All That Is Mine I Carry With Me, page 12
“I know, Jane. There’s nothing to be upset about. I’m just being honest with you. We’re both adults, aren’t we? We’re grown women, and we both know that some girls would look at Danny as a golden goose. So we need to be frank with each other. Is that all right? Can I be frank with you?”
I nodded. I did not tell her what I really thought of her insulting little speech.
“Do you know what my father likes to say about why he got into the shoe business? Because when you step in shit, it’s not your hat that gets dirty.” She leaned forward to confide: “That’s us.” She winked. “Come. It’s not so bad.” She stood me up and scrubbed her palms up and down the outsides of my arms to jostle me out of my tears. She arranged the necklace so it sat just so. “Such a beautiful girl. We’re going to be good friends, you and me.”
* * *
—
On a Saturday morning in March 1977, Jeff woke up—rousing slowly from the deep, drugged sleep of a teenage boy—to hear Sarah’s voice downstairs. Not her words, just the unfamiliar timbre of a woman’s voice, for the first time in over a year, transmitted through the timbers of the old house up to his room.
Outside, a car idled.
He stood up stiffly and, fingering apart the slats of a Venetian blind, he looked out to see Sarah’s teal-green Olds Toronado in the driveway with smoke wisping out of the tailpipe. He grunted and shuffled off to the bathroom.
When he came back into his room to dress, he peered out again. Sarah’s car was still in the driveway, engine still running.
Downstairs, in the front hall, he found a pile of cardboard boxes, which his father and Sarah were ferrying down to the basement. Apparently Sarah’s belongings.
The happy couple came up from the basement.
“Hey, kiddo,” Dan said, resolutely cheery, using a nickname he never, ever used.
“Good morning,” Sarah said, more cautious.
All at once, Jeff felt sour, toxic—unreasonably, he knew, but he couldn’t control his own venomous mood. Resentment swelled up in him like sewage. Sarah’s presence here, so early in the morning, moving in, a constant intruder. His father’s expectant face and obnoxious, chipper tone of voice, intended to manipulate him. It was all too much to bear.
He said, “You left your car running.”
“I know. Jamie is out there.”
Jamie was Sarah’s daughter, a girl whose existence—here was another galling detail for Jeff to swallow—whose very existence they had hidden from Jeff until only a few weeks earlier, when Dan had revealed that slipping Sarah into the family might be more complicated than he had let on. The two families had all gone out to dinner to “celebrate” and give my kids a chance to meet this girl, their new stepsister. Even Alex came, arriving by cab from Cambridge like a movie star to a premiere. They went to Pier 4, the kids’ favorite (expensive) restaurant, which was reserved for birthday dinners and special occasions—another clumsy attempt to manipulate him, Jeff thought, to buy him off.
“You left her out in the car?”
“I didn’t leave her. She wouldn’t come in.”
“Why?”
“I don’t know. Why don’t you go ask her?”
“Hn. Okay, I will.”
Now, Jeff was being gallant here, I think (I hope), but it was obvious that he was happy for an excuse to leave Dan and Sarah. He ambled to the kitchen cabinet, got himself a packet of Pop-Tarts, and left the open box on the counter, all in an unhurried way, to show his father that he would not be hustled out of his own house. A teenage boy has a thousand ways to say “fuck you.”
Outside, as he shivered in the winter cold, Jeff saw Jamie sitting in the front passenger seat so he got into the driver’s seat beside her. Bench seat, nothing between them.
