The Longings of Wayward Girls

by Karen Brown

  Sadie gave Betty an exasperated look. “Love doesn’t always make sense.”

  The date was moved back for the Haunted Woods. Parts would be reassigned. That evening Sadie spent the night at Betty’s, and they slipped out and hid the note to Francie. Moths fluttered by lampposts. Through the open windows they could hear Mrs. Frobel yelling at her children and smell the meals that had been prepared in each house. Mrs. Sidelman’s was dark, and Sadie remembered that she hadn’t watered the plants, and after they left the note they went there with Sadie’s key. They flipped on all the lights, fearful of the quiet and the dark. Sadie showed Betty the Aquacade playbill with Mrs. Sidelman’s name. She kept the letters hidden under the cashmere sweater. They were in the kitchen at the table in front of the sliding glass door to the patio when they saw the bobbing light in the fields. They both watched it move and saw it go out. Sadie wondered if her mother was home, if she was still out in the woods, and she felt a twinge of concern for her.

  “What do you think it is?” Betty breathed.

  “Hezekiah just left his letter,” Sadie said. She laughed, half afraid, half believing that what they’d invented had taken on a life of its own.

  PART THREE

  POLICE FEAR WINTONBURY GIRL IS KIDNAPPED

  Wintonbury—June 19, 1974

  If 9-year-old Laura Loomis is not found today, state police said Monday, they will assume she was either kidnapped or wandered from the search area near her home. The girl was reported missing Thursday, but hundreds of volunteers have combed the dense, wooded terrain more than once, and a pond has been dredged. State police spokesman Dan Fontaine says that since it doesn’t seem the girl has left the area on her own the focus will shift to the possibility that foul play may be involved in her disappearance, and the massive search will then end. Fontaine commended the police chief and the hundreds of volunteers who the family hopes will continue the search indefinitely, although some now seem pessimistic about the prospect of locating the girl. “After six days she’s probably either dead or kidnapped,” volunteer Jim Thompson said. Police are questioning persons who have been charged with morals offenses in the Wintonbury area.

  August 29, 2003

  WHEN FRIDAY ARRIVES, THE DAY to meet Ray, Sadie finds that everything she does, everything she says, is mechanical and stilted. Bringing laundry up from the basement, brewing the coffee, calling the pediatrician to make appointments for the children’s physicals, putting dishes in the dishwasher—she does it all in a wind-up-doll kind of way, and she thinks this has been her life and she’s never known it. She kisses Craig good-bye, a lingering kiss that he accepts without question. She watches his broad shoulders in his gray suit move through the door and then the grayness of him flashing in front of the picture window, and she wills him back. She is crushed that he does not return, that he continues to back his car out of the driveway, oblivious. The lawn men show up, parking at the road, revving their big mowers.

  She looks around at her house. Things have caught up with her; she has left it all untended for too long and the rooms, like the flower beds that flank the front stoop, have gone to weeds. Dust has accumulated under the couches and chairs. It leaves a pale coating on the cherry tables, on the bookshelves. The silver tea set is tarnished. There are cobwebs high in the corners near the plaster ceilings. Sadie has pretended not to notice these things, but she sees them now, and it is as if she is looking at an image of herself stripped naked, and she is surprised to feel embarrassment. She has slowly, cautiously, been pulling away, tucking herself into herself. She cannot decide when it started—after Lily, or after Ray? Both events seem inseparable. She packs up for the day and takes the children to the pond.

  Max complains, grouchy about his tube being deflated, unable to comprehend her insistence that she will blow it up when they get there. “When—we—get—there,” she says, each word bitten off, containing her irritation. Sylvia is her little helper. She takes her brother’s hand and tells him a story about the wood elves. “They live in the trees,” she says. “They get in through the roots. There are little hidden doors.” She steps off the path and goes up to a beech and knocks. Max stands by, transfixed, the deflated tube forgotten.

  “No one’s home,” Sylvia says brightly. “Maybe they’re up at the pond!”

