Orient (2 page)
Authors: Christopher Bollen
T
his is how I first saw you, Long Island, on a map in the front seat of Paul Benchley’s car. Like the body of a woman floating in New York harbor. It still amazes me that no one else sees the shape of a woman in that island sprawled along the coastline, her legs the two beach-lined forks that jut out to sea when the land splits, her hips and breasts the rocky inlets of oyster coves, her skull broken in the boroughs of New York City. Even now, when I close my eyes and try to picture the place where all the trouble happened, I see her drifting there in the waters of the east.
When people try to picture me, they undoubtedly recall only the last time they saw me, just before I went missing. There’s been a lot of speculation about the night I left the far North Fork of Long Island—how a nineteen-year-old wanted for questioning in a string of murders managed to elude police and vigilant local drivers, both parties hurrying too slow through the pale marsh frost and winter Sound winds that turn the coast beds into grisly scrap yards of ice. That part is simple: I ran. What seems lost, in the growing storm of blame, is how I got there in the first place.
I don’t expect you to believe the goodness of my intentions. I have learned too late a lesson about life in the better parts of America—that it takes merciless, distrusting, miserly acts in order to live an ordinary life. I came to Orient at tail end of summer, and I went by the name Mills Chevern. I arrived mostly innocent. Do you remember seeing me on those last warm days?
The air-conditioning in Paul’s car spewed balmy tunnel exhaust as I traced my finger over the island on the map. Obviously, I didn’t mention that it looked like a body to Paul; he might wonder if I’d lost my mind, and at that point Paul Benchley had few clues about the working of my mind to go on. Instead I kept my mouth shut and studied the halting traffic of the Midtown Tunnel. The truth is, I’d never known that land existed out in the Atlantic beyond the city. As a native of the West, I’d dreamed of the East since childhood, and I’d always imagined the country ending right there among the skyscrapers. But there is land, a hundred miles of it, beyond.
It was Paul who decided we should get out of town early that morning. “Weekend traffic,” he said, with the special fatigue reserved for the topic. “Weekends keep getting longer just to account for it.” We cleared the tunnel and the tollbooth and fought the sun that greased the windshield. Soon enough we were out in its stretch, a straight shot of expressway through warm and ravaged Long Island. One mall was alive and blinking, but the next was a ghost town of discount mausoleums, as if all the life-forms here had withered into asphalt. I pictured the ghosts of prudent shoppers haunting those silent, lacquered halls. The island’s main harvest was parking lots; they grew thick around the off-ramps, thick as the trees that guided the highway and gave riders a sense of the wilderness that must once have covered the island from shoulder to foot.
Still, even today it is not entirely tame. We passed Wall Street traders in Budweiser-red Porsches and swerving out-of-state minivans, and I felt the heavy bass of radios in my teeth. We wove so quickly along those four eastbound lanes, opting mostly for the HOV, that I didn’t bother to tell Paul how hungry I was, and every turnoff blurred by us as an afterthought. As the signs reading
ATTRACTIONS
grew sparser and emptier, the sunlight picked through the dense Atlantic clouds, and, for a few minutes on those last speeding turns, we glowed. We took the Long Island Expressway to its last exits, and while most of the cars threaded south at the splitting, off to the Hamptons, we went north to Orient.
Paul had taken me out of the city to save me—those were his words. And I’ll admit I needed saving. I had hitchhiked all the way from California locked in cars with strangers, but now in Paul’s Mercedes I was anxious. His knuckles skimmed my knee as he maneuvered the stick, and I kept a lookout for train stations in case my nerves got the better of me.
On a thin, red artery of a county road, the last footprints of city life disappeared. Tiny private gas stations were already shuttered for the off-season. Apple orchards and vineyards blanketed the fields; between them, blue pines rolled their coats in the wind. I counted telephone poles—later, they would be decorated with my picture—and worried how many more there would be, leading us through vacant farmland. Paul licked his lips and smiled. “Peaceful, isn’t it?” he said. I put my fingers on the door handle and looked back at the road, one long, black carpet to New York being yanked from under our wheels, and for the first time I could remember I was frightened to be traveling east.
I had lived in Manhattan for five months, first on the couches of friends I had known back west, then on the floors of acquaintances whose bad habits began at midnight and who threw blankets over their windows at the first tremors of dawn. I can still remember the panic on those mornings when the muscular lights of the city bleached into the mineral blue of the sky, and all the promises I had told myself at 1:00 and 2:00 and 5:00
A.M
. tasted bitter and stale in my throat.
