Authors: Maggie Mitchell
“I’m sure we could work something out,” she said, because of course she had never intended to give up her stake in me. She was fine with the idea of picking me up from some juvie home, my fellow delinquents waving good-bye-for-the-weekend as I got into the car with my gowns slung over my arm.
Ha.
“Don’t forget what she’s been through,” Daddy said, though he didn’t say—no one ever did—what that was, exactly.
“She can’t use that as an excuse forever.” Gail squirted a big blob of ketchup into the meatloaf she was mixing. I could tell from her voice that she would give in—she had no choice, really. I did an obnoxious pirouette and then struck a graceful pose. I studied the long dark hairs on Gail’s stirring arm, wondering why she didn’t bleach them. It seemed like the kind of thing she would do.
“She isn’t,” Daddy said. “I am.” He used his firmest voice, the one even Gail gave in to. He folded his newspaper, set it aside, and settled his fists on the table, knuckles touching, giving the question of my fate his full attention.
Daddy suggested, of course, that it was the pageants that should go. There was a logic to this, I had to agree. I would have fought it, but I also would have accepted it. The whole lipstick-and-lace scene had gotten pretty old, and there were other ways to get where I wanted to go. Gail, however, would have none of it. She said pageants were the most positive thing in my life, what kept me grounded, gave me self-esteem. I watched her curiously while she spewed this crap. Then, against his better judgment, Daddy talked himself into believing her. I watched that too, my faith in him fading fast; I was disappointed but hardly surprised. The most interesting question, as far as I was concerned, was this: how the hell were they going to get me away from the boys?
In the end they decided I would go and live with Grandma Mabel for a while. Daddy’s mother. She had moved into a small house in town when Grandpa Luke died, and she’d been there on her own ever since. We didn’t visit Grandma Mabel much. She came to the farm for dinner every couple of weeks, but her house was too small and tidy, I guess, for all of us to invade. Or, I don’t know, maybe she just wasn’t Gail’s biggest fan. I liked it at Grandma Mabel’s. It was orderly and calm, a place where you could think straight. It smelled a little like old people, true, and Grandma Mabel watched horrible stuff on TV. But: no farm, no little brothers, no Gail. Getting off the farm would be the first step. From there I would find a way to get out of Nebraska.
Of course I’d be leaving Daddy, too. I would like to say that part of what I felt was sad; it would make me sound like a better person. Maybe I was sad; maybe I’ve just forgotten. What I remember, though, is that I was ecstatic. I sulked for all I was worth so they wouldn’t catch on.
Lois
I can’t get out of bed. I clutch my snowy white comforter beneath my chin. Under the covers, I lock one hand around my phone. My curtains are closed, but they don’t altogether block the light; I am well aware that it is daytime. Spring sun, cold and bare, streaks my walls.
It’s Friday. I don’t teach today, and I have no meetings scheduled. No one will know if I get up or not.
I have lain here for an hour or more. My agent woke me, calling from New York with news: that the major parts in the movie adaptation of
Deep in the Woods
had finally been cast. She told me the names. I have been curious, but I have tried to divorce myself from that project as much as possible, to protect myself from disappointment—and self-reproach; I sold my right to care about the movie long ago. (The film, my agent, Erin, calls it loftily.) If Hollywood makes a mess of the story—which happens more often than not, I would venture to guess, at least from the author’s point of view—it would be hypocritical of me to complain. My pretty antique sleigh bed, my expensive silk nightgown, my zillion-thread-count sheets, the lovely espresso maker that awaits me in my cold kitchen—all of these pleasant luxuries serve as reminders that I received a tidy little check in exchange for signing away any say whatsoever in the making of the movie.
What I had learned is that most books that are optioned never become movies; someone buys the rights and then sits on them forever. Before the novel’s success, I had half convinced myself that the fate of
Deep in the Woods
would be no different—or that even if it was, I might somehow preserve my comfortable cocoon of anonymity, appearing to the world as Lucy Ledger only when it suited me, and keeping Lois Lonsdale safely out of the public eye. Once I revealed my history to my editor, I realized that this would be far trickier than I had imagined, and when I heard that a movie was actually going forward—and quickly—I suffered my first serious qualm. It finally occurred to me that I might end up seeing some wretchedly botched version of my childhood trauma on the screen, and that this might be—well—a little disturbing, to say the least; and that I had no one to blame but myself.
