Chapter 35
Dodie
I was, to put it mildly, not an athlete.
Some models did aerobics or jogging to stay thin, but most of us used the time-honored methods used by our model ancestors of decades past. If starvation, cigarettes, and fishy diet pills were good enough for the girls in the fifties, then they were good enough for me.
So I was out of breath before Terri and I had gone a block on our bikes.
The bike Terri had lent me—the one she got for Christmas and didn’t like much—was a five-speed, the kind with a high seat and low handlebars curled like horns that you had to lean onto.
It made a loud, somewhat-satisfying whizzing sound as I rode, but the seat was so hard that my nethers began screaming.
Within moments, I hurt in places that I hadn’t previously known existed, or usually refused to acknowledge.
Terri rode ahead of me, ignorant of my pain. She seemed delighted to have a companion for this ride, even a companion as old and decrepit as I was. She talked as she pedaled, while I wheezed as quietly as I could. Luckily, she didn’t seem to need me to respond.
“We can go to the creek,” Terri said. “I’ll show you the fort I made.”
“No creek,” I said, thinking of the shadow in the trees. “Let’s go toward town.”
“I’m not allowed to go downtown,” Terri said. “But there are lots of good spots in the neighborhood.”
“Aren’t there other children around for you to play with?”
“There are no kids in this neighborhood, and none of the girls at school want to come over. Were there kids here when you were growing up?”
“No, there weren’t. None at all.”
Terri was incurious about this. I followed her around a curve in the road, feeling the trees recede behind our backs and remembering how there were no children here for us Esmies to play with, even if we had wanted to.
Only Violet had had a friend, Alice McMurtry, who I had thought was boring.
I’d felt bad for thinking that when Alice died.
Alice had been around Terri’s age, and now I was thinking about Terri lying lifeless next to the train tracks.
I pumped harder on my pedals to stay close to her, nearly hitting her rear tire with my front one.
Terri slowed next to a curb, then got off her bike. “There’s a hollow tree this way,” she called to me, leaving her bike sprawled as she hurried away.
I got off my bike, wincing, and followed her. I had no interest in a hollowed-out tree, but I said, “Fine. Don’t you have any siblings?”
“No,” she called back.
How did one live without siblings to drive one crazy day in and day out for one’s entire childhood?
I suddenly felt fond of my dullest days growing up, which I spent drawing, reading a line or two of a book at a time, or simply lying on my bed, staring out the window at the sky while Vail and Violet bickered down the hall.
I was even nostalgic about Violet hogging the bathroom and Vail emitting various gases on me whenever possible.
The tree Terri showed me was indeed hollow, as advertised. “How nice,” I said politely as she showed me the hole, where she sometimes stashed treasures for the purpose of retrieving them later.
“There’s a hill I like to bike up as fast as I can,” the girl said. “It’s steep. Want to try?”
Just the thought made me wince. “Maybe another time.”
“How about the old graves? Have you seen those?”
The sweat trickling down my back went cool. “Pardon me? Graves?”
“You haven’t seen them?” She seemed surprised. “Didn’t you say you grew up in this neighborhood?”
“I didn’t go outdoors very much,” I said. “What do you mean, graves?”
Terri’s eyes widened, and she looked pleased as she realized she could show me something I’d never seen before. “They’re really old,” she said. “They’re back where we came from, behind your house.”
I hesitated. “You mean in the trees?”
“Yes.” She was walking back to her bike, so I had to follow. “I’m sorry I went back there, but no one lived in your house. I didn’t think anyone would mind.”
“I’m not angry,” I assured her. “I just don’t think it’s safe.”
“But it is. There are bugs, and it’s muddy after it rains, but there aren’t any wild animals or anything.” She picked up her bike. “The graves are old, and they’re really neat.”
Neat. I did not think that going back to the trees, toward that shadow, would be neat.
But graves? I had no idea there were graves back there, and neither did my siblings. The police who searched the grounds for Ben hadn’t talked about graves, and they weren’t in the police report.
Vail and I had walked through those trees, and we’d seen nothing.
This girl wasn’t lying. That much I knew. If I sent her home, I couldn’t find the graves by myself without hours of searching. To find them, we had to go back to where I’d seen the shadow.
Terri was waiting, so I nodded. “It has to be quick. And don’t stray far from me.”
She smiled. She thought I wanted her to protect me, not the other way around. “All right.”
