After Her, page 17
Only the year before, our gym teacher had sat us down to show us a movie called Our Changing Bodies, with animated drawings of a pair of ovaries, like a couple of bendable straws, and a woman’s uterus as it changed over the days of a menstrual cycle. Accompanied by an upbeat sound track, the movie featured sprightly cartoons of sperm and egg meeting up like two old friends in some unnamed place that could have been the hallway at school and merging into something that became a baby.
From the moment of your birth, the voice said, your body holds a treasure chest of unfertilized eggs. Your lifetime supply. Getting your period is the sign the eggs are now capable of fertilization. Your body can make a baby now.
For every other girl in my class, getting her period was old news at this point. I had been waiting so long now that I’d concluded there was something permanently wrong with my body.
“At least you’ll never be one of those teenage mothers,” Patty said, trying as always to look on the bright side. “If we were Catholic, you could sign up to be a nun.
“And anyway,” she went on, “I never saw what was so great about getting blood in your underpants. If you ask me, you’re lucky.”
I didn’t know what I was anymore, except different. The Sunset Strangler killings had begun right around the time all the other girls started talking about their periods, and in an unsettling way those two events—the murders of all those young women and my own anxious anticipation of blood—were linked for me. It seemed as if fertility brought danger.
At this point in my life, I hadn’t witnessed much in the way of tender or loving relationships between men and women, or boys and girls. The Pollacks down the street seemed friendly enough with each other, but as with the Brady parents, and the parents on most of the shows my sister and I had observed through other people’s picture windows, their relationship seemed to be about taking care of their house and their yard, their son, and the baby on the way—going to work, going to the supermarket—with no visible evidence of passion. No intimation of sex happening, though Jennifer Pollack’s pregnancy was proof it did.
When Karl Pollack paid me my babysitting wages at the end of the evening, he’d walk me the three doors down Morning Glory Court to our front walk and stand on the sidewalk to watch until I was safely inside before returning to his own house. I used to think it was almost like the end of a date, or at least the way I imagined a date might be, minus the good-night kiss. One time, just before reaching my house, Mr. Pollack’s hand had flicked at a bug and grazed my chest. (Or maybe he meant to do that? Maybe there was no bug. He just wanted to touch me.) The picture came to me then, of Karl Pollack, whipping me around to face him and bending over to kiss me hard on the mouth. Not like Teddy Bascom, but deep and long, and in the picture, I was kissing him back.
After he was gone, I sometimes tried to imagine what might happen after he got back to his own house. I pictured the two of them together—Karl and Jennifer, naked. I wanted to imagine a nice picture, for a change, but my mind came up blank. All that came to me were the horses mating on the hillside and howling coyotes; the sounds Alison’s boyfriend, Chase, made, that could be heard emanating from inside Alison’s bedroom; and Teddy, splayed across the beanbag, holding on to my hair like the reins of a pony and panting. Maybe some of these people were enjoying themselves, but if you didn’t know differently, the noises could have been those of a murder victim.
In my real-life experience, only a single picture came to mind, of two people who seemed to look at each other with love and passion, not anger, or desperation, or distrust or bitterness or resignation, as well as unmistakable yearning for each other—people for whom the simple act of touch carried a rush of wonder. It was a picture of my father and Margaret Ann.
“You’ll be seeing a lot more of her, I think,” he had told Patty and me that day in the car.
But we hadn’t. I knew why, too, of course. I was the one who’d spoiled it.
THEY WERE HAVING A VALENTINE Fair at the rec center, and Patty and I decided to check it out.
A boy in my class, Raymond—nobody I knew to talk to—was selling popcorn balls and brownies and Rice Krispies treats dyed pink. He was raising money for a trip his Scout troop was planning to take the next summer to Washington, D.C. I hoped he wouldn’t notice me, but he did.
“My father showed me a letter to the editor in the paper today,” he said. “The person said they should fire your dad and bring in someone that knows what he’s doing. I thought you should know.”
“People are dumb,” Patty said.
“My dad said they should bring in the FBI,” another boy at the table added. Also a Boy Scout, apparently. “The FBI’s got computers and stuff. Real crime experts who know what they’re doing.”
I knew Raymond was looking at me. I knew he was looking at my chest actually—though when he did, I understood well that the noteworthy aspect would be what he failed to observe there: breasts.
I tried to think of what my father would tell me. Don’t let any boy give you shit. But he’d never said how we should go about preventing this.
It was my sister who spoke up, in that surprisingly firm and husky voice of hers that carried over a whole playground when she wanted it to. “Our father could squish your father with his little finger if he wanted to,” she said. “Go tell your father to get his eyes examined.”
This was a pretty good one. I wondered if Patty even remembered that Raymond’s father was an ophthalmologist, or if it was just one of those weirdly appropriate things she came out with.
“Oh yeah,” he said. “Anybody ever tell you to get some braces?”
