Nowhere Girl (19 page)

“Or a breakdown.” I bore down against her and tried to stand, but it felt like my knees were going to buckle from the pressure of holding it all together.

“No time to stress about therapy. We have skating to do.”

I pushed off against the pavement and stuttered forward.

“Great job. It's a gliding motion, like skiing.”

“I don't ski,” I reminded her.

She ignored me. “Put your legs together and then push out. Like this.”

I watched her pushing one foot out behind her like a ballerina. I had a feeling I would never be able to do anything on Rollerblades but keep my feet awkwardly hip-width apart and stumble along after her while she went twirling off like Dorothy Hamill.

“I wish you'd brought helmets,” I told her. I was about an arm's length behind her. “And if we keep holding hands like this, people will think we're lesbians.”

Gabby turned her head and rolled her eyes. “So?” she said. “It's not like we didn't make out at David's wedding.”

I laughed. “I loved horrifying Emma and her parents.”

“You are an excellent kisser,” she said, puckering her lips. “But now back to business. Squat. Not that much. Perfect. Now push off from the side like this.” I tried to mimic her movements. “How was the serial killer?”

“He's a lunatic,” I said. I was getting a feel for the squatting-gliding motion, and although I had no intention of telling Gabby, it was kind of fun. “And fascinating.”

“You're brave,” she said. She hadn't even looked back to see how I was doing. “I mean the guy's a fucking maniac. Were you terrified?”

“I was at first. But he was”—I lost my balance but righted myself—“kind of mesmerizing.”

“What's going on with Brady?”

“He's mad at me.”

Gabby slowed, but since I didn't know how to stop, she had to keep going. “That's good,” she said. “Guys only bother to get mad at you if they like you. What's his beef?”

“He thinks I said too much to Larry Cauchek. He hasn't called me since, and I don't really know if I can call him. It's so weird.”

“Call him,” Gabby told me.

I opened my mouth to tell her I had no reason to call Brady, but instead I said, “That cop who worked Savannah's case called me a few weeks ago.”

Gabby dragged her toe and stopped. I crashed into her, but she grabbed my arms and steadied us both. “Officer Tenney? What did he want?”

“Tunney,” I told her. “And he's a detective now. They're reopening the case.”

She took my hand and pulled me to a bench. “Holy shit. Why are you just telling me this now?”

I had no answer. “I don't know. It's been so much to take in; I think I've been avoiding it a little. I mean, this is all I've ever wanted. I've spent my whole adult life trying to piece together who could have choked my sister to death. And now this cop shows up out of nowhere and says that's what he's going to do.”

Gabby pulled me into a hard hug. “Cady! That's great. You must be so excited.”

All I felt was a stone in my stomach. “What if nothing happens? What if it's like last time and they spend a year asking questions and scaring the shit out of everyone, and then they give up again?”

Gabby patted my leg. “No, honey, it's different now. That asshole Fisher is gone, and Officer Tunney is involved. They'll catch him.”

I hadn't thought I'd tell Gabby about Patrick reopening the case. But now that I had, I felt something like relief. Even if he didn't solve it, at least I knew someone still cared. Gabby and I sat on the bench, not talking. After a few minutes, she got up and offered me her hand. We took off gliding around Baskin Park. The breeze was sweet on my face. I liked how my muscles pushed and then relaxed. I could smell the mud loosening from the winter months and saw tiny crocuses coming up. After a while, I felt secure enough to let go of Gabby's hand. This great gliding sensation arrived, like I might actually launch. And then fly.

“This is fun!” I called to her. “I think this is the only exercise I've ever really liked.”

Gabby laughed. She was a little wonky herself, and I liked that, two wobbly friends, gliding along as best we could, trying to move forward around a really pretty park.

 

CHAPTER

23

What Patrick and Jon Caritano had told me kept popping up in my mind. I'd be driving to pick up Greg's suits at the dry cleaner, and I'd think of what Patrick had said. I could feel myself looking for Fisher everywhere, and I had a fantasy of getting out of my car and screaming at him in public, but I knew I never would.

