The Drifter Read online

  DEDICATION

  For Louis and Millie,

  who really love stories,

  but who won’t read this one until 2023

  EPIGRAPH

  I could not tell myself the old story Once upon a time because the time was now; the story was now; I’d believed I was causing the story to take place, but in fact the story was taking place around me, as a tide rises, brackish and muddy and filthy and filled with debris. My Kappa sisters were fascinating to me as giant, brightly feathered predator birds would be fascinating to a small songbird hiding in the brush. Or trying to hide in the brush.

  —Joyce Carol Oates

  CONTENTS

  Cover

  Title Page

  Dedication

  Epigraph

  Prologue: September 9, 2010

  Part 1 Chapter 1: The Drifters

  Chapter 2: Dirty Rushers

  Chapter 3: Welcome Back

  Chapter 4: Crazy Shit

  Chapter 5: Gavin

  Chapter 6: Sharpies

  Chapter 7: J.D.’S

  Chapter 8: Serial, as in More than One

  Chapter 9: Weird Bobby’s Party

  Chapter 10: New Orleans

  Part 2 Chapter 11: Evergreen

  Chapter 12: Thrift Store Chronicles

  Chapter 13: The Big Plan

  Chapter 14: Debra Must be a Pi Phi

  Chapter 15: Confessions

  Part 3 Chapter 16: Number 79

  Chapter 17: The Bachelorette

  Chapter 18: The Tourist

  Chapter 19: The Folder

  Part 4 Chapter 20: Expecting

  Chapter 21: Out of the Game

  Chapter 22: Kumquat Tree

  Chapter 23: Reunion

  Chapter 24: Game Time

  Chapter 25: Long Drive Home

  Chapter 26: Coming Home

  Acknowledgments

  P.S. Insights, Interviews & More . . .* About the author

  About the book

  Read on

  Credits

  Copyright

  About the Publisher

  PROLOGUE

  September 9, 2010

  From her perch on the brownstone stoop, Elizabeth lifts up her sunglasses, runs her ring finger along her lower lashes to flick away the welling tears, and glances at her phone to check the time. 9:25. She shifts her weight to her left hip and stretches out her other leg to let the blood circulate to her toes, then sits backs against the iron railing and scans the street.

  As nonchalantly as possible, doing her best impression of a person who isn’t entirely unhinged, she scrolls through her emails, keeping her peripheral vision trained on the front door of the tan brick building across the street. Several times a minute, her eyes dart back to the entrance.

  By now, she knows the morning rhythms of the block by heart. The middle-aged silver fox in Italian loafers who catches a cab on the corner of Fifth Avenue. The pair of Caribbean nurses who swap comic insults as they walk to the radiology clinic down the street. The twentysomething who stumbles out of her apartment in pricey yoga wear at the same time every morning but never makes it further than the corner for a coffee. Their familiarity has become a comfort to Elizabeth. It’s the new faces, like the driver of the black sedan who seemed to stare at her from behind his mirrored glasses while he waited for his fare, that unnerve her.

  Today, a quick study of the scene reveals a FedEx delivery truck, two tattooed bike messengers, a few flustered parents dragging their children to school. Elizabeth eyes these women with a bit of envy and suspicion; perversely, she wishes that her own daughter would put up more of a fight each morning at drop-off. Back in July, on the first day of the weeklong “transition” period, Remi was the child in her classroom to wander over, tug at her mother’s hand, and say, “Mommy? It’s OK if you want to go now.” Elizabeth had tried not to look as stricken as she felt. “Alright, sweetie,” she said, forcing a smile. She’d lingered for a while in the other room, out of her daughter’s sight, sipping weak coffee from a thin paper cup, waiting for the school’s beatific director, Elodie, a woman whose chipper condescension she found impossibly irritating, to come in, pull her aside, and whisper gravely, “Elizabeth, can you come back in for a minute? Remi needs you.” It never happened.

