by Karen Brown
The rush of the sound is replaced with the strange quiet of the deserted gravel road, the wide darkness of the sky. Sadie feels as if she’s stepped into an empty room and shut the door. She wants to share with him the puzzle pieces she’s just now put together about her mother, about the suitcase, the basement sex. She sees that her mother’s seduction of a neighborhood boy was criminal, but she doubts her mother recognized this. In her haze of pills and alcohol she was simply acting out a role she’d invented for herself. But Ray was a boy, heading back to school soon, and something intervened. Sadie feels a catch in her heart.
Francie.
Sadie wrenches her hand free of his once they reach the split-rail fence. She opens the truck door and climbs in, slamming it with a violence that surprises her. She doesn’t know where her anger comes from, what he’s done to prompt it. She watches him go around to the driver’s side and open the door.
“It was that old bitch from Cherrystones,” he says, intimating that Mrs. Sidelman has caused Sadie’s wavering moods. The two of them sit in the dark truck in silence. From far off is the sound of the waves on the rocks, a sound that might be mistaken for passing traffic on a nearby highway, for wind through trees.
“Yes,” Sadie says, her voice hard. “My mother hated her, too.”
She gives Ray a chance to admit an affair with her mother, but he does not. She turns in her seat to look at Ray. “I never liked you, you know that? I only liked the version of you I made up.” She doesn’t say “in the letters.” She doesn’t go that far.
PART FOUR
FAMILY STILL HOPES MISSING GIRL ALIVE
Wintonbury—August 16, 1974
It’s been nine weeks since Laura Loomis was last seen by a girlfriend, heading up Hickory Lane to her home. In a phone interview, Mrs. Cynthia Loomis, Laura’s mother, claims the fact that nothing has been found gives her hope her daughter is still alive. She wants to thank the state police, who have been working tirelessly to solve the case, and the many volunteers who searched the wooded area near the Loomis home for a week without discovering any evidence of the blond 9-year-old. “It’s the uncertainty,” Mrs. Loomis says. She’s sought medical help and been prescribed tranquilizers, which she takes occasionally. “I’ve had trouble sleeping,” she says. Her husband, Mr. Richard Loomis, an attorney, has recently returned to work. State police told her that they have no solid leads.
July 4, 1979
THE MORNING OF THE LOBSTER bake Sadie heard her father up early, moving around the kitchen, and her mother’s voice, a flurry of admonishments about the size of the lobsters he picked up at the market the day before, the brand of gin. “Bittersweet chocolate?” she said. “I hope you remembered!” Her mother planned to make her famous chocolate cupcakes. Sadie imagined her downstairs, perched at the kitchen table with her juice and her cigarette. She felt an almost peaceful sense of normalcy. Through her window she could hear the sounds of the children already gathering outside in the yard across the street, Charlene Donahue calling hers in for breakfast. “Not until you eat something, missy,” she said. Sadie could picture her framed in the doorway, drying her hands on a dish towel.
The fathers steamed the lobsters in a metal trash can over the pit, a bit of chicken wire soldered near the bottom of the can. This had been Sadie’s father’s invention. The Donahues’ yard, with its level topography and minimal tree cover, was the place delegated each year for the bake. The tables, stretching across the entire backyard, bore flapping plastic cloths held down with stones. Gusts of wind filled the trees with a sound like applause. Sadie met Betty in the backyard by the tables. Along the side of the garage, more metal trash cans had been filled by noon with beer and ice, the sides sweating in the sun. The entire neighborhood came to the bake—although conspicuously absent each year were the Binghams. Some years they packed up their station wagon and left for the day, as if they’d been invited elsewhere. But from Francie’s letters Sadie and Betty knew that was not the case today, and Sadie imagined them sitting in their hot house, listening to the sounds of the party going on up the street.
The girls, as promised, participated halfheartedly in the egg relay, Betty standing with one line of children, urging them on, helping place the egg on the spoon, and Sadie standing by another, both of them irritated with the children’s fumbling movements. Charlene Donahue smiled at them from her lawn chair, her drink balanced on the arm. Sadie’s mother, in a teal and bright green Lilly Pulitzer shift, entertained a group by the fire pit, tipping her head back in laughter, leaving her lipstick on her plastic cup.
