The Longings of Wayward Girls

by Karen Brown

  Kate and Craig will both glance at her, surprised.

  “Grandma died a long time ago,” she’ll say quietly, awkward now that their eyes are on her. “She lives with the elves and fairies now.”

  “Now, don’t you worry about anything,” Craig will tell her. “We’ll go home and get ready for bed and wait for Mommy.”

  Max will look up at his father. “Is she having another baby? Will this one come home with us?”

  Craig’s face will darken with an emotion that even as a product of her imagination Sadie cannot decipher. He will tug on the children’s hands and turn toward the door without any reply. Sylvia will cast a longing look back at Kate. As Sadie stands by the screen door of the motel, her heart feels tight.

  She hopes that Kate will offer to help put them to bed, that maybe she will offer to let them stay with her. She doesn’t want Sylvia or Max to cry. She can see Craig refusing out of annoyance or pride, pushing open the screen and moving down the front steps and the walkway, tugging the children along, before he stops and turns, his face white.

  “I’d appreciate your help,” he’ll say stiffly.

  At Sadie’s house, Kate will try not to notice the evidence of Sadie’s despair. She’ll take the children up the carpeted stairs. The bathtub she’ll run water into will have a ring of grime. Sylvia will bring Max pajamas that look as if she has picked them up off the floor. The children are unused to someone else preparing them for bed, and they will be quiet, compliant.

  “I take a shower, not a bath,” Sylvia will tell Kate, who will have bundled Max up in a towel and then helped him with his pajamas and brushed his hair with her father’s old hairbrush. Sadie will remember that Max’s bed is unmade, but Kate will fluff the pillow, reshape and turn down the sheets on one side. She will have agreed to read as many books to him as he’d like. It is a warm night, and he will wear little cotton pajamas comprised of shorts and a T-shirt decorated with pictures of a cartoon character Kate won’t recognize. Sadie knows the room is in disarray, and she wishes she had tidied it up for him the way he likes it: deposited the toys in the old wooden box, lined up others just so on the shelves—a model car, an airplane, small plastic army men. Instead, she’s been spending her free time sitting alone on the back deck with a drink, talking on the phone, dreaming of a man who is not their father. Sadie is overcome, suddenly, with regret like a flush, a warm dousing. Max will have chosen a stack of books and will be sitting on his bed, waiting. On his face will be an expression of watchfulness.

  “Where is Sylvie?” he’ll say. His eyes will shine in the light from the bedside lamp. Sadie closes her eyes, opens them. She attempts to compose herself. If she could she would fly back to Max’s room, to its neglect, its boy smell, its bedside lamp in the shape of a baseball bat and glove, the books—Mike Mulligan and His Steam Shovel, Caps for Sale. Sadie never needs to read the words—these are books she can recite—but even if Kate remembers reading them to her own son, she will have to squint in the dim light to see the print, and she will get some of it wrong, and skip pages in an effort to finish quicker.

  Kate will offer to help Sylvia, her face in the dim hallway pale, fringed with her dark hair, but Sylvia will have dreamed up some fairy tale to make sense of the evening’s strangeness, casting Kate Curry as a witch. She’ll remember some version with the children’s victorious escape. Sadie hopes she will block out all the rest—the awful captivity, the fear of the oven, the old woman’s transformation into a hobbling creature with warts and vile breath and long arthritic fingers, her bunions pressing against the leather of her outdated shoes. Sylvia will shut the bathroom door and turn the lock.

  Sadie imagines the dark hallway, the soft carpet, her husband downstairs calling the authorities. Kate will know by now what she has suspected for hours—that Sadie’s need for saffron was a ruse. There isn’t a recipe set out on the kitchen counter. Sadie wonders if Kate will tell the police this when they come, if they will ask her only what Sadie said or if they will solicit her opinion. Kate must know Sadie has gone somewhere in secret, a place where she does not wish to be discovered, that she has for some time neglected the life she once lived and has surreptitiously forged an idea of another. She can tell this from the collected dust, the fingerprints on the storm door, the sink filled with plates from breakfast and lunch, the crumbs on the counters.

