The Longings of Wayward Girls (28 page)

August 15, 1979

T

he parents decided the Haunted Woods was no longer appropriate, and the event was canceled. no one wanted to go into the woods anyway, fearful of

laura’s and Francie’s ghosts. larry schuster claimed he’d seen their spectral presences on the swings in his backyard. others had their own Francie sightings—sometimes alone, eating a sundae at the local Farm shop restaurant, or with laura loomis, riding the Tilt-A-whirl at the sacred Heart Church’s strawberry Carnival. reports had come in from as far away as ohio and Florida of girls matching Francie’s description. It had been over a month and the local search—conducted by the police, fathers and grandfathers, volunteer firemen packing thermoses of coffee and ham-on-rye sandwiches—had nearly halted, the group that met each morning dwindling to a few bitter loners who trampled the yellowing fields arguing about the fallout of the Three Mile Island accident. The focus had shifted to the children who were not missing, who needed new school clothes and shoes. sadie’s mother dropped sadie and betty off at the town center the saturday before labor Day, and sadie was allowed to pick out new outfits at the youth Centre, the weathervane, to place them on hold so that her mother could return to pay. They didn’t need to be reminded not to talk to strangers, to stay together. Her mother threatened them both with a pointed finger before taking off in the Cadillac, and sadie had made fun of her

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after she’d gone, not knowing, then, how little time she had left with her.

The stores were located in the outdoor mall. sadie and betty had worn their jean shorts and midriff tops. They picked out their school clothes and went into Drug City, where Francie’s picture was taped to the door now, alongside laura’s, her expression wistful, apologetic.
I’m so sorry I’ve caused all this trouble,
her face said. sadie pretended not to see it, but betty stared at it, and then when she saw sadie watching her, she looked away. It had become something they didn’t discuss—a firm block of coldness between them. They left Drug City and sadie saw the same Mustang trolling the parking lot.

“look, it’s Mack,” she said. And before betty could reply she’d raised her hand and called to him. The car made a wide arc and slid alongside them.

“well, well,” Mack said. He had on a work shirt with his name stitched on the pocket. rob sat beside him, fiddling with the radio dial. They each had a can of beer cradled between their legs. rob glanced up.

“look, it’s sadie Mae and betty.”
sadie was slightly flattered that he remembered their names.
“Can we ride around and do nothing with you?” she said. betty’s eyes widened. “we’re getting picked up in twenty minutes. your mom is coming.”

but sadie suspected that she would not, that she would be passed out in her bed, taking her afternoon nap, that they would be stuck at the outdoor mall with the kids from their school, the ones giggling and gathering once again by the fountain, the ones who would head over to the movie theater to see
Meatballs,
the boys holding the girls’ hands in the airconditioned dark. she was tired of being on the outside of things. she wanted her own place to fit.

sadie knew betty wouldn’t let her go alone, that she would be forced to slide into the backseat with her, and she was right—betty climbed in beside her. The car was old but clean. There was a cooler on the floor, and sadie asked if they could have a beer, and she and betty shared one. betty grimaced, her eyes watering, and sadie did her best to keep her face passive, her eyes dry. They bummed cigarettes, and Mack drove around town, up and down the streets that they’d known since childhood—the road the bus took to school, the one that led out to the reservoir, the one that took them past the historic homes of early town founders, past the Filley produce stand, the stalls filled with summer squash, tomatoes, the fields waving late-summer flowers. They kept the windows down, and the breeze blowing in and the smell of the pasture grass made sadie sleepy and dazed. every so often rob would turn around and ask them something—how old they were, where they went to school, questions adults asked children to make small talk. sadie told them they went to private school, that they were sixteen.

“Don’t you want to know my favorite color?” she said. rob turned in his seat and smirked. “what’s your astrological sign?”

rob and Mack had graduated from high school the year before. one of them worked at the local gas station, the other at a company that put up aluminum siding. They lived at home with their parents. In ten years they didn’t know what they’d be doing.

“no hopes and dreams?” sadie said.
betty leaned over and whispered, “losers,” in sadie’s ear. “I heard that,” Mack said, looking up into the rearview

mirror.

They pulled into Penwood Park and took the narrow road that wound up through the woods, around the lake. betty leaned over to sadie and whispered in her ear.

“Is this the park where the girl was raped?”
“Don’t worry,” rob said, swiveling to look back at them.

