The Longings of Wayward Girls

by Karen Brown

  “I could see,” she says, “if it had been back in the days when women had babies in houses without heat and running water, without modern medicine, with just herbs and roots to treat complications.” She remembers the graves in the old cemetery, the markers for the infants with the inscription Born and died, followed by a single date. As a child, Sadie hadn’t understood how this might be possible, much less imagined a time it might happen to her.

  She tells her how the labor was normal. “She looked perfectly fine,” Sadie says. “I couldn’t quite believe it. Sometimes I still don’t. Sometimes I think she is somewhere else, living a life with other parents. Stolen from me.”

  Like Francie, Sadie thinks. She won’t confess about the letters. Despite Ray’s accusation that she is complicit, she isn’t sure how much the letters contributed to Francie’s ultimate disappearance. In the light of what she’s learned—about Ray, about her mother—the letters are only a part. Sadie has eaten one of the triangles of toast, and then another, and now discovers she has eaten them all. She sits back. Mrs. Sidelman has remained silent all of this time. The sun heats up the sand. The tide has shifted and the water laps at the jetty, fills the pockets between the stones with a hollow slap.

  “I don’t know what to do now,” Sadie says.

  On her fingers are the buttered crumbs, and the taste of the toasted bread still fills her mouth. She feels desperate, depleted. Mrs. Sidelman’s eyes watch her with the kind of sorrow that cannot be ignored.

  “Can I be honest with you?” Mrs. Sidelman says. “I feel I owe you that much.”

  Sadie nods, curious. Mrs. Sidelman tells her that when her mother first moved to the neighborhood they became friends.

  “We would have coffee,” Mrs. Sidelman says. “Like you and I are doing now.”

  Over coffee, Clare revealed her dreams of an acting career, and also personal things about her husband—how he insisted on having sex on Friday nights, and no other night would do. How he made strange faces when he climaxed. She told her about her feelings for other men. It would be one she met at a party or someone she saw at Drug City, who held the door for her and whose cologne she could not forget. Mrs. Sidelman, Bea, encouraged Clare to join the community theater, tried to discourage her from obsessing about the men.

  “I told her to buy the cologne for her husband,” Bea says. “I said, ‘Close your eyes when you make love.’ Well, she didn’t want my advice.”

  Bea tells Sadie that her mother came to her one afternoon, brimming with news.

  “She was pregnant,” she says. “I worried, of course, about who the father of the baby was, but I didn’t let on. She was happy, and that was all that mattered.”

  Sadie can’t imagine her mother pregnant, but this is another woman Bea’s describing, someone Sadie didn’t know. “She lost the baby,” Sadie says, finally understanding.

  Bea nods solemnly. “And the one after that. And then another.”

  Sadie remembers the wary happiness, the crushing sadness of her own lost pregnancies.

  Bea says she called Sadie’s mother and her father would tell her she couldn’t come to the phone. Bea baked a lemon pound cake and left it at the house, and she found it later in the day on her own front porch. Sadie’s mother made it clear she wanted nothing to do with her, for whatever reason. “This was long before I wrote the reviews,” Bea said. “At the time, I didn’t know why, but maybe she felt she’d shared too much.” She finally accepted this and stopped trying to contact her. “I heard later that she’d taken an overdose of pills.”

  Bea sips her coffee. She looks up at Sadie over the rim of her cup, her eyes softened.

  “But I couldn’t sit by and allow what was happening with that Filley boy,” Bea says. “I saw him that summer before I left for the shore—slipping into your basement. At first, God forgive me, I thought you were letting him in. But one morning your mother came out with him—and they embraced. I was standing on my porch, and your mother saw me watching.”

  Bea looks to Sadie, waiting, her mouth tight.

  “Blame me for her suicide, if you want. But don’t think you’re destined to become her.”

