Walter, it turned out, was not a particularly fast reader, and although they stayed in Fredericksburg for several days—he had found work with a private moving company, whose owner didn’t mind if Walter’s “little sister” tagged along—he managed to read only the first third of the book in the hours he had available.
But when they moved on at week’s end, Walter was dismayed to find that the next library didn’t have the book. And the library in the next town over had it on the noncirculating shelf, which required library patrons to sign for the book at the front desk, because it was a best seller. He made Elizabeth ask for it.
Say it’s for your mother, Walter said, and she did, only to find herself almost choking with tears. Her mother would never read such a book. Her mother would laugh at such a book.
The librarian didn’t seem to notice how emotional Elizabeth was. She gave her the book, saying only: “We’ve got a waiting list for the circulating copies. More than fifty names.”
Walter stole that copy of the book, an action he later justified at length to Elizabeth. “Taxpayers pay for those books,” he said. “And I’m a taxpayer, and I hardly ever use the library, so why shouldn’t I take just this one book?”
“But you’re not paying taxes now,” Elizabeth said. “Everyone you do jobs for pays you in cash. And you never paid tax in Virginia.”
“Sales tax,” Walter said. “Gasoline tax. I pay my share, and I’m not getting any services back. I’m not like that lady who drives her Cadillac to pick up her food stamps.”
“That’s a myth,” said Elizabeth, who remembered her father discussing the matter heatedly at the dinner table, just last year. Had it really been only a year ago? Now 1984 seemed impossibly distant. Her parents had been Mondale supporters, of course, and Elizabeth had gone to a rally in hopes of catching a glimpse of Geraldine Ferraro. Later, at school, some of the cooler boys had ridiculed her, and she had backpedaled, saying she didn’t like the Democrats, that her parents were for Mondale, but she wasn’t. She felt guilty for that now, and for all the dozens of small betrayals against them, the endless denial of their existence. True, her mom didn’t dress like the other moms and she wore her hair too long, loose, and unstyled. She hadn’t understood when Elizabeth wanted a bubble skirt. She never understood why Elizabeth wanted anything. She said she did; she was a psychiatrist, after all. But Elizabeth could see that her mother was puzzled by her, that she didn’t understand why, in a family of cheerfully loud, opinionated nonconformists, Elizabeth was determined to be like everyone else, never standing out from the crowd.
She had thought it was safer to be that way.
Walter read aloud from the stolen book to Elizabeth at night. He appeared to think it was wonderful, wise, and profound, and some of it was interesting to Elizabeth. The book counseled women to return to a more “natural” relationship with men, to celebrate their “inherent softness” while accepting that men were rough, a little wild. Meanwhile, women should realize that the best men were those who would care for them—not financially, but emotionally. They should not judge men by external things, such as clothes and looks, but learn to find men who were kind and supportive.
“This is the problem,” Walter said. “I do these very exact things and it doesn’t help at all. Not at all.”
Elizabeth was thinking about what it meant to be “natural.” Wouldn’t that mean not shaving your legs, not blow-drying your hair? Her mother might wear her hair long and loose, but she still shaved her legs. Elizabeth had not been able to shave her legs since the day that Walter took her, and they were now covered with soft fuzz. She wouldn’t want anyone to see it, but she liked the feel of it. At night, alone in her bed or sleeping bag, she stroked her legs, felt under her arms. Perhaps she was transforming into something new and formidable, an animal who could fight Walter or run away from him, swift and fleet.
Only she could never get away. Never.
Walter began to prefer his book to the stories that Elizabeth told and sometimes asked her to read from it as he drove. His favorite chapter was about a cold, driven businesswoman who thought she wanted someone exactly like herself.
“‘Maureen, twenty-nine, appears to have it all,’” Elizabeth read. “‘A willowy brunette, she works for a large department-store chain in Texas, part of the team that oversees its expansion plans. By day, she wears tailored suits, her sleek brown hair pulled back in a chignon—’”
“What is that?” Walter asked. “A shin-yon?”
