Coram House

Chapter 3

3

My arms and back ache from hauling boxes yesterday. I wash down a couple ibuprofen with coffee and then eat a bowl of cereal standing over the sink. I have one week before my meeting with Father Aubry. It’s not enough time to familiarize myself with the case in the way I’d like. But a week’s what Stedsan gave me.

Given that, I decide to start with the transcripts. I’m hoping they’ll give me the best feel for daily life at Coram House—the mundane and the awful. Then I’ll sift through the court documents about the negotiations around the settlement. I don’t expect to be an expert in a week, but I need to know where to tread lightly and where to probe.

Pushing aside my laptop, I free the pages of Sarah Dale’s deposition from the binder clip. My first thought is that whoever did the transcription did a good job. They capture every utterance and silence, so I can feel the rhythm of the conversation. For a while, Sarah talks about daily life—chores and meals. Routine cruelties like being slapped or locked in the attic as punishment. Her recall is impressive. The way she describes the frigid air of the attic, the heat of a summer day, her dress soaked with sweat—it makes me feel like I’m right there with her.

In my experience, it’s rare to find someone who remembers things with all five senses. Sarah Dale either has a remarkable memory or a very active imagination. I don’t think she’s lying. But if you tell a story enough times, it can start to feel true. Then again, she did live at Coram House for twenty years. A lifetime.

Toward the end of one day’s testimony, her tone changes. Even through a transcript, I can sense her distress. Her answers break like Stedsan is pulling the words from her. There are long silences, as if she’s dredging up these memories from somewhere deeper than the others. She watched a boy drown while others stood by and did nothing. My throat clenches when I imagine her on the hill watching the events play out far below. I’d braced myself for horrors, for abuse, but this is cold-blooded enough to knock me breathless.

I think of that little boy in the water, gasping for air, reaching for a hand to pull him out and finding no help at all. I sift through the mildewed shoebox until I find the photo of the nun and children by the rowboat. Swim lessons. S. Cecile. I stare at the nun’s ghostly blur of a face and the small pinched faces of the children. They look cold and scared. The nuns said he ran away. Cold seeps down the back of my neck. Wrongness has a temperature.

Once, while I was working on The Isle , I’d tried to describe the feeling to Adam—that moment when people who had only existed on paper suddenly become real. It’s a rush , I’d said, almost like they’re sitting next to you, just out of sight, but you can hear them breathing. They’re there.

He’d asked me if I was high.

I’d laughed, but it was a little like that.

Tommy, what happened to you? I place the photo back in the box. Then I stack the pages of Sarah Dale’s deposition and put them gently aside. My hand closes on the next stack—maybe there will be more answers here. Okay, Michael Leblanc. I read on.

The next few days are a blur. I barely leave my desk except to go across the street for coffee and cellophane-wrapped turkey sandwiches. The apartment is covered in stacks of papers—depositions, legal pads, photos. I spend hours drawing a map of Coram House and the surrounding area on a sheet of butcher’s paper. I’d done the same when I was writing The Isle . It had helped me understand the space and see people moving through it. Now I label every place mentioned in a deposition. The dormitories. The kitchen door. The sections of Rock Point where the children went to play. The dump. The trails that crisscrossed the graveyard and woods. The deepwater cove where Sarah Dale saw Tommy drown.

Lola calls at one point and leaves a message asking what I’m up to tonight. I’m not surprised. In college, she was always the one to pull me out of the library—to a play, to a late dinner, to a movie. And in the last couple years, she’s started calling even when she’s busy just to make sure I’m not sitting home alone in my sweatpants, which is usually exactly what I’m doing.

Lola and I met the first day of college. The first five minutes, really. She rescued me then and, like we’re in some fairy tale, I think a part of her believes it’s her responsibility to rescue me now. Our dorm was this massive complex, an old hotel they’d turned into student housing. The two wings—east and west—stretched around in a horseshoe. But the rooms had been numbered by someone with a sick sense of humor. So there I was at eighteen, my first foray into adulthood, and I was already lost and foolish, dragging a massive suitcase and pushing along a cardboard box with my feet. When along came Lola.

She’s not tall, but she’s one of those people who feels tall. Something about the bounce in her step, the wild curly hair bleached blonde just at the tips, the massive gold hoop earrings, and overalls hand-printed with woodblock stamps. She was so the opposite of me in my nondescript jeans, my white tee that I owned seven of.