On the day Paul finally intervened, I was barely forming sentences, slumped in the hallway of his Chinatown apartment building. He lived next door to an acquaintance of mine, and we had exchanged small talk several times in the foyer of his building. I was new enough to New York to include a bit of recent history with my hellos, and Paul was old enough in New York to understand why a kid wearing the same dirty T-shirt would come banging on his neighbor’s door so often. On that day, when Paul practically stumbled over me on his third-floor landing, he hardly recognized the grime-streaked teenager crouching like a gargoyle at his door.
He let me into his apartment, poured me lemony water, and offered me his phone, though I waved it off. “I’m not really like this,” I kept repeating, but for a while I refused to say what I was like. Paul turned his sofa into a sickbed, and I stayed there until I shook out my shakes and my constant sweat soaked his cushions. I made sure to fall asleep before he could find subtle excuses to kick me out. In the morning, I showered, washed his dishes, and scoured the top of his stove. “You didn’t have to,” he said, squinting in disbelief to find both me and his apartment cleaner than he’d left us. “Yeah, I did. I’m good at helping.” That’s when I told Paul what I was like: mixed up in drugs, at bad ends, for sure, but someone who could straighten out if he managed to find his footing. Someone, I told him, who could be all right. After a long talk, he suggested that I get some distance from the city and come with him to help fix up his weekend house.
I repeat: it was not my idea to come this far east. But east sounded right, and I agreed.
Orient
. It still sounds beautiful, or would if I didn’t know any better.
We gutted through the low, mud pastures. Roadkill bloodied the pavement, squirrels or maybe even family dogs that now served as meat for hawks that spiraled away at the approach of our car. Paul glided us through country bends as if they were as familiar as the curves of his signature. His face was kind-looking even in profile, with distinguished wrinkles and a brown mustache eaten gray at the edges. And he was generous in filling the lulls in conversation. He babbled on about the great native tribes that once roamed these fields, their gods all forgotten by now; from the looks of the empty A-frame churches we passed, tagged in weeds and crumpling under aluminum steeples, it seemed we’d done a decent job of forgetting our own.
I could taste the salt in the air before I saw the sea. After twenty minutes of wineries and cow barns, the boarded-up motels gradually gave way to open hotels with vacancies. Strip malls narrowed the
view. Then suburban homes made their claim until they lost their lawns, and it all dropped off, so suddenly it almost hurt, into water.
We drove over the causeway. Each window was flooded with the reflection of water, so white I was scared when Paul let go of the steering wheel. Grabbing the map, he pointed to the sliver of road between the Long Island Sound and Gardiners Bay, and tapped the isolated landmass.
“That’s Orient,” he said.
“It looks like a bird,” I replied, noticing how the land fattened out and then thinned to a beak. Not a predatory bird, like those road hawks. More like a small grouse or sparrow trying to lift off to fly east into the sky of the light blue Atlantic.
“Most of us think it looks like a flame,” Paul said. “That’s probably because of the lighthouse at the tip that the historical board is so proud of. I’ll take you there. If you want to see it, that is.”
“It’s a bird,” I repeated. Paul didn’t know, I suppose, that I was something of an expert on Rorschach tests. All foster kids are. He didn’t know much about my background—who I came from; why my family made their home in California; the eyes or mistakes of my mother and father—and for that matter, neither did I. I was never burdened with that information. But now you understand why I went with Paul so easily. I have always been up for adoption. I like to think I saved many California homes from foreclosure in my childhood due to the monthly checks the owners pooled in to shelter me.
The car slowed into a thicket of trees beyond the causeway. Lawns reappeared, along with two-story clapboard houses and faded porches with faded children’s Big Wheels. Day care at a nearby elementary school let out, sending a swarm of tiny, rain-slickered bodies wandering across the street. They were the only things moving, besides the branches overhead. Even the sailboats docked in driveways were as still as held breath. As Paul stopped and waved at the crossing guard, I stared out the window at Orient.
It frightened me, this kind of raw innocence so close to the city, like the feeling of the temperature falling too fast.
It is hard for me to picture those first days without seeing the madness that was to follow. I realize now that the deaths in Orient would have happened whether I had made my way east or not. They were like matchsticks in a book waiting neatly to be ripped and burned. They remind me of something I’d heard years ago from one of my foster-care buddies, a twelve-year-old pyromaniac. “Everything burns,” his girlish voice sang. “So you might as well learn how to handle it.”