Poor Jeff, this was the closest he’d been to a girl in months. The only females at his school were a few middle-aged secretaries and one spindly math teacher. He was not especially shy but he had no patter, no idea what girls might be interested in talking about. The only thing he wanted from them—sex—he did not have the nerve to ask for. Jamie Bennett was a little older than Jeff, a grade ahead in school. She was pretty, and so curvy and full, swaddled in her puffy down jacket, that she must have seemed to Jeff like some ripe, juicy peach dangling from a branch. It was simply impossible for this boy to sit next to her and not think of her body. Yet, for all that sexual electricity, he felt oddly calm in that car, too, closed in with her, quiet, warm, safe. Their problems were all locked outside with the cold. In fact, their situation was just so weird—strangers soon to be stepsiblings, in the shadow of my mysterious absence, and Dan and Sarah’s unseemly happiness, and the quasi celebrity the case brought to the family—that he thought Jamie might be the only girl on earth who could understand what he was feeling. He actually thought she had it worse, in a way: Jamie’s mother was choosing to enter this fucked-up family and dragging her along. It was not Jamie’s mom who had disappeared, after all. Jeff was comfortable with her for another reason too: the word stepsister, with its whiff of incest, made her off-limits and thus easier to talk to.
“Did they send you out to check on me?”
“No.”
“You just came out here for no reason?”
“No. Didn’t want to be with them.”
“Me too.”
He opened the crinkly white Pop-Tarts envelope. “You want one?”
“What kind is it?”
He checked the package. “Strawberry.”
“No frosting.”
“My mother never let us have the kind with the frosting. Too much sugar.”
He slid one of the Pop-Tarts out of its envelope and offered it to her. She shook her head.
“You don’t want to live here?”
“No.”
“Me neither.” He took a bite then said, while still chewing (an old, terrible habit of his, by the way), “Your mother just said she doesn’t know why you’re out here.”
“She knows.”
“She knows you don’t want to live here?”
“Yeah. She said she’s sorry I feel that way but it’s happening anyway.”
“I bet you my father told her to say that. It sounds just like him.”
“Maybe. I am not living here.”
“You’re freaked out because of the whole…what happened? Or you just don’t want to live here?”
“No, it’s because of…what happened. Your father—well, never mind.”
“No, you can say it.”
“I can’t live in the same house as him, that’s all.”
“You’re scared of him.”
“I’m terrified of him. Aren’t you?”
“No.”
“Never? Not even a little?”
“No. He’s just my father.”
“So then you think he didn’t do it?”
Long silence.
“I don’t know.”
“Then how can you not be afraid?”
“I don’t know. I’m just not. Doesn’t make any sense, does it?”
“No. Unless you’re suicidal.”
“Maybe I am. The other night I had this dream—”
“Ugh, only boring people tell you their dreams. You’re not going to tell me some stupid dream, are you?”
“Well, not anymore.”
“No, go ahead.”
“Nah. It’s stupid. Never mind.”
“No, tell me your dream. I want to hear it. Is it the one where you show up for a test and you haven’t studied and you don’t have any clothes on?”
“No. Though I have that one too. How did you know?”
“Everyone has that dream, Jeff.”
“Do you?”
“No. I do my homework. So go ahead. What’s the dream?”
“Okay. So in the dream, I’m at the doctor’s office, and the doctor tells me I have this fatal disease and I only have like a week to live.”
“That’s it?”
“No. The weird part is, I am totally happy. Because it means I don’t have to go through with it, y’know?”
“Go through with what?”
“Growing up. The whole next thirty years. You ever had that one?”
“No.”
“Oh.”
She gave my Jeff a consoling little smile—oh, sweet, kind girl, thank you!—and he said, sheepish, “Me neither. I was just making it up. Anyway, that’s why I’m not afraid of him, if you see what I mean.”
“I do.”
“You know, we have a room all made up for you. Mimi did the whole thing. She made a sign with your name on it and put it on the door. She thinks she’s getting a new sister.”
“I can still be Mimi’s sister. She’s sweet.”
“She’s not sweet. People only think she’s sweet.”
“She is! Maybe you’re the one who’s not sweet.”
“What about your father? You could go live with him.”
“He’s not interested.”
“Why not? Did you ask him?”
“I don’t really know him. He’s not around. You know…” Her voice ebbed away.
“So where will you go?”
“My friend says I can come live with her.”
