The Fates Will Find Their Way (3 page)

She heard the car before she saw it. And before that, she smelled it. Smelled the gasoline, thick and strange in the cold snowy air. She was surprised to feel relief. Surprised to feel less scared now that she was back in his company.

He would have laughed when he saw her. He would have reached across the seat, just as he’d done earlier in the day outside the Greyhound station. “Figures,” he would have said, pushing the door open, making room for her on the passenger side.

And Nora, somehow different already, somehow resigned, would have scooted in next to him and asked for a cigarette.

O
r maybe she didn’t get out of the Catalina at all because he never took her to the woods. And he never took her to the woods because he’d never had anything but good intentions. Maybe when she got into his car that day at the bus station, he asked her immediately where she wanted to go, and maybe just as quickly she told him the airport. Just like that. They were both confused by the suddenness of it all, confused but also pleased. Maybe he laughed at her and maybe she laughed with him, so that he was charmed by her brazenness. And just like that he decided to do it. He decided to drive this complete stranger to the airport just because he could. Perhaps he was returning a favor once done for him.

At most she thanked him. Not effusively, but quickly, curtly.

“Where will you go?” he might have asked.

“Argentina,” she might have said. “Russia, India. Who knows?”

He nodded.

“Unless you have suggestions?” she said, her question perhaps a way to postpone getting out of the car; to postpone the reality of being on her own for the first time.

“I’ve always liked Arizona,” he said.

“The Grand Canyon,” she said. “Of course.”

“It’s just a thought,” he said. He shrugged and looked at his hands where they rested on the steering wheel. An airplane passed overhead, the sound of its engine large and deep.

Nora nodded. She put her hand on his shoulder. It was the first and only time she touched him. “Thank you,” she said.

“Don’t mention it,” he said and laughed—the whole thing impossible, unlikely.

When she was out of the car, standing on the curb, leaning down into the passenger window of the Catalina, the skirt of her uniform flying up in the November air, she said, “Will you get in trouble for this?”

He shook his head, laughed again. “I don’t even exist,” he said. “How can something that doesn’t exist get in trouble? It’s been the story of my life. One day here. One day there.”

She laughed too, not actually understanding. He rolled up the window and she stood up straight; she stomped her feet and shoved her hands into her armpits for warmth. The Catalina pulled away. She didn’t go inside till it was completely out of sight.

I
t was after midnight and Halloween was technically over, but some flight attendants were still wearing costumes. Nothing fancy, nothing that conflicted with their regulation uniforms, but a few women were wearing half-masks. It was a chance to see what Martha Washington and Marie Antoinette would have looked like as stewardesses.

“You’re a schoolgirl,” said the stewardess dressed as Marie Antoinette. Nora looked down at her uniform, worrying possibly that she’d been caught so soon. “I tried to come up with a way to be a schoolgirl, but it’s hard with this suit,” the stewardess said. “So I settled on Marie Antoinette.” The woman pointed to the mask as if Nora might have missed it. Nora nodded. The stewardess didn’t leave. Perhaps she sensed something strange, after all.

“I thought you might have been Josephine,” said Nora.

“Who?”

“She probably had Napoleon’s baby. She hated him, but she was beautiful.” Nora looked down at her plaid skirt. “Anyway, I borrowed my little sister’s uniform. It’s a hand-me-down. I used to wear it when I was in school, if you can believe that.”

W
e don’t know if Nora Lindell even went to the airport or if she ever got on a plane. But the local newspaper really did run a piece shortly after Halloween in which Tracy Hinckley, twenty-three, single stewardess and mother of one, was quoted as having talked to a girl in a uniform who fit Nora’s description.

“She was pretty,” said Ms. Hinckley. “She looked my age. I thought she was my age. The way she talked.” When asked about the uniform and why it wasn’t a red flag, Ms. Hinckley said, “It was Halloween. There were lots of costumes. I was in costume myself, actually.” There was a photo of Ms. Hinckley in her stewardess suit holding up a mask for the cameraman. “Josephine,” she was quoted as saying. “Napoleon’s lover. She was very beautiful.”