  Once there, Sadie settles into her chair. She notices that the sunlight through the trees is different, the pond’s water altered to a deeper color. Her lost girl, Lily, would have celebrated her first birthday yesterday, she thinks. She let the day pass without comment to Craig, and she wonders now if he acknowledged it and was too afraid he’d upset her to mention it. She is filled with regret. It is too late now to get balloons, to make a cake. Summer is already fading; the start of school looms. The dragonflies are gone and the field is filled with bluestem, lobelia, purple coneflower. The children know. They putter in the sand. They huddle at their mothers’ feet and listen to them talk about school shopping and sales. Sadie is tired, more tired than she’s ever been before. She tries to think back through the summer days. When did she begin to leave the housework undone, let the laundry pile up? When did dark mold grow in the cracks of the shower stall? All she’s needed is her bathing suit, washed out each night in the sink. It is an addiction, the haze, the dappled leaf shadow, the sound of running water. She hopes for Indian summer.

  She doesn’t know what to make of any of this, or what she has become—an unfaithful wife, an unreliable mother—or what the use of all her striving to be good was, if only to end up in this place, unable to move one way or another. The way to the old Filley house is clear, through the pines, then down through the meadow. She might ask Maura to watch the children and go there now. She imagines Ray waiting for her, pacing the wide floorboards. Isn’t this all it would take—a quick walk through the woods, sex in the upstairs room? Would anyone ever know? But Sadie understands Ray now wants more from her than that, and she thinks there is more she wants as well, though what, yet, she is still unsure. Her limbs feel heavy. The sky is a white blanket. She hears the short, high yelp of a child at play, and she closes her eyes and decides, for now, that she is not going anywhere.

  • • •

  After lunch, Sadie, Maura, and Jane, back from vacation, pack up early. Kate has asked them to come before the other women, told them she is ready to share it with them, a little hobby. On the way down the path, Sadie suggests that maybe this is what Kate’s been working on all day while they are at the pond, and Maura and Jane agree. While the children play in the den Kate leads the women with their drinks down the basement steps. Her dark hair is loose today, and she seems almost girlish with it brushing her shoulders. Sadie descends into the basement and imagines painted bookshelves or restored antique chairs. She pictures, in the recesses of the basement, a sewing machine and the old-timey patterns she once pieced together in home economics, or yards of brocade upholstery. She almost tells the story of the plays she would put on in her own basement as a child, but she decides against it. She and the others clutch the wooden rail and step carefully. It is dim and cool and smells, much as their basements do, of mildew, damp, and laundry soap. Jane says, “Where’s the light?” and stumbles around looking for the string pull for an overhead bulb, but Kate says to wait, her voice pitched high with anticipation, and she flips a switch somewhere ahead of them in the darkness, and the room illuminates, a cavernous space decorated, inexplicably, for Christmas.

  She has tacked up swags of fake greens filled with tiny white lights along the ceiling, threaded among the exposed pipes. There are imitation Fraser firs covered with glass balls and ribbons and tinsel, and those motorized dolls dressed in Victorian garb, their mouths opening and closing to music they can’t hear. There are fake deer that dip their heads to eat and raise them to listen for predators, a miniature town set up on a large platform covered with fluffy snow batting—churches and stores and houses, a mirror pond with ice skaters, a train doing its mechanical whir around the perimeter. There are ornaments th
at later Jane surmises must be the result of years of collecting—Nutcrackers, angels with trumpets, glass fruit covered with glitter. They ooooh and aaaah, make the expected noises. But none of them understand. Is it for the children? What is it?

  Kate tells them she burns the pine-scented candles when she works, but still Sadie imagines the feeling on first entering the basement is one of dampness and decay. She remembers it herself, the times she’d go down to her basement to play practice or to play Old-Fashioned-Days House. Sadie guesses Kate must use the overhead light while she constructs the little village.

  “Michael loved them as a child,” Kate says, referring, for the first time, to her own son.

