Don’t Look Back

Manny was always careful to use the most neutral words possible – experienced, not suffered, or even endured. Not because he was inclined to euphemisms, but because Eliza’s parents didn’t want to define her life for her. ‘You get to be the expert on yourself,’ her father said frequently, and Eliza found it an enormously comforting saying, an unexpected gift from two parents who had the knowledge, training, and history to be the expert on her, if they so chose. They probably did know her better than she knew herself in some ways, but they refused to claim this power. Sometimes she wished they would, or at least drop a few hints.

‘I was willing to defer admission,’ Vonnie reminded her father. This was accurate, as far as it went. She had offered to delay entering Northwestern, but not very wholeheartedly, and there was a risk that her parents would have to forfeit part of her tuition. Besides, now that Eliza was home, her parents were still keen on making distinctions between authentic issues, as they called them – her need to know that the house was locked at night, not so much as a window open, even on the fairest spring evenings – and rationalizations, or any attempt to use her past to unfair advantage.

Yet it was Vonnie who was inclined to leverage her sister to garner attention. Oh, she didn’t tell her new college friends too much. But she hinted at a terrible tragedy, an unthinkable occurrence, one that had made the national news. She was perhaps too broad in her allusions. Over the years, as Vonnie’s various college friends visited, they were clearly surprised to meet a normal- seeming high school girl with all her limbs and no obvious disfigurement. At least one had believed that Eliza was a young flautist, who lost her arm after being pushed in front of a subway train.

‘Remember,’ Eliza said to her mother now, ‘how Vonnie hated this house at first? Now she has a meltdown if you even suggest you might want to downsize.’

‘I think we’re still a few years away, knock wood.’ Inez did just that, rapping her knuckles on a small, rustic table that held their glasses of tea mixed with lemonade. Known as Arnold Palmers to most of the world, half-and-half at the Korean carry-outs in Baltimore, this drink had always been called Sunshines in the Lerner household. At a makeshift campsite in West Virginia, Eliza-then-Elizabeth had shown Walter how to make them. First, how to prepare the tea itself, in a jar left in the sun, then how to make homemade lemonade, with nothing more than lemons, water, and sugar. Walter thought that all juice came in frozen cans of concentrate; the lemonade proved almost too genuine, too tart, for his taste. But he had liked it, mixed with tea. ‘What do you call this?’ he’d asked Eliza, but she hadn’t wanted to tell him. ‘No name,’ she’d said. ‘Just tea and lemonade.’ ‘We should make up a name for it,’ he’d said, ‘sell it by the roadside.’ Like most of Walter’s plans, this was all talk.

‘Where will you go when you do sell this house?’ she asked her mother now.

‘Downtown D.C., I think, what they call the Penn Quarter neighborhood now.’

‘Not Baltimore?’

Inez shook her head. ‘We’ve been gone too long. We have no real ties. Besides, in D.C., we could probably give up both cars, walk most places. Theater, restaurants. You know me, it’s all or nothing, city or country, nothing in between. If I can’t see deer destroying my garden, then I want to breathe big, heavenly gulps of carbon monoxide and rotting trash, know the neighborhood panhandlers by name. I’m Eva Gabor and Eddie Albert in Green Acres.’

Eliza had to laugh at this image, her bohemian, unaffected mother as Eva Gabor and Eddie Albert. The children burst in, faces smeared with the residue from Rita’s, their favorite custard stand, whose neon letters promised ICE * CUSTARD * HAPPINESS. She couldn’t have felt any safer, even if the windows had been closed and locked.

The windows were open. That’s what was different about the house tonight. She was happy for her mother, even if she couldn’t imagine what it would be like to live that way.

