Cinderland

by Amy Jo Burns

  In the early morning hours, study the premonitory aim of his rifle, cocked in the direction that the buck will dart—an intuition gleaned from seasons spent in these woods, camouflaged with his own father. See how he lowers his gun when a doe with her fawns wanders into his scope, how he watches them in wonder.

  Hear the clank of pennies rattling in an empty milk jug as he shakes it at the high school football game on a Friday night. See the tunnels of warm air escape from his mouth and nostrils in the cold. He won’t wear gloves. He’ll clap his hands together when he’s cold or rub them together furiously as if he were starting a fire with a stick. He’ll stomp his boots on the metal bleachers when we score a touchdown. He’ll accuse the referee of being partial, blind, or worse. He’ll pump his fist in the air when the Mustangs win, and he’ll huff off to his four-wheel-drive truck when they lose, fuming inside the cab while the engine warms, lamenting that the team just hasn’t been the same since he played.

  Find him in late afternoon, scraping up the last of the leaves from the dying ground. Watch him dump them on the wet, decaying pile in the backyard. Bum a cigarette from him as he waits for the leaves to be dry enough to catch fire.

  Or find one of these men just before autumn, on a sweltering August day, accepting the task of defending Howard Lotte in front of a small-town courtroom and an impartial judge. His client has already pled guilty, and now the attorney sets his sights on helping Mr. Lotte avoid jail time. He appeals to the home crowd and its affection for high school football, the needle that might stitch a severed town back together, the Friday-night bucket that holds all our hopes and dreams.

  Coming into this courtroom today, as I was looking outside, it reminded me of attending—and I’ll use my high school—a Brighton High football game. You were either pro-Brighton or against Brighton, the visitors. And I was saddened because I as a lawyer do not represent Mercury; I represent Howard Lotte in this case. And it’s true. You’ve got the pro-Lotte and the anti-Lotte supporters.

  The pro-Lotte supporters have demonstrated the greatest character flaw and the greatest character strength, and that’s loyalty . . . And then this game that we have, the two sides, the ball that’s in the middle of the field really is Howard Lotte and the kids; and the guy that’s in the striped shirt is His Honor.

  After opening with such a stellar metaphor (really, Lotte as the ball?), he goes on to defend his choice of testifying psychologist, a woman who works at the school and is friends with Mr. Lotte. After six sessions together, she states that while he admits to touching his students throughout his twenty years of teaching, he still hasn’t admitted that his actions were “for sexual gratification.” Surely someone in the courtroom has to wonder what on earth they’ve been talking about for the past two months.

  Either way, the psychologist insists that he needs help, that he’s not a typical offender, whatever that means. To her, it means that “as far as incarceration, I do not see how that would serve a purpose; and I think that would be detrimental at this point to his treatment.” The transcript starts to read like an intervention on Lotte’s behalf, rather than justice on behalf of the seven girls, and his attorney continues to ride the wave.

  Howard Lotte has lost everything. The only thing he hasn’t lost right now is whatever freedom of mobility that he has. He’s lost his jobs, which he resigned for acts that were not occurring in the school. He lost his position at his church, and he lost his career. He doesn’t teach piano to anyone.

  He claims it’s time for the community to recognize reality. What a laughable sentiment to offer to a group of weary parents whose daughters have become public enemies while Mr. Lotte’s support fund continues to grow. Those who need to recognize reality most are nowhere near that courtroom; we’ve scurried down our rabbit holes, and there we’ll remain until it’s safe to come out. But in a place where Mr. Lotte’s welfare is paramount, it may never be safe enough.

  In the meantime, the lawyer continues:

  What we have to do, and what I would suggest, is the man has a sickness. He has admitted that. For those of you that are here to support him and are his friends—and most of you are—he has admitted to a lot of people and to you openly in court that he did those acts. And he has never called the children liars; that’s evident by the process that he pursued in a guilty plea. If he would have called the children liars, he would have demanded a preliminary hearing, he would have put the children through the rigors of a trial. He did not want, nor did that happen, because those kids were telling the truth.

