So Much Pretty (4 page)

He looked at Ross and Claire and took in the expansive, silent damage they radiated, the way they could occupy the world by drawing a private one around them, like Alice in the barn with her head thrown back, blinking. He loved them, but he did not feel what they felt. Was haunted by no past or place. The mystery of Gene had always been how he could slip into the present and disappear.

Alice

HAEDEN, NY, 1997

I
N THE LIVING
room the city’s roads were the zigzag lines on the old Persian rug that Constant’s aunt had left in the house when she left Ross. Shoe boxes, cereal boxes, blocks, and butcher paper were spread across the floor and scaled, in a precarious masking-taped pyramid, up the lower part of one wall. The cars on this city’s roads ran on magnet power.

The city’s newspaper occupied a whole shoe box. A white pipe-cleaner sign stuck up from the roof reading
SHORT & SWEET
. Inside, a wooden Peg sat in a dollhouse chair in front of a cube on which an open eye-shadow case had become a laptop computer. Peg was a fairy and a reporter who had lost her power to fly yesterday afternoon and could only get it back if she wrote a story about what happened to the forest. She had gold glitter glued to her round head, blue sequin eyes, and she wore a green tie made of embroidery thread.

Alice clicked the eye-shadow case closed and made Peg walk outside the
Short & Sweet
and get on top of the magnet car, which Theo drove by pushing the other magnet behind it, all the way into the woods: green and orange cardboard pine trees glued to butcher paper, on which other pine trees were drawn with a crayon and marker. The car stopped at the edge of the woods, and Peg got out. Theo’s band of plastic praying mantises, frogs, and snakes were waiting there for her.

“She would never have been able to meet them if you didn’t bring the magnets,” Alice said to Theo. He nodded at her gravely. They couldn’t believe it when Peg lost her power to fly. It was because of the dust in that one stream of light just when the sun
was setting Friday night. It was sinister dust! They tried in vain to restore her power, and finally, Theo came up with the heroic plan to get her a magnet car. It was hundreds of miles from Peg’s newspaper to the woods. And there was no public transportation, because they didn’t have any animal-cracker boxes.

The insects and frogs gathered in a circle around Peg. The largest frog hopped through the low forest brush. He towered over her. But she wasn’t afraid at all. She knew they would help her through the forest.

The frog stared at Peg, and finally in a low chirp, he said, “We have something to show you.”

Flynn

W
HEN WHITE DISAPPEARED
in the fall of 2008, there was a lot of praying going on. A lot of people talking about praying, telling one another they were praying. We ran a full-page ad for months, featuring a picture of Wendy and calls for the community to pray. I prayed for Wendy myself while covering a town board meeting and bowed my head again for her when asked to do so before a high school football game. It was easy to get caught up in the idea that it might work. When White disappeared, stupidity became a form of politeness. Failure to feign stupidity would engender indignation and reproach, as if it should be clear to everyone that silence must be instituted in order to make it all just go away.

The White investigation was defined by how it did not unfold. It was a story about a name added to a federal list, about horrified parents and organizing community members and the repetition of the phrase “we are pursuing all avenues.” When she was found less than a mile from her apartment, it would have become a story about grieving and a funeral and the topic of off-the-record speculation, had I not been there to put it in context.

People liked to say it was a drifter who killed her, someone passing through. There’s only two thousand people
in
this town, and they’ve all been here for-fucking-ever. So naturally, no one from here did it, or someone would come forward. Get it? Someone’s brother or mother or father or friend. A tight-knit little town like this one, someone would have known what was going on.

I always think of one thing when people start talking about the town’s heyday or start quoting the PR that the town board attempted in the aftermath of April 14. I always think of these pictures I found in the paper’s archive: four black-and-white shots
of an incredibly well-attended Klan march in 1941 through the Haeden town square. While clearly large enough to include most of the residents’ grandfathers and great-uncles, it was thought, as the cutlines read, to have been attended entirely by people from “a nearby city.”

