In May, Tess asked me to help her run away from home. It wasn’t as big a deal as it sounds. Tess was like a professional runaway, always disappearing from home for a night or two. She’d only go as far as the tree house on Farm Street or the little island in the middle of Harris Pond or maybe the sand pits, but it would still send her parents into fits. Her mom would show up at my house, telling my parents that Tess had run off again, and I’d end up sitting in the back of Mr. Bryson’s pickup, taking them to all our regular spots. Eventually we’d find her with a box of Ritz crackers and a blanket and her parents would take her home. She never told me why she ran away so much, and I don’t think I ever asked. It was just Tess’s thing. Some kids play guitar. Some kids go fishing every Saturday. Tess liked to run away. She’d been doing it for years.
But in May she asked me for help. It was the first time she even talked about running away ahead of time, at least to me. She wanted to go to her aunt’s house in North Carolina, and she needed some help with maps and planning. Since we were learning almost nothing by then, except for fucking Blondie songs, Tess and I would sit in the back of the classroom with atlases and maps from the AAA and plot her course. My family was always taking car trips around the country, to Florida, New Hampshire, Chicago … all over. Mom hated to fly. So the station wagon’s glove compartment was stuffed with old maps. I found one for New England and one for the southern United States, starting around Maryland I think, and we filled in the rest of the trip, New York and New Jersey mostly, with an atlas from the library. Today we’d just use MapQuest and have our route in seconds, but back then, things were harder.
At the time, it was exciting to think about Tess running away to a place as far as North Carolina, even if it was just Chisholm, a tiny little town that no one had ever heard of. God, I still remember the town’s name after all these years. Chisholm. I can still picture where it is on the map. But I never thought that Tess would really do it. I guess I figured that she’d eventually end up in the tree house or the sand pits or under the bridge near Getchell’s Stream. Not hundreds of miles away.
Not that she ever made it that far.
We spent about three weeks planning her trip, writing down directions, calculating how far she might be able to walk each day, and finding roads off the beaten path. We knew that she wouldn’t be able to walk down I-95 without being picked up, so we found back roads and good spots to pitch her tent for the night. Campgrounds. State parks. Not bad for a couple of thirteen-year-olds with no Internet.
The night before she left, she was over my house for dinner, and before she went home, she asked me if I could loan her any money. I gave her forty dollars. Almost all of my savings at the time. I know that makes it sound like I knew that she was really going, but in my heart, I never really believed it. I figured that Tess would be back in a day or two, the money would make it back to my piggy bank, and Tess would be grounded like always. But before she left my house that night, she took my hands and made me promise not to tell anyone where she was going, no matter what. She was so serious, standing there in the moonlight in front of my house, more serious than I thought possible from a thirteen-year-old, and she wouldn’t let go of my hands until I swore on my mother’s someday-grave that I wouldn’t tell. I remember thinking that her parents already knew about all her good hiding spots anyway, and that they’d find her with or without my help. Promise or no promise.
I can still remember the day that she ran away like it was yesterday. It was a Friday, and Tess didn’t show up to school that day. I remember sitting at my desk, listening to Mrs. Lavallee take attendance, knowing all about Tess’s plans and feeling so superior to everyone in the room, like I was the only one who could be trusted with the biggest secret of the year. I knew something so important that no one else knew. It took all my willpower to keep my mouth shut.
Then the weekend came and my family went to stay with Aunt Nancy on the Cape. This was long before cell phones and pagers, so the Brysons had no way of getting in touch with us during those two days. And with the beach and the sun and the two cute boys in the house next door to ours, Noah and Ewan Wol-a-something, I forgot all about Tess and her plans. Besides, I wasn’t really worried. Like I said, Tess ran away all the time. I guess if I had taken the time to think about it in between all the swimming and flirting, I would’ve assumed that Tess was already home, stuck in her room for the weekend without TV.
We got back late Sunday night and my parents found a note on our door from the Brysons asking for us to call as soon as we got home. I knew that it was about Tess, and so did my mom, but it was nearly midnight when we pulled in, so she decided to wait until the next day to call. Tess running away was just a regular part of life back then. No big deal. I know it sounds crazy, but it’s true.
I was in class the next morning, Monday morning, and Tess wasn’t there. At first I thought, Wow, she must’ve caught a cold hiding under the bridge all night. But then I started to think that maybe she had really done it. Maybe she really had packed up our maps and directions and my forty dollars and taken off for North Carolina. That’s when I started to get scared. Not for Tess, but for me. What if my parents found out? What would they say if they knew that I had helped Tess run away for real this time?
I was sitting at my desk in the back of the classroom, thinking about how much trouble I would be in if my parents found out, when two police officers walked right into our class like they owned the place and started talking, without an introduction or anything. They said that Tess Bryson was missing and her parents thought that she might have runned away. “Runned away,” the older cop said, and I remember that it made a few kids around me giggle. But not me. I was thirteen years old and suddenly understood what it meant to be fucked.
