The Longings of Wayward Girls (22 page)

in exclamation and sent one of the little kids for a stick, then
used it to pick up the underwear. It was a simple pair, pale
and slightly grayed from washing, a small flower attached to
the elastic waistband. The kids made joined sounds of surprise—some laughed, others shrieked,
“Cooties!”
betty’s sister,
holding the stick, lurched at a boy and he recoiled. some of
the kids began running away, making a game of it. sadie and betty had already walked partway down the
street when one of the schuster boys rode by on his bike, the
underwear on the stick held up in the air, like a flag. sadie
imagined her own underwear, tucked in the darkness of her
top bureau drawer, exposed against the contrast of sunlight
and waving grass, the starkness of the stone, the asphalt, the barbed wire tines, the decaying cedar post. she and betty exchanged looks. They’d learned from health class about the bright blood that could bloom there at any time, that it could be soon—and it terrified them. sadie clutched Francie’s letter. The group of kids paraded back down the street, the boy at the lead, looking like the benign children depicted in Joan walsh Anglund prints, with their chunky limbs, large fore
heads, heavy bangs, eyes like dark pinpricks.
sadie and betty snuck back to the Haunted woods to read
the letter at the old maple table where they’d sat earlier, surrounded by empty cans and cigarette butts and casting tentative looks over their shoulders.
Again, my locked door has been breached. Someone came into my
room last night
, Francie had written.
His breath smelled of crème
de menthe. His hands were furry, like a wild beast’s. I am so happy
to finally escape this cursed place! Thank you for the lovely bracelet—I
will cherish it always. I am leaving you something of mine as well.
Until tonight!
with Francie, it had become difficult to decipher where
the fantasy ended. betty bit her lip. “Is she serious?” she said.
“what is she talking about?”
“she’s going to meet him, that’s the important thing,”
sadie said.
betty looked unsure. “Maybe we shouldn’t have set up the
meeting.”
The light had begun to fade in the woods, and she stood
up and began to stuff the cigarette butts into the beer cans, to
gather the cans up.
“she’ll know it’s all a fake when he doesn’t show up,” sadie
said.
“what about the other things she wrote?” betty said.
“Maybe we should say something.”
sadie considered the note again. she thought, briefly,
about Hans in the field, and she imagined him slipping into her bedroom at night. The idea of his body close to hers in the
dark made her flush with warmth.
“what would we say?” she said. “That the beast from
‘beauty and the beast’ went into Francie’s bedroom? That we
have a note that proves it?”
betty smiled tentatively.
sadie shook her head. “It’s nothing.”
Then she crumpled the note and dug a small hole in the
woods, and buried it. betty stood nearby, still unsure. “we
could just give it to her mother,” she said. but by then the
note was gone and the dirt covered over with leaves. They put
the beer cans inside a cardboard box and headed back out of
the woods. neither of them could believe Francie had left a
pair of her underwear for Hezekiah.
“what was she thinking?” betty said.
sadie took a deep breath. “we can’t tell anyone,” she said. That evening, as if enacting a sort of penance, they organized yard games for the neighborhood kids: freeze tag; red
rover; Mother, May I; what Time Is It? They played until
dusk, when they could no longer see each other in the darkness, until the fireflies began their heated blinking, bobbing
and elusive along the edge of the woods. The party continued
around the pit, the remaining parents circling the fire in their
aluminum folding chairs, the lit ends of their cigarettes and
their low voices the only indication of their presence. betty’s
sister had the idea that they should all take their positions in
the Haunted woods and do a run-through. betty and sadie
appointed one of the older girls to be the guide, and they pretended to be the kids being led. “Don’t show any emotion,”
they instructed her. “Don’t feel sorry for them when they get
scared.” The fluorescent markings showed up perfectly, the
boys made the right noises in the trees, the ghosts moaned
and shuffled, the sets were garish and surreal in the flashlight’s
beam.
Francie’s set, the empty crib, remained empty. none of
the kids had seen Francie all day, and someone thought the
binghams had gone away for the holiday. even though sadie
knew better, she used this as an excuse not to send someone
to get her. she and betty kept an eye out for her as it grew
later, wondering when she would set out to meet Hezekiah, if
she would set out at all. betty’s mother and father got into an
argument and decided at the last minute that there would be
no sleepovers, and their tentative plan to meet at eleven thirty
in betty’s backyard was thwarted by the stragglers who kept a
vigil at the pit. Instead, sadie went to bed with grass-stained
feet, her hair smelling like sun and sweat, all the summers of
her childhood becoming this one last night.

