myself once again. I am calmed by his story, which is just like mine. A beach without a child. A perfect night without lovers.
“I never got kids,” I say. “Until my nephew was born. And even then, it wasn’t until he started to know me that I could understand the power children wield.”
Jonathan looks at me now, a question causing his eyes to narrow. Only I can’t read his mind the way he’s read mine.
“I thought you hadn’t been back much?” he asks.
Again, with the questions about my past. What the fuck?
Still, I answer.
“I came home for holidays. Usually just a night or an afternoon. But my sister would bring Mason to the city. He knows me. He does.”
I stop then, because he doesn’t deserve to know more. How Mason learned to say Lala before Dada. Aunt Lala. I have a name he’s given just to me. And when he sees me, his face lights up with a million colors of delight. I know where he likes to be tickled and I know how hard to toss him on my bed, into the fluffy comforter. I know how long to chase him before his laughter will give him hiccups. And I know how soft his skin feels when I kiss his cheek.
So fuck you, Jonathan Fields. My nephew knows me.
“Does it make you think about it?” he asks then. I can feel him trying to pull me back.
“What? Having kids?”
“Yeah. Of course.”
I’ve been waiting for this question.
I shake my head. “It scares me even more,” I say.
“Scares you? Why?” he asks.
“Because they’re so easy to break. Rosie says this all the time. She says it scares her. So of course it scares me.”
Now he grows silent and I wonder if he’s picturing me picking up a child and breaking it in two. But that’s not what I mean.
“It’s a big responsibility to be a parent. To know what to say and what not to say. Kids are blank slates, and everything we draw on them stays forever.”
He gives me a curious huh like he’s never had this thought, like all the years he wanted a child he never thought what he would do with one after it arrived.
And I think he is normal and I am not. But then I am the one who can still read the things that were drawn on me as a child. Fists for hands. So hard to love. And the eyes that never looked down at me, no matter how long I held my desperate gaze.
Jonathan Fields has stopped walking. It’s my mood. He can feel it rolling in and out like the current we hear in the distance.
“Something’s been on your mind since we left the first bar. Hasn’t it?”
Goddamn, Jonathan Fields. You really are inside my head, aren’t you?
So much has been on my mind, but I know what he means from the words he’s chosen—since we left that first bar—so I say it.
“That woman—from the bar on Richmond Street. The one who called your name as we were leaving.”
He knew this was coming, so his answer leaves his mouth as smooth as silk.
“She was a woman I went out with a few weeks ago.”
My heart sinks. It begins to drown. Who runs away from a woman who calls your name? A woman you dated? An asshole, that’s who.
“Did you meet her on findlove?” I manage to ask. It’s hard to speak when your heart is drowning.
He nods. “We went out on three dates.”
“Three dates,” I say. It’s the magic number. The industry standard. Sex on the third date maintains some decorum but prevents the wasting of precious time if things aren’t good enough in that department.
I’ve done my research.
Now he looks away, embarrassed as well. “Yeah … three dates. She came back to my apartment. It was really weird. I feel bad saying that, saying anything about another woman. Don’t kiss and tell, right?”
I can’t answer. I need him to finish.
“I told her the next day I didn’t think it was a good fit.”
He looks at me then, with a strange kind of earnest. The kind that I usually feel spreading when I am desperate to be understood.
“I thought it was the right thing to do. Not lead her on. Let her find someone else. Shit—it’s not like there aren’t a ton of other men just like me on every dating site and app and…”
He sighs and leans his elbows on the metal rail that lines the boardwalk, keeping people from jumping in at moments like this one.
I find words.
“So what happened?”
He shakes his head and clasps his hands together.
“She wouldn’t stop texting, calling. I responded for about a week, but then I told her I was going to stop and I did. She still sends angry texts every day. I saw her after you walked in, and I knew we had to get the hell out of there.”
I consider all of this information. I don’t like it, but this actually makes me feel good. Maybe it’s pathetic, but I feel happy that with all the things I’ve done chasing after love, I have never been a stalker—texts, calls, emails—nothing.
I smile and he catches me.
“What?” he asks.
I start laughing because I actually believe him and now feel relieved. My heart crawls out of the sinkhole.
“Is it terrible that I’m wondering what happened on that third date, in your apartment, that made you realize it wasn’t a ‘good fit’?” I make quotation marks in the air with my fingers. My mood has taken another drastic turn.
Now he laughs as well.
“Sometimes there’s just no chemistry. You must have walked away from men for similar reasons.”
Again, he turns the light on my past. But we are not going down that road.
“It’s a giant candy store, isn’t it?” I say instead. “Only, you get to try everything before you have to buy it. Take a bite. Good but not perfect. Pick up another, take a bite. Better, maybe. Or worse. Maybe the first was better.”
He nods. “Exactly like that. And when it’s the second time around, there’s fear.”