If I had reason to fear—if the early reviews were bad, for instance—I simply wouldn’t go to see it, I told myself:
if
it even got a screen run,
if
it played anywhere within a hundred miles,
if
it stayed in theaters for more than a week,
if
any of this happened before I was old and stooped and gray.
And if it was a success? If success led to exposure? A secret almost-hope had glimmered into being, unexamined, barely acknowledged:
if success led to exposure, maybe it would lead me back to Carly May, wherever she was, whoever she had become.
In the meantime, my discovery of Chloe Savage had explained why Google searches produced no traces of Carly May Smith’s existence past the year 2000.
And now this.
A shaft of sunlight hits my slightly angled full-length mirror and reflects sharply across the room, falling on my face. With it comes a flash of realization:
she has to know
.
Chloe Savage has read the script. She will have recognized the story. She knows that no one else could have written it. She has sought out the novel from which the screenplay is adapted. Her expensively manicured hands have turned each page. They would have been shaking. With anger? Or simply with emotion? She would have been on the alert for misrepresentation, dissimulation, all forms of narrative misdirection or injustice. She would have found them. She would have tried to enter my mind, to imagine what I had been thinking—just as I am now trying to enter her mind. We are trapped in a telepathic loop: but without him, we’re doomed, I think. He who could read our minds, who could lay them bare to us and to each other.
She took the part.
This is what finally gets me out of bed.
I stumble down the chilly hall and into the kitchen, wrapped tightly in my heavy robe, stiff from oversleep. I am making cappuccino when my phone rings again. I’m tempted not to answer it; my life is already complicated enough, and I don’t want to dilute Carly May’s influence with other voices.
But I do answer my phone, after all, because suddenly I wonder if I have become a bit unbalanced, and refusing to answer the phone strikes me as supporting that possibility. I do want to be sane. “Hello?” I say it with a bit of impatience, in my most businesslike voice—as if I am very, very busy; not at all as if I have slept until practically noon.
No one is there. Or, I should say, no one answers; there’s a peculiar quality to the silence that suggests that someone
is
there, someone who has chosen not to speak. I think I hear breathing, ever so faintly. I think I hear something rustle. I try to discern whether the silence is male or female, hostile or—or what? Something else. Before I draw any conclusions, the silent person hangs up.
Who could it be but Sean? How did he acquire my cell phone number? I try to consider whether I should be afraid, and of what, but realize that—reason aside—I
am
afraid.
Fear: fescennine, furciferous, farraginous, fardel
. I picture Delia’s card, tucked in my wallet; I try to imagine calling her. Could I trust her? Could she tell me anything I don’t know? I push aside the thought of calling Delia, push Sean aside, stow my fear in a little box and stash it at the very back of my mind. I have more important things to think about: the sequel, my contract, my deadline. Yesterday’s message from Amelia, wondering how the book is going.
A little while later I settle at my computer to write. A steaming mug warms my hands. Across the street, the neighbor’s gray cat chases squirrels. Clouds hang heavy and low. All color has been washed from the world. I shift my eyes to the screen and begin typing.
After I have pounded madly at the keyboard for an hour or so, I get up, stretch, and return to the kitchen. I rinse my mug in the sink and toss a bag of popcorn in the microwave. (One must eat.) While it pops I retrieve from my bedside table the file in which I have stashed all the newspaper clippings Sean has left in my faculty mailbox. I flip through them until I find the one I’m looking for. “Kidnapper’s Past Yields Few Clues”:
In the weeks since the recovery of two preteen abductees from kidnapper John Whitlow’s isolated Adirondack hideaway, police have tried to piece together information about the man’s life. A hazy picture has begun to emerge of a painfully shy young man of considerable promise who, in his mid-20s, suddenly changed his name, retreated from the world, and cut all ties with family and friends. Whitlow left little trace in the years that followed until he resurfaced this month as the perpetrator of one of the most highly publicized kidnappings in recent years. Born on May 3, 1965, in Utica, New York, he was christened Randy McDougal but changed his name legally at the age of 21.
