The Longings of Wayward Girls

by Karen Brown

  “You girls need a ride?” he said.

  Sadie felt Betty stiffen and grab her arm. The car was an older-model Mustang in need of a paint job. The driver was fair haired and blue eyed, his pointed chin covered with a patch of blond scruff. The car’s passenger leaned over him and called out, too.

  “You sure look like you need a ride,” he said.

  The radio played the Guess Who’s “No Sugar Tonight.” Sadie stopped walking and bent over at the waist to see inside the car. The boy in the passenger seat had long brown hair. He wore tinted aviator glasses.

  “We have a ride,” she said. “But thank you anyway.”

  The boys smiled at her, and the car stopped.

  “Are you sure?” the driver said. “What’s your name, little girl?”

  Betty grabbed at the back of Sadie’s shirt, but Sadie laughed, confident that no real kidnapper would use this classic kidnapper’s line. She stepped off the curb and went up to the driver’s window. She leaned on the car door and smelled the Christmas tree air freshener hanging from the radio dial.

  “I’m Sadie,” she said.

  “Sadie Mae,” the passenger said in a singsongy voice. “I’m Rob. This is Mack.”

  Sadie asked them what they were doing, and Mack told her they were driving around. A pack of Winstons sat on the dash. Sadie bummed a cigarette and asked Betty if she wanted one. Betty stood back on the sidewalk.

  “Yeah, Betty, you’re welcome to a cigarette,” Mack called to her. He held the pack out the window and shook it.

  “Sadie, my mom will be right back,” Betty said.

  “We have time,” Sadie said. She bent down to the boy’s match. She heard the music coming out of the old car radio, the shrieks of the kids near the fountain.

  “You aren’t playing with your friends?” Rob said, nodding toward the fountain where the kids still chased each other around.

  “Those aren’t my friends,” Sadie said. She realized as she said it that this was true. She sat beside them in class, at the same table in lunch; she traded papers to grade when the teacher demanded it, paired up with them during gym. But they knew nothing about her, and if they’d been curious to learn who she really was, she’d have had nothing she’d have been willing to tell them.

  She heard Rob laugh in the car. “I was kidding,” he said. And then his voice changed, seemed to deepen with genuine interest.

  “Why don’t you ride around with us?” he said.

  The song ended, and the eight-track tape clicked and whirred. Sadie smoked her cigarette and smiled. “Not today,” she said. “Sorry.”

  “Too bad,” Mack said, and he put the car in gear and drove off. Sadie watched the car’s taillights, watched the boys turn out of the parking lot, and she wondered where they might go, and she envied the girls they’d find who’d go with them. Betty insisted Sadie chew gum before she got into her mother’s car, so they went back into Drug City, where Sadie slipped a tangerine lip gloss into her shorts pocket while Betty paid for the gum at the counter.

  August 29, 2003

  IN THE CHERRYSTONES PARKING LOT Sadie knows she is drunk. She hasn’t allowed herself to be drunk in years. There are always children waiting at home with a babysitter, dishes to pick up and wash before bed, an early morning with Max and Sylvia asking for breakfast—their tiny voices crying out, “Belgian waffles!”—needing their hair brushed, clothes picked out. Their needs, the elaborate waffle-making preparations, all require a clear head. But mostly, she has never wanted to be like her own mother, a woman who awoke with a hand pressed to her forehead, who vomited and returned to her own sour-smelling sheets to sleep well past midday. “Mommy’s head is splitting,” she’d say, one of those phrases—like tear the heart out of you—that made Sadie fearful as a child. She considers turning to Ray and telling him what her mother was really like, but she does not.

  The asphalt, cracked and threaded with small weeds, rises up at odd angles. She is wearing sandals she kicks off, the parking lot easier to navigate without them. Ray has her arm, laughing.

  “Oh boy,” he is saying. “Oh boy oh boy.”

  Sadie leans on the truck. “What?”

  “You did not like my singing.”

  She stares at him in the fluorescent glare. Nearby on the driving range there is the crack of a golf ball being hit, then another. The air is filled with salt. “What are you talking about?” she says.