  She tells them they would go to the Christmas Barn in Wilton, and he’d lean forward in his stroller, his eyes level with the scene and lit with wonder. Even when he was older—a toddler, a young boy, up until he was ten or so—he loved the villages erected on the snow batting. Kate has made each building light up, and inside each house is a small scene of merriment: dancing, caroling, gift unwrapping, parties, eggnog. Sadie thinks she’s constructed this village as if the child he was may one day see it. She leans down and looks at the scene. In a blue Cape that sits on a cul-de-sac are three miniature figures—a mother, father, and young boy. The father wears a tweed suit, the mother a dress that might have come from a Butterick sewing pattern circa 1970. The boy is in jeans and a green sweater. His face is tiny and plastic, and poorly painted. They gather around a table. There is a decorated tree in the window, a fireplace with stockings. Sadie sees Kate has re-created scenes in each house. It reminds her of her old dollhouse—the brilliantly colored metal walls with painted-on wallpaper, rugs, bookshelves, the children’s nursery wall covered with scampering squirrels. The furniture was all plastic. Kate uses real wood pieces she tells them she special-orders from catalogs. The houses are vintage dollhouses: Colonials, split-levels, midcentury modern ranches. She’s put in small roasts on platters, cups and bowls and silverware on tiny place mats. She has vintage television sets, toasters and blenders, beds and bedding, miniature pillows, pets, even books—tiny leather-bound ones with blank pages. The houses are electrified with wires that illuminate lamps and chandeliers swagged with imitation greens, tiny trees lit up with strands of colored lights.

  Jane widens her eyes and is the first to make an excuse to leave. She has the meatloaf still, she explains. She is up the stairs before anyone can stop her. Maura goes on nonstop about Christmas being her favorite holiday, and how growing up there was one house in her neighborhood that really did it up big, and Sadie knows her chattering is done as a kindness to fill the silence. She and Maura make a show of walking about and fingering ornaments, commenting on their uniqueness. In the shadowy place beyond the laundry room, where the black oil tank sits, Sadie sees an odd pile of things: boating magazines, a Burberry overcoat, stacks of file folders, neat piles of folded clothes—not enough things to be a man’s total possessions. Sadie imagines they are Kate’s husband’s but finds it odd that they are piled there where mice might burrow into his starched shirts, nibble at his leather shoes with the cedar inserts, shred the paper in his stack of old reports.

  Sadie trips over an extension cord and her drink spills its bright tropical colors onto the pristine village snow. She and Maura watch Kate’s face lose its softness, stiffen with apprehension.

  “Oh, don’t worry about it,” she tells them. She laughs and waves her hand, but neither of them is convinced.

  They end up standing by the stairs. “This is lovely,” they say. “This is so creative.”

  “It isn’t normal to have Christmas in your basement,” Jane says when they gather afterward in her driveway. She is winding and rewinding her hair, clipping it back up—a nervous habit. Maura does her Oh well look, as if nothing can surprise her. They surmise that Kate, still out of work, needs to find a way to channel litigious energy.

  “Have you seen her husband’s car at all this summer?” Jane asks.

  Maura says that maybe he’s been out of town. They imagine her waiting for him to return, gluing plastic carolers outside a miniature snow-covered house. But Sadie remembers the pile of things by the furnace and suspects that for whatever reason her husband is gone, and Kate is the keeper of the items he’s left behind. Sadie, with her own secret, doesn’t share her suspicion with Jane and Maura. She silently excuses Kate’s hobby, feels almost traitorous about her reaction when Kate shared it with them. She found herself entranced by the intricate scenes, the miniature re-creations of what she always expected her married life to be—perfect, happy, fixed. The basement Christmas throws everything into strange relief. Nothing is as it once seemed. Sadie sees herself glued into place in her own house, her life filled with the predictable sameness that Kate seems to long for. I’ll wait all day, Ray said. Sadie feels a small flutter of panic, as if she’s known all along what she will do and is now incapable of stopping herself.

