by Karen Brown
Sadie put a hand on her hip. “And what will you do?” she said.
Ray’s face seemed to still. His laughing eyes darkened. “None of your business,” he said.
Sadie remembered times that Ray Filley would throw the football with the other boys on the street, when he’d helped build the tree fort, dragging heavy sheets of plywood from the new development going up on Butternut Drive. At one time, he’d been a child, and now suddenly he was not. She saw a furtive, darting movement in the woods behind him, and she tilted her head to get a better look. Ray spun around to see where she was looking.
“What?” he said.
Sadie shrugged. “I don’t know. I can’t see anything now. Maybe it was just Beth, following you.” She knew this would anger him, but she didn’t care. He moved through the woods and came down the path into Sadie’s backyard and stood in front of her. He smelled of sweat and cigarettes. He brushed back his long hair and grinned, the smile false and sarcastic.
“You know you look just like one of Beth’s friends—what was her name? Linda? Lisa? No, that’s right, it was Laura. Aren’t you afraid to be out in the woods by yourself? You wouldn’t want to end up like her.”
Sadie felt a spark of fear, but she refused to show it. “You’re in my yard,” she said.
“Once, all of this was my yard,” Ray said.
Sadie was certain that her pajama top was sheer, that he could see her breasts. She felt her face flush. Oh, the total humiliation, she might have told Betty. He bent down beside her and retrieved the candlestick. He hefted it in his hand, the fingers long, the tendons flexing and tightening.
“You should bring this inside,” he told her. “Seems like it’s worth something.”
Then he handed it to her, and turned and headed back up the path into the woods. Sadie watched him until he’d disappeared within the green shade of leafy saplings. She returned to her house, and when she got to the top of the porch steps her mother was there at the screen door.
“What are you doing out there?” she said, her voice sharp. Sadie startled. Her mother still wore her robe. Sadie smelled the coffee, her perfume, the scent of her skin, and the cigarettes. She was breathing as if she’d been running or dancing. They looked at each other, their chests rising and falling.
“I was looking for something,” Sadie said.
“What is that? Where did you get it?”
Sadie held the candlestick up. “We used to play with it—I found it in the woods,” she said.
Her mother opened the screen door. And when Sadie stepped into the house her mother reached out and slapped her across the face.
“What kind of girl are you walking around outside like that?” she said. “What is wrong with you? What if someone saw you? What will people think of us?”
Sadie felt the sting on her cheek and the anger from the indignity all at once. She tasted blood in her mouth where she’d bitten her tongue. She slipped past her mother into the house, everything dark and cool, the light just coming through cracks in the drapes, the family room foggy with cigarette smoke. Behind her she heard her mother begin to cry. She got to the stair landing and her father emerged from the bedroom.
“What’s wrong with your mother?” he said.
And then her mother weeping behind her. “I’m so sorry, Sadie,” she said. “So sorry!”
Despite the burning mark on her face Sadie was prompted to accept the apology, to allow herself to be held by her mother, enfolded in her arms, the Chanel No. 5 slightly sour on her skin. Her mother’s tears wet Sadie’s shoulder, seeped into her pajama top and into her hair. She had to wrap her arms around her mother in the semblance of an embrace, while her father ambled down the stairs, scratching down the back of his shorts. But Sadie was starting to realize that her mother never felt any remorse. All of this was just a manifestation of some other sadness—one that flitted around her wry smiles, that revealed itself when she stared into her drink or exhaled after a drag of her cigarette. Maybe a dreamy, sweet look masked it, but Sadie knew it was there, had always known it.
Her mother finally let her go. Her face was wet. “Don’t ever make me do that again,” she said. “Good girls don’t talk to strange boys in the woods, Sadie.”
Sadie felt a little bolt, like a charge, run through her. She had been watching her. They had been watching each other. “It was only—”
Her mother reached out and put her hand on Sadie’s slapped cheek. “It doesn’t matter who it is,” she said quickly. “You don’t ever really know someone.”
August 29, 2003
AT THREE O’CLOCK SADIE DRESSES in her new skirt and blouse and takes Max and Sylvia back to Kate Curry’s. She is jittery, as if she’s drunk too much coffee.
“I need saffron,” she tells Kate. “I need it for a recipe and it will be so much quicker if I can go alone.” Saffron, something she knows the woman won’t be able to pull from her orderly spice cabinet.
