The Longings of Wayward Girls (30 page)

Yankee Flyer
for the little houses, the electrical wiring, the miniature sets of furniture. when Kate and walt Curry’s divorce was final sadie learned that Kate’s son had not been in europe after all, examining insects for an academic thesis, but that he’d died the winter before of an “undisclosed illness.” Maura called her and told her, and then said that they couldn’t have known. sadie agreed but still felt the flutter of doubt, the dark brushing of its wings. Kate cared for all of their children and they’d never once asked her about her son. Didn’t they all wonder and say nothing? Isn’t this just as much a betrayal? she called Kate and left a convoluted message, expressing her condolences, but Kate never called her back. Her beautiful shoes still sit in the dark recesses of sadie’s closet. someone has seen her at shaw’s supermarket, her hair dyed a new color. someone else says she has gotten an offer with a firm in new york City, or was it boston? she will be spending part of the winter at a friend’s villa in Tortola.
Craig comes downstairs and, late for work, drinks his juice at the counter. He leans in to give each child a kiss. “I’ll see you two tonight,” he says, and they each suppress a giggle, knowing they will be in bed asleep when he gets home, that there is a secret planned for him and they are now part of it. she rises from the table and Craig takes her in his arms, and she presses her mouth to his lime-scented neck. There is time for this, she thinks. Today she and bea sidelman will see an exhibit at the wadsworth Atheneum. she will study her lines for
Our Town.
she will clean out the hall closet. Tonight she will put on a black cocktail dress like one her mother used to wear, low-cut crepe de chine; slip into black heels, her pearls—not as a child playing dress-up, but as the woman she is now able to become. she will celebrate her marriage with her husband at the restaurant where they had their first date.
The early settlers of this land buried their children in family plots, on a rise of land visible from sadie’s second-story window. Here a mother would have paused, her arms heavy with laundry or firewood, with another child on her hip, and then moved on to the baking of bread, to the planting of her garden, to the demands of a house that bring forgetfulness. sadie still goes alone up the secret path through the woods. The cicada nymphs burrow beneath the leaf litter, down into the soil to feed on tree root sap, keeping their seventeen-year vigil. she sees the trees fan out like a blaze, the pond coated with ice. she watches the fog settle among the bare, black branches and the snowfall, its obscuring blanket. she longs for the sun in her hair and pauses, listening, as if she can still hear the high and happy voices of children—those who have come and gone, those who have never been. each passing day, filled with the work of her life, is its own solace.
For a long time she would dream she’d returned to her old neighborhood, where everything remained the same—the houses lining the street, the farm and the farmer’s fields in the distance. It would be summer, and the corn would do its fine green swaying dance. A thunderstorm would roll in, the lightning arcing and cleaving and the air sharpened with the smell of rain. she’d enter her house to discover her mother’s cigarette burning in the bright orange ashtray on the kitchen table, the phone cord stretched across the tile. she’d follow the cord and find the receiver sitting on the floor of the pantry, the dial tone discordant, her mother nowhere in the house, though she’d search from room to room, pulling open closet doors, expecting to find her. what did she want to tell her? she’d wonder. now she knows, and finds she has stopped looking.

Author’s Note

on July 26, 1973, seven-year-old Janice Pockett of Tolland, Connecticut, left her home on her bicycle to retrieve a butterfly she’d hidden under a rock. she never returned. Janice’s case was given attention in the
Hartford Courant,
in often poignant reporting by J. Herbert smith, Jon lender, and George Gombassy. These newspaper articles detailed the extensive search, the fear of kidnapping, the effect on the family, and the ultimate struggle to move on.

As a child growing up in a Connecticut suburb, Janice’s disappearance was a tragedy that unfolded a few towns removed from mine—one I knew nothing about until I discovered the newspaper articles years later as a curious writer. when I set out to create a fictional world around a missing girl, I wanted to reinvent the feeling of loss captured in the articles, and to provide some sense of closure that remains, as of this writing, sadly absent in Janice’s story.

In seeking a setting for my novel I returned to the Connecticut town of my childhood. For information about latimer Cemetery and a feeling of the town’s layout and history, I consulted the wintonbury Historical society and its wonderful book
From Wintonbury to Bloomfield: Bloomfield Sketches,
published in 1983. bloomfield residents will recognize some of the names and places in my novel but will discover that in my fictional version the places have been relocated to suit my needs, the names given to invented people. In an attempt to

314 Author’s Note

relay the Colonial history I felt so strongly in my own childhood, my town is a combination of several towns, and the folklore and legends are appropriated from across the new england region.

Finally, I wanted this book to be one about mothers, and mothering, about the nature of that role and its responsibilities, joys, and sorrows, and for this reason I was drawn to Colonial women’s diaries. That of Mary Vial Holyoke, a doctor’s wife from salem, Massachusetts, which I found in
The Holyoke Diaries 1709–1856,
seemed to resonate the most for me. Its daily recording of visitors, travel, and chores includes the births of children, and almost as frequently, the deaths. of the twelve children she bore only four survived infancy. In her spare accounting we glimpse a community of women taking turns at the bedside of her sick three-year-old, the child’s death a brief notation that we might miss if we were skimming the pages. I wanted to pause at that moment after the words were written, and then reveal its indelible mark on everything that comes after.

Karen Brown
Acknowledgments

Grateful thanks to laura Mathews and Michael Koch, who first published portions of this book, and to samantha shea and Valerie borchardt, whose insight and perseverance found it a home. I am indebted to sarah Cantin for her wise and careful editing, and to the Atria books team, who shared her enthusiasm. And, finally, a special note of thanks to the literary Dames of Tampa, Florida, who taught me, through their generosity and their stories, what really makes a book great, and to my sister beth—my first reader.