1985
THEY DROVE. IF THERE WAS a purpose, a destination, Elizabeth could not pinpoint it. They had dipped down into Virginia, this much was clear from the highway signs, and they sometimes crossed the Shenandoahs into West Virginia. Walter found odd jobs to make cash-chopping wood, for example, to help people with vacation homes prepare for the winter ahead, which Walter said would be a bad one, as bad as last winter, which had seen one of the worst snowstorms in the area’s history. “I feel it in my bones,” he said, and he was being literal. He chopped wood, he did yard work, he fixed things. Elizabeth was surprised by the ease with which he found work, how people looked past her, never questioning why she was with Walter and, after Labor Day passed, not in school. Perhaps they thought she was simpleminded, as simple as Lennie in Of Mice and Men. She seldom spoke. Walter had made it clear that she should answer only direct questions with as few words as possible. And although Walter had purchased clothing for her-two pairs of jeans, some T-shirts, a sweater, all from JCPenney-she always looked a little dingy because she had to wear each outfit three to four times before they could go to a coin laundry. It was one of the few times he left her alone. He would have her strip down behind a sheet, whether at a motor court or a campsite, then hand him her clothes. He tied her hands, but not her feet, and although he gagged her the first few times, he didn’t even bother with that after a while.
She could, of course, have left the room or the tent, wrapped in nothing but a sheet. Her feet were free. She could have called for help when he stopped gagging her. But it was too embarrassing. She could not get past imagining those first few minutes, when she would be the girl in the sheet, when people would point and laugh and maybe worse. There was the very fact of the…un-loveliness of her body, the potbelly, which was more pronounced from their fast-food, on-the-go diet. She could not imagine walking around in a sheet, worrying about what might be glimpsed, or how it might come untied.
The real problem was that she couldn’t imagine escaping at all. He would kill her. Kill her family. She dreamed of rescue, hoped for it, prayed, but she believed it would have to be something that happened to her, not because of her.
SOMETIMES SHE WOULD TRY to pinpoint where she would be, back home, at a particular time of day. At, say, 10:15 A.M., she would picture the mind-numbing lull of late morning in school, those early periods when the day’s promise has already burned off, but the end still seems impossibly distant. At 4 P.M., she would see herself lying on the sofa, watching television while doing her homework, the height of her rebelliousness. Her parents always said they didn’t mind if she watched television before or after homework, only never during. But there would be no one to rat her out, since Vonnie had gone to college. Only-had Vonnie left for college, after Elizabeth disappeared? Probably. Elizabeth hoped she had. A disappointed Vonnie was a terrible, terrible thing. Vonnie seemed to believe that she should always get what she wanted, more so than other people. The drama around her college applications had been intense, affecting the entire household. They all knew better than to fetch the mail during those weeks when acceptances-and, in one memorable case, an actual rejection, from Duke-started arriving, but Elizabeth might sneak a peek into the mailbox if she got home before Vonnie. She examined the envelopes, knowing that it was all about fat versus thin, daydreamed about the day when her own letters would be waiting for her. But she didn’t dare take the mail in, and even her parents ceded that privilege to Vonnie.
In the truck, driving the mind-numbingly familiar roads, Walter said: “Tell me a story. Tell me about that man and his dog.”
She did. The problem was-she hadn’t actually read Travels with Charley. She had started it but found it dull, not at all the work she was expecting after reading Of Mice and Men and Cannery Row. But she was scared to admit that she had lied-Walter prized honesty above all other values and had made it clear that she must always tell him the truth-so she made it up as she went along, trying to figure out what kind of stories Steinbeck and his poodle would have lived on the road. She borrowed heavily from a book her father had read the summer before last, Blue Highways, which had inspired her parents to take them on back-road drives in Maryland, Pennsylvania, and Virginia. God, it had been boring. Sometimes, roaming with Walter, she would glimpse a place, a town, a gas station that she thought she recognized from those day trips, but she could never be sure.
“Tell me another story,” Walter repeated. It was a gray, indeterminate day, out of season. Too cool to be summer, which it still was on the calendar, but lacking the crispness of autumn. The air was muggy, as damp and unrewarding as a sponge bath.
“Well, there’s a time when they went to… Tulsa.”
“ Tulsa? After Milwaukee?”
“I’m not telling it in order, just as I remember it.”
“Where did they start again?”
“ New York.”
“And where do they end up?”
“I can’t tell you that. It gives too much away.” She couldn’t tell him, in part, because she was making it up as she went along, but also because she was scared to find out what happened should Mr. Steinbeck and his poodle ever stop moving. If they didn’t reach the end, Walter wouldn’t tire of her, dig a hole in some forest and leave her there.
“Okay. What happened in Tulsa?”
