“And to herself,” said the boy with the pencil, switching to hangman.
“I heard they were already unconscious when they found them,” said a large kid a few rows back.
“Fucked up, isn’t it?” said his seatmate, and the bus driver chewed him out for cursing.
I felt a panicky tightness in my chest, as if someone had suddenly turned off the world’s oxygen. The next few minutes slipped out from under me, like the floor of a spinning Gravitron, while other kids weighed in on the matter. Someone said April and Lily had been eaten by the Loch Ness monster, not killed by their mother. Another kid claimed the whole family had drowned in the JCC pool. An older boy behind me mentioned something I didn’t understand about gas and carbon monoxide. The girl in the seat across the aisle from mine, who was in sixth grade, told everyone to shut up, there were children around. Then she tilted her head in my direction.
“What’s ‘unconscious’?” I asked her.
“Don’t worry about it,” she said. “It’s just a fancy word for dizzy.” Then she stared out the window.
“Oh, like when you play ring around the rosie,” I said.
“Yeah, the black plague version,” said a boy.
“Shut up,” said the girl.
“What happened to April?” I asked.
“Ask your teacher,” she said, shaking her head and catching the eye of the boy behind me as if to say, I told you so.
But I did ask my teacher! I wanted to yell, and she wouldn’t answer! But my voice was suddenly stuck in the back of my throat.
When I arrived home from school, I paused to eye the gas-tank cover on our Dodge Coronet wagon and then quickly ran past it, as if it could reach out and grab me, like the trees in The Wizard of Oz. I rushed through the door to find my mother standing in the foyer, a baby bottle in hand. “Lizzie, please, can you feed Josh? I have to get ready to take Ellen to Daddy’s office. She has another ear infection.” I heard my younger sister Ellen in our shared bedroom, screaming from pain. I saw Josh in his plastic infant seat, his reddened face scrunched up like a prune. I spotted Becca—whom everyone was calling Josh’s Irish twin, even though they looked nothing alike and weren’t Irish—scribbling with an orange marker on the living-room wall, while her Irish twin, Lisa, which I figured made the three of them Irish triplets, spun Cheerios projectiles off her Sit’n Spin. I wondered what it would take for a mother to feed her children gas.
Surely less than this.
I sat down on the shag carpet next to Josh’s infant seat and fed him a bottle. “Rock-a-bye baby . . .” I sang, echoing my mother, pulsing his chair gently up and down with my free hand like I’d been taught to do. “I’ve finally got an heir!” my father kept bragging whenever people came by with presents for the new baby. “A real heir.” Ellen and I were the only ones old enough to understand that whatever an heir was, it was probably good, and we weren’t. I was supposed to be born a boy, but God made a mistake, April had said, that first day we met. Which was why, it suddenly struck me, we might have become friends. We were both mistakes, both missing some essential part, like the way Lite-Brites come packed without bulbs. I watched my brother’s cheeks suck in the milk, his needy eyes probing mine with a mixture of relief and “What took you so long?” If I put gasoline in his bottle, I wondered, what would happen?
No! I thought. It made no sense! A mother wouldn’t feed her child gas.
“. . . and down will come baby, cradle and—” I stopped singing.
And then, very quietly, so my mother wouldn’t hear, so she wouldn’t have one more child to worry about that day, I gave in to the pressure building behind my eyes. By the time Mom was out of the shower, Josh had been fed and burped, my head cleared of all vapors gaseous and grotesque.
The next day at school, I noticed that April’s accident clothes had been removed from our cubby.
I LOOKED UP from my work. Mark was snoring. A streetlight outside my window gave way to a conical mass of swirling snowflakes beneath it, through which an ambulance sped by, lights ablaze. I watched the flakes twirl around in the wind, twinkling in the light like the dust from that filmstrip long ago, and I could see why April would claim the light made the dust, rather than simply illuminating it. It’s hard for anyone to know where illusion ends and reality begins, let alone a small child.