The next morning Mrs. schuster, Francie’s next-door neighbor, came to sadie’s front door with a birdlike rapping of her bony fist. sadie was the only one up. she had peered through the living room window first and seen the woman waiting there, her arms wrapped tight around her chest, her hair flattened from sleep on one side.

she hesitated to open the door, but the woman kept up her urgent knocking, and sadie’s father and mother were roused. They appeared at the top of the stairwell, her father in his robe, her mother behind him in her sheer nightgown, both of them nursing headaches, her mother disappearing into the bathroom with a moan. sadie watched as her father quickly descended the stairs, opened the door, and listened to Mrs. schuster through the storm door screen. Her voice was highpitched and panicky. sadie heard her father tell her
calm down, Lenore,
in a tone that intimated years of neighborhood cookouts and reciprocated dinners with cocktails. The open door let in a clean morning smell, the sound of birds alert and sharp in the maple tree. Mrs. schuster slipped inside the house, her arms still clasping her chest. she wore a cotton cardigan that smelled of camphor, her hair still in the bouffant style of the sixties. she only had a minute, she said. she had to go to other houses. sadie’s mother appeared in her robe, and her father summoned sadie, who pretended to appear from the hallway to the den. she was interrogated, first by Mrs. schuster, and then by her father and mother, each chiming in with further questions:

“Did you see anything unusual this morning?” “when was the last time you saw Francie?”
“what was she doing?”
“who was she talking to? was anyone around that you

didn’t know?”
“Have you seen anyone around the neighborhood that you
don’t know lately?”
The questions weren’t explained, but they left sadie’s
heart thudding.
“what happened to Francie?” sadie finally asked. Mrs. schuster’s eyes grew wet. she put her hand over her
mouth, and then she bent down to look into sadie’s face.
“she’s missing, honey.”

August 29, 2003

R

ay starts up the truck, and the sound is ominous on the quiet road. The day Francie disappeared some of the searchers found a loose sheet of paper

blowing about the cornfields. It had been the letter to Hezekiah that sadie and betty had lost in the field weeks before. no one knew who the boy was or where he lived, and all of the neighborhood boys were questioned, the police going house to house. It reminded sadie, in true Francie fashion, of “Cinderella,” when the prince goes through the village trying to ferret out the young woman whose foot fits the slipper.

ray turns to her. “Do you know it was old Mrs. sidelman who told the police she used to see me in the woods. ‘lurking in the woods,’ she said. Those were her words on the police report.”

sadie wants to say that Mrs. sidelman was partly right in accusing him, that it was a version of him that caused Francie’s disappearance.

but then she would have to tell him everything, how she remained silent, even when the police drove up the street to his house and put him in the back of the cruiser to take him in for questioning. everyone had seen the cruiser head up the street. The neighbors had all been gathering every day on the bingham’s front lawn, and the lawn was littered with cigarette butts. The fire engines and buses of searchers who moved like ribbons through the pastures were parked on wadhams

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road. sadie remembers ray’s face in the backseat as the car drove by her house, how he looked out the window, directly at her where she stood with her parents on the front lawn. At the time, the weight of her guilt convinced her he was staring straight into her. she wonders now whether that steady look was for her mother.

ray turns the truck onto shore road. They’ve only gone a short way when the headlights light up a woman walking along the sandy shoulder. sadie recognizes the waitress at once.

“It’s emma,” she says as they pass her.
ray pulls the truck over.
“why did you do that?” sadie asks. “she’s going to think

