Finding Mrs. Ford

by Deborah Goodrich Royce

  “No! It’s me who wants to know who’s there!” demanded a booming male voice.

  Annie peered through the beam of the flashlight and realized that it was Frankie’s boat captain, emerging from the aft stateroom, or somewhere thereabouts.

  “It’s me. Annie.”

  “Annie? What are you doing here?”

  “Freddie, I’m looking for Frankie. Is he here?”

  “What the hell kind of stupid are you?” He wasn’t being very nice, and Annie thought he might be hiding Frankie. “Go home.”

  “I need to talk to Frankie. Is he here?” her voice was gaining strength.

  “Listen, get outta here. I mean it. Go home. Frankie’s not here and you shouldn’t be here, either, in the middle of the night. What the hell’s wrong with you?”

  “Freddie! You’re being rude!”

  At that, Captain Freddie grabbed Annie by the arm in a not-too-gentle manner and hustled her along, through the galley to the forward cabin, flipping on lights as he went. “Look. He’s not here. Now go home. You don’t know what you’re getting into.”

  “Okay, okay! I’m going!” Annie shook herself loose and made a semblance of walking back toward the deck, when she suddenly lunged in the direction of the aft stateroom from which Freddie had just emerged.

  “Jesus Christ!” Freddie was right behind her. “You are one fucking nut!”

  Annie made sure to get a good look into the room before Freddie unceremoniously hauled her upstairs and across the deck—maintaining his firm grip on her arm as she scrambled back down to the dock. She could see that she was not going to be able to investigate further with this Neanderthal watching her every move.

  “Well, goodnight, Freddie.” She tried to salvage the relationship. “Thanks.”

  Freddie stood there in his boxers, glowering at Annie and blurted a final, “Go home!” before she turned and sauntered back toward the car.

  She meant to follow his advice at that point. She really did.

  44

  But Annie did not heed Freddie’s counsel. She did not listen to Susan, whose wisdom she had been seeking. She followed nothing but her own dogged determination to confront Frankie. She turned the car in the direction of his house and barreled south along the lake.

  Arriving, Annie saw his car in the driveway and believed with the conviction of an evangelist that she had been right all along. She had found her man and would catch him in the act. On feeling the hood and finding it hot, she knew she was right and that she had been wronged.

  What did she imagine would happen? Did she think that if she caught Frankie in bed with a babe, he would weep and beg her forgiveness? Drop to one knee and ask her to marry him? Had she even thought that far? There was not much in Annie’s mind that night, except that, like a greyhound chasing a decoy around the track, she needed to catch it. And, like the greyhound, she did not understand, could not see the game, stacked as it was by forces larger than she was.

  When she practically fell through the front door—it opened so easily—certainty yielded to confusion. Every light in the room was blazing. Men, some of whom she recognized, were standing and sitting everywhere. Still, this did not stop her. Like a rubber band leaving a slingshot, her body moved forward toward Frankie standing on the left of the room near his brothers, Danny, and Johnny.

  Annie was so intent on her goal that she did not, at first, register that some of the men, those on the far side of the room, were Chaldeans. All heads turned in Annie’s direction when she burst through the door. Hands moved to pockets and waistbands, but Annie did not grasp the meaning. Her mission propelled her closer to Frankie and the showdown that she had imagined.

  Vito spoke first, asking his little brother to get his girlfriend the hell out of there. Johnny Buscemi and the cop said nothing, but stood next to Vito, frowning in solidarity. Frankie caught Annie by both arms to stop her forward propulsion. The other men shuffled around and broke the silence with sotto voce mumbling.

  Annie, unconcerned about the zeitgeist of the room, theatrically demanded that Frankie account for his whereabouts in the preceding hours of the evening. Vito again commanded Frankie to get the girl out. Frankie, caught between the rock of his brother and the pain-in-the-ass hard place of his girlfriend, shook her a little as he, too, told her she had to go. Annie, tired of men telling her to go home all night long, flatly refused.

