What he does with me hurts a little, but that’s only because it is my first time, Blake tells me. Next time I’ll adore it, I’ll come to him with a spasm of rapture; he knows how to make me come that way. “Take your panties all the way off,” he murmurs to me, “and give them to me for a souvenir.”
I shake my head. My mother will want to know what happened to them; she inventories laundry items.
“But I need to have a souvenir, Candy!”
“Something nicer,” I whisper, slipping out from under him and sitting up, blinking, dizzy. “I’ll think of something.” My heart pounds. The world looks strange, incomprehensible, the seemingly bodiless feet passing at the window strangest of all. My own hands look alien to me, disconnected, as I straighten my bra and smooth my dress.
When I get home late from school, my mother gives me the usual welcoming snack—today, warm molasses cookies—but also a hard look. “Candor, where have you been?”
“At the library,” I tell her. I know she would see it in my face if I lied, but I am safe, because I am telling her the truth.
The next day I try to play sick, but my mother will not allow me to stay home. At school I try to avoid Blake, but he hunts me down. He kisses me in the hallway, with other kids watching, in defiance of school rules. I know now that he carries defiance of school rules in his pocket. The knife. And I know how much defiance he hides in his black jeans. “Candy,” he murmurs, “my Candy, my love. Meet me after school. You know where.”
I am a coward. “No, Blake, I . . .”
He puts a finger to my lips. “There’s even more we can do. I’ll open you like a red rose. Be there.”
“But—”
“Be there, Candy, or that is the place where they will find my dead body, and I will write your name on the wall with my blood.”
* * *
Every day for the rest of that week and into the next, I remembered, I went with Blake to the library after school. But my habitual daydreams did not include every detail of those days. My memories of that time had been washed out by a kind of white light.
EXIT, read the highway sign, APPLETREE, 1 MILE. I needed to get off at that exit, of course, and find a telephone, and my mother and father didn’t have to know, but still, I felt my buttocks tighten, cringing. I’d been forbidden ever to enter that town again.
That was the way my parents had done things all my life. Sometimes they had let me get away with little things out of kindness, but when push came to shove, they had laid down the law. No explanations. No discussion.
The exodus from Appletree had been that way, a no-questions decision made by my parents, although even for them it had been quite abrupt. I had come home late one afternoon from school—well, from the library—and I’d found my mother and father in a fury of activity, piling boxes and suitcases into the old station wagon. My father should have been at work. My mother should have been in the kitchen giving me chocolate-chip cookies soft and warm from the oven as she started supper. Neither of them was acting normal, but neither of them offered any explanation or even so much as looked at me.
My mother ordered, “Get in.”
“What’s going on?”
“Shut up.” My father had often spoken to me harshly, but never so vulgarly. “Get in the car.”
I needed to go to the bathroom, and I wanted to put down my schoolbooks, put on the sweatshirt and baggy slacks I was allowed to wear at home, and have my snack; why was I not to be allowed my usual snack? But I did not dare to talk back. I crawled into the backseat of the station wagon, and with a clash of metal my father banged a box of pots and pans onto the seat next to me. They grated like the sound track in a movie when the jail cell clashes shut. My father slammed the car door and barked at my mother, “Let’s go.”
“My African violets—”
“Forget about them.” An enormity: African violets are difficult, fragile, but properly cared for, they can live forty years. Abandoning them was like abandoning children. But Father barked, “Let’s go.”
So we drove out of Appletree and passed through dusk into darkness along a bewilderment of country roads. I looked at my father’s black narrow-brimmed hat, my mother’s stiffly starched white prayer bonnet. I wondered whether they had packed any clothes for me. Neither of them turned around. No one spoke.
Finally I ventured, “Where are we going?”
“Shut up.” My father.
Then I knew for sure that whatever had happened was my fault. And although I did not yet allow myself to think it, I sensed that I would never see Blake again.
Somehow my parents had found out.