  Sadie wonders how many people claim responsibility for her mother’s death. Hasn’t she thought back through it all herself—over and over again? How her mother had pressed a new shirt for Sadie and made her a lunch to take to school. How she was dressed and standing by the door as Sadie left to catch the bus—the white silk blouse, the herringbone skirt. She tried to kiss Sadie good-bye, but Sadie felt awkward in her arms and pulled away. Her mother called to her as the bus chugged up the hill, but the other kids were there, and Sadie only glanced back and didn’t hear what her mother said. Was it an important message? Some instruction that Sadie neglected to follow? She imagines her mother putting on her coat, mixing the drink they found with her in the car, cutting the lime they found on the counter, gathering her cigarettes. What journey did her mother take, watching the woods waving beyond the garage window?

  Mrs. Sidelman gives her a long look. “It’s not about judgment. It’s about how you choose.”

  Sadie realizes that she’s been involved in a long pursuit and sees now that having recognized it, she cannot go on any longer. Her mother is still gone, and she is still floundering, unsure. She remembers the Mary Vial Holyoke diary, the entries that chart the death of Mary’s daughter, Polly, the women all coming to sit and watch—the word conjuring up figures by a bedside, their presence a balm, bearing witness. Sadie shunned the women trying to watch her, hid herself away with her sorrow rather than share it and move on. She never considered that her mother did the same. Pretending it had never happened, seeking her own method of escape.

  “I should leave,” she says. She stands up, suddenly, and knocks her china cup onto the stone patio, where it shatters, a sound that is both delicate and deafening. Sadie looks down at it in despair.

  “I’m so sorry,” she says, and stoops to pick up the shards.

  Mrs. Sidelman waves her hand at Sadie’s apology. “It’s an old cup,” she says. “Don’t worry about it.” But Sadie bends down and gathers the little floral-patterned pieces, her eyes stinging with tears. When she stands Mrs. Sidelman is standing as well, and they look at each other—Sadie with the china pieces gathered in her hand, Bea Sidelman with her hands clenched like a warrior.

  “You’re going home,” Bea says in that way she has of making an order out of a question.

  Sadie is afraid to imagine it, to allow herself to entertain the idea. “I could go wake up Ray and ask him to take me back,” she suggests.

  “I’ll drive you,” Bea says. She takes the china pieces from Sadie’s hand and disappears inside the cottage. She emerges in a caftanlike cover-up, jingling a set of car keys.

  “I don’t want to bother you,” Sadie says.

  “Nonsense,” Bea says.

  They climb into her long Grand Marquis, the sand from their feet falling onto the floor mats. Sadie settles back into the leather upholstery, already hot from the sun, but she cannot relax. They pass Pietro and Emma’s, Ray’s truck still there in the sandy lot in front.

  “What if it’s too late?” Sadie says. She doesn’t say anything about Craig refusing to take her back, the children with questions she cannot answer.

  Bea reaches over and pats her hand. “Never too late,” she says. “You’ll tell him you ran into an old friend of your mother’s, and I invited you to my house. We had too much sherry, and you fell asleep.”

  “The children will hate me,” she says. “They won’t ever trust me again.”

  “They’ll forget,” Bea says. “It won’t matter in light of everything else.”

  Sadie understands what she means, the way that memories come like postcards pinned to a board, standing in for years of a life. And even though she isn’t entirely convinced she can return, that Craig will accept Bea Sidelman’s outlandish story, she lets herself imagine the smell of her children—Max like sweat and earth, Sylvia cleaner and sw
eeter, like her Bonne Bell perfume, like her Johnson’s Baby Shampoo. She imagines the swell of Craig’s chest beneath his work shirt, his brusque, familiar way of saying good-bye in the mornings. She thinks about the casserole recipe that Maura gave her two days before—Indian inspired, with raisins and almonds—and imagines what it will taste like. Ray’s truck disappears in the rearview mirror. They turn onto Shore Road and head toward the highway, and Bea turns on the radio to a station playing old forties and fifties hits and she begins to sing along, softly, to “Baubles, Bangles, and Beads.” Sadie knows she cannot ask Bea about her hidden love letters, but she remembers the longing in them, Bud’s desire to make a life with her, the lost opportunity. Bea made her choice, and yet she kept the letters all those years. Sadie doesn’t think she could keep Ray’s letters, not when she sees them as devices to lure her into having sex, letters written to a dead woman, a character she tried to play. “Clare,” he said, his voice low and tremulous, a fleeting sound that might, as time passes, be yet another thing she tells herself she only imagined.