LUNCHTIME AGAIN. I WAS SITTING in my spot across from Alison, who had her usual bag full of raw vegetables that were supposed to make her skinny as a model, which might have if she didn’t douse every carrot in blue cheese dip. The girls were talking about the upcoming Sadie Hawkins dance where the girls asked the boys. The obvious thing would have been for me to invite Teddy Bascom, but that would have meant that I considered him my boyfriend, and in spite of all the making out we did, I wasn’t sure that term applied.
“They found some footprints after the last girl got killed,” I said. “My father thinks he might be able to tell what kind of shoes the killer wears. The ground was really muddy from the rain, but they still got some kind of impression.”
This part was actually true, for once. I knew this from my father, who had made a rare appearance at our house the night before, just as Patty and I were going to bed, to say good night to us and have a drink with our mother. Their usual routine now.
I had started noticing that my bulletins about the Sunset Strangler case no longer had the effect on the girls at school that they used to. Back in September, Alison had hung on my words, but my father’s position as chief of homicide no longer carried much weight with anyone at school.
“Finding the imprint of a shoe is really good news,” I continued, having gotten no response to my first disclosure. “My dad says this guy is so smart, that’s probably the best clue they’ve located yet.”
A couple of months earlier, this statement would have inspired a lot of questions. Now, nobody said a word.
I wished then that I hadn’t said anything. When I made things up about the case, I never felt guilty, but it felt wrong revealing something that was real, or even talking about something that my father had shared with me in a moment that had been just ours up until that second. Those moments felt too precious to talk about here.
The night before, he had come into our bedroom to say good night to us. Months had passed since he sang us one of our familiar songs, but he had sat on the edge of my bed, not even talking, just sitting in the quiet darkness for a surprisingly long time.
My sister had fallen asleep. It was just the two of us, and so I had asked him—as I generally never did—how things were going with the case.
“I can’t lie to you. It’s rough, baby,” he said. “But maybe we got a little break with this last one.”
That’s when he told me about making the plaster impression of the shoe imprint, and how it was the first good lead they’d had in weeks. “I brought over a bag of the plaster for you,” he said. “I thought you and Patty could use it to do something fun, like making casts of your handprints. Maybe give them to your old man to put on my desk at work.”
“What size shoe does he wear?” I asked my father. Meaning the killer.
“Don’t keep putting this creep in your brain, Farrah,” he’d told me, stroking my head. “I can tell you from personal experience, once he gets in there, he doesn’t get out. It’s not good for a person’s health.”
“So what did your dad say then?” Alison asked me, plunging another carrot in the blue cheese dip and sounding more bored than enthusiastic now. “Are they getting close to catching him?”
“Once this guy is in your brain he doesn’t get out,” I told the girls, though I had meant to keep quiet. “It’s like a toxic virus.”
“Or that old movie, The Exorcist,” Soleil offered. “A person can get possessed.”
“Your dad’s not possessed, is he?” Heather said. “Like where a person’s eyeballs turn crazy and gunk comes out of their mouth?”
“He’s a professional. They know how to keep that from happening. There’s things he knows how to do, to keep it from messing him up,” I said.
I hoped this part was true.
HE WAS NOT POSSESSED, BUT by March our father seemed to have aged ten years. He gave the impression of being not just tired, but weary in a way I’d never seen before. Some of the changes were so small nobody but Patty and I would have picked up on them: a heaviness in his step on the stairs, his failure to bring us our gardenia and chocolate bar on what had always been his favorite holiday—Valentine’s Day. He was as thin as I’d ever seen him, and I could tell when he gave me rides to school—the ashtray overflowing—that he was smoking a lot in the car. Once that winter, when he’d taken my hand—warming it up in the cold by blowing on it—I had noticed his fingertips were yellow from cigarettes. It had been a long time since we’d ridden together in his Alfa with the sunroof and all the windows open, singing “Volare” at the top of our lungs.
I CAUGHT SIGHT OF HIM on television one time over at Alison’s. The pizza had just arrived and we were in her rec room, diving for slices.
There had been no new murders on the mountain for a couple of months, probably due to the rainy season, but with the rains expected to end soon, and the killer still at large, a group of citizens had been putting pressure on the governor to do something about securing the mountain. A reporter had asked my father for a comment on developments in the case. There were none.
I sat on the beanbag chair in Alison’s family room, while Heather applied polish to my toenails. My father stood in front of the microphone, looking like a “before” picture in an ad for some miracle rejuvenation product. His skin sagged and his eyes were puffy. Knowing him, and how he prided himself on his appearance, what alarmed me most was his hair. He always cut it himself, so regularly you were never even aware he’d had a haircut. This time it looked as though he’d taken whatever pair of scissors was closest and hacked it all off without bothering to check in a mirror.
“What if this guy just keeps going on and on murdering people?” a boy named Rich said, to nobody in particular.
“I’d get a gun,” said Soleil, never the brightest bulb.
“I’d get my parents to move to L.A.,” said Heather. “The weather’s better there anyway.”
“Maybe we could form our own SWAT team, and stake out the trails with our nunchucks,” one of the boys offered. Another idiot.