  No one—not Annie, not any of the Italians and maybe not even the Chaldeans—had focused on Sammy slipping out the back door. It was Sammy’s return, what felt like hours into the tense scene, that unleashed the bedlam that followed.

  All eyes had been riveted on the domestic drama unfolding between the warring couple. Because of that—the flash in the corner of the eye that was Sammy reappearing, startled someone—tipped that person off balance. One shot rang out, its source unknown. For the briefest moment, it might have been a lone shot and composure may have been regained. The delicate negotiation that had been interrupted by the girlfriend might have transpired, after all.

  But that was not to be the case.

  For Annie could not stop herself from screaming. The infinitesimal second of silence after the initial gunshot was followed first by Annie’s scream and, subsequently, by a barrage of gunfire, ricocheting in all directions.

  Annie’s first thought, on seeing herself covered in blood, was that she had been hit. It was only when Frankie’s steely grip on her arms relaxed and his body began its slow descent down her torso that she realized that it was Frankie who had been shot.

  Adrenalin, fueled by cocaine, enabled Annie to shake Frankie’s crumpled body off of her feet and run. That same super-human energy kept her sprinting for where she thought she’d left her car and allowed her to nimbly pivot and lurch into it, in its new position, as Susan was already pulling away.

  Coming down from coke was always bad. But there was no equal to the black hole that opened to swallow Annie as she sat in the car, her own Corvette, driven blindly by Susan through the sleeping streets of Grosse Pointe, just before dawn that morning.

  Even in her addled state, Annie recognized that she had been an actor in this tragedy. Even she could perceive that she had played a starring role. She sat and whimpered, turning over in her mind the rudimentary concept of her own responsibility. She knew that she was one of the guilty parties in the grizzly scene she’d just fled but wasn’t yet ready or able to make a full accounting of her own transgressions.

  What she did not know, what would later prove to be a failure of imagination, was that the worst was not yet over.

  Susan plunged on.

  Annie thought they were dead, for sure, when Susan careened over the Ashland Bump, the famously mounded bridge over a canal, just on the Detroit side of the Grosse Pointe border, popular with teenage hotrods showing off their mettle. She feared Susan would crash the Corvette then, as it landed, nose down, spewing sparks and fishtailing to the side. But it was not to be. Susan righted the body of the car through deft handling of the steering wheel. A good Detroit girl knew how to drive.

  Annie mistook the significance of this near crash. Once again, she interpreted this as the crescendo. Again, she believed they had come through the worst. Again, she was mistaken.

  Susan drove on through the shabby streets of Detroit. Detroit blight, in 1979, was in its early stages. Detroit, like the suburbs that enveloped it, was a city of houses. But these houses did not look like those across the border the girls had so recently crossed. Arson had begun to proliferate and scattered houses were missing. There were corner stores, parking lots, and small factories interspersed with residential stretches. Overall, it looked scruffier and more urban. And darker. The moon had set, the sun had not appeared, and the streetlights were not all functioning.

  And then, Susan had her meltdown over the watch.

  “I’m sorry, Susan,” Annie screamed, hoping to reel her back. “I found it! I didn’t know it was yours! I’ll give it back. But you have to go faster!”


  “I don’t know if I can.”

  “You have to!”

  “Stop screaming at me!” The sinews in Susan’s neck were straining with the exertion of controlling the car. “I don’t think I can.”

  “They have guns! Do you hear me? Guns!”

  “Okay!” Susan screamed back at her, “Okay! Okay! Okay!”

  Intrepidly, street after street, Susan hurtled deeper into Detroit’s east side.

  Annie twisted forward and back, sometimes watching their pursuer and sometimes trying to follow Susan’s advancing course. Neither girl had any hope of finding the way home from here.

  Both girls were concentrated on the most pressing problem, the car that continued to chase them.

  Then Susan said the strangest thing.

  “Ah!” she gasped. “I don’t know the time!”

  “Now?” Annie wondered what the hell was the matter with her.

  “When we meet in Paris! I don’t know the time!”

