Miranda learned from Felicity’s grandmother, Alice, who lived not far from my parents, about what happened a few days into the new year, how state police, local police, and police from Madison all converged on the building to arrest a 120-pound girl. (I suppose they thought she could be holed up in there with an automatic weapon.) Alice got there just in time to see her only granddaughter taken away in handcuffs.
Her family had no idea what was happening. For all they knew, it was because of the rigorous nature of her graduate studies that Felicity didn’t come home more often. Would my parents have figured out that I wasn’t really in school? My mother, of course, was overly inquisitive by nature and training, and further, they helped subsidize my bills and stuff when I got jammed up, so I had very few secrets. Other families were different. Stories of abuse, sufferedor perpetrated in secret, were almost ubiquitous...He seemed like a decent guy, quiet, kept himself to himself, I would never have suspected...
When the whole thing transpired, Nell and I were with my parents, house hunting in Florida, in Cocoa Beach, near where my dad had gone to college and where a few of his old fraternity brothers lived. My parents wanted a vacation place, where they would eventually retire, in anticipation of the day when we finally got around to giving them grandchildren. For one hot, creepy week, Nell and I drove every morning to Cocoa Beach past snowmen and reindeers standing on lawns as plush as putting greens. We sat on the sand listening to people’s phones playing “Jingle Bells” as the sun smashed down on us. One woman whose mat was next to our towels was so cooked that her skin was the color and texture of a leather boot. She lay there all day, neither reading nor listening to music and not even going into the water to get her ankles wet. How could this feel pleasant? How could she believe the result was attractive? Yet, the oranges were so delicious compared to the ones at our local Woodman’s that I ate until my gums hurt. I also actually got sick of eating fried grouper, which, on my first night, was a delicacy.
The condominium our folks decided on was nice enough: two stories, four bedrooms, a pool, solidly built and thoughtfully finished to resemble a little Victorian house. It looked the same as three dozen others in the same planned neighborhood. No matter how old and cold I got, I decided (ironically, as it transpired) that I would never live in Florida.
If I had been home (Where there was snow! Where it was real Christmas!) I might have seen Felicity. We might have had a drink or gone out for lunch. Why hadn’t I made the effort to do that sooner and more often? Not that it would have changed anything; that was a foolish notion, but the frisson of guilt was real. It was never that I didn’t care for her; of course I did, but life had whirled both of us away—or so I assumed. Theage we were, work came first. Study came first. Social life and love were folded into the work of inhabiting the adult role you would have for the rest of your life. You were leaning forward into the wind, into the future, with the past at your back, reliable and recoverable, and sometimes, for the moment, ignorable.
Still, I was aghast in the knowledge that, whatever had happened, it was already underway by then. Whatever she knew, whatever she had planned, if she had done what they said she’d done, the guilt and agitation must have been crushing. How could she go through the ordinary week of holiday rituals, knowing she was on the verge of something so monstrous? It was unsettling to think that, at the time, I knew nothing of something now central to my professional and personal life. At the time, I was stuffing my face with fried grouper sandwiches.
I wondered then, if you were going to do something so grim, why pick such a contradictory occasion for it, a time like winter break when families gathered, that, for the survivors, would stain that supposedly joyous week forever? Or did the murderous not even consider such matters? Was the timing so she could pretend somehow that she was out of town? Was her need for that money so fierce and urgent? Why? Was it just to be safe? Never again to have to rely on men? How did Felicity even feel about men? Did she despise them? Was she gay (not that gay women despised men)? Why did the police just immediately believe Cary’s account of Emil’s death? Why did no one think that Cary might have killed him?
Why wouldn’t Felicity talk to me?
“Do you know where there’s a restaurant around here that might still be open?” Ross asked.
I twitched, startled by his voice. Lost in my freewheeling thoughts, I’d all but forgotten he was there.
“I don’t. I don’t think I’ll ever eat again. I feel like I swallowed a bag of doughnuts.”
“Well, two loaves of bread... single-handed.”
“Are you hungry?”
“I’m going to look and see if there’s some kind of fast-food place. I’ll bring you some cookies or something. Do you want a soda too? We can talk more then. I can’t think when I’m starving.”
“Sure,” I told him, as he shrugged into his peacoat, winding his scarf around his neck. This reminded me that tonight was markedly colder than it had been in weeks. I was in such a hurry to leave that I actually lost time through haste. As my Grandma Nell said, what you lack with your mind, you make up with your feet. I had to go back to get my favorite quilted winter coat, the one she made for me. Despite having seen designers and cutters at work, actually making a coat without a pattern was still a level of textile achievement far beyond my understanding. It was like choosing to knit a refrigerator from steel wool. With the trial still distant, I could go back to Chicago later and pick up more clothing and books. But I would never be without my coat, a confection of white cotton velvet with fringe that Grandma Nell had designed to grow more fashionably faded with every wash.