  Ray turns on the bed behind her. Sadie hears him ease himself into a sitting position. She feels the cool rain through the screen.

  “Why are you by the door?” Ray says. His voice is thick with sleep, confused.

  “I like the rain.”

  “You look like you’re going to leave.”

  Sadie breathes in the smell of the oil paint on the door frame. The sky is pale, the rain slowing. “I’m hungry,” she says.

  She hears him move on the bed and then he is standing behind her, his body pressed against hers. He places his face in her hair and sighs, runs his hands down her arms.

  “Don’t don’t don’t don’t ever leave,” he says softly.

  He encircles her with his arms and she falls back against him. It is easy to give in, to pretend whatever he wants her to, be whoever he wants.

  “Lobster,” she says. “Let’s get lobster at Cherrystones.”

  This was her mother’s favorite meal, her favorite restaurant at the shore. Ray laughs into her hair and spins her around. There is a moment when their eyes meet—brief, fleeting—and Sadie sees something like disappointment, as if he believed he was holding someone else, someone just like her. But it is there and then gone, so brief that she cannot be entirely sure. She watches him pick up his clothes from the motel room floor and dress. She stays by the door. The rain has stopped, but the awnings drip and the air blows into the room, cool and clean.

  That long-ago summer is suddenly here, in sharp relief. It has been worrying the edges of her consciousness for weeks—a fleeting, amorphous presence—and now it has arrived, fully formed. Sadie realizes she has been seduced by Ray, by his letters, by her own desire to find out who she really is. With Ray she is becoming someone other—a new person, transformed.

  He grabs the key and stands by the scarred bureau.

  “Ready?” he says.

  Sadie pushes open the screen door and steps outside, and lets it bang shut behind her. She feels his eyes on her as she walks to the truck. She feels the sway of her hips and brushes her hair back from her forehead. She knows she’s been playing a character, but now she suspects that character is her mother. As she climbs into the truck, she wants to laugh. This is a new script.

  Ray backs out of the motel lot. The shells grind under the tires. The seagulls swoop into the puddles. Sadie flips down the visor mirror.

  “I look messy,” she says. She tries to brush her hair with her fingers, then she pulls it all back into a ponytail. No matter what she does the face in the small square mirror is her mother’s—the way her eyebrows are positioned over her eyes; the eyes themselves, having taken on the foggy, dazed look of a harried housewife. She wonders when that happened, if Ray’s nearness has prompted this alchemy.

  “There you go,” Ray says as she secures her hair back. He glances at her as he drives, maybe worried she is thinking of a way to get home, coming up with an excuse to explain where she’s been.

  “He’s going to worry,” she says.

  They have never discussed Craig, as if Ray assumes he knows all he needs to know about him.

  “The husband returning from work,” Ray says now. He laughs softly. “Pulling his fancy car into the garage and wondering why dinner isn’t ready. What’s he drive, Cadillac? Benz?”

  Sadie offers a flat smile. Ray imagines him in a pressed suit, a man unflappable and assured of his wife’s love. The man he pictures is one from their childhood sitcoms—the kind who takes out his cigarettes after a meal, who pours himself highballs from a glass decanter and has a casual method of whistling, as if he was once a boy who walked along split-rail fences or delivered newspap
ers on his bike with his dog running beside him. Sadie knows Ray doesn’t think about her children. To him they are just a girl with wise, knowing eyes, threading daisies. A boy’s round head in his car seat. Sadie is grateful she can keep these two lives—the one with Craig and the children, the one with Ray—separate. She didn’t imagine herself beyond the bedroom of the old Filley house, but now that they’ve left she feels the space between who she was and who she is widen with the distance.

  He reaches over and puts his hand on her thigh. They have time, she thinks, before anyone comes looking. They will have this night, and then a discussion of where to go next. Time to plan it out. Sadie knows he relishes the secrecy, the hiding. It excites him to imagine having her to himself in the motel room. Sadie thinks he will ask her to say some lines from the play, and she will pose in the room for him, both of them pretending they’ve left nothing behind. She remembers Ray and her mother running through lines together at the Filleys’ pool that summer. Her mother was always a flirt. Sadie would notice her with men at cocktail parties at their house—leaning up close to them, whispering in their ears.