She’d stopped, smiled at me. “Lost?” she’d asked in a way that made it seem like I was in on the joke.

“Maybe,” I’d said. “The numbers don’t make sense.”

She laughed as she explained how they’d numbered the rooms so odd numbers were in the east wing and evens in the west.

“Here, I’ll show you.”

She took my hand then, such an unusual gesture from someone who was basically a stranger, and I’d felt—not a spark—more like a thunk. The way a magnet feels when it meets its opposite—joined, inseparable. A perfect fit. I’ve never felt love at first sight, not with Adam or anyone else. Love was always something that grew quietly and slowly for me. But those moments—the thunks, the sense that someone is going to be important—that’s the closest I’ve ever come.

Something inside Lola called out to something in me. Not just her intelligence, her wild clothes, the wilder theater crowd she hung out with. No, it was her sureness. About the things she loves, how sure they were worthy of her devotion. How unworried she was about what other people thought she was making with the clay of her life.

I, on the other hand, agonized over all of it. Where to intern. What to do with my love of words. Whether I’d end up as a penniless writer, whether I had anything original to say or was just regurgitating the ideas I found in other, better work. I took a fiction class, but whenever I tried to make something up, I’d just sit and stare at that blank page, paralyzed. I didn’t know then that creating something from something else was an art form too. To take facts and assemble them into a story that made sense. It took me years to realize that too was a calling.

After college, Lola and I had moved to New York together, lived in a one-bedroom apartment the same size as the dorm room we’d shared our sophomore year. Except this had a kitchen and living room crammed in. We’d pursued our dreams in parallel.

When she’d met Kay, an actress in a play her theater company was producing, they’d moved in together, and I’d taken a year abroad. A supremely weird copyediting job at a newspaper in Bangkok. I’d spent the year sending emails back and forth with Lola, regaling her with stories about food—so spicy I’d eaten a napkin on my first day in a desperate attempt to get the chili oil off my tongue. The islands ringed in sand so white and fine it was like powdered sugar. But the truth was, I was lonely, had been relieved to go back to New York.

The plan was to couch surf with Kay and Lola. Their apartment always hosted at least one actor or musician between gigs. I’d wait for a sublet to come up. I already had an entry-level job at the news show lined up.

When I got on the plane and found my row, there was a guy sitting in the aisle seat. Dark wavy hair, glasses, and pale skin, sunburned pink. I paused, looked down at my ticket, and then up at him.

“Lost?” he said, and smiled at me.

The words tugged on me, and the gentleness of his tone too. I felt the strange echo across continents and years. The same words Lola had spoken to me in that hallway six years earlier. Years later, the four of us would laugh about this. How I’d fall in love with anyone who gave me directions. But even now it gives me a little chill, makes me wonder if I did look at him differently because of that moment. Because his words echoed Lola’s.

“I think you’re in my seat,” I said.

We did the dance, rechecked our tickets, and settled into our seats for the sixteen-hour flight.

“I’m Adam,” he said.

I wonder what would have happened if someone had sat in that middle seat between us. What path my life would have taken and with whom. But no one ever did.

By the end of the flight, I felt that same sense of two magnets clicking together. Thunk. You will be important , I thought. Then, with a thrill because I was twenty-four years old and the world was possibility: What will happen next? I shove the memory into the locked box inside my head and shut the lid. It’s getting crowded in there.

It’s only after listening to Lola’s message that I realize it’s Saturday. I’ve worked through half the weekend without knowing it.

My dreams are becoming eerie, full of empty halls and the feeling of being watched. I know I should take a break, so I drive out to a complex of big-box stores to buy a VCR, which turns out to be a challenge. I have no luck at the electronics store and the acne-faced teenager at Walmart acts like he’s never heard of a VHS tape. I try calling thrift stores with no luck. Finally, I give up and order one online that promises it will be here in three to five days, all along cursing myself for waiting so long.

That night, I eat popcorn for dinner and read, turning pages with one hand so I don’t smear cheesy residue on the brittle paper. By midnight, I’m turning the final page on the last deposition in the box. Then I wash my hands and pour a tall glass of wine. Back at my desk, I close my binder and push aside my notepad.

