Betty Flynn
The signature eliminated any hope I had that it was a hoax or elaborate forgery—the romantic, oversized loops in each y were enough to convince me. That, and the melodramatic tone she struck with every sentence. Not everyone can be a fighter. Perhaps it was sheer ego, but I was convinced she had written that line just for me. As for why she’d allowed the letter to languish with her application, I can only guess. Perhaps she had second thoughts about letting Calder so clearly off the hook; I like to think she knew that I would find it, that she was, in her own way, deferring to my judgment in terms of what to do.
I knew I should send it to Emily or Dad or even Owen. Emily could keep it as insurance, in case Calder ever turned up; Dad could put it in the Messenger, prove at last what Calder really was. And Owen would at least have something to corroborate the story he’d told the police.
Betty might have wanted to relieve Calder of the responsibility, but her wishes did not interest me all that much just then. How selfish could she be, to leave me and expect my forgiveness to extend to him, too? I wasn’t sure I couldn’t muster up enough for even her. And I was sure as hell not going to take the chance that someday a jury might take her at her word. Did the letter have a greater chance of convicting Calder or exonerating him?
Maybe it was just my own selfishness, but I knew I didn’t want anyone else to ever read it. I had earned the final glimpse into her troubled heart. All I had to do was picture Shelly reciting portions of the letter to her cunty little friends, and muscle memory took care of the rest. My lighter came out of my pocket, I spun the metal wheel until the flame caught. I held that little orange thumb of fire to the corner of the page until it burned, and I let it burn until there was nothing left but ash.
• • •
Nobody talks about the Millers. Nobody speculates about what might have happened to Calder; nobody ever claims to see his ghost. The same collective amnesia, that tacit agreement to pretend it had never happened, was applied to Calder more thoroughly, more permanently, than it had ever been to Betty. Still alive or not, Calder is gone in a way she never will be—like a tumor that’s been neatly excised, restoring the body to health. After defending him so staunchly, Williston’s only way to cope with the shame is to ignore the whole episode, although I’m sure there have been a few late-night conversations at Charlie’s about how they could have all misjudged him so badly. But mostly now it’s his name they never speak.
They keep seeing Betty. Even after the theater was rebuilt, there were occasional complaints about lights that flickered without cause, strange noises coming from the catwalk, crucial wardrobe items going missing minutes before the curtain went up on opening night. The students still don’t like to be in there alone, and two kids were actually expelled several years after Betty’s death for locking one of their classmates in the theater overnight as a prank. I was impressed and heartened when I heard about that; everyone involved was too young to have actually known Betty personally, but apparently her specter looms large over Williston’s consciousness, and I’d be lying if I said I didn’t take at least some credit for that.
The grave in the woods where Calder and Leroy buried her has been long filled in and reclaimed by the forest, and I doubt anyone could identify the spot exactly, probably not even me. But it’s still a place where the kids go at night on a dare, maybe a little drunk or stoned, half hoping they might see her ghost, half terrified they actually will. Sometimes they claim to see her, in one of her old vintage dresses and painstakingly applied red lipstick, but more frequent are the reports of just one of those strange feelings—a sudden gust of frigid air, a hint of movement in the peripheral vision. I always wonder which of the storytellers are the out-and-out liars, and which ones truly believe they’ve seen her ghost. The liars I can sympathize with; it’s the others I find irrationally loathsome, those people with no connection to Betty who manage to convince themselves she would in any way reveal herself to them. Not that it would be so out of character for her. She always did revel in attention and was not particularly choosy about the source. Maybe I’m just jealous because I’ve still never seen her.
If I wanted people to remember her, then I suppose I got my wish, but it’s a cheap sham, cold comfort, whatever. In my occasionally cocky moments, I tell myself I pulled off something of a resurrection, bringing her memory back to life in a place so hell-bent on forgetting her, but it doesn’t change the fact that I couldn’t save my friend, that in the end the unlights won and took her from me. As a girl, she couldn’t hack it, but now, in her own peculiar way, she’ll live forever. I don’t believe in ghosts, but I’m haunted just the same. Not in the same way I was that summer—grief does fade, and anger, too, much to my surprise.
Loss is a strange alchemy that changes you forever, remakes you into someone, something else, but even that I could have dealt with; sooner or later, everyone does. It’s the price of admission for this whole human experience.
If Betty had never asked Calder to kill her, would she still be alive? Would she have found somebody else to do it? How many people need to hear that proposal before you find one who’s just curious enough to take you up on it? When I thought Calder was a charming psychopath who had the whole town fooled, I slept better at night. But now I don’t think he would have done it if she hadn’t begged him to. When I ride the subway, I wonder how many of those strangers are convinced they’d never hurt a soul, unaware they have something sleeping inside them that could be woken up if the perfect circumstances came along, if they were issued a direct invitation in just the right way. I think about what Calder said in the sweat lodge, that this is all made up. It could fall apart at any minute.
I ask myself sometimes, if I could trade the lives of everyone in the sweat lodge that night to have Betty back, would I do it? The truth is, I go back and forth. I like to think that when I reached into that rock pit so we could all get out alive, I evened out some kind of cosmic score that let me off the hook for her death, but I don’t know if I believe that, either. Maybe we don’t want to know what we’re capable of, maybe we’re better off not knowing, but on those days when I’m convinced that we all unwittingly have murder in our hearts, I look at the scars on my hands and I remember that it works both ways.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS.
Thanks to my agent, Brianne Johnson; my editor, Alex Ulyett; and the entire team at Viking, including Ken Wright, Krista Ahlberg, Jennifer Dee, Jim Hoover, and Samira Iravani, who designed the gorgeous and spooky cover of my dreams. Thanks to Sharyn November for giving me the freedom to pursue this project in the first place.
I am deeply grateful to all my friends for their patience, encouragement, and support as I wrote a book that took me to some pretty dark places. Thanks to the fellas of the WSC, the ladies of FMH, and all the misfit toys of Red Hook, Brooklyn, who have made my home so much more than just the place where I live. Special thanks to George Briggs for being my Maine consultant and answering my many questions about growing up there; and to Erica and Craig Berkenpas, in whose Nairobi attic much of this book was written, for giving me a second home halfway around the world.
Thank you to my family: my parents, whose belief in me has never wavered; my brother, who still makes me laugh harder than anybody; and all of my cousins and relatives. They are amazing raconteurs, all of them, and everything I know about storytelling I learned from listening closely at family gatherings.
Finally, thanks to Sarah McCarry for never letting me give up the fight.
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