  And on the other side of that coin, on the other side of the football field, he was telling the truth. He could have easily said: I’m not saying anything.

  We don’t know if Lotte’s attorney is a hunter, but here he takes aim and shoots so wide of the mark that all of the girls he just targeted can’t help but laugh. And we thought we were the naïve ones, just girls who are prone to fantasy. We can attest, more than anyone else, that it’s not so easy to say nothing—not so easy at all. No one told us that acts of omission will always age into acts of desertion.

  Mirror, Mirror

  AFTER I THOUGHT SIMON had disappeared for good, his preoccupation with tragedy left me with a hangover I didn’t try to cure. Death’s shadow, recondite and pliable, started appearing in unforeseen places. I noticed things I’d ignored before, like the glut of roadkill on Route 17 and the town’s omnipresent smell of burning leaves. Each fall, millions of dead leaves were cremated in backyard bonfires and rusty metal drums. The aroma was inescapable.

  As a child, I liked to walk in town during the fall, to smell the scent of burning leaves and hear the throb of the bass drum in the distance before a Friday night football game. One last chance to walk through the maze of Victorian houses before a long, cold winter. In the fall, we’d rake leaves, we’d bag them, we’d burn them. The burn pile always caught fire quickly, and my eyes stung from the charred bits of leaves dancing around me like confetti. A yearly communal ritual, raking and burning the dead. A welcome for winter.

  Like school, church, and funerals, fires in my town were a community affair. Penn’s Auto, Conley’s Car Dealership, Rip’s Sunrise Market. We all felt the loss when a piece of the commercial landscape disappeared. That’s what happens when Rip’s is the only grocery store in town. Sometimes the cause was electrical, sometimes it was suspected arson. Other times, suspected insurance fraud.

  “They’ll rebuild,” people liked to say as a way of comforting each other. “They’ll rebuild and it’ll be just like it was, or even better.”

  The building’s remnants and charred framework would show up on the front page of the local newspaper the following morning next to a picture of what the building used to look like. How we would all remember it.

  Memory was this way, too—a community affair. I never got to see any of the buildings burn. I never saw the moment they turned over from is to was. But you hear enough people talk about it, and somehow it becomes your story, too. The capturing of it, the forgetting of it. The silt that gathered at the dams of our throats.

  —You ’member ’at old auto parts store? It had a backroom full-a-dirty movies. Used to be dahn where the bank is now. I still got three films I rented aht the night it burnt dahn.

  —Nah. That ain’t it. That was Gene’s General. Don’t you remember anything anymore? Penn’s Auto was on the other side of the street.

  —It was? Nah. Don’t believe it. Yer jaggin’ me.

  —Eh, suit yerself. But ’at fire wasn’t near as bad as Conley’s dillership. Remember ’at one? Propane explosion. Half near the whole tahn was evacuated.

  —’Course I remember. Hey, they never did rebuild ’at Penn’s Auto, did they?

  —Nope. They never did.

  That year, fall’s deathly stupor even infiltrated the stage at Mercury High School, the only arena left for me to feign immortality. I couldn’t deny it—my character in Guys and Dolls, Great-Aunt Abernathy, was old. She hunched when she walked, leaned on a cane
, and failed to steady the palsy in her hand. Even the church mission she supported was on its last legs. Save-a-Soul Mission, a withering band of believers outfitted with a brass quartet and a bass drum, trudged through a town full of gamblers, ringing bells and praying to fill the pews of an empty church.

  From the moment I landed the role in September, I’d avoided turning myself old. By the time the dress rehearsal arrived in November, the time for waiting to grow old had run out. Standing alone in the hallway bathroom across from the auditorium, I bent over and my long, brown hair fell to the floor like a waterfall. As I showered the underside of my hair with gray paint, an ashen cloud consumed the room. The odor burned my nostrils. Saturated, my head sank toward the tile.

  My mother and I had discovered the spray paint in the Halloween aisle at Rite Aid a few weeks ago, next to the fake blood and white face paint.

