As I got to know her, and as she began to let me into her heart, Cynthia told me more about her family, about Clayton and Patricia and her older brother, Todd, whom she loved and hated, depending on the day.
Actually, when she’d talk about them, she’d often retract her tenses. “My mother’s name was-my mother’s name is Patricia.” She was at odds with the part of herself that had accepted they were all dead. There were still sparks of hope, like embers in an untended campfire.
She was a part of the Bigge family. It was, of course, a kind of constant joke, given that their extended family, at least on her father’s side, was pretty much nonexistent. Clayton Bigge’s parents died when he was young; he had no brothers or sisters, no aunts or uncles to speak of. There were never any family reunions to attend, no disputes between Clayton and Patricia over which family they’d go see at Christmas, although sometimes work kept Clayton out of town during holidays.
“I’m it,” he liked to say. “The whole family. There are no more.”
He wasn’t much of a sentimentalist, either. No dusty family albums of previous generations to linger over, no snapshots of the past, no old love letters from former flames for Patricia to throw out when she married him. And back when he was fifteen, a kitchen fire got out of control and burned his family house down. A couple generations of mementos went up in smoke. He was a day-at-a-time kind of guy, living for the moment, not interested in looking back.
There wasn’t that much family on Patricia’s side, either, but at least there was a history of it. Lots of pictures-in shoeboxes if not in albums-of her own parents and extended family and friends from her childhood. Her father died of polio when she was young, but her mother was still alive when she met Clayton. Thought he was charming, if a bit quiet. He’d talked Patricia into slipping away to get married, so there was no formal wedding, and that didn’t endear him to Patricia’s limited family.
Her sister, Tess, certainly wasn’t won over. She didn’t think much of the way Clayton’s work took him on the road more than half the time, leaving Patricia to raise her children alone for so many long stretches. But he provided for them, he was decent enough, and his love for Patricia seemed deep and genuine.
Patricia Bigge had a job in a drugstore in Milford, on North Broad Street, looking out on the town green, just down from the old library, where she would take out classical records from the library’s extensive music collection. She stocked shelves, worked the cash register, helped the pharmacist, but only with the most basic things. She didn’t have the proper training, and knew she should have taken more school, learned some sort of trade, something, but mostly she had to get out there and support herself. Same for her sister, Tess, who worked in a factory in Bridgeport that made parts for radios.
Clayton walked into the drugstore one day, looking for a Mars bar.
Patricia liked to say, if her husband hadn’t been hit by a Mars bar craving that day in July 1967, as he passed through Milford on a sales trip, well, things would have turned out very differently.
As far as Patricia was concerned, they turned out fine. It was a speedy courtship, and within a few weeks of getting married she was pregnant with Todd. Clayton found them an affordable house on Hickory, just off Pumpkin Delight Road, a stone’s throw from the beach and Long Island Sound. He wanted his wife and child to have a decent home to live in while he was on the road. He had responsibility for a corridor that ran roughly between New York and Chicago and up to Buffalo, selling industrial lubricants and other supplies to machine shops all along the way. Lots of regulars. Kept him busy.
A couple of years after Todd was born, Cynthia arrived.
I was thinking about all this as I drove to Old Fairfield High School. Whenever I daydreamed, I found it was often about my wife’s past, her upbringing, about the members of her family I never knew, would in all likelihood never be able to know.
Maybe if I could have had the chance to spend any time with them, I’d have more insights into what made Cynthia tick. But the reality was, the woman I knew and loved had been shaped more by what had happened since she’d lost her family-or since her family had lost her-than by what had happened before.
I popped into the doughnut shop for a coffee, resisted the urge to buy a lemon-filled while there, and was carrying my takeout cup with me into the school, a satchel full of student essays slung over my shoulder, when I saw Roland Carruthers, the principal, and probably my best friend here at this institution, in the hall.
“Rolly,” I said.
“Where’s mine?” he said, nodding at the paper cup in my hand.
“If you’ll take my period one class, I’ll go back and get you one.”
“If I take your period one class, I’m going to need something stronger than coffee.”
“They’re not that bad.”
“They’re savages,” Rolly said, not even cracking a smile.
“You don’t even know what my period one class is or who’s in it,” I said.