“Oh! What are you making?”
Kate leans on the counter, chin in her hands. If Sadie’s grocery-shopping outfit gives her pause, she doesn’t let on. Outside the glass doors the humidity has broken. The backyard trees thrash their leaves, signaling a late-afternoon thunderstorm. Sadie has no idea how to answer Kate’s question. She cannot remember the last time she made something requiring any spice more complicated than pepper. She is flustered, thinking about Ray waiting for her, the smell of the meadow flowers through his windows, his hands on her hips, his mouth. She staggers toward the woman’s door. “Oh God,” she says. She waves her hand. “I’ll tell you if it turns out.”
“Drive carefully,” Kate calls. “It looks like it might storm.”
Her children are seated in the wood-paneled den in front of the television. They don’t respond when she calls good-bye, so she returns to the doorway and says it again. Although she feels an overwhelming desire to go to them and take them in her arms, a simple trip to the grocery store doesn’t merit it, so to avoid suspicion she stands in the doorway waiting, her heart thudding.
“I love you,” she says. “I’ll be back soon.”
Sylvia chews on a hank of her hair, absorbed in the television, but she turns, as if sensing something in Sadie’s voice. She nudges Max, who says, “Bye, Mommy.”
Sylvia waves, her eyes suddenly wary. She takes in the skirt Sadie’s wearing, the blouse. “What time?”
Sadie makes a pretense of looking at her watch. “In a little bit.”
As she closes the door she hears Kate ask in her bright voice if they want an ice cream cup. How she envies this woman whose beds are made, laundry folded—her efficiency in attending to all of it. She drives away from Kate’s, from Gladwyn Hollow, and feels a weight lift; the things behind her dissolve, as if she’s never been responsible for any of them—the dishes in her sink, the cobwebs, the clothes the children have outgrown that need to be replaced, the handprint on the front window, Craig’s creased brow, his sighing on his side of the bed. She’s left her cell phone at home inside her nightstand drawer. Craig is always after her to take it with her, but most times she does not. Leaving the phone behind will not make him suspicious should he discover it, and she feels let loose in the world—unmonitored.
She turns quickly, recklessly, into Ray’s gravel drive and leaps from the car, eager to fall into his arms. She knocks, a noise that resounds through the empty rooms, but he doesn’t come right away, and she stands there, watching the sky darken, feeling the wind pick up, listening to it drag at the tree limbs overhead, and wonders if she’s made a mistake, misread his letter, his whispered reminder. She thinks she’s come on the wrong day. But then there’s a sound of footsteps and he is there, his white dress shirt damp with sweat, his eyes blank and cold. He apologizes. He tells her he is working on the house, things are a mess.
“I didn’t know if you would come,” he says.
He takes her chin in his hand, and his expression changes, his eyes slowly warming. He draws her into the house. “I can’t believe
it,” he says. He pulls her into his arms and lowers his head to her shoulder like a child. Sadie holds him and feels his sweat-stained back, his alarming trembling.
“What?” she says. “What is it?”
“I’m just so glad that you’re here,” he says.
He leads her toward the stairs, and she follows, not sure if she believes him, not sure now about anything, the darkness of the storm outside seeping into the house’s rooms, a presence enclosing them. She tells him she has left the children with Kate. “I can’t stay long.”
“Who?” he says. “Who is Kate?”
He takes her into the same bedroom, to the unmade bed and the scattered clothing, and he pauses there in the doorway.
“I have to make a phone call,” he says, to her surprise. “I’ll only be a few minutes.”
And then he is gone; his footsteps sound on the stairs. She is left in the room filled with shadows, the sky darkening beyond the window. She hears faint, far-off thunder. She sits on the bed to wait, torn between staying and leaving, hating herself for her indecisiveness. She hears Ray downstairs pacing, then his voice—short phrases that sound like an interrogation. Beth, she thinks. She can tell from the tone of his voice he is talking to her, and she feels slightly resentful. Then she sees the suitcase. It is still there, behind the chair, and she stands up, unsteady in the darkened room. She squats down by the suitcase, lays it flat, and this time the latches flip easily and the suitcase pops open. She smells the perfume first—that scent she’s shunned as an adult, because it is forever her mother’s—attached still to the clothing inside. For a moment, she just looks at the contents before putting a hand in and stirring the clothing about—the panties, underwire bras, a dress made of silk in a bold black-and-white pattern, one she saw her mother wear out to the Officer’s Club for dinner, to a cocktail party at a neighbor’s. She tells herself that surely her mother must have loaned the dress years ago to Patsy Filley, that these are really Patsy’s things left here in this old suitcase.