  June 30, 1979

  SADIE WOULD SOMETIMES WONDER WHAT began the series of events that came to mark that summer as blighted. Was it the note under the stone? Was it the Haunted Woods? Was it long before any of these things, when Francie was taken for the irritating girl no one wanted to play with, her family ostracized by the neighborhood and held suspect for no explainable reason? Was it the setting—the waving elms and hickories, the way the sun rose over the hills of corn, the cow paths twisting over tree roots and stones, the pale violets that sprang up among mosses, the smell of the air through rusty window screens? Or was it the cicadas, their harsh whirring like something rending the air, like a spacecraft hovering over their neighborhood?

  One morning, she woke up before anyone else in her house. She could hear her father’s heavy breathing across the hall. She went downstairs and emptied the ashtrays since no one else seemed to. She sat on the couch in the den. Last spring she’d taken a small plastic hinged box—the type that might hold costume earrings tacked to imitation velvet and cardboard—and she’d filled it with things that identified her: a sheet of paper on which she’d written facts about her life and a poem, a small wooden medallion with a metal letter “S,” a penny with the date. She’d folded the paper up tightly into a square. She’d covered the box with black electrical tape. And then she’d tossed the box out into her backyard, into the bare, wet branches, into the patches of melting snow and the twigs of thorny bushes dotted with red berries. That girl was a mystery she couldn’t solve, residing in a place she couldn’t return to.

  But she remembered the box now and decided to find it. She went out the back door to the deck. She peered over the railing into the depths of the woods—green and flickering, the birds starting to make noise, the light dappling the porch floor. She didn’t know how she could ever locate it under all the ferns and layers of decomposing leaves, but she would try.

  In a moment she was down the path and in the woods, near the spot she believed it might have landed. When she glanced back at her house she was surprised to see her mother standing in the basement in front of the sliding glass doors. She held a cup of coffee, a cigarette. She wore her pale-colored summer robe, and Sadie watched as she smoked and stared out the doors. She couldn’t see Sadie there in the woods. She moved back and forth in front of the glass, and then she untied the robe and let it slip from her shoulders. She wore only a pair of panties, blue and shimmery. Her breasts were full, outlined by the darkness of her tan. She stared out the doors, and Sadie realized she was looking at her own reflection in the glass, the outside world still dark, the sun just hitting the rim of the hill behind her. Her expression was pensive. Even then Sadie could feel her terrible longing. Her mother reached out and touched the glass, bent down and retrieved the robe, and disappeared into the basement, as if she’d been summoned.

  Sadie turned away and continued to look along the floor of the woods, though it seemed to matter less now if she found the small box. She parted the ferns and found a tarnished silver candlestick, left there from one of their old game
s. It saddened her to see it, this reminder of the girl she once was, who seemed about to slip away from her.

  “What are you looking for?” a voice said.

  Sadie spun around. There was Ray Filley, leaning against a tree with his cigarette. She realized she was still in her pajamas.

  “What are you doing there?” she asked.

  “Oh, I’m spying on you,” Ray said. He exhaled and laughed. “What do you think I’m doing? Having a cigarette. What do you have there?”

  Sadie dropped the candlestick. “Nothing.”

  She felt childish in the pajamas, the baby-doll kind everyone’s mother bought for her in the department store’s children’s section. “Mortified” is the word she would have used if she’d decided to tell Betty. And there he was, just standing there in the ferns, watching me. I was in pink baby-dolls and I was mortified.

  “You’re up early,” Sadie said.

  “I guess we’re a couple of early risers,” Ray said. He put his cigarette out on the tree. Everything he did was cocky. Oh so full of himself, Sadie thought. She hated him, and loved him. She wanted to grab the candlestick and throw it at him. She wanted his hands to slide beneath her pajamas and up her bare back the way the characters’ did in Mrs. Sidelman’s books. Instead, the two of them just stood there in the woods, staring at each other.

  “Do you have an extra cigarette?” she said.

  Ray smiled. “An extra one?” He took out a crumpled pack and shook it. “No, sorry. No extras.”

  He had on a pair of madras shorts, a sloppy T-shirt. He wore tennis shoes. Every so often he shook his long hair away from his eyes. “You should run along back to bed,” he said.

  Sadie slitted her eyes at him. “What for?” she said. “I’m up now.”

  “Go have yourself a Pop-Tart or play with your dolls,” he said.