Missing Pieces (10 page)

When Sara went out that night, supposedly to rehearse for an upcoming fashion show at school, I had no idea she was lying. Or maybe I did. Past experience had taught me to view everything Sara said as suspect. But, like a wife who has chosen to stay with her faithless husband, I had made a conscious decision to believe the things she told me until presented with conclusive evidence to the contrary. Sara being Sara, this usually didn’t take long.

The first time I’d caught Sara in an outright lie was soon after she turned fifteen. We’d been out for dinner, it was raining, and Sara dropped her purse in the parking lot as we raced for the car. About ten empty packages of cigarettes tumbled out of the overstuffed leather bag and onto the wet pavement.

“They’re not mine,” she said, quickly scooping them up and stuffing them back inside her purse as I watched in awed silence.

“They’re not yours,” I repeated.

“They belong to a friend. She collects them.”

Now most people would immediately dismiss this for the ridiculous fabrication it was and get in out of the rain. But when it’s
your
kid with the ridiculous yarn, it’s a different story. “Your friend collects
empty
cigarette packages?”

“Yes, and her mother would be really mad if she found out, so she asked me to keep them for her.” Sara vaulted to her feet, the empty, and now soaking-wet, cigarette packages safely back inside her bag and out of sight. “I don’t smoke,” she insisted. “They’re not mine.”

I struggled to believe her. People collected all sorts of weird things, I told myself. Why not empty cigarette packages? If her friend’s mother would be upset at this, well, then it was perfectly logical for her to ask Sara to keep them for her. This is what I actually tried to convince myself. And then common sense prevailed and the therapist took control. “You say you’re not smoking, and I’d love to believe you,” I began. “You know how dangerous smoking is, and I know I can’t follow you around twenty-four hours a day. If you’re going to smoke, you’re going to smoke. I only hope that if you
are
smoking, you’re smart enough to quit before you become addicted.” And I left it at that. And, of course, she
was
smoking, and she
wasn’t
smart enough to quit before she became addicted. Why was I surprised?

The ten empty cigarette packages were followed by the five full bottles of beer which I found in her closet while searching for the white blouse she’d asked me to iron. How dare I go snooping around her closet! she screamed later, as if I should have realized that her white blouse lay
in a crumpled heap on the floor along with most of her other worldly possessions. And, of course, the beer wasn’t hers—she was merely keeping it for a friend.

There was the day she skipped school to go shopping in Fort Lauderdale, the weekend she snuck off to Miami to see the Grateful Dead. I’m sure I wasn’t the only mother not to mourn the passing of Jerry Garcia, however much I might have enjoyed his music in my youth.

Sweaters disappeared from my drawers. Half our CDs went missing. Sara stole money from my purse and denied it outright to my face. The adoring creature who’d once looked at me with something approaching awe was replaced by a creature who glared at me with such utter contempt that it shook me to the bones. I told myself that this transformation was simply a rite of passage, that it was Sara’s unconscious way of separating from me, of becoming her own person. But it still hurt. That’s what the psychology texts don’t prepare you for—how much it hurts.

Actually, it’s the lies that hurt more than anything, because lies destroy trust, and it feels awful not to trust the people you love.

Not that the truth provided us with any great comfort. Sara blithely informed me, a few weeks after she turned sixteen, that she was no longer a virgin. Since she had no steady boyfriend, to say I was stunned was something of an understatement. I mumbled something about hoping it had been a pleasurable experience for her, then launched into a lecture about the dangers of unprotected sex in today’s society, probably because I was afraid that if I stopped talking, she’d tell me something else I didn’t want to hear. She assured me that she knew all about the threat of AIDS and the necessity for condoms, and insisted she wasn’t a child. Then she asked me to drive her to the record store.

It was around this time that she also admitted to having experimented with drugs. Just a little grass and acid, she said with a shrug. Nothing to worry our old-fashioned little heads about. She reminded us that our generation had practically invented hallucinogens; I reminded her that they were still illegal, that she was playing with fire, and that we would send her packing should we ever find any drugs in the house. “That’s what I get for being honest with you,” she huffed in response.

She started getting phone calls at all hours of the night. Since we only have one line, these phone calls woke up the whole house. I told Sara this had to stop; she said she couldn’t be blamed for something over which she had no control. I told her it was her responsibility to tell people not to call after 11
P.M.
She told me to mind my own business. The argument ended with Larry storming into her room and literally tearing her phone out of the wall. That pretty much took care of that.

The phone was how we found out that Sara hadn’t gone to the school for any fashion show rehearsal. A friend, I suspect more than slightly inebriated, called at 2
A.M.
to tell us that Sara had left her purse at the party, could we tell her not to worry? We said we’d be only too thrilled.

As it turned out, Sara had already realized she’d forgotten her purse and gone back for it, so she knew about the phone call and she was as ready for us as we were for her. Can you imagine? she lamented even before she was through the front door. She’d gone all the way to school only to discover the rehearsal had been canceled. A bunch of the kids, knowing how important this fashion show was—the proceeds were going to the United Way—and wanting to do the best possible job, decided to have a rehearsal of their own at somebody’s house. There was no party. They’d selflessly worked their butts off all night, stopping only an hour ago when they were fully satisfied this was
going to be the best fashion show ever. If we didn’t believe her, she finished with a flourish, then that was our problem, not hers, and she felt sorry for us. By the time she was through, she’d worked herself into a self-righteous fury of almost biblical proportions. How could we not trust her? What kind of pitiful excuse for parents were we? And what were we doing talking to her friends anyway?

We grounded her for two weeks.

“Go to hell!” she shouted, storming into her room.

