Nowhere Girl (26 page)

I drank my beer and chatted David up about the app he was creating, but I really wanted to know who would put flowers that symbolized regret and remorse on a dead girl's grave. And why?

 

CHAPTER

29

Devils and Dust
was coming along, but I was stuck on Hopper and why he became a prison guard. I understood he wanted to get close to the person he thought had harmed his sister, but there had to be more to his motivation. As I was creating a riff for him, I realized in the months that Brady had been helping me with research, I'd never asked him what drove him to what seemed like such a hopeless career.

The night before we met, I'd dreamed he wanted to talk in the cooler—what the inmates called solitary—but when I got there, they were on lockdown, and we couldn't leave. As I got out of bed, still bleary from a poor night's sleep, I thought about what he'd been telling me, how there was no rehabilitation in prison. The recidivism rates were consistent, and the more violent the crime, the greater the chance of reoffending within three months of release. Even those who were never getting out or weren't eligible for parole for many years managed to reoffend while incarcerated. There was always a new inmate, a weaker one.

I arrived at Battlefield State Park with my iced tea and settled in the shade of the Mercer Oak offspring that had been planted over a decade ago when the original three-hundred-year-old tree finally went down in a storm.

Brady came from the northwest corner of the park. He was dressed for work—dark-blue pants, gray short-sleeved polo shirt, and his DOC jacket. It was too hot for long sleeves, but I knew he wouldn't take it off. I thought maybe he liked the authority it gave him. Firearms weren't allowed inside the wire, but between the nightstick, his large frame, and his intimidating expression, he was clearly in charge. He sat on the grass next to me.

“Sorry I'm late,” he said. “My parents moved into a retirement community and sent me a bunch of stuff that I left in their house after I graduated and started traveling. I started unpacking and lost track of time.”

“No problem,” I told him. “Thanks for coming.”

“Everything okay? You sounded a little stressed on the phone.” Despite the distance between us, I could smell him. Pine cologne and hand sanitizer.

“Why'd you become a prison guard?”

“Corrections officer,” he said at the same time I realized my mistake. I wondered if there were union meetings where people sat around thinking up better-sounding names.
Sanitation workers. Administrative assistants. Landscaping engineers.
I never called myself a nutrition provider for the four years I waitressed at the EQuad Café on campus at Princeton. I kept my head down and my ponytail tight and brought skinny girls chef salads with no cheese and fat-free dressing on the side.

“Sorry,” I told him. I felt bad. He always made sure to call me a novelist. I knew it bothered him to be called a guard.

“Why do you ask?” I opened my mouth, but he held up his hand to stop me. “And don't tell me it's for your book. I've told you everything you could ever want to know about being in prison.”

A Y-shaped vein in his forehead was started to pulse. I knew that meant something was bothering him. “You've done a fantastic job telling me what it's like to be a prisoner, but what's it like for you? Is it tough going to work every day knowing there's no way out for most of the people there? I need to get inside Hopper's head a little more.” The breeze was warm, and it made me sleepy. It'd been such a cold winter, but it felt like a perfect spring was our reward. “But you're right. There's more to it than that. I guess I'm curious. What made you want to work with people who are caged like animals?”

He was quiet for a long time. Finally, he said, “Imagine making one mistake that changes your whole life and takes your freedom.”

I hadn't expected a man who'd been spit on, worked Thanksgiving and Christmas, and risked his life every day to have so much empathy for a population who had all broken the law. “I know a thing or two about how quickly life can get turned upside down,” I said. “Is everyone on your block a lifer?” I couldn't imagine anything more depressing than going to work every day with a bunch of men whose only way out of the South Jersey Penitentiary was in a cheap pine box.

“Does it really matter? A year, five years, the rest of your life. What's the difference?” I started to speak, but he kept talking. “Once you lose control over everything in your life—when you sleep, what you eat, what hours of the day you're allowed outside—you're never the same.”

