A Good Idea Read online

  When we returned to the party, Calder was there. I didn’t know when he’d arrived. Maybe he had been there the whole time. He was sitting around the fire, sipping from a red plastic cup and talking to Shelly, who had attended that ill-fated sleepover so many years ago. I searched her face for any sign of fear or fascination, some indication that she recognized Calder for what he was. There was none; he was just another classmate who had graduated that day.

  “Did you know he was going to be here?” I asked Owen.

  “I don’t know. I guess I figured he might show up.”

  I stared at Calder, waiting, knowing if I kept my eyes locked on him long enough he would look up; it took longer than it should have, and I suspected he was actively avoiding my gaze, but finally he gave in. Our eyes met, and I felt my face slacken and go expressionless; he sighed, a pained exhalation of air that made his shoulders sag. He looked sad, sadder than I expected.

  “I don’t feel so good,” I whispered.

  The whiskey had snuck up on me, devious fucker. I took a step and stumbled. I was drunker than I realized. People were starting to stare, not at Calder, of course, but at me.

  “Are you going to be sick?” Owen asked me.

  I shook my head vigorously, as if by denying it I could make it so.

  “Come on,” he said. “I’ll take you home.”

  I let him slip an arm around my waist and lead me back to his truck.

  • • •

  In the morning I stumbled into the kitchen, hungover. My father was sitting at the table, drinking a cup of coffee. The French press was still half-full, wrapped in a dishtowel to keep it warm. I poured the remainder of the coffee into a mug with a chipped handle and a picture of an orange kitten clinging to a tree branch wrapped around the side; the caption read, Hang in there, baby! It was the only mug I ever used; I had drunk hot chocolate from it as a child, sipped warm ginger ale from it when my stomach hurt and valerian root tea when I couldn’t sleep. When my parents divorced and I moved to New York City with my mother, I had debated taking it with me, but in the end decided to leave it in Maine, more for my father’s benefit than for mine; I imagined him seeing it in the cupboard every morning and being reminded that I still thought of this house as home. Every year when I returned, I was cheered to find it waiting for me, this one familiar object in a place that felt more foreign and alienating all the time. But there was little that orange kitten could do for me that morning—sour-stomached as I was, clammy with sweat that smelled like Old Crow, devastated by a headache that started at the base of my skull and radiated upward, culminating right between my eyes. I might have been “hanging in there, baby!” but it was only by a thread.

  • • •

  My parents split up when I was thirteen, the summer before I started high school. My mom was from Manhattan and my dad was from Williston; they’d met at college in Boston, a neat halfway point between their respective origins. Dad had apprenticed at the Messenger, Williston’s local paper, since he was a teenager, learning the trade of putting out a local paper from Stan, his older, wizened predecessor. For Dad, there was no question that returning to Williston and eventually taking over the Messenger was his destiny. My mother’s destiny, however, was back in New York City, where she planned to attend grad school and become a psychotherapist. By the time they graduated, this impasse proved impossible to overcome, and they broke up. Six months later, however, Dad made a completely unexpected romantic gesture, and visited Mom, telling her he was miserable without her, so miserable he would move to Manhattan if it meant they could be reunited. Thrilled, she accepted his offer, and they moved in together, Dad working as a freelance journalist while Mom got her master’s degree.

  What neither of them had anticipated was that there was one thing that would make my father more miserable than life without my mother, and that was life in New York City. Every rat that scurried across a subway platform, every trash-strewn, urine-soaked sidewalk that reeked of sour milk and human effluvia, every summer day when a thick filthy fog of humidity rose up and settled on his skin, leaving that grimy film with which all city dwellers are so intimately familiar, reminded Dad that this was not where he belonged.