How, I had no idea. They didn’t tell me. They didn’t accuse me, they didn’t threaten me; they didn’t speak to me at all. Once we stopped at a drugstore for a few things. Famished, I stared at a display of junk food cupcakes in plastic wrappers, but I didn’t dare to ask for any. We drove on in the dark, and no one suggested supper. I had not yet fully realized that I would never see my home again, but somehow I already knew they had left my T-shirts and sweatpants, my teddy bear, my pink plush flamingo wearing a magenta tutu—everything dear to me.
Except the very dearest.
But only because they didn’t know.
I still had my love notes from Blake; those I carried with me in a pocket of my three-ring binder, always, and they were all that would remain of everything I cherished. I sat in the backseat of the car clutching myself and shivering—
Stop it, Dorrie, I ordered myself, gripping the Kia’s steering wheel. That was a long time ago. Now I was the one in the front seat, and not just a passenger like my mother either, but driving. Driving the car long after dark. On my own. I was thirty-three years old, for gosh sake; why did I still feel weak and shivery?
“Because you haven’t eaten, dodo head,” I told myself aloud.
Yet I couldn’t eat, not with my stomach wadded into a fist of anxiety. I wouldn’t be able to think of eating until I found a phone and called the police and got them moving. I had to make sure they would find Juliet before—
Before nothing. It was a kidnapping. There would be a ransom demand. That was all.
The interstate felt lonely now. I turned off my four-way flashers.
APPLETREE EXIT, read the sign, with an arrow pointing the way for me in case I didn’t remember how to get there.
* * *
I crawled along country roads for the next twenty minutes and never passed a gas station, a convenience store, anything except benighted farmhouses and fields. And I began to wonder whether I’d taken a wrong turn, because, actually, I didn’t remember how to get to Appletree.
I’d repressed a lot since we’d left. The last thing I remembered clearly was my mother bursting into the motel bathroom the next morning as I peed, thrusting a paper cup between my legs to catch the urine. Utterly startled and embarrassed to tears, I clamped my legs together a moment too late.
“When’s the last time you had a period?” my mother demanded.
Sobbing, my hands folded over my lap, I shook my head. I didn’t know. Mom probably knew. Trust Mom to keep track of my periods.
Mom opened a box and dipped a kind of paper stick in the urine. PREGNANCY TEST, the box read. I just sat on the commode—that was what my parents called the toilet, “commode”—because I didn’t want to wipe in front of her. She lifted the strip and looked at it.
Her face went ugly. My mother, ugly. “You slut!” she screamed at me, and she slapped me so hard she split my lip.
After that, my memories got really blurry. I vaguely remembered pleading with my mother and father that the boy loved me and he would marry me. But my father hit me when I tried to speak Blake’s name. I’d never seen Father so furious. I was never to speak of, or to, “that sinful, fornicating young man” again.
But—but Blak
e and I were in love. He was my prince. We were supposed to be together forever.
Instead, I was to be locked away like a princess in a tower.
I hadn’t even given him some little thing to remember me by. A keepsake.
We hadn’t even said good-bye.
What would become of him?
He would be so distraught he might kill himself.
It was all my fault.
I was not allowed to contact anyone in Appletree to tell them where I was or what had happened.
Somehow there was a strange new house. I spent months locked in a strange new bedroom lacking any of the amenities of a princess’s tower. Then there was the baby, born and given away the same day. Then six more weeks locked in the room, although by this time my mother was once again baking warm treats and offering them to me. Then a strange new high school, and once again Father asked me what I had learned, but he locked my room after I went to bed, and I was never allowed out of the house at night. As if night had ever had anything to do with it.
Then college, much the same. No driver’s license. No car. My mother didn’t have a license or drive a car; why should I? I took the bus to campus. My father picked me up at an appointed place and time to drive me home, asking what I had learned in class. My mother gave me cookies or brownies or pastries just as delicious as ever, then sent me to my room. Rather than eat them, I flushed them down the toilet, then dreamed of Blake.