“Jeez, you should be a motivational speaker for at-risk kids. When you put it that way, I think I'd do anything to avoid going to jail. It makes me wonder why the recidivism rate is so high. You'd think knowing what it's like on the inside would make people do what they had to in order to stay on the outside.” I'd never heard the word
recidivism
before meeting Brady.

“Look at it from the flip side,” Brady said.

I caught his eye, and neither he nor I turned away. After that one night at the Wine Cask, we hadn't kissed again. I couldn't get past how unfun it'd been.

“There's a certain safety to prison. You always know where your next meal is coming from, and you never have to worry about a warm place to sleep.”

“That's so sad,” I said more to myself than him. “How crappy must your life be to want to go back to jail?”

“Exactly. And that's why I do what I do. It reminds me of how good I have it.”

“What would you have done if you weren't a
corrections officer
?”

“I'd wax surfboards on one of the smaller islands in Hawaii.”

I laughed. “You hate the ocean.”

“I didn't say I'd surf.”

“Touché.”

“As long as we're playing twenty questions, what would you do if you weren't a novelist?”

I answered without having to think about it. “I'd be an FBI profiler.” There was a time in college when I'd researched it as a career, but when I got to the part about having to have less than 23 percent body fat, I closed my laptop and signed up for another creative writing course.

“Sounds like the same thing, if you ask me.” I cocked my head, and he kept talking. “When you write, you get inside the heads of your characters. The profilers on
Criminal Minds
spend all their time analyzing people too.”

“I've never thought of it like that, but I guess I do have to know my characters inside and out to be able to write about them.”

“So profiling doesn't count as a second career choice. It's too similar to what you do now. What would you be if not an author? Pastry chef? Teacher?”

It wasn't lost on me that he didn't ask me why I chose to be a novelist. He knew it was the only way I could keep my grief at bay. Every time I wrote about a slain sister or a lost parent, the gripping panic I'd felt since Savannah died loosened its hold just a bit. I tapped my finger on my nose as I thought.

“An accountant,” I said. Before he could laugh, I added, “I like order. I find it comforting knowing what to expect. Numbers don't change. They don't lie. You can break them down and add them up, and they're always the same. Going through life without having to look over my shoulder, wondering what's going to happen next would be my idea of nirvana.”

We lapsed into a comfortable silence. “Do you think you'll be able to make it to David's again?” I asked when I could no longer stand the quiet. I pulled a blade of grass and sucked on the thin, white end.

He tucked a loose strand of hair behind my ear. His touch sent goose bumps down my arms. Why couldn't his kiss do that? “I'm not sure. Colette hasn't been … um, feeling well lately. When I'm not working or volunteering, I feel like it's best for me to be home with her.”

Colette. Something was going on with her, but every time I tried to ask Brady about it, I lost my nerve. “Then you should bring her.” That was the third time I'd invited his girlfriend to eat dinner with us, but this time, I was sincere. If Brady wasn't going to be my soul mate, like I'd thought in high school, he was certainly turning out to be a great friend. And how much he cared for Colette was one more thing I admired about him.

He smiled, but it was sad, not joyful. “I don't think that would end well. Everyday things can be hard for her.”

 

CHAPTER

30

The key to the storage unit was hidden in a drawer underneath the silverware separator. It wasn't so much that I thought someone would steal it; I just didn't want it on my key ring, where I'd have to see it every day and be reminded of what it unlocked. I was in my car with my seat belt on before I decided I couldn't face riffling through Savannah's stuff alone. I called Gabby and asked her to meet me there. She put the phone down, and I could hear her fake sneezing as she told the director of Sarandius that she wasn't feeling well.

Fifteen minutes later, we were both standing in front of the metal overhead door at Cranberry Street Storage Units. She grabbed my hand. “Are you ready for this?” As soon as I nodded, she slipped the key from my fingers and opened the padlock.