  It was the midseventies, and from what I’ve been told about the city then—the South Bronx in a constant state of smolder, Son of Sam rampaging freely across the boroughs—it’s not hard to imagine why he felt that way. After Mom got her degree, Dad wasted no time impregnating her and then using their forthcoming offspring—me—as leverage for moving back to Maine. He insisted that Manhattan was no place to raise a child; Stan was ailing and wanted to turn over the Messenger’s reins; in Maine, my mother could start her own practice and not have to compete with the glut of therapists who had already set up shop in New York. She acquiesced, eventually, and so I was born in Williston.

  Certain things, however, never materialized. Mom’s practice never got off the ground; people in Maine don’t particularly care to talk about their feelings. For a few years, she occupied herself with raising me, but then I was off to school and she was left every day with hours to fill, so many hours, and to be honest I don’t know how she lasted as long as she did. She made no effort to hide her unhappiness—picking fights with Dad, sullenly preparing dinner and refusing to eat it herself, planting herself on the porch with the phone so she could call her friends in New York and cry about how miserable she was. She held out until I was finishing middle school, and then told Dad she was moving home with or without him.

  Dad doesn’t do well with ultimatums. When they sat me down to tell me they were getting divorced, I was so relieved—no longer would I have to endure their epic battles or my mother’s almost tangible misery, which made every meal she prepared turn to a flavorless paste in my mouth—but I squeezed out a few tears, determined to produce the appropriate emotional response.

  It was only when I realized that their divorce meant I would have to choose whether I went with my mother to New York or stayed in Maine with my dad that the tears came honestly. As difficult as she could be, my mom was my mom, but Williston was home.

  Betty was dead set against my leaving. My father remained stoically neutral, Maine still in his blood, insisting again and again that it was my choice to make. My mother acted like it was a foregone conclusion that I would come with her, which was almost enough to make me stay in Williston out of spite.

  In the end it was Owen, of course, who convinced me to give New York a chance. I’m not sure there was anybody else who could have. I think it horrified him that I would pass up the opportunity to trade a life in Williston for one in a big city—any city, really, let alone New York. And I think it horrified him even more because he knew if I stayed, he would be part of the reason; I’m sure he thought I was a ruthlessly calculating thirteen-year-old, biding my time, waiting for puberty to fully take hold so I could pounce and seduce him in the alley behind the diner. This scenario was not that far removed from my actual intentions.

  He told me to go down there and give it a try. He told me if I hated it, I could always come back. So I followed my mother down there, certain I would be as miserable in Manhattan as my father had been. But I didn’t hate it. I didn’t hate it at all.

  • • •

  “How are you feeling?” my father asked, watching my tentative movements.

  “Tremendous.” I sat down across from him at the table and took a sip of my coffee. “This tastes fancy.”

  “I splurged on the good stuff.”

  “Thank you.”

  “You should call Owen later and thank him.”

  “Thank him?”

  “For getting you home last night. You were in rare form. It took both of us to get you into bed.”

  I winced. “Sorry.”

  “Is this what it’s going to be like all summer?”

  I shook my head, a mistake. Sharp pain flashed inside my head like lightnin
g and then dulled, settling in right behind my eyebrows. “I was upset. Seeing everyone at graduation, and then at the party, acting so normal. Talking to Calder like it never happened. It’s so weird. It’s like she never existed.”

  Dad shook his head. “That’s not true.”

  “Yes, it is.”

  “You just got back. You’ll see. She’s on people’s minds more than you think.”

  There was a time, right after Betty died, that I tried to convince myself she wasn’t actually dead. It was easier than I thought it would be. Though Calder had confessed to drowning her in the ocean, her body had never been found; it had gone out with the tide, the initial theory went. Maybe it was some prank, some joke, and Betty had been in on it; she certainly had the requisite flair for the dramatic. Maybe she had wanted to pull a Tom Sawyer and watch her own funeral—but, of course, there had never been a funeral. If she had hoped to watch the town come together and grieve for her, surely she had been disappointed. And then Calder’s confession became irrelevant, and the idea that she had run away—so much more palatable—took hold in Williston’s collective imagination. Maybe she had taken off to start over someplace else, the thinking went, escape her bad reputation. Maybe she couldn’t wait for NYU. Maybe she needed a quicker out, one with more panache.

