by Karen Brown
“The whole family is crazy,” Betty said. Her eyes feigned shock beneath her bangs.
Sadie told her to wait a minute, and she slipped from the bathroom and returned with a sheet of her mother’s stationery—heavy, ivory-colored paper—and a pen.
“What is that?” Betty asked.
Sadie held the paper and pen out to her. “Tell her they sound eccentric,” Sadie said. “He doesn’t care about her family, anyway. Say: I find you incredibly intriguing. I want to know more about you.”
Betty stared at the pen and paper, and hesitated. But they both knew she was the best at making up handwriting. Hadn’t they spent one long winter day copying the slanted script off of old postcards and letters from Betty’s grandmother?
“Come on, Hezekiah,” Sadie said.
Betty took the paper and pen and grinned. “So what was that again?”
It was a weekday, and Sadie’s father was at the office. Her mother was downstairs talking on the phone. Betty invented a handwriting that was part boy’s messy cursive, part arthritic scrawl. She wanted to write I think I love you. They laughed until they cried at this, a Partridge Family lyric. Sadie finally decided it was too soon. “He has to woo her,” she said, wondering, as she said it, where she’d ever heard of such a thing. They sprinkled Sadie’s father’s Old Spice on the envelope. They’d used one of his old Playboys to write on, May 1974, Marsha Kay in sheer bra and panties. And then they slipped out to the dead end, past boys building a go-cart out of plywood, past girls running through a sprinkler, their legs speckled with grass. No one knew where they were headed. No one followed them. They had their cigarettes, and after they left the note they lifted the barbed wire and kept walking through the field’s tall grass, its black-eyed Susans, dame’s rocket, and chicory, the kinds of flowers they used to bring back in damp fists to their mothers on their birthdays. They sat down in the middle of the field in the tall grass and no one could see them.
“She’ll look today,” Sadie said, predicting what would happen next.
She practiced smoke rings. In a year she would be caught with Ritchie Merrill, an older boy who drove a motorcycle, on the Schusters’ bed while babysitting their eight-year-old. The news would spread, and she would become infamous in school, and she and Betty would no longer be friends. But that summer neither of them knew that this would happen. In their bliss they believed they were forever bound in their conspiracy against Francie. They would always press their foreheads together, and stare into each other’s eyes, and know exactly what the other was thinking. It was the beginning of summer, and they could predict nothing more than what they’d come to expect from summers past: the possibility of days of endless letter-writing, and grape-flavored ice cubes, and gum-wrapper chains, and a new attraction to plan—their own Aquacade, where they would convince Beth Filley to let them use her pool and devise an elaborate swimming performance, all of them in matching suits, doing flips and headstands in the water, dreaming about being watched and applauded. They would have their stack of books from the library as they always did—Flambards and its sequel, The Edge of the Cloud. They expected that boys would continue to keep clear of them, that they’d find evidence of them—murdered robins riddled with silver BBs, muddy trails in the woods littered with potato chip bags, and soft drink cans, and trampled violets—but that they’d remain elusive as they always had. Sadie would form the basis of her knowledge about sex from Mrs. Sidelman’s books, from the bits of the love letters she’d been able to read, the man, who did not seem to have ended up as Bea Brownmiller’s husband, discussing the plumpness of her lips, the curve of her hip, the strangely intoxicating scent of chlorine in her hair.
April 3, 2003
RAY RETURNS THE NEXT DAY, and the one after that, parking in the same place at the end of Sadie’s street. She avoids him for a week, and then he stops coming, and she feels as if somewhere inside of her a space has been carved out. The day he comes back she walks down there, purposely passing the truck, letting herself feel the longing, drawing it out until he puts the truck in gear and drives alongside her.
“Going for a walk?” he says to her over the chug of the old truck’s engine.
She won’t look at him. She looks ahead, places her feet carefully on the pavement until the truck forces her to the side of the road, to the mud, to the brambles beginning to bloom.
“Stop it,” she says through the passenger window. “Just stop it.”