Sadie sat down at one of the picnic tables.
“Filleys,” Betty said, sliding alongside her on the bench.
Sadie glanced up. Patsy and Beth Filley crossed the side-yard grass from the street. Patsy held a bottle of Mateus by the neck. It swung at the end of her long arm like a dumbbell. Beth kept a few paces behind her, arms folded across her chest, making it clear to everyone that she was there against her will. She had on the same boy’s oxford that Sadie had seen her wear before and which she now thought must be Beth’s favorite shirt. She had her hair in two braids.
“Pippi Longstocking,” Betty whispered.
Sadie smiled and tried not to laugh. The Filleys were invited every year to the bake but were often away on vacation and rarely made an appearance. Patsy spotted Clare Watkins immediately and held up the wine. “We’re here!” she called across the lawn. Sadie’s mother lit up and rushed to Patsy, and Beth locked eyes with Sadie and approached the picnic table. She slid onto the bench across from Betty and Sadie and stared at them, chewing a piece of gum.
“This is it?” she said in her deadpan voice. “It’s got to be a hundred degrees out here.”
Sadie thought she saw a bead of sweat slide down Beth’s neck. She hoped Betty wouldn’t comment on Beth’s choice of clothing, but Betty sat silent and immobilized by Beth’s presence. Beth’s eyes darted around the yard and lit on the line of trash cans, where one of the fathers had just pulled out a can of Black Label. She smiled. “Perhaps the day is not yet lost.” She leaned in toward Sadie, ignoring Betty entirely.
“My brother and his friend are up in the woods. Why don’t we sneak some of that beer to them?” She widened her brown eyes. “They would be ever so grateful. Our house is dry. Dear old Mom has taken the car keys, so no sneaking out for a trip to the packie.”
Sadie could smell Beth’s mint gum. She turned and glanced at the trash cans. Their placement on the side of the garage kept them relatively hidden and easily accessible to the path into the pasture. But Sadie wasn’t sure she wanted to be around Ray, with his flippant comments and his disregard. “I don’t know,” she said.
“I can’t carry enough of it by myself,” Beth said, adopting a whine. “And my brother would love us. We’d be his heroes.”
Sadie glanced at Betty, who still seemed to be stuck in her frozen state. “What do you think?” Sadie asked her.
“Oh come on, Betsy! Help us out here,” Beth said.
Betty eyed Beth. “My name is Betty,” she said.
“Oh, we’re both Elizabeth, aren’t we?” Beth said. “But we can’t really choose our own names, or even our nicknames, when we’re born. I have a friend whose parents call her Bunny. Can you imagine that? When I’m an adult I’m changing mine to Serena.”
Betty smiled. “Yeah, I’m changing mine to Roselyn.”
Sadie said that if they all walked over to the cans and stood in a group, one person could take out the beer, shielded by the others. They all stood up and crossed the backyard to the garage.
“Look at this,” Beth said. “Not a single person is paying any attention to us.”
And she was right. The adults in their circles were transfixed by each other or occupied with children, setting out paper plates that the wind promptly blew across the yard. They were bent down tending the fire pit or coming in and out of the Donahues’ porch door. They refilled their drinks at the drink table. Sadie’s small group by the li
ne of beer-filled cans seemed invisible.
Beth lifted off one trash can lid and pulled out a six-pack of beer, the cans held together by the plastic rings. Sadie thought they would move quickly toward the break in the barbed wire, but Beth reached in again and rummaged around until she found another four beers attached together. Betty kept up a high-pitched, fake conversation in the kind of voice she’d have used when they were playing house.
“So, yeah, I always liked your horse. Do you still have it? What’s its name? Really? Oh, sure, I like that. When do you go back to school?”
Beth handed the four beers to Sadie. “What is she saying?”
“I’m pretending we’re standing here talking,” Betty said.