Mr. Whitlow’s mother, Tina McDougal, is currently living in Boonville, New York, a small upstate town north of Utica, but claims that it has been a year or more since she has spoken to her only son. With her lives a young boy, two years old, a thin, solemn child with lanky brown hair. The boy, she says, is Whitlow’s son, though she has no records to prove it, and claims not to know the whereabouts of the child’s mother. He doesn’t seem to take after his father, she adds, watching the boy throw a stick for a large dog of uncertain breed.
Though it begins as a routine enough story, the piece reveals its “human interest” leanings more blatantly with each paragraph. It’s the same old angle: how could
this
person become
that
person? How could this ordinary community, this unremarkable woman, this redbrick school, produce
this man?
This monster? Were there signs? His high IQ, his shyness, his obsession with books? His failure to attend the prom?
The article has sparse facts with which to work. His neighboring Uticans aren’t chatty. The mother’s memory seems imperfect. (The article implies that she drinks and even hints at drug use, but stops short of specific assertions about her vices.) His yearbook picture is even more inscrutable than yearbook pictures generally are. One detail has always interested me: Tina McDougal also had a daughter, Zed’s sister, three years younger. She ran away to New York City at sixteen. “Too pretty for her own good,” Tina is quoted as saying. “I always knew she’d end up in trouble.” The girl—Roxanne—had never reappeared. One thing I had forgotten: “Mrs. McDougal says that her son was devastated by his sister’s disappearance. Just out of high school himself, he boarded a bus for New York with the intention of finding her. He claimed upon his return to have been unsuccessful, but his mother has doubts. ‘He didn’t talk much after that trip,’ she says. ‘But in my opinion he did find her, and whatever he found out messed him up so bad he never got over it. That’s what I think.’ She shrugs her thin shoulders. ‘But what do I know?’”
The article does not come out and say that Roxanne became a hooker, but it invites readers to arrive at that conclusion. Carly May had asked him once if he had a sister. His anger had flared.
Roxanne is an important piece of the puzzle, no doubt. But right now, another detail demands my attention, something to which I’ve never given much thought.
It’s the two-year-old boy. Thin, solemn, lanky-haired. He would be—I add swiftly—about twenty.
I forget to listen to the popcorn. The charred bag collapses when I open the microwave door. Dark smoke pours into the room. It smells vile. I toss the bag in the garbage and return to my computer, promising myself vaguely that I’ll go out later for something to eat.
It has begun to rain. Most of the snow has melted, and now it rains almost constantly, washing away the sand and slush, along with whatever else isn’t tied down. The small fierce drops batter my window. I’ve become accustomed to working to a snare drum–like rat-a-tat-tat. Earlier this week I managed to wrench my disgruntled character from his trailer and set him on the road, but his movements still didn’t feel natural to me. I knew, deep down, that I was forcing him. It’s like trying to position a doll whose limbs are supposed to be flexible but actually have a limited range of motion; there’s only so much you can do without resorting to violence—jamming their rubbery joints out of alignment and twisting limbs in their anatomically incorrect sockets.
At which point they tend to break.
Now, though, something settles into place. The young man moves freely and logically through his world. He’s no longer at a loss for words. He is younger than I thought; there’s much that I’ll have to go back and change. Still, he leaves the trailer and his doting but useless grandmother. He heads off to a state university, with the help of financial aid. He’s not the brilliant student they say his father was, but he is not without potential.
I am thinking this over when a figure comes into view on the other side of the street, carved into fragments by my many-paned window: all in black, slightly hunched over, umbrellaless. I can’t see his face, but I know. It’s Sean’s gait, his coat. He’s blurred by the rain, but I see him raise his face to my house as he passes. For a second it seems he is looking directly at me. Quickly I reassure myself that, given the distance, the rain, and the warped old glass, this isn’t possible. But he raises a hand in a possible greeting, something like a salute. I get up to boil water for tea; I’m thoroughly chilled.