After Her (14 page)

After the sentence was spoken, the rest of us repeated it back, over and over. Particularly in the dark, delivered while studying the motionless body of one of our friends, this had the effect of freaking us out.

I didn't know much about what kinds of deaths the group used to construct for one another before the murders began, because they only included me after, but for all the times I played the game, the favorite choice as a reason why the person died was that she'd been done in by the Sunset Strangler.

“She was making out with her boyfriend and the killer came along and strangled them both” was one. “She was fourteen years old.”

“She was only twelve, practicing her routine for cheering tryouts, when the Sunset Strangler raped and murdered her” was another. “He took off all her clothes and left her holding her pom-poms.”

Sometimes, if we did Light as a Feather with a boy, we varied the scenario a little: “He was hitchhiking to the mall and a guy picked him up, and he noticed piano wire on the front seat, and the guy said, ‘Now I have to kill you.' ”

Once we'd said these words enough times, the words of the chant would change, and we'd go back to the ones that remained the constant refrain:
Light as a feather, stiff as a board.
The only one who didn't speak was the person playing the body, because she was supposed to be dead.

Now came the surprising part. After all these years, I still don't understand how this worked, but invariably, after enough chanting, it did.

With nothing but the two fingers of each person touching the body in the middle of the circle, we'd lift that person off the ground. To those of us holding it up, the body had come to seem weightless.

The body only stayed up a few seconds, but the effect was amazing and terrifying, both at once. After we set the body down again and turned on the lights, we'd laugh almost uncontrollably, hugging each other and screaming. We'd fix ourselves tacos or rip open a bag of chips, and when we did, we would be ravenous. Someone would put on music—the louder the better.

Later, back at home, I told Patty about it.

“Give me a break,” she said. “Those kids are turning you into a nutcase.”

I swore to her that it happened. I had been the body myself one time. Nobody dropped me. I floated.

“If just kissing a boy makes you go crazy this way,” she said, “I hate to think what actually having sex does to a person.”

I
READ A BOOK ONCE,
A Night to Remember,
about the sinking of the
Titanic,
and how certain terrible men had pushed the women and children out of the lifeboats and leaped in themselves to keep from drowning. I knew, reading that story, what my sister would have done: jump out of the boat to give me her spot.

We looked alike, but different. I knew people considered me the prettier one—a fact that would have been a source of resentment to most sisters but not to Patty, who seemed to take my looks as a source of pride, as she did my writing skills. Even before her growth spurt made her a star at basketball, she was the sporty one, where I was more of a reader and a thinker. Patty teased me sometimes for how long I'd spend standing in front of the mirror in our room, checking myself out or trying on clothes. Patty never cared much about clothes, but she positioned herself in front of the mirror for another reason: to practice her baseball swing or an imaginary hook shot.

Because I was bossy, and she was endlessly compliant to my commands—and always up for whatever I proposed we do—I established the practice, early, of playing school, with myself as the teacher and Patty my one student.

When we were little, I'd made her sit on the floor and gave her horrible assignments, which she executed without complaint. (
Rip off twenty squares of toilet paper and draw a different shape of poop on every one. Write the letter A one hundred times with your left hand.
Her only issue with this one: she couldn't count to a hundred.) Because of our school game, she learned how to read young, and when praised, she was quick to say that I'd been the one who taught her.

Back when our parents were still together, I found a pair of police handcuffs on our father's dresser once and thought it would be interesting to handcuff Patty's wrist to my ankle. The cuffs were snapped shut before it occurred to me to check for the key, but there was none around. We had to stay in our odd positions—she crawling behind me with her locked-down wrist—until our father got home from work many hours later.

“It wasn't so bad, Rach,” she whispered to me, after he placed the key in the lock. “I got to pretend I was your pet dog.”

Given a choice of any activity, however exciting (a choice we were never offered), the one she would have chosen every time, with only one exception, was to be with me. Growing up as we did—less hovered over or even watched than any children I've ever known or heard of, without even the dubious education in the ways of the world that would have been provided by the presence of television—we were both more mature and independent than other children, at the same time that we remained almost hopelessly naive. I even more than my younger sister, strangely enough.

And yet there was this: of the two of us, it was Patty, not me, who could look sharply at our father and speak of him critically when she felt our mother being hurt. About certain things—like the fact that he drove an Alfa, but never came through with money to fix her teeth—my sister said nothing. But she was increasingly critical of his failure to support our mother and, most of all, of the way he kept saying he was coming over to see us and didn't. She came to view the excitement that always accompanied his brief appearances to see us with a certain skepticism, where I accepted his absence as confirmation of our father's importance. Though she never seemed about to give up the hope that he'd make it to one of her basketball games and sit through all four quarters, as he never had.

