Stalker Girl (5 page)

Val came to Bellwin in seventh grade, when the school was undergoing a big diversity push. Val would have gotten into Bellwin anyway. She was that smart and that disciplined. But she’d have been perfectly happy to stay at St. Cecilia’s, her neighborhood Catholic school, if Bellwin hadn’t found her and offered her a full scholarship.

Despite the common wisdom about three being a crowd, the three of them had managed to stay a three-some of best friends up through the end of sophomore year. She and Val were still friendly with Paula, but now they were mostly a twosome.

So how does a well-behaved, reasonably confident, responsible, and otherwise normal teenage girl become the kind of person who spends an entire day following her ex-boyfriend’s new girlfriend around the streets of Manhattan—ducking into doorways, knocking into people, and almost getting run over by taxis along the way?

 

It started with a string of bad luck at the end of Carly’s junior year. Or what seemed like bad luck at the time. Later, at the starry-eyed height of her relationship with Brian, Carly would see the series of events that had disrupted her life as the handiwork of a celestial being, someone whose job was to bring together lovers who were destined to meet. Maybe even Aphrodite herself, the patron goddess of the ancient city Carly was supposed to spend her summer helping to unearth.

There’s a picture of four-year-old Carly hanging on the wall of her father’s office at Denman College. She’s wearing a big floppy hat and sunglasses and peering into a shallow hole she is proud of having dug all by herself.

At first glance you might take it for a typical vacation shot. But if you stopped to study it, wondering if you knew the beach where it was taken, you’d see that the ground you took at first to be sand was reddish, densely packed dirt. You’d look in vain for a brightly colored plastic bucket by Carly’s side or a glimpse of shimmering ocean behind her.

Thirteen years later, Carly could still recall the moment that picture was taken. After digging for what felt like hours but was mere minutes, she’d uncovered a trove of archaeological treasure: a clay shard, three well-worn coins, and a small metal thing she would later learn was called a fibula, a decorative pin that was to the ancient world what buttons, zippers, and Velcro are to ours.

Her father told her the shard was part of a jar or cup and at least two thousand years old. “Imagine a little girl like you, holding this in her hand,” he’d said, as he placed it in hers, “drinking juice at breakfast.” Carly had pictured a dark-haired girl with golden-brown skin dressed in a mini toga and sandals. She wondered whether she and the girl would like each other and what kinds of games they would play together. Up until the moment she held those things in her hand, Carly didn’t get why her father was so excited about the hot, dusty place he’d dragged her and her mother to. But with this imagined playmate before her, she could finally see the city that had once been on that mountain in Turkey. At four, Carly could barely pronounce “archaeology,” but now she understood why her father wanted to dig his way into those ancient lives. She wanted to dig, too.

A lot changed after that trip.

She didn’t know it, but her parents had already decided to split up. In the fall her father moved to Ohio for his job. Less than a year later she and her mother moved in with Nick, and Carly grew up a city girl, surrounded by concrete and glass and asphalt and steel. But as she walked those concrete sidewalks or rode metal buses over asphalt streets, she’d always wonder what was underneath the hard surfaces, what stories were buried, waiting to be discovered. She never forgot the feeling of holding those little pieces of someone’s long-ago life, and unlike most kids—who change career plans every other day—she couldn’t imagine doing anything else but archaeology.

Even after she figured out that her discovery was a setup.

During her visits to Ohio, she’d spend a lot of time in her father’s lab at Denman. The more she learned about archaeology in general and that dig in particular, the more suspect her discoveries seemed. It eventually dawned on her that the likelihood of finding all that stuff in the same spot was pretty low. Archaeological digs went on for years, decades even. Actual discoveries of artifacts were relatively rare. Most of the work was in the digging itself, the careful removal of layer upon layer of soil and sediment, which then had to be tested and analyzed and dated. One layer a few inches thick could represent hundreds of years. A hole a few feet deep could tell a thousand years of geological history.

When she finally asked him about it years later, Carly’s father admitted that he and some of the other grad students planted the stuff for her to find.