  “I sure don’t need any of this,” my mother had said in the store, holding the package of hair spray. “Not with my hair.”

  My mother, though young, had a head of striking white hair. As far back as I could remember, her hair had been salt-and-pepper, even in her late twenties. The pure white suited her; she always looked regal, even in sweat pants. She didn’t mind joking about it, either. “You can always find me in a crowd,” she liked to say.

  Once, when she’d been my age, my mother’s hair had been chestnut brown like mine. I’d seen it in her high school photos, her straight hair parted down the middle, the background tinged with an orange glow. Her face and smile remained untarnished; only her hair and the shade of the picture betrayed the time’s passing. My mother left her own small hometown in Maine in 1975, and as far as I could tell, she hadn’t looked back.

  I never understood why I didn’t tell my parents the truth about Mr. Lotte. They were confused, like the rest of the town, loath to swallow the reality that they’d left their daughters alone with a pedophile for years’ worth of half-hour lessons. All I can say is that Mr. Lotte turned Mercury into a land of opposites: safety turned to danger, truth to lies, and the young turned old. Who could be trusted? From the moment I committed to keeping my secret and to forgetting it, I’d lost my youth, and that was long before I portrayed an aged woman beneath the stage lights in the Mercury High School auditorium. Youth was so fleeting, indeed.

  On opening night of Guys and Dolls, Pete—who had been cast as one of Nathan Detroit’s henchmen—pulled me aside about an hour before the overture was slated to begin. By then, his relationship with Nora had run its course.

  “Hey,” he said. “I have an idea for our scene.”

  Near the end of the play, Pete and I had a quick moment together in front of the curtain, designed to keep the crowd entertained while the stage crew reworked the set behind the drapes. After committing some kind of shenanigans outside the mission, my character—cane and all—chased Pete across the stage.

  The two of us stood in the hallway, just to the side of the backstage area. He wore a herringbone cap and a thick coat of blush and I had my worn, knotted cane in hand. A friend’s grandmother had agreed to loan it to me for the performance.

  “What’s your idea?” I asked.

  “You should hit me with the cane,” he said. “It’ll be hilarious.”

  “Aren’t you afraid it’ll hurt?”

  He shook his head. “Nah. The audience will eat it up. Trust me.”

  Later that night during our scene together, I hiked up my skirt and swatted Pete’s back with my cane as we ran across the stage. The onlookers erupted in laughter. When we reached the other side of the stage, the two of us stood in the dark for a moment.

  “Come on,” he whispered. “You can do better than that. Really hit me next time.”

  During the next performance, I whacked him so hard that the cane split. After we rushed offstage, I put my hand on Pete’s back.

  “Pete!” I said, breathless. “Are you okay?”

  “Are you kidding?” he said. “They loved it!” He paused, touching the welt the cane had left. “Just next time, maybe don’t hit me so hard.”

  By the time we got to the Sunday matinee performance, we’d struck our rhythm and my lopsided gait had turned into a waltz—two beats for my feet, and one for my cane. Thank God for Pete, who still had the power to make me feel young.

  About two days before Christmas, I sat in the living room of our house, watching the snow come down outside. The year was coming to a close, the wash of white shielding all the dead leaves that hadn’t been swept and burned in the fall. When I returned to school in a week and a half, it would be 1998. Slowly, we were inching toward the millennium. Next year at this time, my plans for escape would be in motion. But for now, I waited.

  I wasn’t far from the phone when it rang. I already had my hand on the receiver when an unexpected number appeared on the caller ID. A trill rang through the house. If I didn’t answer, I knew he’d never leave a message. After months of silence, Simon was on the other end of the line. My brain told me he was home for break and he was bored. My gut told me to just pick up the phone already, so I did.

  “Hello?” I said.

  “Amy,” Simon said. “How are you?”

  “Fine,” I said, hesitant. “How are you?”

  “I’m okay.”

  There was no playful banter, no sense of his usual prescript. Simon was just being Simon, and he sounded tired.