“He's just so busy with the case,” I told her.

“You make excuses for him,” she said one time.

“And you're mean.”

“I love him,” Patty said. “But our dad is a loser.”

We didn't speak to each other all day after she said that. We did not engage in our usual round of Drive-In Movie on the hill out behind Helen's house. That night, when I came in from outside—no fun by myself; I had wandered up and down the street missing my sister—I stepped into our room to find a masking tape line down the middle of the floor, and a sign:
KEEP OUT
.

But it was Patty who broke the silence, as we lay in the dark later that night in the unfamiliar silence.

“Let's not do this ever again, okay?” she said.

“Okay.”

I couldn't see her face in the dark, but I could see it in my head then. Patty had the kind of eyes—there must be a name for this, but I've never known it—in which the white remains visible around the entire iris, which had the effect of making it seem, at times, as if she was not simply looking at, but drilling into you. She seemed to possess an unwavering ability to cut to the truth of things.

“I'm your best friend in the world,” she said.

“I know.”

M
Y SISTER HAD BECOME THE
undisputed star of the JV team. Center.

That night in bed, with Linda Ronstadt singing to us in the dark—
Some say a heart is just like a wheel; if you bend it, you can't mend it—
I had told Patty that Teddy Bascom had taken off my shirt and touched my nipples. Now she wanted to know what it felt like.

“Did you want Teddy doing these things?” my sister said. “Or was it more like this feeling that you were supposed to?”

I thought about this. It was a harder question than a person might think.

“He definitely has sex appeal,” I told her. “It's a thing some boys give off, like a smell, only a good smell. Like cologne. I think Dad has it, in a grown-up version.”

Patty wanted me to elaborate. She had yet to experience the effects of anybody's sex appeal, though she greatly admired Larry Bird—a fact that could not possibly have had anything to do with his looks.

“You get this feeling,” I told her. “There's this place inside your body you never knew was there before, like a room you walked into and turned on the lights. It makes you uncomfortable being in there, but you don't want to leave.”

“That's how I get when I'm taking a foul shot,” she said. “My skin starts tingling. It's like the whole world goes away and there's nothing but me and the basket.”

I wasn't quite sure if I got the connection, but I decided to leave that one alone.

“Do you think Mom used to feel that way about Dad?” she said.

I thought a long time before answering. In all this time, watching how my father was with other women, I'd never actually thought about him with our mother, back when they were young. I never thought about our parents kissing each other, our parents being in love.

“I guess she must have,” I said. “Look how all the others act around him.”

“He let her down,” Patty said. “He didn't keep his promise.”

I had always blamed our mother for not keeping our father around. Always, in the past, I'd looked at her as the one who messed up, for losing him—not just for herself, but for us too. I had seen her as a loser. Now my sister was suggesting a different picture, in which it was our father, not our mother, who'd been the weak one.

“He's just one of those people,” I said. “The type that everybody wants to be around. What did you want him to do, stay around here and mow the lawn or something? And carry out the trash?”

“Yes,” she said, quiet now. “Yes, I did want him to do that. That's what fathers are supposed to do. If home is where we were, yes, I did expect him to stick around.”

 

Chapter Seventeen

J
ust after Veterans Day, another girl disappeared—number eight. This time it happened in Muir Woods, just barely out of sight of the visitors' center, amazingly, but in an overgrown spot where a couple of old-growth redwoods lay fallen on the forest floor, having no doubt concealed the killer as he lay in wait for his victim.

Her name was Naomi Berman—an eighteen-year-old from New York City who'd flown out to San Francisco with her mother just the day before to visit Stanford; her interview was scheduled for the next afternoon. To pass the time until then, her mother had signed the two of them up for a tour through Marin County. It was the last tour of the day, and the tour guide had given everyone forty-five minutes to explore Muir Woods, but the mother had stayed on the bus, feeling carsick. After an hour passed, and Naomi hadn't returned, the guide contacted a ranger.

An hour later another ranger found her body. I didn't ask, and nobody would have told me if I had, but no doubt he found her in the naked prayer position, with the electrical tape over her eyes. Shoelaces gone.

That night in bed, I couldn't stop thinking about the murder. I didn't want to. I made myself think about all the things I had loved that my sister and I used to do—trying on clothes we'd never be able to afford at the mall, when we went for our Slurpees, going out on the mountain together, lying on the grass, talking about our dreams for the future, when she'd be playing for the WBL and I'd be traveling around the world, doing research on international spying for my books. Lying on the four-poster bed at the Kerwins' house with Alison and the other girls, flipping through
Seventeen
and deciding, if we could be any of the models, which ones we'd be.