“I wanted you to have fun. And see what it was that took me away from home so much. I wasn’t trying to make you into an archaeologist. It isn’t exactly a growth industry, you know.”

Oh, she knew. Carly’s mother reminded her of it whenever her plan to major in archaeology came up. And Carly’s father, who was still a little afraid of his ex-wife, halfheartedly tried to discourage her by telling her how boring and tedious the day-to-day work could be.

But Carly knew that nothing about archaeology bored her father.

And nothing about it—not even the slow, tedious, painstaking digging and brushing—bored her, either.

Though she hadn’t been back to Aphrodisias, Carly had still managed to find archaeological opportunities in the much less ancient city of New York. She’d dug for artifacts in its junkyards and landfills with Nick, helping him find materials for his sculptures. She’d worked on the site of a colonial-era farm out in Brooklyn, where she’d touched more shards than she could count, bits of blue-and-white pottery that had belonged to the original Dutch settlers.

Something happened to her when she saw places where people lived thousands or even hundreds of years before, or touched things they touched. Whenever she visited her father’s office, he would unlock the glass case her “discoveries” were kept in and let her hold them. As her finger traced the faded artwork on that shard, she could still see the little girl her imagination conjured thirteen years before. Planted or not, the shard was real, and it really was two thousand years old. Someone’s robes were held together by that fibula, and those coins were passed from hand to hand in that place which once was a city.

Now she was finally going back to the place where it all started, the place where they worshipped the goddess of love. Her father, who was now in charge of the dig, had gotten a big grant, and Carly was not only going, she was going to get paid—like her father’s graduate students—to clean and preserve and catalogue relics from the ancient city of Aphrodisias.

 

Carly’s bags weren’t exactly packed when he called three weeks before they were scheduled to leave, but they might as well have been. The trip was pretty much all she was thinking about in between studying for exams. In fact the call came when she was at a camping-equipment store downtown. Her father had sent her a gift card and made her promise to buy clothes with the official seal of approval from the American Dermatological Society.

“The sun over there is brutal. I promised your mother we’d be careful.” She’d managed to find a not-too-ugly, dermatologist-approved, long-sleeved shirt with UVA and UVB protection, and she was heading over to check out dermatologist-approved hats. When her phone rang and DAD flashed on the screen, she assumed he was calling to remind her of something else she needed to pack or do for the trip. Did she have the right shoes? Good sunscreen? A sun hat? Layers for night when the desert gets surprisingly cold? “Feminine products,” because they were sometimes hard to find in the villages near the dig? Was she sure her passport was valid? Had she gotten her gamma globulin shot, was her tetanus up to date?

She answered the call with: “I got SPF nine hundred ninety-nine, and I’m bringing three hundred tampons, so you can stop torturing yourself.”

“Carly, it’s Dad.”

“Yeah, Dad, I know. You think that’s how I answer the phone for everyone?”

“Oh.” He made a noise approximating laughter. “Of course. Sorry. Listen—I’m afraid I’ve got some bad news. No. Wait. What am I saying? It’s—” The connection started to break up. It sounded like her father had just jumped into a swimming pool. “—news, in fact.”

“Wait a sec. I barely have a signal here.” She hung the shirt from a shelf full of PowerBars and headed toward the exit. Something about her father’s tone told her she wouldn’t be coming back for it.

As soon she set foot on the sidewalk, he said, “Ann’s pregnant.”

“Oh.” It was late afternoon on a warm Saturday in spring. The first truly warm, summer’s-just-around-the-corner Saturday, and Broadway was thick with shoppers.

For three years, Carly’s father and his wife had been trying desperately to have a baby, using everything science had to offer. Ann had gotten pregnant twice through in vitro fertilization but had miscarriages both times. The last Carly had heard, they were going to give the test-tube method one more try before starting the adoption process. But not until after the summer.

“I thought you guys had decided to wait until we got back before you—”

“Did the next round of IVF, I know. That’s what’s so crazy! This just happened. The old-fashioned, low-tech way.”