“Like a bun, but fancier,” Elizabeth said. She pushed back her own short curls, which could no longer be arranged into anything. “You spell it c-h-i-g-n-o-n.” She knew that later, when Walter reread this section—and he always reread the sections she had covered during the day—he might challenge her, ask her why she had given him the incorrect word.
“Okay. Go on.”
She had lost her place in the text, needed a moment to locate it. “‘But at night, she lets it fall loose to her shoulders, as she prowls the clubs and nightspots of Dallas, looking for a man. She thinks she knows exactly what she wants—a professional, at her level or above—and she can tick her “no-nos” off on her fingers. “No mama’s boys, still living at home.”’”
“Living at home doesn’t make you a mama’s boy,” Walter put in.
“‘“No mama’s boys, still living at home. No fatties. Bald is okay, if he’s really cute and fit. In short—no losers.” Yet Maureen, for all her calculation and precise ideas about what she wants, never seems to find the right man. Oh, she finds professional men with good salaries and chiseled physiques, but they always disappoint her because Maureen has broken faith with her own femininity. She is trying to be a huntress. She has violated the natural order of things and will never find the right man until she learns to sit back, relax, and wait for him to find her.’”
Elizabeth pondered this. Her hero, Madonna, wore a belt that said BOY TOY, but it was clear that she was the one who toyed with the boys, who used them and moved on. Elizabeth had seen the movie Desperately Seeking Susan four times since it appeared last winter and yet never felt thoroughly satisfied by the ending. There was Rosanna Arquette, cute enough—cute enough that her rock star boyfriend had once even written a song about her—but it seemed strange that she was paired up with the really handsome guy, while Madonna was with the less desirable one, the one with the spiky hair. And, at the very beginning of the movie, Madonna had been in bed with someone else, so it wasn’t true-true love for her and the spiky hair guy, no matter how passionately they kissed. At the movie’s end, they seemed more companionable than lovestruck, chomping popcorn and laughing. Just last month, Madonna had gotten married to Sean Penn as helicopters circled. She was thinner now, not that she had ever been plump, her hair short and sleek. Elizabeth remembered reading about the couple’s decision to wed, how she had proposed to him because she knew it was what he wanted. She wondered what it would be like to know that a man wanted to marry you, to have the confidence to ask first. The author of this book clearly would not approve of Madonna.
“I wonder,” Walter said, “if Maureen ever found anyone?”
Elizabeth looked up, startled. “I don’t think she’s a real person.”
“Of course she is. It’s nonfiction. Says so right on the spine.” He pointed to the library label. Elizabeth wondered if they should scrape that off, if they would get in trouble if someone glimpsed it, so obviously far from home. But maybe if someone reported them for the stolen library book, the police would finally find her.
“I mean, she’s real, but they probably changed her name and some details.”
“Why would they do that?”
“I don’t know why, I only know that they do. My mom explained it to me once. She has a friend who works for one of the women’s magazines and they create these—I can’t remember the word. They find real stories, only the people are kind of fake.”
“Oh, no. Maureen is real,” Walter said. “Real as Mr. Steinbeck and Charley a
nd the people they met.”
Elizabeth felt a small flush of panic. What would happen if Walter found out that she had been making up adventures for John Steinbeck and his poodle? What if Walter figured out Travels with Charley was in the library, decided to read it? He didn’t like deception of any kind. Yet he was allowing himself to be deceived by this book. It’s true, Elizabeth hadn’t always understood the license that such writers employed, she had once read Seventeen and Mademoiselle and believed that every word was gospel. But she was glad when her mother explained to her that the stories were not quite true, that the writers shaped real people’s stories and matched them to these glamorous, made-up people because that’s what people wanted to read about. Walter, however, would not be pleased by this information.
“I’d like to meet this Maureen,” Walter said. “I bet she’s still single. Of course, she’s older than me, and that’s probably one of her rules, too. Women are funny that way. They ought to be grateful that a younger man finds them attractive. One day they will, but then it will be too late and no one will want them. I never understood that, in high school, how the freshman girls all wanted to go out with juniors and seniors, instead of freshmen.”
