So Much Pretty (26 page)

“You know, I think now it’s real strange he was that upset right then. You know now I think that. I told Alex Dino that.

“He’d called her friends, he’d talked to people at work. You know she didn’t have her own car, so she probably hadn’t gone into Elmville. And I told him I’m sure it’s fine. Maybe one of her girlfriends drove into town and they were up to the mall. Well, we went through all the places we thought she could be. And I started to feel really uneasy because Wendy had been such a homebody before she started going with Dale, and I just figured when she wasn’t around, she was with him. So it did frighten me right away, like I said. I called Danny, and he took the truck out looking for her. Dale sat with me there, and we played with the girls and waited in case she showed up. He was too worried up to go out.

“So finally, he just goes and tells me he had asked Wendy to marry him—which was a shock to me, honestly. A shock that she didn’t come and tell me about it. And he was so worried because he thinks that she ran off. She said yes, of course, but he thinks she got to thinking and was overwhelmed.

“And then that did make me feel better because I figured she wanted to share that news with her friends and probably they had driven down from Geneseo, where she’s got a few girlfriends at school. Probably wanted to tell them before us. And I was able to make Dale feel a little better, explaining that to him. I made him some hot chocolate, and after the girls went to bed, we watched some television and ate popcorn and talked about Wendy while we waited to hear from her. Waited to hear from Danny. Dale went home before Beth Ann came back. We told each other we’d call if she showed up.

“It turned out Wen didn’t go out with her girlfriends. We called everyone the next day. By the end of that week, I just—”

Here her voice broke, and she sobbed.

“That was two months ago. I don’t know what happened that night. Captain Dino keeps telling us they are investigating but . . .
what
are they investigating? There was nothing in her apartment gave anybody a clue. I mean, she was just
gone
, and
nobody we talked to had any idea. She would not walk out on work and family, she never did a thing like that her whole life, that’s just not our way. And for weeks I could feel that she was out there—like she was right here in town but I was just missing her somehow. I feel it now, I know she’s here. I know she’s got to be. I know somebody here has got to know what’s going on.

“Please tell people if there is anything at all seems strange, please tell us. Tell us directly, because we don’t care what’s gone wrong at all. No, sir. We just want to get our baby back home safe. Anything. Anything at all that seems out of the normal—we don’t care if it seems small, even if you just think you saw her, or you think you saw her in a car, or if you’ve seen a strange car or a stranger in town or even not a stranger. Please. Please. We will do anything and give you whatever we can, but we can’t do this alone. And if she is here, we want her to know how much we love her.”

The pitch of Lori White’s voice raised but somehow became softer, almost a whisper. “We just love her. Her daddy and her nieces and her brother and Beth Ann. And me.” There was a long pause on the tape, and Flynn looked at the ceiling trying to keep the tears from sliding out of her eyes while White’s mother’s voice whispered the word “me,” one more time.

Alice

HAEDEN, NY, APRIL 11, 2009

I
SPENT MOST OF
my time that spring with Ross. Megan was at the Rhode Island School of Design, working on losing her sense of humor. I spent most of the time swimming, hunting, volunteering at Haeden Medical, and waiting for Theo to come home from school. Gene and Claire wanted to talk about colleges because colleges and teachers wanted to talk about me. Whenever they brought it up, I would tell them I planned on living in a trailer with Theo. Me and Theo and a bunch of books. I was lonely.

I built a lot of things and went shooting with Ross. But people make you feel alone if you think a certain way. Eventually, you give in to what they say is real. What they insist is normal. And of course it’s easy to excel at normal things—get praise for normal things—the grades, the sports, telling jokes, not being mean. The regular things you really do like: EMT class and pancake breakfasts and sledding on Tamarack Hill, practicing trapeze, going to dances at school. Reading at home.

Sometimes I could see why Gene and Claire lived the way they did. I could see how it had become important for them. I respected them, the life they led. I loved them. But I was not going to become a doctor or a circus performer or an organic farmer. And no matter what they thought, that was not what they were raising me to do. Those were things they did, not things they really thought were important.