If I had stayed in New York City, I might have committed all sorts of unspeakable crimes. Instead I came to Orient and left two months later guilty of nothing more than trying to save myself. What else can I tell you that you won’t believe? That I saw the killer’s face the night I left? I did. I held a flare into the darkness and saw a face so familiar that anyone might pass it on the sidewalk and not blink an eye. They might even say hello.
I know it doesn’t matter who I accuse. You have already decided who is responsible. You know by now that Mills Chevern isn’t my real name. I picked it up on my way east and took it as my own. I will leave that name here with you now. I’ve cut and dyed my hair and removed my earring. The only feature I can’t change is my gray front tooth, but I don’t expect to be smiling much. Where am I going? Back into the nowhere of America, and I’ll be there soon.
Like all things that run, I don’t want to die. That’s what a man is when he’s running—not dying, refusing to. Still, the threat of being caught is always there, and I must keep going, as quietly as planes overhead, something moving at a terrible speed out of the corner of your eye and gone by the time you look again.
W
hen news spread that Paul Benchley was bringing a foster-care kid to stay with him rent-free at his house on Youngs Road, many of his neighbors were understandably concerned. They had seen, all too recently, what outsiders were capable of. Not three months ago, during the Sycamore High senior picnic, a row of car windows had been smashed along Main Road. Some assumed it was a disgruntled student who’d failed out of Sycamore and was seeking revenge. But many more were sure it was the work of a delinquent, an unknown intruder pillaging the village for purses and electronics as Orient’s proud graduating class danced on the nearby football field to bittersweet pop songs and the sex-and-gun ballads of hip-hop.
Pam Muldoon, whose daughter Lisa’s car was looted in the robbery, was particularly enraged—so much so that even Orient year-rounders wondered if Pam was coming slightly unhinged. By graduation, most had forgotten about the whole episode. Lisa Muldoon herself could be found jogging on the beach by Bug Lighthouse, the iPod she’d lost in the incident replaced by a newer, lighter one clipped to her shorts.
Pam, on the other hand, couldn’t let it go. Within days she announced that she’d started her own fund for the victims, pointing out that several kids didn’t have the insurance to cover the damages. Throughout those grueling summer evenings, during the most dangerous season for Lyme disease contraction, Pam Muldoon went door to door with a small brown bag in her hand, disturbing her
neighbors’ dinners to ask for donations. Not a few residents winced as they scrounged around for a folded Alexander Hamilton after spotting her beelining up their steps. Her path might have seemed erratic—she canvassed three houses, then bypassed the next two, far fancier homes, with their pristine lawns and expensive cars ticking in the driveways like beds of fertile locusts—but Pam knew every house in Orient, and she chose only the year-rounders to bother with her missionary work.
To draw a map of Pam Muldoon’s hopscotch course on those early summer evenings would be to chart Orient’s changing demographics. It occurred to Pam that even five years ago she would have stopped at nearly every house, but so many city dwellers had descended upon the village in recent years that the tight-knit community had seemed to unravel, shedding countless native families who couldn’t resist cashing in on the spiraling market value of their plots, despite the shoddy brick two-stories that often graced them. It was as if some noxious spell had blown across the bay from the south, transforming ordinary houses into exotic weekend getaways for the city’s idle rich. Pam could remember a time when a bright coat of paint or a new backyard pool served as a point of communal pride. Now it meant something different: another empty set of chairs at the monthly council meeting, another late-night party spilling a scuttle of beer cans into the gutter, another pair of pale, spidery Manhattanites eyeing her grove of Spanish roses while frantically cell-phoning friends to describe the guts and bones of a potential easy-pick investment—perhaps even the Muldoons’ house.
She stopped in front of what had once been the house of Frank and Elizabeth Daltwater. Elizabeth had babysat her as a child, and Pam had returned the favor by watching over the Daltwater girl for two winters. The Daltwaters had moved last year to a retirement village in Stony Brook, thanks to the two-million-dollar windfall that came when they sold their house. Now, Pam noticed, there were untreated cane swings swaying on the porch, oh-so-preciously decorated with Indonesian batik pillows; through the house’s ancient
handblown parlor windows, a horrendous neon-light art installation blinked two words:
GET
, then
OFF
. She kept walking.