Eliza headed home along the twisting country roads on which she had learned to drive twenty years earlier. Her driver’s ed teacher had been a horse-faced woman oddly intent on letting Eliza know she had been a popular girl in her day, pointing out the former houses of various boyfriends, providing little biographies of each one. The sports played, hair color, the cars driven. Eliza knew the instructor did this only to girls she perceived to be popular, so she accepted this strange patter as a compliment. But it was irritating, too, a form of bragging, an unseemly competitive streak in a woman who should be past such things. Once, when the driving teacher directed Eliza down a section of Route 40, narrating her romantic adventures all the way, Eliza had wanted to say: ‘You see that Roy Rogers? That’s where I was headed the day I met the first man who would ever have sex with me. He didn’t play any sports, but he had dark hair and green eyes and drove a red pickup truck. And when he broke up with a girl, he usually broke her neck. Except for me. I was the only one he didn’t kill. Why do you think that was?’

‘Mommy?’ Albie said from the backseat. ‘You’re driving on the wrong side of the road.’

‘No, honey, I’m—’ Oh God, she was. She pulled the steering wheel more sharply than necessary, horrified by what she had done, only to glimpse a flash of something white zipping behind the car.

‘What was that?’ Albie asked.

‘A deer,’ Iso said, utterly bored by their brush with death.

‘But it was white.’

‘That was the tail.’

A deer. Eliza was relieved that her children had seen it, too. Because, like Albie, she wasn’t sure what had dodged their car. For a moment, she thought it might be a girl, blond hair streaming. A girl, running for her life.

Chapter Six

1985

‘Wannabe,’ her sister said.

‘I’m not,’ Elizabeth said, but her voice scaled up because she didn’t know what Vonnie meant, and Vonnie pounced on that little wriggle of doubt, the way their family cat, Barnacle, impaled garden snakes.

‘It’s a term for girls like you, who think they’re Madonna.’

‘I don’t think I’m Madonna.’

But Elizabeth secretly hoped she looked like her, a little, as much as she could within the restrictions her parents had laid down. It was rare for her parents to make hard-and-fast rules. They gave Vonnie a lot of leeway – no curfew, although she had to call if she was going to stay out past midnight, and they trusted her never to get in a car with someone who had been drinking. But this summer, Elizabeth had suddenly discovered that there were all sorts of things she was forbidden to do. Dye her hair, even with a nonpermanent tint. Spend her days at the mall or the Roy Rogers on Route 40. (‘Watch all the television you want, take long walks, go to the community pool, but no just hanging,’ her mother had clarified.) And although she wasn’t actually prohibited from wearing the fingerless lace gloves she had purchased when a friend’s mother took them to the mall, her mother sighed at the mere sight of them.

Elizabeth put those on as soon as Vonnie left for her job at a day camp for underprivileged kids, checking herself in the mirror. She had a piece of stretchy lace, filched from her mother’s sewing basket, tied in her reddish curls, and a pink T-shirt that proclaimed WILD GIRL, which even she recognized was laughably untrue. Although it was a typical August day, hot and humid, she had layered a bouffant black skirt over a pair of leggings that stopped at her knees, and she wore black ankle boots with faux zebra inserts worked into the leather. She thought she looked wonderful. Vonnie was jealous.

Vonnie simply didn’t like Elizabeth, she was sure of it. Her mother said this wasn’t true, that sisters were never close at this age, but it was an essential stage through which they had to pass. Her mother sounded hopeful when she laid this out, as if saying it might make it true. Elizabeth was fifteen years old now to Vonnie’s soon-to-be eighteen and all her life she had carried the distinct impression that she had spoiled a really good party, that Vonnie had been miserable from the day the Lerner trio became a quartet.

