The Longings of Wayward Girls (24 page)

July 6, 1979

I

t had been another day of heat and humidity when the police took ray in for questioning. sadie had wanted to go to betty’s but her mother had forbidden it. she had her arm looped around sadie’s chest and held her

close.
“you aren’t going anywhere alone,” her mother said. The fathers who had all participated in the search now

resignedly took their briefcases and suit coats and headed in to work, each eldorado and Continental Mark joining the procession from the neighborhood into Hartford, and sadie’s mother dragged sadie over to the Filleys’. Patsy opened the door, her face swollen with tears. beth was behind her, crying in her pajamas, her face covered by her hands. sadie’s mother told sadie to go to beth, and she took Patsy’s arm and they went outside onto the patio. sadie imagined this was what it was like after someone died. she wondered if beth was remembering laura loomis. she approached her and patted her shoulder. “It will be okay,” she said.

beth lowered her hands and glared at her. “not if your bitch of a mother can help it,” she hissed.
sadie jerked back. she removed her hand.
“My brother had nothing to do with that fat little girl’s disappearance,” she said. “now we’re ruined. He’s ruined for life.”
sadie sensed that beth had obtained this last part from

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Patsy. but she was confused about her mother being implicated—before this summer beth had always loved sadie’s mother, and sadie had always been put out about it. now that she sensed beth might be an ally against Clare she became more interesting. “My mother is a bitch,” sadie said. “you’ve got that part right.”