I’d been inside the tabernacle at Starbright Ministry just one time. My father contemptuously called the place “Six Flags Over Jesus.” It was on Valentine’s Day, that same year.
Rev. Wild was loud and showy, beseeching his flock. “Husbands, love and treasure your wives! Wives, love and serve your husbands! The love we celebrate today with chocolates and flowers is the merest drop in the ocean of the mighty love of the Lord for each one of you.” Calling Ruth “my bride,” he passed a Valentine card from the back of the huge tabernacle to the choir, where Ruth stood in the top row, blushing furiously, trying to smile as everyone applauded her.
He was praising her to the skies. And yet, now that I recalled the occasion, it also seemed that he looked down on her.
Plenty of devoted Starbright women might have envied Ruth her marriage, but I didn’t. Neither did Felicity. She didn’t have to tell me; her face that day was a banner proclaiming hypocrisy. Several women stood up and pointed out that they knew Jesus personally. One of them even beseeched Him for help at the supermarket finding a bargain on pot roast, which seemed to me creepy even in that limited context. I recalled the supposedly joyous songs they sang that instead sounded like a dirge for sailors lost at sea, songs about short and brutal lives, hastening to their close. I remembered as especially gross the ancient tune “Abide with Me” (“Change and decay in all around I see...”). There was just one beautiful song, an old gospel hymn (“I sing because I’m happy, I sing because I’m free, for His eye is on the sparrow, and I know He watches me”).
When Felicity transferred to the public high school from Starbright Academy the winter morning she turned sixteen, I thought she just hated the school, which she said managed to work Jesus into everything, including math. Maybe there was more to it. There was always more to it, I thought.
I thought of how Ruth Wild, as a science teacher, was good and clear-minded. She did not dodge the bits of science that probably went against her fundamentalist Christian code, or at least her husband’s. Being who I am, I appreciated how she managed to style her long-sleeved dresses over leggings and jeans so that they looked more urban hippie than conservative pastor’s wife. Felicity’s younger brothers, Jay and Guy, were cute little blonds who resembled dark-haired Felicity only in that they were human, since Felicity was the product of Ruth’s fleeting college relationship with an absent beau (whom my dad, ever the comic, called “the unsub”). Felicity once told me that she had no idea who her biological father was, beyond his being part Italian, and she didn’t care to know. Poor Ruth.
Winding around and around in my memories, I must have fallen asleep. When Ross finally returned with his snack, it was after midnight, and he had to pound on the door to wake me up. It took me a moment to figure out where I was.
I tried to ignore the dismay on his face when, without asking, I grabbed half his beef sandwich. Munching away, I asked, “Do you know how I can convince these guys to talk to me?” Ross shrugged and shook his head. “I won’t force anybody to go on the record. But if the police have already talked to them, the reality is that’s a moot point anyhow. My call should come as no surprise. I don’t care about them as much as I want to know what they saw in her. Why pay a thousand dollars for an hour with her? What would make you agree if you were them?”
Ross said slowly, “I guess if I thought you were going to write about me anyway, then the only thing left would be to make sure you didn’t completely trash me, without giving me a chance to tell my side of it.” Good point, Ross. Apparently, our long friendship outweighed institutional loyalty... or even softball-team loyalty.
“Well, that’s what I intend to tell them. But I’m more concerned about what they thought about her and why they paid for her attention. If you were me, wouldn’t you wonder? Wouldn’t you want reasons? Wouldn’t you want to try to trace a visible line that led from here to there? Wouldn’t you think, there but for the grace of...?”
“Not you, Reenie. You would never,” Ross said. “Apparently, there wasn’t a lot of feeling in it on her side. At least, that’s what the rumor is.”
“You mean she didn’t fake orgasms?” I said. “Or she didn’t seem to care?” Ross blushed and shook his head. “Would you care?”
Yet I found myself grateful that Ross thought that I would never make such a degrading choice. I was grateful that he said it. Iwas certain, but is anything truly certain? I knew how disclaimers made in daylight could get lost in the dark. I knew Ross had to be on his way. I’d kept him up so late, and yet hated to part with him. Not only had he given me useful foundational information, virtually being a stand-in for the men I would talk with, but he was also familiar and dear—and very much on my side.
I promised Ross that I would let him sleep and would not, after all, show up at 8:00 a.m. for breakfast. He could leave a note for the innkeepers to pack up something for him, for the road.
“One last thing,” I said to Ross. “Then I promise I’ll release you. It’s not like I need to know how to do an interview. But the kind I’m used to these days is ten minutes if you’re lucky, people saying, ‘utterly fabulous,’ or ‘totally trending,’ or ‘passion for fashion,’ or ‘OOAK.’ Like, once you track them down, you just press the button and out comes the spiel. This is different.”