And Elizabeth couldn’t figure out why. Vonnie still got most of the attention, excelling in everything she did, whereas Elizabeth was always in the middle of the pack. Vonnie was a good student, she had gone to the nationals in NFL – National Forensics League, not National Football League – and placed in extemp, short for extemporaneous, which meant she could speak off the cuff. That was no picnic, having an already combative older sister who was trained to speak quickly and authoritatively on any topic. Vonnie was going to Northwestern in the fall to study with Charlton Heston’s sister. Of course, Charlton Heston’s sister was simply another teacher there, in the drama school, and she had to take whoever signed up for her classes, but Vonnie managed to make it sound like a very big deal: I’m going to Northwestern in the fall. I’m going to study with Charlton Heston’s sister. Although barely two years older than Elizabeth, she was three years ahead in school because her September birthday had allowed her to enroll in school early, whereas Elizabeth had a January birthday. Elizabeth didn’t mind. It meant Vonnie went away all that much earlier. She was looking forward to seeing what it was like, being home alone. Maybe once Vonnie was gone, Elizabeth might discover what she did well, where her own talents lay. Her parents insisted she had some, if she would just focus. So far, all focus had brought her was the uncanny ability to ferret out dirty books in the houses where she watered plants for people lucky enough to go somewhere in this long, boring summer. Erica Jong and Henry Miller and – in one house, hidden behind the Encyclopaedia Britannica – the complete set of Ian Fleming. The Spy Who Loved Me – wow, that was nothing like the movie.

She left the house, with no particular destination in mind, but then – the only places she wanted to go were the ones that were explicitly forbidden. Her parents thought their neighborhood, Roaring Springs, was a big deal, but Elizabeth thought it was boring, boring, boring. Roaring Springs was nothing more than a bunch of old stone houses, remnants of a nineteenth- century mill village not even a mile from busy Frederick Road. But because their house backed up to a state park, thick with trees, no one could ever build near them. The isolation suited her parents, and even Vonnie never complained about living in this quirky stone house among other quirky stone houses, filled mostly with people like their parents, only childless. Everyone in Roaring Springs was proudly, determinedly eccentric, indifferent to trends and what was popular. They all professed to hate television, too. They might as well hate television: The county had yet to extend the cable system out here, which meant that Elizabeth saw MTV and VH-1 only when she went to friends’ houses after school. She wondered, in fact, how her mother even knew enough about Madonna to find her objectionable. Her father had glossy magazines in his office, for the parents who waited while he consulted with their children, but she didn’t imagine there were magazines in her mother’s office. Of course, she had never been allowed to visit there, given that it was in the state prison.

There was a small, old-fashioned family bakery on Frederick Road, and she stopped there, inspecting the various treats on display. Vonnie had said the other day that Elizabeth may be straight-up-and-down skinny, but she was prone to having a potbelly and she better watch it. The problem with Vonnie was that she said some things merely to be mean, but she said other things that were mean and true, and it was hard to sort them out. Elizabeth turned sideways, smoothing down her T-shirt, trying to assess her stomach. It looked okay to her. It would look better if she had boobs, real boobs instead of these A-cup nothings. Real boobs would balance her out. But she was okay with how she looked, today. Gazing in the bakery window, she thought about going in, but the problem was that she wanted everything: the lacy pizelles, the cunning pink-and-green cookies, the cannolis, the éclairs. Lately, she never felt satisfied, no matter what she ate. Theoretically, she could buy one of each, eat them all, then throw them up, but she had failed repeatedly at the throwing-up part, no matter how her girlfriends coached and encouraged her.

She continued up Frederick Road, trying to catch her reflection in the windows she passed along the way. Elizabeth wanted to know what she looked like when no one was looking. She wanted to stumble on herself unawares, sneak up on her image, but she had yet to master that trick. She was always a split second ahead, and the face she saw was too composed – mouth clamped in what she hoped was a shy, and therefore alluring, smile, chin tilted down to compensate for her nose, her nostrils, which she found truly horrifying. ‘Pig snout,’ Vonnie had said, and that one had stuck, although her mother said it was a ‘ski jump’ nose. Elizabeth had asked her mother if she could have a nose job for her sixteenth birthday, and her mother had been unable to speak for several seconds, a notable thing unto itself. She was a psychiatrist, but a really interesting one, who worked with criminals at the special prison for the insane. She could never talk about her work, though, much to Elizabeth’s disappointment. She would love to know about the men her mother met, the things they had done. Right now, she was pretty sure that her mother was working with a boy who had killed his parents, his adoptive parents, just because they asked him how he did on a test. He was actually kind of handsome; Elizabeth had seen his picture in the newspaper. But her mother was careful never to speak of her work. Her father, also a psychiatrist, didn’t speak of his work, either, but all he did was sit in an office and listen to teenagers. Elizabeth was pretty sure she already knew everything her father knew, probably more.