“If it’s made up of students from this school, then they’re savages,” Rolly said, staying in deadpan.
“What’s happening with Jane Scavullo?” I asked. She was a student in my creative writing class, a troubled kid with a messed-up family background that was vague at best as far as the office was concerned, who spent nearly as much time down there as the secretaries. She also happened to write like an angel. An angel who’d happily punch your lights out, maybe, but an angel just the same.
“I told her she’s this close to a suspension,” Rolly said, holding his thumb and forefinger a quarter inch apart. Jane and another girl had gotten into an all-out, hair-pulling, cheek-scratching brawl out in front of the school a couple of days earlier. A boy thing, evidently. Was it ever anything else? They’d attracted a sizeable cheering crowd-no one much cared who won as long as the fight kept going-before Rolly ran out and broke it up.
“What’d she say to that?”
Rolly pretended to chew gum in an exaggerated fashion, including “snapping” sound effects.
“Okay,” I said.
“You like her,” he said.
I opened the tab on the top of my takeout cup and took a sip. “There’s something there,” I said.
“You don’t give up on people,” Rolly said. “But you have good qualities, too.”
My friendship with Rolly was what you might call multilayered. He’s a colleague and friend, but because he’s a couple of decades older than I am, he’s something of a father figure, too. I found myself looking for him when I was in need of some wisdom, or, as I liked to say to him, perspective of the ages. I got to know him through Cynthia. If he was an unofficial father figure for me, he was an unofficial uncle to Cynthia. He had been a friend to her father, Clayton, before he went missing, and outside of her aunt Tess, was about the only person she knew with any connection to her past.
His retirement was imminent, and there were times when you could tell he was coasting, counting the days till he was out of there and down in Florida, living in his newly purchased mobile home someplace outside Bradenton, out on the water fishing for marlin or swordfish or whatever it was they pulled out of the water down there.
“You around later?” I asked.
“Yeah, sure. What’s up?”
“Just…stuff.”
He nodded. He knew what that meant. “Drop by, after eleven would probably be good. I’ve got the superintendent in before that.”
I went into the staff room, checked my cubbyhole for any mail or important notices and found none, and as I turned to head back into the hall, bumped shoulders with Lauren Wells, who was also checking her mail.
“Sorry,” I said.
“Hey,” Lauren said before she realized who’d bumped into her, and then when she saw me, smiled with surprise. She was decked out in a red tracksuit and white running shoes, which made sense since she taught phys ed. “Hey, how’s it going?”
Lauren had come to Old Fairfield four years ago, having transferred from a high school in New Haven where her former husband taught. When that marriage fell apart, she didn’t want to work in the same building with him, or so went the gossip. Having garnered a reputation for being an outstanding track and field coach whose students had won several regional competitions, she was able to pick and choose among several schools whose principals were happy to add her to their staffs.
Rolly won. He told me, privately, that he hired her for what she could bring to the school, which also happened to include “an awesome body, flowing auburn hair, and gorgeous brown eyes.”
First I said, “‘Auburn’? Who says ‘auburn’?”
Then I must have given him a look, because he felt obliged to say, “Relax, it’s merely an observation. The only pole I can get up anymore I use to catch bass.”
In all the time Lauren Wells had been at this school, I’d never been on her radar until the show about Cynthia’s family had aired. Now, whenever she saw me, she asked how things were going.
“Any nibbles?” she asked.
“Huh?” I said. For a second, I thought she was asking whether anyone had brought snacks to the staff room. Some days, doughnuts miraculously appeared.
“From the show,” she clarified. “It’s been a couple of weeks, right? Has anyone called in with any tips about what happened to Cynthia’s family?”
It seemed funny, her using Cynthia’s name. Not “your wife’s” family. It was like Lauren felt she knew Cynthia, even though they’d never met, at least as far as I knew. Maybe at some school function in the last four years where teachers brought their spouses.
“No,” I said.
“Cynthia must be so disappointed,” she said, laying a sympathetic hand on my arm.
“Yeah, well, it would be nice if someone came forward. There has to be somebody out there who knows something, even after all these years.”
“I think about you two all the time,” Lauren said. “I was telling my friend about you just the other night. And you, how are you holding up? You doing okay?”