“we’ll protect you from the rapist.”
betty grabbed sadie’s hand and sank her nails in. Mack drove up to a clearing where they parked alongside

a group of other cars—Chevelles and GTos and road runners, cars that looked poised at a starting line, their paint jobs shimmering in the sun. Mack and rob got out, their bodies unfolding from the car to reveal their height and bulk—broad shoulders, low-slung jeans, men more than boys, sadie noted. rob opened the door to the back and stared in at them.

“you two just going to stay in there?”
sadie and betty slid out and leaned against the car, their arms folded over the skin exposed by their midriff tops. In
three years sadie will meet up with Mack again and discover
that rob died in a car wreck in Hamden, and she’ll ride on the
back of his new motorcycle to a motel on the berlin Turnpike.
but that day she and betty just moved to a picnic table in the
shade. rob and Mack leaned on the car hood drinking and
joking with the other boys, who cast occasional looks over at
sadie and betty, but for the most part ignored them. sadie listened to the discussions of who would run in the demolition
derby at riverside, who would race who that night on Dudley Town road. she heard one boy ask rob if they’d stolen
sadie and betty from the middle school playground. There
was nervous laughter, and the boy, who was met with stony
silence, became absorbed in his beer. sadie decided that Mack
and rob, as older boys who had achieved some fame in their
world—through car racing and drinking, through fistfights
and a general disdain for the accepted paths mapped out for
them by their parents—were not to be questioned. she felt a
keen sense of having been chosen, as if these boys sensed the
same potential in her.
betty kept up a low mantra. “I cannot believe we are doing
this, I cannot believe we are doing this.” They were the only girls there. when they left rob climbed into the backseat, and betty was asked to sit up front, and rather than argue, or maybe because she felt chosen herself, betty complied. riding this way back down the twilit roads of town, sadie leaned boldly into rob and rob put his arm around her. His shirt smelled faintly of sweat, and sadie tried not to compare him to Hans and his expensive-soap smell. Up front, Mack slid his hand over the gearshift to betty’s bare leg, and sadie watched her knock it away. she gave directions to Mack, and they drove to Hamlet Hill and deposited them at the end of the street. rob tugged sadie in and kissed her, long and hard, his aviator glasses pressing into her cheek, his tongue searching the inside of her mouth. He slid his hand between her legs, wedging it there like a brick, lifted sadie’s own hand and pressed it against the V of his jeans and the swelling there. sadie felt aroused and sick at the same time. betty was already outside of the car, waiting by the asphalt curb, when sadie got out. The car with the boys drove away, the tires leaving a thick, black mark on the road. sadie and betty walked in quiet,
stunned silence up the hill to their houses.
“what if they hadn’t brought us back?” betty said, her
voice choked.
sadie looked over and saw betty was crying, her round
cheeks wet with tears. sadie felt her own chest zinging with
the nicotine and the beer, the excitement of having been released into the wild, and the relief of returning. she felt a little
ashamed when she thought about rob’s tongue in her mouth,
the groping, and so she didn’t think about it. she thought
of Francie, wondering if she’d been lured into the car of a
stranger, the ways this was accomplished not readily known
to children at the time. It seemed inconceivable that someone would choose Francie, in the way sadie herself had just
been chosen, and so instead she preferred to think of her as
a runaway. Hadn’t sadie planned this often enough herself, imagining what she’d bring, how she could live in the woods, how she’d survive on dandelion and wild berries, the hard little apples that grew in the old orchard? she’d drink brook water, build small fires for warmth. In the fall she could eat the hickory nuts that fell in multitudes onto the lawns. she
could slip into houses at night and steal swanson TV dinners. In a week sadie would go to the junior high school, a place
foreign to her, its building old and its linoleum marred, an
in-between place fraught with unknowns. It seemed that, unless she was found, Francie, like laura loomis before her,
would have the luxury of avoiding the return to school, the
dreaded early-morning alarm, the wait for the school bus in
all kinds of weather, the cold vinyl seats and toxic exhaust, the
frightening sense of being trapped all day at a desk, unable to
use the restroom when needed, to get a drink of water. “but they did,” sadie said. “They did bring us back.” betty wouldn’t look at her. “Is this a venial sin?” she said. sadie stopped walking. “what?” she said. “what are you
talking about?”
betty stopped too. she stamped her foot, and her long
ponytail swished. “All of this,” she said. “everything we’ve
done.”
she didn’t wait for sadie to respond. she turned and picked
up her pace and left sadie behind. The Frobels’ sprinkler wet
the side of the road. From inside the houses sadie could hear
the clink of cutlery, smell pork chops and Hamburger Helper.
she watched betty let herself in her house, watched it all happen from a distance. In two days she turned thirteen. she felt
the widening rift between herself and that world of mown
grass and tree canopies, the race of years, their rush to overwhelm her.