I wondered what had happened to him. Was he alive? Was he okay? Had he graduated from high school? What was he doing? He was a poet, I fantasized, living somewhere at the edge of the world, in the wilds of Alaska or on an island in the ocean. He didn’t need to grow up and be like my father, wear a narrow-brimmed hat, spend his days selling prefabricated farm and storage buildings. Blake would never work for anyone. He didn’t seem to need to eat, or follow any of the usual rules. It was as if he had been created, not born. No way was he imprisoned by family as I was.
Living at home was more like just existing. I didn’t really live except inside my mind. Nothing I felt was valid to my parents—the only people close to me—so I no longer allowed myself emotions.
No wonder the months are mostly blank in my mind. Years, really. Until I got out of my locked room and away from my parents by marrying Sam.
* * *
As soon as he had let himself into the empty house, Sam phoned Dorrie’s cell. But she didn’t pick up. He got her voice mail, her gently musical voice telling him she couldn’t take his call right now.
Why wouldn’t she pick up? She always picked up. Her phone seldom left her purse and her purse never left her arm.
He tried three more times before he left a typically understated message: “Hi, Dorrie, it’s Sam. Got home from work, wondering where you are? Please call me.”
He wished the darn phone wouldn’t switch over to voice mail after only five rings. Wished it would keep ringing and ringing until she had to answer. But he failed to consider what might be the implications if a cell phone rang in the weeds behind a BP station and nobody heard.
After the first few minutes, Sam found that he couldn’t sit down. Pacing the empty house, he phoned some neighbors and some women Dorrie knew from church, asking whether they had seen Dorrie or knew where she was. No, they hadn’t, and no, they didn’t, but Sam could tell by the extra courtesy in their voices that he was overreacting. Dorrie probably had a flat tire or was stuck in traffic, for gosh sake. A couple of hours late meant nothing.
But she was hardly ever late, even by a couple of minutes.
Forcing himself to stay off the phone for a while in case she was trying to phone him, Sam walked into the bedroom to change clothes, pulled off his tie and tossed it onto the bed, then forgot what he was doing and walked out of the room still in his business suit and wing-tip shoes. Downstairs again, finding himself in the family room, he sat on the edge of his lounge chair and tried to watch the news on TV. Stock market down. Floods in Georgia. Suicide bombing in Pakistan. In late-breaking local news, possible abduction of the daughter of District Attorney Don Phillips . . . but the details were sketchy, and Sam couldn’t focus or sit back and relax or even sit still. He got up and emptied the clean dishes from the dishwasher, stacking them by size in the cupboards. Then methodically, starting in a sensible way at the back, he loaded the dishwasher with dirty coffee cups from the sink. He found himself pausing, teaspoons in hand, to listen for the sound of Dorrie’s car in the driveway.
The phone rang. He jumped to answer it.
Telemarketer.
Sam slammed the phone down on the guy’s spiel, then stood breathing deeply, surprised at himself. Never before in his adult life had he been so rude. Okay, he wasn’t LDS anymore—the world said “Mormon,” but Mormons said “Latter-Day Saints,” “LDS”—not since he and his parents had kind of lapsed so he wouldn’t have to go on the two-year missionary tour of duty. Then later, in order to get married in peace with Dorrie’s parents, he’d joined Dorrie’s church, which was strict, but it was an LDS carryover that he still didn’t swear, drink, gamble, or lie. He didn’t even allow himself caffeine. All of which made him unsure whether his bad manners and worse feelings were forgivable under the circumstances. He knew he ought to pray outside the Silverado for once, but he didn’t feel as if he had either time or patience to talk with God right now. Rigidly he stood beside the phone, trying to regain control. No, he told himself, no way, he was not going to go snooping in Dorrie’s closet to see whether clothing and luggage were missing. There was no reason for him to think she might have left him. None.
Maybe she was at church for some meeting or something.
On Saturday night? Sam knew better, but he called the church office anyway. An answering machine welcomed him to leave a message, but Sam didn’t want to talk to it. He hung up, then called Pastor Lewinski at home.