Elizabeth’s friends thought it was weird and creepy, what her parents did. They thought the Lerners could read minds, which was silly, or see through lies more easily than ‘normal’ parents. ‘They’re not witches,’ she told her friends.

In some ways, her parents were easier to fool than others. This was because Elizabeth told them so much that it didn’t occur to them that she ever withheld anything. Of course, what she mainly told them about was her friends – Claudia’s decision to have sex with her boyfriend while her parents were away one weekend, Debbie trying beer and pot, Lydia getting caught shoplifting. Each time she shared one of these stories, her parents would ask, gently, if Elizabeth had been involved, and she could always say ‘No!’ with a clear and sunny conscience. This made it easier to keep what she needed to keep to herself. Trying to make herself throw up after eating too much, for example. She knew it was bad, but she also knew it was a problem only if you couldn’t stop. Given that she never got to the point where she actually threw up, she couldn’t see how there was anything wrong with trying. Claudia said she should use a feather or a broom straw if she couldn’t force her finger far enough down, but – gross. The idea of a feather made her want to throw up, yet the fact of a feather didn’t. Was that weird? It was probably weird. Elizabeth worried a lot about being weird. Unlike Vonnie, she didn’t want to stand out, didn’t want to attract too much attention. She wanted to be normal. She wanted just one boy to look at her like, like – like that way Bruce Springsteen looked in that video, when he rolled out from under the car and he knew he shouldn’t want the woman who was standing there in front of him, but he just couldn’t help himself.

None of her friends lived close by. They lived on the other side of Frederick Road, in the kind of houses where Elizabeth’s mother would not be caught dead, to use one of her favorite expressions. I would not be caught dead living there, I would not be caught dead shopping there, I would not be caught dead going on vacation there. Finally, Vonnie had said: ‘Do you get much choice, about where you’re caught dead?’ and it had become a family joke. They had started naming the places where they would be caught dead. Still, their mother was pretty serious in her dislike of modern things. She had wanted to stay in the city, in their town house, which was almost right downtown, on a pretty green square built around the Washington Monument. But, about the time Vonnie turned fourteen, Elizabeth’s father had seen a chance to build a practice in the suburbs, where more parents were inclined to seek help for their children. And could pay for it, too, no small consideration. Roaring Springs was a compromise, thirty minutes from her mother’s job at Patuxent Institute, not even ten minutes to her father’s office in Ellicott City. It was his daytime proximity that gave Elizabeth her freedom on these summer days. But it wasn’t much of a freedom, when one was alone, with all these rules.

She tracked back to the park and began walking along the stream known as the Sucker Branch. If she followed its banks, she would come out at Route 40, not that far from Roy Rogers, maybe a mile or so. At least, she thought she might come out there. She wasn’t allowed to walk to the Roy Rogers because it was a hangout, and her parents believed that being idle was what got most kids in trouble. But they liked the idea of her being outdoors on summer days, so if she explained that she was simply following the stream and found herself there by accident and she was terribly thirsty after the walk, that would be okay. If they asked, and they might not even ask. She would go to Roy Rogers, see if anyone was there. If no one was around, she could still get a mocha shake, maybe some fries. Then – she was resolved – she was going to throw it up, she would learn how to throw up today. Her worries over her body were secondary; she didn’t need to lose weight, only the potbelly, if she really did have one, and she still wasn’t sure. What she needed was something to tell her friends when they were reunited as high school sophomores in two weeks. She wanted to have something to show for her summer. Unlike Claudia, she didn’t have a boyfriend. Unlike Debbie and Lydia, she wasn’t daring enough to shoplift, and she had no interest in her parents’ booze. She had to do something in these final weeks of summer that counted as an achievement, and learning how to throw up was her best bet.