  But I knew she wasn’t alive, because if she were, she would have come to me, found me in New York and let me in on her secret. She wouldn’t have let me, her oldest, closest friend, who’d suffered so much in her absence, believe her body was drifting in the ocean, rotting, picked apart, if she were still alive and whole, still wearing Fire and Ice lipstick and listening to Billie Holiday on rainy days. If she had run off somewhere, she would have taken me with her.

  And I think Williston knew it, too, knew that the story about Betty leaving on her own was nothing but a convenient fiction meant to soothe everyone’s nerves, dispel the distasteful idea that the mayor’s son might be a murderer by using Betty’s reputation as a melodramatic slattern against her, the bow that neatly tied the whole narrative together. Because nobody from Williston—not Emily when she was still sheriff, not the toady with whom Leroy had replaced her, not an underling state trooper, not even Betty’s parents—had ever called me in New York to ask if I had seen her. My mother’s apartment, where Betty had her own goddamn toothbrush, would have been the most logical place to start looking, and nobody had ever bothered. I think they all knew there was no point. I think they all knew she was already dead.

  “I just want to know why he did it.”

  My father raised his eyebrows. “Do you really think that would make a difference?”

  “Yeah, I do,” I said.

  • • •

  After he left for work, I dry-swallowed two aspirin, chased them with a glass of water, and lay down on the couch in the living room: hideous gold velour, overstuffed cushions splitting along the seams, the fabric rubbed bare in places. It always took me a few tries to remember how the remote control worked, and after several frantic minutes of pushing buttons, I began to despair that I might have to give up and read a book. Almost by accident, I managed to press the right combination, and with a comforting series of beeps the screen came to life. I flipped through the channels until I found the one that showed classic movies twenty-four hours a day. Laura was on, and though it seemed a little early in the morning for Otto Preminger, I let it play, closing my eyes and listening to the dialogue I knew by heart.

  “I don’t use a pen,” Waldo Lydecker said. “I write with a goose quill dipped in venom.”

  In the movies, the murderer always dies at the end; the writers know the audience won’t be satisfied if he’s taken away in handcuffs. I wondered what would have happened to Lydecker if he’d been arrested instead; maybe he would have gotten a good lawyer, found a way to talk himself out of it, and Detective McPherson would have had to live with that, knowing that the guilty party had been allowed to walk.

  I dozed but didn’t sleep, vaguely aware when Laura ended and Bunny Lake Is Missing began. Even in my stupor, I felt a warm rush of sympathy for Ann Lake. I wished it were raining so I would feel justified staying inside all day; instead, the sunlight bled into the house around the edges of the curtains. I tried to summon the energy to get up and adjust them and failed.

  Betty hadn’t always been Betty. Growing up she was Liz or Lizzie, E-liz-a-beth when I was annoyed, and I needed every syllable for my outrage. Betty came later, when we were about to start high school and ripe for self-reinvention.

  My last summer in Williston the weather fit my mood; it rained constantly, a steady drizzle punctuated by the occasional afternoon thunderstorm. The fog hung thick and low, and the ocean was just a vague, sleepy idea somewhere under the heavy blanket of mist. My parents were splitting up, my mother had already moved back to New York, and everyone was waiting on me to decide where I would live, whether I’d go to Williston High with the same people I’d known since kindergarten or join my mother in a place called the Upper West Side. Betty was both sympathetic and jealous of my misery; normally her dramas far outweighed mine.

  We spent most of the time in her basement watching television. Eventually we tired of MTV’s endless Real World reruns and discovered the classic movie channel. That week they were showing a Douglas Sirk marathon, and Betty fell for fifties melodrama. The histrionics and overwrought dialogue, those strange kisses—passionate yet close-mouthed—and, of course, the clothes. The fit-and-flare shirtdresses with the voluminous skirts, bolstered by tulle netting and petticoats; sleek wiggle dresses with scandalous necklines; silk dressing gowns and marabou mules.