“That’d be a shame. I mean, for Mimi.” Awkward smile. “You’re wasting gas, you know. You should turn the engine off.”
“I’m not sure I can turn it back on. I’ve never done it before. We’ll freeze.”
“I can turn it back on.”
“Okay, go ahead, then.”
He turned the key on the steering column, switching off the engine. The car got very quiet. They heard voices of pedestrians. Immediately the cold began to seep in. The intimacy of their little sealed chamber was not the same without the warmth and the grumble of the engine, and they felt less comfortable together, less willing to confide.
Jamie rubbed her hands.
“Back on?” he said.
“Back on.”
He restarted the car.
“How do you know how to do that? You’re too young to drive.”
“I don’t know. Just monkey see, monkey do.”
“Do you think I’m crazy to be afraid of your dad?”
“I think you’d be a little crazy not to be afraid of him.”
“But you’re not.”
“I just try not to think about it, y’know? I try not to think, ever. About that.”
“Does that work?”
“Not really. But what else can I do? Where am I gonna go?”
“So what if he hurts you?”
“He won’t hurt me.”
“Or Miranda.”
“If he hurt Miranda, I’d kill him.”
“Okay. Sorry, I didn’t mean to upset you.”
“No, no, I’m fine. I’m just sayin’.”
“It’s none of my business. I’m not like this usually. Sorry.”
“It’s all right. It’s not like I never thought about it.”
She slumped in her seat, still feeling she had gone too far. And also not far enough—she hadn’t gotten any real answers to her own dilemma.
Jeff: “Do you get along with your mother?”
“I used to. Do you get along with your father?”
“I don’t know. I don’t think he likes me very much.”
“Why not?”
“I just kind of rub him the wrong way. Something about me. But he’s not so bad.”
“He’s not so bad except for this one little thing.” She held her fingers a quarter inch apart.
Jeff snorted.
Jamie laughed, clapped her hand over her mouth. “I’m so sorry. I shouldn’t have said that.”
“So he killed his wife, so what? He only did it one time.”
“Oh my God, stop! It’s your mother! That’s terrible.”
They stopped laughing and awkwardness filled the car.
“What was your mother like?”
Jeff considered the question. His vision began to blur, and he wiped his eyes with his thumb and forefinger. “She was nice” was all he could come up with. (Oh, Jeff. Break my heart.) “She was really nice.”
Jamie sat back and stared through the windshield, unsure where the conversation could go from there.
“I wish we could just get out of here,” Jeff said.
“Me too.”
A beat.
“We do have a car.”
“But we don’t have a driver.”
They shared a sly look.
Jeff put both hands on the wheel, at nine and three.
Jamie: “Oh no. We can’t.”
“Well, technically we can. I think you mean we shouldn’t.”
“No, I mean we can’t.”
“If we can’t, then I guess I can’t do…this.”
He moved the gearshift into reverse, and the car immediately rolled backward until he was able to stomp on the brake pedal. The car stopped with a lurch.
“Stop! You’re not allowed to do this!”
“I know! It’s great, isn’t it?”
Tentatively he raised his foot off the brake and backed the car out onto the street.
“You can’t drive!”
“Stop saying I can’t. I can. I am!”
He put the car in drive and they rolled down the street slowly, slowly. At the stop sign, he braked too hard and they were jostled. They shared another look, the same dopey grin.
“Where should we go?”
“Home!”
“Sorry. No such place.”
“Go back!”
“No. Let’s go someplace far away. How about California?”
“I don’t want to go to California.”
“Sure you do.”
They rolled down the block toward the lake, Jeff focused, Jamie’s mouth hanging open.
“Do not crack up my mother’s car!”
“Jesus, this is the biggest car I’ve ever seen. Who drives a car like this? It’s like driving the Hindenburg.”
“Not what I want to hear right now.”
“Right, sorry.”
“Just keep your eyes on the road. If you mess up this car, she’ll kill me.”
“You? What about me?”
“She can’t kill you. You’re not hers.”
