lovely and her body was magnificent, like a movie star’s. He slowed down.
‘You want a ride?’
She looked confused, on the verge of tears. ‘One-oh-three Apple Court, Point of Rocks. One-oh-three Apple Court, Point of Rocks.’
‘Sure I can take you there, just tell me—’
She shook her head, kept repeating her address. She looked to be at least eighteen, but she was acting like she was six. Oh.
‘Calm down, calm down, I’ll get you home. We’ll have to find someone who can tell me the way, but I’ll get you there, okay?’
She climbed into his truck. Gosh, she was pretty. Too bad she was slow, or retarded, or whatever it was called now.
‘You got lost?’
She nodded, still hiccuping from her tears. Eventually she gulped out that she had been in a store with her mother and she had gotten thirsty, gone to find a water fountain in the store, but when she came back, she couldn’t find her mother, so she had decided to walk home.
‘You still thirsty? You want something to drink? A soda or something?’
‘Home,’ she said. ‘One-oh-three Apple Court, Point of Rocks.’
‘I’ll take you home,’ he said. ‘But I have to stop anyway, to ask directions. If you want a drink or a snack, you just let me know.’
He pulled over at the next convenience store he saw, a Sheetz. His father loved to say that name, drawing out the vowel sound to the t. Sheeeeeeeeeeeet – then waiting a split second before adding the z. And his mother laughed every time, as if it were new. That’s all Walter wanted. A wife, a world of private jokes. It shouldn’t be so hard.
He parked at the far end of the parking lot, where his truck wouldn’t be in view of the cash register. Inside he bought two sodas and some candy. He did not ask directions, at least not to 103 Apple Court. Instead, he asked if there were any good fishing spots nearby.
She liked it at first, he could swear that she did. He told her it was a game, and he fed her M&Ms for each step she mastered. Fact is, she might have done it before. It happens, with retarded people. They get up to all sorts of things. That was why the girl in his grade school had to be transferred, because she was doing things with the older boys. She had a woman’s body and a little girl’s mind. That was no way to be. He was doing this girl a kindness, if you thought about it. But, in the end, it wasn’t right. He needed someone who could help a little. He wouldn’t make this mistake again.
Later, when he shouldered her body and carried it deep into the woods, trusting that no one would be looking for her here, not soon, he found himself feeling very tender toward her. She wasn’t happy in this life, couldn’t really be. Everyone was better off now.
He was home in time for supper.
Chapter Five
Eliza’s parents lived only thirty minutes from the new house, another mark in its favor. (Funny, the more Eliza kept enumerating the house’s various advantages in her mind – the trees, the yard, the proximity to her parents – the more she wondered if there was something about it that she actually disliked but didn’t want to admit to herself.) She had assumed that their lives, maintained at a physical distance for so long, would braid together instantly, that she would see them all the time. But, so far, they met up no more than once a month, and it was typically a rushed restaurant meal in downtown Bethesda, at a place that offended no one and therefore disappointed everyone.
Perhaps they were all just out of practice at being an extended family; Eliza had lived a minimum of 1,500 miles away since college graduation. Besides, both her parents, now in their late seventies, continued to work, although her father had cut back his practice; her mother was an academic, teaching at the University of Maryland in downtown Baltimore. They were not, nor would she want them to be, the type of settled grandparents whose lives revolved around their only grandchildren. Still, she had thought she would see more of them than she did.
This week, however, they were having dinner at her parents’ house, an old farmhouse in what had been, back in 1985, a rural enclave in Western Howard County. Their road still had a country feel to it. But all around, development was encroaching. For Inez, those new houses were like battleships in a harbor, massing, readying an attack. As for the large electrical towers visible in the distance – those made her shiver with revulsion, although she did not believe in the health claims made against them. She just found them ugly. ‘Imagine,’ she often said, ‘what Don Quixote would have made of those.’
Yet the Lerners had never thought twice about relocating here, leaving their beloved house in Roaring Springs in order to enroll Eliza in a different high school. One county over, Wilde Lake High School had been far enough so a new girl, known as Eliza, would have no resonance. There was always the slight risk that someone from the old school district would transfer and that Eliza’s identity would be pierced. But as her parents explained to her repeatedly, the changes were not about shame or secrets. They moved because the old neighborhood had dark associations for all of them, because some of the things they loved most – the stream, the wooded hillsides, the sense of isolation – were tainted. They chose not to speak of what had happened in the world at large, but that was because the world at large had nothing to contribute to Eliza’s healing. If she had returned to Catonsville High School with her friends – and it was her choice, they stressed – her parents didn’t doubt that people would have been sensitive. Too sensitive. They did not want their daughter to live an eggshell existence, where others watched their words and lapsed into sudden, suspicious silences when she happened onto certain conversations. New house, new start. For all of them. A new house with an alarm system, and central air-conditioning, despite Inez’s hatred of it, because that meant they didn’t sleep with open windows.
Iso and Albie loved their grandparents’ house, which was filled with the requisite items of fascination that grandparents’ homes always harbor. But the real lure for them was the nearby Rita’s custard stand. As soon as they left with their grandfather for an after-dinner treat, Eliza told her mother about Walter’s letter.
‘What are you going to do?’ she asked.
‘Nothing,’ Eliza said.
‘Doing nothing,’ Inez said, ‘is a choice in its own way. When you do nothing, you still do something.’
‘I know.’
‘I assumed you did.’
They were sitting on the screened porch that ran along the back of the house, a place where the view was still, more or less, as it had been when the Lerners purchased their home. They had bought it quickly, almost instinctively, a month after Eliza came home. It was actually larger than the eighteenth-century stone house they had known in Roaring Springs, and better appointed in almost every way – updated bathrooms, more generously proportioned rooms. Yet when Vonnie had come home for Christmas break, glum over her poor academic performance in her inaugural quarter at Northwestern, she had pitched a fit over her parents’ failure to consult her on this important family matter. Vonnie had always been given to histrionics, even when she had little cause for them, and her family was more or less inured to the melodrama.
But no one, not even psychiatrist parents as well trained as the Lerners, could have been prepared to hear their eldest daughter proclaim: ‘It’s just that everything’s going to be about Elizabeth – excuse me, Eliza – from now on.’