When I look back on it now, I think I was slow to understand. Before Wendy White was found and the newspaper came out, I was very slow to put things together about the way things work.

But after they found her, everything changed. If anyone still had a question about what was going on, there was just something wrong with them. When the paper came that week, I had to revisit my responsibility as a person who lived in that town. And in the world. I was so awash in rage, I was weightless with it. Falling or rising or swimming deep underwater, holding my breath, hovering.

I would have to think about jokes I had heard and what they meant and what my responsibility was. Or had been. What responsibilities I’d already shirked. I would have to think about what was funny or not. What was real.

Bruce Haytes, whose brother had dated Wendy White, told a lot of jokes. And for some reason, I didn’t pay close attention. Because Wendy jokes were common. Because Wendy being gone was a source of fear and gossip and, oddly, something funny. But why would
he
be joking?

I would have to revisit the things Kyle and Bruce and Rick and Taylor and a few of their other friends had said. I would have to revisit their mannerisms and the way they looked at me and other people from the time we were all young. Think about the things they said in class and did outside of class, things they yelled from their trucks. What they did after practice when people were walking home. The way they walked. The way their bodies moved and the sounds of their voices, how they smelled. The clothes they wore, how they changed their demeanor around certain people. Changed the phrases they used, shifted something inside themselves.

I would have to think hard about all of it. Because there were details I had missed or never bothered with, and now they had to be parsed out. Otherwise, they blended together, were a way, a manner, instead of a body of evidence. I would have to consider all the evidentiary details. After Wendy was found, I studied them for another week. To see if things changed. To see how they changed. To think about the level of anxiety they each telegraphed,
the way they spoke in the months between November and April. How some of them seemed more relaxed and more confident. How there were days when I looked at them and knew exactly what was going on, but something stood between me and that thought, that understanding. I saw and sensed and knew, but some awful animal thing blocked that information from reaching my body, my voice. I saw but stood frozen like an animal. I saw the way I see when I know the answers, when I know what people will say just by looking at them, when I can remember nearly everything I have ever heard or read to take tests. And because I was slow this time, I would have to replay it for myself to double-check.

I would have to hear Bruce say over in my head what he had said out loud in February, that Wendy wasn’t dead. Because he just fucked her last night.

“Probably dead by now . . .”

“. . . not dead yet. I just fucked her last night.”

“Oh, shit, dude. That’s fucking cold.”

“Too bad you were last in line.”

“Your dad was last in line.”

“Miracle of Viagra.”

I would have to see all the details in my head. The picture of them looking up at me and the slight startled hunch of shoulders before Bruce threw his head back to laugh. Because it was funny I was there or funny that he was startled or funny that what he said was so sick.

I would have to revisit that moment to see if I had caught the slightest bit of fear or remorse in his look—if he had telegraphed some need for help. Because that would be a different kind of information. Would have changed the cost-benefit analysis.

I felt bad when Wendy was found. I knew that I would not feel the same again about my school or my friends or the place I lived. The whole world. And I felt sad about her body. Which was like my body. Being able to devote myself to the study of
Bruce and his friends made me feel better because I was doing something. Because it was a rational thing to do, to consider my ethical obligations.

It would hardly be rational to accept that I live inside a thing made of flesh that people capture, hide, and then wait in line to rape.

Gene

HAEDEN, NEW YORK, APRIL 20, 2009

I
HAVE HER BABY
teeth saved in a box in my dresser.

Yesterday I was getting dressed for work and saw the little wooden box, and I had to pick it up and squeeze it as hard as I could. Just squeeze it. Careful not to shake it and hear them rattle. I started to think again about those parents. About how they probably have baby teeth saved somewhere. Or hair caught in a brush. Clothes on the floor. Muddy boot tracks inside.

I picture their houses, every possession, every space in their lives now filled with pain. Not just the photos of their children, which in some way must be a comfort, but things. Things ringing with the ghost of a baby’s or child’s touch.

