But in fact she couldn’t stop imagining it. She thought about the child wandering the dark countryside, stumbling over rocks and through skunkbrush. She heard the crack of the branch that saved the boy from hanging, and the dull thudding of the little girl’s feet as she made her escape. She wondered whether LeDivic had spoken to the children while he tried to hang them, and what he might’ve said, and whether the children had cried for their mother or gone mute with shock. All week, thoughts like these had driven her to distraction. She’d burned herself on the stove and left the front door standing open. She’d pricked her fingers while tailoring her mother’s old wedding dress. Maybe it was the surprise she couldn’t shake — the fact that something so terrible could happen on an average day, like a curtain lifting to reveal some grim other world rubbing up against this one, then falling shut before she could fully apprehend it. She couldn’t forget how the child had clung to her while they waited for the sheriff to arrive, or the way she’d smelled — like creek water and musty earth.
Now, when she felt Ron fumbling with the buttons of her shirt, she pushed his hand away. She was thinking about the way Mr. Dewey had wept when he came to retrieve the girl, how he’d grabbed her out of Nora’s arms so abruptly you’d have thought Nora was the kidnapper. She wanted to talk about this — about all of it — but she’d already told Ron everything at least twice.
“Maybe we could forget that deal for tonight,” Ron said. “Give yourself a break.”
But how could she forget? How could she be expected to return to normal life, to fooling around in the backseat of Ron’s car, as though nothing extraordinary had happened? If finding a kidnapped child in a doghouse didn’t give a person pause, whatever would?
Not to mention how often people asked about it. Given her role, she was expected to have some insight. “How are you holding up?” the women asked, reaching out to give her arm a gentle squeeze. “You must’ve had quite the scare!” Men were more irreverent, though no less nosy. “Well, if it isn’t the big hero!” Or, “How’s life in the limelight?”
Nora understood they weren’t really asking after her. What they wanted was the grim particulars. They wanted to hear about the child’s terrible shivering, which started right after Nora and her father got her inside and could not be stopped by blankets or sips of warm broth. They wanted to hear about her underwear stiff with urine and her ankle swelled with cactus needles. They wanted to know what exactly LeDivic had done. What exactly the child had told her.
The inconvenient fact was this: the child had revealed nothing. Aside from asking for her brother once, she hadn’t spoken at all, and by the time the police arrived she was just staring out the window at the shapes of the trees. The sheriff and his deputy were no more forthcoming, and in the end Nora and her father were left to piece things together from the newspaper, just like everybody else.
Local Teen Abducts Two Children, Tries to Hang One.
Hanged Boy Recovering from Injuries.
Trial Begins in Abduction and Hanging Case.
Alongside every story, the newspaper ran the same grainy photo of Clay LeDivic. At first glance he looked just like any other young man, smiling for what must have been a school photographer. His forehead was wide and smooth, partially covered by a swoop of sandy hair, but his eyebrows were so blond they looked more like blank places where eyebrows had been peeled away. This gave him a startled appearance and drew attention to his eyes, which were small and dark, like buttons. He was only fifteen, but if Nora stared at him long enough she saw a quiet, adult menace.
Woman Who Found Escaped Child Speaks Out.
Of all the articles, this one saw the most wear. Nora cut it out and saved it along with the other clippings in a kitchen drawer, reading it so many times the paper went soft and pliant. It was exhilarating to see her own words in print, and to read them as though she were someone else, an average person picking up the paper, drawn in by her account. I knew there was something wrong from the moment I heard the dog barking. I could just feel it. And when I saw that child, there was no doubt in my mind she’d been running for her very life.
In the accompanying photo, Nora sat on the porch steps, hands folded in her lap, hair pulled over one shoulder. She wore a skirt she now regretted, but her expression was appropriately resolute, and the black-and-white gave her a kind of gravity, as though she knew all the world’s tricks and wasn’t about to be taken in by them.
It was hard to say what Ron Whitehead had seen in her. But whatever it was, he’d seen it right away. They were at a Grange Hall dance, Nora with her girlfriend Marjorie, who was homely to the point of painful but always scheming after this or that bachelor, and Ron playing chaperone to one of his big-boned sisters. He was passing Nora’s table, and then suddenly he wasn’t — he stood there gaping at her, so that the first thing Nora noticed about him, rather than his sunburned nose or his thick farmboy’s hands, was his interest.
Next to her, Marjorie squealed. Then she commenced whispering wetly into her ear what Nora already knew: that Ron was the eldest son of the Whitehead family, which was large and well-regarded. In fact, they were everywhere you looked, volunteering at church, parading their livestock around the county fair — broad-chested, rosy-cheeked, loud-laughing Whiteheads. Nora had never attended football games in high school, but according to Marjorie, Ron had been something to see on the field. He’d also dated the prettiest girls. His disinclination to marry any of them after graduation had made him all the more popular, and now that so many boys had gone off to Vietnam, he was the most eligible bachelor left.
It wasn’t long before Nora caught him looking at her again — this time from across the room, with a hopeful expression. Already she wished he’d develop a bit more cunning, but she supposed it might be useful to have a man whose every thought appeared right on his face. He had a ruddy sort of charm, and everybody knew and liked him, which was more than could be said for Nora, who was sallow and shy and bookish, with big gray eyes that tended to water. As a girl, she’d been prone to headaches that kept her confined while other children celebrated Halloween and rode horses and performed in Christmas pageants, and perhaps it was these early absences that had pushed her to the margins. There was something off-putting about her, she knew, some seriousness or intensity that made people’s smiles lose their warmth. At school and at family gatherings she had a sense of being tolerated but not particularly enjoyed, and she often wondered if this was typical of only children, or of motherless daughters, or of women who felt strongly about certain things: tidiness, timeliness, simplicity, composure. She’d learned by now to keep these opinions to herself, but it seemed people could still sense them there on her tongue, as though she carried with her some inextricable air of censure.
She and Ron made an odd fit. But he was proud to have her on his arm, and he beamed when he introduced her to people at dances and at the feed store. He was impressed by what he considered her great intelligence, and he also found her funny, which nobody else ever had done. He had a great big laugh that expanded his already sizable chest and further reddened his wind-chapped face. He had a tendency to grab her up and spin her around. His hugs were warm and sudden and crushing.
They went to dinner and spent time with friends, but what Nora remembered most were those hours alone in his Plymouth, after the public part of their dates was over. Then, they haunted the backroads and darkened oil field sites, lounging in the dashboard lights, listening to Ron’s eight-tracks. They paid to park at the drive-in movie but saw very little of the screen. Often they didn’t even hang the speaker in the window, and John Wayne’s head would materialize silently in front of them, filling up the windshield like a storm cloud, and Nora would feel his look of disgust aimed at her. It was thrilling to defy him and allow Ron’s hands in her hair and under her clothes. Passion came to her slowly, and at first she didn’t quite know what to do with it, aside from narrate the experience to Ron, telling him how warm his body felt and how much she liked his shoulders, and asking him questions about his previous sexual experience — until he suggested she shut up and enjoy herself for once. They grappled for hours in that old car, fogging up the windows, inadvertently honking the horn, forgetting all possibility that someone might see them. He was a different Ron then — not the grinning man who shook hands with everyone they met, but serious and single-minded, growling with desire. His back was so broad Nora could barely get her arms around it, and she felt crushed beneath him, erased, subsumed. She made noises it embarrassed her to remember later. When at last she stumbled out of his car in front of her house, she could not have told you what day it was, or named a single constellation in the sky.