The Fates Will Find Their Way (2 page)

Paul argued that you couldn’t force someone into becoming something they weren’t already, but mostly we agreed that Paul had pushed her into it. That, believing she already had the reputation, Sissy Lindell thrust herself into fulfilling what only Paul Epstein had alleged. At one point it was rumored that she’d even had sex with Trey Stephens. When we took it to him, however, he denied it. “I might go to public school,” he said, “but I wouldn’t do that to Nora.” We couldn’t help but respect his loyalty; couldn’t help but believe that he alone would have the dignity and self-restraint that the rest of us lacked. Of course, this was before Paul Epstein had a daughter, before any of us could even conceive of having daughters of our own.

By the time Sissy left for boarding school, bound for one of those inscrutable states in New England, we’d stopped speculating publicly about the whereabouts of Nora Lindell. It was impolite, for one thing. For another, it was just plain weird to indulge the interest; unhealthy to continue the conjectures. It appeared that our mothers, as we prepared to leave them, were finally rubbing off on us. We’d grown out of Halloween. Our complexions had evened out; our skin maintained a perfect equilibrium. We learned discretion from girls, about girls. We packed our trunks and suitcases, prepared for our natural and necessary moves away from home. Outwardly, we breathed sighs of relief at the somber comfort of growing up. Inwardly, we held our breath and tried to stand as still as possible, afraid we might be the only ones who didn’t yet feel the promised calm of adulthood.

But it would be a lie to pretend that every one of us—alone finally, that last night of childhood, that last night before leaving for college—didn’t close our eyes, perhaps in unison even, and imagine Nora Lindell. We closed our eyes, and we imagined both Nora and ourselves, ten years, twenty years from now. We imagined houses and cars and maybe even children. We imagined her there with us, more beautiful than our wives, more aloof, more tender, more kind. We imagined her future and our own. We closed our eyes and fell asleep to Nora Lindell, alive and happy. In the morning we advanced to adulthood, relieved at last of childhood fantasies.

2

B
ut what if Drew Price and Winston Rutherford weren’t lying? What if there really was a Catalina, and what if she really did get in? What if she didn’t know the man but she’d seen him before, and when he leaned across and opened the passenger-side door, she got in? What if it was that simple?

They drove away together. It was an adventure, perhaps. But the experience that Nora had no doubt hoped would be intriguing turned quickly into something more menacing than mysterious. Almost immediately after she got in, she probably wanted to get out. It’s the stuff of fantasies, not of real life. In fantasies, you can get into strangers’ cars. You can have sex with men you don’t know. They’ll love you and pet you and whisper things that high school boys don’t know to whisper. They’ll fall hard for you and do anything you tell them to, including take you home whenever you want.

But the man in the Catalina didn’t take Nora Lindell home. She waited too long to admit to herself she was in danger. She waited, unbelievably, out of politeness. It was dark by five o’clock, and it was the darkness that brought out the fear, but by then they were already far enough from Nora’s town that she didn’t know where they were. They were in the woods was all she knew. She felt strongly there was water nearby. She didn’t look at him as they drove. She didn’t talk to him, either, afraid that talking would give him the opportunity to confirm what she already knew. That this was it. That she was never going home.

The radio lost reception and the woods got thicker and the man turned the stereo off so that the little light that had been coming from its face was now gone. There were no stars, no moon. At least not that she could see through the tree cover. Perhaps it would snow. She turned her head towards the window and closed her eyes. She wanted the night to be over.

The car slowed. She felt his hand on her knee. She was still in her uniform and she regretted that. She wished she were wearing jeans, pants, something hard to pull off. She moved her knee away from his hand without looking at him. She pulled herself inward, upward, so that she was pressed fully against the passenger-side door. She did not open her eyes. The car stopped but he didn’t turn off the ignition.

“You’re cold,” he said.

She didn’t say anything.

“I can turn the heat up,” he said.

She wanted to make herself invisible.

“But you have to ask me,” he said.

She clenched shut her eyes until there was a throbbing, until the black behind her eyelids shot stars into her brain. She wanted to be at home again. She wanted to be trick-or-treating with Sissy and all of Sissy’s idiot friends. She wanted to be a baby again, to be anything other than a girl. She wanted for sex not to exist. She wanted for Trey Stephens not to exist. She wanted for the aqua-blue aquarium and that basement and those boys to never have existed in the first place. She regretted her uniform. She regretted her legs and the urge ever to have shown off her knees. She regretted skin. Yes, skin. That was it. More than anything she regretted the existence of skin—hers or anyone else’s.

“Hey,” he said. His voice was young. Not young like hers, but smooth and easy like maybe he preferred singing to speaking. “Hey,” he said again. He poked her in the side, and she opened her eyes. They were in the woods. There was no light, no house, no road.

