Don’t Look Back

Only a man who had never been raped could have written that phrase.

‘Let’s wait him out,’ she told Peter. ‘He’ll either drop this, or he won’t. As he said, he doesn’t have long. And he’s not being put to death for what he did to me.’

That night, in bed, she surprised Peter by initiating sex, quite good sex, with those little extras that long-married couples tend to forgo. It was, by necessity, silent sex, and she had to clap her hand over Peter’s mouth at one point, fearful that the children would hear him. But it was important to remind herself tonight that her body belonged to her, that this was sex, this was love. She deserved her life. She had created it, through sheer will and not a little help from Peter and her family. She had every right to protect it.

But as she fell asleep, spooned by her husband, the other girls came to her as they sometimes did. Maude and Holly, followed by all the faceless girls, the ones that Walter was suspected of killing, although nothing had ever been proven. Two, four, six, eight – the estimates climbed into the teens. They were, all things considered, remarkably kind and forgiving little ghosts. Tonight, however, they were mournful in their insistence that she was not alone in this, that they must be factored into any decision she made about Walter. Holly, forever the spokeswoman, reminded Eliza that her life was theirs, in a sense. Polite even to her phantoms, Eliza did not argue.

Eventually the others slipped away one by one, but Holly lingered in Eliza’s thoughts, keen on some private business. ‘I was the last girl,’ she said. ‘They shouldn’t have called you that. I was the last girl, and he’s going to die for what he did to me.’

‘Oh, Holly, what does it matter? Last or next-to-last? Ultimate or penultimate? They’re just words. Who cares?’

‘I do,’ Holly said. ‘And you know why, even if you always pretend that you don’t. Ha-ha!’

Chapter Four

1985

Point of Rocks. He had always liked that name, seen it on signs for years, but somehow never managed to visit. Now that he had – well, it wasn’t that much different from any of the towns along the Potomac. From his own town, in fact, back in West Virginia. Almost heaven, the license plate said, and Walter agreed. Still, he liked to drive, wished he could see more of the world.

When he was a child, no more than four or five, his father took him to a spot in Maryland, Friendsville, where it was possible to see three states – Maryland, West Virginia, Pennsylvania. He had been disappointed that the area wasn’t marked, like a map or a quilt, that one state was indistinguishable from another. He told his father he wished they could go out west, stand in the four corners, which he had heard about from his older sister.

‘If wishes were Mustangs,’ his father said. It was one of his favorite sayings. He didn’t believe in vacations. Years later, Walter felt a bit betrayed when he started working at his father’s repair shop and found out just how steady the business was. They could have taken trips, known a few more luxuries. Maybe not all the way west, but to that big amusement park in Ohio, the one with the tallest roller coaster in the world. Or his father could have sent Walter, his mother, and his sister on a vacation if he really felt he couldn’t close up for seven days, or leave the place under the care of one of his employees. The only trip Walter ever took was to Ocean City, Maryland, after high school graduation, and it felt like he spent more time on the bus than in the town itself.

Now that Walter worked for his father, he didn’t get vacations, just Sundays and Wednesdays off. What could he do with that mismatched pairing of days? Today was a Sunday, and he was thinking about turning back, going home. There was no law that a man had to do anything with his day off, no rule that said he wasn’t allowed to spend the afternoon watching television, then enjoy Sunday-night supper with his family. Lately, his mother seemed to be dropping hints that he might want to get his own place, move out and on, but he was ignoring her for now. He didn’t want to move out until it was to move in with someone, set up his own household. But, wait – maybe that was the problem? Maybe the reason he had trouble meeting women was because he didn’t have a place to take them? There were all those jokes about men who lived with their parents, but he didn’t think that applied to him. He worked in his father’s business. Why shouldn’t he stay at home until he could afford a proper house, not one of those cinder block motel rooms that people rented by the week, making do with hot plates and mini fridges. Living that way, in a single room, wasn’t living at all. He’d wait for the real thing. Real love, real house, a partnership in his father’s business. Already he had asked his father why they couldn’t change Bowman’s Garage to Bowman and Son’s Garage. His sister, now married but living on the same street, said it didn’t sound right, and his father said he didn’t want to pay to change all the signs and stationery, and when Walter had said the sign would be enough – wait, was that a girl?

It was, a tall, shapely girl brushed with gold, her hair and skin almost blending with the cornfields on either side of the road. She had a funny walk, kind of a lope, but she was otherwise 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.’

The statement, delivered at the dinner table, was wrong on so many levels that no one in the family spoke for several seconds. It was factually wrong; the whole point was that the Lerners were trying to make a world in which things were neither about, nor not about, what had happened to Eliza. Besides, they had always been fair-minded, never favoring one daughter over the other, honoring their differences. Vonnie was their high-strung overachiever. Eliza, even when she was known as Elizabeth, was that unusual child content simply to be. Good enough grades, cheerful participation in group activities in which she neither distinguished nor embarrassed herself. Inevitably, it had been speculated – by outsiders, but also by Inez and Manny, by Vonnie, and even by Eliza – that her temperament wasn’t inborn but a subconscious and preternatural decision to opt out. Let Vonnie have the prizes and the honors, the whole world if she wanted it.

From a young age, Eliza was also a willing, complacent slave to her older sister, which probably undercut whatever traditional sibling rivalry there might have been. She was simply too good- natured about the tortures her sister designed for her in their early days. Oh, when she was a baby, she cried when Vonnie pinched her, which the newly minted older sister did whenever the opportunity presented itself. But once Eliza could toddle about, she followed her sister everywhere, and not even Vonnie could hold a grudge against someone who so clearly worshipped her.

But she could – apparently, amazingly – seethe with resentment over the way her sister’s misfortune had transformed the family dynamic.

‘Would you rather be Eliza?’ her father asked Vonnie the night of her unthinkable pronouncement.

Eliza couldn’t help wanting to hear the answer. Obviously, Vonnie had never wanted to be Eliza back when she was Elizabeth, so it would be odd to think she might want to trade places now. But what if she did? What would that signify?

‘That’s not what I meant,’ Vonnie said, her anger deflating. Imploding, really, from embarrassment. ‘I was just trying to say that, from now on, so much of what we do will be controlled, influenced, affected by . . . what happened.’

‘Well, that’s true for Eliza, so I think it’s fitting that it be true for our family as a whole,’ their father said. ‘This happened to all of us. Not the same thing – there is what Eliza experienced, which is unique to her, and what your mother and I experienced, which is another. And what you felt, going off to school while this was happening, was yet another unique experience.’