  “I need to go shopping for some Christmas gifts. Would you like to come?” He paused. “I’d really like to see you.”

  When Simon picked me up later that evening, he wasn’t driving the jeep. Instead, he pulled up in a white sports car that sat low to the ground.

  “What happened to the jeep?” I asked as I climbed into the passenger seat.

  “Retired,” he said. He smiled from behind the wheel, his hand on the stick shift. We kept our distance. It burned, the way I had him, and the way I didn’t.

  “You look good,” he said.

  “Thanks,” I answered. “You, too.”

  We rode about fifteen minutes outside of town to the stretch of wetland that recently had been developed into a huge outdoor outlet mall. It had caused a huge controversy during construction, resulting in patches of untouched marshes dotted throughout the mall’s landscape. This mall was the most exciting thing to happen to our area since the Mercury Raceway had come to town. Every Saturday night in summer, the “races,” as they were called, packed a stadium at the base of the hill on North Street. Our back-country area was finally becoming known for something else besides summer noise pollution and automobile exhaust.

  As we traveled the winding back roads that led to the mall, the silence had no wind to couch it. Night had fallen, and we could see little except the glowing beacon of retail ahead, guiding us toward it. When we arrived, we sat in the car as the engine idled. All summer, Simon took good care to ensure we remained out of the small, though scrutinizing public eye. Now, we were about to enter the most crowded place for miles at the height of its busiest season.

  “Well,” he said, popping open his door. “Shall we?”

  The outlet mall was a gridded maze easy to get lost in, and we did. Simon and I strolled up and down the aisles as Christmas music piped through the outdoor stereo system. The place glowed, every store display decorated with holly and wreaths.

  “You could get your mom a sweater,” I suggested when we turned the corner at the mall’s center. In front of us, a thin wooden bridge suspended over a shallow bit of wetland, now covered in snow. “Or a scarf.”

  Simon nodded, though I could tell he hadn’t heard me.

  “Are you all right?” I asked.

  In the midst of a crowded square, Simon stopped walking. “I’ve been miserable,” he said.

  His honesty surprised me. “Why?” I asked.

  “I miss you,” he said, looking at me.

  “You do?” I spoke softly in a mass of shoppers who yelled and laughed together. They barely noticed the two of us, each of our frozen glances
caught up in the other’s as the blond wooden bridge behind us became slick with ice.

  “I thought about you every day,” he said. “And it’s been killing me.”

  Though my hands quivered because of the dropping temperature, I grew hot beneath my jacket. Stripped of his usual flattering quips, Simon bewitched me.

  “What do you want?” I asked him.

  He lifted his shoulders as an act of surrender. “I just want to be with you.”

  He didn’t touch me or try to kiss me. He didn’t try to flatter me as a way to clothe himself. That night at the beach the previous summer, he’d seen me naked when I appeared with my glasses. Now, he was bare before me, revealing himself without the act he hid behind.

  I couldn’t help but see myself when I looked at Simon—someone who wanted to leave home, and yet couldn’t bear to part with it. I forgot all the plans I had to make him pay for the hurt he’d caused. I missed my mirror, even as it tricked me. With Simon, there was no looking backward or forward. There was only now.

  Between Christmas and New Year’s, Simon and I were inseparable. He had dinner with my family, he took me to my favorite restaurant and ordered me fried ice cream, and we went to the movies. Titanic had just come out, and Simon couldn’t wait to see it. When we arrived, the theater was packed, and we were lucky to find two adjacent seats in the back. The movie had the kind of storyline Simon always fell for, a romance doomed from the beginning. We both knew how it would end, and still we leaned forward in our seats.

  When we exited the theater after the movie ended, I crossed my arms and leaned into the wind. Simon put his arm around my shoulder, and I let him comfort me. The nudity in the movie embarrassed me, but not because Simon was there. It was because Kate Winslet was at ease in her naked skin, a sensation I feared would always be foreign to me. I never felt beautiful; when I looked at myself, all I saw was a lie.