August 31, 2003

I

t is the Sunday before Labor Day. Craig tells sadie to forget the cookout, but a few of the women have already called to ask about the plans, and sadie insists the tradition will continue. she will head out to shaw’s to pick

up what’s needed. she is heady with exhaustion, with relief, eager to restart her old life. Craig offers to go to the store himself—he raises his eyebrows at her. “what if you run into another friend?” he says. sadie smiles, then laughs, and Craig sighs, pulls her into his chest, lays the palm of his hand gently on her head, like a benediction. “Take your phone,” he says, and hands it to her, and sadie accepts it, glances down to see the missed calls, the messages—an archive of Craig’s and her friends’ growing fears in her absence.

Max is taking a nap. sylvia has been asleep, too, on the couch, but awakens as sadie prepares to leave and asks to go with her. sadie has given her a bath, and washed her hair, and combed out the snarls. she has dressed her in her little seersucker sundress, her white sandals with the flowers. sylvia climbs into the car and notices the suitcase in the back.

“what’s that?” she says.
sadie tells her it’s her grandmother’s. she circles the town so that she passes the old Filley house. The driveway is empty,
and her heart stretches tight with longing. sylvia leans forward in her seat and watches the house recede.
“That’s the castle house,” sylvia says excitedly.

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sadie sighs. “It is.”
she drives past Vincent elementary school, where
The Night of the Iguana
is scheduled to open the following weekend, and she tells sylvia about attending her mother’s plays,
how she would sit in the front row with her father, waiting
for her mother to appear onstage. she felt a little afraid, she
tells sylvia, in expectation of her mother. It was always some
other woman who stepped out into the lights in a costume,
one who lived with different family members and had different problems, who wore outdated clothing, and sometimes
a wig, her face altered with heavy makeup. sadie recognized,
as a child, her mother’s long arms, the ring on her finger, a
certain timbre of her voice, but all of that only served to confuse her further. she would watch the perspiration build on
her mother’s face, listen to her voice lower or raise in entreaty
or paralyzing fear. Afterward, she and her father slipped into
the makeshift dressing room—usually the art room, where a
mirror was propped—and they presented her mother with
flowers, roses and orchids, clouds of baby’s breath. sadie’s
mother would gather her in her arms and press her cheek
up against hers, the powder, cold and damp, transferred to
sadie’s skin.
“oh, I love love love my little girl,” she’d say.
everything was abundant and swelling with happiness.
Her mother clung to sadie’s and her father’s hands. “when can I go to your plays?” sylvia asks.
“when you’re older,” sadie says.
“when is that?” sylvia says.
“A long time,” sadie says.
At some point her mother must have grown weary of
pretending, she thinks. she herself has worked hard to be a
different kind of mother, to keep her life simple and straightforward and free of secrets, and yet she has found that she
could not. still, she knows she need not follow her mother’s
trajectory. she has already learned things her mother failed to. she and Craig have decided not to punish sylvia for sneaking out of the house and wandering off. They’re convinced
she now knows to stay out of the woods.
“I went on an adventure,” sylvia says from the backseat.
she begins to describe the darkness in the woods, how the
moon was out.
sadie tells her she saw the sequin stars sylvia dropped.
“weren’t you afraid of animals?” sadie asks.
“no,” sylvia says. “I knew you weren’t at the pond. I went
through the field of flowers to the castle.”
she tells sadie she wanted to bring Max, but he whined
when she told him where they’d be going, and she couldn’t
risk alerting her father or Mrs. Curry, who were downstairs. “what were they doing?” sadie asks.
“Talking very quietly,” sylvia says. “Drinking.” At the edge of the pines, sylvia says, she paused. she could
see the castle house and all the lights lit. she expected to find
the man, but she saw someone else moving around inside,
passing back and forth in front of the windows.
“I thought it was you,” sylvia says.
The woman was throwing her hands in the air. sylvia wondered if she was dancing, or laughing, and then she thought
of the Twelve Dancing Princesses and how they slipped out
at night to dance with men in a secret place, wearing out their
slippers, vexing their father. sadie remembers the fairy tale:
the princesses dancing all night, exhausting their lovers, then