“Oh.”

“Nature took its course.”

“Uh-huh.”

“We really didn’t think it was possible. Ann threw away her diaphragm a long time ago—”

“Dad.”

“And if you don’t
have
to use a condom, then—”

“Dad—”

“God, when I think of all the trouble we’ve been through. The money we’ve spent. Did you know we were spinning my sperm to make it more concentrated?”

“Dad! Please—you can spare me the details.”

“Oh. Sorry. It’s just—I’m excited.”

Carly already knew way more about their procreative woes than she needed or cared to know. One morning during her winter break visit two years earlier she had awakened to her father calling up the stairs to say, “We’re going to get Ann inseminated.”

After they left, she made the mistake of flipping through a brochure from the Center for Reproductive Health, which explained all about sperm collection. For days she was tormented by thoughts of her father entering a little room with a DVD player full of porn—actually, the brochure used the term “erotic materials”—holding a little plastic cup.

“So I guess this means—”

Her father sighed into his phone, sending a crackly static into her ear. “Yeah. That’s the bad-news part. I’m really sorry. Ann said I should go. That there’s nothing I can do here, and with the grant and everything . . . She’s already at sixteen weeks, and the doctor thinks we can breathe easy since the miscarriages were both at eight weeks—”

“Sixteen weeks? That’s four months!? And you’re telling me now?”

“I know. It’s crazy, but we didn’t realize it ourselves until two weeks ago. Ann’s cycle’s been off since the fertility treatments, which also made her gain weight.”

“Mm-hmm.”

“We’ll go next summer. I promise. No matter what.”

“Mm-hmm.”

“Listen. Ann and I were talking, and we have an idea. Why don’t you come out here for the summer?”

“To
Greenville
?”

“Yes, Carly, to Greenville. You say it like it’s Mars. It’s really a great place to be in summer. I’ll pay you to be my research assistant. We can still get a lot done even if we’re not at the site.”

“Like what?”

“I’ve got findings that need writing up. There’s correspondence. You could take a summer-school class, get to know the campus from a student’s point of view.”

Greenville, Ohio, population 3,167, home to Denman College, was the last place Carly wanted to spend the summer. Holidays and school vacations were boring enough. But in a little over a year she’d be moving there to start her freshman year at Denman, where as the child of a faculty member, she would get free tuition and was pretty much guaranteed admission.

Before he and Ann bought their house and spent something like fifty thousand dollars trying to get Ann pregnant, Carly’s going to Denman had been talked about as a “possibility,” a backup plan if there wasn’t enough money for her to go elsewhere. But now, if she was going to college—and neither of her academic-professional parents could so much as imagine she wouldn’t—she was going to Denman.

Denman was a perfectly fine school. And if it had been on one of the coasts, or closer to a real city (Columbus didn’t count), or if her father didn’t teach there, she might have been interested. It did have a good, if small, archaeology department.

But it was surrounded by cornfields.

And Amish people who sometimes drove their horse-drawn buggies into town.

And the one friend Carly had in that town, Jolie Albright, who lived next door to her father and Ann, had not only become a meth-head, she’d robbed a 7-Eleven and gone to Juvie. (Which, Jolie’s mother had confided to Carly on her last visit, Jolie’s parents were actually glad about because they figured she might at least get clean that way.)

No way Carly was spending any more time in Greenville than she absolutely had to.

AN HOUR
after that conversation with her father, Carly and Val sat at the SJNY bar, contemplating life’s injustices.

“How far along is she?” Val asked.

“Sixteen weeks.”

“Sixteen weeks? And he’s just telling you now?”

“I know. I hate that baby. Or embryo or whatever it is.”

“Fetus.”

“What? ”

“First it’s a zygote. Then it’s a blastocyst. After it makes its way down the fallopian tube it’s an embryo. After eight weeks, it’s a fetus.”

A year had passed since Val aced the AP Bio exam, and she still had that stuff down. If anyone was ever destined to be a doctor, she was.