“Me?” I acted surprised. “Yeah, sure, I’m good.”
“Because,” and Lauren’s voice softened, “sometimes you look, I don’t know, maybe it’s not my place to say, but sometimes I see you in the staff room, and you look kind of tired. And sad.”
I wasn’t sure which struck me as more significant. That Lauren thought I’d been looking tired and sad, or that she had been watching me in the staff room.
“I’m okay,” I said. “Really.”
She smiled. “Good, that’s good.” She cleared her throat. “Anyway, I’ve got to get to the gym. We should talk sometime.” She reached out and touched my arm again and held her hand there a moment before taking it away and slipping out of the staff room.
Heading to my first-period creative writing class, it struck me that anyone who’d construct a high school timetable in such a way as to make anything “creative” come first thing in the morning either had no understanding of high school students or was possessed of a wicked sense of humor. I had mentioned this to Rolly, whose response was, “That’s why they call it creative. You have to be, to find a way to get kids to care that early in the day. If anyone can do it, Terry, you can.”
There were twenty-one bodies in the room as I walked in, about half of them sprawled across their desks as if during the night someone had surgically removed their spines. I set down my coffee and let my satchel hit the desk with a fwump. That got their attention, because they knew what had to be inside.
At the back of the room, seventeen-year-old Jane Scavullo was sitting so low in her desk I almost couldn’t see the bandage on her chin.
“Okay,” I said. “I’ve marked your stories, and there’s some good stuff here. Some of you even managed to go entire paragraphs without using the word ‘fuck.’”
A couple of snickers.
“Can’t you get fired for saying that?” asked a kid named Bruno sitting over by the window. There were white wires running down from his ears and disappearing into his jacket.
“I sure fucking hope so,” I said. I pointed to my own ears. “Bruno, can you lose those for now?”
Bruno pulled out the earbuds.
I riffled through the pile of papers, most done on computer, a few handwritten, and pulled out one.
“Okay, you know how I talked about how you don’t necessarily have to write about people shooting each other or nuclear terrorists or aliens bursting out of people’s chests for something to be interesting? How you can find stories in the most mundane of environments?”
A hand up. Bruno. “Mun-who?”
“Mundane. Ordinary.”
“They why didn’t you say ‘ordinary’? Why you have to use a fancy word for ‘ordinary’ when an ordinary word would do?”
I smiled. “Put those things back in your ears.”
“No no, I might miss something mun-dane if I do.”
“Let me read a bit of this,” I said, holding out the paper. I could see Jane’s head rise a notch. Maybe she recognized the lined paper, how the handwritten sheets had a different look to them than paper pumped out of a laser printer.
“‘Her father-at least the guy who’d been sleeping with her mother long enough to think he should be called that-takes a carton of eggs out of the fridge, breaks open two of them, one-handed, into a bowl. There’s bacon already sizzling in a pan, and when she walks into the room he tips his head, like he’s telling her to sit down at the kitchen table. He asks how she likes her eggs and she says she doesn’t care because she doesn’t know what else to say because no one’s ever asked her before how she likes eggs. All her mom’s ever made her that’s even remotely egg-like is an Eggo waffle out of a toaster. She figures whatever way this guy makes them, there’s a pretty good chance they’ll be better than a goddamn Eggo.’”
I stopped reading and looked up. “Comments?”
A boy behind Bruno said, “I like my eggs runny.”
A girl on the opposite side of the room said, “I like it. You want to know what this guy is like, like, if he cares about her breakfast, maybe he’s not an asshole. All the guys my mom hooks up with are assholes.”
“Maybe the guy’s making her breakfast because he wants to do her and her mother,” Bruno said.
Laughter.
An hour later, as they filed out, I said, “Jane.” She sidled over to my desk reluctantly. “You pissed?” I said.
She shrugged, ran her hand over the bandage, making me notice it by trying to keep me from noticing it.
“It was good. That’s why I read it.”
Another shrug.
“I hear you’re flirting with a suspension.”
“That bitch started it,” Jane said.
“You’re a good writer,” I said. “That other story you did, I submitted it to the library’s short story contest, the one they have for students.”