giving them up—like ray, she thinks. sylvia says she moved
through the field and crept up to the house. The woman was
not her mother; that much she could tell. The woman had
short dark hair, like her friend Anne’s mother.
“Maura?” sadie asks.
“yes,” sadie says. “I thought, what if all the mothers from
the pond snuck out at night to dance, just like the princesses?” sadie laughs. “Imagine if they all met up there wearing the
clothes they put on to go out on saturday nights, their earrings
and necklaces, their pretty sandals.”
“yeah,” she chirps. “That’s what I thought!”
sylvia says that when she stepped up closer to the window
she could only see a big room with a fireplace, the light coming from a crystal chandelier. no other women were visible,
and she knew the woman there was not Maura when she came
back into the room, her heels clicking. sylvia says she threw
her arms up in the air again, the way her mother does when
Max spills his juice.
“How can you do this?” the woman said. “what are you
thinking?”
sylvia imitates the woman from the backseat, and sadie
watches her in the rearview mirror do a near-perfect imitation
of beth Filley. sylvia says she couldn’t see who the woman
was talking to. she thought she must be talking to someone in
the hall, or in another room. but when no one answered, she
wondered if the woman was just talking to herself. “you go and ruin everything I’ve done to help you.” sylvia imitates the woman shouting, and then, to sadie’s
surprise, crying.
sylvia doesn’t remember everything the woman said. she
shouted some things and then whispered others, then she lay
back on the floor and cried. “you were supposed to leave with
me,” she said. “It was our plan.” when she was quiet sylvia
wondered if she’d gone to sleep, so she stepped up closer to
check. she still wanted to find her mother, and she wondered
if the woman might know where she was. she peered into the
open window.
“The floor smelled old,” she says. “I could smell the lady’s
perfume.”
Then the woman sat up and looked at her.
sadie is stopped at a stop sign, and she turns to look at sylvia, who is now imitating the look on the woman’s face. “Then she screamed,” sylvia says. “she kept screaming, and I
ran away through the grass and then into the woods. “I thought she was a witch,” sylvia says. “I thought she had
changed you and the magician into birds or mice. Maybe she
put you in a cage.”
so sylvia ran, plunging through the woods, forgetting the
path and the little sequin stars, until she reached an open place
and a big tree with boughs that dipped toward the ground. she
was a good climber—sadie knew this to be true—and the bark
was smooth, the little leaves dark and thick, the branches wide
enough for her to walk across. she found a place where the
thick branches formed a hollow, where she fit inside, and she
huddled there and hid.
sadie has told sylvia stories of tree forts, of the old wagon
she and her friends found at the edge of a pasture, its metal
wheels sunk into the earth. They climbed up on it and pretended they were traveling west. They built a fort out of the
graying wood from a fallen-down shed, stole a bale of hay
left over in the field, rolling it over and over to the fort and
spreading it out on the ground so that in the winter they might
return and find it dry and warm.
“I thought maybe the tree was one of your old forts,” sylvia says.
sadie tells her maybe it was. she drives down Tunxis
Avenue and stops at the intersection. sylvia says the witch
eventually stopped screaming but that there was rustling in
the woods, something thrashing through the ferns, breaking
small twigs. she slipped down as low as she could in the tree
and heard the thing pass by her, heard it mutter and curse and
move farther away, and she imagined the witch limping along,
changed now into her real form.
“I was going to keep running,” she says. “but I thought she
might be waiting, and then I fell asleep.”
sadie listens to sylvia’s story, remembers the dirt on beth’s
heels. she doesn’t let herself imagine how close her daughter
was to real danger. she thinks she must be traumatized by her
experience. “were you afraid?”
“no,” sylvia said. “I like pretending for real.”
sadie smiles at her in the mirror. “yes,” she says. “I know
what you mean.”
sylvia tells her she awoke when the birds had gathered
around her in the branches and something scurried near her
head. It was dawn. she felt sore from sleeping in her sitting
position. she could see where the woods thinned out and the
sun just lighting up the meadow grass. she was there when
Mrs. Curry crossed the meadow, and she watched her carefully, wondering if she was the one in the woods last night. she
rose slightly to see better through the leaves, and something
shifted under her feet. she stepped out of the hollow, onto