Most of the depositions had been what I’d expected. The former children of Coram House had been in their thirties and forties by the time they were interviewed, and their memories had dulled over time. Everyone remembers eating and sleeping. Attending classes in the schoolroom. The sting of being slapped. But most transcripts contain very few specific moments. They read more like a summary.

There were terrible stories, to be sure—and some of those were very sharp indeed. Stories of abuse at the hands of the priest and nuns who ran Coram House. But there was a depressing sameness to even the worst ones. I guess that’s unsurprising. Predators tend to find something that works and stick with it.

But not all the testimony feels routine. Karen Lafayette describes a girl being pushed out the window by one of the nuns. Though her account is called into question by the testimony of Sarah Dale, among others. Anthony Fiero talks about a boy who was electrocuted trying to climb under a fence, how he was forced to look at the body, how for years after he had nightmares about his hands turning black. And then there’s Tommy, who sticks in my head like a burr.

Based on what I’d read, many of the children hadn’t remembered the abuse until they’d reconnected with other children from the orphanage in a support group, something I knew the church had made much of during the case. False memories, they’d claimed, painting a few as vengeful liars out to say anything to wring a settlement from the church. The attacks on Sarah Dale had been particularly vicious. But she’d been particularly insistent about Tommy’s death and, after all, even child abusers balk at being accused of murder.

But that’s just how memory works. Something horrible happens and you tell yourself it wasn’t real; you lock it in a dark closet where the nightmares live. You make this true by the force of your will, at least until someone opens that door by mistake. We shape our reality as we live it. So, no, it didn’t seem unbelievable to me at all.

I look down at my binder, now full of questions divided into research areas, starting with the deaths and injuries. The unnamed girl pushed out the window. The boy who crawled under the electric fence. Tommy, drowned in the lake. How many other unrecorded deaths and injuries existed in Coram House’s past? And then, the other side of that question: How many of these could be creations by traumatized children, trained by terror to see monsters everywhere, even inside their own heads?

The wine is overly sweet, but I finish the bottle anyways. Soon the world is pleasantly blurred. In the bathroom mirror, I see my teeth are stained red. I don’t bother changing out of my clothes. The bed is cold. I huddle under the comforter, shivering. Every time I close my eyes, the bed starts to rock gently, like I’m drifting on the water. I think of Tommy with his scraped knees and freckles and I want to shout at him to run, to lift him out of the boat and carry him away.

I wake as if no time has passed at all, except now sunlight stabs my eyelids. Paper crinkles when I roll over. My comforter is littered with folders and loose paper. I don’t remember bringing them into bed with me. My head aches. Possibly something to do with the empty bottle of wine on the bedside table. I shuffle into the living room. A dusting of powdered cheese coats the table. Papers blanket the floor. It looks like a dorm room.

I gather the papers and wipe down the table. Then I splash water on my face and hunt through my suitcase for a pair of socks—the floor is like ice. All morning, I search for Tommy. Through the list of children, the intake forms, the sheaves of receipts. When that doesn’t turn up so much as a mention, I search online—death records, police records, hospital records. But, without a last name, I don’t get far.

Frustrated, I call Stedsan. He had years with the case; he spoke to Sarah Dale and the others. He must know more than what’s inside these boxes. When he doesn’t answer, I leave a message, asking him to meet. His reply comes when I’m halfway through a bowl of cereal, suggesting we meet tomorrow, Monday. Only two days until our meeting with Father Aubry, but it will have to do.

My body is twitchy from too many days at a desk. The need to move is constant and as annoying as an itch. So I pull on my sneakers and head outside with no plan except to run. The sky is pale blue and cloudless. The air crackles with cold. Within minutes, my thighs ache beneath the thin leggings, and every gulp of freezing air feels like a dagger inside my lungs. Still, I keep going. Past a brewery where people stand around fire pits drinking beer, past a playground with a slide built into the hillside so four children tumble down at once, and along a bike path full of other joggers, chatting in pairs or on the phone, running to nowhere.

By the time I get back to the apartment, my toes throb and the hair around my face is crusted with ice. My fingers fumble when I try to unlock the door and I feel a spike of real fear. Upstairs, I get straight into the shower, leaving my clothes in a puddle on the bathmat. The cold, which felt like a part of me just a minute ago, melts away, so easily forgotten.