As I sat at the bar in the VFW with Scoop that day, after failing to hit even one Mountain Dew can with whatever kind of bullets went in the handgun I didn’t really want to fire, he told me that everyone was staring at me and that a reporter should be inconspicuous. He talked so slowly I could barely stand it.

“If you’re going to cover this case, you need to get rid of those crappy glasses,” he said. He took a sip of his beer and seemed to be lost in thought. “And stop wearing those polyester shirts.” Paused again. Then: “You know, you should stop wearing those polyester shirts, period. A grown-up doesn’t wear stuff like that to work.” He also expressed skepticism that even people in Cleveland dressed the way I did.

Scoop wasn’t just talking about my clothes. In this land that time forgot that was the VFW, there was nothing untoward about a guy in his sixties making ten or twelve specific comments on a person’s physical appearance. His critique of my clothes was just the beginning, and I suspected it was a way to talk about my size. I am a small woman. I buy my clothes and shoes in children’s departments, often the boys’ department, because I’m not into floral prints and velvet dresses. When that doesn’t work out, I make my own clothes. I easily fit into things I wore in fifth and sixth grade and have altered these vintage items. Scoop was obviously concerned that I looked like a kid. His other editorial advice that afternoon included “It wouldn’t kill you to put on some makeup.” “You’ve got such nice silky long hair, maybe you should use a clip to hold it instead of a pencil.” And then eventually, the one I was waiting for, the great fishing question that would intimate that my line has some kind of miscegenation uncommon in these parts: “Black hair and blue eyes, that’s a little
rare, isn’t it?” I was waiting for the comments on my smooth complexion to follow, but I got something even better: He said I looked like I thought I was a hotshot. People around here, he said, didn’t trust people from cities who wore Malcolm X glasses and thought they were hotshots. “You will never,” he said, “be able to get the cops to talk to you unless you clean up a bit.”

“Yeah, just a minute,” I said. “I’ll get the crumbs out of my beard. Oh yeah, hang on, my bald spot is getting a little flaky, too. Oh! And I fucking forgot to floss again. Can you believe that? How’s that? Is that any better? How do I look now?”

“I’m just saying,” he said, grinning, “you’re doing more than covering the Friends of the Library bake sale now. You should dress for it.” He handed me a brown paper bag he’d carried in from the car. I took it and peered in. “Now, that there’s called a blouse,” he said. I looked at the tag. At least he’d had the presence of mind to buy an extra small. He said, “If you put it on, it will make the glasses bearable.”

I smiled. “Your shooting,” he said, “is a different story altogether. I don’t know what in hell could fix that.”

Scoop was right about the cops. They didn’t talk about White. And this is one more reason why I wrote what I wrote once she was found.

Captain Dino didn’t seem to be looking very hard for White’s abductors. He didn’t seem to have much paperwork on the White case at all. And the medical examiner, who hadn’t shown up at the scene, was not, it turned out, required to have a medical degree. He was elected (along with the town judge) by popular vote every two years.

Dino and I met at the Rooster pretty often in those days. Usually just before happy hour. But he had little to say. He was a big thick guy with a large pockmarked nose and small green eyes. Had a shock of mercury-colored hair, a well-trimmed mustache,
and impeccably clean dentures. Dino went running every day with a couple other guys from the PD. They would all wave to me as they went by the newspaper office, and I would look to see if there was a new guy. Preferably someone under forty who didn’t look like a beefed-up queer. Someone smart and unmarried who thought he might be protecting the citizens and liked to drink. But Haeden was too small for even the most clichéd cop/reporter romance.

Dino wasn’t a stupid man, and most of the time I didn’t mind dealing with him. I watched him watch people. I knew his look of knowing things. Our jobs were not dissimilar. In many ways he was a quicker, meaner version of Scoop, and there was something appealing about that at first.

Dino had a lot of off-the-record theories for me but, unfortunately, no clue what could have happened to White. Nothing. No leads on anyone local.