“you don’t know the half of it,” beth said.
sadie gave her a wry smile and stared at her wet face. “Is there anything I can do?” she said. beth turned away and sadie
heard her thump up the stairs and slam her bedroom door.
she stood in the foyer at a loss. she went into the den to watch
television until beth came back down an hour later. Her face
was blotched, but she was dressed, and her hair was brushed.
she seemed to have made an attempt to pull herself together. “Do you want some lunch?” she said.
They went into the kitchen. Here the walls were lime
green. The floor was checkered black and white. A bowl of
oranges sat on the counter. beth took out a jar of pickles,
opened it, and began to eat out of it, one pickle after another.
Her eyes glazed over. Then she realized what she was doing
and stopped.
“want one?” she said. she held out the jar. she wore a
macramé bracelet, and her arms were tanner than sadie’s. “where do you think Francie is?” beth said. she had gotten down a jar of peanut butter and was unscrewing the lid,
her face scrunched up with the effort.
sadie never considered telling beth about the pond and
the floating object. she shrugged. “no idea,” she said. “what about those letters from some
boy
?” beth said.
“what is that all about? what boy would write to her?” “seems kind of weird,” sadie agreed.
beth made two peanut butter sandwiches. she took out
some potato chips. “Do you like chips on it?” she said. “no, thank you,” sadie said.
beth dropped a handful of chips on one of the sandwiches,
placed the piece of bread on top, and pressed it down. she
handed sadie a paper plate with a sandwich, and chips and
pickles on the side. she half-filled two glasses with Hi-C and
then topped them off with smirnoff she took from another
cabinet—a large bottle she unscrewed expertly and then returned so quickly that sadie barely had time to register surprise.
“This whole disaster calls for a drink,” she said. she lifted
the glass and took a sip. sadie had no choice but to do the
same. she took a bite of the sandwich, the peanut butter thick
in her mouth, and swallowed the drink, harsh and awful. beth
looked at her and smiled.
“you’ll get used to it,” she said. “If you’re anything like
your mother.”
she and beth had poured another drink after that, and
maybe another one, the two of them lying out in the yard
under the trees, the pasture land rolling away from them,
the gladiolas and peonies in the garden wilting in the sun.
sadie asked why Hans wasn’t considered a suspect, and beth
laughed, a harsh little sound.
“oh, your boyfriend’s father picked him up right after
your little make-out session. Drove him all the way home to
stamford, so
he
has an alibi.”
sadie felt her face redden, but beth was still looking up at
the sky and didn’t notice.
occasionally they’d hear bits of their mothers’ conversation, and then the phone would ring, and Patsy would drag
the phone on its long extension outside, and they’d hear her
talking to beth and ray’s father, intermittently crying, and
screaming into the receiver. beth would raise her head up
and glance down at her mother, her face lit with fear. sadie’s mother gathered her cigarettes to go and let sadie stay
with beth to keep her company. “you’re my sweet, generoushearted girl,” she whispered before she left, her breath smelling of gin. when she tried to hug beth, beth pulled back and made a face over sadie’s mother’s shoulder.
sadie had laughed after she went. she’d made fun of her mother, and beth had joined in.
“I’m so sorry I don’t like her anymore,” beth said. “It makes me sad not to like her.”
“I’m not sorry,” sadie said. “she’s vile.”
“you really have no idea,” beth said. she stared at sadie, a long, intense look. “I just wish things could go back to the way they used to be.”
sadie still didn’t know what had made beth turn against Clare, and since she liked it better this way, she didn’t ask. she didn’t want to seem as if she cared. They lay back in the dry grass and felt the thunderstorm return, the leaves overhead whipping up, the gray clouds rolling in.
“It’s like rip Van winkle,” sadie said. “Maybe Francie is playing nine-pins with the strange little men. Maybe she will sleep for twenty years and suddenly reappear in the neighborhood looking like her mother, with wide hips, graying hair, and the beginnings of a double chin.”
beth told sadie twenty years was too late. “we need to find her
now
,” she said. “oh where oh where is that piggy little girl? If I knew where she was I’d drag her back and make her tell the truth!”
And right then sadie,
not drunk, just tipsy
, almost told beth everything. she felt the urge to confess bubble up, a feeling like knowing the answer in school. she saw herself explaining about the letters and clearing ray’s name entirely. but beth’s eyes were lit with a dangerous intensity, and sadie felt suddenly afraid of her.
“Maybe the dead end is an alien landing place, and she’s been taken off as a specimen,” she said instead.
beth stared at her, her eyes suddenly vacant. “you’re the most imaginative person I’ve ever met,” beth said. “but you’re
a drunk now, too.”
“no, I’m not,” sadie said, but when she stood up she
nearly tumbled over. beth began to laugh and point at her. Then ray’s father’s car pulled into the long driveway, and
beth jumped up and ran down the hill, falling and stumbling,
calling, “ray! ray!” and sadie was left alone to watch ray
emerge from the car, sullen in his wrinkled shirt and madras
shorts. beth threw herself into his arms, and he shrugged her
off of him. He looked up the hill at sadie, and then the two
of them went into the house. sadie was left to walk home, the
grass and then the tar road tilting and spinning, the wind from
the storm whipping the leaves off of the trees, the rain starting
up and soaking her through her clothes. she threw up, once
into the sewer grate in front of Mrs. sidelman’s house, and
again in the row of pine trees that separated the Donahues’
from the Frobels’, and hoped that no one noticed. she told
her mother she had a stomach flu, and her mother chastised
her for walking home alone.
“you aren’t allowed to be out by yourself,” she said. “we
don’t know what nutcase is stealing little girls.”
“I’m hardly little,” sadie said, irritated.
Her mother sighed. she led sadie upstairs to her own
room and pulled back the satin comforter and told her to get
in bed. she brought her ginger ale and set it on the nightstand,
and then stretched out beside her, and smoothed her forehead
like she used to when sadie was little. sadie lay there smelling
her mother’s scent on the pillow, thinking about the pond,
and the still water, and the way the insects landed and stirred
it, the way the current moved the mysterious object out near
the center, raising it up, spinning it about.

August 30, 2003

S

adie isn’t sure what has awakened her until she hears the foghorn again, a low, mournful sound that seems to enter her body with her breath. The shade flaps gently against the window. The room appears around her,

gray at first, then lighter so she can make out the pale painted walls—the leaves of a tree, the birds in its branches, the white crib in the corner. emma has put them in the nursery. she sits up and slides out of the bed. ray is asleep, his arm thrown back over his head, his face averted. she puts on her clothes, furtively, and steps over to the crib, and touches the bumper pads, the little knitted blanket draped over the rail. she touches the painted tree, the leaves, the birds and their feathers so real she imagines she might feel their smoothness, their little beating hearts. behind the tree, painted in the distance, is the cottage she stands in, and beyond that the sound. These aren’t store-bought images stuck to the wall with adhesive like hers. These have been painted by a gifted artist—Pietro or emma, or the two of them, working together.

