Chapter 13
13
When I get out of the shower, my skin is as pink as a baby mouse. I stand in front of the open fridge, cold air winding around my ankles as I look for dinner, which turns out to be a beer and a bag of nuts. From the desk, my phone pings. I hadn’t brought it on my run and now I have two missed calls. Dammit.
The first is from Father Aubry. He’s sorry he missed my call, he says. He’s traveling but says try him again tomorrow or just come by on Sunday morning—he’ll be in the office preparing for the afternoon service. I’d been hoping the second call was Stedsan with Sister Cecile’s address and phone number, but it’s an unknown number. I hit play. At first it’s silent and I nearly delete it, but then a voice speaks.
“Alex, hi.”
The man’s voice is low and thick, like he has a cold.
“I—um—well, I hope you don’t mind me calling. This is Xander Nilsson. We met the other day at the police station. Or, well, maybe met isn’t exactly the right word. I—well, I wanted to call and say I’m sorry for my behavior. It’s inexcusable, really. But I would actually really like to treat you to dinner if you’re up for it—to apologize. But I understand if you’re not. Anyways, sorry again and—yeah. Just let me know.”
Xander Nilsson. Until now, he has felt unreal. A fairy-tale millionaire who set his own car on fire. It’s strange to hear the voice of an actual person on the phone. I’m not sure what to make of the fact that he got my phone number. I should probably be creeped out, but mostly I’m curious. Either way, I’m not calling him back, I decide. I don’t need any more distractions.
I nurse my beer and riffle through boxes of old receipts. I find Sister Cecile’s name on a few documents: an order form for two hundred pencils, a receipt for a donation of flannel sheets. Sometimes she signs her full name, Sister Cecile, and sometimes S. Cecile. Some of the other signatures are illegible, but her looping whirls are identically tidy. It’s maddening to have all these pieces of the past and nothing useful. I’m on my second beer when the phone rings. I lunge for it. The number is blocked.
“Hello?” I answer, hoping it’s Stedsan.
“Hey, hey.”
Lola’s voice throws me off. Like she’s calling me from a past life instead of just from Brooklyn. “Lola,” I say. “Hi.”
“Don’t sound so excited.” Her tone is mock annoyed.
“No—I’m just surprised—your number is blocked.”
“I’m at work. Anyways, what are you up to?”
“Going through grocery receipts from 1958.”
“Girl, it’s almost nine. Even brain surgeons take evenings off.”
“I’m not sure that’s true.” But I move to the couch and lay down. “I’m drinking a beer.”
She sighs. “You know there are these places called bars where you can drink with other humans.”
I put Lola on speakerphone and listen to her talk about a project at work that’s not going well, how the restaurant around the corner—our happy hour spot—is closing, how the weather has been terrible. Her voice is soothing and steady, the backdrop of the last two decades of my life. I listen while I finish my beer and open another, feeling like I’m floating on a familiar sea, warm and relaxed.
“Alex,” Lola says. “How are things—really?”
I sit up. I know what she’s really asking. Am I still obsessed with the Tommy thing? Does she need to worry about me?
“I’m— It’s good,” I say, which is what I’d say if I’d just chopped off my leg and was bleeding to death on the floor. But I do the dance. She’s just trying to help.
Avoiding any mention of Tommy, I tell her instead about the charming and handsome elderly lawyer and the gruff local cop. I tell her how badly I messed up our first meeting. And I tell her about the moose, which does make her laugh. I don’t mention the dead body I found in the water. Partly because I know she’ll freak out and partly because the woman’s warm, slippery skin still feels too real under my fingers. I’m not ready to package it into an anecdote.
“Officer Russell Parker,” Lola rolls the name around her mouth. “It’s a movie star name. How old is he?”
“I don’t know. Early forties maybe.”
“Is he hot?”
“Jesus, Lola. I don’t know.”
“That means yes.”
This line of questioning makes me want to get up and pace, so I change the subject to Xander stumbling into me drunk at the police station. How he’s some kind of wayward tech millionaire that washed up in Vermont.
“You’re going to go, right? To your apology dinner?”
I can hear how careful she is not to call it a date.
“What?” I laugh. “Of course not.”