“They found a necklace, lying on the sidewalk. That is, Charley found it, while they were out on their walk. It had purple stones-”
“They call those amethysts.”
“Yes, I know.” She did know, but she hadn’t thought Walter would. He surprised her, sometimes, with the facts he had at his disposal. More surprising, though, were the things he didn’t know, common bits of everyday living that even little kids understood. “Amethysts, in an old-fashioned setting, big square gold frames, clearly an antique. But there was no one around and it was a block of funny old houses. It was hard to imagine that anyone living in those houses owned such a necklace. Charley lifted it from the sidewalk with his nose-”
“Aw, he made that part up. A dog couldn’t do that.”
She felt a need to defend Steinbeck and Charley, although the story was hers. “He has poetic license.”
“What’s that?”
She wasn’t sure she could define it. “If you’re a poet-or a writer-you’re entitled to certain details, even if they’re not exactly real. Like you could say there was an eclipse of the sun on a day there wasn’t, if you needed to. I think.”
“And do they charge you for that?”
“What?”
“I mean, like a driver’s license or a hunting license. Is it something you go down and buy?”
She yearned to lie to him. That was the kind of thing Vonnie would do, set someone up, usually Elizabeth, to look like an idiot later. But he would punish her. “No, it’s not a license-license. It’s just a, like, way of talking.” She groped for the vocabulary of school. “A figure of speech.”
“So the license to make stuff up is made up?”
“Yes. Sort of. I guess. But that’s not the point. The point is, Charley found this necklace. And it was valuable, and they wanted to find the real owner. But how would they do that? I mean, if you go door-to-door, and show it to people, there will always be a dishonest person who says, ‘Yes, that’s mine.’”
“What you do,” Walter said, “is ask if anyone has lost a necklace, then get them to describe it. Or, better yet, they could have gone to the police station and asked if there had been a burglary in the neighborhood, then worked backward, right?”
“That’s sort of what they did. They walked a few more blocks, then found a little business district and there was an antique store. It was run by a Holocaust victim.”
“One of those people the Nazis tried to kill.”
“Yes.” Again she was surprised that he didn’t need to have the Holocaust defined. Walter had been skeptical when she told him she needed sanitary napkins, not because he didn’t know about menstruation, but because he didn’t think she was old enough. “I thought you got breasts when that happened,” he said, and even he could tell he had hurt her feelings. Later he explained that although he had a sister, she was thirteen years older and he didn’t know much about what he called girl secrets.
“The jeweler was very old, and stooped, and he wore one of those things that jewelers use to look at things closely.” She waited a beat to see if this was one of the odd things that Walter might know, but he didn’t supply the word and she didn’t have a clue what it was. “Mr. Steinbeck asked if any of his customers had recently had a necklace repaired there.”
“But the customer might have been on the way in,” Walter said. He had a real argumentative side. “And the jeweler couldn’t know that.”
“Only the necklace wasn’t broken, and it was shiny, polished up. He was pretty sure someone had dropped it on the way home. And he was right. A teenage girl had brought her mother’s necklace in to get it cleaned and repaired as a surprise to her, then it had fallen out of her purse on the walk home and she was terrified to tell her mother what had happened because it was an antique, a family heirloom.”
“How did the jeweler know all that? It happened after she left.”
“He didn’t, but he told Mr. Steinbeck how to find the girl, and he learned the rest of the story.”
“Did she offer him a reward?”
“Yes, but he said he didn’t need one, that people shouldn’t get rewards for doing the right thing.”
Almost all her stories about Mr. Steinbeck and Charley ended this way. They did a good deed, then declined any reward for it. She hoped that Walter would eventually decide that doing the right thing-letting her go, turning himself in-would be a reward in and of itself. But so far the man-and-dog duo had traveled to Boston, Atlanta, Milwaukee, Crater Lake, Yellowstone Park-thank goodness her family had taken that cross-country trip when she was eight, she had lots of material on which to draw-and now Tulsa, always doing good deeds, and it didn’t seem to make any impression at all on Walter.
THAT NIGHT, IN ONE of the motor courts that Walter preferred, places where cash and men with young girls didn’t seem to excite anyone’s curiosity, he asked if her period was finished.
“Yes,” she said, her stomach suddenly queasy, drawing her knees to her chest. So far, he had not touched her, not in that way. So far. But maybe that was because he had thought she wasn’t a woman yet, and therefore off-limits.
“So I can put these back in the truck for a while?” He held up the box of sanitary pads.
“Yes.”
“For how long?”
“A month.” She paused, not wanting to admit the next part. “Sometimes more.”
A month. Would he really keep her for another month? Did she have a month’s worth of stories about Charley and Mr. Steinbeck? She hoped so.