Jane’s eyes did a little dance.
“Some of your stuff, it reminds me a bit of Oates,” I said. “You ever read Joyce Carol Oates?”
Jane shook her head.
“Try Foxfire: Confessions of a Girl Gang,” I said. “Our library probably doesn’t have it. Bad words. But you could find it at the Milford Library.”
“We done?” she asked.
I nodded, and she headed out the door.
I found Rolly in his office, sitting at his computer, staring at something on the monitor. He pointed at the screen. “They want more testing. Pretty soon, we won’t have any time to teach them anything. We’ll just test them from the moment they get here to the moment they go home.”
“What’s that kid’s story?” I asked. He needed to be reminded who I was talking about.
“Jane Scavullo, yeah, shame about her,” he said. “I don’t even think we have a current address for her. The last one we have for her mother has to be a couple of years old, I think. Moved in with some new guy, brought her daughter along, too.”
“The fight aside,” I said, “I think she’s actually been a bit better the last few months. Not quite as much trouble, a little less surly. Maybe this new guy, maybe he’s actually been an improvement.”
Rolly shrugged. He opened up a Girl Scout cookie box on his desk. “Want one?” he asked, holding the box out to me.
I took a vanilla.
“It’s all wearing me down,” Rolly said. “It’s not like it was when I started. You know what I found out behind the school the other day? Not just beer bottles-if only-but crack pipes and, you won’t believe this, a gun. Under the bushes, like it had fallen out of someone’s pocket, or maybe he was hiding it there.”
I shrugged. This wasn’t exactly new.
“How you doin’ anyway?” Rolly asked. “You look, I don’t know, off today. You okay?”
“Maybe a bit,” I said. “Home stuff. Cyn’s having a hard time giving Grace any kind of taste of freedom.”
“She still looking for asteroids?” he said. Rolly had been over to the house with his wife, Millicent, a few times and loved talking with Grace. She’d shown him her telescope. “Smart kid. Must get that from her mother.”
“I know why she does it. I mean, if I’d had the kind of life Cyn’s had, maybe I’d hold on to things a bit tight, too, but shit, I don’t know. She says there’s a car.”
“A car?”
“A brown car. It’s been by a couple of times when she’s been walking Grace to school.”
“Has anything happened?”
“No. A couple months ago, it was a green SUV. Last year, there was a week or so there, Cyn said there was some guy with a beard on the corner, three days in one week, looked at them funny.”
Rolly took another bite of cookie. “Maybe, lately, it’s the TV show.”
“I think that’s part of it. Plus this is twenty-five years since her family vanished. It’s taking a bit of a toll on her.”
“I should talk to her,” Rolly said. “Time to hit the beach.” In the years after her family’s disappearance, Rolly would occasionally take Cynthia off Tess’s hands for a while. They’d get an ice cream at the Carvel at Bridgeport Avenue and Clark Street, then stroll the shore of Long Island Sound, sometimes talking, sometimes not.
“That might be a good idea,” I said. “And we’re seeing this psychiatrist, this woman, you know, once in a while, to talk about things. Dr. Kinzler. Naomi Kinzler.”
“How’s that going?”
I shrugged, then said, “What do you think happened, Rolly?”
“How many times you asked me this, Terry?”
“I just wish this could end for Cyn, that she could get some sort of answers. I think that’s what she thought the TV show would do.” I paused. “The thing is, you knew Clayton. You went fishing with him. You had a handle on the type of person he was.”
“And Patricia.”
“They seem like the types to just walk out on their daughter?”
“No. My guess is, what I’ve always believed in my heart, is that they were murdered. You know, like I told the show, a serial killer or something.”
I nodded slowly in agreement, although the police had never put much stock in that theory. There was nothing about the disappearance of Cynthia’s family that was consistent with anything else they had on their books. “Here’s the thing,” I said. “If some kind of serial killer did come to their house, took them away, and killed them, why not Cynthia? Why did he leave her behind?”
Rolly had no answer for me. “Can I ask you something?” he asked.
“Sure,” I said.
“Why do you think our fabulously engineered gym teacher would put a note in your box, then go back a minute later and take it out again?”
“What?”
“Just remember, Terry, you’re a married man.”