“Come on!” she says. “You have to go. He probably has a champagne fountain.”
“I don’t think that’s actually a thing.”
“It’s definitely a thing!”
“All right.”
“ All right you’re gonna go?”
“ All right a champagne fountain might be a thing.”
“I’m just saying—once in a while you can do the crazy thing.”
“Well, as long as we both agree it would be crazy.”
Laughing makes me feel lighter. I like talking like this—at a distance. Like how the thread that connects us is just what we choose to share.
“By the way, I’ve got next weekend off. I was thinking I could come visit.”
I sink back onto the couch. “Visit? Here?”
“Yeah. That’s the idea.”
The thought fills me with panic. Like a piece of my old life coming to haunt me. Then I feel terrible because I love Lola. “But what about the show?” I ask.
Lola works in marketing for a theater company. The pay is shit, but the people make up for it, she always says. And it’s true. She’s constantly surrounded by actors, always has an art opening to attend and knows where the coolest bar is before it’s the next big thing. It also usually means that her weekends are fully booked from September to May.
“Tech problems,” she says. “It got pushed out a week. So what about it?”
“I would love that,” I stutter, “but things are just so busy right now. I’m just starting to dig in. I’m working weekends, always on the phone, you’d hate me. Plus it’s freezing. Come in a month or two—it will be better then.”
I cringe at the way I’m throwing a barrage of reasons at her when one would have been enough.
“Yeah,” she says. “Sure.” Her voice sounds hard.
“You know I’d love to see you.” And I mean it. I do. Sort of.
“Yeah,” she says again. “Sounds good. Anyways, it’s getting late. I should go.”
We say our goodbyes and she hangs up. My phone is hot from being used for so long. Then I pick up the box of receipts and keep reading. As if Sister Cecile might have scribbled some vital clue between the lines of an invoice for canned goods.
The next day my stomach feels greasy and hollow. Guilt over all the things I didn’t tell Lola. Or possibly a protest that everything I’ve eaten over the last week has come out of a foil wrapper. Today will be different, I vow. Today I will eat a vegetable. So I get dressed and head for the grocery store a few blocks away.
The aisles are clean and brightly lit, filled with a bounty of boxes in the muted greens and browns that promise local and organic. In the bulk aisle, I decide between seven kinds of granola, and then stop by a refrigerator case stocked with homemade soups and quiches— homemade by other people, my favorite kind. My basket is overflowing by the time I make it to the checkout, but remembering my vow to eat something green, I wedge in a spinach salad covered in goat cheese.
On the way back, I cradle the paper bag, determined not to let a hundred dollars’ worth of organic granola I can’t afford fall in the snow. Inside, on the top step, I trip over something, barely catching myself before I plummet backward. My spinach salad goes sledding down the stairs.
When I look down to see what nearly killed me, I find a large cardboard box with a note from my landlord explaining it had been delivered next door by mistake. For a second, I’m puzzled. Then I remember. I unlock the door and push the box inside, groceries be damned. My key slices through the packing tape and there it is: the VHS player.
Twenty minutes of plugging and unplugging and swearing later, I’m staring at a glowing screen on the TV saying AUX input . I unearth the box of VHS tapes and lay them out on the floor one by one. Most are labeled with a name and a date, but so faded I can barely read them. I find Sarah Dale’s testimony, pop it in, and press play. I’ve already read the transcripts—I know I’m not going to learn anything new, but I want to see her face and hear her voice. It feels like I’m about to meet a friend, back from the dead.
The only sound in the room is the whir of the tape. I realize I’m holding my breath. At first it’s just static, but then a woman’s face appears, her mouth moving, but the only sound is a loud crackle. Then the whole picture distorts and turns green. The screen goes black.
“No.”
In my head it’s a scream, but it comes out a whisper. I want to rip the thing out of the wall and throw it out the window. Instead, I eject the tape and start searching.
According to the internet, either the tape or the heads are dirty from thirty years in a box. I might be able to clean them or they might be too degraded to ever work again. I head out to get supplies.
An hour later, my instruments are laid out like I’m prepping for surgery. Cotton swabs, alcohol, a tiny screwdriver to remove the tape casing. I start with Sarah Dale. A fine white powder coats the tape. Mold. I swab every inch of it, slowly, painfully. Then I eat my salad standing over the sink while the tape dries. Salad demolished, I wind the tape back onto the spools.