. . .

T
echnically, it was Jack Boyd and not Trey Stephens who was the last to find out Nora was missing, because Jack Boyd was on his way back from visiting his biological father in Texas when the rest of us got word. Jack claimed to have seen Nora at the airport in Houston on the morning after Halloween. He had the unbelievable audacity to insist he had talked to her between terminals.

“I was visiting my dad,” he told her.

“I’m visiting my grandmother,” was her alleged reply.

“You’re wearing your uniform?” he said.

“It’s my costume,” she said.

He nodded. “My dad’s getting remarried,” he said. “Just found out today.”

Jack Boyd’s flight was leaving soon and though they didn’t talk long, it was long enough for Nora to reveal that she had a grandmother in Phoenix. She was only connecting in Houston.

While it was true that Mr. Boyd was getting remarried—for the fourth though not final time—Jack’s airport run-in with Nora sat uneasily with the rest of us. Our own allegations had never been so specific, so daring as to include actual conversation. We especially didn’t like that the article featuring the decidedly not-beautiful Tracy Hinckley came out
after
Jack Boyd had told us his story.

When we thought no one was listening, we asked our mothers about the Lindells, whether or not there was family out West. “Maybe in Arizona?” we asked. But they scoffed at us, shooed us away into other rooms, anywhere but the kitchen where we were only in their way. Our curiosity, they said, bordered on obsession.

N
ine years later, Danny Hatchet had the bright idea to ask Sissy about the rest of her family—a grandmother, perhaps.

“No family anywhere but me and my dad,” she said. It was January. There was snow. It was a chance run-in on the sidewalk a few blocks from the three-story Tudor—Sissy was in town only for the holidays. She was in her early twenties; Danny had just turned twenty-five.

Maybe he was high or maybe he just couldn’t help himself. He said, “So what was it like? All those years?”

“What was it like?”

“Yeah,” he said. He shoved his foot into the snow at his feet. He looked down. He felt foolish. He hadn’t had a steady job in months. We knew this because our mothers told us, because Mr. Hatchet had told them.

“I’m still trying to figure that out,” Sissy said. “Do you know what I mean?”

According to Danny, they went for drinks. He ordered bourbon, but she insisted on tequila. “Tequila or I’m leaving. That means you too.”

They drank for hours. It’s possible they played a few games of pool. She would have been handy with a cue. All the girls in our neighborhood had been. Too many basements, too many pool tables not to be good. Sarah Jeffreys had been one of the best—Sarah, whose rape he probably still felt responsible for, though it hadn’t been Danny who raped her. He and Sarah had gone out a few times. They’d done a few things. He liked her and, for all we knew, she liked him. But when he found out about the rape, he changed. He felt responsible for the things men were capable of. We tried to understand, but at most we simply felt bad for both of them.

At some point, Danny had the wherewithal to ask Sissy about Phoenix. The city came back to him, making a path through the haze of cigarette smoke and the rush of alcohol. “Did you ever consider looking in Arizona?”

Sissy laughed. She was still sexy as a high schooler, but she’d turned unfriendly, brittle. “You’re serious? You’re seriously asking me this question right now?”

“Don’t you have a grandmother out there or something?”

“My god,” she said. There was spit in her laugh. “You all thought of everything, didn’t you?” She finished a final drop of tequila and wiped her mouth. Her hair was more orange than he remembered. “No,” she said. “No grandmother in Phoenix. Like I said, no family anywhere.”

They had sex in the back of Danny Hatchet’s Nissan. It had belonged to his dad. It smelled like an ashtray. There was a banana peel on the back floorboard. There were lottery tickets and glass coffee mugs with dried-out grinds at the bottom. There was a spoon with something like Coffee-mate congealed at its tip. Sissy didn’t question this. She didn’t question any of it. She simply crawled in after him and lifted up her skirt.

When it was done, Danny dropped her off at her car, a large luxury SUV, parked at the rear entrance to the mall. There were two car seats in the back. Danny didn’t ask about that.