Elizabeth, who was missing her sophomore year of high school, thought about the boys her age. They were so small, most of them. Not just short, but small. Even Elizabeth, who was not particularly tall or filled out, felt huge among them.
“I could show that Maureen a good time,” Walter said. “She’d be begging for it.”
If the book hadn’t been open on her lap, Elizabeth might have brought her knees to her chest, hugged herself. Walter had never touched her. Well, never touched her in that way. Sometimes, he tugged the neck of her jacket, if he thought she was walking too fast, or yanked her arm to change direction. She had lain in bed, those first nights, wrists and ankles tied, expecting he would force himself on her. He had raped the other girl, the one he buried. He must have. He never said as much, but she was sure of that. She thought about that girl often, although all she knew of her was her first name. Maude. Such an old-fashioned name. The kids at school had probably teased her, called her—Maude the Odd. Unless she was really, really, really pretty and popular. Pretty girls could survive anything. But a pretty, popular girl would never have gotten into Walter’s truck. Elizabeth wouldn’t have, given the choice, and she wasn’t that pretty or popular. Still, she knew better than to get in some strange man’s truck.
Then again, what if Walter had been driving along Route 40 and a sudden rain had come up and he had stopped and offered her a ride? She had taken a ride from a man under those circumstances, just once. He had asked her where she wanted to go and she was scared to give her home address, scared to let her parents know she had hitched a ride, so she told him she was headed to the bowling alley, the Normandy Lanes, only a mile or so away. He nodded thoughtfully, started in that direction, but then announced: “The rain’s too heavy. I’m going to wait it out. Better safe than sorry.” He had pulled into a parking lot, then reached across to where she was—and opened the glove compartment, bringing out a little cut-glass bottle of amber liquid, from which he took a long swallow.
“You shouldn’t drink and drive,” Elizabeth had said.
“And you probably shouldn’t hitchhike,” he’d said. There was surprisingly little menace in his words. He took another swallow, sat there with the motor running, listening to a radio station that played oldies. When the rain slackened, he took her to the bowling alley.
So, yes, Elizabeth had gotten into a strange man’s car, once. But would she have allowed Walter to give her a ride on a bright, warm August day? She thought not. Why had Maude agreed? Had she agreed, or had Walter grabbed her by the arm, as he had seized Elizabeth, and forced her into the cab of the truck?
Walter seldom spoke of Maude, except in passing, as a warning. He liked to talk about the girls he saw, though. “I could show her a good time,” he would say when he glimpsed a girl with a good figure. “I know what I’m doing. These girls, they sell themselves cheap, don’t realize what’s out there, waiting for them. They’re too busy thinking about movie stars.”
And now he was speaking about Maureen that way in great, horrible detail, yet so matter-of-factly that one might think he was talking about a trip to the grocery store. What he would put where first—his mouth on the hollow of her throat, his tongue in her ear, then his fingers—Oh, please stop, Elizabeth thought, desperate to block out his voice, but Walter continued his play-by-play. Not even he seemed to find it sexy. He might have been reciting a set of instructions he had memorized. It was like listening to a seduction scene from a romance novel, but one read by a robot, so it was reduced to a road map, where he would go when.
“She’d be begging, begging for it,” he said. “But still, I would make her wait. A woman like Maureen, she needs to be broken down. That’s what the book is trying to explain. Women have to wait. Their anatomy dictates that. They wait, they receive. Men pursue, men give.”
Elizabeth, who had read the book almost as many times as Walter—it was, after all, the only reading material available when they were in the car or in a motel room, except for a copy of The Godfather he had allowed her to purchase at a yard sale—did not think the book, awful as it was, meant to say all that. But she knew better than to argue.
“Look at that girl,” Walter said suddenly, slowing the truck. “Look at the shine on her.”