Sadie reaches in and takes the dress in her hands, holds it up, and smells the decay beneath the Chanel No. 5, sees the sad little rings of perspiration under the arms. She puts it back and sorts some more: toiletries in pink-capped bottles, facial cream, tweezers, manicuring scissors, a compact with pale powder, Chanel eye shadow and mascara. She recognizes her mother’s linen slacks, a cotton blouse and bright print skirt she wore that last summer. Sadie finds her bathing suit—smelling still of Sea & Ski, of chlorine. The gold sandals. She imagines her mother choosing the items, placing them inside, but she cannot imagine how this has arrived here, in the old Filley house. She takes one of the gold sandals in her hands, traces her mother’s toe prints marked on the insoles. She places it back and reaches into one of the satin pockets and discovers an old piece of construction paper, folded like a card, and her own first-grade handwriting, Happy Mother’s Day—a loopy cursive, written with the heavy pencil handed out to each student. There’s a drawing of a blue bird on a branch, a sun, and inside: You are shinny like the sun / You are sweet like all the flowers / you are the only one / I want to be my mother. There’s more in the pockets, but she hears Ray’s voice downstairs—suddenly sharp, raised in anger.
“What’s in the hidey spot, Beth?”
Sadie stands up. She hears Ray’s footsteps on the stairs, his angry cursing, and she bends again to the suitcase, quickly closes it with her shaking hands, and returns it to its place behind the chair. The smell inside the suitcase seems, as if by some magical force, to fill the room—she sits on the bed, wishing it away, her head spinning. Ray appears in the doorway. Rain strikes the window behind her, and she startles. The shadows of the blown trees mark the bed, the floor.
Sadie stares at him, wide-eyed, numb, and confused by the suitcase and its contents, by his behavior. His gaze darkens with suspicion, and he glances quickly to the suitcase in the corner, then back to her face. Then he goes to the closet, pulls down a duffel bag from a shelf, and begins to stuff clothing into it—items from the floor, items that she notices now he folded on the bed. He grabs a set of keys off the bureau.
“We need to go.”
His urgency frightens her, and she lets him take her arm and lead her back along the narrow hallway, down the stairs, and out the front door. He moves so quickly Sadie senses they are escaping something in the house.
“What is happening?” she manages to ask. They are on the stone front walk, and the rain lashes their faces. He tells her to hurry and put her car in the barn, and he points down the drive to a barn near his parked truck. Beyond the barn stretches the field, its grasses blowing. Beyond that—the woods. She stands by her car and shrugs off his arm. “Why?”
“Beth might be coming over,” he says.
His face is white, and pinched and altered. The wind brings the rain, harder now, and Sadie feels it through her blouse.
“I told her not to come, but you know Beth,” he says. “She’ll probably just show up.”
“Why do you have your bag?” she asks him.
He looks down at the bag in his hand as if he’s forgotten it’s there. “I’ll tell you later,” he says. “We’ll go in the truck.”
She shakes her head at him and turns toward her car, and he yanks her back by the arm, his hand gripping her tight. “Don’t tell me no, Sadie.”
Then before she can protest he’s dropped the bag on the gravel drive, taken her face in his hands, and pressed his mouth to hers, a kiss that makes her weak-kneed, that she doesn’t ever want to end. “You came here today,” he tells her, his mouth by her ear. “You must want the same thing I do.”
And without examining what she wants or doesn’t want, she realizes that Beth may arrive at any minute, and so she does what he asks, pulls the SUV down the drive to the barn. Ray opens the barn door, and after closes her car inside, hidden from Beth’s prying eyes.
“Hurry, hurry,” he calls.