“Watch it,” I warned.

“Watch this,
Ms.
Therapist!” Her door slammed shut.

“Make that three weeks,” Larry yelled after her. The response was the sound of a shoe crashing against her still-vibrating door.

Seconds later, Michelle tiptoed out of her bedroom, fixed her father and me with her most baleful glance. “You know that grounding never works,” she intoned, the seriousness of her message undermined somewhat by the teddy bear nightgown she was wearing. “Grounding only makes kids angry.”

She’s right, I thought. “Go back to sleep,” I said.

Not that it’s all been awful as far as Sara is concerned. Aside from the sheer creativity of some of her tirades, there is also a tremendous vulnerability, a genuine sweetness to Sara. Behind those enormous breasts beats the heart of a good kid. Sara is a child trapped inside a woman’s body. She still isn’t ready to come out.

I remember when she got her period for the first time. She was fifteen years old, which is late, and she’d long ago forgotten the mother-daughter discussion we’d had about such things. She took the pads I gave her, and skulked from the room, as if this appalling state of affairs was something I’d wished on her. The next morning, I asked if the pads had interfered with her sleep.

She looked horrified. “You mean you have to wear them at night?!”

I still laugh about that one, as I do when I recall her disgust some four days later. “How long does this go
on
?” she demanded indignantly. I didn’t have the heart to tell her another thirty-five years.

One night, Sara was reluctantly helping me stack the dinner dishes inside the dishwasher. I’d lined all the glasses along one side. There was one left over, which I placed on the other side of the dishwasher. Sara immediately took a glass from my neat row and put it beside the single one. “I don’t want it to be lonely,” she explained.

It was all I could do to keep from crying. Instead, I hugged her and told her I loved her. Sara tolerated my embrace, mumbled something about loving me too, then left the room.

So, how does one reconcile the sweet innocent thing who worries about the feelings of dirty dishes with the foul-mouthed hellion who doesn’t seem to understand that human beings have feelings too?

“The apple doesn’t fall far from the tree,” I tell my clients, seeking to reassure them—and no doubt myself—that eventually life returns to normal, that teenagers such as Sara do become human beings again. Provided they live long enough.

Is it true we get the children we need?

I wonder what my mother would say to that. So, to answer my own question, I don’t know whether or not I could have prevented much of what happened later had I acted differently in the beginning. Hindsight, as they say, is twenty-twenty. You do the best you can with what you’ve got. Sometimes it’s good enough. Sometimes it isn’t.

I steadfastly refused all Jo Lynn’s entreaties to accompany her back to the courthouse, insisting that neither Colin Friendly nor her designs on him held any interest for me. In truth, I’d started following the case quite closely in the paper and on television. In the last week, the prosecutor had called a long string of witnesses to the stand, all of whom had been able, in one way or another, to connect the defendant to at least eight of the dead girls. An elderly man testified to having seen one of the victims giving Colin Friendly directions on the day she disappeared; a teary-eyed woman swore she’d seen him sitting on a bench in the park where her friend regularly walked her dog. The dog had been found by a group of children as he wandered aimlessly through nearby streets, dragging his leash behind him. His owner—or rather, what was left of her—had been discovered four months later by a group of campers near Lake Okeechobee. The medical examiner had since determined that she’d been raped, beaten, then stabbed some eighty-six times.

By Wednesday, the medical examiner had already been on the stand for two full days. In meticulous detail, he’d recounted each of the victims’ injuries and how they’d been caused. He offered the forensic findings in dispassionate tones, unshaded by nuance, untouched by emotion. Victim number one, Marie Postelwaite, age twenty-five, and a nurse at JFK Memorial, had been raped, beaten, stabbed, and strangled with her own white panty hose, the knot twisted around her neck so tightly, she’d been almost decapitated; victim number two, Christine McDermott, age thirty-three, an elementary school teacher and mother of two, had been raped, sodomized, beaten, stabbed, and bitten repeatedly; victim number three, Tammy Fisher, age sixteen, grade eleven honor student, was found raped, beaten, stabbed, her throat slashed from ear to ear; and on and on, through to victim number thirteen, Maureen Elfer,
age twenty-seven and a newlywed, who’d been raped, sodomized, beaten, stabbed, and virtually gutted. Slight variations on the same grizzly theme.

The last thing I wanted to do, I’d told my sister when she called the night before, was to hear any of these gruesome details up close. It was enough to read about such awful things in the paper without having to listen to the muffled sobs of the victims’ families as each fresh horror was recounted. Hadn’t she had enough? I demanded.

“Are you kidding? This is only the beginning.” The forensic evidence was highly suspect, probably tainted, she said knowingly. DNA was a notoriously inexact science. The medical examiner was in the prosecutor’s pocket. Wait till the defense got a crack at him.

I thought of my visit to the squat building on Gun Club Road. I had told my sister about it, hoping it might scare some sense into her. It hadn’t.

“Colin will be found innocent. You’ll see,” she insisted, still resolutely in his corner despite the fact that he hadn’t responded to her note. At least somebody was thinking clearly, I thought, relieved.

“I wonder if they gave him my letter,” she mused aloud in court that second Wednesday, as I squirmed around in my seat, my eyes drifting toward the back of the room, flitting casually across the representatives of the media.

Was that what I was doing here? Had I been hoping to see Robert again? Was that why I’d finally given in and agreed to spend another day in court?

Oh God, I thought with a shudder. I’m as bad as my sister.

“Do you think they’d do that?” Jo Lynn was asking.

“Do what?”

“Not give him my letter.”

“I don’t know,” I said honestly, distracted by the powers of my own self-delusion.