  Annie squinted at Susan in dismay, then something made her turn her head forward. Some shadow of intuition. She saw the Packard Plant first, only a second before Susan did, dark and enormous, hulking before them, as they rounded the last corner. She looked up at the old factory and she wasn’t sure if she uttered the command, “Brake!”

  Did she say it?

  Would it have made any difference?

  She saw Susan shift her gaze to look up at the very last moment, the too-late moment, the moment of no return. The mass of the old Packard Plant loomed in front of them. Susan spun the wheel to the left, while furiously pumping the brakes in a futile attempt at stability.

  And then the car took over. As though it wanted to fly. As though it were tired of Susan’s disorderly driving and wished to show her a better way. It lifted and moved to the side. It jumped in the air. And, just for that second, it was smooth sailing.

  Then the car hit something immutably hard. Annie could not see that it was a fence post. For, at that same moment, from the force of the impact, she, too, was flying. The car had chosen again. Her Corvette had ejected her, thrust her out, an unworthy passenger on its final journey. But Susan, it had kept.

  Simultaneously, one girl was flung to the curb while one girl died in the whirling Corvette, which presently burst into flames.

  Then the world went black.

  45

  Sunday, August 17, 2014

  Watch Hill

  If she could lie in utter stillness, ceasing every controllable movement. If she could slow her breath—scoop it so shallow that the oxygen she takes in becomes microscopic, and the carbon dioxide she lets out, immeasurable. If she could render her thoughts pacific—calm like a glass-flat ocean.

  Then could she stop this from happening?

  But, at last, she knows that she cannot. She could not stop the sliding car then. She can’t halt its impact now. After all these years—the warped slow motion of the accident accelerates, and she will finally experience the crash.

  Mrs. Ford is at home in bed. It is early on a Sunday morning. How many summer Sundays has she had? It’s been eighteen years since she first met Jack. Eighteen summers in Watch Hill. This summer, they shift into memory.

  This Sunday morning, like those before it, starts with a lull—after the sun rises and before the hordes arrive for the beach, the carousel, the shops along Bay Street. Before they come to eat ice cream and fudge, clam chowder, and lobster rolls, there is a hush that hangs over the village.

  There is a quiet that sits like a low-slung fog on the parking lots, before they admit outsiders to this little slice of Brigadoon. A silence that rings a little—like a bell tone in the distance—before the summer people, those who own the cottages surrounded by wisteria and hydrangea, roses and privet hedges—cottages like Mrs. Ford’s—begin their walk to services at the Watch Hill Chapel.

  Then the calliope cranks up. The air hisses out of the tubes of the circus instrument—breathy and high—and the show is about to begin. The greatest show on Earth. Step right up, folks! Get your seats! Get your popcorn! Get your peanuts! They enter stage right and stage left—the summer people in their Nantucket Reds and blue blazers, pastel dresses, and pearls—the day trippers nearly naked in their cover-ups and tattoos. They arrive from opposite sides, cross each other on winding paths, and exit in different directions. The tourists head to the beach. The summer people enter the chapel.

  The Church is Many as the Waves, but One as the Sea.

  In Essentials, Unity: in Non-Essentials, Liberty: in All Things, Charity.

  That’s what its mottos say. In beautiful blue and gold, against aged walls of wood. But, do they mean it? Charity in all? Charity for all? Charity for the tattooed visitors? Charity for Mrs. Ford?

  She will not go to chapel this morning. She will not join her friends singing hymns—Amazing Grace and Rock of Ages perhaps. But, there, next to the sea—so placid on a summer morning—she hopes they will remember the furies and fates of winter. She wants their voices to rise high in homage to their seafaring ancestors. She wills them to bargain For Those at Sea. She lies motionless in bed, looking out at the lighthouse, dogs on her legs, reciting the words to that hymn:

  Eternal Father, strong to save,

  Whose arm hath bound the restless wave,

  Who bidd’st the mighty ocean deep

  Its own appointed limits keep;

  Oh, hear us when we cry to Thee,

  For those in peril on the sea!