I press play. Static again. Then a woman’s face.
“Thank you for coming, Ms. Dale,” a familiar voice says off camera. Stedsan. Tears prickle my eyes. Fireworks are going off in my stomach—Ms. Dale. Sarah Dale. She’s right here.
Sarah Dale is a tall, slender woman with dark brown hair. Her voice is low, but there’s nothing meek about it. Throughout the interview, she never raises her voice or sounds anxious or hurried. Her voice has a distant, dreamlike quality, as if she’s telling Stedsan something of no consequence. Fred, he grabbed Tommy under his arms and he pushed, so Tommy went right into the water. It’s easy to see why the defense attorney went after her, why others believed she was making things up. But I know it doesn’t mean anything. People disassociate painful memories all the time.
The only time she shows any sign of emotion is when she describes how Sister Cecile locked her in the cupboard. She told me to climb inside and she latched the door from the outside. Sarah Dale’s hand goes to the top button of her blouse, just below her throat, and twists, as if trying to loosen the collar. Then she goes still and looks right at the camera. You can leave Coram House but you can’t leave it behind.
I’ve read every deposition, hers multiple times. I know what she’s going to say before she says it, like she’s an actor reading lines in a play, but still—it chills me to hear her say it out loud. When I eject the tape, I’m breathing heavily, as if I’ve been running instead of sitting cross-legged on the carpet.
Next I tackle the tape for Karen Lafayette’s interview. She’s the opposite of Sarah—disheveled, nervous, constantly loosening and tightening her scarf. Her anger comes off the screen in waves. I can feel it. And yet, when she tells the story of the girl who was pushed out the window, she’s no more or less believable than Sarah. Just different.
After four hours, my back hurts from bending over the tapes. My head throbs from the alcohol fumes. And I’ve only managed to clean and watch two tapes. My hope that seeing their faces would bring in stant clarity feels incredibly stupid now. Years ago, in science class, we did an experiment where we placed a drop of ink in a glass of water. Black tendrils twisted through the water. After a few seconds, they faded and disappeared, leaving the water clear as ever. But the ink was still there, the teacher reminded us, we just couldn’t see it. This story feels like that. I can’t see it, but the truth is there.
I pick one last tape from the box, one of the unlabeled ones, and unscrew the cassette lid. My cracked skin stings from the alcohol as I swab the tape. I should have worn gloves.
An hour later, I’m done. After this, I decide, I’ll stop for the day. I screw the lid back on, feed it into the VHS player, and hit play. The screen is black. I wait, but nothing happens. The tape must be blank. I’m not sure whether to laugh or cry.
My finger is on the eject button when I hear Stedsan’s voice. “Good morning, Sister Cecile,” he says.
I freeze, heart thudding. I feel as if I’m in that room with them, crouched under the table, eavesdropping instead of here in this dingy apartment thirty years later. There’s a muffled screech—a chair being pulled out—and then a sigh, but the screen stays resolutely black. I lean toward the television, as if it’s a curtain I can peek behind.
“Thank you for coming today,” Stedsan’s voice continues. Then another voice speaks, a woman’s voice. It’s low and gravelly with a faint accent. Sister Cecile. It must be.
“Well,” she says, “I didn’t have much choice, did I?”
“All these interviews are voluntary—ah, one moment,” says Stedsan.
The screen goes bright, the color of a peach lit by the sun. Fingers. Then I get a close-up of a much younger Stedsan as he stares into the camera, lens cap in hand.
“Sorry about that,” he says and steps to one side so I can see the speaker seated across from him. Then I’m burning, as if my blood has been replaced by acid. The woman has close-cropped hair and an unsmiling, elfin face.
One I know.
One I saw yesterday in the paper. And before that, streaked in blood, lying in the cold water.
She laces her fingers together and looks right into the camera. “You didn’t let me finish, young man.”
But I can barely hear the words over the pumping and whooshing in my ears. Every hair on the back of my neck stands up. This woman is the dead body in the water. Jeannette Leroy. Sister Cecile is Jeannette Leroy.