What Has Become of You (35 page)

“I don’t know anything about that,” Frank Ouelette spoke up, again directing his response at Vera. “That’s weird that she would write to you. She told me she didn’t want to hurt you because you didn’t seem so bad, after all, but she might have changed her mind.

“Anyway, that’s kind of why I wanted to talk to you in person. To tell you that I didn’t kill Jensen, and that I wish I’d never laid a finger on those other two girls or even thought for a minute about putting you in a bad spot. We both got duped by the same girl, I guess. Funny, right? You seem like a nice-enough lady. I don’t think Jensen’s dead, and she thought of doing something to you once, so who knows? She might get that idea again. You’d better be careful.”

“I think we’re done here,” Ferreira said. With a nod to the corrections officer, he said, “You can take him back now, Wade. Thanks, Frank, for being willing to talk again. We’ll talk again soon, I’m sure.”

When Frank Ouelette and the entourage were gone, Vera looked up at Ferreira helplessly. “I don’t think he killed Jensen Willard,” she said to him. “Let me be the first to admit that I’m a much worse judge of character than I ever thought. But when he says she’s still out there, I believe him. I could be wrong. She could be in the river, like you think, and he could be lying through his teeth.”

“That’s what we’re trying to sort out.”

“Are you planning to try him as an adult?”

“Not for me to decide. Do I look like the courts to you? Nice work with the Scotty connection, by the way. We hadn’t gotten him to pin down exactly where he met Willard. Can’t use this as evidence, of course, but it’s a useful thing for us to know.”

Vera suddenly felt her entire body sag. She put her head between her knees and moaned softly.

“You going to be okay?” Ferreira said.

“I think I’m going to be sick.”

The detective pulled the garbage can from the corner and planted it in front of her just as she leaned forward and retched. Coffee-colored saliva and bile hit the edge of the trash can liner, and Vera wiped her chin with the back of her hand, embarrassed. “My God,” she said.

“You’ve been through a lot,” Ferreira said. “You’re looking a little worse for the wear. I wonder if there might be a close friend or relative you might stay with for the day.”

Vera tried to heave again, this time bringing up a pasty gruel that she took for the package of crackers she had eaten shortly before Ferreira picked her up.

“I’ll be all right by myself,” she said, but she was not sure that she would be. She realized she was too spooked to go home alone. She thought of Frank Ouelette—Scotty—telling her to be careful, and of Bret Folger nearly saying the same thing before that. She wanted to be careful.

“I’d feel better if I knew you had someone to keep an eye on you,” Ferreira insisted.

It was nice to know someone cared. And the more she thought about it, the more she decided what she wanted to do and whom she wanted to call. She found herself pumping quarters into the pay phone at headquarters and dialing her mother’s number while Ferreira looked on. She barely got out a hello before her mother let out a relieved squawk and launched into a series of recriminations for not having answered her voicemails, for not having called her much sooner.

“Mom,” she said, “Mom. I can’t really talk right now. But I need a favor. Things have gotten bad. I need to come home, Mom.”

No place was home,
Vera thought, but sometimes a substitute had to do. She wondered if Jensen Willard’s substitute home was now the river—if she was cradled on the riverbed, the water lapping gently over her, the bottom-feeding sea creatures feasting on what remained. She doubted it. She replaced the receiver in its cradle and then closed her eyes because it hurt to keep them open, and the more she looked at the empty chair where Scotty had just been sitting, the more she felt the urge to throw up again.

It was an hour’s wait before her mother could reach Dorset. She wondered if she could nap there in the police waiting area. She thought once again about the young girl who might or might not be in the river, and for the first time she felt a great divide between herself and this girl—a divide of decades and experience and maturity and mortality and even conscience. She remembered what she had said to Jensen in the hotel room:
I’m still that fifteen-year-old girl in a lot of ways.
In some ways, perhaps that still held true. She might always be the awkward, self-doubting girl she once was. But in other, more significant ways, a door had closed on that fifteen-year-old girl forever.

