SHE LIKED IT AT FIRST, he could swear that she did. He told her it was a game, and he fed her M &M’s for each step she mastered. Fact is, she might have done it before. It happens, with retarded people. They get up to all sorts of things. That was why the girl in his grade school had to be transferred, because she was doing things with the older boys. She had a woman’s body and a little girl’s mind. That was no way to be. He was doing this girl a kindness, if you thought about it. But, in the end, it wasn’t right. He needed someone who could help a little. He wouldn’t make this mistake again.
Later, when he shouldered her body and carried it deep into the woods, trusting that no one would be looking for her here, not soon, he found himself feeling very tender toward her. She wasn’t happy in this life, couldn’t really be. Everyone was better off now.
He was home in time for supper.
5
ELIZA’S PARENTS LIVED ONLY THIRTY minutes from the new house, another mark in its favor. (Funny, the more Eliza kept enumerating the house’s various advantages in her mind-the trees, the yard, the proximity to her parents-the more she wondered if there was something about it that she actually disliked but didn’t want to admit to herself.) She had assumed that their lives, maintained at a physical distance for so long, would braid together instantly, that she would see them all the time. But, so far, they met up no more than once a month, and it was typically a rushed restaurant meal in downtown Bethesda, at a place that offended no one and therefore disappointed everyone.
Perhaps they were all just out of practice at being an extended family; Eliza had lived a minimum of 1,500 miles away since college graduation. Besides, both her parents, now in their late seventies, continued to work, although her father had cut back his practice; her mother was an academic, teaching at the University of Maryland in downtown Baltimore. They were not, nor would she want them to be, the type of settled grandparents whose lives revolved around their only grandchildren. Still, she had thought she would see more of them than she did.
This week, however, they were having dinner at her parents’ house, an old farmhouse in what had been, back in 1985, a rural enclave in Western Howard County. Their road still had a country feel to it. But all around, development was encroaching. For Inez, those new houses were like battleships in a harbor, massing, readying an attack. As for the large electrical towers visible in the distance-those made her shiver with revulsion, although she did not believe in the health claims made against them. She just found them ugly. “Imagine,” she often said, “what Don Quixote would have made of those.”
Yet the Lerners had never thought twice about relocating here, leaving their beloved house in Roaring Springs in order to enroll Eliza in a different high school. One county over, Wilde Lake High School had been far enough so a new girl, known as Eliza, would have no resonance. There was always the slight risk that someone from the old school district would transfer and that Eliza’s identity would be pierced. But as her parents explained to her repeatedly, the changes were not about shame or secrets. They moved because the old neighborhood had dark associations for all of them, because some of the things they loved most-the stream, the wooded hillsides, the sense of isolation-were tainted. They chose not to speak of what had happened in the world at large, but that was because the world at large had nothing to contribute to Eliza’s healing. If she had returned to Catonsville High School with her friends-and it was her choice, they stressed-her parents didn’t doubt that people would have been sensitive. Too sensitive. They did not want their daughter to live an eggshell existence, where others watched their words and lapsed into sudden, suspicious silences when she happened onto certain conversations. New house, new start. For all of them. A new house with an alarm system, and central air-conditioning, despite Inez’s hatred of it, because that meant they didn’t sleep with open windows.
Iso and Albie loved their grandparents’ house, which was filled with the requisite items of fascination that grandparents’ homes always harbor. But the real lure for them was the nearby Rita’s custard stand. As soon as they left with their grandfather for an after-dinner treat, Eliza told her mother about Walter’s letter.
“What are you going to do?” she asked.
“Nothing,” Eliza said.
“Doing nothing,” Inez said, “is a choice in its own way. When you do nothing, you still do something.”
“I know.”
“I assumed you did.”
They were sitting on the screened porch that ran along the back of the house, a place where the view was still, more or less, as it had been when the Lerners purchased their home. They had bought it quickly, almost instinctively, a month after Eliza came home. It was actually larger than the eighteenth-century stone house they had known in Roaring Springs, and better appointed in almost every way-updated bathrooms, more generously proportioned rooms. Yet when Vonnie had come home for Christmas break, glum over her poor academic performance in her inaugural quarter at Northwestern, she had pitched a fit over her parents’ failure to consult her on this important family matter. Vonnie had always been given to histrionics, even when she had little cause for them, and her family was more or less inured to the melodrama.
But no one, not even psychiatrist parents as well trained as the Lerners, could have been prepared to hear their eldest daughter proclaim: “It’s just that everything’s going to be about Elizabeth -excuse me, Eliza-from now on.”
The statement, delivered at the dinner table, was wrong on so many levels that no one in the family spoke for several seconds. It was factually wrong; the whole point was that the Lerners were trying to make a world in which things were neither about, nor not about, what had happened to Eliza. Besides, they had always been fair-minded, never favoring one daughter over the other, honoring their differences. Vonnie was their high-strung overachiever. Eliza, even when she was known as Elizabeth, was that unusual child content simply to be. Good enough grades, cheerful participation in group activities in which she neither distinguished nor embarrassed herself. Inevitably, it had been speculated-by outsiders, but also by Inez and Manny, by Vonnie, and even by Eliza-that her temperament wasn’t inborn but a subconscious and preternatural decision to opt out. Let Vonnie have the prizes and the honors, the whole world if she wanted it.
From a young age, Eliza was also a willing, complacent slave to her older sister, which probably undercut whatever traditional sibling rivalry there might have been. She was simply too good-natured about the tortures her sister designed for her in their early days. Oh, when she was a baby, she cried when Vonnie pinched her, which the newly minted older sister did whenever the opportunity presented itself. But once Eliza could toddle about, she followed her sister everywhere, and not even Vonnie could hold a grudge against someone who so clearly worshipped her.
But she could-apparently, amazingly-seethe with resentment over the way her sister’s misfortune had transformed the family dynamic.
“Would you rather be Eliza?” her father asked Vonnie the night of her unthinkable pronouncement.
Eliza couldn’t help wanting to hear the answer. Obviously, Vonnie had never wanted to be Eliza back when she was Elizabeth, so it would be odd to think she might want to trade places now. But what if she did? What would that signify?
“That’s not what I meant,” Vonnie said, her anger deflating. Imploding, really, from embarrassment. “I was just trying to say that, from now on, so much of what we do will be controlled, influenced, affected by…what happened.”