Sometime in the night, another one of my visions woke me. I saw the body of a brown-haired girl lying with her skirt pushed up and her panties off, on a bed of moss—a necklace a little like Alison's friend Heather's looped around one hand, along with her camera. I saw something else a little way off: a small dog with a red collar, peeing on a tree.

As much as I wanted to see his face, the killer never appeared in these scenes that came to me, though I caught sight of his hands, and his feet, and on that one awful occasion, his penis. Most of the time though, for however long the movie played out in my head, what I saw was the face of a girl beholding her killer in her last moments of life. This was a terrible sight to take in, and one that offered nothing to assist my father in locating the killer.

But the presence of this dog could help. It wasn't a lot, but it might offer a clue. Maybe the dog owner—if we could locate him—had seen something that day. Maybe the dog owner was the killer himself.

I
KNEW IT WOULD BE
hard to explain the significance of my vision to my father, but I felt compelled, this time, to try. I called him up at work.

“I need to speak with Detective Torricelli,” I said. “This is his daughter.”

A minute later, he came on the line. “Farrah!” he said. “Is everything okay?”

“I need to talk to you,” I said. “I need you to come and get me, so we can go someplace and talk.”

“What's going on, honey?” he said. “Is it some boy? Did some boy hurt you?”

“I can't talk about it over the phone,” I said. “I need to see you.”

He was there on Morning Glory Court ten minutes later. He opened the car door for me, the way he always did. (“Any boy who doesn't open the door for you is a boy you show to the door,” my father always told us. “This is how it's supposed to be,” he'd say, making sure my fingers were out of the way. “Don't ever forget that.”)

In the car, on the way to Marin Joe's, my father was quiet. I knew he was waiting until we were in our booth. I was waiting too.

Normally, he would have shot the breeze with the waitress and maybe stopped by a few tables, saying hello to people he knew or ones who knew him anyway. That day we went straight to our corner. He told the waitress we'd have our usual.

“Okay,” he said, when she had set his coffee down for him, and my chocolate milk. “Tell me about it.”

My father was quiet for a minute. He was familiar with my history, over the years, of having seemed to know certain things without explanation, though until now, the visions I'd told him about had never been particularly alarming. But he, alone among the members of our family, had maintained that what I possessed was not about some extra sense or supernatural gift. Just strong powers of observation combined with an above-average imagination.

“I've been having these visions,” I told him. For a few months, I said, pictures had been coming to me, of the murdered girls. Sometimes after the murders happened. Sometimes right before. I hadn't laid eyes on the killer in these visions, but I had seen the looks on the girls' faces when they'd caught sight of him and realized what he was about to do to them. In my most recent vision, I told my father, there'd been a dog.

As a detective pursuing every lead, my father might have asked to hear more at this point, and maybe if I hadn't been his daughter he would have. As it was, his face changed. A look came over him that I hardly ever saw: hard, and unyielding. Not just a closed door, but a locked one. If I hadn't known differently, I would have thought he was angry at me, instead of what he was, which was worried.

“You need to stop this right now,” he said. “I don't want to hear you talk this way ever again, baby.”

“But it could tell you something,” I told him. “If you could figure out who the dog belonged to. Maybe someone else saw him that day.”

“Locating the Sunset Strangler is my job, not yours,” he said. “Your job is to be a kid. Go to school. Make friends. Find out about boys, but carefully. Look after your mother and your sister. Leave the detective work to your old man.”

“You don't understand,” I said. “I know things that could help you solve the case.”

“I don't want to hear you talking about this anymore, Farrah,” he said. “Take it from me, this stuff can mess you up bad if you let it.”

He lit a Lucky and inhaled deeply.

“Put this garbage out of your head,” my father told me. “It can eat you alive.”

I
WENT TO SCHOOL EVERY
day. But I barely paid attention to anything the teachers said. My mind was occupied with the killer, my father, and Teddy Bascom. That took up all the space I had. My grades that year—which had never been distinguished—fell lower than my normal B-minus average.

My mother didn't seem to mind. When she was young, she had harbored a dream of going to college, where she would have studied English, or maybe library science. But whatever ambition she'd possessed once had drained out of her long ago, and now she seemed not only devoid of ambitions for herself but lacking any expectation that her daughters might possess ambitions either. Maybe the thought of wanting something she couldn't give us was too sad, or maybe she'd concluded that expecting nothing would save us the disappointment when nothing turned up.

So unlike many of the kids we knew, Patty and I never felt pressure from our mother—or our father either—to excel in school. Our mother never checked on our homework or inquired about particular projects or assignments. She loved books but seemed to make no connection between the experience of reading and learning and that of sitting in a classroom at our school. And in fact she had a point there.