  They pass the Italian place and he suggests they eat there.

  “No,” she says. “It has to be Cherrystones.”

  He laughs and glances at her. Sadie finds herself giggling too and she cannot stop. The two of them, laughing, their eyes wet, pull into the Cherrystones parking lot. Next door is the driving range, two boys sharing a bucket of balls. The sun has just set over the salt marsh, and the air is cool. They get out of the truck and Sadie feels once again the approach of fall, sees it in the color of the marsh, the way the birds wing overhead. She sits in the truck, laughing and crying. Ray glances at her, and she wonders, suddenly, if Ray and her mother actually spent time alone together, what her mother was like with him. Ray was just a teenager—but one her mother might have led on, enjoying the attention. The light continues to deepen over the marsh—pale violet now, with streaks of an orange the color of sherbet. She hears her own heartrending laughter and they sit in the truck a moment, until she catches her breath. She wipes her tears out from under her eyes.

  “I need a drink,” she says into the car’s quiet interior.

  “Let’s get you a drink,” Ray says. “Let’s get you that lobster.” He opens the truck door and Sadie hears its metal scrape. The seat springs groan. He tells Sadie he’s gotten used to the sounds of the old truck, that he even imagines his father hearing the same things and staring out of the same splattered windshield and feels close to him because of it.

  “You’re more generous toward him,” Sadie said. “Now that he’s gone.”

  “Since I found the bottles,” he says.

  Ray steps around the truck to open Sadie’s door and tells her he hated his father more for giving up the drinking than the drinking itself. “He was so righteous when he quit,” he said. “At least when he drank he could be pitied. We could see he felt guilty for being a bastard, and he was smothering his guilt with drink.”

  Ray said it was as if when the drinking stopped the guilt disappeared as well. “He was still a bastard then, just sober. Always telling us what to do and how to do it. Faulting us for the slightest mistake.”

  Finding his father’s bottles, hidden in the linen closet, tucked inside a crocheted tissue caddie, was like uncovering the man’s weaknesses, bit by bit. Ray tells her he found the first bottle and went on a search of the house, digging through cabinets and bureaus, even under loose floorboards.

  “I found fifteen bottles in all,” he says, explaining that the old man must have forgotten where he’d hidden one and bought another, evidence of years of covert drinking.

  “And that makes you happy?” Sadie says skeptically.

  Ray stands beside her, his face bright with vindication. “Yeah,” he says. “It was pretty pathetic. I found a bottle in a bag of birdseed.”

  “Did he put any in the hidey spot?” Sadie asks. She remembers his angry phone conversation with Beth at the old house.

  Ray’s face clouds and he stares at her with a dark look like the one he gave her in the bedroom. “No,” he says, shutting down the conversation, taking her hand. They walk across the parking lot to the restaurant, strangely somber.

  As a child Sadie’s parents would bring her to Cherrystones for dinner when they vacationed at the shore. They would come in and sit at their regular booth, and her father would have the cook make her mother a special lobster thermidor, and Sadie would have a club sandwich. She’d sit quietly while her parents drank martinis, and her mother would begin to criticize her father for something he’d done or said that day. These arguments would be conducted in soft, conversational tones—unlike those at home—and only Sadie, small and unable to leave, would witness the escalating anger, the biting remarks that could never be taken back.

  The restaurant is much as Sadie remembers from her childhood: smoky bar, dark wooden booths, shuttered windows. Everything is varnished, like the deck of a ship. The light fixtures are lanterns hung by coiled ropes. Ray leans in close to her ear. “Shiver me timbers,” he whispers. His lips brush her neck. There is no hostess to seat them, and they wander into the dark looking for a table. The bar has a television, the noise of drunken sunburned vacationers. Sadie tugs Ray into the dining room. Here there are tables and booths, mostly empty. A family is at one long table, and they barely glance up at Sadie and Ray. The waitress ambles past, her arms filled with baskets of fried clams.

  “Sit anywhere,” she says. “It’s just me tonight.”