And isn’t it better this way?
she asked herself.
Isn’t it better to finally leave her behind?
Vera thought the answer was yes. Still, as she felt herself nodding off in her chair, she felt the inner dissonance of one who has lost and gained in equal measure.

The next two weeks were the lost days, spent in a state of half waking.

This was a time when one day bled into another, a time when sleeping until two or three in the afternoon was commonplace for Vera. A time when little was required of her other than keeping her mother company. She ate her mother’s plain New England cooking—everything baked and boiled within an inch of its life—and listened to her complain about the neighbors, who, her mother was sure, were running a brothel out of their house. She picked up smoking cigarettes again—her former habit, and her mother’s lifelong one—and she and her mother often sat out on her patio, inhaling tobacco and stubbing their butt ends into a shared ashtray with particular emphasis, as though the extermination of a cigarette were the period at the end of an unspoken sentence.

Vera seldom went outside during these days for fear of running into Peter and his new wife or—worse, in its own way—former high school classmates who might wonder what she was doing back in town. She slept in the same bed she’d had as a child, under the slanted roof with its window that looked out at the barren crab apple trees, until she realized her Dorset apartment wasn’t paying for itself and that she would either have to relinquish her rental or go back to it.

She was afraid to go back, she had to admit. She felt safer under her mother’s roof. Then again, if Jensen could find her at the volunteer headquarters, she could surely find her at her mother’s address. She could find her anywhere.

There was also the question of how Vera would continue to support herself. She had appealed to her former boss at Dorset Community College, asking if there might be some adjunct work she could pick up there, but she’d been told all the sections of English composition were full—and she’d received this message not from the boss himself but from his secretary, which made her think she was unwelcome on campus, just as she was at every other academic institution in Dorset.
Only to be expected,
she thought with a sort of fatalism.

During the fourth week of her unemployment, after she’d returned to her studio, Vera went to the shopping mall in South Portland and walked out with a low-paying job as a sales associate in the junior formals department; she had no retail experience, and she saw this as a dismal step down from teaching. Still, she felt lucky to get this job over the other options—fast-food worker, grocery store carryout girl—that were available to her; at least at the department store she could wear pretty clothes and lipstick and handle garments intended for events Vera herself had never attended: prom, homecoming, spring formal. She spent a great deal of time herding giddy teenagers and their tired mothers into fitting rooms and shooing boyfriends out of them; she zipped zippers and tied sashes and straightened petticoats of dresses.

Tending to these exuberant younger girls, she tried not think of Jensen Willard. Sometimes she was successful. Sometimes not. There were times when she would see a dark-clad girl sulking in the waiting area outside the fitting rooms—usually a younger sister who had been dragged along while the older girl tried on gown after gown—and Vera would stop dead in her tracks, her arms often laden with heavy garments that needed to go back on the sales floor, her mouth a small
O
of consternation until she realized, as she always did, that the girl she was looking at was not Jensen Willard. Not even close. No matter how many times this happened, she never failed to be surprised by the commingling feelings of relief and disappointment she felt all at once.

One day an older customer came into the department store with a younger one; as the girl browsed the racks, the older woman proudly told Vera that this girl was her granddaughter, looking for a formal dress to wear to “nice events” at Princeton.

“Oh, I went to Princeton,” Vera said without even thinking.

“You did?” The older woman looked horrified. “And this was the best job you could get?”

“Well,” Vera said, hiding the sense of affront she felt, “I do other things, too.”

But this was a lie. She didn’t do anything else. She didn’t even pretend to work on the Ivan Schlosser book anymore. She hadn’t read a real book in months. She hadn’t talked to anyone but her mother and her customers—and the customers barely counted, as most of them looked at her as an impersonal “it,” a means of getting something they wanted. As for Elliott, even his chiding emails had softened, taking on the pitying tone of one who has assessed his friend as being beyond hope. She couldn’t even summon her bright wit in her own email responses, but one day, after crawling out of bed in the late afternoon, she logged on to her email and wrote,
Elliott, you old cabbage. Do you know of any jobs available in New York City right now? Maybe a desk job. A cubicle job. Entry level is okay. I don’t really care what it is.

