Miss Me When I'm Gone (5 page)

Chapter 8

The next day, I forced myself to dive into Gretchen’s manuscripts again. This time I went for the crate full of notebooks. The top one was a school notebook for kids, decorated with cartoon owls. Underneath that was a moleskin. I opened the owl one first and read the first handwritten page:

“Pretend I Never Happened”

Interstate 495, New Hampshire

What better song for a grown bastard child looking to find and stalk her biological father? Sure, the lyrics don’t fit my situation exactly, but I’ve never found lyrics that fit my situation exactly.

Listening to it obsessively on my first trip to Emerson in years, I quickly decide Waylon is my new Tammy for this project. My man-Tammy.

He’s got a tear in his voice, just like her.

He’s also, I’ve decided, the sort of man I hope to find on the other end of this—an outlaw with a beard and a black hat and sweaty long hair plastered across his forehead. A man so proudly badass he either didn’t know I existed or was in jail for so much of my life it didn’t seem worth finding me once he got out.

The sort of man Johnny Cash finds at the end of “A Boy Named Sue.”

A man who couldn’t be around for good reason, a man who thought it better for me and even Shelly that he wasn’t. I want him to explain this to my face and charm me still with his fat old cowboy smile.

This is what I want to find. Because what’s the alternative?

That was the whole piece. I put down the notebook, stunned.

The baby kicked.

“I know, right?” I said. “That’s what this was going to be? Gretchen looking for him?”

As I said it, I felt myself faking an enthusiastic tone: feigning a calm, motherly voice so as not to stress out the baby with my grief. I’d found myself doing this since the day after Gretchen’s death. I doubted my son was fooled.

“The Waylon Jennings part’s kind of what I expected, at least,” I continued anyway. “And the mention of Johnny Cash.”

Still, I found it hard to believe where Gretchen seemed to be going with this. I thought of her father—Mr. Waters—thin, balding, and bespectacled, nodding politely to everyone who came up to him after the memorial service. He was a kind man, but the furthest thing from a cowboy that I could imagine. I wondered if he knew about this piece. Since it was on the first page of the notebook at the very top, I imagined at least Mrs. Waters had read it.

I turned the page and looked at the next piece.

“Judy and Diane”
was what Gretchen had scribbled across the top of the page.

Shelly’s old friends Judy Bacon and Diane DeShannon remind me of “Nan and Jan”—the women I was always encountering in Tammy Wynette’s biographies and documentaries back when I wrote
Tammyland
. “Nan and Jan” are a pair of hairdressers—sisters—who worked for Tammy and became two of her closest friends. They often traveled on her bus with her and were among her most trusted confidantes.

When you read and hear their words about Tammy, you get the sense that they know entirely too much about the woman. They have things to say about her life and relationships, and they enjoy being experts on this most famous and controversial life. You get the feeling that they’ve overprocessed her life by now—among themselves and other friends of Tammy’s who share their views of her difficulties.

So it is comforting, if a little disconcerting, to see that Shelly had her own “Nan and Jan”: Judy and Diane.

It’s six days before Christmas, and I’m chatting with them both in Judy’s living room. Judy’s Christmas tree is weighed down with colorful, worn-looking felt ornaments: felt Santas, felt angels, felt reindeer heads with loosely glued red noses. There’s a preponderance of felt ladies holding tinfoil cookie sheets full of teeny, tiny felt cookies. Judy resembles these ladies: plump and rosy-cheeked, with an apparent exuberance about serving holiday goodies. She’s supplied us each with a mug of eggnog and outfitted her coffee table with ginger cookies and a box of glistening ribbon candy.

Glancing from the tree decorations to Judy, I realize I recognize her. I’ve been told I’ve met both Judy and Diane when I used to visit Shelly as a kid, but for the first time I feel something familiar. The roundness of Judy’s face, perhaps, or her exaggerated smile—the oddly wide sort of smile one uses on a shy child.