  She will not join them afterward, as they gather for refreshments in front of the chapel—facing the dumbfounding beauty of the Atlantic Ocean—as they nibble their cucumber sandwiches. Had she known that her Sundays were finite, would it have made any difference?

  She does not know where she will go or what she will do today or any day going forward. Her housekeeper, Helen, is not at Gull Cottage. Her stepson, Jack Jr., is avoiding her. She is alone in the house, except for her dogs. She is at liberty to construct the day in any manner she wishes. Free to contemplate recent disclosures. She has time to think about where these revelations will lead, what she surely has lost, what decisions she must make, and what consequences lie in store. The creeping inevitability of reckoning is upon her. The gig is up for Annie-Johnston-Nelson-Susan-Bentley-Ford.

  She will have to say something to Helen. She does not know what she can say to Jack Jr., whose faith and friendship she may have lost forever. She will not need to say one word to her friends in Watch Hill or New York. The story will travel like wildfire, all on its own, jumping over obstacles like fire over creek beds.

  She has had a good run—an extra thirty-five years. She has had the chance to re-invent herself. She has had the opportunity to marry a man she loved. She has had the ability to give to her favorite charities. Hell, she’s had the chance to have favorite charities. She has had all of these options that the girl born as Susan never had.

  But Annie really doesn’t think of herself as Annie any more. Nor does she think of herself as the false Susan. She became Susan long ago. Or a version of Susan that was hers.

  It has been so long since the summer of 1979. Feelings have been sublimated and facts, she had hoped, were wiped out. Recumbent in bed, her legs pressed down by the weight of her dogs, she finally faces the fact that there is no big cosmic eraser. She is in peril on the sea.

  She examines the force of her own resolve. In the early years, she willed herself to become Susan, to talk and walk like Susan, to cultivate Susan’s interests, to go one better and develop those interests over time, deepening her cultural knowledge.

  The French was a sticking point, though; she never could fully master French. That had worried her, but she had learned enough of it to feel that she wouldn’t be caught out on that count. In the end, she had been right. French is not what failed her.

  She considers what she has done and those she has hurt; those she has lost and those she may still lose. She considers the consequences she may face. She considers the whole sweeping panorama of a life l
ived in fragmented episodes and broken, disjointed roles, of doors slammed shut in her face and miraculous doors that opened to her touch. As she lies there, tallying collateral damage, she tries to locate herself. No longer Annie, the girl she was born as, and not really the girl born as Susan. Who is she?

  And then, like a bobbing cork, physical hunger arises. She thinks about making herself a nice, hot cup of cappuccino with her DeLonghi machine, of taking the dogs out, just to the seawall, to do their business, about multi-grain toast and beach plum jam and sea salt butter.

  What does this say about her, she wonders? What kind of a woman, despite the rack and ruin around her, can think about eating breakfast?

  The kind of woman that Annie is.

  She kicks her legs to wake the dogs, who scramble up the duvet for kisses. She swings her legs around, puts her feet firmly on the floor and heads down to the kitchen.

  46

  Monday, August 18, 2014

  Time: 6:12 p.m.

  Two bells ring at once. One is the phone. The other, the door. At the exact same moment, they both go off.

  “I’ll get the phone!” Annie shouts down the stairs. “Helen, would you answer the door?” She doesn’t wait for a response.

  “Hello?” she says into the receiver.

  “It’s Jack.” His tone is cool and professional. “Do you have a minute?”

  “Yes, of course.” Annie sits on the edge of her bed. “What is it?”

  “I called that FBI agent. He won’t tell me much. I think you should be prepared for a charge of homicide.”

  “I…That could not be farther from the truth!”

  “Yes, well, it wouldn’t appear that truth-telling is a talent you hold in your repertoire.”

  “Look, Jack, I’d really like to sit and talk with you about everything that’s happened.”

  “I don’t think so. But, there is one thing that’s eating at me. Can you tell me something? Truthfully?”

  “Yes.”

  “Did my father know?”