When Sissy was safely outside the Nissan, she ducked her head down and looked at Danny. She was putting on a pair of white leather gloves. “Tell your friends,” she said before she closed the door. “Tell them all. They’ll want to know.”

We didn’t see Sissy again until Mr. Lindell’s funeral and then not again until Minka Dinnerman’s funeral, which would prove to be the last time any of us but Danny would ever see her, but that was years—almost a decade—in the future.

Shortly after Danny’s alleged run-in with Sissy, a for-sale sign went up on the lawn of the three-story Tudor. A moving van came. Danny called first; he was always calling these days. He needed money still, though he never exactly asked and we never exactly offered. “Stop by sometime soon,” we said. “Well, no, not right now,” we were forced to add. “The kids are home and the baby’s a mess. The holidays and all. Yes, yes. Soon. Can’t wait.” To keep us on the phone, he told us about Sissy. “In the parking lot?” we said. “In the backseat of your dad’s Nissan?” We closed our eyes. We pictured the exact parking spot where her SUV must have waited. We didn’t believe him, and yet.

Our mothers called next. Mr. Lindell was finally leaving, they said. He was off to live with his daughter somewhere out West.

“Out West?” we asked. “Are you sure?”

“Out West,” they said. “And why not? Some place with altitude where his knees won’t hurt. You might think about something like that for us, you know.”

“We know, we know,” we said, our first and second daughters and sons crying in the background. “By the way,” we said, trying to sound unconcerned, uninterested, “do you know anything about a baby, maybe two? Did Sissy get married? Are there twins?”

“Oh, enough,” they said, upset that we hadn’t offered them Denver, Lake Tahoe, or at the very least Truckee. “Hush up about the Lindells already.”

And we did hush up. At least, we tried very hard. We hung up the phones. We attended our own crying babies. We soothed our wives. But at night, at night we lay awake, the shades drawn, our eyes wide open, the breath of our families a constant hum beside us. We lay awake and wondered all over again about Nora and her strange sister.

3

I
t was Sissy, fourteen, who—exactly one year after her sister disappeared—led Kevin Thorpe, eighteen, into the mudroom. She took him by the hand at Sarah Jeffreys’ Halloween party and led him to the mudroom off the rear garage. It was her idea and it was that simple. Kevin didn’t force her to go in there, regardless of what anyone else might say.

Girls who saw them go off together said she was too easy. They said having a sister go missing turned Sissy into a tramp. “It’s not her fault,” they said. “But still.” We might have pointed out to the girls that they—and not Sissy—were the ones dressed as skimpy bunny rabbits, as trashy vampires who’d just gotten out of bed, as season-impaired police officers. We might have, but we didn’t. We knew they were hoping for our attention, but we had a hard time getting over how ridiculous they looked shivering in the winter chill, their determination to look sexy preventing them from dressing for the weather.

Of course, we knew Sissy wasn’t a tramp because we knew Kevin Thorpe would be the first to be alone with her. We’d been keeping track. We had, in fact, been watching her since the day her sister disappeared. Probably we were filled with the desire to shake Kevin Thorpe’s hand and then punch him in the face. Trey Stephens had gotten Nora, and now Kevin Thorpe was getting her little sister. It wasn’t fair, and we said so under our breath.

“So it goes,” said Chuck Goodhue, who then ran off to tell Paul Epstein because he knew it would break Paul Epstein’s heart.

S
issy liked the kissing, at least according to Minka Dinnerman, who’d been her best friend since lower school. She’d told Minka it was wet and soft and alien. She said it took her out of herself and brought her back into herself all at once. According to Minka, there’d been a lot of talking, as well as kissing, which Minka thought was weird and she’d said so to Sissy. Their nine-year friendship didn’t last the month of November.

“I just want to kiss you,” Sissy had said in the mudroom, giggling at her own shamelessness.

“I just want to touch you,” Kevin Thorpe had said, and maybe she’d felt sexy when he said it. Maybe she’d thought he was being flirtatious.

They kissed more. He backed up, pulling her with him, over to an old sofa. He sat down. She stayed standing. He put his hands on the waistline of her jeans. She put her hands on top of his, pulled them away.