the wide branch, and peered down. Inside the place where
she’d been sitting was a small knapsack with a tarnished clasp,
a camping dish, a spoon.
“what kind of knapsack?” sadie asks, now incredulous. sylvia says it is like the one she used to take to the pool—
lined with plastic so her wet bathing suit could be carried
home. “It had hearts on it, but it was really old and falling
apart.” when sadie asked she described what she found inside—a bracelet made of tiny colored beads strung on elastic;
a few changes of clothes, shorts and T-shirts, each item filled
with holes, as if bugs had crawled inside and eaten through. “And letters,” sylvia says.
A sudden breeze shifts through the open car windows carrying the smell of the field they have just driven past, of wildflowers and manure.
“what do you mean letters?” sadie asks.
At the bottom of the knapsack, sylvia says in her chatty
voice, was a packet tied with a thick piece of yarn. some of the writing she couldn’t read because the paper was torn, and the
handwriting was messy.
sadie looks back at sylvia in the rearview mirror, and their
eyes meet—sadie’s dark and startled, sylvia’s earnest and wide
with excitement.
she had gone through all the letters when she heard her
father calling her name, and she put everything but the bracelet back and climbed down from the tree and went to wait for
him on the path. Her father had come, and Mrs. Curry. “And then you,” sylvia says. “Mommy.”
she is going to draw the story of the boy who wrote the
letters, of the castle house where he must have once lived, of
the girl who was, like her, unafraid of the woods. sadie tells
her that would be nice.
“Maybe we can go back there,” sylvia says. “And I’ll show
you.”
sadie imagines going at night, following the little sequined stars. she tells sylvia, “Maybe.” she isn’t sure how
much of sylvia’s story could possibly be true, is half-afraid
to find out.
The parking lot at shaw’s is hot, overbright, and the
stunted trees planted in the medians blow in the wind that is
kicking up and promising rain. sadie opens the car door and
opens sylvia’s door to let her out. she takes sylvia’s hand in
hers and they stand there together beside the car. sylvia pulls
a small beaded bracelet out of her dress pocket and slips it on
her wrist.
“Is it okay if I keep it?” she says.
sadie, remembering the day she made the bracelet with
betty, finds she cannot speak and must simply nod her head. Inside she pushes her cart across the waxed linoleum.
The air-conditioning is cool, the store filled with music, with
the squeak of the cart wheels. she and sylvia move through
the aisles and find hamburger and hot dog buns, pounds of ground beef, packages of hot dogs, three watermelons. she buys dozens of eggs for the children’s egg toss, cucumbers for
her cucumber salad.
she reaches out to touch her daughter’s blond head and
thinks how much she was like sylvia when she was little—
how her games, her pretending, are all replicated in her
child. she sees, too, how closely she has patterned her own
life after her mother’s—joining the Tunxis Players, the affair with ray. How alike they are in other ways beyond her
control—the miscarriages, the grief. she admits to herself
that once she discovered the suitcase it was as if her mother’s
ghost had thrown up one more dare. Clare made plans to
leave sadie and her father, to run off with a schoolboy. As
incredible as it seems, sorting through the packed clothing
sadie had admired her mother’s nerve, saw her leaving as an
attempt at happiness, as an act of bravery against the world
that told her how she must always behave. At the time, sadie
thought she was seeking the same thing. but she wonders
now why her mother would flee the people who loved her,
as if their love wasn’t enough, why she made her last flight
one from which she could never return. sadie sees how narrowly she has missed falling from the same precipice. she
feels her longing for her mother like a crushing burden, left
for her to lug about alone for all these years. she is relieved
to have saved her daughter from that weight. she can parse
out memories to her—create a version of Clare that is both
made-up and true.
she tells sylvia that they will bake her grandmother’s
chocolate cupcakes.
“These are the best cupcakes you’ll ever taste,” sadie says.
she finds that she is near tears, imploring her daughter to
believe this. The little beaded bracelet is bright on sylvia’s
narrow wrist.
The men will pitch in and line up grills in sadie’s side yard.
They will circle their chairs, the legs gritty with pond sand,
while the children play manhunt in the darkness, drawing out
the last of the summer, every bit of it coursing through their
limbs, the bottoms of their feet stained with tar and grass.