  Her voice is careful and low, a calm, almost musical sound. She wears jeans, a T-shirt. Her belly is swollen with child. The arm holding the tray is a tattoo sleeve: deep-pink-petaled flowers, a swirl of green stems and leaves. Sadie feels an awful yearning. She and Ray slide into a back booth. It is so dim, and the booth so wide, that they could lie down together on the bench. When she is with Ray, every place is an opportunity to have sex. She turns to him, playfully trying to squelch her sadness, and pushes him back. He laughs and shakes his head. “Oh no you don’t,” he says.

  The waitress appears, tugging down her T-shirt. She wears her jeans below the mound of her stomach, and a strip of skin shows. “I’m Emma,” she says in her music-box voice. She looks at them. She has wavy red hair, blue eyes. Her mouth is a half-smile. Sadie remembers only too well the tranquilizing effects of pregnancy, the way her body made the rest of the world seem under a gauzy haze. She envies the girl and her beautiful skin, her baby. She looks at her and smiles, one that feels false and stiff on her face.

  “When are you due?” she asks.

  Emma puts her hand on her stomach as if for confirmation. “She’ll be here October eighth,” she says. “Do you need menus?”

  Ray is staring at Sadie, and Sadie stares back. “Menu?” she asks him.

  He nods and Emma turns to retrieve two large sheets of what looks like parchment, covered in plastic. The edges are burned, like a treasure map Sadie made once in fourth grade. The restaurant is quiet—the family at the long table is busy eating. The restaurant smells of spilled clam broth, of Old Bay seasoning. She realizes she has never brought her children here, and she feels something like terror at what she is doing. She imagines Craig appearing in the doorway. What expression would he wear? Disappointment? Fury? Sorrow? She has no idea, and this is more frightening than the idea of being discovered by him.

  “I’d like a Bloody Mary,” Sadie says.

  Emma nods. She leans against the booth and crosses her arms. And you? her look says. Ray orders a beer. She leaves them to get their drinks.

  “We don’t need the menus,” Sadie tells him.

  She can’t be bothered to look it over. His nearness, their situation, distracts her. They sit side by side. She thinks it odd that she can know his body intimately and yet find everything else about him still a mystery.

  “What do you think Beth did when she found you weren’t at the house?” Sadie says now. “Would she have waited for you to get back?�
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  Ray makes a face. “Oh, I’m not going back. And she knows exactly why.”

  Sadie’s skirt and blouse are still damp. The restaurant’s air-conditioning is cold. And yet she doesn’t think these things cause the chill she feels. She stares at him as if she hasn’t heard him correctly, and he turns to her, his expression blank, difficult to construe.

  “I mean, what did she think for the last seventeen years?”

  “Ray,” she says.

  “Yes, Sadie.”

  “Where do you plan to go if you’re not going back?”

  “You mean where do we plan to go?” He leans in and kisses her, slowly, and then pulls away. He keeps his face close to hers and grins, boyish and silly.

  Sadie wonders what he is giving up to be with her. Nothing. He is giving up nothing at all. She ignores his suggestion that they are running off together. They are not running off together. The only clothes she has are the ones she’s wearing. But it is getting later and later, and soon it will be too late to go back. She imagines being ousted from her old life, a reviled imposter. As with most things unseemly she will go unmentioned, disappear like she was never there. They are all tethered to their houses, the rooms and the people inside calling them back with needs to be met. Somehow, Sadie thinks, she has cut her own tether. She thinks of Craig’s smiles, his soft, shaved cheeks, his persistence. All those years ago she loved that he loved her without knowing very much about her, assuming he knew all he needed to. Even as she is thinking about leaving him, Sadie is aware that she loves him still.

  Emma brings their drinks and they order food, too much for two people to eat. Sadie recalls doing this as a teenager—she and her friends scrambling into booths at the Farm Shop restaurant, ordering specialty cheeseburgers called Golden Abigails, fries and onion rings, sundaes and milkshakes. The food made them happy, like a drug. Now she orders chowder and lobster, the club sandwich the restaurant still offers. Ray orders fried clams and fries. They will share it all, they tell Emma, who smiles her little smile and nods. She doesn’t write any of it down. She gives them a slightly suspicious look, as if they are children who will dine and dash and leave her with the tab.