  Bea signals and changes lanes. The radio is lost beneath the rush of morning traffic composed of commuters heading into Hartford, vacationers anticipating the holiday weekend. The cars merge and speed past them, and she worries about letting Bea, an eighty-year-old woman, drive on the interstate highway, about a tractor-trailer nudging them off into the metal guardrail. The traffic slows and jams and then inches along, the heat rising off the car bumpers. Sadie tries to remain calm, but she is filled with a sudden urgency. Now that she’s decided to return she is faced with the exasperating possibility of being prevented from doing so.

  July 7, 1979

  THE SEARCH FOR FRANCIE MOVED into its third day, and still there was no mention of finding a body in the pond. It was a Saturday, and the fathers gathered at the end of the street to meet with state police and firefighters, with people on horseback, with the National Guard. They were placed into search parties and sent out into the same woods, the same swampy ground they’d searched for the last three days, that they’d searched five years ago for another girl. Already, a few had expressed frustration. “Maybe there’s a black hole in the woods,” one said. “Maybe there’s a Bermuda Triangle thing going on here.” Sadie heard her own father downstairs that morning.

  “It’s just getting depressing,” he’d said before he left.

  The mothers gathered around kiddie pools with the younger children, their voices lowering and then ceasing altogether when Sadie and Betty approached. Each car that drove by was noted and its make, model, and tag recorded: maroon Oldsmobile Toronado, blue wood-paneled Chrysler Town and Country wagon, black Cadillac Calais. The list was supplied to the detective, the cars checked out, the occupants verified: Mrs. Holmes going to visit her daughter, Jill Mandell bringing doughnuts to her sister’s family, a priest going to visit the Mansfield kids’ grandfather and administer last rites.

  Betty and Sadie sat up in Sadie’s bedroom in the sweltering heat, eating root beer Popsicles. It was late afternoon. Before Betty came over, Sadie had passed by her mother’s bedroom door and seen her packing her suitcase. She’d stood and watched her through the crack in the door placing items in, the suitcase open on her bed. Then her mother had closed the suitcase and stood before the mirror, fixing her hair, and Sadie had slipped away from the door and into the hall bathroom, where she’d watched her mother with her suitcase head downstairs, the hem of her sundress brushing the carpeted steps. Sadie heard the garage door, and when she went downstairs the garage was empty and her mother’s car was gone. Sadie wondered where she’d go, whether she was coming back. Her father came into the garage, his T-shirt damp, his face and arms sunburned and scratched in the search.

  “Where’s your mother gone?” he asked.

  “To the store,” Sadie said. “For some ice cream.”

  Two hours had passed since her mother had left, and the prospect of her never returning filled Sadie with a buzzing sense of apprehension. Betty sat across from her on the bed, and relayed how she’d heard her mother on the phone with her grandmother and that she was thinking of taking them all to her grandmother’s house in Farmington. “ ‘Another girl is missing,’ ” Betty said, imitating her mother’s harsh whisper. “ ‘They already took a neighbor boy in for questioning. What about all the other neighbors they haven’t questioned? What about the people who drive through that we don’t see? I can’t sit at my window all day thinking everyone is a kidnapper, or worse!’ ”

  Betty’s grandmother must have suggested that Francie ran away. “This girl isn’t like that,” her mother said. Betty imitated her mother taking a long drag of her cigarette. “She’s a little, dumpy thing.”

  Betty said her grandmother must have asked whether Francie was a Mongoloid.

  “It’s called Down syndrome, Mother, and no, she isn’t, she’s a smart girl, smarter than my kids. They found sheaves of notebook paper in her bedroom, practically a book she’d written, some fairy tale with kings and queens and magic spells.”

  Sadie eyed Betty. They’d gotten some of that in the letters. But not a book, not a whole story. “I wonder if we can find that,” Sadie mused, preoccupied. She still half-believed that Francie was running away—escaping whatever it was that came into her room at night.

  Betty dripped her Popsicle onto her leg and then dipped her mouth down to lick it off. Outside the wind picked up in the trees, and they could smell the air, cooler, filled with the approaching afternoon thunderstorm. The sun flitted in and out of clouds. The curtains billowed out. They talked about poor Ray Filley and wondered what would happen to him next.