you’re some stranger. she’s going to be scared to death.” ray opens the truck door and calls out. “Hey, emma! It’s
us, from the restaurant.” And then he sings a bar of “Cecelia”
out into the darkness.
“you just did that to make me mad,” sadie says. “you think
I hate your singing, and you did that to bother me.” emma walks up to the passenger window. “Hey,” she says
in her soft voice. she brushes her hair back.
“need a ride?” ray asks.
“I’m not sure,” emma says. “I was expecting a ride from
someone and he’s not here. I’m a little worried.”
sadie thinks that the boyfriend has ditched her. Certainly
it isn’t a husband. but then emma says it is her husband, and
that he is always on time, and she thinks something must have
happened to him. sadie wants to tell her that (an hour away)
her husband is saying the same thing about her. Instead, she
scoots over and emma climbs in. sadie feels the sweat of her
body, the heat radiating from her abdomen.
“sorry it’s so hot,” ray says. “no air conditioning in this
thing.”
The wind whipping into the truck makes it difficult to
talk. emma leans forward and says she likes the fresh air, and that the truck is a
fine relic
. sadie thinks the wording is a bit dramatic—it’s an old truck. There is nothing particularly valuable or meaningful about it. she’s run off with a man who drives a junker, and somehow that hasn’t mattered to her until now. Her hair blows over her eyes. emma holds hers back with her hand, her tattooed arm balanced on the door frame. They drive down shore road and take a left where emma points, and then down a narrow lane among cottages with little name plaques on the front—
Eeny, Meeny, Miney,
and
Mo, Winkin, Blinkin
, and
Nod
—past a tennis court and a little general store. They pull up to a small cottage, pale blue, with an outdoor shower, and a clothesline, and the open water right behind it. The cottage is dark, and there isn’t a car in front. All down the tar lane the cars are parked haphazardly in front of other cottages with beach towels flapping on lines, different colors with small painted porches, all of them dark. sadie sees a candle flicker inside one. And then someone approaches them as emma climbs out. He has a camping lantern, and the
light swings back and forth as he walks.
“none of us have any power,” the man calls to her. “someone hit a power line up the road.”
emma puts one hand to her mouth, the other to the
mound of her stomach. “oh.”
“Do you have a flashlight?” ray asks. He climbs out of the
truck, walks up to the bottom of the steps. sadie sees emma
turn to talk to him, but she can’t hear what she says over the
crashing of the waves on the beach.
ray comes back to the truck and leans in. “I’m going to
help her light some candles,” he says. “now she’s all freaked
out about the wreck.”
“okay,” sadie says.
ray looks at her, waiting. “Are you going to come in?” sadie wants to wait in the truck. she watches ray go into
the house, sees the candles being lit through the windows— one placed on a table, another on what looks to be a kitchen counter, the rooms beyond the windows lighting up, and ray and emma there inside as if they belong together. sadie knows this is what has hardened her against emma from the beginning. she is the kind of girl ray dated—the type she saw with him the few remaining times he came back to the neighborhood after the Francie incident. He’d be with a girl with long hair wearing a man’s T-shirt, a pair of washed jeans so pale they looked white, who wore rings on all her fingers, jangly bracelets, and a paisley scarf in her hair. she would be
dreamy eyed, one languid arm draped out the car window. sadie, on the other hand, was smart and secretive. she was
good at facades. she wore the suburban costumes assigned to
her, even as a teenager—corduroys and clogs, turtlenecks and
Fair Isle sweaters. she still does. ray has no reason but one
to have chosen her out of the innumerable women he might
choose as a single man accustomed to living in Florida, a state
where minimal clothing is necessary and women are always
tan. sadie recognizes this now, and sees, suddenly, her mistake in believing he loved her. only one woman alive looks so
much like her mother.
He comes out onto the porch and lets the screen door bang
shut. sadie can hear the sand grinding under his boots. Then
he steps down and comes back up to the car.
“why don’t you come in?” he says. “we can sit with her for
a little while until her husband gets back.”
“what if he doesn’t come back?” sadie says. she gives him
a small smile. “what if he’s run off with some girl he knew
from his old neighborhood?”
ray stares at her. His face is the same as she pictured it all
those years when she didn’t see him. older, with lines around
his eyes, but the same. He is still slight and boyish, though his
body has filled out to that of a man. He wears the same sloppy
clothes.
“really, sadie?”
she wonders if she’s always been this heartless—then
thinks about Francie and knows the answer is yes. but now
she tries to consider emma in her fragile state, alone and
pregnant, worried about her husband, and she opens the
truck door and gets out. she is tired, as if she’s reached the
end of an exhausting day with the children and she wants