I kept my mouth shut. What could I say? The terrible part was, looking at him now, I wished nobody even knew Detective Anthony Torricelli was my father. Maybe I was the daughter of the designated protector of the girls of Marin County, but if the girls of Marin County kept getting murdered, what did that say about us?
Chapter Twenty-two
Teddy Bascom had decided it was time I had sex with him. He told me this—not in any romantic way, more along the lines of “hey, let’s get it on”—one afternoon at Alison’s, after our usual makeout session: the breast, the hand, the wetness after.
“Alison and Chase do it,” he said. “Everyone does after they’ve been going out this long.”
I never understood why people used the term “going out.” All I ever did with Teddy was stay in the rec room.
“Thirteen’s too young,” I said, though my fourteenth birthday was coming up. (My fourteenth birthday. And still no period.) I could have offered a bunch of other reasons, most particularly the fact that I didn’t want to have sex—that in fact I didn’t want to be doing the other things we had been doing all this time either—but I kept it simple.
“Not going all the way is bad for my health,” Teddy said. “The way it is with guys, if you get too frustrated, even if you get to come, it can mess up your balls.”
I didn’t know why it was my responsibility, making sure Teddy Bascom’s balls were all right. He hadn’t shown much concern about my breasts; I was starting to worry that all the manhandling might make them stretched out and droopy, the way our mother’s were. I didn’t bring this up either. I just repeated that thirteen was too young. And then, not so much because it would have any effect on Teddy, but more for myself and the small comfort that saying these next words out loud would offer me, I added, “My father wouldn’t want me to do that.”
“It’s not like you’d tell him.”
“He’d know.”
This part was true, not so much because my father happened to be a detective as because he loved me so much, and, absent as he was, when he was with us, he noticed every single thing. If I had sex with Teddy Bascom, I knew something would change about me, and my father would pick up on it.
All my life—my life, and my sister’s—our father had told us we were the most special girls. “Don’t ever let some guy treat you like less than a princess, or he’ll be hearing from me,” our father had said, time and again.
Thinking about this, lying on the beanbag chair with Teddy on top of me, I started to cry.
“Oh, Jesus,” Teddy said. “Here comes the waterworks.”
I wasn’t sobbing. No sound came out. But there were tears streaming down my face.
“I can’t believe you,” he said. “I should just break up with you now.”
“That’s a good idea,” I said. I realized then—though until this moment it had not occurred to me—that I had no further interest in spending my afternoons on the beanbag chair while Teddy Bascom yanked on my small, sad breasts and rubbed his penis against my jeans. I didn’t want to be in this room at all, not with Teddy, or with Alison and her friends either. I wanted to be home with my sister.
“I think I’ll go now,” I told him.
ALISON’S HOUSE ON PEACOCK GAP lay on the opposite side of the freeway from ours. On my bike I could have made it home in fifteen minutes, but on foot it was a few miles, and the rain was heavy enough that afternoon to make it hard to see.
I knew how busy my father was with the case, but maybe because I’d just invoked his name I was wishing, even more than usual, that I could see him. I had a couple of dimes in my pocket. Enough to place a call.
One of his deputies answered, but when I said I was Detective Torricelli’s daughter, she put me through right away. I told him I was sorry for interrupting him at work.
“What’s more important than one of my girls when she needs me?” he said.
I asked if he could pick me up. I told him where I was. The 7-Eleven out by the highway.
“I’m on my way,” he said.
USUALLY WHEN PATTY OR I rode someplace with our father it was in the Alfa, but this time he had the patrol car. The unmarked kind, since he was a detective, not an ordinary member of the force.
“Oh, Farrah,” he said when he saw me. “Who made you cry? Tell me his name.”
We drove out past the sandpit to a spot where, when Patty and I were younger, he’d taken us to learn to ride our bikes, and where, another time, with Margaret Ann, we’d had a picnic, and he’d set up the bocce balls that used to be his father’s. Margaret Ann had brought bubble solution and taught us a song in French. It was after that afternoon that I told my father I didn’t want to spend time with her anymore. I wanted it to be just the three of us, like before.
“I wish you didn’t have to work all the time,” I said.
“Once we nail this killer, I’m taking a vacation. I’m taking you and your sister to Italy.”
Other people’s fathers might have offered Disneyland. Ours talked about Venice.
“Do you ever worry the Sunset Strangler might try to get you, Dad?” I asked him. “If he gets the idea you’re onto him.”
“I can take care of myself, baby. Me, and my girls too.” He didn’t mention the gun, but I knew he had one, in a holster on his shin. It was there even now, as we sat in the car talking, though what made me feel safe when my father was around had never been the presence of a gun.
I put my head on his shoulder. The bench seats in my father’s unmarked police car made it possible to lean up against him, the way we used to do in our old station wagon when my sister and I were little. He lit a cigarette and stroked my head.
“I’m sorry about how it worked out between your mother and me,” he said. “She’s a wonderful woman. I never meant to hurt anybody. ”
I wanted to ask, What about Margaret Ann?, but I couldn’t say it. Whatever happened there was between the two of them.
“Do you think you’ll ever marry anybody else?” I asked him. As close as I was ever going to get to that topic.