  “It’s all our fault,” Betty said.

  “No,” Sadie said, jaded by her experience with Beth at her house. “It’s not.”

  “What if she was really taken?” Betty said.

  Sadie shifted back onto her pillow. “Who would take her?”

  Betty gave her a halfhearted smile. “I guess.”

  “After five minutes anyone would kick her out of the car.” Sadie sat up and made a Francie face and assumed her Francie voice. “Excuse me, but I’d like a general idea of the direction we’re heading. I do have a vocal lesson this afternoon, and I told my boyfriend, Hezekiah, that I would meet him at two o’clock precisely. I’m a stickler about being on time, and I really appreciate that in others as well. A ride in a car with the windows down is a nice change from my routine, but getting back on time is a priority.”

  Betty fiddled with her Popsicle stick, and Sadie kept on, believing she could make Betty laugh. “I like this part of town, it’s really new to me, and it’s been a pleasure taking this sightseeing tour of New England’s quiet country roads, but I hate to worry my family unduly.”

  “Stop,” Betty said.

  Sadie widened her eyes and puffed her cheeks up. “I’m quite certain that it is past my lunchtime, and a regularly scheduled mealtime is essential for children’s health and well-being. I haven’t noticed any restaurants on our drive through these scenic woods, so perhaps you have a picnic lunch packed? I enjoy peanut butter and jelly, but bologna is okay if it’s been kept cool.”

  There was a soft knock on Sadie’s door, and Betty jumped. Then the door opened just a bit, and Sadie’s mother spoke through the crack.

  “I just want you to know that I hear you,” she said, her voice hoarse and quavering. “I’m so very disappointed with the way you’re behaving.” And then the door closed, and Sadie and Betty heard Sadie’s mother’s soft footfalls moving down the hall. Her bedroom door opened and then closed. Nothing remained of her mother but her words, and the almost imperceptible smell of stale Chanel No. 5. Sadie felt a joyous relief, sure her mother had left them, had a change of heart, and returned. Betty said nothing. She bit her lip.

  “Oh my God,” she whispered.

  Then Sadie’s father came upstairs. They heard the creak of the stair treads, heard him open the bedroom door and accost Sadie’s mother in his booming voice.

  “Well,
where’s the ice cream?”

  Sadie’s mother said she didn’t know what he was talking about, her voice muffled by the pillow.

  “Why aren’t you out searching?” she said.

  “They sent us home,” her father said, his voice lowered. “They don’t want us to be the ones to find her body.”

  Betty’s eyes widened, and Sadie put a finger to her lips, signaling her to be quiet. Once they heard her father retreat down the stairs they emerged from Sadie’s room. They stepped quietly by Sadie’s mother’s bedroom door, and Betty moved past it to the stairs, but Sadie paused, listening, and heard only her mother’s sobbing, stifled by the pillow. She felt all of her gladness depart. In its place was a hollow worthlessness—weren’t she and her father enough to make her happy? And now there was her mother’s concern for Francie.

  Betty started down the stairs, but Sadie made her Francie face.

  “Yes, I’m thrilled to spend the night! No one asks me. This is exciting, almost like a campout. I’ll just snuggle up here in the backseat.”

  “What kind of girl are you?” her mother cried out from inside the room, her voice close to a wail. “I can’t believe you are my daughter.”

  Sadie told her mother she was going to Betty’s, and she followed Betty down the stairs. They went to the screen door and watched the wind whip up the poor maple tree, the green leaves flapping violently, the sky a roiling gray. Upstairs they heard the bedroom door open.

  “We’d better run,” Sadie said, and they took off across the front lawn, the wind yanking their hair, bending the trees. They reached Betty’s house, and inside her mother clanked the pans around in the kitchen, and Sadie felt the strangeness she always felt, no matter how many times she’d been there, of being a guest in another house—allowed the opportunity to be served first at the large kitchen table, having to bow her head for the blessing, mouth the words she did not know, having to observe the petty arguments of a large family, from the size of the servings (“He took more!”) to the proximity of chairs (“Move over! You’re touching me!”), and endure the questioning of Betty’s mother playing amateur sleuth.