  “I guess that’s the one good thing about waiting to send your child to preschool until she’s nearly five years old!” Elodie had said to Elizabeth on the morning of Remi’s first full day of school. Elodie rarely missed an opportunity to remind Elizabeth that her daughter was starting preschool unusually late for a sophisticated city kid. “Is Remi ever ready to be here with us!” Elodie would say in front of the other moms at drop-off. “It’s like she was shot out of a cannon.”

  ELIZABETH KNEW SHE had started off on the wrong foot with Elodie during the parent interview many months ago. Things started heading south right in the middle of Elizabeth’s grand inquisition about teacher background checks. She grilled Elodie about how frequently the school changed the code to the keypad at the door, whether the strike plates on the door locks were kick resistant, and what the school’s disaster preparedness plans were. But then, just as Elodie looked really disturbed and on the verge of showing them the door, Elizabeth’s husband, Gavin, leaped to her rescue. He put his arm around his wife, flashed the preschool director his trademark grin, and saved the day with his relaxed charm, as he so often did whenever Elizabeth got carried away.

  “Well, when I was about Remi’s age, I found an alligator paddling around in our pool, and my mom came out to take a picture before she called the fish and game department,” he said, using his best syrupy drawl. “So I guess danger is fairly relative.” They all laughed. The ice broken, the conversation turned more benign, to childhoods spent in Florida and the weather. Crisis averted.

  Still, before they left, Elodie had asked offhandedly if there had been anything unusual about Remi’s birth or infancy, anything at all that would impact her ability to thrive in a new environment. Elizabeth and Gavin had avoided each other’s eyes as Elizabeth explained that Remi came more than a month early and had stayed in the NICU for two weeks.

  “We can be a bit . . . overprotective, as a result, I guess,” Gavin said. “She was just so . . . fragile for so long.” Elizabeth blinked hard and pretended to examine her wedding ring, a simple, gold band they’d bought in the men’s section at Cartier. There was so much more to the story than Elodie could ever guess. The real story was something she would never begin to understand.

  “I’m sure Remi will be just fine,” Elodie said as she stood up to escort them out to the school’s cheerful foyer. “Children are so much more resilient than we are.”

  JUST AS ELODIE predicted, every morning since school started, Remi bounds in as if she is on the payroll, and Elodie has to shepherd Elizabeth out the front door.

  “Elizabeth, your daughter is not the least bit fragile anymore. Look at that happy smile. You have to relax,” Elodie insisted earlier that morning, not unkindly. “Let her go.”

  Let her go. Elizabeth shuddered. I’ll never be able to do that.

  Elizabeth had knelt down in the doorway to the classroom so Remi could wrap her arms around her neck. “Have a great day, sweet girl,” Elizabeth whispered, smoothing Remi’s unruly hair behind her ears. Remi gave her mother a quick air peck near her cheek, then hurried across the room to study the “jobs” that lined the wall. She picked up a small bowl of plastic animals and carried it to a mat on the floor. Watching as her daughter lined up the figurines by size, Elizabeth arranged her face into a smile. Elodie was right, her daughter was fine. Look at her, so happy to be out in the world, making friends. Elizabeth was holding her back.

  “Remi has been very interested in sifting the flour,” said Elo
die, peering cautiously at Elizabeth over her glasses. “You should ask her about it later.”

  “Well, what can I say? She’s a natural-born sifter, from a long line of accomplished sifters,” Elizabeth said.

  Elodie took Elizabeth’s arm and guided her out to the school entrance like a reluctant child. “Trust me, Elizabeth. She’s really thriving here.”

  Elizabeth nodded and mumbled while fumbling through her bag for her black sunglasses that would obscure the tears welling in her eyes again. She hurried past the parents who were still peeling their toddlers off their pant legs, nodding at a few, but too paranoid about botching a name to say hello.

  Outside on the sidewalk, away from the waxy smell of crayons and the astringent sting of hand sanitizer, she inhaled deeply. She wondered how she must look to passersby in her studied urban gear—the discus-sized sunglasses under her razor sharp bangs, platform wedge heels, a giant tote bag with hardware too heavy to be practical, and a shapeless sleeveless dress in an arty print that was cooler than it was flattering, which she’d smarten up with a blazer once she got to the office. If she ever got to the office. If she could ever lift herself up from the purgatory of the brownstone stoop.