“No, I am definitely not hers.”
They rolled down the street, letting the engine move them at idling speed, like a boat drifting with the breeze. Gaining confidence, Jeff began to experiment with the gas pedal.
“Turn on the radio.”
“No! You need to concentrate!”
“Radio!”
“Okay! What station?”
“BCN.”
“What number is that?”
“Wait, you don’t listen to BCN?”
“Oh my God, look at the road! You’re going to get us killed!”
“Yes, I am,” he said as he negotiated a twisting stretch of road along the lakeside. “Yes, I am.”
The next week, when Sarah moved in, her daughter moved in, too, without argument. Miranda had her new sister after all.
* * *
—
In March 1977, Detective Glover set out for Cleveland, ten hours by car due west from the Newton Police station, on I-90 all the way, no turns. He left on a Friday morning and made the drive with as few stops as possible. Once out of Boston’s orbit, he lost the radio signal, so he drove most of the way in silence, with only the sound of the road passing beneath his car. There is always an illusion on long highway trips like this, especially after you have been driving awhile, that the car is not moving; only the outside, the trees and road signs whizzing past, are in motion. That is how I think of Tom Glover that Friday morning, moving west against the eastward spinning of the earth: he was suspended at a fixed point in space while everything else rushed by. Because that is what happened to this poor, sweet man, I think. He got stuck in time, looking for me, while the rest of the world moved on.
The trouble, you see, was that my case never quite went away. People saw me, or thought they did, in all sorts of places. I was in Santa Monica, California, and soon after that in Petaluma. I was in Mobile and Montreal, and Portland, Oregon, and Spokane and Vancouver. (The Northwest must have been a good place for ghosties like me to reappear.) I was in some out-of-the-way places, too, places I’d never heard of: Benson, Minnesota; Plano, Texas; Las Cruces, New Mexico. These sightings usually followed a news report that showed my picture. Often the witness was a New Englander far from home, more familiar with the case than the locals. The reports came in to local and state police, sometimes to the FBI (which did not investigate ordinary missing-person cases), and all of them were passed along from agency to agency until they finally reached Tom Glover’s desk. Every one of these leads he ran down, in one way or another.
That was even more difficult than it sounds, for two reasons. First, in 1977 there was no way to prove a person’s identity definitively except fingerprints. Glover did have samples of my fingerprints. (There was no proper, ink-rolled example of my fingerprints, of course. I’d never been arrested. But the cops were able to collect “latents” from objects that only I would have touched: my hairbrush, the drawer pulls on my dresser, a plastic Bic lighter on my night table.) The only other “scientific” way to conclusively prove that one of these doppelgangers was actually Jane Larkin was a scar on my right shoulder, which my mother told them about, a detail that the cops withheld from the public. (The scar was from when I was nine or ten years old. I was riding my bike and decided—God knows why—to find out what would happen if I rode full-speed into a deep pothole on our street. Well, here is what happens: the bike stops, the little girl goes sailing over the handlebars, and she lands on her shoulder.) So, for Glover, the work of ruling out suspects was slow and meticulous.
The second thing you must understand is that people go missing a lot more than you might think. There are thousands of unsolved missing-person cases every year, and even if you exclude the dreary, tragic cases involving runaways, people who want to disappear—people in unhappy or violent relationships, people who lose hope because they are in debt or in trouble with the law, people who are mentally disturbed or addicted to drugs or alcohol—that still leaves a lot of people who vanish for no apparent reason at all. A lot of these are murder victims, but the fact that their bodies have gone missing makes it impossible to know precisely how many. (And the poor communication between jurisdictions means that a nameless dead body found far from home would likely never come to the attention of the detectives searching for her.) All we know about the disappeared is that they were here and then they were not. One by one they vanish, here and there, year after year, until whole crowds of people are simply gone, missing, absent. So for Glover, the needle-in-a-haystack aspect of this investigation was particularly difficult, because the haystack was very large.