“Let’s pretend that we’re going for a walk now,” Sadie said.
“Yes, here is where we’ll begin the Haunted Woods,” Betty said, again to the air.
The three of them moved away from the picnic, clutching the wet beer to their chests. Behind them they could hear Sadie’s mother’s laugh, a loud whoop, and then others joining in, and the shouts of children who had turned on the sprinkler. Once they’d breached the fence and gotten under the cover of the pines, all three of them started to laugh. Beth took one of the beers and opened it, and Sadie did the same. Betty said she’d rather not, and Beth simply shrugged.
“It’s not too bad,” she said. “It tastes a little like watered-down cigarette ashes.”
Betty made a face and looked at Sadie, and Sadie took a sip, pretending it was fine, that the taste wasn’t exactly as Beth had described. They walked along the Haunted Woods path and drank the beer, and Beth talked about how clever the sets were. This made Sadie cautious. She wasn’t at all sure if Beth meant it. They stopped at the kitchen scene, and Beth set the beer on the table and pulled out one of the chairs.
“Why don’t you have a seat?” she said in a voice that Sadie imagined was an imitation of her own mother. “Would you like some coffee? A pastry?”
Betty sat down. “No thank you,” she said.
Beth laughed then. “That’s how you do it, right? Play house?”
Betty’s face turned pink with irritation. It seemed best to not reply to Beth, who in her odd way may have been serious. Sadie wondered if Beth had ever played anything other than backgammon. She watched her sit down at the table and take a long sip of her beer. She shook the empty can and then tossed it over her shoulder. “Next,” she said.
“You should save some for your brother and his friend,” Betty said.
Beth shook her head. “Early bird catches the worm. First come, first served.”
They heard a snapping of twigs and the lowered voices of boys, and the girls turned to where Ray and his friend appeared from the swamp. Their sneakers and the bottoms of their shorts were wet. They had their T-shirts tied over their heads, and Ray’s chest was smooth and tan. The other boy was shorter and pale white in the dim woods. He took his shirt from his head when he saw them and put it on, out of politeness, Sadie surmised. He came up and introduced himself, holding out his hand for the girls to take. “Hans,” he said. He shook back his long, fine blond hair. Ray kept his shirt tied around his head and leaned over to grab two of the beers.
“I see you were resourceful, as always, Beth,” he said.
“What were you two doing?” Beth said.
Hans displayed his good rearing by turning to her and answering. “Why, we were just swamping,” he said.
“Looking for some swamp hoydens,” Ray said. “Backwater hussies.”
The boys snickered. Hans smiled politely toward them. “No offense.”
They pulled out their cigarettes. Hans sat down on a stump, and Ray leaned against a tree. The sun came through the pines in shifting patterns on the floor of the woods, on the patches of ferns. Beyond, the meadow filled with a brightness that hurt her eyes. The boys drank the beer quickly, as if a race was on to finish it, and when it was gone they decided to visit the lobster bake trash can coolers again. Sadie’s beer had grown warm in her hand. She watched the two boys saunter up the path. She’d said very little while they’d been there. Instead, she’d listened to Beth’s chatter and the boys’ low chuckles, their comments to each other barely audible.
Now Beth turned to her. “Hans thinks you’re cute,” she said, as if in some secret way he’d passed her this information.
Sadie didn’t quite believe her. She’d noticed that Hans smiled at her pointedly, but she took that to be his good manners.
“I think she’s right,” Betty said. “He kept looking at your chest.”
Beth tipped her head back and hooted. “He likes swamp hoydens.”
Sadie didn’t know whether she should laugh with them or get angry.
The boys came back up the path. Ray had another six-pack wrapped in his T-shirt. “They replenished,” he said.
Sadie couldn’t imagine drinking any more beer, but Hans lifted her old one out of her hand and gave her a new cold one. “Drink up,” he said, grinning.
They smoked Hans’s Parliaments, and listened to the boys talk about the teachers at their boarding school and the antics of their classmates, and Sadie thought how different it seemed from the settings in books she’d read, from her mother’s nightmarish stories—where children slept in dormitories and died of consumption, where headmasters had paddles and punishments involved long, laborious writings in cursive.