19
THAT EVENING, ONCE THE CHILDREN were asleep—well, Albie was asleep, Iso was probably under the covers, sending texts on the un-satisfactory cell phone they had given her—Eliza told Peter about the second letter. She wished now that she hadn’t shredded it, that he could read it himself, if only so she wouldn’t have to relive it. He listened without comment, although he raised an eyebrow at the peculiar turns of phrase she was able to re-create. Dean of Death Row. The appeals process is formidable. I won’t bore you with it. Eliza realized she had practically memorized the letter word for word.
“What do you want to do?”
“I don’t know,” Eliza said. “I feel as if this is out of my control, all of a sudden. This woman—or Walter—could go to the media anytime, tell them who I am and where I am.”
“I can’t imagine a responsible news organization that would write about you, if you weren’t interested in cooperating,” said Peter. He wasn’t arguing with her, only puzzling things out, trying to imagine every angle.
“Unfortunately, the world is full of irresponsible news organizations. What if she found Jared Garrett? Do you realize how exposed we are, how exposed everyone is?”
She showed him what happened when she plugged their address into Google maps, then clicked through to street view. There was their house. Of course, this was no revelation to Peter, whose career as a journalist had taken off, in part, because of his expertise with computer-assisted research. Still, she could tell that he found this image as arresting as she did. Looking at the photo of the white brick house—complete with the clichéd picket fence—Eliza could not help imagining the score of a scary film pulsing beneath the placid image. Barbara LaFortuny had seen this house, had driven by it, then reported back to Walter—what, exactly? Anything was too much. The woman was probably gathering a dossier on Peter, the easiest household member to track, the one who had left the largest public trail. But would she stop there? What if she showed up on the sidelines at one of Iso’s soccer games? Or followed Eliza en route to school with Albie, exciting his imagination, keying him up to ask all sorts of questions. Who is that lady? Why does she want to talk to you? Why does she have a scar on her face? What if Barbara LaFortuny tried to befriend Reba, sneaking scraps through the fence? What if she poisoned Reba, who had growled at her? Would she—
A child’s all-too-familiar scream tore through the night.
“Albie,” Eliza shouted, letting him know that she was coming.
“Albie,” Peter repeated. “I hoped this was behind us.”
I hoped a lot of things were behind us, Eliza thought as she took the stairs, two at a time.
ALBIE’S NIGHTMARES HAD STARTED shortly after they moved to London. Every pediatrician and book that Eliza consulted said it was normal for a child to have bad dreams in the wake of an enormous change, but Albie’s nightmares seemed unusual to Eliza. They were incredibly detailed, for one thing, with such intense imagery and plot twists that she almost itched to write them down. It was interesting, too, to see how his unconscious reshaped the innocent stuff of the daylight hours. A book such as, say, In the Night Kitchen, which Eliza found wildly creepy, did not affect Albie at all. But other, almost bland icons popped up. The Poky Little Puppy foamed at the mouth. (She blamed Peter for this, because he had shown the children To Kill a Mockingbird.) Madeline, the usually admirable Parisian girl, turned out to be a witch, the kind of person who pinched people and then lied about it. Peter Rabbit seldom escaped Farmer McGregor’s pitchfork. That particular dream had started after Eliza had eaten a rabbit dish in front of Albie at a London restaurant they particularly liked.
But the more striking aspect of Albie’s nightmares was that Iso usually appeared, and always in peril. Tonight, between heaving sobs and sips of water, he told a chilling story. The family had gone to a new bakery and Iso had refused to wear her glasses, not that Iso wore glasses in real life. (Eliza and Peter glanced at each other over Albie’s head; they recognized this detail from The Brady Bunch, the movie, which Albie loved beyond reason. He did not experience it as a hip, winking joke, but as an honest exhortation to live exuberantly, indifferent to what others thought was cool. Burst into song, chat up carjackers, be nice to everyone, and you will prevail.) The family could not enjoy the new bakery with Iso gone, and they searched for her frantically. They found her in a storeroom filled with bags of flour and she was flat, as if someone had rolled her into a gingerbread girl—and taken her legs.
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