Miss Me When I'm Gone (20 page)

Chapter 37

“I’m getting up at six tomorrow,” I told Sam two evenings later. “My alarm’s gonna go off before yours.”

“Why?”

“I’ve got an appointment.”

“They gonna do another ultrasound ever? Are they gonna let you bring home the pictures?”

“Not that kind of appointment. I had my last doctor appointment yesterday morning, and it was uneventful. She basically just listened to the heartbeat and told me my belly’s getting sufficiently bigger. No, I’ve got something set up in New Hampshire. A little south of Emerson. Forty minutes less of a trip. Willingham’s this little city not far from UNH. And you know where that is, right? Didn’t your friend Alex go there?”

“But . . .” Sam looked confused. “Wait, that’s all they did for the appointment? What’ll they do for the next one?”

“I don’t know. Probably the same thing.”

Sam looked dubious. “You’re driving all the way there and back before work? For what?”

“Someone’s agreed to talk to me. It’s about Gretchen.”

“Well, I figured that. Another one of her sources?”

“Sort of.”

“This couldn’t wait till the weekend? I could help you drive on a weekend.”

“This lady doesn’t work on weekends. I could only catch her on a weekday.”

“What does it matter when she works? Did you tell her you’re over seven months pregnant?”

“Why the hell would I tell her that?”

Sam shrugged. “I don’t know. But, Jamie . . .”

“Yeah?”

“How long is this going to last?”

“Till my time runs out, Sam.”

“You make it sound like you’re about to die. You know, you don’t need to give up on Gretchen once the baby’s born. I’ll be helping you. It’ll be both of us. You’ll still have time.”

I pulled one of Gretchen’s notebooks from the small stack on my bedside table, deciding not to bother reminding Sam that
time
was going to be a different animal for us in a couple of months. He would have time to “help” after work. I would have time to take an occasional shower. There didn’t seem much sense in holding this against him, since it was biology and our current financial situation that dictated the terms, not him.

“It feels urgent
now,
though . . .”

I stopped myself before elaborating, unsure whether or not I should tell him about Gretchen’s purse in the lake. I hadn’t yet. I hadn’t wanted him to worry. And now I was pretty sure it wouldn’t convince him of anything, except that I shouldn’t go anywhere near Emerson again in my condition.

Sam closed his eyes.

“Okay,” he whispered.

I examined the notebook. It was red, with an especially worn cover. On the first page, Gretchen had scrawled
Tammy 2?

Sam rolled over and turned off his lamp.

“I love you,” he said.

“I love you, too,” I answered.

I opened Gretchen’s notebook. After a few minutes, Sam began to snore softly.

Chapter 38

“Till I Get It Right”

Perhaps more than any of her songs, this was Tammy’s real anthem. Certainly more than “Stand by Your Man,” which made her famous, but, as everyone knows, did not reflect her real approach to relationships.

In “Till I Get It Right,” Tammy declares that she’ll “keep on fallin’ in love” till she gets it right. This summary makes her sound plucky, but anyone who’s heard it knows it’s more of a sad song. Tammy describes herself as “a wounded bird,” and it’s essentially a breakup song. The narrator has been hurt again, but knows she’ll give love another try, again and again.

When I listen to it, tiny, embarrassing tears form at the very corners of my eyes. Not so much because I can relate—but because the song is so Tammy, and, really, so Shelly, too—although I’m fairly certain that Shelly would’ve found it cheesy and old-fashioned.

Like it or not, she and Tammy had a few things in common. In particular, the habit of jumping naively from man to man in hopes that one of them would magically make everything better. This habit can be pretty frustrating to those close to such women—surely it was for Tammy’s family, as it certainly was for my mom and Shelly’s friends. Even for me, remembering what I do and trying to understand.

But this song brings me closer to understanding. It doesn’t explain anything, of course. It simply makes me feel the sadness of it, and along with it, the hopefulness of it. The words hint at what it feels like to want romantic love with the same kind of compulsion that some of us have for our next promotion, our next mixed drink, our next piece of chocolate.