Following the stream, high in its banks after the weekend’s heavy rains, turned out to be much harder than she expected. Mud sucked at her boots, and when she came to the spot where she needed to cross, she couldn’t. The unusually deep water covered the rocks she had planned to hop across, and it was moving quickly. She paused, uncertain. It seemed a shame to turn back, after making it this far. She thought she could hear the traffic swooshing by on Route 40. She was close, very close.

Then she saw a man on the other side, leaning on a shovel.

‘It’s not so swift you can’t wade through,’ he said. ‘I done it.’ He looked to be college age, although something told Elizabeth that he wasn’t in college. Not just his grammar, but his clothes, the trucker’s hat pulled low on his forehead. ‘Just go up there, to where that fallen tree is. The water won’t go above your shins, I swear.’

Elizabeth did, taking off her boots and tucking them beneath her armpits, so they were like two little wings sticking out of her back. Zebra-patterned wings with stilettos. He was right, the current was nothing to fear, although she worried that the water itself was dangerous, filled with bacteria. Luckily she’d had a tetanus shot just two years ago, when she stepped on a rusty nail. And the man was nice, waiting to help her scramble up the banks on the other side, taking hold of her wrists. He wasn’t that much taller than she was, maybe five seven to her five three, and his build, while muscled, was slight. He was almost handsome, really. He had green eyes and even features. The only real flaw was his nose, narrow and pinched. He looked as if the world smelled bad to him, although he was the one who smelled a little. B.O., probably from shoveling on such a hot day. His T-shirt showed sweat stains at the armpits and the neckline, a drop of perspiration dangled from his nose.

‘Thank you,’ she said.

He didn’t let go.

‘Thank you. I’m fine now. I can stand just fine.’

He tightened his grip on her wrists. She tried to pull away, and her boots fell, one rolling dangerously close to the water. She began to struggle in earnest and he held her there, his face impassive, as if he were watching all of this from a great distance, as if he had no part in holding her.

‘Mister, please.’

‘I’ll take you where you’re going,’ he said.

Chapter Seven

Eliza had never Googled herself. What would have been the point? Eliza Benedict was not the kind of person who ended up on the Internet, and the story of Elizabeth Lerner was finite, the ending written years ago. Peter was all over the Internet – most of his work behind a pay wall, but nevertheless there – represented by almost a decade’s worth of his own words, probably more than a million when one included his HoustonChronicle days. And since taking his new job with the venture capital firm, he was even more omnipresent in this shadow world: a source, a personage, someone to be consulted and quoted on these new financial products, which Eliza didn’t understand. She didn’t even understand the term ‘financial product.’ A product should be real, concrete, tangible, something that could be bagged or boxed.

However, Eliza knew, even before Walter had written her, that she showed up at Peter’s elbow in the occasional image, especially now that Peter had crossed over to the dark side – his term – and they had to go to functions. That was her term, but it made Peter laugh. ‘You couldn’t call that a party,’ she said after her first foray into his new world. ‘And they didn’t serve dinner, only finger food, all of it impossible to eat without dribbling. No, that was truly a function.’

Sitting on their bed, Peter had laughed, but his mind wasn’t on the party, or on what to call it. ‘Leave your dress on,’ he said. ‘And those shoes.’ She did. But even Peter’s admiration for her that night hadn’t been enough to send her searching for her own image, despite the knowledge that they had been photographed repeatedly. She hated, truly hated, seeing photographs of herself. A tiresome thing to say, banal and clichéd, but more true of her than it was of others who professed to feel the same way. Her photographic image always came as a shock. She was taller in her head, her hair less of a disordered mess. She and Peter looked terribly mismatched, like an otter and a . . . hedgehog. Peter was the otter, with his compact, still hard-muscled body and thick, shiny hair, while she was the hedgehog. And not just any hedgehog, but Beatrix Potter’s Mrs Tiggy-Winkle. Even dressed up in expensive clothes, she gave the impression that she had just been divested of an apron and a bonnet, a happy little hausfrau who couldn’t wait to get home and put the kettle on.