“Sit down with me,” he said.

She sat down, tucked her legs beneath her the way Nora used to sit when boys were around. This way Sissy was a little higher than Kevin, and probably she felt slightly more in control despite the age difference, despite the fact that he was a year older than Nora even, or older than Nora would have been.

He pulled her face towards his and she liked it. She liked being moved around.

“I like the way you manhandle me,” she said. The line was from a movie maybe, she couldn’t remember. She felt impossibly sexy.

“I like the way you won’t shut up,” he said.

She giggled. This went on for some time. The kissing, the back and forth. Both of them sitting, never lying down, but constantly repositioning.

After awhile he went for her pants again, and again she moved his hands away.

“You’re good at that,” he said.

“Thank you,” she said. It felt like play. It felt like what it was supposed to feel like. But then he put his hands on her pants again, and this time she felt her face get hot.

“We can’t have sex,” she said.

He laughed at her. “I wasn’t going to have sex with you,” he said.

She felt her face get hotter. She felt young suddenly. She said, “Oh,” and moved back away from him a little.

“You’re embarrassed,” he said.

“I’m embarrassed,” she said.

“You’re also cute,” he said. He put his hands on either side of her face. She felt small in those hands and she liked it. He smiled at her. She liked that too.

“Kiss me again,” she said.

He did, but he moved his hands from her face and she heard the sound of a belt buckle, not her own. She didn’t look down; she just kept kissing him, her face getting hotter, the heat spreading to her chest.

She felt his hands on top of hers. She squeezed them. He squeezed hers back. He pulled them towards him, towards his pants, and what she felt was soft and not soft at the same time. This detail Minka was sure of, because she’d thought the same thing a month earlier when she and Marty Metcalfe spent seven minutes in a closet together. And, like Minka, Sissy claimed to know what she was feeling; she’d heard Nora talking with her friends before. She knew what was happening, and yet she’d said she felt something like homesickness in the bottom of her stomach.

He kept his hands on top of hers, moving them as he wanted them to be moved. The whole time he kissed her, and this is what she tried to concentrate on. Whenever he took his hands away, she stopped, and he had to put his hands back in order to get hers to move again. It wasn’t complicated, but it also wasn’t easy.

After awhile, he said, “You can put your mouth on it.” He said this while he was kissing her, and she couldn’t understand him, and she said so.

“What?” she said, his mouth on top of hers. “What did you say?”

He pulled back a little, said, “You can put your mouth on it if you want to.”

This is when she stood up. She was shaking her head. She couldn’t speak.

“Wait, Sissy,” he said. “Just wait.” His hand was on her waistline again, pulling at the button and zipper, pulling the fabric down.

“Just let me see it,” he said. “Just let me see it.”

She looked away and he pulled the fabric down hard, just enough so that her pubic hair was exposed. He made sounds. She closed her eyes. One hand held down her pants, the other hand was around himself, working.

“Look at it,” he said.

She looked at his face instead, but she was crying a little, hoping it would be over, wanting him to have whatever he needed to finish. His eyes were closed.

“Look at it,” he said again. She did, even though he wouldn’t have known. She looked and she felt dizzy, felt like she was being held up only by the hand holding down her pants.

“Sissy, Sissy, Sissy,” he leaned back his head, eyes still closed. “Sissy, Sissy, Sissy. Sit on it,” he said. “Just sit on it.”

She turned away and saw, standing not four feet away, Mrs. Jeffreys in the doorway of the mudroom. Neither the girl nor the woman spoke. Mrs. Jeffreys was crying, a detail only Sissy knew, one she would refuse to reveal for years—even to Minka—out of respect for Mrs. Jeffreys or out of shame for what she’d done or maybe simply because admitting Mrs. Jeffreys’ tears would require admitting her own. Whatever the reason, the sight of Mrs. Jeffreys and her wet, crumpled face was enough to stop Sissy from crying.