He looks at her from under the brim of his Filley Farm work cap. His eyes look startled, as if she’s just given him a slap.
“I can’t,” he says. She notes the longing in his voice, and her heart swims. She takes hold of the passenger-door handle and tugs the door open and climbs in. He gathers her into his arms, his mouth wet and searching. They kiss on and on, and then he puts the truck in gear and this time she allows him to drive her away. They take the back road up the mountain, past Filley’s gravel lot filled with sleek Mercedes, Audis, a Lexus. Smoke billows out of the stone chimney. His father opened the produce store fifty years ago as a seasonal roadside stand. Now it’s popular with the wealthy people who come over Avon Mountain to buy native corn, fresh eggs, or Christmas trees and mulled cider.
Ray has her pulled in tight under his arm. At the stop sign, he leans down to kiss her. Like teenagers, Sadie thinks, a little abashedly. He tells her that the manager, Ludlow, keeps the fire going in the hearth, and she tells him that people like that—stopping in for tea, or coffee, or fresh cider, sitting around that hearth with home-baked crumb cake. “I remember your father would come in and chat with everyone,” she says.
Ray laughs and shifts the gears of the old truck with his left hand, removing it from the wheel to reach over so he doesn’t have to let go of her. “Oh, yeah, fresh from the fields with his mud-splattered pants and chapped hands. The old New England farmer.”
Sadie looks at him carefully. His voice is harsh, as if she has opened up some old wound. She leans up and kisses his neck. Each part of his body, she suspects, will be like a new territory.
“Get your pumpkins, get your yellow squash, peppers, beans, get your fresh eggs,” he says in a barker’s voice. “Now they’re all ready for spring—the bulbs, Easter.”
“Will you stay?” Sadie asks him.
She can’t imagine that the life he’s so far revealed to her—as a pampered prep school boy, or traveling to Aspen skiing, to Europe, or on the road with his band, playing gigs in dark rock clubs—has even remotely prepared him to run a store, much less a farm.
“It’s like some kind of joke,” Ray says, looking pained. Even the truck is his father’s, one of the old faded green work trucks he insisted on driving everywhere. Ray tells her that when he flew in from Florida his sister, Beth, picked him up in it. “Oh, she thinks it’s hysterical. ‘It’s your truck now,’ she says.”
Sadie shifts uneasily on the old vinyl seat, sits upright away from Ray and feels the springs beneath the upholstery. She hasn’t yet considered Beth as part of this. She remembers her obsession with Ray and almost asks him if his sister is still following him around, but decides against it.
“How is Beth?” she asks, trying to be kind.
Ray laughs. “She teaches elementary school in Granby,” he says. “If you can believe that.”
Sadie finds this incredible, but she won’t say so. She imagines one of her children, one of her friend’s children even, assigned Beth as a teacher, and knows she would be uneasy without really knowing why. She’s relieved Beth teaches a few towns away.
Ray tells her his parents divorced years ago, that his mother used to accuse his father of playing the “country bumpkin.”
“He drank, too,” Ray says. “There was that.”
After the divorce, his father moved into the old Filley homestead, built by his own great-great-grandfather. He quit drinking, went to AA, and was sober, as far as anyone knew, until he died.
“I don’t come back here often,” Ray says. “But when I have the ol
d place always seemed more like home than Wappaquassett.” He says the name of the house he grew up in with a hint of distaste, and Sadie laughs. Ray laughs, too, and she slips back under his arm.
He drives down Duncaster Road, the woods on either side belonging to him, and then the fields where they grow the corn, the wildflowers women buy now in paper cones for fifteen dollars. He drives the truck over potholes, asphalt dislodged by tree roots. He pulls down a long, winding gravel drive lined with forsythia, to a rambling house made of trap rock. The house sits on a wide plot of open land, the woods encroaching in back. They sit in the truck and watch the wind knock the plaque by the front door (Oliver Filley House, 1765), watch it whip the forsythia’s bright shoots against the blue sky.
