“I think we’ve pretty well determined that Sarah doesn’t have any significant repressed memories,” Dr. Brown began, and then I stopped listening. I settled back into my chair. The corners of my mouth twitched: a tiny smile. I’d won, finally. After all this time, here was an official who believed me, who could stand up for me, who could get them to stop asking the same goddamn questions over and over and over. I felt relief, and I felt smug, like any teenager proven right in the face of adult conviction.
But still, I would gladly have been proven wrong, to have found out who the killer was. If we had recovered something important in the first session, we could have had him in jail by Christmas. The theory was that memories are repressed for a reason—usually to minimize psychological damage. I had been willing to risk some damage to find this person.
Walt’s face remained serious as he listened to Dr. Brown. He nodded, asked a couple of questions. As we walked back to the car he said, “Well, I guess that’s it.”
“I guess so,” I said. “Sorry there wasn’t more.”
We drove to a deli and got Italian sandwiches, made small talk as we ate. Walt wasn’t a bad guy, I thought. But the cops had failed me, and I was sure they would keep on failing. They were so prim in their pressed blue uniforms, so professional in their manner, and yet they weren’t actually in control of anything. It had been six years, and still they were helpless.
When we got back into the car, Walt sat there a moment before putting the key in the ignition.
“Sarah . . .” he said. “I’m really sorry that we haven’t found this guy yet. I know it’s been hard for you to do all this. We’re going to keep working. I promise you, we’re going to do everything we can to find this guy.” He bowed his head a moment while he ran a hand across his forehead. Then he put the car in reverse and twisted around to peer past me, to see the way out.
There had been tears in Walt’s eyes; he’d had such hope. I felt uncomfortable, seeing this man cry. I finally had to admit that he and the other cops had been trying as hard as they could. That maybe we just weren’t going to find him.
33
* * *
Carol and Carroll and I got along pretty well in those final high school years, until suddenly, shortly after my eighteenth birthday, we didn’t. Carol and I got into a huge fight—our first, really. I was going to a movie with Jason that night, and she asked who was paying for the tickets. I told her I was, surprised that she knew that when he and I went out, I sometimes—but not always—paid. It made sense to me: I received an allowance out of the remainder of Mom’s Shoe Shop money, and his family wasn’t able to give him extra cash. He was very kind, always did something nice for me in return. Carol immediately got angry when I told her I was paying, and I was so surprised that I responded with something snotty, like, “It’s my money—what does it matter? It’s only like ten dollars.”
But it didn’t really matter what I said; I could see that Carol had been ready to be angry before I’d even answered the question. Everything I said made her angrier, in a way I’d never seen before, an out-of-control escalation. She was particularly irate over the fact that I was letting my boyfriend “take advantage,” which I took as an insult, as though I would be blind to manipulation.
Carol’s reaction was surprising, all out of proportion. The fight didn’t last long; moments after she asked who was paying, she was leaning sharply toward me, yelling. Soon she was chasing me up the stairs. It didn’t occur to me to stand my ground. I slammed my bedroom door against her, slid down to the floor, and braced my sneakered feet while she continued to yell. The next day, when I asked her to serve as a reference for potential landlords, she agreed, and that was the only discussion we ever had about my moving out. I was angry at her, but I was more angry at myself, for scurrying away into my bedroom, for taking it.
Later, I found out that Carol and Carroll’s son had landed in some serious legal trouble shortly before our fight. And I remembered that Tootsie was going through a divorce when she threw me out. They’d both been raised in a family where people screamed at one another, where if you felt vulnerable you came out swinging. I wasn’t perfect, but I think that I was probably the recipient of frustrations that had little to do with me, or, at least, that made dealing with an extra family member much more difficult.
I’d used some of the Shoe Shop money to get my license and a car on my eighteenth birthday. And I was already paying a small rent to Carol and Carroll, out of the Social Security benefits that would continue to be paid out until I started college, money that would have gone to Mom had she lived to retirement. I figured I might as well pay a landlord instead, and lose the ten o’clock curfew.
The only available apartments were in Rumford, home to the smoke-pumping paper mill that was the area’s stuttering economic heart. The mill’s golden era was forty years past, and now the town was all uneven clapboard and acid-crumbled bricks, the bars of better times long boarded over. Most mill employees preferred to live in one of the clean, leafy towns nearby and commute to work, as Carol and my uncle Wendall did. But those places were too small to have many apartment buildings, and I would have been too nervous to rent a house surrounded by trees.
I met with a handful of landlords I found via classified ads in the newspaper, older men who often seemed a bit threatening. One asked if I had a boyfriend, and as I answered him I told myself that he just wanted to know if I had a backup if I ran out of cash. The apartments were usually moldy, with stained carpets and long-buried cooking smells. I told a girl at school the address of one, and she said that the place next door was where people went to buy meth. I got a little more depressed with each showing, until I found a miraculously perfect apartment: the top floor of a cute wooden house, a clean place with a washer and dryer and a screened-in deck. The bedroom was huge, and from it I could crawl out onto the roof to sunbathe. A previous tenant had stenciled a border of flowers and ducks up near the ceiling; when I saw them I remembered Mom on the ladder in the sunshine, painting hearts and pineapples in the kitchen. The landlord, Rob, was a respected foreman at the mill, a youngish man who knew my friend Danielle’s mom. The rent was eighty dollars a week, cash I left in an alcove in the back stairway, where Rob sometimes left me maple syrup he tapped from his own trees.