They said that they wanted to know if anyone had information about Tess and would be asking each one of us to come across the hall to the music room to answer a few questions. “No big deal,” the older guy said, but I didn’t believe him for a second. Then the one with the Yosemite Sam mustache said, “We’d like to start with Cassidy Glenn.” God, my stomach felt like it had dropped right out of my body. It took me like a minute to say anything, and in that time, everyone had turned and was staring right at me. Then Yosemite said, “Are you Cassidy Glenn?” and he pointed at me. I nodded. I couldn’t have said a word even if I had wanted to. Then he asked me to follow him.
Milo understood the importance of the information that he had just heard. Freckles’s real name was Cassidy Glenn. But he almost didn’t care, completely transfixed by the woman in the tiny screen on his lap. Unlike with previous stories, Freckles (using Cassidy would take some getting used to) was not exhibiting any emotion despite the content of her narrative. She had become a storyteller, conveying the emotion of the time without the emotion of the present interfering. And he noticed that she was speaking slower and with more of a cadence, as if the woman on the screen were suddenly thirteen years old again and telling the story in a long-forgotten pubescent voice.
If Tess’s parents had shown up at my house, Mrs. Bryson crying like she always did when Tess ran away, I probably would’ve cracked in three minutes and told them everything. But those cops scared the hell out of me. I was absolutely positive that I was going to prison. I had helped a girl run away from home, had given her money for the road, and now I was in the biggest trouble of my life. We went into the music room, the older cop in front of me and Yosemite behind me. The older guy, the clean-shaven one, told me to sit and asked me if I knew where Tess was.
I said no.
Then they asked me if Tess had mentioned anything about running away from home.
I said no.
Then they asked me if Tess had a reason to run away. A fight with her parents? Trouble in school? A bad breakup with a boyfriend? I didn’t really understand the questions at the time, because Tess never had a reason. And it’s not like either of us had boyfriends. She just liked to run away.
So I said no.
The
n they asked me about Tess’s parents … if I thought they were good parents, and they asked me a lot of questions about Mr. Bryson. Did Tess get along with him? How did Mr. Bryson treat me? Did I like Mr. Bryson? I realized that they thought that maybe Mr. Bryson did something to Tess, chopped her up in a wood chipper or threw her down a well, which I knew he didn’t do, and this scared me too. I thought, Oh my God. Now Mr. Bryson is going to be in trouble too. Because of me. And this made me want to keep my secret even more. It was like one of those snowballs in the cartoons that keep getting bigger and bigger as it moves down the mountain. The whole thing felt impossibly huge and just getting huger. The old guy asking the questions was sitting next to Danny Pollock’s tuba and I remember looking at my reflection in it, all blurry and twisted, and I thought to myself that the person looking back at me had made a promise to Tess and I was going to keep it. But that was just an excuse. It felt good and sanctimonious and righteous, but it was all bullshit. Nothing more than a good reason to keep my mouth shut and not feel guilty or responsible. Something to hang my coward’s hat on. The truth was that I was scared out of my mind and ashamed and couldn’t bear the thought of everyone knowing what I did.
I think the police believed me, because they only came back to class once more after that day, and that time, they didn’t meet with us individually. They just explained how serious the situation was and asked us to think hard about anything that might help them find Tess. Then Mrs. Lavallee put the phone number to the police station on the board, just in case anyone thought of something. By then, things in town were crazy. No one knew if Tess had run away or been abducted, so parents were keeping their kids at home after dinner. There was talk about canceling the Little League playoffs for a while, but that didn’t happen. It was a small town, still is, and people weren’t accustomed to kids disappearing in the night. I remember hearing rumors about Mr. Bryson, but I think that was later on, after people had pretty much given up hope on finding Tess. People wondered if he had something to do with it, and I think it got pretty uncomfortable for him for quite a while. But I was off the hook. My parents asked me some questions a few times, mostly trying to find out if I knew something that I didn’t realize was important, and Mrs. Bryson called once and asked if I could think of anything that might help, but I said no.
I just kept saying no, no, no all spring and summer, waiting, praying for Tess to come home or show up at her aunt’s place. I’d ask Mrs. Bryson if she heard anything when I’d see her at the grocery store or the laundromat, but my mother finally told me to stop. That it was too painful for Mrs. Bryson to talk about. So I just waited for word that she had come back or shown up in North Carolina like we had planned.
She never did. For all I know, she was picked up on the highway by some sick fuck half a mile from town and was raped and killed in the back of a pickup truck. That’s what I think about most often. What might have happened. I can’t help it.
Whatever happened to Tess, it couldn’t have been good or she would’ve eventually called me or her parents or someone else in town. But no one ever saw her again. And thirteen-year-old girls just don’t disappear into the night and start new lives. When thirteen-year-old girls disappear forever, something bad happened. Something sick and twisted and fucked up. You find yourself lying in bed at night, praying to God that whoever killed her did it quick and didn’t make her suffer. Think about that. You go from praying that she’ll just come home to praying that maybe she was smothered in her sleep or shot in the back of the head when she wasn’t looking or something else quick and painless. This is the kind of stuff that occupies my mind. I used to try to think of all the best ways to be murdered. The least painful ways. The ways where you don’t know it’s coming. I’d make a list in my head and then pray to God that whoever killed Tess used one of them instead of cutting her throat or throwing her into the bottom of a well to drown or starve to death. And I still find myself wondering if Mrs. Bryson thought the same thing in her bed at night. If she still does.