The bike in the garage, the basketball hoop, clothes in the dryer. A dish in the sink. This day frozen forever. The worn path under a swing or worse; the swing that was asked for and never built. The tree standing bare without it. The smell of food. The sound of a door closing or feet on the stairs. All these things that must bring so much pain. Even now I am missing them. Missing Alice.

I have never in my life prayed or believed I knew what it meant to pray. But when I first heard the news and thought,
My God. My baby is in that school
, I was praying for her wit and her speed. The things she surely used to do what she did. Her wit and her speed. Those were things for which I prayed. And I cannot stand this thought.

Alice

HAEDEN, NY, APRIL 13, 2009

N
OT TOO MANY
people know about Andrew Golden and Mitchell Johnson, who were eleven and thirteen when they dressed up in camouflage like soldiers and shot fifteen girls in their middle school in March 1998. Five of the girls died. Some were very little girls. These were things I didn’t know about. My mother and father never told me about these things. They gave me books to read. Theory and philosophy. Ideas about why the culture is the way it is. But we didn’t talk specifically about who was doing these things. We didn’t talk about these kinds of current events.

Then there was a couple of years ago, when girls were molested and killed at school by men who came in from outside. First in Colorado, at Platte Canyon High School, where a man took six girls hostage in a classroom and molested all of them, killing one, a sixteen-year-old. He entered the school with a list of the girls’ names. He’d looked them up in a yearbook. Later that same week, a thirty-two-year-old milkman took ten Amish girls hostage in a one-room schoolhouse, molesting them and killing five. He told the boys to leave the classroom, and they did. He said he was doing it as an “act of punishment” for something that had happened years ago. What could have happened, you think—was he molested by some Amish girls? Could be. He lived out in Amish country his whole life. Was he hurt by a teacher? But no, it turns out the thing that happened years ago was that
he
had molested some little girls. Hmmm. It’s hard to see what he meant by “punishment.” Punishing
these
girls for the crime he had committed against
those
girls. Because of course, they caused his actions by their mere existence.

The list of girls is long and not confined to one country.

It isn’t just helpless schoolgirls, though. Jamie Leigh Jones. That’s a name you don’t remember. She was working in Iraq when she was drugged by a firefighter named Charles Boaretz and gang-raped by Boaretz and an undisclosed number of coworkers at a place called Camp Hope. Her body required extensive reconstructive surgery. Including reattachment of her pectoral muscles.

Stacy’s article didn’t talk about these killings in great detail. But she did a good job of talking about other rapes and killings in New York State, almost none of which I had any idea occurred, even though two hundred cases happened within thirty miles of here. It was a big gap in my education. The newspaper made me do a little more research. Research is essential in making any rational decision. Wendy White was raped, killed, and dumped. Men raped her, men killed her, men dumped her, men found her, men are examining her remains, men are looking for the men who did it. Then the men who did it will be represented in court by men, and a man will make the decision based on laws men made throughout the legal history of this country. There may be some women involved off and on throughout the process. Witnesses, maybe, family members, lawyers. But this is Haeden, so besides Stacy, who are we kidding? There’s no one here.

And that’s a little hard to take. It’s a little hard to take these days.

Audio File: Lourde, Cheryl, 4/18/09
Stacy Flynn, Haeden
Free Press

I’m Cheryl Lourde. I live in Haeden, New York. It’s April 18, 2009. I was Alice’s teacher. She was a beautiful girl. She had pale, very pale blue eyes. And she had this look like she was imagining something funny most of the time. It was a pleasure to watch her think. She never ever took notes. She had an incredible memory. She wrote papers and completed her tests, but otherwise, she would sit and listen. I don’t know if she had a photographic memory, but she could certainly remember everything she had heard or read, and she paid attention. She had a very intense focus. She asked lots of questions, and she had an extremely agile intellect—she often connected things that I wouldn’t have thought about, even now, after twenty-five years of teaching. She brought life to subjects that I was going over by rote at that point, not thinking about. She said English was her worst subject. I think it was a subject she struggled to understand, but she had no trouble with her work that I could see. She was very well read and a very critical reader.