“Why’d you get into my car?”

She tucked her legs under her body, pulled her skirt down so it covered her knees.

“I don’t know,” she said. She was crying.

“What if I told you I’d take you anywhere you wanted to go? What if I told you that?”

“Will you?” she said, looking at him finally. He was smiling. He was handsome even. She felt sick.

“That’s not the question,” he said. He reached towards her and she flinched, but he only opened the glove compartment and pulled out a box of cigarettes. “You smoke,” he said.

“No,” she said.

“Don’t be a liar,” he said. “Take one.”

She took one. He struck a match and held it only partly towards her. She didn’t lean forward, and he let the flame burn to his fingers.

“Are you being fussy with me?”

She shook her head.

“Seems like it though, doesn’t it.” He lit another match. “Doesn’t it?”

“I’m sorry,” she said.

“I know,” he said. He lit his own cigarette, then held the match towards her, again only so far. “It’s not going to light itself,” he said.

Nora leaned forward, looking at the cigarette in her hand, at the murmur of flame in the middle of the car. She was aware of her mouth, of the heat on her cheeks, of his incredibly steady hand. She was conscious of these things, which meant he also was conscious of them. She inhaled as the tip of the cigarette closed in on the light. Their fingers touched. She moved immediately back to her corner. She was shaking from the cold.

“The question is this,” he said. He used his hands when he talked. He moved them up and down as if he were giving a lecture, but as if the movements were inconsequential to the meaning. “If I told you I’d take you anywhere, what would you say? Where would you go?”

“Home,” she said.

“You’re lying again,” he said. He rolled down his window a crack and blew the smoke up and out. “You like my car?” he said. He held the cigarette up, towards the crack, but he looked at Nora. “I know you like my car. That’s why you got in it.”

She tried to smile, but she couldn’t. She was physically incapable of moving the muscles in her face. Her cheeks were wet and she wanted to wipe them but her hands weren’t receiving commands. They weighed too much, more than they’d ever weighed before.

“You got ash on your skirt,” he said. She looked down. Half the cigarette had landed in a heap on her lap. “You want me to wipe that off for you?”

She shook her head.

“No,” he said. He smiled. “No, I didn’t think so.”

She looked around the car. There was an overwhelming sense of tidiness. Everything was white. The seats were white. The dash was white. She looked behind her. She couldn’t see the floorboards in the back, but she guessed they were as tidy as the ones up front. There was a folded blanket on the backseat. She felt sick again. Her shoulders slumped. Her muscles were giving out one by one.

“Hey,” he said. She held up her head, tried to focus on his words. “Where are you going to put that ash? You’re not going to wipe it onto my floor, are you?”

She shook her head.

“No,” he said. Again he smiled. “I didn’t think so.”

S
he tried the passenger door, but it was locked. She looked at him.

“You got to unlock it first,” he said.

She nodded and did as she was told. The door opened easily and a gust of wind held it that way. She looked again at the man, realizing now that she was looking for permission, understanding finally that he was in control. The easier she made it for him, the easier he would make it for her. Maybe.

“Go on,” he said, still with that smile, as if he were embarrassed to know more than she did. As if he were embarrassed to have to explain.

She inched backwards out the door, careful to keep the ash on her skirt, careful not to let any fall onto the interior. When she was outside, she stood up straight. The hem of her skirt raised up in the wind, and she quickly moved her hands to hold down the fabric against her thighs.

“Shut the door,” he said. “It’s cold in here.”

She shut the door with her hip, not sure what else she was supposed to do.

The night was black, crowded with black. And the trees, though the leaves were beneath her feet now and not on the branches, felt somehow thick with overgrowth. Animal noises might have comforted her, or the noise of the water she believed was close by. But there was nothing but the wind and the sound of the engine.

She turned away from the car and closed her eyes. She could smell the cigarette smoke still coming from the crack in the driver’s window. The car idled behind her and she realized now that she could also smell gasoline, an exhaust leak maybe, something that a boy could have identified more easily than she.

There was a knock on the glass behind her. She turned. The man’s face loomed large in the passenger window, though his body hadn’t left the driver’s seat. He showed his teeth when he smiled.

“Hey,” he said. His voice was muffled behind the glass, like he was speaking underwater. Like they were both underwater. She thought about laughing. “I’ve got an idea,” he said. She waited; her fingers had lost feeling. She couldn’t have opened the door and gotten back in if she’d wanted to. He rolled down the passenger window slightly.

“Take a walk,” he said. Now his voice was clear, re-announcing the reality of the night.

She shook her head. “I don’t understand.” The words came out though her chin didn’t move.