She pulled to a stop between our houses and got off her bike again. She hurried across the grass in a line as straight as an arrow, heading for the trees where we’d met.
I followed her, half jogging and looking from side to side. We entered the trees at a different spot from where Vail and I had walked. Terri seemed to know exactly where she was going. She wove along a path only she could see, stepping over fallen branches.
I felt cold and sweaty, but that could have just been because of the exertion. When I glanced behind us, I didn’t see a shadow.
“I hope this cemetery isn’t for family pets or something,” I said. Was it getting darker, or was I imagining it?
“It isn’t pets,” Terri assured me. “It’s the Whittens.”
“What’s the Whittens?”
“They’re people. It’s their graveyard.”
She stepped over a fallen branch and pointed to a space clear of trees. Brush and weeds had been roughly pushed aside in some places, obviously by hand.
At first I couldn’t see anything, but when I stepped to one of the cleared spots, I saw a stone. It was a flat headstone, dirty and tarnished.
“There are a dozen of these,” Terri said. “I haven’t found them all, I don’t think. They’re all Whittens.”
I looked at the stone between my feet, then stepped to the next one. I understood it now. If the police had come here in their search for Ben, they wouldn’t have seen these stones if they were covered in dead brush. The graves would have been deep under the unbroken snow.
I crouched down to read Nathaniel Whitten, Dearly Departed, Beloved of God and His Family, July 7, 1848–October 29, 1889.
I kept walking, using my feet to flatten the grass, and found another Whitten, and then another. One of the stones listed three names, all babies born a year apart. Next to them was their mother, who had died at age fifty-one.
How was it possible for a family to just bury its members in the woods for years? Was that legal? Perhaps this had been a cemetery at one time, though there was no church for miles. Maybe it had been private land. Whitten land.
I pictured a family living here for decades, maybe a hundred years or more. Burying their dead in the family plot instead of at one of the city’s cemeteries. Your father would be here, and then your babies, and eventually yourself. None of you would have to leave, to be buried near strangers.
I had no idea where my father was buried, and my mother was scattered in Long Island Sound.
“This one’s at the edge,” Terri called to me. “It’s the only one over here. I don’t know why.”
I followed to where she’d cleared a space. Anne Whitten, 1886–1907. RIP. Anne Whitten wasn’t beloved, by God or by anyone else. She had died at twenty-one.
The wind picked up, sending veins of cold over my skin. I glanced around into the trees, looking for a shadow.
“Dodie?” Terri said beside me. “It’s getting cloudy. I think it might rain.”
The words Anne Whitten scraped the back of my brain, pulling at something old and barely remembered. Something I thought I knew.
“We should go,” Terri said, but I ignored her. I moved to another grave, away from Anne’s, toward the center of the plot. I gently pushed the long grass aside.
Edward Whitten. Beloved Child. August 3, 1900–September 22, 1906.
“Ben,” I said, the word surprising me and coming out in a whisper. It was almost a sob.
I heard Terri ask, What? But it was an echo far away.
I heard the wind in the trees and the cries of the birds overhead, the rustle of the tall weeds.
A car’s motor, somewhere far off. The pounding of my own blood in my ears, the blood I reluctantly carried from my forebears, the blood I shared with my siblings.
Beloved Child.
He had died at six years old.
I felt a rush of love so hard it made me choke. It was followed by a rush of fear. The water flowing over me, icy and dark, pulling at me, dragging me down. Over and over again, night after night, the water coming, always coming. Always hungry to pull me under and never let me go.
Me as a child, sobbing in the bathroom in fear, running the bathwater to get warm, hoping that no one—that it—wouldn’t hear me.
“Dodie?”
I turned to Terri. She was pale with alarm, her eyes wide as she watched me.
It struck me that she was so small, so alone.
Defenseless against the shadows in these trees.
Alice McMurtry had died by the train tracks years ago, and now she haunted Violet in the ladies’ room of Fell Hospital, forever a girl.
“Terri,” I said, making my voice as gentle as I could manage, “do you ever have nightmares?”
“No,” she replied, but she was lying.
“It’s all right,” I said. “I have them, too. Mine is about water rushing over me in bed. Cold, dirty water, trying to drown me under it. Horrible, isn’t it? I’ve had the same dream many times. My siblings have different nightmares, but they dream, too.”
The girl next door pinched her lips together, as if biting back the words. I knew the feeling.