CHAPTER 4
AFTER UNSUCCESSFULLY TRYING to locate Miss Martin and finding nothing about the story on Google, I sent off a FOIA request to the Montgomery County police. While waiting for a response, I decided to try my luck digging through stacks of microfilm. A six-year-old child’s death, I reasoned, even back in that slow-news-cycle era, could not have been a tree falling in the forest. Someone must have made some noise about it. Somewhere.
The air was frigid, the steps of the New York Public Library glazed with ice as I ducked into the microfilm reading room stamping my feet, jingling a pocketful of dimes. I would need, as it turned out, only two dimes that morning: one to photocopy the original article, buried on page C3 of the Washington Post the same day H. R. Haldeman was prematurely—if correctly—fingered on AI for his involvement in Watergate; the second for the next day’s follow-up, a short rehash of the first. But while I may have overestimated the number of stories I would find, I underestimated my reaction to them.
At the sight of the words “Cassidy, Adele,” in the microfilm index, I could actually feel the surge of blood and adrenaline exploding outward, wound up grabbing onto the edge of the bookshelf for balance. Steadying myself and taking some deep breaths, I sat down at the microfilm reader, loaded the spool, and watched the buzzwords of my youth whiz by. Kissinger, flashed the screen, as I slowed down the machine to check page numbers and dates. Then Playtex Cross Your Heart (vroom), Secret Fund (vroom vroom), You’ve come a long way, baby! (vroom), Roe v. Wade (vroom), Thieu Orders Cease-Fire (vroom), until, finally, simply, there it was:
Maryland Mother, Children, Found Dead
BY JOHN SEYMOUR
Washington Post Staff Writer
A 39-YEAR-OLD POTOMAC WOMAN and her two children were found dead yesterday in the back of the family station wagon, a 1967 Plymouth Fury, which was idling in the woods in western Montgomery County when police were summoned to the scene.
While the autopsy has not yet been completed, Montgomery County police are reporting that all three of the passengers appeared to have died of asphyxiation, approximately eight hours before they were found, in a double homicide and suicide committed by the mother, Adele Levine Cassidy. The children were identified as Lily Ann Cassidy, 8, and April Noreen Cassidy, 6.
They are survived by Mrs. Cassidy’s husband and the girls’ father, Shepherd (“Shep”) Cassidy, a vice president of sales and marketing for Pipeline Industries.
Officers John Malatesta and Vincent Polenta, the first policemen to arrive on the scene, said they discovered the bodies at around 11:20 AM after receiving a call from a resident of the area to investigate a car parked in a clearing of dense underbrush in the woods near his property, not far from the intersection of routes 28 and 107 in Gaithersberg.
According to witnesses, a vacuum cleaner hose had been retrofitted with duct tape to the exhaust pipe, the open end of which had been fed into the passenger compartment through a crack in the window, which was then sealed off with plastic sheeting.
The police report stated that Mr. Cassidy had last seen his wife, a former nurse, at 8 AM Saturday. The report also stated that the couple had been having marital difficulties and that Mrs. Cassidy had recently sought out the care of a psychiatrist.
“I checked all the pulses as soon as I arrived,” said Officer Polenta. “The woman was curled up on her knees in the compartment behind the rear seat, between the two girls.” Polenta said that the station wagon was located approximately one-fourth mile from the nearest road. Officer Malatesta said Mrs. Cassidy had one arm wrapped around each of her daughters. The two girls, he said, were lying on pillows, their feet toward the tailgate. They were dressed i
n flannel pajamas.
Dr. Angus Lord, county deputy medical examiner, said traces of codeine, of the type found in cough syrups, were found in the girls’ bloodstreams.
Malatesta, who said there were no signs of a struggle in the car, said it contained two large suitcases, one filled with Mrs. Cassidy’s clothes, the other with clothes for the girls, and that the car’s gas tank was still one-eighth full upon his arrival.
Mrs. Arnold Traub, a neighbor, said the two girls attended Sycamore Hill Elementary School. “They were lovely girls,” she said, “and their mother was a lovely person.”