The coffee shop where I’m supposed to meet Stedsan is tucked on a narrow street, barely wider than an alley. Deep snow covers the sidewalk, so I have to slog my way to the door. A bell rings as I step into air thick with coffee and cinnamon. Stedsan is folded into a green armchair, underneath a painting of a rooster. He sees me and lifts his cup in greeting.

I order a coffee and find the milk hidden among the antique glass bottles arranged on the counter. I take the chair next to his, this one red velvet draped in cowhide. Fur scratches my neck when I lean back. I suppress a shudder.

“Thanks for finding time to meet,” I say. “I’ve read through the depositions and wanted to follow up on a few things before we see Father Aubry.”

“You’ve read all of them?” Stedsan raises his eyebrows. “You do move quickly. All right, go ahead.”

He leans back, getting comfortable. I open my notebook to a random page. People have an easier time talking if you’re not looking at them.

“I want to talk about the children who died.”

The words take flight, an insect crawling out of my mouth and fluttering across the room.

“There’s a boy who was electrocuted on a fence—” I start, but Stedsan interrupts.

“That one was quite sad, but just bad luck. He’d found an army helmet, one of those old metal ones, and the fence was poorly marked. These days you could probably make a case for neglect or sue someone, but back then…” He shrugs.

“Some of these incidents have conflicting accounts, though. There’s a girl who went out a window—”

“Melissa Graves.”

“What?”

“Her name was Melissa Graves, but the children called her Missy, I believe. She’s buried in the graveyard behind Coram House. East section with some of the other children.”

He ticks off the death matter-of-factly. I should find it encouraging that his memory of the case is so good. But instead I feel on the defensive—like he’s preempting every question to show me how little I know.

“And Missy’s cause of death?”

Stedsan shrugs again. “Complications due to flu. About six months after the incident you’re referring to—with the window. Hard to believe children still died of the flu in the sixties but the medical care here wasn’t exactly state of the art.” He laughs.

I wait for him to go on, but he doesn’t. Case closed.

“And how can you be sure that the records weren’t falsified?”

He makes a visible effort at patience. “We can’t be sure, not really. But to have the local doctor faking death records for a child?” He shakes his head. “It’s unlikely. And besides, both Sister Cecile and Sarah Dale gave similar accounts—the girl was sent out onto the ledge to clean and then came back in.”

“So Missy Graves was sent outside, onto the outer windowsill, to wash the windows—that part is true.”

“Yes, but she came back in—the important part.”

But I’m not so sure. The windows were two stories up. If Sister Cecile sent a child out there with nothing but a couple of kids holding on to her ankles for protection, it establishes a pattern of behavior. My heart thuds—like I’m about to ask about something off-limits.

“What about Tommy, the boy who drowned?”

Stedsan sighs. “I wondered if it might be that.” He steeples his hands together beneath his chin, as if in prayer.

“Let it go. I looked into all this decades ago. There’s no record of any of it. Not his death, not even a last name. Concentrate on the material you have.”

I reach for my coffee and then let my hand drop halfway there, afraid Stedsan will see how it’s shaking. I need to appear calm and professional, but it’s taking every ounce of strength. Let it go. I know an order when I hear one.

“Children can’t just disappear as if they never existed.”

“My point exactly,” Stedsan says. “If his records existed, they’re gone. Poof. For all we know, he ran away and changed his name. Look, I know this is horrible stuff, but I think you’ll find the general abuse was well documented.”

He looks at me, waiting for confirmation.

I think of the accounts I read. Children slapped with hands and with sticks. A child made to stand in the middle of the room with his arms outstretched for hours after dropping a cup of water. The sameness of the stories. I nod.

“The sexual abuse by Edmund Foster in particular,” Stedsan continues. “Children who had never met each other all gave very similar accounts of what happened after they were sent to his office. And they were almost always children between nine and twelve. Even the church couldn’t ignore it. He was quietly retired and then died a year after the settlement. But the other accounts”—he looks up, as if searching for a word on the ceiling—“the more outlying violence. Those were slippery. You can include them in the book, but it’s going to be more questions than answers. I mean, you’ve read the transcripts—half of them contradict each other.”

I lean forward. “Do you mean Karen Lafayette and Sarah Dale?”

Stedsan winces as if those names were sharp and I’d just stabbed him. “Sarah Dale. She was a tough one.”