But Elliott, in his reply, knew of no available work:
Vee, you old Nutter Butter. If I knew of a job in NYC, do you really think I’d continue to write about Crunch ’n Munch vs. Cracker Jack? The pickings are slim. Do what you did before and apply to a college program around here—something practical this time, like auto repair. Oh, wait—you don’t drive! Maybe library science, then. You’d like that. But don’t do it unless you can get a tuition reimbursement and a little stipend on the side. With your credentials, you could probably teach remedial English to the incoming frosh. It’s just an idea.

To Vera it wasn’t a bad idea at all. She could imagine herself living somewhere in the outer boroughs—Queens, perhaps—and taking the train to night classes after putting in her shifts at some quiet editorial job. She would not mind living modestly, in another cramped space; she could imagine herself walking back from the train at night amid the sound of police sirens and cheerfully drunken Irish immigrants calling to one another outside the neighborhood taverns, and this thought warmed her all through.
As soon as I can,
she thought,
I will request an application from Queens College. Maybe I
could
get a scholarship.
If she could not teach impressionable young minds anymore, then at least recommending books to these same young people might give her some sense of fulfillment. She imagined herself one day working in the young adult section of the library, suggesting titles to those who were betwixt and between—neither adults nor children—as well as to those adults who felt similarly in limbo.

But this would take time. It might be too late even to apply for the fall semester. Nevertheless, this possibility of reinventing herself gave her the fortitude she needed to get up and face her job and her empty life over the next few months.

In the meantime she took a metro bus to South Portland each day, seeing the usual mix of college students, local drunks, and working folks who were either too poor to buy a car or tired of the hassle of finding a place to park in the city. One drizzly morning, as she boarded the bus, she took one of the only empty seats and hoped there would be no new passengers to take the space next to hers—but during a busy, rainy-day commute, this was an unrealistic hope. At the Park Avenue stop near the post office, an entire Latino family, an old man in a motorized wheelchair, and several young professional types waited to get on. Vera guessed that the girl in the sundress and the white linen jacket might ask to share her seat, but she took a seat closer to the back, next to a boy wearing headphones. “Is it okay if I sit here?” said a tall young man at her elbow, a man in a dark-green server’s apron, and of course Vera had no choice but to say that it was perfectly okay.

The man settled in beside her, not taking up too much space as men often did, and carefully unfolded a newspaper in his lap, turning to the crosswords page and taking a pen out of his shirt pocket. The crossword was half filled out already, with several scratched-out words that had failed him. Vera glanced at the crossword, then at the light hairs on the man’s exposed forearms under his rolled-up shirtsleeves, and then, with a sudden dawning, at the man’s profile. His rather sunken cheeks, high forehead, and thinning hair all seemed familiar to her.

She was sitting next to Ritchie Ouelette. She was sure of it. She wanted to say something to him, but she did not know what there was to say.

“Are you good at crosswords?” Ritchie Ouelette suddenly asked without actually looking at her.

“Sometimes,” Vera said.

“This one’s a bear. Do you know of an eleven-letter word that means ‘to lie’? I don’t know if they mean it like lying down or if they mean it like telling a lie.”

“Try
prevaricate
,” Vera said after a moment. “See, that has to be it. The
V
fits with
vermilion
, which is what you’ve got for fifty-six across.”

“Thank you,” Ritchie Ouelette said. “I didn’t think of that one.”

“You’re welcome.”

He seemed so studious, bent over his puzzle, and had such a gentle, almost shy way about him. He must be working at one of the chain restaurants around the mall, based on the looks of his uniform. The accountant job, the numbers-crunching job, hadn’t been there waiting for him when he’d been released from prison. In a way, they’d both been demoted. They had this in common.