Whatever the reason, report card days—so filled with anxiety for most kids in our class, and triumph for a few—were for us no different from any others. We forged our mother's signature on our report cards ourselves most of the time, next to the Bs, Cs, and occasional Ds—though if we'd asked, she would have signed them willingly enough, with or without studying the grades and comments written inside.

“I know who you are,” she said. “I don't need your teachers to tell me.”

Sometimes I passed in my homework. Other times not. If I did, I felt no particular need to garner distinction—my main objective was to draw as little attention to myself as possible. I hardly ever even showed one of my teachers a story I'd written, though I wrote constantly. My writing had nothing to do with school, and with my teachers, it didn't matter if nobody ever noticed me.

So why did I care so much to win the favor of this boy, Teddy, who never showed me kindness, or even much in the way of interest? Only I did.

Our relationship, if you could call it that, had a predictable inertia. At lunch I sat with Alison and her friends—an honor never bestowed on me before that year, and one I recognized as having the potential to be withdrawn at any moment—but if Teddy gave indication that he'd like me to come and sit with him, that's what I did. We seldom spoke.

Every day after seventh period, Teddy would wait at my locker for me, and we'd walk to the bus together, also without exchanging more than a few words. At this point, I no longer needed an invitation to go over to Alison's after school; it was just understood we were all headed there, unless Teddy had practice that afternoon, in which case he'd tell me what time it started—not to ask if I was coming; he assumed it. He always rested his hand on the small of my back, but less in a spirit of any affection, I knew—as my father would have—than to steer me in the direction he chose, like the controller on a video game.

He steered. I followed.

“What's happened to you?” Patty said. “You turned into a zombie, all because of a dumb boy.”

B
ECAUSE
I
ALWAYS TOLD
P
ATTY
everything, I had confided in her that Teddy now took my shirt off on a daily basis. Also my bra—though having done this, he had not found much. She offered the opinion that he didn't sound to her like a very nice person. I knew she was right.

Still, I went over to Alison's every day, and now when I did, the pressure was stronger than ever to take off not just my shirt but my pants too. So far I had resisted the pants part, but it was getting more difficult. When Alison's boyfriend, Chase, showed up, they'd disappear into her bedroom; when they emerged eventually, her hair was messed up and her lips puffy looking. Soleil and Heather usually went home when the boys got there, or they went up to the kitchen to make slice-and-bake cookies or melt cheese for nachos. This left me in the rec room alone with Teddy.

Nothing in his approach was what you could call romantic, and as my father's daughter—reminded by him all my life that I was beautiful, wonderful, perfect—this was a disappointment. Not that I'd believed everything my father told me about myself, but I had assumed it was part of what boys were supposed to do, to say these things or come up with some kind of compliment anyway, even if it was nothing more than liking your sweater.

Teddy took the no-nonsense approach.

“Hey, babe,” he said, settling into the beanbag. He patted his crotch then, as indication of what he wanted.

I'd sit on his lap. He put an arm around me—strictly a gesture of ownership. “You see me get that shot from midcourt in the first quarter at practice?”

“Really great,” I told him, though I hadn't caught it.

He was rubbing his hand on my mostly nonexistent left breast. This led, within seconds, to the buttons on my shirt. “Why don't you take this off?” he said.

So I did. Back before we'd gotten to this point, one of my main concerns had been the prospect of Teddy seeing my ridiculous training bra. My mother had bought the bra for me months ago, but it was more along the lines of what a fourth grader would wear—a tube of spandex stretched across the front of me like a bandage—than the style the other girls had, the ones who'd gotten their periods and had a shape.

Teddy had little time to notice this, since he always took my bra off immediately now, without studying it, or me. The look on his face when he did—dogged, purposeful, mechanical—reminded me of Mr. Pollack trying to get his lawn mower started.

“You can touch me here,” he said, putting my hand on the crotch of his pants. I gathered this was supposed to be a privilege, though I was unsure what to do once he'd placed my hand on the spot. He was rubbing against me, so I didn't need to do anything, it turned out.

The picture came to me of the cover of the
Sticky Fingers
album, with Mick Jagger's fly on the front, and the zipper my sister and I used to play with. Now that my hand was on a real zipper, with a real penis pressing up against it from all I could tell, it didn't seem like fun anymore.

He put his mouth on one of my nipples and chewed on it, hard. Up until this point I'd been totally silent, but this made me cry out.

“Getting worked up, huh, babe?” he said.
Never gonna stop. Give it up.
On the radio again: that song.

I thought about the Sunset Strangler.

As I had feared, Teddy was unzipping his fly now. He had taken his penis out. I didn't want to look down.