Saturday night, I dreamed that Savannah stood the boys who used to be in love with her—Chapman Sharp, Dylan Freeman, Jeff Kilbourn, and Eddie Zygmont—in a row and then paced back and forth in front of them in her jean cutoffs and a bathing suit top. “Eeny meeny miney moe.” She was pointing at each of them in turn. “Catch a tiger by the toe—” I woke up with the space beside me already empty. Greg had run off to yoga. Savannah's voice was still clear in my mind, and the mattress was indented as if she'd watched me while I slept.

Boys. Savannah had found them early. They had exhilarated her much the same way getting model cars at Christmas had excited David. She was unafraid of them. She had a sort of playful power that when I was an adult I recognized in only very beautiful, often famous women. I'd been terrified for her, though I couldn't have said why then, but now I wondered if it was a premonition. “Tell Mom and Dad whatever,” she'd said on that fateful night when I finally realized Savannah's childhood was over and mine was still in full swing. “Just cover for me until midnight.”

But my parents hadn't even come into our room after she'd slid off the shingled roof onto the back porch and gone running to Chapman Sharp's waiting car. I'd pretended to be asleep when she crept into our room at midnight. I lay there, listening as her clothes dropped to the floor. I heard her open the pajama drawer, put her earrings on the dresser, and then walk over to my bed and pull back the covers. I rolled toward the wall, but she crawled in with me and put her mouth next to my ear. “I did it,” she whispered. I sighed as if dreaming. She'd never let me be, but I tried anyway because I didn't want to hear that a girl who looked exactly like me except for twenty pounds had kissed boy number six and let him lift up her skirt and bear into her.

I knew what french-kissing was, but I couldn't figure out why you'd want someone else's tongue in your mouth, how you kissed if you had a cold, if people with braces like Lita Edelton and Michael Pritchet got stuck together. And, most of all, why anyone would want a boy's penis jammed in where it didn't belong. I had a hard enough time using a tampon. I'd walked in on David a few months before as he was about to shower, and I saw him, all of him. His penis had been sticking straight up, and I couldn't imagine how it could fit inside a girl.

But that night, alone in my bed while Savannah was out and knowing what she was going to do, I'd wanted to feel what it was like, so I'd put my fingers inside me. It would be years before I'd learn that it only felt good when I rubbed the top part with my index and middle fingers, but that night, having no experience at all, I put one finger up there, my nail cutting the thick part of the labia. It hurt so badly, I yelped. There was no pleasure. None at all.

“Did you hear me?” she whispered again. She sounded giddy, like she had when our father gave her that cell phone she used all the time even though it was for emergencies only or when she finally got her braces off. Mine were still on, one more reason I'd never kissed a boy.

“I did it. Can you believe it?” Her feet were freezing against my calves, and she smelled of cigarettes.

“Wow.” I rubbed my eyes and feigned excitement. “Congratulations, I think. I mean, am I supposed to congratulate you on something like this?” I wasn't going to get any sleep until I let her tell me every gross detail.

She kissed me on the cheek, her lips soft, as though they'd been rubbed raw of anything but tenderness. “Yes!”

“Did it feel good?” In the pale light of the streetlamp, I could see her messy hair, the smudged eye makeup.

“Of course it did.” She crawled deeper under my sheets. But I knew it hadn't. I'd felt a stinging pain down there when I was drifting off to sleep.

“Did you…” I whispered.

“Did I what?”

“Have one?”

But Savannah said she didn't know if she'd had an orgasm. We had no idea what one felt like, so how could she know? The year before, Mrs. Davenport, our gym and health teacher, had told all sixty-seven girls in the eighth grade that orgasms were like sneezes. “You feel the tingling coming, and then it's like a miniature explosion.” After a smattering of questions about what an explosion in your privates feels like, the red-faced teacher told us that we'd know it when it happened.

“Well, are you going to do it again?” I asked her.

In the light from the streetlamp outside, her eyes sparkled as though someone had thrown glitter at them. “Every chance I get,” she told me, and then she closed her eyes and snuggled up beside me like she used to.