One gets the impression that Shelly was the most interesting and yet unfortunate thing that ever happened to these women. They got to be the best friends of the youngest and most widely discussed of Emerson’s few-ever murder victims. This wild and tragic friend had a baby at seventeen and did funny drugs and died very young. This is something these ladies will be asked to talk about for the rest of their lives. And both of these ladies—and I don’t mean this badly—really like to talk.

Before any of that scandalous stuff happened, however—before Shelly was the Bad One or the murder victim—she was just a girl on their street with whom they’d ride bikes and play tag and walk downtown for ice cream.

“When we were little, she liked to collect pretty rocks and little pieces of colored glass,” Diane informs me. “She kept them all in an old Easter basket in her room. It was very sweet.”

As we chat, Judy is the only one drinking her eggnog with any sort of gusto. I’m shy about it, since I haven’t seen these women since I was seven, and worry my behavior might be scrutinized later—for signs of my resemblance to Shelly, of my inheritance of the worst of her inclinations.

Diane—a stately, well-mannered woman—sips delicately at her eggnog only every so often. While I don’t recognize her face at all, the thickness of her northern New England accent—the way she says “Eastah”—is familiar to me. Shelly’s was the same. My mother—a suburban Connecticut resident for several decades now—lost hers long ago.

Both women agree Shelly wasn’t particularly wild until they all entered high school.

“The death of her dad—your grandfather—had a lot to do with it, I think,” says Judy.

“Shelly and Linda had very different experiences growing up,” Diane explains, and Judy agrees. “They were so far apart in age, and the situation was completely different when Shelly was a teenager, after he died. Harder than it ever was for Linda.”

My grandfather died when Shelly was twelve and her sister, Linda, was twenty-one. Linda—my mom, or more accurately, the woman who raised me—had a relatively comfortable, if strict, upbringing. After my grandfather died unexpectedly of a heart attack, my grandmother had to find work and eventually move to a smaller house.

“She was pretty depressed, too,” Judy adds. “It was all she could do to hold a job and keep food on the table. Keep herself together. Controlling Shelly just wasn’t possible for her at the time. And Shelly changed slowly over those early teenage years. It didn’t come all at once.”

So, the ladies theorize, Shelly’s “acting out” in high school was a result of her changed family situation.

“Kids didn’t really get counseling then,” Judy continues. “Not so much, anyway. I mean, we all knew she’d be sad. And teachers were understanding and all that. But what happened next, you couldn’t have predicted.”

“What happened next,” according to Judy and Diane, was Shelly experimenting with alcohol early in high school and then other substances. And boys—lots of them—from the moment she stepped into Emerson High.

“Even when we were freshmen, she was invited to all of the parties with the older kids,” Diane says. “She was popular because she was so outgoing.”

“And she was so pretty,” Judy adds. “I wonder, though, if it might have been better for her if she wasn’t so popular.”

Linda was just starting her new life out of college then—living and working in Boston. She was kind to her mother and Shelly when she came home, the women explain, but really didn’t have a clear picture of what was going on with her little sister.

“Shelly was still sweet to her mother at home,” Judy says. “She’d do a lot of the cooking and cleaning, she wouldn’t talk back. She wasn’t bad in that way. She knew her mother needed her like that and didn’t complain. That’s maybe what made her the way she was outside of that . . . finding a little escape by partying, or with the boys. Finding her affection that way. I didn’t see it that way then, of course. Back then I thought she was so bold . . . so . . . well, crazy, sometimes.”

“But now, thinking back . . .” Diane continues for Judy, nodding.

“It just seems . . . a little sad,” Judy says. “She was so young. And it should have been so obvious.”

I sniff at my eggnog but don’t sip it. The homey holiday smell of it is comforting enough, and I’m growing more comfortable here with these women—women who knew Shelly so well and who are willing to share in a way my mother never quite could.

“Obvious?” I repeat.

“Well, that it was more of a . . . cry for help than her being a typical bad girl.”

