I hadn’t known what she was thinking, what she experienced; but still, atavistically, I had known how to find her—she was not so changed as that. What I hadn’t anticipated was that she did not want to be found. That the last look she would give me was full of rage.
In the kitchen with my mother, she at the stove and I at the sink, I had for the first time the adult apprehension that my mother too was afraid of this abyss, not as it related to Cassie but as it related to me, to my mother and me. I understood that she had thought to have known me—flesh of her flesh, brought into the world from between her thighs, always beside her, and still, somewhere, inside her—and that she feared, now, maybe for the first time, that she didn’t know me at all. I turned and took her in my arms—she was no longer bigger than I was; in fact, I was the taller of us two—and embraced her, and kissed her soft cheek, and whispered in her ear, again, “Don’t be silly, Mom.” And then, “There’s nothing to be afraid of.” So many times my mother had said these words to me, had made this gesture of love and reassurance; but this was the first time I did it for her. And the first time too that I understood these words might not be true.
PETER SAW CASSIE one more time. Not on purpose, and not really to speak to, but he saw her. A couple of days after Bev had shunned my mother, Peter was with his father at Target at nine o’clock at night, after his track meet, picking up dog food, bulk paper towels, and a new charger for his phone. They ran into Cassie and Bev in the wide aisle between makeup and home goods. Pale as milk, Cassie pushed the cart, he said, dwarfed by its red plastic lattice, and her mother practically interposed her body—the voluminous, swishing, scented body—when he approached. They had a pile of white bath towels in the cart, he said, and a gold can of hairspray. He noticed this. Cassie said hi, but she didn’t move out from behind the cart, and her eyes, he said, were dull. He thought she was probably on medication, sparrow thin, drifty in her movements. Bev, who had never liked Peter, smiled hard and bright.
“Some last-minute errands,” she brayed. “So much to do before we go!” And then she pushed Cassie and the cart forcefully into the pet-food aisle—like a kidnapper, Peter said—and that was that. Cassie wore bedroom slippers, the fluffy sheepskin kind. He was hurt that she didn’t look back.
“Like she was a hostage,” he said again. “Like she wasn’t herself.”
Whatever that meant.
FOR ALMOST a year, Anders Shute didn’t go anywhere. He stayed in the little house in the cul-de-sac—he rented it from Bev, I guess, until she sold it the following spring—and when, rarely, you saw him at Bell’s or the Rite Aid, he would stretch his thin lips into a smile and incline his head slightly by way of greeting, and move on.
The community broadly surmised, from his presence, that he hadn’t done anything wrong, that whatever had transpired in the little house could be summarized simply as “things didn’t work out” or “Bev and Cassie needed a new start.” But wasn’t Anders Shute the source of all of Cassie’s despair? Hadn’t he destroyed her as surely as Leo the pit bull had savaged her hand? We didn’t say this to our parents, and if they had any such thoughts, they didn’t express them within our hearing.
Maybe too Anders was an innocent—ill favored, strange and cold, but no more than these unfortunate things. Maybe, Peter and I wondered, it was all about Bev, angel of death. What was true and what wasn’t, in Cassie’s history? Had her father even been named Burnes? Where had Bev come from, and now where had they gone? Wherever they’d moved to, in such haste, it wasn’t because they had “people” there—as far as we knew, as far as Cassie knew, Bev had no people. And for that matter, maybe wherever they’d gone, they weren’t Bev and Cassie Burnes any longer. For months afterward, I’d Google their names and nothing would come up, nothing at all about a life after Royston, as if they’d simply ceased to exist. I hoped that Cassie might write to me, or call, or text, but she never did.
BY MIDSUMMER, Royston had stopped talking about her altogether. Once school was out, kids took up lifeguard and camp-counselor jobs, went on bike trips or to summer school, turned their attention to Jodie’s mother’s breast-cancer diagnosis, the factory fire at Henkel. The grown-ups had nothing more to say, and so said no more, and then the silence around Cassie grew quieter than the grave, as if Cassie had never existed at all.
Peter and I talked about her a lot, at first, as we held hands and finally as he came to see our friendship as love, the way I’d seen it all along. But we spoke of her less with each passing week. Even between us, who knew as much as anyone knew, we could say only so much before we turned in circles.
Peter was convinced that Bev Burnes had changed their names, that Cassie, wherever she’d gone, was no longer Cassie Burnes. He believed, upon reflection, that Bev was a lifelong fantasist, a con artist, spinning one story after another; and her decade in Royston just one episode in a series of dramas. In his version, there’d never been a Clarke Burnes, and Cassie’s football coach in Bangor was pure, strange coincidence. “Imagine that poor guy,” Peter said, “with this crazed kid in a beanie on his doorstep, one Monday at dawn, out of the blue. What does that feel like?” I wondered whether Arthur C. Burnes had spoken to his wife, Anna Maria, about it, whether they’d talked about Cassie, whether she was still alive to them somehow.
Peter thought that Bev had had a different name to begin with—did we even know where she was supposed to have grown up? Rochester, New York? Lancaster, Pennsylvania? Outside Wilmington? Why did nobody know for sure, and why had nobody noticed that they didn’t know? Peter thought that Bev was like one of those grifters on crime television, a made-up name, a false identity, out delivering death across the country with her bag of morphine and oxycodone and fentanyl—the angel of mercy, so-called. Maybe, he said, Bev never even knew who Cassie’s father was. Potentially, Cassie wasn’t even Bev’s child.
“You’re going too far,” I said; and he said, “Why? It happens.”