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SHE LIKED IT AT FIRST, he could swear that she did. He told her it was a game, and he fed her M &M’s for each step she mastered. Fact is, she might have done it before. It happens, with retarded people. They get up to all sorts of things. That was why the girl in his grade school had to be transferred, because she was doing things with the older boys. She had a woman’s body and a little girl’s mind. That was no way to be. He was doing this girl a kindness, if you thought about it. But, in the end, it wasn’t right. He needed someone who could help a little. He wouldn’t make this mistake again.
Later, when he shouldered her body and carried it deep into the woods, trusting that no one would be looking for her here, not soon, he found himself feeling very tender toward her. She wasn’t happy in this life, couldn’t really be. Everyone was better off now.
He was home in time for supper.
5
ELIZA’S PARENTS LIVED ONLY THIRTY minutes from the new house, another mark in its favor. (Fu
Perhaps they were all just out of practice at being an extended family; Eliza had lived a minimum of 1,500 miles away since college graduation. Besides, both her parents, now in their late seventies, continued to work, although her father had cut back his practice; her mother was an academic, teaching at the University of Maryland in downtown Baltimore. They were not, nor would she want them to be, the type of settled grandparents whose lives revolved around their only grandchildren. Still, she had thought she would see more of them than she did.
This week, however, they were having di
Yet the Lerners had never thought twice about relocating here, leaving their beloved house in Roaring Springs in order to enroll Eliza in a different high school. One county over, Wilde Lake High School had been far enough so a new girl, known as Eliza, would have no resonance. There was always the slight risk that someone from the old school district would transfer and that Eliza’s identity would be pierced. But as her parents explained to her repeatedly, the changes were not about shame or secrets. They moved because the old neighborhood had dark associations for all of them, because some of the things they loved most-the stream, the wooded hillsides, the sense of isolation-were tainted. They chose not to speak of what had happened in the world at large, but that was because the world at large had nothing to contribute to Eliza’s healing. If she had returned to Catonsville High School with her friends-and it was her choice, they stressed-her parents didn’t doubt that people would have been sensitive. Too sensitive. They did not want their daughter to live an eggshell existence, where others watched their words and lapsed into sudden, suspicious silences when she happened onto certain conversations. New house, new start. For all of them. A new house with an alarm system, and central air-conditioning, despite Inez’s hatred of it, because that meant they didn’t sleep with open windows.
Iso and Albie loved their grandparents’ house, which was filled with the requisite items of fascination that grandparents’ homes always harbor. But the real lure for them was the nearby Rita’s custard stand. As soon as they left with their grandfather for an after-di
“What are you going to do?” she asked.
“Nothing,” Eliza said.
“Doing nothing,” Inez said, “is a choice in its own way. When you do nothing, you still do something.”
“I know.”
“I assumed you did.”
They were sitting on the screened porch that ran along the back of the house, a place where the view was still, more or less, as it had been when the Lerners purchased their home. They had bought it quickly, almost instinctively, a month after Eliza came home. It was actually larger than the eighteenth-century stone house they had known in Roaring Springs, and better appointed in almost every way-updated bathrooms, more generously proportioned rooms. Yet when Vo
But no one, not even psychiatrist parents as well trained as the Lerners, could have been prepared to hear their eldest daughter proclaim: “It’s just that everything’s going to be about Elizabeth -excuse me, Eliza-from now on.”
The statement, delivered at the di
From a young age, Eliza was also a willing, complacent slave to her older sister, which probably undercut whatever traditional sibling rivalry there might have been. She was simply too good-natured about the tortures her sister designed for her in their early days. Oh, when she was a baby, she cried when Vo
But she could-apparently, amazingly-seethe with resentment over the way her sister’s misfortune had transformed the family dynamic.
“Would you rather be Eliza?” her father asked Vo
Eliza couldn’t help wanting to hear the answer. Obviously, Vo
“That’s not what I meant,” Vo