“My mother went to boarding school in New York City,” she said.
Ray turned to look at her, setting his beer on his knee. “Really?”
Sadie didn’t know if he was truly interested or making fun of her.
“The nuns beat them. The food was horrible. She ran away when she was sixteen, but they caught her and made her go back.”
Betty stared at Sadie. She’d never heard any of this before, and Sadie knew she thought she was making it up. “Really,” she said to her.
Her mother had told her once about going to a friend’s house for the weekend in Weston, Connecticut—about the neighborhood cookout, the large houses on their wide lawns, and how she’d always dreamed of that for her own children. Sadie remembered she’d said “children,” not “child.” Sadie thought all schools had both good and bad. At her middle school the walls pushed away to combine classrooms, and they did their math work independently from cards chosen by color from a box set in the front of the room. She was part of a high-achievement class that went on field trips, and learned to write Japanese characters with a brush and ink. But she still had to ride a bus to and from school, breathing in the exhaust, suffering the anxiety of hills covered in ice, the crazed behavior of one boy or another that at times justified his removal by the driver.
Sadie drank her beer, and then Hans was next to her, asking about the path and where it led, for a tour of her Haunted Woods, and then she was walking with him on the rutted cow path, the roots of the trees tripping her up, the sound of the cicadas so lulling she thought she might lie down and sleep on the mossy earth. They passed the living room with the headless father, and when Hans wanted to go off the path, toward the meadow, she relented with the intention of describing Francie’s role as the ghost of Emely Filley, clutching her baby. He smelled of soap—years later she will identify the scent as sandalwood—and his hand was soft on her elbow. At one point he slid it down to take her hand and lead her into the grass, into a sitting position, the dry blades sharp on her bare legs. And then she was aware of his hands in other places, softly insistent, and his mouth, a gentle pressure on hers. She heard Betty calling her as if from some far-off place, and she sat up.
Hans applied his gentle force to pull her back down, but Sadie saw he’d shifted her T-shirt up, and she yanked it down and stood up in the grass, light-headed with sun and beer and shame. Even years later, in her memories of this afternoon, Sadie will always imagine that Hans was Ray. She stumbled across the meadow to the woods, to Betty standing there with her hands on her hips, her mouth a terse line.
“Where have yo
u been?” she said. She stared past Sadie at Hans, then took Sadie’s arm and dragged her back down the path, through the barbed wire, to the lobster bake. Ray and Beth had disappeared. The activity in the Donahues’ backyard made Sadie dizzy. The parents were singing some made-up ditty and laughing at each other’s singing voices, collapsing at the waist, the women’s hair wildly untidy, the men clutching their stomachs, the backs of their madras shirts wet. There were the bright shards of lobster left on paper plates soaked with butter, the paper towel rolls unfurling in the wind. There were charred burgers still left, so Sadie and Betty put two of them on rolls and took some chips, and went upstairs to Betty’s bedroom, closing the door against her sister, who followed them, asking where they’d been. Even after they shut the door she kept up her knocking, and threatening—“It’s my room, too,” and “I’m going to tell”—until Betty shrieked for her to go away. They didn’t talk about what had happened. The room, with its chenille bedspreads and sheer curtains, its soft carpet, felt like a haven, close and quiet.
They ate their food in an awkward silence. Betty kept glancing up at Sadie, and Sadie pretended not to notice.
“Where did Beth and Ray go?” Sadie asked her.
Betty shrugged and made a face. “I don’t know.”
“They just left Hans there by himself?”
“They said they were going home,” Betty said. “Maybe they figured he knew how to get there.” And then, finally, “He was cute.”
Hans’s cuteness had nothing to do with what had gone on in the field. Sadie had been unprepared for what boys wanted, and now she vowed she wouldn’t be caught unaware again. She admitted none of this to Betty, even though she felt it was something she should know. Knowing it while Betty didn’t made her feel stronger somehow.