  IT’S NOW 9:43. Elizabeth checks her email and starts to reply to the forty-two unread messages that show up in her in-box, tapping quick replies with her thumbs. The clock is ticking on the biggest project of her career, an estate sale of more than 350 lots, including rare prints and lithographs from Picasso, Magritte, Kandinsky, Munch, and Mary Cassatt, that is less than two months away. She is dangerously behind schedule. Her assistant, Nina, sent her a message the night before at around midnight to remind her that the public relations department needed some answers about promoting the auction in The New York Times, and there were still contracts from the heirs that needed to be finalized and signed. The auction catalogue is due at the printer in a week, and she is going to have to work overtime to finish it. But she can’t manage to peel herself away. She clicks on an email from Jessica, her closest friend in New York, asking her to lunch next week. She starts to write back, and then stops. She’s been avoiding Jessica, too.

  At 9:57 the phone rings. A picture of Remi as a wrinkly faced newborn, wearing a cap with tiny brown bear ears knitted onto the sides, pops up on her screen. She panics, considers letting the call go to voice mail, then decides it’s best to answer or he might call the office instead.

  “Hey, Gav,” she says as breezily as possible. “What’s up?”

  “Nothin’ much. Whatcha doing?” he asks. Gavin never rushes his speech, but a pace this slow is deliberate, and suspiciously casual. He is crunching something, loudly, in her ear.

  “Not much, sweetie.” She eyes the ragged cuticle of her left thumb, and the deep navy polish that is starting to lose its sheen. “Just finished my coffee outside, getting a last blast of fresh air before work, you know. Sort of makes me miss smoking. I don’t get to linger on the sidewalk on a nice day anymore.”

  “Oh, really. That’s weird . . .”

  She listens as he takes another bite and munches in her ear.

  “Because Elodie just called. She tells me that you’re camped in front of the school,” he says. “Again.”

  Elizabeth’s eyes dart across the street to the window on the left of the front door. The blinds are raised and there is Elodie, peering over her hateful little glasses with pursed lips. Elizabeth offers a smile and a limp wave. Elodie does not wave back.

  “Honey, what’s going on? You’re starting to freak everyone out. Remi’s fine, she’s safe. What is it?”

  “I don’t know,” she says, even though it’s a lie. The tears reappear on cue and this time she uses the heel of her palm to swipe them away. She checks her hand for black streaks before she remembers that she stopped wearing mascara for this very reason. “It’s awful. God, Gavin, I’m so fucked-up. And I’m late for work again. Everyone probably thinks I’m a total nutjob.”

  Gavin takes another bite in her ear. “Well, I mean, you are stalking the preschool.”

  “What are you eating, anyway?” she asks. “It sounds like you’re chomping on gravel.”

  “Oh just one of your extremely undelicious granola bars,” he says, with a lilt of sarcasm. To assuage her working-mom guilt, Elizabeth spent last weekend making corn-syrup-free snacks for her daughter.

  “Oh God, sorry. They’re so gross. You might want to chase it down with some milk or something,” she says, grimly. Remi had taken one bite and spit out the chewed mush into Elizabeth’s palm, then asked for cheddar bunnies instead.

  “Look, honey, Remi is safe. She really is. We wouldn’t have sent her there if we thought she wasn’t. And by the way, a little corn syrup isn’t going to hurt her either.”

  They pause for a minute, letting the silence and the weight of all that they never need to say settle between them. He knows that her nightmares are back. “You were talking in your sleep,” Gavin had said to her when she awoke in a daze on Friday morning, and Elizabeth blew it off, pretended not to remember how she’d bolted up in the middle of the night, a spasm of dread in her chest. She could hide it from everyone else, but not Gavin.

