My Last Innocent Year(68)
This may not have been something I could fix, but it wasn’t something I could live with.
The world will not fall apart if you tell the truth.
The phone rang twice more, then a woman answered and I told her what I knew.
* * *
EVERYTHING HAPPENED QUICKLY after that.
A few hours later, based on an anonymous tip, state police were dispatched to a cabin near the Canadian border, where they found Igraine. The little girl was huddled inside a sleeping bag, hoarding what was left of their provisions, severely dehydrated but alive. It appeared they’d been in Connelly’s cabin for a while—the police found flashlights and blankets, a hot plate, a battery-operated radio. When the officers asked Igraine where her father was, she told them he’d gone to get firewood. “When was that?” they asked. “Four sleeps ago.”
It took them several days to find Tom. The area around the cabin was thickly wooded, and the recent rain made the terrain soft and treacherous. He hadn’t gone far; his body was found at the bottom of a ravine no more than a mile from the cabin. Whether he’d slipped or jumped, no one knew; an autopsy showed no sign of drugs or foul play, only that Tom had died as a result of injuries sustained during the fall.
Most of this I learned later, after I was back in New York. Between compiling listings for one-woman shows and cover bands for Get Out!, I followed the case on the Daily Citizen’s fledgling website. There was little in the news coverage about Igraine, which didn’t surprise me. I imagined Joanna wanting to protect her daughter from the glare of outsiders curious about the little girl who had survived. From Andy, I learned Igraine had spent a few days in the hospital but had been, for the most part, unharmed. The only photograph I saw of her from that time was taken at Tom’s memorial service, which took place at a Quaker meetinghouse later that summer. In it, Joanna held tightly to her daughter with one hand; with the other, she clung to someone’s arm as if for dear life. I zoomed in closer and saw it was Roxanne.
As for Tom, despite everything, I could never bring myself to believe that he would have left Igraine alone to fend for herself. In the end, I believed—I chose to believe—that his death had been an accident. But what was clear was that Igraine would have died if the police hadn’t found her when they did. She might have wandered off to look for her father and gotten lost in the woods or simply died because she didn’t have enough to eat or drink. I didn’t think about that much, or the part I had played in her rescue. It was only later that spring, the spring after I left Wilder, when news coverage crescendoed with the release of the final report before petering out to nothing, that I allowed myself to think about Igraine, always at the end of the day, when the late afternoon sun moved across my desk like a beacon. And when I did, I often thought about calling Connelly. Once, I even dialed the first six digits of his phone number before remembering that I couldn’t. It felt like dreams I used to have after my mother died. The phone would ring and it would be her. “Where have you been?” I would ask her. “I have so much to tell you.” And I’d fill her in on everything she had missed. Because of course I couldn’t call Connelly. After what I had done, I would never talk to him—he would never talk to me—again.
* * *
OUR LAST DAYS at Wilder were hectic, filled with finals and packing and trips to Kinko’s to get our theses printed and bound. The English department honored Jason and Andy for their work on The Lamplighter, and there was a reception for studio art majors where one of Kelsey’s photographs was on display. And then a few days before graduation, a class ceremony where Debra was presented with an award for her contribution to women’s lives on campus.
“Total crock of shit,” she said, tossing the plaque in the trash as soon as we got home. “They’re thrilled to see me go.” I was happy for my friends, swept up in the excitement of their accolades even though none came my way. In the end, Andy won the department prize for excellence in creative writing, and Amos Jackson’s thesis about his great-grandfather was named Outstanding Thesis. I was disappointed, but not surprised. “There should be a word for that emotion, or at least a German phrase,” I said to Debra as we packed up the room one afternoon. “It doesn’t matter. I’m just happy to be done.”
Debra threw a pair of boots into a box labeled More Crap. She had a Blow Pop in her mouth. “That’s because you’re a crumb eater, Isabel, and you think you deserve scraps. I can’t wait to see what you do when you realize you deserve a place at the fucking table.”
I never told Kelsey what happened that spring, but I did tell Debra. After graduation, she moved to California, studied acupuncture, toyed with becoming a therapist, but eventually became a lawyer instead. She spent time in Mexico, where she met Luis. The two of them moved to New York with their daughter, Anka, and I found the intervening years had mellowed her. I told her the story one night at her apartment while on the baby monitor we watched Anka sleeping. I told it simply and without embellishment, beginning with the night of the Senior Mingle all the way to the bitter end, or what I thought was the end. Debra listened thoughtfully, didn’t judge or probe. “I’m sorry you went through that,” she said when I was finished. “I’m sorry I wasn’t a better friend to you.” The way she said it, I thought she might have made a good therapist after all.