When he gets out, Sadie follows him. She asks him how his father died, and Ray tells her it was a heart attack. They go into the house and Sadie smells the old plaster, the paint and sanded wood. She smells linseed oil. Ray pauses in the doorway to the kitchen and points to where Ludlow found his father when he didn’t come into the store for two days in a row.
“Two days?” Sadie says.
Ray shrugs. “I guess no one checked in with him every day. I know I didn’t monitor his life. I don’t feel guilty about that.”
They stand in the doorway to the kitchen where his father fell. Ray tells her that the day Beth picked him up at the airport and brought him to the house the soup was still in the pan, congealed and mottled with mold, the can on the counter.
“She didn’t even clean up?” Sadie says.
“This place gives her the creeps,” Ray replies.
The morning sun bounces off the chrome handles on the stove and the refrigerator. Ray turns to Sadie. “We used to come over here and play hide-and-seek when we were little.” He tells her how Beth found a secret hiding spot behind a panel. One of those places in old houses that held stores for the Revolutionary War or escaping slaves. She called it her hidey spot. He points to the open, nearly empty room that Sadie imagines is the main living area, the chestnut floorboards wide and scarred. “There, beside the fireplace.”
“What happened?” Sadie asks.
Ray smiles. “Old Grams and Gramps Filley used to tell us they had a ghost. When we were playing one day Beth got stuck in the hidey spot and just freaked out.”
“Didn’t anyone know she was there?” Sadie says.
Ray shakes his head. “My grandfather was dead by then. My grandmother never knew about it. We were little—Beth was probably about seven. I would have been nine. I had quit playing the game when I couldn’t find her and gone outside.”
The panel beside the fireplace is sealed up and painted and looks exactly like the one on the other side. Sadie imagines how Sylvia might crawl into such a place to hide, and then she tries not to think about Sylvia. Outside the wind picks up and rattles something against the house.
“How did she get out?” Sadie asks.
Ray tells her he heard Beth crying, and eventually, he figured out where the sound was coming from. “After that, it was our secret, me and Beth’s.”
Sadie remembers the glee Beth took in frightening her with the old house’s ghost story, back when Laura Loomis had been missing only a year, and Sadie had mentioned, more than once during their backgammon marathons, her fear of what might have happened to her. “Beth never seemed like the type to scare easily,” Sadie says.
Ray laughs. “Horseshit,” he says. He laughs some more and crosses his arms. “I can’t believe I just said that. My father used to say that.”
Sadie smiles. She likes to see him laugh. She realizes she rarely saw him laugh when they were younger—he always seemed preoccupied, older than his years.
“It’s my house now,” Ray says. He takes Sadie in his arms. “And I always liked the ghost. I used to imagine it was like Georgie, in those books I read as a kid.”
Sadie wants to remind him that the ghost is a woman, Emely Filley, but like many of the things she seems to recall so clearly, she decides not to bring it up, to let him know she remembers. He leans in and kisses her then, his hands moving along her waist, up over her breasts. He tugs her toward the stairs and then up, Sadie barely taking account of the rooms they pass, their doors opening off the long hallway, most of them empty. Ray takes off her clothes, keeping his mouth busy with hers. She feels his fingers, quick and desperate, working the buttons of her blouse, and she thrills at his desperation, the person she imagines she’s become. He pushes her down onto a bed that has been slept in, the quilt hastily shoved back, the sheets wrinkled and smelling of him. She nestles in his arms, warm, safe, the house’s timbers groaning like an old ship, the windowpanes, buffeted by the wind, banging in their frames. Outside, the crocuses peek from between the wall’s fallen stones, the grass brightens, the leaves unfurl like little green cloths, all wet and wrung out. The smell of manure fills the fields. Ray tells her he remembers when she was a girl and would come swimming at the house. He says he used to like watching her.
“Watching me where?” she says. “In the pool?”
He says nothing for a moment. His hand keeps moving over her thigh.
“When?” she asks him. “How old was I?”
“I don’t know,” he says. “How old are you now?”
“You know how old I am,” she says.