  For years, the fear has come like this, in waves that pound over her and then recede. Her mind was calm for most of the summer. She was fine, happy even. She left Remi with their nanny, Flavia (who had been background checked within an inch of her life), each day; at work she was focused and productive. Then, last month, an email out of the blue brought it all rushing back. She knew what would happen as soon as she saw the name in her in-box, Leslie Portner, an old acquaintance from her college sorority days. Elizabeth dithered over whether to open the message for a few minutes, peered out of her office window to see if anyone was approaching, and angled her monitor to be sure no one walking down the hall could see. She considered deleting it. Perhaps she could look at it later. But then, her heart hammering, she clicked, and the past opened up on her screen.

  “Look how young we were!!!” the email exclaimed. Attached was an invitation to a sorority reunion, scheduled on the weekend of the Tennessee football game, written in bold orange letters over a grainy photo. “Bygones,” Elizabeth mumbled to herself, as she scanned the image, five rows of beaming college girls in sundresses on Bid Day. Once you were in, even if you strain against it and resign in a huff, they never really let you go. She zoomed in with her mouse to scan their blurred faces. First she found her own—soft angles, her long honey-colored hair curled for the occasion.

  Then she saw them. To her left was Caroline, and Ginny was wedged between them, seated on Caroline’s lap, her slender tanned arms draped around their shoulders. That’s how it always was. Ginny was the bridge between them, filling the empty space. Elizabeth went over their features again and again, suddenly aware of how long it had been since she had seen this photo, and that she could no longer recall their faces precisely from memory. All of the photos she had from that time were out of sight, stored away in her mother’s attic. Faces that had once been as familiar to her as her own had become hazy in her mind, until now.

  Now they are all she sees.

  Gavin’s voice shakes her back to the present. “Honey, listen. You’ve got to let her go.”

  “Let who go, Gav?” she whispers into the phone, leaning her head down and pressing her thumb and forefinger against her brow bones to try to stop the tears. They both know she no longer means Remi. “That’s the question, isn’t it? And I can’t. She’s with me every day.”

  Elizabeth has tried to move on, for years and years. Sometimes, on good days, she feels like she has. But the memories come nightly now. In her sleep, she walks into a dark apartment and notices a light burning in the bedroom, the door left slightly ajar. Sometimes there is a dark puddle of blood on the old hardwood floor. Sometimes he’s there, his face turned away from her, but she knows who it is. She wakes up in a sweat, runs into Remi’s room, feels the covers for her warm little body, watches the sheets move up and down with her breat
h.

  “I can’t let her go, Gavin.” She sits on the stoop. She is shaking now.

  “I’m coming, Betsy, don’t move.” And those words, hearing Gavin say her real name, sends her hurtling back. She is not Elizabeth anymore. She never was. She is Betsy, she will always be Betsy. Betsy, who left her friend alone to die. Betsy, who will never be able to move on, who will never deserve the beautiful life she has made. She sits on the stoop, warm now from the bright sunlight, and cries.

  PART 1

  CHAPTER 1

  THE DRIFTERS

  August 22, 1990

  In another world before New York, before Remi, before the nightmares, Elizabeth was called Betsy, and she rode a bicycle to work. The pedals were leaden under the soles of her Converse, which were worn paper-thin. And, as always, the last stretch of the steep hill she climbed to get to campus was slow and brutal, through air that clung to her skin like jeans snatched impatiently out of the dryer: damp, hot, sticky. It was seventy-four degrees at 5:30 in the morning, the coolest it would be all day.

  The one obvious con about Betsy’s job at Bagelville was that people ate bagels in the morning, sometimes desperately early. They’d had a lock on the market until the culty Krispy Kreme doughnut shop opened down the street and challenged their dominance in the round, pre-noon food category. Regardless, business remained steady as long as refills were free, and Betsy, for the moment, was employed.

  The upside of the job was that the coffee was decent and the place was derelict enough to be acceptably dingy to all of the cool kids in town who avoided anything too shiny. Betsy’s battered cutoffs and last night’s T-shirt were considered an acceptable uniform. Plus, there was ample fresh-squeezed orange juice to slip to her friends, who’d shuffle in dry-mouthed with bloodshot eyes around ten. If she was in at six, she was out by noon and sufficiently caffeinated for a class or two, her backpack loaded with remarkably versatile day-olds to stow in the freezer for times when money was tight, and it always was.