  She is spread out against the side of the truck, a ready victim. She’s allowed this to happen and she is giddy at the prospect of her own vulnerability.

  “You didn’t like my singing in there. You stopped me cold with that look.”

  “Why is that important?” she says. The word, “important,” sounds wrong, slurred, hard to spit out. “I liked it fine.”

  “You didn’t seem to like it. You seemed out of sorts.”

  “It’s that woman,” she says. “That woman from the neighborhood.”

  Ray spins around and glances behind him. “Where?”

  Sadie feels exasperation, and then laughter, rise up in her chest. “In there,” she says. But she is laughing at his face, his worried eyes. She is doubled over, and dizzy, and then he has her face in his hands, and his mouth on hers. This time, though, she cannot stop laughing, and he has to pull away. “You’re drunk,” he says, a little taken aback.

  She waves him off and tries to open the passenger door. Her hand slips from the handle and she falls back in a heap on the asphalt. Ray stands over her, his hands on his hips like a chastising parent.

  “What’s this?” he says. “What’s going on here?”

  “I don’t usually drink,” she tells him.

  “Obviously,” he says. He reaches down and yanks her to her feet.

  “I think your singing is fine. It’s wonderful. The waitress liked it. You impressed her.”

  “Emma,” he says.

  She hears something in the way he says her name. She thinks of the waitress’s tattooed arms, the swell of her stomach, that bit of skin showing below her shirt. Everything whirls, speeds up and slows down, like the merry-go-round on the school playground, the kind they now say is too dangerous to play on, with the metal bars. Sadie stares at him.

  “The waitress?” he says. “Emma?”

  “You keep saying that,” she says.

  The lights on the driving range illuminate the grass, bright and green from the rain, the line of trees—barely visible beyond—a dark curtain. Ray opens the truck door and helps her inside. Sadie bites her lip. She feels her eyes well up. What is so sad? she wonders. But something is off, something has shut down. She has never been prepared to start a new life—no new life is beckoning her, really—and for the first time, she hopes there might still be time to return, to slip into her house under cover of darkness, as if she has never left.

  “I’m ready to go home,” she says weakly, half-afraid of his reaction.

  Ray climbs into the cab beside her. “No you’re not,” he tells her, his voice matter-of-fact. He starts the truck up. “I don’t believe you.”

  They sit in the cab with the truck rumbling. Sadie imagines the rust on the tailpipe leaving bits of debris in the parking lot, the oil leaking in the spot they will soon abandon.

  “Why am I crying then?” she says.

  “Because you’re so happy,” he says. “You’re happy to be here with me. You can’t believe how happy you are, how much I love you, how much you want to run away with me.”

  Sadie imagines what that might be like—happiness bubbling over, free of all the guilt and trepidation that comes with the burden of memory.

  “I am happy with you,” she says.

  “I’m the man you’ve been waiting for,” he tells her. He reaches over and takes her in his arms. She hears the springs in the truck seat, smells the butter and beer on his mouth. He holds her tight against the front of his shirt, so tight that she must angle her face to breathe, to speak.

  “No,” she says before she can stop herself. �
��You’re the dream boy of my childhood, Hezekiah.”

  She doesn’t think she’s said it out loud, but she must have. Ray’s arms stiffen. He lets go of her and rights himself behind the wheel. She sees the deliberately impassive side of his face. He puts the truck in gear and they leave the parking lot and drive in silence down Shore Road. Sadie imagines clicking the View-Master to the scene of what is happening without her. By now the children are in their beds. Kate has returned to her house, perhaps slipped down her basement stairs, gritty with dust, to work on her little village, to try not to think about Sadie or where she’s gone. It will have occurred to her that when people are missing they aren’t necessarily somewhere. They aren’t delayed at an airport or staying the night with a friend. Sometimes their bodies are trapped in wreckage or hidden in a wooded area, and the person they once were is gone forever. What if Sadie has had an accident? What if she has been forcibly taken away? These things are disconcerting, but isn’t what has really happened worse—that she has run off of her own free will? That she has left everything behind for a reason, and that reason is her own sanity, her own sense of well-being? Sadie believes Kate will understand this better than any of the mothers she has come to know this summer. Kate with her little village, her desperate wish to be surrounded by women, to be made whole. Women, Sadie realizes, who would be appalled at what she’s done and vehemently denounce her. She can see them once they hear the news, sitting about Kate’s kitchen, nursing their bright drinks.