For the next fifteen minutes Vera wanted to say something else to him. She wanted to tell him she knew who he was, that he and she had something else in common, too—a close connection to the crimes in Dorset, though both were essentially innocent bystanders who had stepped too close to the flame. She had a feeling that Ritchie would be embarrassed to be recognized, hunched as he was over his newspaper, and that it would be better to say nothing at all. He was wearing a light, woodsy cologne, and she was close enough to see a few small scrapes on his chin where he had shaved himself too closely.

“Have a nice day, now,” he said to her, getting up at the stop before the mall.

“You, too,” she said, watching him go. The soft cadences of his voice stayed with her, and she smiled to herself as she watched him cross the parking lot toward the restaurant; those cadences were like snow, a gently falling snow that mirrored the soft rain outside the window and something even softer inside her. She thought,
I could have fallen in love with that man’s voice,
and she wasn’t ashamed. She remembered how she had once told Jensen not to lose sight of the beauty in things. She had been right in giving that advice, whether the girl had taken it to heart or not. It was good to know, after all was said and done, that one could be right about something.

 • • • 

As the days and weeks and months passed by, the more stagnant and predictable Vera’s existence became. Things continued around her and without her during the quiet days that she later would see as a convalescence of sorts. She read on the Wallace School website that Tim Zabriskie had been promoted to associate dean. She saw a newspaper article saying that
The Catcher in the Rye
was banned in several southern Maine high schools; according to one teacher at Millbank Academy, “It’s not so much a question of censoring a book because it’s controversial, but honestly, this isn’t a book that speaks to teenagers anymore.” This would have hurt Vera if she’d still had the capacity to feel hurt by such things.

The only story that remained at a standstill was the story of Jensen Willard.

The search of the river had yielded nothing. And then, gradually, the stories about her stopped altogether. At the six-month mark of her disappearance, the attention had vanished as completely and utterly as Jensen Willard herself; there was one article in the
Journal
telling how her parents still “held out hope” that their daughter was alive, but this sentiment was not echoed by the local police or, it seemed, by anyone else.

Vera did not know if she held out hope. After the first few weeks, she had stopped being entirely afraid and once again allowed herself some curiosity about the girl who had aroused her curiosity from the very beginning.

When she worked on her writing during her favorite predawn hours, her mind would, on occasion, wander back to Jensen Willard. On such occasions she could not help entertaining the possibility that the girl was alive somewhere and poised to come back. As she toiled over the flow of her sentences, she wondered if Jensen was somewhere not so far away, writing works of her own—but who was her audience now, she wondered? Whom could she possibly find to take Vera’s place?

She wondered if Jensen would continue her education someday and maybe go on to college. She wondered if she would ever have a teacher who appreciated her talents and handled these as they should be handled. She wondered what the girl would think of herself ten or twenty years down the line, when adolescence had lost some of its sting but none of memory’s potency.

If, that is, she lived to remember.

If she was alive—and if she did remember—Vera hoped Jensen would one day see her in a kind light, and as something other than what she now knew Jensen had seen her as: a weak scapegoat serving the girl’s temporary purpose. But a time might come when the girl truly
would
see something good of herself in Vera, just as Vera had seen something of herself in the girl.

She hoped, either way, that Jensen Willard might think of her in the future and remember that someone had identified with and cared about her and had not given up so easily—even if that realization was a long time in the making and came without regrets.

 • • • 

Just a few months shy of the one-year anniversary of the day she had first met Jensen Willard, Vera bused home from her evening shift in junior formals and reread the handwritten text in the notebook on her lap. She was putting the finishing touches on her rough draft for the essay portion of her application to the Queens College library science program; the rest of the application was filled out at home, and tonight, she thought, she could put the essay in a Word document and have the whole packet ready to send out in the morning.

It was a wet and foggy walk back to her studio, but Vera didn’t mind these things. She felt as though she were taking the first real step to metamorphosing, or perhaps settling in to the self she’d been meant to be all along.
Reinvention—so wonderfully American,
she thought. As music blasted from a car at a nearby stoplight, she tried to hum along to the tuneless hip-hop, bobbing her head a little as she sought out a beat.