They return to the truck. Sadie yanks the door open. She is soaked through, her hair, her clothing, and inside the truck is warm and sticky. The lightning brightens the sky beyond the windshield. Ray starts the truck up, turns it around. It bounces down the gravel drive, and the tires spin on the street, where they hurtle away, as if in flight. Sadie half expects Ray to check the rearview mirror. They curve along Duncaster, onto Route 187. His cell phone rings and he works it out of his pants pocket, glances at the screen. He rolls the window down—the sound of the rain rushes through the cab—and Sadie watches in shock as he tosses the ringing phone out the window into the woods. His mood changes afterward, and they leave the town behind.
“Where are we going?” she asks finally.
He makes an exuberant hoot and tells her that they can go anywhere she wants.
“Anywhere in the world, sweetheart.” He laughs, one hand on the wheel, the other holding hers, shaking it like loose change. The only problem is that Sadie doesn’t know where he expects her to want to go. She is still flummoxed by the suitcase filled with her mother’s clothing. Weren’t the gold sandals given away years ago to the League of Mercy? The rain and wind rock the old truck on the highway. Sadie looks over at Ray carefully. She feels a little burst of fear, like a bubble rising to the surface and breaking.
July 2, 1979
Dear Hezekiah,
I am so sorry to hear about your sister. And I feel we are now compatriots in sadness. It is a heavy curtain that is drawn around us. Even your sunny fields, your busy days, aren’t enough to waylay that sorrow. I wish we could follow through with our plan to run off together. There’s been another addition to the already frightful tradition of suspense and upset in the kingdom. The queen put all of the king’s woodworkings in trash cans and set them out at the curb for the garbage collector. Thankfully, he found them before they were taken. Next time, she says, she will light a bonfire in the backyard. I am happy to have the summer end, to return to the normalcy of study. Where do you attend? I am looking forward to your All Hallow’s Eve hayride. I’d like to
bring your sister a gift—it is a small china box painted with dragonflies. [Drawing included.]
Yours in understanding,
Francie
Dear Francie,
My sister has taken a turn for the worse and is now watched over by the nuns in a private hospital. She is peaceful there and likes the sound of their rosaries. She says she has a good view of the rolling hills that reminds her of our farm, and a birdhouse where the finches come to feed. Sorry to hear that your mother doesn’t appreciate your father’s art. It seems you are an artist as well. I’ve shown your drawing to my sister, and she has pasted it up on the wall of her room. I feel that soon we may be able to put our plan in place.
Hezekiah
Dear Hezekiah,
I have often considered joining a cloister, but I must be of a certain age before they will have me. I am not very religious, but I am used to being persecuted and alone. The queen is once again comatose on the couch. “Passivity is a form of rebellion,” the king says. I often think about the little girl who disappeared five years ago, and I picture her living out in the woods in a little hut made of pine branches, hunting with a handmade bow, reading books she’s stolen off shelves of houses she slips into at night. Sometimes I wish I was her, rather than me. I am set to play a character in our neighborhood Haunted Woods—a grief-stricken ghost named Emely Filley who drowns herself in a pond over the loss of her infant. You remember the girls you first met? They are the ones planning the event. I think they are creative girls, but very stuck-up. They think they are clever, but they are not. When do you think the time will be right?
Yours truly,
Francie
Dear Francie,
I do remember those girls—but they don’t understand me like you do. Corn to harvest this week. I feel obligated to stay a little longer. Wait for word from me—I promise it will be soon.
Hezekiah
Work on the Haunted Woods became a daily activity. Each morning everyone would meet on Betty’s front lawn and then move through the backyard to the pasture. One of the boys stole his father’s wire cutters to make an opening through the barbed wire fencing. They used one of the old cow paths, narrow and meandering, as their main route. The path curved under pines; around the old swamp; through an abandoned apple orchard, the tree trunks mottled, the branches like spines; and finally through a small field. From the field they made their own path back, marking it with the fluorescent spray-painted sticks and rocks. In the heat of the day when the cicadas were the noisiest they took breaks under the pines, the needles fragrant and soft, the bases of the trees covered with moss. Sadie had a handwritten script. The props required were elaborate—her mother’s long evening dresses, the candles and the candelabra, a maple table and four chairs, stacks of books, wood for the construction of perches in trees, platforms for beds, fishing line, copper wire, nails, an old push lawnmower, galvanized buckets, pots and pans, assorted dolls, bedspreads and sheets, the fake blood and red tempera paint that could only be purchased at Drug City.