Since what they’ve told me so far didn’t seem so bad . . . a little alcohol and a lot of boys . . . I ask them for clarification. Was she really such a “bad girl” for the late seventies?

“Well . . .” Judy says. “She was always sweet to her friends. I don’t mean she was unkind. Nothing like that. It’s just that . . .”

She looks at Diane.

“There were quite a few guys,” Diane says, clutching her eggnog, glancing into it—I suspect to avoid eye contact with me. “A lot. Of guys. Many.”

Judy nods.

“She started flirting when we were about twelve,” Diane adds. “Honestly, I don’t think I knew how to flirt till I was about eighteen. But little Shelly, she would flirt with Judy’s big brother and his friends when he’d come home from college. Remember that?”

Judy nods again, shrugs, and finishes her second eggnog.

“Yeah,” Diane says. “There were always a lot of guys, with Shelly.”

I nod. I see. They are trying to tell me what my mom never quite had the heart to say, but that I was able to surmise long ago. They are trying to tell me that Shelly was a slut.

I closed the notebook. Yes, it really did seem Gretchen was heading in that direction—looking for answers about her biological roots. I supposed, now that I’d had a few minutes to let it sink in, that it wasn’t such a crazy idea. It was only natural for an adopted child to ask these questions eventually. In theory, it could fit with the men-of-country-music theme—hence the little Waylon Jennings piece. It certainly wasn’t the nuttiest idea Gretchen had ever had.

This piece didn’t have anything about country music, but maybe she was planning to insert it later. It was just a first handwritten draft, after all.

Still, I felt like I needed a little guidance here.

I found the phone number in my purse that Nathan had given me—of Gretchen’s agent, Tracy Pike. I dialed it, got voice mail, and left a message, explaining who I was.

When I picked up another notebook, something slipped out of it and onto my lap.

It was a faded snapshot of Gretchen wearing a fuchsia tank top, with her arm around a little girl squinting in the sun.

For a moment, I wondered who the little girl was—then I looked back at Gretchen and realized it wasn’t Gretchen at all. Gretchen had probably never worn a tank top in her life, and this young woman was a bit bustier than Gretchen had been, too. Of course, it was Shelly. And the little girl was Gretchen.

Still, Shelly looked shockingly like Gretchen. They had the same dark blond hair streaked with brown, the same whiteness of complexion, even the same tilt of the head.

The young Gretchen looked uncomfortable in the sun but was trying to manage a cringing smile anyway. There was something about the smallness of her lilac T-shirt, the innocence of its gathered little sleeves, that made me very sad.

My cell phone rang. It was Tracy Pike, surprising me with a quick call back.

“Thanks for taking the time to talk to me,” I said after we introduced ourselves.

“Not at all,” she said. “Of course. I wanted to say again how sorry I am. It must be such a shock. I’m terribly sorry.”

“Thank you,” I said.

I was surprised by the speed of her callback and by the youthful efficiency in her voice. She didn’t sound much older than me. Whenever Gretchen had mentioned her “literary agent,” I’d always pictured a middle-aged Manhattanite with a smoky voice and a highball glass.

“So, I’m just starting to go through Gretchen’s handwritten things.” I spoke quickly so she wouldn’t feel the need to offer more condolences. “And this weekend, I’ll be getting the computer files from her boyfriend. Probably I’ll know more when I see that, but I thought it might be good to touch base with someone who had a better idea of the scope of the book. So I’ll know what I’m supposed to be looking for.”

“Actually, I’ll be curious what you find.” Tracy paused. “She had kind of stopped communicating with me about her progress a little over a month ago. She was past deadline. I wasn’t sure if she was powering through to the end or was so far behind she was reluctant to discuss it.”

“But . . . what were you expecting to receive, exactly? What was the book she’d proposed? I mean, I know it was supposed to be like
Tammyland,
just about men this time. Men country stars. Johnny Cash, Willie Nelson, George Jones . . . Is that right? That was the last thing she told me about it.”