  “I can’t imagine leaving my children behind!”

  “Poor, poor Craig!”

  “How will she live with herself?”

  “She will never be happy.”

  They will pretend that it is unfathomable, but if they are honest they will know, somewhere in the deeply knotted center of who they really are, that they sometimes imagine it. When they think of Sadie running away they feel a surge of envy so powerful it borders on fury.

  Sadie rides along beside Ray, conscious of his body beside her. Yet, she cannot shake the image of Craig and the children alone in their white Colonial. She imagines one light lit downstairs and Craig pacing, on the phone, his arms waving, jerky and angry. Sadie wishes, suddenly, that she’d thought to leave a note behind. I am fine, she might have written. Do not look for me. One imagined line leads to another, until the note she never left becomes a series of instructions about housework (the coffeepot goes on the top rack of the dishwasher), about Max’s Little Bear T-shirt being in the dryer. At the end she would have to say, I’m sorry. But these words, after all of the things of which she has made him sole trustee, seem insignificant.

  Ray takes a turn and they wind down another narrow road past a gravel drive marked Private. He parks by an old split-rail fence and a wide field. The sky is still strangely lit. In the middle of the field is a tree. They are only ten minutes from the restaurant, and yet the sense of isolation is complete.

  “Let’s go to the beach,” he says.

  Sadie stares out at the field. “Where?”

  “Just beyond the tree,” Ray says. He rolls down the window and they can hear the tide coming in, the waves striking the rocky shore. They leave the truck and walk across the wide field. Sadie finds the fresh air, the walking, sobering. This is land owned by a friend of his father’s from years back, Ray explains. They reach the shore—the rocks piled up, the wind coming in off the sound. The water is alive in the moonlight. The rocks are damp, covered in snails, the water rushing in between them and sloshing up to wet her feet, her ankles. They are two dark shadows. She can barely make him out as he picks his way across the rocks.

  “We’d come here and make bonfires when I was a teenager,” Ray says. “Here or the old barn, until it was struck by lightning.”

  Sadie remembers meeting up with Beth one winter night as a teenager, and driving with Beth and her friends from school down a winding lane, through pine woods, to a barn that used to stand on the Filley property. Her friends had names like Bogie and Digger and Griz, names that she could not remember because she had never heard any like them before. They wore Stetsons and hats with fur flaps, and smoked pot and drank Amstel beer. They sat around the barn in the light of a gas lantern, drinking and smoking and playing cards. Sadie sat in a corner, listening to them talk about ski trips to Stowe, and St. Thomas vacations, and the various boarding schools they attended before landing at Skidmore and Bennington and Dartmouth. She didn’t see Ray there, but she wonders now if he was, if she simply didn’t recognize him wearing a hat, or a beard, or any of the other costumes the people there seemed to wear.

  “I remember the barn,” she says.

  Ray pauses in his hopping from one rock to the other. His white shirt is billowing in the wind. “You do?”

  “Those were the good old days,” Sadie said.

  “They were?” Ray scrabbles his way over to her. “What are you talking about? You never went to the barn.”

  “Beth brought me once,” she says. “I was there.”

  He looks at her in the darkness, his features suddenly unfamiliar, and she wonders if hers are equally strange to him, what he sees when he looks.

  “No, you were always home studying your French,” he says. “You stayed in watching The Carol Burnett Show on winter nights.”

  Sadie shakes her head. “Not me,” she says. “You’ve got the wrong girl.”