But I knew what was happening. I knew it more than ever that night. After losing her virginity to Chapman Sharp, the cutest boy in school, in the backseat of his dark-blue Jetta, I knew I was losing Savannah forever.

Then the phone rang, and I reached across the bed to grab it. The caller ID said it was my mother.

“Hi, Mom,” I said. “Everything okay?”

“Sweetheart.”

She sounded surprised I answered. We didn't call each other often, and when we did speak, I got the feeling my mother was walking on balloons around me, wearing an imaginary pair of stilettos.

“Honey, your father and I have something we need to discuss with you.” Patrick must have called them. “He's on another extension, and we have your brother on call-waiting.” Perfect. A long-distance family reunion.

I sat up in bed. My mother never wanted to talk about anything. She was famous for stuffing everything under a rug and walking all over it.

“Hi, honey,” my dad said. His voice was faint, as if on speakerphone. “Hold on a minute while we get David on the line. If we hang up on you, we'll call you right back.”

Then the phone squealed in my ear as if he were pressing buttons, and I heard him say David's name a few times. Finally, it was quiet, and then everyone was talking at once.

I leaned back into the pillow and closed my eyes. “Is everything okay?” I asked again.

My mother sighed. “How's the new book coming?” She was so good at ignoring me I almost believed I hadn't asked the question.

“It's getting there.” I got out of bed and took the phone downstairs. I grabbed a yogurt out of the fridge, even though I wanted a Pop-Tart. I went to sit on the front steps. I started eating the bitter plain yogurt to get to the prize of sugary strawberries on the bottom, and my mom began talking quickly, like she did when she was nervous.

“So,” she said. “Do you have any idea why we called you both?”

I was sure it was about Patrick reopening the case, but I didn't want to say anything if I was wrong. “Are you moving back?” I asked and heard David gasp. It was so easy to rattle him.

“Of course not,” my father said too quickly.

“Hang on a second,” David said, and then I heard water running and metal banging against metal.

“Good heavens.” My mother sounded irritated. “David, what are you doing?”

“Sorry,” he said. “I have to water Willow.”

David had planted one lonely weeping willow tree smack in the center of his lawn the year he bought his house. Our parents had had one in their front yard that David had wanted to uproot when they moved to Florida, but the buyers wouldn't let him, even though it was an ugly little tree, a runt that never grew properly. My dad had put stakes in the ground with wires attached to the trunk in order to hold it up, and every time there was a big storm, he worried the wind would rip it up. So David had gone to Madden's Greenhouse in Princeton and asked them for the smallest, frailest weeping willow sapling they had. He'd never told us why he wanted such a sad tree, but I was sure it was because Savannah had loved that little weakling. She always was for the underdog.

“This call is probably costing us a fortune,” my dad piped in. “Are we ready to talk?”

“Sorry,” David and I said at the same time, even though we hadn't done anything wrong.

“Well.” I could almost hear my mother rubbing her hands together. “We wanted to talk to you kids about…”
Kids?
“Well, you probably both know that Detective Tunney has reopened the case.”

I had no idea if David knew. God, I hated it that Emma was so right about us.

“We think it's important to talk about what this means to us as a family.”

This was awkward, because our glue was missing. Savannah had been the light that wound us all together. Without her, we were fragmented pieces, uncomfortable as a whole.

My mom was tall but small boned and birdlike. Yet there was something fierce about her, something tightly gathered that ran the risk of letting loose. Even on the phone, I could sense it.

“What
does
this mean to us as a family?” I asked.

“Well.” My mom's voice was too bright. “It can be stressful. It can bring up memories. People in town will be reminded again if word gets out and—”

“Mom,” David interrupted her. “Do you think people
forgot
?”

“All I'm saying,” she continued, “is that you two are fragile right now, and I think it's better if we don't get too involved.”

“That's easy for you,” I said. “You're a thousand miles away.”

She kept right on talking. “We know this will be stressful, especially for you two, and we're not sure that's what you need right now.”