No one knows exactly why Tammy was that way about men. Some theorize that it had to do with the death of her father when she was a baby. She never had a father, and perhaps she was always looking for the perfect masculine prince and protector.

I think this explanation is too simplistic. For one thing, Tammy’s grandfather played an important and protective role in her life through high school. What’s more, there are plenty of women who grow up without fathers but don’t become man-crazy, and in any case, I prefer not to reduce most behaviors to a direct cause-and-effect relationship. If you can simplify Tammy’s behavior that way, you can simplify Shelly’s in almost the same way: She lost her father when she was twelve. I never knew her father, but I knew her, and I know nothing of hers could ever be that easy to explain.

I believe a lot of Tammy fans think they know who was the best man for Tammy: George Jones. He was her true love, they say, but he threw it all away with his alcoholism. Personally, I like to point to Burt Reynolds as the true love. Sure, it didn’t last long and wasn’t likely to, but accounts of their time together make me think it was the most fun and uncomplicated relationship she ever had—something she certainly could’ve used more of. Her daughters and others close to her, however, claim that neither of these men—nor any of the men she was ever with—was her true love. She never really got it right.

And of course, I wonder about Shelly, and if any of those guys she was with was ever the right one. And if she found something she was looking for in any one of those relationships. Or if what she wanted was fixed but unattainable, or simply kept changing.

The guys I’ve picked out as her possible real loves are Bruce and Roland. Bruce because he was an atypical choice for her. From what I’ve heard, he was a kinder, gentler, more thoughtful kind of guy than she usually went for. Why she dated him I don’t know—but there must have been something different there that kept her with him for all of those months. They say that the two of them remained friends long after high school—after he went to college and she stuck around here. And I remember meeting him once, when I was six or seven. We ran into him at Kmart in Plantsville, where she’d always take me to buy cheap candy before a movie. He was in the candy aisle, too, with a package of black Twizzlers in his hand: this gangly, suntanned man with poufy dark hair. He was doing the same thing we were—buying candy ahead to avoid the theater’s prices—although he was going to a different movie than us. I remember Shelly laughing at the coincidence, and telling me, “Honey, this is my friend Bruce. We’re old friends.”

The other is Roland. One of those cool guys who went exclusively by his last name. He was with my mother when I was around four or five, and apparently I even met him a couple of times on visits, though I don’t remember it. The thing about Roland is that he helped Shelly get off drugs. Brought her to meetings and even helped her pay for a short clinic stay, at one point. My mom has told me this about Roland more than once. And I remember her telling it with a wistfulness in her voice, as if she wished Shelly had stayed with him. Whether or not this was a great match, Roland must have cared a great deal about Shelly. And Shelly must have, on some level, trusted him.

Did she ever get it right? I like to think she did. Maybe not with her last romance, if you can call it that—but maybe with a couple of the others along the way.

“Jolene”

Route 2, southern New Hampshire

Winter 1985

It was actually Shelly who introduced me to country music. She did so unwittingly, while she was driving me back to Connecticut from Emerson one Sunday night in the winter. In those days I visited her about two weekends a month—whole-weekend visits that had started less than a year before.

I remember it as the last drive we had together, but I know that can’t be true. She was killed in March, and I know we must’ve seen each other in between.

Shelly wasn’t even a country fan, but she was flipping around on the radio that night, and stopped at the song. She may have been distracted by the road, just wanting to settle on one station for a moment—but I remember her singing along softly with it.

I remember the
click-click click-click
of Shelly turning her high beams off and on again when other cars came along. With the road winding in front of us as we glided through the dark, the song felt almost scary to me—with that low guitar and the lady I didn’t yet know was Dolly sounding so sad as she repeated that name: “Jolene.”

“I like that name, ‘Jolene,’ ” I said, after it was over.

“Do you?” Shelly said. “It’s not a name you hear much around here.”

“I like the name ‘Stacey’ even better, though.”

All the girls in my first-grade class loved the name “Stacey,” I explained. We all wanted to change our name to “Stacey.”

“Well, you can’t all be Stacey,” Shelly said. “That would be weird if you were all Stacey.”