  And then Ray grabs her, forcibly, both of his hands gripping her upper arms, his eyes boring into hers. “I know who I have,” he says, protesting so much that she wonders if he is ashamed of being caught imagining her as someone else.

  Sadie thinks, for a moment, that she will be pummeled, thrown down onto the rocks, the sea-worn basalt slick with green lichen. She will be raped and killed and left for the tide to drag down the coast to Rocky Neck State Park. But he gives her a little shake and lets her go.

  “Stop the playacting, Sadie,” he says. “You were always good at that as a kid. Too good.”

  “Why are we having this conversation?” she says. “Why aren’t we back at the motel?”

  “Because you said you wanted to go home,” he says. He rubs his face with his hands.

  She wishes her fear would subside, but it does not. “I shouldn’t have said that,” she tells Ray to pacify him. “Of course I like being here with you.”

  He approaches her again. He cups her elbows with his hands. “Maybe it is too much. Maybe we should go about this differently.”

  Sadie can’t see his face fully in the dark. She wishes they were in the motel room with its big bed and its sole purpose. “Is this some kind of reverse psychology? My mother was always big on that. ‘Oh, Sadie, don’t wash the dishes. I do them so much better than you do.’ ”

  She mimics her mother’s voice, something she hasn’t done in years. There’s a heavy silence after, filled with the sound of the sea. She didn’t intend to mention her mother—she’s never wanted this to be about her. But something about tonight has made her mother unavoidable. Maybe it’s that Sadie is now playing the role of “bad mother.” Finally, she hears Ray sigh, a quavering sound that surprises her with its emotion.

  “No, this isn’t reverse psychology,” he says finally. And then, “Jesus, Sadie, you sound like you hated her.”

  “You don’t know anything,” she says.

  The sound draws in and out, the pebbles and shells tumble. Ray stands with his hands on his hips, watching her. “I think you’re still drunk.”

  But it isn’t the alcohol that’s taking her over now, and she senses that her mother’s ghost, hovering over them all this time, has decided to descend and inhabit her body.

  “It will all work out,” Ray says, but Sadie hears the falseness in his voice.

  “You’re starting to wish you’d never done this,” Sadie says. “Admit it. You’re thinking you should have left town and gone back to Florida before you ever saw me.”

  He takes her hand and leads her away from the waves, back across the salt-parched grass, under the st
ars. The sound of the water breaking fades. The moon moves beneath the clouds, then emerges to make the field luminous, the lone tree a stark sentry. She clutches his hand. She isn’t sure which one of them wants her to be her mother, but the nagging memory of the packed suitcase in the old Filley house means something she doesn’t yet want to think about.

  Ray says nothing. He watches her suspiciously, as if she might break from his grip and rush headlong into the sound. He keeps hold of her hand, even though she tells him to let go and tries to wriggle free.

  “Don’t drag me along,” she says. “I’m not a child. Let me walk.”

  “No,” he says. “You’re staying right here.”

  “I won’t run away,” she insists.

  “How do I know that?”

  “Because I’m telling you. Because I promise.”

  She says this and expects him to believe her, even though she has left a husband and children, people to whom this promise was implicit. She says this, even though the fragments of that summer are flooding back, adding up to create an entirely new memory. She flashes to the June morning she saw her mother at the basement door in her robe, and she imagines more, perhaps the part she did not see—Ray slipping through the pasture, along the cow path, rapping lightly on the glass door with his knuckles, her mother coming to the door with her finger to her lips, sliding the door on its runner. She wants to ask him if they are alike in that way, too, imagines her mother pulling him down onto the old mattress there on the floor, the mattress smelling of mildew.

  Did her mother and Ray meet at the old Filley house on a similar afternoon of thunder and lightning? It would have been before his father moved in, when the roof leaked and the plaster walls were damp. The windows in the front would have been broken, and maybe small animals or birds had gotten in. The air outside may have been filled with the smell of wet grass. Cows would have speckled the fields. Sadie wonders if the suitcase was there because they had a real plan: Tickets purchased for the train to New York. Hotel reservations made. Would they have disappeared under assumed names?