But for every blank now filled, every question answered, I thought of ten more. What secrets had Adele Cassidy confided to her shrink? What had finally pushed her out of her house and into her station wagon? I wondered about her husband, Shep, about the vacuum hose itself (did she bring it from home or purchase one on the road?), about the logistics of the act and the contents of the suitcases and the thoughts in Adele’s head as she turned the key in the ignition, all the while circling back to the most obvious, least answerable, and most terrifying question of all: How could a mother kill her children?
The microfilm room was hardly crowded that day. Those who were there were immersed in their own journeys backward, leaving ample space between us, but even so once again I started to feel faint. I tried containing the inner thrum, to focus on making the photocopies, dating them, placing them into a clear plastic folder. But the heaviness grew oppressive, the staccato contractions of my chest more pronounced, the tear ducts in my eyes now quietly swelling.
Get a grip on yourself! I thought. It wasn’t as if I hadn’t heard this story before. I’d interviewed several experts on postpartum depression after Andrea Yates drowned her children in a bathtub. I’d helped edit the coverage of Susan Smith. This was not unfamiliar territory. What was wrong with me?
“Ma’am, are you okay?” a librarian said, bending over. She looked to be in her sixties or so, her gray hair held back from her forehead with a velvet headband.
“Yeah, I’m fine.” I wasn’t fine. “It’s nothing.” How the fuck do you rewind this thing? “I think it must be jammed.”
“Jammed? No, look.” She leaned over my desk, flooding my nostrils with Chanel N°5, and placed one hand on the rewind button, the other on the back of my chair. “You have to push it to the left.”
“Oh. Thanks.”
“Doing research on Watergate?” she asked, adding, with a knowing smile, “It’s a popular spool.”
“No, I was just looking up . . .” But I couldn’t finish the sentence. I could feel my face tightening, lips, nose, and eyebrows all converging together. “I’m sorry,” I said. “I have to . . . I’m late to . . .”
The librarian’s demeanor suddenly softened. “I can put it back in its box for you,” she said.
But can you put April back in her box? I wanted to say. Because that’s where I suddenly needed her to go.
Outside the library, I pulled out my cell phone and dialed the number on the business card Dr. Karen Rivers had handed me a week earlier. “Hi, Dr. Rivers. It’s Elizabeth Burns,” I said into her answering machine. “You were right. It probably did have to do with April. The fainting episodes, I mean. Watergate, the gas station, that mean mother on the bus—they’re all related to her disappearance. I’ll tell you all about it when I see you on Friday.”
I hung up the phone. Continued down the icy library stairs, staring down so as not to slip, then across Fifth Avenue at Forty-first Street, glancing up barely in time to see the taxi speeding toward me. A bad corner. I accidentally ran through it once myself. As I leapt toward the curb, I imagined the impact, the crunch of bone, the body flung off the grill into a pile of twisted limbs and blood. It took so little to erase a person. It was a wonder any of us could remain standing.
CHAPTER 5
DRIVEN BY A DESIRE to delve deeper into the story I couldn’t quite, at the time, understand, realizing I would need research funds to do so, I typed up a proposal and emailed it to Lucy. Lucy had just been named the director of reality and documentary programming at FemTV, a new women’s cable network that was positioning itself as a darker, more cutting-edge alternative to Lifetime.
I was in Central Park near the swings in the Pinetum, walking Daisy and Tess to their rescheduled dental appointment, when she called. “Well, I hate the name April, and you’ll need to figure out a way to ramp up the community outrage,” she said. “But . . .”
“But?”
“Well . . .” It wasn’t a sure thing, like the Britney Spears biopic she’d been trying to get me to produce, but it was, she ventured, a maybe. “Where are you anyway?” she said. “It sounds like you’re in a playground.”
“Because I’m in a playground,” I said.
I could almost feel the disapproval oozing through the cell phone. “Irma’s day off?” she said, her words glazed in a fine veneer of sarcasm, her teeth working a piece of the Nicorette I knew she kept stashed in her purse.