Still, I wanted to know how a person changes her name. A girl in my class had said her mother was going to let her change her name to Stacey, but I suspected she was lying. And I wondered, if it were really true, how they were going to do that. Would they change her birth certificate?

Shelly said yes, that girl was probably lying. Little girls aren’t allowed to change their names. If I still loved “Stacey” when I was much, much older, I could change my name.

“But it doesn’t suit you, though,” she said. “You don’t seem like a Stacey.”

I remember being a little sad because it was surely better to seem like a Stacey than almost anything else. And did Shelly think I seemed like a Gretchen? I wondered. And what did it mean to seem like a Gretchen? Was it a little like being Gretel in the fairy tale? (Did she even pick that name for me? I wondered years later. Or did someone else? It was everything my aunt Nantie—later, Mom—wanted me to be: buttoned up and classy, but gentle, like her.)

Shelly was none of those things. From everything people have told me about her since, she could’ve been a Jolene. She could have any man she wanted, and she did. Since high school. She was woman enough to take just about any man. Which is how I came into the world, with ambiguous paternity.

She could’ve been a Jolene, but she was Shelly. I always called her Shelly. Not Mommy. Not Mom.

My aunt raised me from the beginning, but no one ever kept it from me that Shelly was my mother. My dear aunt didn’t want to upset Shelly, I suspect, by forcing the issue. She had me call her Nantie. When I was nine I switched to Mom because I was getting older now and Nantie was weird and that’s what everyone else had: a mom.

I suspect that during the period when I was five to seven, when I was visiting Shelly more, it was a sort of “trial run” for her. She’d been getting her life together. She was thinking of asking for me back, and my aunt knew it. Everyone probably knew it but me.

But then she died. She died before I could know it for sure.

That “last drive”—I remember it so well. I remember Shelly telling me about the pet-food factory where she used to work. She never told me about the actual job. Instead, she’d make up stories about the dogs and cats who’d write letters of appreciation, letters of complaint. The snooty white longhair cat who was always complaining that the kibble wasn’t quite crunchy enough. The cheap little wiener dog who typed his letters on an old-fashioned typewriter, always trying to get free samples.

I remember the bittersweet promise of school the next day. I loved first grade. I loved bringing home to Nantie dittos with 100s and star stickers on top of them, putting them on the refrigerator. I never showed these things to Shelly when I saw her—it didn’t seem the sort of thing that would interest her.

And I remember Jolene. I remember that guitar haunting me like Halloween. Jolene, Jolene, Jolene, Jolene.

I’ve only heard the song again a handful of times. It’s not the kind of song that just pops up on the radio in New England—or maybe anywhere—these days. And I’ve only begun to listen to it deliberately lately—this song that first made a conflicted country fan of me all those years ago, before I knew that there were different types of music for different types of people. This song that will always remind me so painfully of the only woman who I would ever really think of as my mother.

Chapter 39

I was dreading arriving at the Willingham Library parking lot—seeing the place where Gretchen had actually fallen. I even considered parking down the road from the library so I wouldn’t have to be in the actual parking lot. But I’d programmed the GPS for the library address, and it ordered me toward the library lot in its clipped, efficient female voice—like a stern mother reminding me of my responsibilities.

I pulled into the lot, took one of the front spaces, then headed straight into the library, without looking around much.

Ruth Rowan—a petite woman in her forties with a soft, mulletlike hairdo—sat me down in her windowless office behind the reference desk. While Ruth herself smelled sharply of soap, her office smelled like old coffee.

“You said in your e-mail that you’re a friend of Gretchen Waters?”

“Yes. And I’m a journalist.”

“I see. And you’re here in which capacity, then?”

Oh, librarians. Always so sharp.

“A little of each, I guess.”

I explained about being Gretchen’s sort-of literary executor, and that seemed to put her at ease a bit.

“I know the police have asked you all about that night. But I was wondering if you’d be willing to tell me about it, too.”

“Are you going to put this information in her book?”

“I’m finding it helps me feel a bit better,” I explained, “to know as much as possible about what happened.”

Ruth nodded. “Fair enough. Shall I start with her reading?”