“What do you mean?”

He sighs. “Her level of recall was impressive.”

“Did you believe her?”

“She was very persuasive. And she struck a sympathetic figure— the widowed mother with her boy.”

It’s a non-answer, a lawyer’s answer, but I let it be for now. “And what about Karen Lafayette?”

He shrugs. “She was angry. And I got the sense she was listing off every terrible thing that happened to her or others—real and imagined.”

I think of Karen Lafayette’s description of the girl going out the window. She sort of bounced when she hit the ground . It was such a strange detail. Had she really imagined it? Or is it possible Sarah Dale remembered events wrong, that the death certificate was a fake?

“The allegations against Father Foster were rock solid. Like I said, there was a record of the boy killed on the electric fence, the girl supposedly pushed out the window—but the boy who drowned?” He shrugs with a finality I don’t like. “It had happened twenty years before and, well, people at the time suggested Sarah Dale was unreliable.”

“Unreliable?”

“Prone to exaggeration. Unstable.”

“Well, that would be in their best interest if they wanted the case settled.”

“I don’t just mean the church. Other witnesses, people who were children at Coram House when Sarah Dale was there.”

My stomach sinks. “I see. Was there ever a police investigation into any of this?”

“No. Nothing official, anyways.”

“What about other people that could corroborate Sarah Dale’s version of that day?”

“The cook was dead by the eighties. And Sister Cecile—all the sisters—always maintained that the boy ran away.”

“What about the other children?”

He shrugs. “No one else saw anything.”

“No one?”

There’s always someone who saw something.

Stedsan’s nostrils flare. He holds out his fingers and starts ticking off points. “The day was particularly hot. Everyone was at the other end of the beach—where the trees in the graveyard give shade. You couldn’t see the cove from there. The sisters reported the boy missing at dinner. There was no record of Sarah Dale ever making an accusation at the time. By the time she gave her deposition it had been twenty years. A body, any physical evidence, was long gone.”

He sits back in his chair, evidently done.

But I’m not finished yet. “What about this other boy—Fred Rooney?”

Stedsan snorts. “What about him?”

“A few accounts suggest he was close to Sister Cecile—a kind of helper. And Sarah Dale saw him going down to the beach that day.”

“ Claims she saw him going down to the beach,” he says absently, another lawyer’s reflex. “Even if Sarah Dale’s testimony was true and Fred was in the boat that day—so what? That makes him less likely to talk, not more.”

I taste blood and only then notice I’ve been nibbling the inside of my cheek. All traces of Tommy are gone, as if he never existed. But it’s not that easy to erase someone. It can’t be.

“Look, Alex,” Stedsan’s voices softens as he leans forward. For a second, I’m afraid he’s going to pat me on the head.

“I know it’s tempting to think you can solve this. And, God knows, it would make for a great story if you could. But it’s been fifty years since that boy died or ran away.” He turns his palms up in surrender. “Some things—we have to accept that they’ll stay questions forever.”

“I know it sounds crazy, but what if we dragged the lake? It’s possible—”

“Alex.” He says my name like he’s slapping sense into me. “I admire your”—he pauses—“dedication to the truth. But there’s such a thing as taking it too far. I’d think you would know that.”

Heat rushes to my face. It was the way he emphasized the you so I’d know exactly what he was referring to.

“Look, I’ll make it easy for you. Ultimately, it’s my book and I’m telling you to drop it. There’s nothing there. There—now you can feel you’ve done your due diligence.”

Stedsan smiles at me as if to say, Problem solved. Then he glances down at his watch. “Listen, I have to go. I’ll see you Wednesday at nine, all right? We can meet at the rectory next to Sunrise House.”

“Fine,” I bark, knowing I sound like a petulant teenager. But Stedsan either doesn’t notice or doesn’t care. He pulls on his jacket, saying something about the chief of police and something called a duffer, but I’m not listening, and then he’s gone.

I pick up my coffee with shaking hands, but the smell of burnt milk turns my stomach. Stedsan acts like the truth is meaningless if you can’t prove it. Sarah Dale was unreliable. Unstable. Prone to exaggeration. How many times has someone dismissed the words of a woman or a child as untrustworthy? He thinks this will all come to nothing, but I think I’ve found a thread that leads to the heart of the story. And the only way to find out is to tug.