The bedroom is papered with pink peonies and wild roses. The sun filters through the old glass to fall pale on the wood floor, on the dust beneath the dressing table. This was once his grandparents’ room, he tells her.
“I used to like watching you and your friends play your little games,” he says.
His hand moves up along her waist, slips over her breast. She can’t think clearly when he touches her. She forgets what she was saying, what word comes next. “Oh,” is all that escapes. She wants to tell him she’s loved him her whole life, dreamed of him, invented scenarios of the two of them together. But his mouth brushes hers, and words became secondary. She focuses on his lips, his tongue, his hands moving over her skin. She luxuriates in her ability to stretch out her limbs on cool sheets. She hears the wind outside, the birds’ shrieks, the soft moans that slip from their mouths. Then she hears a disturbance downstairs. A chair being pulled out from under a table, a woman’s voice:
“Ray!”
He slides off of her, stealthy, quick, exposing her body to the room’s draft. He gathers his clothes from the end of the bed and glances back at her with his finger to his mouth. She sees his erection disappear inside his boxers.
“Beth, I’m up here, getting dressed,” he calls. “I’ll be right down.”
Ray leaves the room and shuts the door, and Sadie props herself up in bed. Though they live in the same town, she hasn’t seen Beth in years and tries to imagine her mischievous eyes, her small, pouting mouth, on the face of a grown woman. Sadie remembers how the teenage Beth always pretended things, so that you never knew what she really thought. Parts of their conversation come up the stairwell, and Sadie lies under the quilt on Ray’s grandmother’s bed, waiting, listening, trying to make it out. It feels just like when she was younger and tried to spy on Ray and Beth while they sat around their pool or walked the dogs down the street. Even then she could never quite understand much of anything they said, as if they spoke a foreign language, and listening only filled her with a dislocated longing.
“Did the ghost take a turn last night?” Beth says. “Any rattling in the attic? Footsteps on the stairs?”
“What do you want, Beth?” Ray says.
“Groaning? Moaning? Glowing shape in a long gown standing in the hall?”
“It’s not a her,” Ray says dully.
“Gramps said it was.”
“We have no idea—he, she, it.”
“That’s disrespectful. Remember when Mommy used to freak when we referenced her in the third person and she was right in the room?”
Sadie hears nothing for a few moments.
“Are you sad?” Beth asks him. “You seem sad.”
&n
bsp; “What do you want? Why are you here?”
“I just came to see if you’re ready to come home,” Beth says.
“I’m not staying in that house with you and Mother,” Ray says.
“Well, then I’m going to make you lunch, like I used to. Pickle sandwiches. A little gin and Coke. Remember gin and Cokes?”
“Sorry, I can’t. I’ve got things to do.”
“I thought we’d play Chinese checkers.”
“You thought wrong.”
“You sound mad.”
Sadie cannot hear anything more between them, though she can feel the vibrations of their movements downstairs. Someone opens a window. Someone slides a chair along the floor. She scans the room for her clothes. She didn’t pay attention to where he tossed them, and she sees them now draped over an upholstered chair in the corner. She slips from the bed, crosses the cold floorboards, and as she gathers her clothing, she notices a suitcase tucked behind the chair. It is covered in plaster dust. The clasps are mottled with rust. A vintage American Tourister. Sadie remembers the old commercials—a suitcase being thrown from a train, tossed around by a gorilla in a cage. She pauses. The suitcase is familiar—turquoise faux leather with metal trim, a 1970s suitcase like one in the set her mother had. She remembers the blue brocade taffeta lining, the satin pockets. She sets her clothes down and listens for Beth and Ray. She hears their voices far off, outside, down below her window. Maybe Ray has convinced Beth to leave and is walking her to her car. Although she knows she should respect Ray’s privacy, she feels compelled to open the suitcase. She doesn’t, for a moment, think she’ll find anything inside, but when she lifts it to the bed she can hear its contents shifting. She wonders whether her mother loaned her suitcase to Ray’s mother, Patsy. She hears Beth’s and Ray’s voices return, and she struggles with the stuck clasps. One of them is bent, as if it’s been recently pried.