In the mornings at her house Max wakes first, padding into her room to tug at the bed sheet, often climbing up into the bed with her after Craig has left for work. Max slips into the curl of her body and falls back to sleep, and then sadie will go downstairs to make coffee, and sylvia will come down holding Max’s hand.

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“why doesn’t he sleep in his own bed?” she’ll say. “He needs to learn.”
sylvia is envious of Max, and yet she is still the little mother. she makes sure Max has his favorite bowl for cereal—the blue one with Thomas the Tank engine on the bottom. she helps him pick out clothes that match. sadie imagines that this is what is happening now, while she is away. she thinks
away
, rather than
gone
. Children adjust; she knows that. Craig will be there to help, and sylvia will be happy to have her father make her breakfast. she looks a bit longer at the mural on the wall, at the crib, the changing table, the little stack of diapers, the tiny nightgowns folded on a shelf. she knows the bliss that went into setting everything out, putting the crib together, arranging the furniture. she knows how impossible it feels to
get rid
of all of these things. you do not know how to take it all down again, to give it away. That isn’t something you imagine you’ll have to do. she remembers the old crib in the basement of the house she grew up in, the little appliquéd bears on the headboard, and she wonders how long her mother, too, dreamed of more children.
They brought the baby to sadie and Craig in the hospital and let them hold her. she was wrapped in the same sort of hospital-issued flannel blanket that Max and sylvia had been wrapped in, and sadie noted her perfect features, her stillness, in disbelief that she couldn’t bring her home, change her diaper, hold her to her full breasts. over a year has passed, but Craig has said nothing about the nursery she’s left set up, absorbed back into the world of work, believing, perhaps, that it is already dismantled behind the closed door.
It was sylvia who finally brought it up a week ago.
“will that room be another baby’s?” she said. Her eyes were bright and hopeful.
sadie had to tell her that no, there wouldn’t be another baby, even though she had not discussed this with Craig yet. They had the two of them, and wasn’t that enough? sylvia said that sometimes she went into the nursery with her doll and pretended she was the new baby. “I put the clothes on her. I change her diaper. I wind up that thing over the crib and listen to the music.”
sadie knows she should have taken it all down by now, put an ad in the
Yankee Flyer
. someone would have happily come with a truck and hauled it all off—immaculate things, brandnew, never used. of the women in the neighborhood, only Maura knows about the nursery. Her daughter, Anne, told her after playing at the house. she came by the other day with the excuse of dropping off a school announcement, tapping on her back porch door.
“you know, that extra room would be a great playroom for the kids,” she said. she had brought sadie a catalog filled with playroom items—shelves and baskets, tiny wooden kitchens, pretend food in real-looking packages, a vanity with a mirror, a table with little blocks and drawers built into it for storage. sadie agreed, and Maura hugged her and left her with the catalog. but she has still not ordered anything. she often found herself at all times of day in the nursery. she’d sit down on the carpet in the center of it and cry. one day Max had a temper tantrum about his little bear shirt being dirty, and sylvia led him into the room and shut the door.
“where is your brother?” sadie asked.
“I put him in the crying room,” she said.
sadie accepted the room’s new distinction, and it became the place each of them went to be alone, to stare at the flitting birds, the pale green walls, at the way the light came through the blinds and threw the shadows of the leaves there. sadie wonders if sylvia is in the room now, having a quiet cry about her mother being gone. she wonders if Craig knows where the waffle mix is kept, how to blow on Max’s food first so it isn’t too hot, which shorts are his new favorite pair, how he likes his hair wet to keep the cowlick down. For the first time sadie allows herself to see the limitless list of things that Craig does not know, the things, vital and important to her children’s lives, of which he is oblivious. she lets herself acknowledge what must surely be their confusion, their frustration with their father, whom Max will not allow to tie his shoes because he doesn’t know how to make the bunny ears first. she sees the place she fits, the gaping space that she has left behind—cavernous, like the hole left by an excised tooth.