The city people brought their decorators and landscapers and imported Japanese plum trees, but with them came city problems—not least of all, an uptick in crime. It wasn’t just the window-smashing incident: last month, the brass placard had been stolen from the United Church of Christ, and vandals marred the Civil War obelisk on Village Lane with spray paint. A weekender’s intoxicated guest tripped the alarm on the historic Old Point Schoolhouse at three in the morning, claiming he was looking for a place to take a leak. Some year-rounders wondered why Pam took these outsider invasions so personally. But what wasn’t personal about safety issues in her own neighborhood? Lisa might be heading off to college, but she had two boys to look out for. To Pam, the threat of city encroachment was real and visceral; she actually pictured Orient as a kind of tapestry, its land shaped like a flame, unraveling at every weft and edge, leaving only a few remaining threads to hold the illusion of an unspoiled image. A kid like Bobby Murphy, he doesn’t have wealthy parents, he can’t do much more than go into the military and fight for this country. How was he supposed to pay for the damage to his car? And what would be next: smashed house windows? Didn’t her neighbors realize she was trying to save what they had left?
So went Pam Muldoon into the June of a summer heat wave.
Pam finally abandoned
her fund-raising campaign in August, just as Lisa was getting ready to leave home early for SUNY Buffalo’s freshman jumpstart program. When Pam heard the news of Paul Benchley’s new boarder, she was preparing for the Muldoons’ annual end-of-summer picnic. The presence of another unknown intruder during another picnic set off alarms, reviving the low-grade anxiety she had only just begun to shrug off. Pam, already wounded by her daughter’s eagerness to flee to college the first chance she got, felt a
restless itch, a mounting irritation at the prospect that trouble was about to move in next door.
Paul Benchley’s family had never called their house a mansion. They didn’t have to; most of Orient did that for them. But it wasn’t a mansion in the traditional sense. In other eastern enclaves studded with extravagant baronial estates, the Benchley house would have looked more like a sprawling servants’ quarters marooned on a large parcel of grass. It wasn’t particularly ornate or even well constructed. The only thing grand about the white clapboard farmhouse was the sheer space it contained, as if its early-nineteenth-century builders had taken perverse delight in adding small, impractical rooms that served only to cause future owners grief about walls too cramped for couches and ceilings too low for tall men. Still, it had sharp, ivy-framed eaves and a wraparound porch, and it managed to make the Muldoons’ residence, just forty feet away, seem both dull and like it was trying too hard. (Pam’s husband, Bryan, was color-blind when it came to house paint.)
Paul Benchley had grown up in that house. He had moved away for boarding school and college, and then settled in New York, but he still returned for holidays and summer weekends. He had spent a month in Orient last spring when his mother, a callous, overbearing woman smoothed of her harsher personality traits by dementia, was dying of cancer. Technically Paul Benchley was the weekender type that Pam despised, but he was a native Orient son. He hadn’t sold the mansion when it was passed down to him and, to his credit, he didn’t fix up his house to show it off. Best of all for the Muldoons, he stayed away for long periods; this allowed them to adopt his backyard as an extension of their own, strolling down to his tract of marshland on the Sound to watch the gulls swoop for crab at dusk. And Paul Benchley was nice. Still unmarried at forty-six, which was a little strange, but he was an ideal neighbor, invisible but dependable, a bird that found its way home at the right time of year.
Paul had called Bryan himself the evening before the picnic, explaining that he was bringing a teenager from the city to stay with
him. Pam’s husband responded with neighborly restraint, asking only a few minor questions. When Pam interrogated Bryan about the conversation at dinner, all he could muster was “Some kind of foster kid he met in New York who’s having a hard time. Paul thinks Orient will be good for him.” Pam believed in charity; she considered herself a firm practitioner of “live and let live.” But such beliefs evaporated when it came to the stability of her own neighborhood. “What kind of hard time?” she asked her husband. “What do you think that could mean?” Bryan retreated to the basement after dinner to do twenty minutes on his rowing machine, but Pam’s anxious brain refused to turn off. If Paul liked children so much, why hadn’t he had his own or ever once offered to babysit? And how could he board a minor in a house he visited only two or three weekends a month? And, more to the point, what kind of “hard time” was this city kid bringing to the house next door?
Of course, Paul was nice. Pam couldn’t deny that. But now Pam wondered if his outward friendliness was perhaps a little too friendly, a convenient smoke screen hiding a man she only assumed she knew. All she really knew for certain about Paul Benchley was that he had a successful career as an architect and a reputation as a decent amateur seascape painter on the North Fork. Some year-rounders occasionally murmured questions about Paul’s sexuality, but Pam had never felt it was her business, not until news of this wayward teenager came to light.
Concerned that the pressures of the picnic might be unfairly darkening her judgment, she texted her friend Sarakit Herrig for reassurance. “Am I overreacting?” Within two minutes, Sarakit wrote back: “You have every right to be unnerved. It’s called being a vigilant mother!” Pam took an extra sleeping pill that night, but her worries continued to mount.