only to sit down for a minute to rest. she has no fresh underwear, no hairbrush. she thought she’d be back for dinner. The porch steps bend under her weight. The cottage is
tiny, a playhouse. Inside the candles flame wildly, blown by
the wind that comes in through the screens facing the water.
emma is on the phone, an old-fashioned type with a spiraled
cord. They hear her describe her husband’s car (subaru, maroon) and her husband (five feet nine inches, one hundred
and sixty pounds, brown hair). His name is Pietro rovella,
and he doesn’t speak much english. she is worried because
of the accident, she says. And then she listens and nods and
hangs up.
“They say it was a truck that hit the pole,” she says. she rises from the table. “you don’t have to stay.” sadie says they don’t have anywhere they need to be. “but
if you’d rather we leave—”
“of course not—I’m glad for the company.”
ray sits down on the end of the couch and sadie sits beside
him. The candle nearby lights up his eyes, burnishes his hair.
emma sits in a wing chair and folds her legs up. sadie can tell
it is her chair, the place where she always sits. emma says they
are sending someone over to talk to her about her missing
husband, to take her statement.
“was he at work?” ray asks. “Maybe he got held up.” “Pietro works from home,” emma says. “sometimes
he goes out and explores and gets lost. That might be what
happened. Maybe he went to the movies in niantic and got caught in the traffic. lots of reasons why he didn’t make it to
the restaurant.”
They finally introduce themselves. They make awkward
small talk, unable to really answer any questions truthfully,
sadie taking over and creating, with some of her old resourcefulness, their false history. she wonders if they should leave
before the policeman arrives and asks them their names, and
then she wonders if the police have gone to talk to Craig. but
she is very sleepy, and sitting on the couch beside ray—his
warmth, his smell—she forgets herself and closes her eyes.
she opens them once, and hears ray and emma talking, but
their voices lull her back to sleep, and she doesn’t wake until
she feels the wind, colder now off the water, and senses that
ray has gotten off the couch. she sees him at the little table
with emma, and a man in a police uniform. The man’s badge
glows in the sputtering candlelight. He is a short man with
a round chest. He writes things down and nods, and sadie
pretends to be asleep when she hears him ask ray who he is,
and who she is, and hears emma interrupt to tell him they
are friends of hers, that they came to give her a ride when her
husband didn’t show up.
“Any reason your husband would take off?” the officer
asks. “was there an argument? Did you check to see if any
clothing or other personal items are missing? A suitcase or
bag? Any jitters about the impending event?”
sadie imagines Craig answering these questions—his emphatic
no,
his objection to this line of questioning. emma answers calmly, truthfully, and manages to keep the annoyance
out of her voice. “He is excited about the baby,” she says. “He
would never just leave.”
“I’m sorry, but I have to ask,” the officer says. “And you’d
be surprised how many spouses say the very same thing—
not to upset you, or imply that your husband has run off, of
course. Few expect it, is what I’m saying.”
sadie imagines he will confess to them that just tonight he
got another call from a man whose wife was missing. “Just up
and left him with two little kids.” Her heart races as she waits,
and her cheeks burn. but he does not say anything. He is an
old lyme town cop. He wouldn’t know anything about her
or Craig. The officer takes a step toward the door. His weight
shifts a nail in the pine floor, a sound like a rusty spring. “My guess is that he’ll be here soon,” he says. “Probably
got held up in the jam.”
sadie hears the man leave, ray and emma talking on the
porch. she doesn’t move from her spot on the couch, feigning sleep. where is Pietro? she wonders. Has he decided to
flee his wife, his unborn daughter? Is he now at a gas station
in rhode Island buying a Coke and a map, trying to figure
out how many bills to give the cashier, making a face and
bewitching her with his broken english? Has he run off with
a girl he met on the beach during the hours when his pregnant wife was working? will he see that the life he left behind
had its own delicate perfection, its moments of happiness?
will he turn the car around? will he pull into the sandy drive
and pretend he never left? And then the refrigerator sputters
to life, and the room is suddenly illuminated—thousands of
white twinkling lights are strung around its perimeter, draped
over the swinging light fixture, looped along the beams of
the ceiling, outlining the screens on the porch. sadie sits up.
ray and emma step into the room. emma spins around in
astonishment.
“It’s my birthday,” she says softly in explanation. she
moves around the room to each lit candle, blowing it out.
sadie remembers the sad little party she gave Craig, the way
he acted surprised for the children as he opened the gifts. In
each strand of lights strung about the cottage is the joy she
could not offer her own husband.