Miss Me When I'm Gone

chapter 42



“Rachel”

D’Angelo’s sandwich shop

Plantsville, New Hampshire

Rachel can’t believe I’m thirty-two.

She’s only ten years older than me, but in her head, she says, I’ve always been the little blond girl—Shelly’s girl, who she saw a couple of times and who disappeared after Shelly died. The little girl she worried about sometimes, asking herself, Whatever happened to her?

Rachel picks up her jumbo fountain soda, sips, and jiggles the ice before going on.

She can’t believe I’m a writer, that I have a real book. She confesses she’s not much of a reader, so she hasn’t picked it up. Her aunt Laurie—Laurie Wiley—says it’s good, though. And her aunt Laurie’s kind of picky, so that’s saying something.

She doesn’t remark on how much I look like Shelly, which is kind of nice.

She says she’s not sure quite why she and Shelly started a casual friendship that year.

“I was only sixteen. She was . . . what? Like, twenty-four? It was kind of weird at first. It started when she was outside once, watching me walk by her house. I was trying to hold on to my little cousin’s hand while my aunt’s stupid dog was practically pulling my arm out of its socket.”

And so Shelly helped her, and started chatting with her. Asked her about school, about her friends.

“I liked her. And I guess I liked the idea of hanging out with a twenty-four-year-old. It was kind of cool, like. And the fact that she’d had some, you know, pretty serious life experience? That made it cooler.”

Rachel says they talked mostly about Rachel. Rachel was dating a guy named Jay at the time and they talked a lot about him. Rachel often tried to get Shelly to talk about her boyfriend, too, but Shelly didn’t offer much. Only in the last few weeks of their friendship did Shelly give the occasional eye roll when Frank’s name came up, indicating that she wasn’t happy. By then, though, Rachel knew better than to ask.

“She was still a lot older than me and I understood, after a while, that I wasn’t supposed to ask about certain things. If I’d realized how grave it was, I would have asked anyway. The week or two before she was killed, she was different. More serious. Maybe I’m just remembering it that way. But it did seem like something was going on. I was maybe just too young to know how to ask.”

“Now you think it was trouble with Frank?” I ask.

“Probably,” she answers.

“Was there ever any sign that he was violent with her?”

Rachel tilts her oval face to think about this, then raises a sculpted eyebrow.

“No physical sign,” she says. “If that’s what you’re asking. It was all her. She said some things to me that were . . . well, sad, now that I think about it.”

“Which were?”

“Well, there was this one point when I was whining about something my boyfriend had said to me. He didn’t like my new haircut, or whatever. I was implying that he could be kind of mean. And Shelly stops me and says, ‘You have to figure out if you think he was being mean or if you think he was being stupid. And if you think he’s mean, you get rid of him, and don’t give it another thought.’

“And I told her that that was very easy to talk about, but not very easy to do. And she just laughed at me, like, no shit, girl. You think I don’t know that? And then she said something like, ‘You know, this is where it starts. You start at your age, deciding how much crap you’re going to put up with. And if you’re not careful, you’ll end up tolerating a lot more than you should. And you won’t know how to cut it off, because that’ll be what you’re used to, what you’ve convinced yourself you deserve. You want to end up like me? How do you think I ended up where I am now? How old do you think I was when I started taking shit from men?’

“Something like that. I was speechless. Because she’d never talked about herself like that before. We both knew she’d messed up her life big-time, but it was the elephant in the room. We never . . .”

Rachel trails off, blushes, shakes her giant soda cup again. “Sorry.”

It takes me a moment to realize why she’s apologizing. She thinks I’ve never heard before that my biological mother “messed up her life.” Or she’s self-conscious about talking to one of the messes.

“It’s okay,” I say. “I know all about Shelly. I know all about the stuff people said about her.”

“Okay. Well, I’m still sorry.”

“You were saying?” I prompt her.

“Well. It was the first time she talked about me in terms of herself. And it felt like she was talking about her life now. Not just past boyfriends. Like she still felt trapped.”

I hesitate. “I wonder if she really felt trapped, though? She didn’t need Frank for money, really. He wasn’t helping her raise any kids, or anything.”

Rachel shrugs. “Yeah, I don’t know. That’s a good question.”

After some thought, she says, “There was this sadness about her, around then. This one afternoon, I was hanging out with my friend Denise, and we went walking downtown to buy some candy and go to the drugstore, because she had a prescription she needed filled. I was excited that I could introduce her to my cool older friend Shelly, who was working the pharmacy counter. She took Denise’s prescription and asked her a couple of questions about it. I don’t know what the issue was—a minor picking up her own prescription, or something? Is that illegal? Or was it back then? Anyway, the pharmacist came in and helped her resolve the issue, whatever it was.

“And as soon as they were done talking, I leaned over the counter, all casual and girl-talk-like, and I said, ‘So, Shelly . . . how’s Frank these days?’ You know, like she and I talked about our boyfriends all the time, me and this cool friend of mine in her twenties. And she looks up from what she’s doing . . . and the expression on her face. She looked . . . horrified. And she said, ‘Excuse me?’ like she didn’t understand what I was saying. Even like she didn’t know me. And I shut right up. I had crossed some line. I remember walking home feeling embarrassed. Denise saying to me, like, ‘I thought you said she was cool. She seems like kind of a grump.’

“That was the second-to-last time I saw her.”

“What was the last?”

“We did one more dog walk together.”

“Was that friendly?”

“Yeah. We didn’t talk about the drugstore. We didn’t talk about Frank. But she seemed tired. I think we baby-talked to my cousin most of the time, paid attention to her instead of each other. That’s how I remember it.”

“And how did you hear she died?”

“My aunt Laurie called my mother the day it happened. My mother told me.”

“What was your first reaction? When you first heard she was killed, did you think of Frank first?”

Rachel considers this. “Hmm. Right away? No. My aunt claims she suspected him the moment she saw Shelly there all beaten and bleeding that morning. But I didn’t know enough about him to think that immediately. For the first few days, it felt more like a mystery. Scary, in that way. Like, who came into our neighborhood and did this? Could they do it again? But the more we heard, the more it seemed like Frank.”