The next morning,
Pam spread linen tablecloths over the long cherrywood table that occupied a permanent spot beneath the oak tree and
the three smaller plastic tables her boys had assembled before disappearing to their bedrooms. A curling wind blew from the Sound that morning, carrying a wet, creasing chill, more beginning-of-fall than end-of-summer. Pam had pushed back the date of the picnic twice, hoping to entice Lisa down from college for the occasion, but all her overtures had been met with reluctant maybes. Earlier that morning, Lisa had called to say she wouldn’t be waiting at the train station in Greenport.
The wind gathered force, stripping the plastic liners from the tables. Pam used coffee mugs and fistfuls of silverware to paperweight the corners. There was potato salad in the mixer, three-bean chili on the stove, and in just two short hours the Muldoon yard would be swarming with guests. Pam pushed her fingers through her coarse brown hair to give it more body and considered a bit of lipstick to enliven the pewter pallor of her skin. She had put on as many pounds as Lisa had lost over the summer with her manic pre-college exercise regimen. The breeze caught a tablecloth and yanked it tumbling across the lawn. As Pam ran after it, a mug in each hand, she glanced at her watch and realized she wouldn’t have time to change before the guests started arriving. She would have to greet them in her madras shirt and gray gingham slacks; this was the outfit that would appear in the family’s photo album and Facebook page for the Orient End of Summer Picnic.
An hour later, a few neighbors arrived to help with the final preparations. The Muldoon house opened at every sliding and screen door, and food, balloons, and folding chairs appeared as if a benign hurricane had come in through the windows and spilled the contents of the living room onto the lawn. One of the helpers was Karen Norgen, whom Pam spotted padding slowly across the grass in her rain slicker.
Karen was a retired nurse in the silver-haired halo of her midsixties. She was Christmas bulb–shaped and forever out of breath, but she had sharp eyes and nimble hands that were always quick to intercede without waiting to be asked. Karen carried a crystal punch
bowl filled with slapping red liquid, and over this glass heirloom she gave Pam the latest update: the “kid” Paul Benchley was bringing to Orient was no child at all. He was eighteen or nineteen, an adult by any standard—and, worse, he wasn’t even from New York, neither the city nor the state. “Terra incognita,” Karen mused. “A total stranger. Go figure.”
Pam took the heavy bowl from Karen’s hands. She looked over at the Benchleys’ mansion with fresh resentment. “Who did you hear that from?”
Karen had heard it directly from old Jeff Trader, a dependable source. Jeff was the never-out-of-work drunk who served as caretaker for dozens of year-rounder and weekender houses in Orient—including the Muldoons. He kept a jar of keys in his truck, making routine visits from house to house, ensuring that windows were locked, pipes drained of water in winter, smoke detectors stocked with fresh batteries, and that the food in refrigerators was eaten before it rotted. Jeff looked after Paul Benchley’s house when he was away, and Paul had called him yesterday to ask him to air out the second bedroom.
“Paul told Bryan that this young man had been having a hard time,” Pam confided.
“Well, if that’s not a euphemism for drugs or crime, I’m not sure what is,” Karen said, searching the table for a spoon.
Pam shook her head and let out a moan. Pam had been throwing this picnic for fourteen years, but she was not a hostess by nature. Just e-mailing out the invitations, let alone all the orchestrated prep work she had to finish before mustering the cheery exhilaration required for a successful event, put her in an aggravated mood. She channeled her worries into a chorus of rapid-fire questions for Karen, posed without pause or upturn. “If I started taking in stray teenagers no one knows, don’t you think I’d have the decency to ask my neighbors first? Why does Paul Benchley feel the need to bring his goings-on in the city here? Wouldn’t his Manhattan apartment be a more convenient place to house a stranger with problems?
When did Orient decide that it was okay to turn the house next-door to mine into a youth hostel?”
“Just what we need,” Karen said, shaking her head as she stirred the punch. “More incidents.”
Holly Drake, who owned an upscale textile shop on Little Bay Road, stopped tying balloons to the branch of an oak and turned toward Pam. Holly, although not born or raised in Orient, had lived in these parts since her marriage seven years ago and prided herself on being the voice of liberal reason whenever close-mindedness threatened to choke the village off from the twenty-first century. Holly bragged about her political causes, but Pam hadn’t forgotten that she had refused to contribute to her car-window fund-raiser that summer.