she looks over at ray, asleep on the bed, his hair over his eyes, his soft mouth. she is as complicit as he in this whole seduction. she slips from the room and closes the door. The house is quiet save for the clock. she can see that the tide is out, the water still and the fog floating over it. she goes out onto the porch and through the screen door to the beach. emma and Pietro have wooden chairs, old heavy Adirondacks, and she sits down in one and buries her feet in the cold, wet sand. If she doesn’t plan anything, if she simply lets ray take her away, the future is a comforting unknown. yet, when she tries to actively imagine a life with ray—an apartment in the city, a career—things shift and distort, as if there is a series of doors sliding open and closed that she must navigate in order to exchange one life for the other, her children always trapped behind the one she doesn’t choose.
out along the fog line sadie sees movement, a breaking of the water, and a small white bobbing. she watches it come from one end of the beach until it is directly in front of her, and she can make it out—someone swimming in a white bathing cap. whoever it is has long arms and accomplished strokes, measured but steady, the splash barely perceptible, the small froth kicked up by her feet like the churning of a boat’s motor. sadie watches the figure slide through the water past her, past the next jetty, where she turns and begins her slow pace back again. A sailboat unfurls its sails, the rising sun making them bright on the horizon. The fog begins to burn away, and the swimmer’s approach seems to falter. sadie watches with concern. The strokes have stopped, and the person is paddling in feebly, until she is near sadie’s beach and she can stand in the shallow sandbar. The woman wears a navy blue suit, an old-fashioned style with an anchor sewn onto the skirt, the top portion jutting out, filled with wire. she seems to drag herself through the water, and sadie stands, worrying, and goes down the beach to the water’s edge to see that it is Mrs. sidelman.
“Are you all right?” sadie asks. she splashes into the water and takes Mrs. sidelman’s arm and helps her up the beach to the chair. Mrs. sidelman allows herself to be aided, leaning a bit on sadie and wetting her clothes in the process. she breathes heavily and lets herself be helped into the chair. she leans her head back and raises a shaky hand to remove the cap. “I thought I could do it,” she says. “I used to be able to. I felt strong enough starting out.”
Her voice is thin, filled with exhaustion. sadie remembers that Mrs. sidelman was once an Aquafemme, and she smiles at the memory, opens her mouth to share it, but then realizes that she cannot. Mrs. sidelman looks up at sadie, and her eyes grow wide.
“you’re the woman from last night,” she says.
“you’re Mrs. sidelman,” sadie says. “I’m sadie. sadie watkins?”
Mrs. sidelman shakes her head. “yes. yes, the daughter, of course. you look just like your mother.”
sadie knows people think it is a nice thing to say, a compliment, so she smiles and keeps quiet.
Mrs. sidelman looks behind her at the little blue cottage. “Are you staying here?”
“we’re visiting friends,” sadie says.
“you and that Filley boy,” Mrs. sidelman says.
sadie hears her disapproval, but she nods. “ray,” she says. “Are you cold? would you like a towel?”
Mrs. sidelman says that she is fine, her cottage is right down the beach.
“so, you still come every summer,” sadie says.
Mrs. sidelman looks at her then, cocks her head, her eyes intent. “yes, I do,” she says. “so, you’re married to the Filley boy.”
“oh, I’m separated,” she says. “From my husband.”
Mrs. sidelman eases herself forward in the chair and stands. “oh,” she says. “well, I’d better get home.”
“Just separated,” sadie says, standing up. “Just lately. would you like me to walk you back?”
“like a dog?” Mrs. sidelman says. “It’s mortifying to grow old. yes, you can walk
with
me.” she reaches out and holds on to sadie for support. sadie feels the papery skin, the slender bones of the woman’s arm. Mrs. sidelman seems tiny now, not the tall, imposing woman she remembers.
she looks up and sadie is surprised to see that her eyes are warm, filled with kindness. “I always picked the most responsible girls to take care of my house,” she says.
They walk down the beach, past the rows of shingled cottages, some quiet, others with occupants just awakening to sit on the porches, the steam from their coffee spiraling through the screens. sadie says the coffee smells good, and Mrs. sidelman invites her to stay for some. Her cottage is the largest on the beach—brown shingles with a copper roof.
“oh, I should get back,” she says. And then she thinks about where “back” is and feels a wave of confusion and guilt, as if Mrs. sidelman already knows what she’s done and is passing judgment. “back to ray. He’ll be waking up.”
“sit down here on the porch. The coffee is already made. I’ll bring you a cup.”
sadie protests, but Mrs. sidelman ignores her and goes into the cottage, the screen door banging shut behind her. she comes out with a tray—coffee and buttered triangles of toast. sadie sits down. The porch is open, the breeze coming off the still water cool. The fog is slipping away in strips. “It’s just that they’ll wonder where I am,” she says.