Another detail Sissy kept to herself for years was the fact that she’d seen her sister late on the night she disappeared, much later than anyone else. She’d knocked on her bedroom door and when Nora didn’t answer, Sissy let herself in. She was surprised, but only partly, to see her older sister under the bed, under the mattresses actually; Nora had taken out the slats that kept them elevated and now she was beneath them—the weight of the box spring and mattress fully on top of her. Her head was turned towards the door. Her eyes were open.

“What are you doing?”

“Killing myself,” Nora said.

“Should I tell Dad?”

“No.”

“Can I borrow your fangs?”

“Top drawer to the right,” Nora said.

Sissy found the fangs, stood in front of her sister’s vanity, and put them on.

“Can you breathe?”

“More than I want,” said Nora.

“Do you want me to sit on you?”

“Maybe next time.”

“Lights on or off?”

“Off.”

It would be wrong to say that Sissy didn’t think about this often. But it would also be wrong to say that she assigned it any significance other than that it was the last time she saw her sister and that it was a cruelly meaningless last memory.

. . .

S
issy looked at Kevin. He hadn’t heard the door open, didn’t know they weren’t alone. He was still saying Sissy’s name, still enticing her to sit on it. Very gently, she undid Kevin’s grasp on the waistline of her pants. She rested his hand on his knee, which is when he opened his eyes. At first all he saw was Sissy, at least that’s what he would say later, glorifying the moment. “She looked like a fucking goddess on fire,” he said. “All that red hair. Shit.” But then he saw Mrs. Jeffreys, and Mrs. Jeffreys, seeing that he was finished, felt at liberty to speak.

“Zip your fly,” she said. “Kevin Thorpe, zip your fly.” Mrs. Jeffreys was still crying, but she stood up straight, refusing to leave them alone. She held out her hand. “Sissy,” she said. And Sissy, everyone’s favorite little sister, went to her. She put her hand in Mrs. Jeffreys’ and together they left the mudroom, left the party, and walked to the foot of the cul-de-sac to the three-story Tudor where Mr. Lindell lay on a couch, not knowing that his fourteen-year-old daughter was only a few blocks away, under the escort of Mrs. Jeffreys.

In ten different ways, on that interminable three-block walk, Mrs. Jeffreys promised Sissy that she had no choice but to rat her out to her father. The entire walk, in fact, she said that she owed it to Mr. Lindell to tell him what Sissy had done. That even if she wanted to keep it a secret, she couldn’t. It was her responsibility as a parent, as a mother. Sissy said nothing, but clutched at Mrs. Jeffreys’ hand and listened as she talked.

“What I wish is that nothing had happened. What I wish is that there was nothing to tell. The position you put me in. Can you imagine? Oh, Sissy.”

At the front door of the Tudor, Mrs. Jeffreys stopped talking. She turned Sissy towards her, looked her up and down, and said, “Who are you supposed to be, anyway? What’s your costume?”

Sissy looked down as if trying to figure out the answer. She looked at her hands, then at the sleeves of her shirt. She remembered finding the flannel western in the bottom drawer of Nora’s bureau. She remembered spending the entire afternoon just trying to find a few pieces of clothes in her sister’s drawers that would fit her. She remembered holding up Nora’s earrings one at a time, before deciding on a pair to wear to the party.

“I’m Nora,” Sissy said finally and held up her arms, as if motioning to her entire body. “See?”

Mrs. Jeffreys shook her head, tried to hold back tears. “You poor thing,” she said, then rang the doorbell. “You poor, poor thing.”

Of course, when Mr. Lindell answered the door, exactly what Sissy had thought would happen, happened. She was handed over. Mr. Lindell didn’t ask. Mrs. Jeffreys didn’t offer. The latter returned to the party, where she officiated that much more closely, and the next day Mr. Jeffreys installed a lock on the outside of the mudroom, as if taking away the place would also take away the instinct.

Sissy went upstairs to her sister’s bedroom, closed the door, climbed under the bed, and lowered the mattresses on top of her. Mr. Lindell went back to the couch. They kept the lights off and, like this, they passed the anniversary of Nora’s disappearance.