I never heard Cassie’s side of that story, which meant she didn’t feel she could make a joke out of it. But I thought about what it would have been like, to be walking in the dark that way—she could only have been upset, right? Just plain running away, no destination, just away. Because why else would you? Unless Bev was on call and Cassie needed to go somewhere (but where? Delia’s house was way too far. I couldn’t imagine where she’d be walking—even my house was over a mile, and Peter’s more than three times that) and didn’t want to ask Anders Shute; or else they were both out and she was home alone and maybe it seemed no scarier to walk alone down the side of the highway than to be huddled by yourself—the cat, Electra, long vanished, by now, into the woods—in the little house down the cul-de-sac.
But whatever the reason she was walking there, what did it feel like when the car pulled over, the headlights turning onto you like a blinding heat, breaking from the chain of traffic, and the car—what car? You couldn’t tell in the dark if it was familiar or unknown, not what kind or what color it was. Like a nightmare, the window rolling down, and a man telling you to get in, and only then do you realize that he’s someone you know, he’s your next-door neighbor, and relief washes through you like new blood, all at once, a change in the inner temperature of your body—except that then he’s insisting you get into the car, the one thing your mother told you never to do, never to get into a car with a strange man . . . but he’s not strange, he’s Mr. Aucoin, big and hairy as a bear, you can see the fur on the back of his paw on the steering wheel, in the reflected light. Then there’s a new, cold wash inside you: it is strange that he’s insisting in this way—you don’t know him well; you know his wife and dogs better—and haven’t you been told that some high percentage of abductions are by people the victim knows? How is it you are in this situation by the side of the highway where a large man is maybe going to force you into his vehicle? He must weigh more than twice what you do. You don’t stand a chance. And if you don’t get into Mr. Aucoin’s car, how long will it be before another car arrives, another window rolls down, and another man—a face you don’t yet know, the face of your nightmares—insists in the same way? And then he says the thing about Officer Callaghan and you’re reassured—he wouldn’t refer to the policeman if he planned to kill you, would he?—and you give in, you get in. And the old leatherette of his Buick LeSabre is crackly but smooth too, and the vents are blowing hot air on your already burning cheeks, and he pulls the car out fast onto the road so it spits gravel, and you think as the seat belt bell is pinging, I’ve fucked up, I’ve fucked up, he’s going to kill me after all, and you only really breathe again when he turns off the engine in the driveway, his belly in its pilled sweater tight against the steering wheel, and clears his throat in that characteristic way that you sometimes hear in the summertime through an open window, and he says, “Now, do you need me to come and have a word with your mother? Or are you going to sort this out?” And for the first time he touches you, just lightly on the forearm, a touch you can feel through your jacket is as light as a father’s, surprising from so meaty a man, and he says, with certain urgency, “She needs to understand—you need to understand—that you can’t go walking along the highway at night that way. It’s not safe. Do you hear me?”
You nod and say thank you, politely, though again part of you wonders if he’s a pervert even to think it’s not safe for you. He doesn’t have daughters; what does he know? And you get out of the car and wave back at him from your front door, where you let yourself into the yellow light, and see him nod at you, a curt sort of nod, that makes you wonder if he understands more than he lets on.
And then, afterward, there is the fleeting apprehension, the anxiety, that all the emotion and dread you experienced was a kind of pornography, a sort of made-up fear like the fear in games of pretend or in horror films, an almost erotic titillation bred in you by your deep understanding of how stories go, how they should go, and when a teenage girl walks alone in the night there is a story, and it involves her punishment, and if that punishment is not absolute—rape and even death itself—then it must, at the very least, be the threat of these possibilities, the terror of them. And that all the stories you’ve grown up with have made you feel, in that moment by the highway, not only like the victim but like the heroine in a story someone else will tell about you: this is a rare occasion when you are the star of the show.
All this I imagine for Cassie, even then, in the winter of eighth grade, so it doesn’t matter that she didn’t tell me, or anyone I know, about it, because I’ve lived it too. Although I wonder whether in Cassie’s head, when the car pulled over, all she felt was irritation—what the fuck is it now? How much worse can this day get?—and whether she would’ve got into the car, whoever’s car, and all the faster if it had been headed beyond, into the great, wild dark? We’re different, Cassie and me, it turns out we always were, wanting to hold on to and let go of different things. Like the Janis Joplin song my mother loves—freedom’s just another word for nothing left to lose—maybe already then, Cassie was ready for the next thing, even though she had no idea what it might be.
Now, of course, all this time later, I wonder why, when my father told me Mr. Aucoin’s story, I didn’t text Cassie, or call her even, or stop at her locker and ask her to talk to me. To be honest, I didn’t even consider doing it. I shook my head and held the story inside. I didn’t tell Jodie—why would I? I already knew what she would say—although I did tell Peter, and we talked a bit about it, and he wrote a song, a slow, mournful song about a girl by the side of the road at night, that I told him was his most beautiful one yet (it was); and as far as I know he never talked to anybody else about it.
But surely the reason Mr. Aucoin spoke, lying back in my father’s dentist’s chair, his open mouth vulnerable under a different set of bright lights and my dad’s gloved fingers poking at his gums, the reason he told my father the story was because he knew Cassie and I had been friends forever, and he knew my father would tell me, and he thought that surely then the information would be in the right hands and someone, someone, would do something with it.