Lucy and I both had children around the same ages—we bonded in a Gymboree class, in fact, after she walked up to me, looking haggard and milk-stained, and asked if she could borrow a clean diaper and a shot of vodka—but we had, I’d come to realize, slightly different notions about raising them. Lucy, whose father died when she was still young, who still felt the sting of moving from a large house in Rye to a one-bedroom rental in Queens, believed providing upper-class trappings and financial security for her children was the highest form of maternal sacrifice one could offer. I, because of the vagaries of my own upbringing, believed children could handle a teaspoon of financial instability so long as their emotional needs were sufficiently met, even if it meant jerry-rigging the scaffolding of one’s career around them for a little while in order to do so. But while I knew neither of us had found an ideal solution to an intractable dilemma, Lucy had staked the entirety of her persona on proving she had.
“Yup. Irma’s day off,” I said, brushing some snow off two swings and lifting Tess onto one so I could continue the conversation. I held my hand over the cell phone’s receiver and whispered, “Mommy has to talk to her friend Lucy, okay? Give me five minutes, just five.”
“But it’s freezing, Mom,” said Daisy.
“So put on your mittens.”
“I lost one.”
“Here, put these on.” I handed her my gloves. “You can hold the chain that way.”
“But they’re too big. Aren’t we late for the dentist?”
“Who’s Lucy?” said Tess.
“The girl who always makes Charlie Brown miss the football,” said Daisy.
“Yes, sweetheart, something like that.” Then, removing my now frozen hand from the receiver, I spoke into the phone. “I’m sorry,” I said. “I think I’ve got the girls occupied for the moment. So what’s the next step here? Should I go down to Potomac, shoot some interviews?”
I felt Tess tugging on my pant leg. “Is she friends with Linus?” she said, her words punctuated with puffs of condensation.
I covered the phone again. “Tessie, please!” I said.
Tess’s bottom lip began to quiver behind the tendrils of dark hair that had come loose from her ponytail. “Well is she?”
I sighed and squatted down, swing level, to speak to her. “No, she doesn’t know Linus. This is a different Lucy. Caleb and Ella’s mommy, remember?”
“The ones with the guinea pig?”
“Yes, the ones with the guinea pig. Give me five minutes, okay, sweetheart?” I uncovered the receiver. “Sorry, Luce,” I said. “I’m all yours.”
“Can we get a guinea pig?” said Tess.
“Honestly, Elizabeth,” said Lucy, exasperated. “I don’t see why you can’t just get yourself a full-time sitter. Look, if this is a bad time, we can just talk on Monday.”
“Right now’s fine,” I said, not wanting to get into it with Lucy, who insisted on—and could afford—twenty-four-hour childcare coverage at all times, hiring a rotating
fleet of Irish nannies (“I do not want my children turning into racists,” she’d said, without irony) to help her achieve it. The one time she did find herself stuck at home with her children on a weekday, she filled a bowl with candy and placed it on her desk, which was situated at the end of a long hallway, so that every time a business call came through, she could lob a handful down the corridor to send them scurrying. “So you were saying you think maybe it’s viable?”
“Yes, I was saying, I think you might have something here—might—but there’s one part I don’t understand. This monster of a woman does something like this, and all you found were two newspaper stories buried in the metro section? Where’s the outrage? The magazine covers? Wasn’t there anything else you could find? It doesn’t make any sense.”
“You have to put the story into context,” I said, pushing Tess on the swing to get her started. “It was 1972. Private lives stayed private.” And, I added, there weren’t twenty-four hours of cable news to fill. And we could still get worked up about presidents who lied. And reality TV consisted of Allen Funt and his hidden camera, and no one read—or at least would admit to reading—tabloid papers, and celebrities were famous for their performances, and publicists stayed off the front pages, and blogging wasn’t a verb, and nobody gave a fuck about which yogi or bikini waxer or hairdresser anyone used. “It’s different today, Lucy. Totally different.” That very morning, in fact, with a suicide bomb in Baghdad thrusting the extended members of another thirty-four families into mourning, the Western press had narrowed its eyes over the corpse of a Playboy pinup.
“I’m cold,” Tess was saying.
I took off my scarf and wrapped it around her neck. “I still don’t buy it,” said Lucy. “How could two girls just disappear from a school, and no one notices?”
“Daisy, let’s go make snow angels!” said Tess. My daughters ran off to find virgin snow.
Between Here and April Page 3