“Because you know there’s a chance you’ll be wrong? That what tastes good in the store won’t be as good when you take it home?” I ask.
“And,” he says, holding up a finger like Sherlock Holmes, “there’s even more fear that you’re the candy.”
“Ah!” I say. “True.” I look at him and try to think this. He’s the candy. I’m the one choosing the flavor. But, no. They are just words. He knows it. Somehow men are never the candy. Never, never, never.
We start to walk again. He leads me back to the street where he’s parked the car. The car that’s all wrong, that’s on my list of concerns. But at least I’ve crossed the woman from the bar off the list, because his story has convinced me.
“So, how did your sister meet her husband?” he asks now.
I’m the candy, so I try to be sweet and give him an answer.
“We all grew up together,” I begin. I go on and on then, about Rosie and Joe and Gabe Wallace and the tree I used to climb and the skunk cabbage and the frog eggs. It gushes out of me, the words, the stories—no longer to please him but because they live inside me, flowing on a river of joy and sorrow. Hot lava and cold water. Wet, dirty clothes. Sunbaked skin. Laughter. Freedom. Bloody fists and tears and clear lines. Black and white. There were no sha
des of gray when we were young. Before we learned that everything is gray.
I stop, though. I don’t tell him about my first boyfriend. And how he ended up dead.
“So your sister and her husband were friends from birth? That’s a great story.” He says. “I have to admit. It makes me sad, though.”
“Why?” I ask.
“It reminds me of me and my wife, friends from college. There is something about meeting when you’re young like that. Before you learn to hide.”
We get to his car and he clicks open the locks.
He stands beside me and opens my door.
“What is it you’re hiding?” I ask him. I can’t help it. He opened that door as well.
Then he answers. “I could ask you the same thing.”
And there is something in his voice that stops me again. He wants to know about my past. Why?
I’ve been fading in and out of dreams and nightmares.
I look at him, and neither of us speaks. I wonder which is real. Which is the truth. Is this a dream or a nightmare?
How long does it take, I also wonder, to know? Our mother didn’t know what was in her husband’s heart or mind, even after eighteen years. Sharing a bed. Sharing a bathroom. Sharing meals and vacations and births of children. I can’t see behind the eyes of a man I just met, but I’m not at all sure time is the reason.
I should fear the possibility that this is a nightmare. And I should not get back in this car. This car that’s all wrong.
But I can’t bear to let go of the hope that this is a dream and the knowledge that no amount of time will give me the answer. We might still be strangers even after we become lovers.
“Come on,” he says. “Let’s head back to town.”
There is a faint whisper in my brain as I get in the car.
What is it you’re hiding?
He never answered.
Still, I let Jonathan Fields close the door.
TWELVE
Rosie. Present Day. Friday, 12 p.m. Branston, CT.
Back at Rosie’s house, Gabe created a new account on findlove.com. The screen name was here4you2. The photo was the screenshot of Jonathan Fields—the man the bartender identified. The profile was live by noon.
They selected women like Laura. Mid-twenties to early thirties. Never been married. No children. Living within ten miles of Branston. And pretty. They sent emails to over sixty profiles. The subject line read: DO YOU KNOW THIS MAN?
The body of the email contained a plea from one woman to another. I met this guy online and I’m worried something’s not right about him. Did he ever contact you? Gabe left his cell number, and Rosie’s.
“One in a hundred profiles on this site is fake. Avatars—fake pictures and enticing information. It’s almost always women who do it. They use an avatar to contact the guys they’re seeing. Or sometimes their husbands, boyfriends. Then they wait to see if he responds, if he wants to meet. That confirms he’s cheating or lying. You get the idea.”
Rosie nodded, staving off panic. A plan was in place. They would wait for a reply. And while they waited, Gabe would comb through the papers in Laura’s room again, see what he could find that might help them. Rosie would start calling the people she knew from Laura’s life. There were surprisingly few, she realized, and this made her uneasy. Guilty. She had been so consumed with her own life since Mason was born.
She would start with a casual call to Laura’s work colleague named Jill. And Laura’s old roommate, Kathleen—the one she’d never met because she spent weekends in New Jersey. Gabe knew how to find their numbers. She would also get in touch with Asshole in New York City, if she could figure out who he was. She would be careful not to raise concerns in case this was nothing and Laura wanted to return to her life without having to explain why her crazy sister called in a panic looking for her.
She fixed a cup of coffee and placed it on the table next to her phone and Laura’s computer.
* * *
It was half past two when she heard the door.
“We’re home!”
Joe set Mason down and he ran to his mother. Rosie scooped him up and hugged him tight.
“How was the park, lovebug?”
She closed her eyes. Breathed him in. Tried to pull herself back from the urgency of the situation. She knew he could feel it.
He squirmed from her arms and ran to the corner where they kept his toys. That left Joe, standing with her in the kitchen, his eyes shifting from her to Mason and out to the street where Gabe’s car was parked.
