Denise’s father came over the line and said furiously, “What in God’s name is going on, Pamela?”
“Denise is fine,” I insisted. “There was an incident at The House. An intruder. Some of the girls were injured and taken to the hospital to be looked at. Denise was lucky, really. Her injuries were the most minor.”
“My God,” Mr. Andora said while Mrs. Andora buzzed around him, telling him what to say, what to ask. “What hospital?”
I repeated the address of Tallahassee Memorial for the umpteenth time that morning: 1300 Miccosukee Road. Still with me after forty-three years.
I hung up with Mr. Andora, feeling drained but relieved. I’d done it. The hardest part, and I’d done it. But then the phone started up, jangling all through The House. I plugged an ear. Had our phone always sounded so piercing? I snatched it off the receiver, less interested in answering it than in making it stop.
“This is Linda Donnelly,” said the voice on the other end of the line, the name sounding familiar but far too distant to grasp. “I’m a resident in training at Tallahassee Memorial. Who am I speaking to?”
“Pamela Schumacher,” I said. “I’m the chapter president of The House.”
“I know who you are,” she said. “Do you remember me?”
I cast around for some kind of clue, but it was as if my memory had melted, like those clocks in the Dalí poster Denise had hung over her head.
“I’m your scholastic adviser. I was chapter of the 1967 class.”
“I apologize,” I said, mortified. I could not believe I’d blanked on the name of a member of our advisory board. I did not see how the evening, the morning, whatever we were in, could get any worse.
“Forgiven. You’ve had quite a night, from what I’ve gathered around here. Do you need anything? Can I help?”
“That is so kind, Dr. Donnelly,” I said with extravagant deference, hoping to make up for my earlier gaffe. “I’m hoping they let us go see the girls soon. Actually, would you be able to share their room numbers with us?”
There was a half-second pause. “Eileen and Jill are both in surgery at the moment, but I can get you that information once they’re out.”
“Thank you,” I said. “And what about Denise and Robbie?”
That pause again, but there was fear in it. I could sense it through the phone. “You mean for identification purposes?”
My hand, on the stainless-steel counter, was slick enough to slip. I buffed away the smudges I’d left behind with the switchblade of my elbow. “What do you mean, for identification purposes?”
“I mean identifying the bodies.”
“I’m confused,” I said testily, though I wasn’t. I couldn’t have been, otherwise I never would have taken a tone with an alumna. I must have understood enough that I knew I would be forgiven, that what had happened occupied the realm of the unforgivable.
“Robbie and Denise expired before they reached the hospital,” Dr. Donnelly informed me clinically. “Did no one tell you this?”
There was a calendar on the wall. A circle around today’s date. It was Super Bowl Sunday, I remembered. Denise was meant to make the dip for the party we’d been invited to later. I’d have to let them know, I thought, that they would be down a dish.
“I was told they were fine.”
“Who told you that?” Dr. Donnelly demanded.
“The sheriff.”
“Put him on the phone, right now,” she said, sounding impatient and bossy. Sounding like me. “Do you have anyone else there to advocate for you? A school official or anything like that?”
I shook my head numbly, then remembered she couldn’t see me. “No.”
“I’ll be there as soon as my shift ends. That’s in one hour. Okay? Can you go and put the sheriff on the line now?”
“Yes,” I said, and set down the phone. Realizing something, I picked it up again. “No, actually. I mean, not right now. I need to call Robbie’s and Denise’s parents.”
“That’s his job.”
“No,” I said. “You don’t understand. I just told them Robbie and Denise were fine. I have to be the one to make it right.”
“You called them and told them…” Dr. Donnelly trailed off as she absorbed the full impact of what I’d done. “Okay,” she said softly. “I’ll be there soon. I need you to hang in there for me, okay, Pamela? We’re going to help you.”
I was shaking my head no. Hanging in there was just not possible after what I’d done.
“Pamela?”
“Okay,” I lied.
* * *
It is the moment that visits me in the middle of a meal at my favorite Italian restaurant, when the pedicurist sets the timer for the five-minute massage, or while I am decorating the house for Christmas. You don’t deserve to feel pleasure, this moment reminds me, not when you caused this level of pain.
“Yes!” Mrs. Andora cried when she picked up the phone a second time. “We’re on our way. We’re running out the door!”
“Mrs. Andora,” I said in a thick slab of a voice. “It’s Pamela.” I swallowed. “I have an update.”
“We’ll be there to speak to the doctor soon enough,” Mrs. Andora said brusquely. She heard it in my voice, I could tell. She would not permit me to say it. “Are you there? At the hospital?”
“No.”
“Then you don’t know anything, Pamela.”
“I do,” I said. “I’m so sorry, but I do.”
Mrs. Andora threw the phone against the wall. I know this because I saw the hole it left when I came for the funeral the following week. The sound that came out of her was manly, a guttural, bloodthirsty battle cry. It sent me staggering back, T-boning the edge of the kitchen counter. I whimpered because the corner was sharp and it had pierced my liver or a kidney, one of those important, tender organs. I listened to ladylike Mrs. Andora suffer in that grotesque, masculine way until Mr. Andora came on the line and choked out, like some kind of grief-programmed answering machine, “We can’t come to the phone right now.”
The line went dead, and then I was going through the louvered doors and into the bright foyer, asking for Sheriff Cruso in a twee little voice, as nonthreatening as could be, because he had already looked at me like I was the know-it-all beast of his nightmares. It was his job to know these things first, and yet I had found out two of the girls hadn’t made it before he did. I was thinking, I’ll pull him aside. I’ll tell him in private that Robbie and Denise are dead. I didn’t want to embarrass him in front of his subordinates. This was how my brain was wired back then. This is how I almost went on to live.
Eight a.m.
The decision to visit Florida State University had nothing to do with an interest in Florida State University and everything to do with getting a rise out of my mother.
In 1968, there were anti-war and anti-segregation protests staged along the campus’s legacy walk. In the fall, students wore blue jeans in solidarity with the Tallahassee gay community. Newsweek called FSU “the Berkeley of the South.” This was all according to the brochure that arrived in the mail my sophomore year of high school, addressed to my father, along with an invitation for him and his family to come for an all-expenses-paid campus visit. They were wooing him, hoping to lure him away from his cushy office on Park Avenue to join the department of the burgeoning law school.
Before my mother threw the invitation in the trash, she tore it up with a look on her face that I had seen only once before, when a neighbor brought over a carrot cake as a thank-you for some letter of recommendation she had written. As soon as the front door closed, my mother doused it in dish detergent, squeezing the bottle in both hands, like it was on fire. From that point on, Florida State University took on a flammable quality in my mind, something that set off my mother’s alarm bells, made her sharp and attentive.