Mrs. sidelman stares at her. she pours cream into her coffee and stirs. “who?” she says pointedly. “who will wonder?”
sadie shakes her head. “well, ray and our friends.” but she knows that isn’t the answer.
Mrs. sidelman’s spoon clinks against the side of her cup. she begins to tell her about the neighborhood. “Mrs. Hoskins passed,” she says. “you would probably have guessed that. The battistons are still there, and the Frobels. The schusters moved away, and I’m sure you know about the Donahues.” she glances up at sadie, her eyes searching. “Poor Mrs. bingham died this year—cancer. but young families have moved in, and I have a new girl watering my plants this summer.”
sadie lifts her cup to her lips and finds her hand shakes.
“Do you have any children?” Mrs. sidelman asks.
“I do. A girl and a boy—sylvia and Max,” sadie says.
Mrs. sidelman smiles at her. “I’m sure you’re a wonderful mother. you were always so imaginative as a child.”
sadie feels cornered, the way she did at Cherrystones when she first spotted Mrs. sidelman and there was suddenly someone present who knew the girl she was, the woman she was destined to become. It doesn’t matter that Mrs. sidelman is old and out of touch, that her ideas are from another era when marriage and child rearing weren’t options you questioned. sadie realizes that all of this time she has believed what she has done is forgivable, an offense that might be explained away, and now, sitting across from a woman whose saved love letters prove she, too, had choices, she’s afraid she’s been wrong.
“Don’t be so sure about that,” she says. “I may not be as good a mother as you think.”
she tries to say it lightly, as if she is joking, but Mrs. sidelman doesn’t respond. she places her spoon on her saucer carefully, letting the quiet expand.
“some days I think I may be as terrible as my mother,” sadie says.
Mrs. sidelman looks up at sadie sharply, her expression fierce. “your mother made a mistake she couldn’t correct.”
no one understood that sadie had, at times, wished for her mother to actually succeed at killing herself. The multiple hospitalizations could only have been other times she’d tried, she’d reasoned long ago—enough times for sadie’s initial terror to transform to resentment, to believe that her mother’s attempts were games, that she would always emerge victorious in the hospital, watching her soap opera in her matching nightgown and robe. Truthfully, that last summer her mother had surprised her each morning by being alive, each afternoon by baking brownies and rice Krispies treats, her hair washed and styled, her clothing clean and pressed, as if she’d just come in from bridge club. so, when sadie got off the school bus that september afternoon, only two months after Francie’s disappearance, and went up the leaf-strewn walk into the house, she expected her mother to greet her. Instead, the house was empty. she called for her and then hesitantly investigated the rooms—trying not to imagine her mother twisted in the bedsheets, or in the bathtub in a puddle of blood, or hanging from a rafter in the basement. when her search uncovered none of these things she was more relieved than suspicious.
sadie shrugged off her coat. she made herself a peanut butter sandwich. The kitchen was spotless, as usual, but there wasn’t a note folded on the table, telling her where her mother had gone. she took her food and her book bag up to her room and sat on her bed. That part bothered her, a little. Her mother always left a note, and since school had begun she rarely went out when sadie was expected home—as if sadie might be next in line to be taken, like Francie and laura loomis. outside the window, bright leaves flapped on the tree branches. sadie pressed her face up against the cold window and peered into the backyard and the woods. There was Mrs. sidelman, standing with her rake, paused in her work and staring over toward sadie’s house. “what?” sadie asked out loud, her breath fogging the glass.
sadie’s bedroom was adjacent to the garage, and she heard it then—the sound of a car engine running. she thought her mother was just getting home from the store, from an afternoon play practice, from westfarms Mall. she went down to the den, and tugged the door to the garage open, and peered in at the Coupe de Ville. The light was dim with the garage door closed, the smell of exhaust strong and noxious. There was her mother behind the wheel. she wore her camel-hair coat. sadie heard the radio playing under the chugging of the engine. she called to her mother, but she saw that she just sat there, staring out the one window into the woods, into the spaces between the trees where the dried cornstalks lined the fields. Through the window sadie saw Mrs. sidelman peering in, clutching a rake. Their eyes met, the horror of the moment equally shared, a parcel shifted back and forth and back. something in sadie clicked.
Her mother was dead