And just like with Mira, it was my fault. Maybe if I had told the police the truth that day in the music room, they might’ve found her somewhere in Connecticut or New Jersey. Hell, I could’ve shown them her exact route. The places we planned for her to stop and pitch her tent, the parks, the campgrounds, the rest areas. I knew everything about her trip and didn’t say a goddamn word. I can say that I was keeping a promise, but honestly, I was just a scared little girl who didn’t have the courage to help her friend. I didn’t put Tess on that road, and I didn’t give her the idea to run away, but I sat in the back of that classroom and planned the whole damn thing with her, excited about being a part of something so big. And when the time came to speak up and make a difference, I decided to save my own skin and leave Tess on her own.
God help me. I let her die somewhere on the road, alone and probably scared out of her wits.
That’s two on me now. First Tess and now Mira.
Freckles was finally crying, the final words coming forth between sniffles and sobs before the tape ended, and in the dim light of the Civic, Milo found himself crying too, not for Tess Bryson, but for Freckles and the secret that she had kept inside for so long. As much as she wished that she could change her past, alter her decisions from so long ago, she could not, and as a result, the disappearance of Tess Bryson had become a part of her. A secret part that she could never remove.
In listening to her story, Milo realized that he too understood what it was like to feel this way, to live every day of your life in constant fear that someone might discover your secret life. He knew what it was like to live with never-ending tension and worry. Though there were moments in the day when Milo’s secrets might fade into the landscape of work and daily routines, they were never far off, and they never, ever faded away for long. Always pushing forward, demanding action, requiring vigilance, and occupying most of his mental processes, his secrets were inescapable, and as such, they required constant attention. In the dim light of his car, sitting outside the house that no longer seemed like his own, Milo realized that these inexplicable demands were his single most defining characteristic, the part of him that consumed the most time and energy and the part that had insinuated itself into every aspect of his life, yet he had never shared this enormous chunk of his soul with another human being.
Milo suddenly felt lonelier than he had ever felt before. The loneliness was almost palpable, a leaden weight bearing down on his shoulders. He realized that even worse than this fear of discovery was the isolation that came with not being able to share the most important parts of himself with another person. Because so much of his life was hidden from others, Milo now understood with deepening sadness that no one truly knew him. They might have known small parts of him, the parts that he carefully vetted and willingly disseminated for public consumption, but no one, his friends, his wife, or even his parents, had ever truly known the man that Milo had become.
In essence, Milo was a fraud to all who knew him, an actor playing a role for his audience, yet he was the only one who knew there was a performance going on.
He had been thrilled to discover that Christine was in love with him and eager to spend the rest of her life with him, but in looking back on those days now, he realized that perhaps he should have instead been thrilled with his ability to deceive a woman so effectively, beginning with that first night in Arugula and continuing through his marriage and separation. Though he was reticent to admit it, even to himself, Milo had come to the realization that he had tricked Christine into loving him by playing a role, when in truth he was someone whom she barely knew.
Until Milo was willing to share his secrets with someone, he would remain a stranger to all, and as a result, he would always be alone to some degree. He knew this with certainty now, but also knew that there was nothing he could do to change it.
Milo thought that Freckles was probably suffering with the same kind of burden, the same inability to open up to another human being, and while he unders
tood why she felt this way, he also thought that Freckles’s circumstances were far different than his own. The secret part of Freckles, the part that had kept Tess Bryson’s disappearance hidden for twenty years, could be exorcised. Milo suspected that Freckles’s burden, unlike his own secrets, could be easily lifted from her shoulders. Even if Tess Bryson was dead (and he suspected she probably was), no reasonable person would ever blame a thirteen-year-old for the role that she played in the tragedy, save the woman who the thirteen-year-old had become. By being forced into immediate secrecy, the teenage version of Freckles had locked away an ample supply of shame and guilt that had continued to plague her well beyond her teenage years. Had she simply been able to share her secret with someone, as a child or even as an adult, she might have been convinced that she deserved no blame and should therefore feel no guilt about the disappearance of her friend. Tess was running away with or without Freckles’s help. As an adult, Freckles might have realized this immediately, but as a kid, facing interrogation by police officers, she automatically had placed all the blame on herself, and there it had remained.
For Milo, the revealing of his demands would do nothing to erase them from his being. They were a part of him now, an inextricable component to the man he had become. Sharing his secrets would only serve to push others away and heighten his degree of strangeness, but he was now convinced that if someone could persuade Freckles to share her secret, she might come to the realization that, while tragic, the disappearance of Tess Bryson was not a burden that she was required to carry, and that her life could be exponentially better.
Milo sat in his car, lit by the glow of the video display, and watched Freckles cry. And he cried too, for all the years that he and Freckles had lost to their secrets, for all the friendship and love that they had sacrificed for subterfuge, but through his tears, he also felt hope, not for himself, but for Freckles. He felt a new and even deeper connection to this woman, Cassidy Glenn, whose secret life was in many ways like his own. He may never be able to save himself, but he thought that he might surely be able to save her.