“Hello, Sam, how are you?” Lewinski was a thoroughly nice young guy, kind of weedy-looking in a freckly redheaded way, thin, narrow-jawed, maybe just a trifle light in his loafers. That didn’t matter to Sam. Live and let live, and anyway, he liked Lewinski. The pastor’s Sunday messages generally spoke of love and joy within the comforting limits of God’s embrace. Funny how the same church could include all kinds of people, such as Dorrie’s gloom-and-doom parents, when the pastor wasn’t that way at all.
“I seem to be missing a wife.” Sam tried to make it light. “Any idea where she could be?”
But Pastor Lewinski couldn’t help. No, there was nothing involving Dorrie going on at the church. No, the pastor hadn’t seen her today. In a wry tone that indicated he realized the unlikeliness of his suggestion, he asked, “Is it at all possible that she’s gone to visit her parents?”
Lewinski knew Dorrie’s parents, of course, because they were longtime members of the church. Old-school. They, not Dorrie or the pastor, had required Sam to join their church in order to marry their daughter. They, of course, were the first people Sam should have called regarding Dorrie’s whereabouts, and the last people on earth he wanted to call. Whenever Sam had to deal with Mother and Father Birch, he ended up shaking his head, wondering how in God’s name Dorrie—sweet, tolerant, patient Dorrie—had ever been born of such a narrow, negative woman and man. Dorrie excused them to him by saying they had gotten worse with age.
“Hello.” Dorrie’s mother. Her voice sounded just as usual: flat and comfortless, like her bosom.
Sam found himself speaking too brightly. “Hello, Mother Birch, this is Sam. How are you?” Feeling like a hypocrite for asking.
“The same.”
“By any chance is Dorrie there?”
“Candor? No. Why should she be?”
“Because she isn’t here.” Instantly Sam wished he’d bitten back the retort. If Dorrie’s parents got worried, he’d feel bad. If they didn’t get worried, he’d feel even worse.
“I should have expected that.” Deep disapproval resonated in Mother Birch’s voice.
“What? Why?”
“Because of the power of the devil in her.”
The old witch, she didn’t sound the least bit concerned, only critical. But Mother Birch often said judgmental things about Dorrie. Up until now Sam had ignored them.
This time he demanded, “How can you say such a thing? What has Dorrie ever done that was so bad?”
He heard a mirthless snort. “Look under her mattress.”
“What?” The old meat cleaver was nuts.
“Look under her mattress. That’s where she hid the filth she read—”
Sam burst into nervous laughter. “Romance novels? Mother Birch, I know all about them.” Most evenings, while he watched TV, Dorrie read a novel—not just romances, sometimes pretty highbrow stuff—and it never ceased to amaze him how she entered into the novel the way she could enter into a Pre-Raphaelite painting, totally in another world, deaf to the voices of the news anchors and the new-car advertisements.
“Filth,” repeated the old woman stonily. “Devil only knows what she keeps there now. You look.”
Sam had no intention of looking under Dorrie’s mattress. He took a deep breath, then asked calmly, “Mother Birch, do you have any idea where Dorrie might have gone?”
“In that automobile you went and got her? To hell. Pray for her soul.”
Sam preferred to worry about his wife’s physical safety. “You pray for her,” he said as gently as he could. “I’m going to call the police and the hospitals to see whether she’s been in an accident.”
FOUR
Things look very different when you’re a couple of decades older, the adult at the steering wheel, not the child in the backseat. When I drove my ruined car into Appletree, nothing seemed familiar. Not that the town had grown; if anything, Appletree seemed to be decaying. It should have been about closing time for the shops on Main Street, but—what shops? I slowed my Kia to a crawl, peering around, trying to make sense of shadows. If there were shops anymore, they closed early. The heart of the town seemed hollow and empty, as if night were somehow much later here than elsewhere. The Victorian-era town clock still stood at the square, but one of its faces read 9:35, another read 10:17, the third read 9:52. . . . I didn’t look at the fourth face on the clock’s ornate blockhead. Appletree’s dark silence combined with my overstressed condition made the three-story buildings of downtown seem to loom déjà vu surreal. I felt a chill, as if Appletree itself were my enemy, a stalker, lying in wait for me, plotting to abduct me.
Dark Lie (9781101607084) Page 5