His aloofness didn’t stop me from trying to get more information. I spent most of my time hanging around the police station having off-the-record arguments and wasting whole afternoons at public records sitting at the long oak table, looking up things that were so tangential to the case that I wondered if I was trying to avoid what was right in front of me. Trying to distract myself from a growing paranoia that White’s murderer was someone I was sitting next to at the bar on Thursday nights, that Dino had no intention of calling him in.

I began watching people, wondering who knew what and wasn’t talking.

I watched men loitering on Main Street outside the Alibi or Sal’s, or down at the Rooster, with their worn tanned faces and paint-covered clothes. I listened when they talked about contracting jobs or music festivals. A lot of them dated high school girls or undergraduates from colleges nearby. I watched other men driving nice cars, stopping by Sal’s to pick up pizza on Friday nights, or ducking into the Savers Club to buy a gallon of
milk, their ties off and top buttons unbuttoned. Salesmen, managers, teachers, and the occasional professor. In a region as poor as this, these were the people who were considered upper-class, successful, the intellectual and cultural elite.

From what I’d observed, the single women in town were generally waitresses or babysitters or just students biding their time before graduating and getting real jobs. There were, in fact, very few women in Haeden. So it wasn’t unusual for a thirty- or forty-year-old guy to be going out with a nineteen-year-old he remembered first “noticing” when she was ten or twelve. I could see that kind of thing playing out with Wendy White, and some nights right after she went missing, I thought I could see changes on certain people’s faces when the subject of White was brought up: information silently transmitted and destroyed. At first it all seemed too obvious, like I was so far outside the culture, I couldn’t trust my judgment. But after a month, I was pretty sure she hadn’t just run away, and I became obsessed with what could have happened to her. The place was so fucking tiny, so accessible, I thought. I was sure I could personally find her. Certain I could do it all myself.

I remember this period of time in fragments. I remember sitting in my little living room, drinking coffee at three in the morning, watching news from the Iraq war on CNN with the sound off, the Humvees and footage through crosshairs, and the shit about waterboarding, guys in blacked-out goggles and orange jumpsuits sitting in the sun behind razor wire. The light from the TV would reflect off the ashtrays and half-empty cereal bowls filled with cigarette butts.

And I would listen to the interviews I’d recorded with White’s parents and with her brother and sister-in-law while the war played out in a pantomime of looped footage. I was trying to find something I might have missed that would bring it all together. I am sure this did me no good. The late hour and the war and the exhaustion and the restrained panic of White’s parents’ voices.
The switch from coffee to Labatts somewhere around four
A.M
. so I could sleep for a few hours. Those were the little details that would make the next day in the newsroom exhaustingly surreal. The obsessive reading and rereading of a situation I was unable to crack in time to have made any difference at all.

My friends from
City Paper
in Cleveland would call sometimes after they got back from the bar. I was usually up and wired on coffee, sitting amid stamped and redacted copies from county records, watching the mute television while they told me about shit going on in my old beat, or asked if I’d covered any dairy parades lately. One night when they were waiting for election returns, they called from the office and just sang “Come baaaaaaaackkkkk” drunkenly for several minutes. “Come on baaaaaaaaackkkkk, girl, come baaaacckkkkk, it’s too looooooong.”

None of them thought much of the White case.

They wouldn’t. The situation with White was not at all uncommon. People disappear and then reappear as corpses. That’s how you get your chops. You see a dead person, and it sets you apart whether you like it or not. Then the getting over it; the fact that on occasion it constitutes something positive for you professionally.

The White case was not like other accidents or exhumations. Not like seeing the remains of some kid who had decided he was a failure and went drowning. Not like that at all. This is shitty to say, but there’s not much pathos involved in a case like that. Think about it: Little So-and-so the Fourth drowns himself Tuesday night after receiving his midterm grades in the school of civil engineering. The body goes back to Westchester, and a lounge in the library or a nature path gets named after him, and a bunch of other blue-blood kids remember him fondly. Sorry. There’s about one story a year like that. Poor Billy Fuckup, Jr., in his Gap khakis, the pressure of going to classes all day really
got
to him. If I were a better person, I would have felt badly having seen things like that.