“Okay.”

“She seemed a little nervous. I mean, she did a good job. But she didn’t seem totally happy to be here. She was . . . maybe . . . uncomfortable. Especially when someone asked her about her second book.”

“What did she say about it?”

“She said that she was in the process of doing a major overhaul of the book. That she wasn’t sure what kind of book it was going to be yet. That she didn’t want to say a lot about it. Which struck me as a little odd. That’s a pretty standard question most authors get, you know? What are you working on next?”

“Maybe she didn’t want to jinx it,” I said.

Ruth gave me a sad look. “Maybe so.”

“Also . . . Gretchen just didn’t really like public speaking.”

“I see. Well, she did a fine job. I’m not saying she didn’t.”

“Did anyone in particular make her nervous?”

“Well, that’s a good question. When she went up to the podium, she said, ‘Oh. Hello,’ to someone as if she recognized a guest she wasn’t expecting. I didn’t see who, it wasn’t clear. I didn’t think much of it at the time, although I did tell the police about it later. And that didn’t seem to make her nervous. On the other hand, there was someone in the crowd who asked her why
Tammyland
didn’t have hardly anything in it about Kitty Wells. He said anyone who knew anything about women in country music would’ve given a big chunk of the book to Kitty Wells. It seemed like he wanted to give Gretchen a hard time about that.”

“What did Gretchen say to that?”

“She said she appreciated the contribution of Kitty Wells to country music, but that her book was a personal memoir, and none of Kitty’s songs happened to speak to her in the way the others had.”

“And was he happy with that response?”

“No, not at all. But this particular patron isn’t happy with anything. He’s a terrible curmudgeon. He writes a letter to the editor nearly once a month explaining why the school or library budgets should be cut. He likes to attend our events just to poop on them, if you’ll excuse my language. I’m sure he didn’t mean anything personal with Gretchen. I’m pretty sure he doesn’t care a whit about Kitty Wells either.”

“So were most in attendance people who regularly come to these book events?” I asked.

“Oh, I recognized about half of them.” Ruth straightened a pile of books on her desk. “We have our regulars, certainly.”

“How many people were there in all?”

“About eighteen or so. Which is pretty good for a book event like this. It’s usually a fairly middle-aged crowd at these things. There were a few young women this time, since
Tammyland
is a little more of a young women’s book.”

“Any men? I mean, aside from your curmudgeon?”

Ruth sat back in her chair. “Um . . . yes. Two others. A short, bald man. I believe he was the husband of one of the ladies. And one other man, who was by himself. A very tall, middle-aged gentleman. I’d never seen him before. He had what they call ‘big hair,’ which is why I noticed him.”

The description took me by surprise.

“Dark hair?” I asked.

“Yes.” Ruth studied me worriedly.

“With some white in it?”

“I think so,” Ruth said slowly.

“And how long did the event last?” I asked, deliberately changing the subject.

“A little over an hour, if you count the refreshments afterward. Gretchen chatted with several of the attendees, had some wine. Then she and I chatted for a little bit while I locked up the library.”

“You two were the last out?”

“Yes. We were behind the other guests by a few minutes.”

“That was still enough time for most of them to start up their cars and leave, probably?”

“I suppose. As I told the officer who came and spoke to me, I didn’t see Gretchen get into her car. I didn’t see exactly where she was parked at the time. I usually park on the side of the building, away from the main lot. Most of the staff parks there.”

I hesitated, not wanting to sound pushy or critical. I wasn’t blaming her for not walking Gretchen to her car.

“So you didn’t see any of cars in the main lot?”

“I caught a
glimpse.
As I came down the steps. But then I circled around to the side.”

“Were there a lot of cars in the lot?”

“A few.” Ruth sighed. “There are usually a few, even when the library is closed.”

“Why’s that?”

Ruth shrugged. “There’s often overflow from the Dragon Buffet half-price nights. We don’t enforce patrons-only parking. It’s usually not a problem, since our lot’s pretty big and we don’t have a lot of patrons around dinnertime anyway.”

“So what kind of cars did you see there that night?”