  TCM moved on from melodramas to film noir marathons, and Betty started wearing an anklet like Barbara Stanwyck in Double Indemnity. We watched Vertigo and All About Eve, Out of the Past and The Third Man, while Betty perfected finger-waving her hair. Finally, she started dragging me out of the basement for shopping expeditions, enlisting Owen as our begrudging chauffeur since we were both too young to drive, searching for the perfect shade of red lipstick. She adopted a signature scent, and with frugality in mind she chose the Body Shop’s White Musk, but she kept it on her vanity in a vintage atomizer, so that even purchases she made at the mall were imbued with a bit of mystery and glamour. Seamed stockings are not easy to come by in coastal Maine, and these expeditions took us farther and farther afield, to thrift stores in Portland and beyond.

  While our endless film marathons inspired her fashion sense and love for acting, they instilled in me a passion for the movies themselves. I was never happier than I was sitting in the dark, watching the classics, trying to figure out how the story would end, why the camera moved the way it did, why some shots lasted for ages and other scenes were edited at a rapid-fire clip. I wasn’t nearly as interested in whatever was at the local theater; I didn’t think Kevin Smith was a genius. I was too busy watching Hitchcock’s Rope over and over, trying to spot the hidden cuts, or wondering how Sunset Boulevard could still be so suspenseful even though it was narrated by a corpse and you knew from the opening scene where it was all headed. I didn’t want to make movies or write movies or work on actual movies in any way at all; the collaborative nature of the medium was not for me. I much preferred picking them apart to figure out how they worked.

  During a phone conversation that August, my mother observed that I was the same way with people, more interested in their inner workings than anything else, and I told her she was one to talk, considering her profession, and I swear I heard her actually bite her tongue in an effort to avoid starting an argument, and so in turn I refrained from making a snide remark about all the progress she was making with her own therapist, and we let the conversation stop there, both silently congratulating ourselves, I’m sure, on nipping that particular screaming match in the bud.

  I made my decision after numerous lectures from Owen—surprisingly impassioned—and when it was time for me to leave, Liz, Lizzie, E-liz-a-beth a
nnounced she was calling herself Betty. I had to admit that “Betty” went with her new wardrobe, and possessed a certain vintage flair her other names did not, but still, I feared for her. This was small-town Maine in 1994; school shopping meant pilfering flannel shirts from your father and tearing holes in the knees of your Levi’s. I’m sure when Betty showed up on the first day in heels and a pencil skirt, people must have reacted like she’d worn a wedding gown. If it bothered her, she never said a word to me, but then Betty thrived on feeling misunderstood.

  She didn’t want me to leave, but still, she swore that she’d be fine without me. It was a convincing performance.

  I believed her.

  She was not Williston’s golden girl; she was not one of the popular crowd. She was too earnest, too flamboyant, stripped naked by her constant need for attention. The same boys who fucked her in the backseats of their cars, late at night after they’d dropped off their unwaveringly chaste girlfriends, always ignored her in the halls the next day.

  She was nobody’s favorite but mine.

  • • •

  Eventually I must have fallen asleep. I woke up, my mouth sour all over again, but my headache had receded and my thirst was less desperate. The sun had shifted lower in the sky, no longer leaking into the living room but backlighting the curtains with an orange glow. TCM had moved on from Preminger to Nicholas Ray. I shut off the television, suddenly restless in the empty, silent house.

  I got dressed, grabbed my car keys. I left behind the gloomy little nest I had made in the living room—my body imprinted on the cushions, the chenille blanket lying on the arm where I had cast it aside, the curtains drawn, a pint glass of water on the end table next to the remote control—and drove to the high school. My car was the only one in the lot; the principal must have had his towed. The building was brick and sprawling; inside, it looked like all the lights were off. I took the flashlight from my glove compartment, testing its batteries and tucking it into my waistband, and slung my messenger bag over my shoulder.