“You take a walk.” He was nodding his head. He was excited by something. He giggled. “You take a walk and see what you think. Then you come back here and tell me what you want.”

Nora pulled the sleeves of her shirt over her fingers. She crossed her arms and shoved her hands into her armpits. Her skirt moved in the wind. She looked at the woods around her, at the trees above her. She looked at the man, his enormous grin. “What if I don’t come back?” she said finally.

He giggled again. “What if I’m not here?” he said.

She felt drunk, foggy. She wondered if her eyes were working properly.

“Be good out there,” he said, more excited now, his giggle high-pitched and tinny. “Don’t get lost, now.”

A
t first she walked. A cliché maybe, but her heart felt like a fist that had worked itself into her throat. Every few paces, she turned and looked at the Catalina where it idled. She wondered at what point he would get out of the car, at what point would he pull the blanket from the backseat and follow her into the woods. She wondered if she was still close enough to hear the driver’s-side door when and if he opened it.

She tried walking backwards, squinting to focus through the cold, afraid to lose sight of the car and its contents. The exhaust was milky and pink in the brake lights. The headlights gave out a glow maybe twenty, thirty feet in front of the car, illuminating a triangle of dead leaves that faded completely at the root of a large elm. The smaller the car got, the faster she moved. At one point, she stumbled over a tree stump and when she looked again in the direction from which she’d come, she couldn’t see the Catalina, and that’s when she ran. She ran for a long time, her breath and the leaves crunching under her feet the only sounds. Five minutes, twenty, she couldn’t be certain. Her hands were numb, but she could feel the tears from the branches and brambles. She could feel the wetness of blood on her skin.

She started coughing when she saw the gap in the tree cover. There, above her, floated the moon that she’d forgotten existed. Such audacity that it would float so calmly, so smoothly. She coughed, and the sound scared her. Of course she’d made noise running, but that noise had sounded natural, animal. This cough was human—weak and tiny and all alone—and she worried that it would locate her, give her position away entirely. She swallowed hard, biting back the burn of mucus in her lungs.

With the moon, she could see the woods more clearly. See for certain that everything was just as she’d suspected—empty, abandoned, dead leaves, dead trees. This was when the snow started. She felt it first on her scalp, put her fingers to her head and was surprised to feel wetness. Bringing her hands to her face, she could see the snow where it combined with the blood from the cuts on her hand, thinning it, spreading it. She looked up and the snow hit her face, wet, cold, clean.

She chose a tree at the edge of the small clearing, one from which she could still see the moon. She wrapped herself around the base of it, covering herself in leaves—her legs first, then her chest, then her face. Then finally burrowing her arms under, all of her hidden by the leaves, all but a tiny opening for her eyes to watch the moon, to watch and wait for the moon to disappear and for the sun to re-announce itself and for everything to go back to normal.

O
ne of two things might have happened at this point. Either she waited as long as she could before getting scared and returning to the car. Or, she stayed where she was, letting the snow pile steadily on top of her. She would have fallen asleep not knowing that her legs and arms had already lost feeling. As the nerves shut down, there would have been a sensation of burning, of fire in her fingers and toes, the end of awareness.

Her heartbeat slowed. The leaves froze to her body. The snow piled steadily. She concentrated on the near-imperceptible pressure of leaves on top of her. It felt like comfort. It didn’t feel like giving up. By morning she would have been dead. They wouldn’t have found her even if they’d known to look for her there.

A late-winter thaw would have done nothing but loosen her body from the tree base, send it slowly down the hill into the river close by. She hadn’t seen it because of the ice and leaves. She hadn’t known how close she’d come to the riverbank. Maybe if she’d found the water, she could have followed it back to civilization. Maybe. But she hadn’t.

Her body wouldn’t have floated. She’d have been hooked by branches, pulled under by the flotsam. Just another piece of jetsam that, when it did finally wash to shore, washed up only as a femur, a patella, a sliver of mandible maybe. “A dog bone,” someone might have guessed before throwing it back into the river. “How sad,” they would have said aloud, imagining the dog on the ice, imagining it going down, the struggle, the fear. “How very, very sad.” Not once would they have thought of Nora Lindell, the missing girl from three towns over, two full counties away.

A
nd then there’s the chance that she thought of all this. That, lying there, she thought of all the grisly things that we would one day think. She thought, death by ice, or brutalization by this young man in this strange car with the possibility of escape or even return? Damaged goods, she thought, damaged but alive.

Perhaps she found her way back to the car more easily than she’d expected. Uphill, breathing heavily. Perhaps very little time had passed. She was sweating. She wanted to take off her sweater, but she knew better, knew that it was merely a trick being played by her body.