“I described what I remembered to the officer who came.”

“Can you tell me, too?”

Ruth looked frustrated. “Well, okay. I don’t have a photographic memory. I don’t remember everything. But there were a couple of SUVs. As usual.”

“Do you remember the colors?”

“One tan—a really huge one. One was smaller and a dark color. I don’t quite remember. There are lots of SUVs in our town. There might have been more than two. It wouldn’t have been remarkable to me. There was a black VW Bug, I think. And there was a cute orange compact car. I noticed that one because I’ve been wanting one of those myself. I test-drove a Honda Fit recently.”

“Okay,” I said.

“There was a pickup truck near the back of the lot, close to the Dragon Buffet side. Blue. Kind of old-looking. But that’s all I remember.”

“There were more cars than that, though, you’re saying.”

“A few, yes. Those were the ones that were memorable to me the next day, when the police questioned me. I certainly didn’t remember any license plates, or anything like that that would’ve been of great use to them.”

“Do you know if the police tracked down other patrons who’d been at Gretchen’s reading? People who were leaving the lot the same time as her?”

“Yes. I gave them the names of the patrons whose names I knew. I don’t know how much they were able to tell them. I know that Susan Sparks—she’s one of our regulars at the readings—before she pulled out, she saw Gretchen head down the stairs to the 7-Eleven, which she thought was a little surprising, since it was dark by then. But you know, it’s really not that odd. I’ve done it—after my shift is over, swing down there for a quart of milk or a Diet Coke.”

“Are those steps down tricky?” I asked. “Dangerous?”

“They are a little steep, yes.” Ruth glanced at me, then out the window at the parking lot. “I tend to hold on to the railing. You could . . . um . . . go out there and see for yourself. If that would help. Or have you done that already? On your way in?”

“Um . . . no. I haven’t. I suppose I should.”

Ruth nodded. “I
am
sorry about Gretchen. She was clearly a kind and interesting young woman. It must be difficult for you.”

“Yes,” I said.

She glanced at my belly. “Would you like me to go out there with you?”

Often I was exasperated by the pregnancy-inspired concern, but this time I was grateful for it.

“Okay,” I said.

Ruth Rowan and I stared down the cement stairs together, silent for at least a minute or two. The steps were cracked in a few spots, with dandelions growing out of them. At the bottom, the black pavement looked relatively new, with fresh white lines for the 7-Eleven parking spaces. I looked beyond the pavement and watched an elderly man in a driver’s cap emerge from the store with an armful of ice. I didn’t wish to focus on the spot where Gretchen had lain bleeding.

“Do you know where Gretchen was parked?” I asked, turning to Ruth.

“Yes. Not far from the steps. That space, I believe.” She pointed to a space a few feet from the steps. “The police had this area blocked off the week after it happened.”

“So she probably was headed for her car, and then saw that there was the 7-Eleven down there, and decided to grab a snack.”

I didn’t look at her, but instead at the patchy grass on either side of the cement steps leading down to the lower parking lot.

There was a simple metal pole railing running alongside the stone steps. I stood on top of the first step and gripped the railing. It was scaly with chipped paint and rust, and it moved toward me when I pulled it—a little wobbly, but firmly in the ground.

“Why are these stairs even here?” I asked.

“That used to be a town building as well,” Ruth explained, pointing at the 7-Eleven. “So these stairs connected them. But since the town sold the building about fifteen years ago, the steps haven’t been maintained by the town.”

I nodded.

“You know it was a bit rainy that day, right? I believe it was kind of muddy. Slippery. So . . . so before they found her purse, we thought that may have contributed. Maybe it still did.”

“Maybe,” I said softly. It certainly would make it easier for someone to push Gretchen, if that’s what she meant.

Ruth gave me a robotic pat on the upper arm. I got the feeling she was grasping for the right thing to say. I decided to relieve her of that burden and let her go back to her job.

“Yeah,” I said. “I think I’ve seen enough. Thank you for coming out here with me.”

Ruth didn’t react immediately. For a few minutes, we gazed down the steep stairs together. Then she walked me to my car.