“No luck?” Joe asked.
Rosie told him about Jonathan Fields and the bar where Laura’s phone had been. They had his picture and his screen name. And how there might be another woman who went on a date with him, who used a credit card. Maybe they could find her. Maybe she would know more about him.
Joe looked quickly at the clock above the sink.
“It’s almost three.”
“I know.”
“We should call.…”
Footsteps pounded the stairs. Gabe walked in, empty-handed.
“I have her social security number. That’s all I found. It was on a reimbursement form.”
Rosie got up from the table and joined them at the island.
“I think we need to call the police,” Joe said again, filling the brief silence.
But then something new came across Gabe’s face. Something she didn’t recognize. It looked like guilt, or shame maybe. And it didn’t suit him.
“I need to tell you both something. I don’t know that it matters.”
“Jesus, Gabe, what?” Rosie had her phone in her hand. Joe was right. It was time. And now this?
“Maybe it’s nothing. Maybe I’m just pulling together memories to make sense of things—I hadn’t thought about any of this for years, but it’s been playing in my head since you called this morning.”
“A memory? Of what? When we were kids? What are you talking about?” Joe asked.
Gabe closed his eyes. Hung his head. Jesus—was he trying to see it more clearly, this memory from the past, or not wanting to see them when he finally said the words? Rosie was losing patience.
“Just tell us, Gabe! What do you know?”
“It has to do with my brother.”
Joe was quick to respond. “Rick?”
“Yeah. Before he left home.”
“For the military school? But that was so long ago—Laura was, what, eleven?” Rosie remembered Gabe’s brother. Rick had been a troublemaker. Two years older than Gabe. Four years older than Laura. But he had never been their friend. Rick Wallace was the vicious dog whose house you ran past, hoping he wouldn’t see you. Joe had gotten into it with him more than once. Fists flying, even as young boys. Mrs. Wallace cried about him to their mother. How she couldn’t control him. How they had to send him away.
Joe was alarmed. “What happened with Rick?”
Gabe began the story.
“Do you remember when Laura would see Lionel Casey. In the woods?”
“Fuck, Gabe—why would you bring up Lionel Casey?” Joe was looking at Rosie when he said it. She was thinking the same thing. Of all the people, and under these circumstances … first Rick and then Lionel Casey—the homeless man who lived in the nature preserve. The man who was eventually found inside the car of Laura’s dead boyfriend, and who’d spent his life in a mental facility as a result.
“Listen,” Gabe continued. “I know it’s hard to hear the name. But do you remember when we were little, when he used to wear that cape and walk the stone wall at the end of the pond? Laura said he looked like a vampire.”
Rosie nodded reluctantly. The stories about the old hermit who lived in the deep woods of the nature preserve would have been funny now, as grown-ups, had things not ended the way they did, with Lionel Casey implicated in the death of Laura’s boyfriend.
“Of course we remember,” Rosie said. Laura always made them run back to the house to get garlic and crosses. She loved tracking hi
m, thinking she saw his footprints in the soil. “He stopped doing that long before…”
“I know. But one time it was just the two of us. Me and Laura. I don’t know why, or where the other kids were, where you two were. But she came running over, in the house to my room, banging on the door. She said he was out there again, with that cape, walking the wall at the end of the pond. God, I must have been thirteen then. It was the last thing I wanted to do. We were getting older. Teenagers, you know? But Laura was still a kid, still wanting to have her adventures.”
“I remember,” Rosie said. “She used to beg us to play with her. She didn’t like that things were changing. She felt like she was getting left behind.”
“That’s why I went with her. We walked the path to the pond, but there was no one on the wall. She said we should split up. That I should go one way and she would go another, both of us walking around the perimeter of the pond until we met up again. I started to wonder if she’d been making it up, about Lionel Casey being out there that day. But I went along with it. I told her after we’d searched the perimeter, I was going home.
“She agreed and I started walking. I made it halfway around and didn’t see her. I thought maybe I’d been faster, so I kept walking in the same direction, until I was back where we started. With no sign of Laura. It was so quiet that day. The trees were still bare. I called her name, then listened. I called it again. Still, no answer. I didn’t know where to start looking for her. I remember hearing nothing but my feet on the dead leaves. I thought maybe he’d been there. Maybe he wasn’t just a harmless old hermit after all.”
Gabe stopped and the room was as quiet as the woods he’d just described. Lionel Casey had not been a harmless old hermit, and all those years they’d gone into the woods, he’d been there. Hundreds of times. Together, in pairs. Sometimes alone if one of them left before the others. Never aware of the danger.
“I went to the places I thought she would go—the field, the overlook. And then, finally, the fort. Remember that fort we built? One piece of plywood lodged between the trees?”
“We remember Gabe. Please—just tell us what happened,” Joe said. Rosie couldn’t speak, or move. She could barely breathe thinking about her sister out in those woods with Lionel Casey.