She hoisted the door open, and it roared as she pushed it above our heads. We stepped in, and she patted at the wall until she found the light. The fluorescents blinked a few times before they came to life and brightened the room. I was wrong. I wasn't ready. Almost everything Savannah had left behind was in here. The Butet saddle that she bought with the babysitting money she earned after an entire summer of watching the Sanford girls across the street. The stuffed rocking horse she'd gotten for our fourth Christmas that she rode so much almost all the fur on its back was gone. And boxes and boxes of her books. Some of them were marked. The entire Nancy Drew series and all of Judy Blume's young adult novels were in one box. Her textbooks were in another. But there were at least a dozen other boxes, most of them recycled produce cartons from Sotto Sopra, that had no markings on them.

“I don't think I can do this,” I said quietly. I started to back out of the cold space. “What made me think this was a good idea?”

Gabby stepped behind me and put her hand on my back. “I'm here. We'll do it together. Where do you want to start?”

I sat on a small area rug that had been in our nursery. Two buckskin ponies were grazing on it, nose to nose. “I guess we should each grab a box and start digging. I called my mom last week, and she said the guest book must be in here somewhere. But really, how would she know? I still can't believe my parents had strangers pack up all of their dead daughter's things.”

Gabby put one box on top of another and brought them to the carpet. She plopped down next to me and handed me one.

“Thanks,” I said. I took a deep breath, closed my eyes for a second, and pulled at the top of the box. It smelled musty, like clothes that had been in the washer too long. I peered in and saw a stack of magazines. “I can't believe my parents kept these,” I said, pulling out a
Cosmo Girl
. I flipped through it and saw articles on how to properly french-kiss, what shade of lip gloss to wear if you were a redhead, and which were better—tampons or pads. I flipped the box over, and about two dozen magazines spilled out.

“Check out what's in my box,” Gabby said. She held up about fifteen mismatching socks. “Did Savannah have a sock fetish?”

I laughed at the memory of her trying to start a new trend at school of wearing socks that didn't match. She wanted everyone to bring in their single socks, and then she'd sell them in pairs, giving the proceeds to an animal shelter. “Don't you remember that company she wanted to start, selling random pairs of socks?”

“Oh yeah,” Gabby said. “What was it called? Match Maker?” She held up two pink socks, each with different colored polka dots, and then smirked.

“What is it?” I asked.

“Match Maker. That's kind of ironic, isn't it?” Her voice was wistful.

I scooped up the magazines and put them back in the box. “I don't follow.”

“This is going to sound a little harsh, and I'm sorry, but Savannah wasn't the best at picking out boyfriends.”

“She didn't really have any boyfriends.” I could hear the defensiveness in my voice.

“That's my point. She slept with all these boys, but none of them ever seemed that interested in her. And it doesn't make sense. She was pretty and nice and outgoing. Why didn't they like her? I mean
like her
like her, like want to be her boyfriend?”

My first instinct was to tell Gabby to fuck off, that Savannah was perfect and everyone loved her. But she was right. Every time Savannah would have sex with a new boy, she'd come home and tell me he was the one. That this was it. But then she'd never mention him again. Instead, I said, “Chapman Sharp loved her.”

Gabby laughed. “Yes, he did. I think he still does.” She was quiet for a moment, and then she said, “Hey, maybe he was the guy you saw at the cemetery.”

“Nah.” I got up and lugged over two more boxes. “Chapman was too short. This guy was big. Tall and broad and kind of built like a house.”

“You mean like Patrick Tunney?” Gabby had seen him in the parking lot of the rec center a few weeks before.

My stomach twisted. “Yes, actually. Exactly like Patrick.” I tried to make myself see the man in the woods more clearly. Was he as big as Patrick? Had I seen wisps of red hair? “Here,” I said, sliding a box to her. “We'll be here for a week if we don't get a move on.”

We went through another twenty boxes filled with fashion magazines, Cabbage Patch dolls, cassette tapes, and Play-Doh. How had I forgotten there was so much stuff here? Finally, exhausted, we were about to give up and go home, but Gabby suggested we have a pizza delivered and keep going. Not wanting to ever come back again, I agreed. There were still another ten or so boxes left to go through, but we took a break and ate an entire hawaiian pizza. “Good idea,” I told Gabby when we were done. “Now let's find that stupid book and get out of here.”