Girl Forgotten
Dedication
For Mrs. D. Ginger
Contents
Cover
Title Page
Dedication
April 17, 1982
Present Day: 1
2
October 17, 1981: Six Months Before Prom
3
October 19, 1981
4
October 20, 1981
5
October 20, 1981
6
October 21, 1981
7
October 21, 1981
8
November 26, 1981
9
November 26, 1981
10
11: One Month Later
Acknowledgments
About the Author
Also by Karin Slaughter
Copyright
About the Publisher
April 17, 1982
Emily Vaughn frowned at the mirror. The dress was as beautiful as it had been in the store. Her body was the problem. She turned, then turned again, trying to find an angle that didn’t make her look like she’d thrown herself onto the beach like a dying whale.
From the corner, Gram said, “Rose, you should stay away from the cookies.”
Emily took a moment to recalibrate. Rose was Gram’s sister who’d died of tuberculosis during the Great Depression. Emily’s middle name was in honor of the girl.
“Gram.” She pressed her hand to her stomach, telling her grandmother, “I don’t think it’s the cookies.”
“Are you sure?” A sly smile rippled Gram’s lips. “I was hoping you would share.”
Emily gave her reflection another disapproving frown before forcing a smile onto her face. She knelt awkwardly in front of her grandmother’s rocking chair. The old woman was knitting a sweater that would fit a child. Her fingers dipped in and out of the tiny, puckered collar like hummingbirds. The long sleeve of her Victorian-style dress had pulled back. Emily gently touched the deep purple bruise ringing her bony wrist.
“Clumsy-mumsy.” Gram’s tone had the sing-song quality of one thousand excuses. “Freddy, you must change out of that dress before Papa gets home.”
Now Gram thought Emily was her uncle Fred. Dementia was nothing if not a stroll through the many skeletons lining the family closet.
Emily asked, “Would you like me to get you some cookies?”
“That would be wonderful.” Gram continued to knit but her eyes, which never really focused on anything, suddenly became transfixed by Emily. Her lips curved into a smile. Her head tilted to the side as if she was studying the pearlescent lining of a seashell. “Look at your beautiful, smooth skin. You’re so lovely.”
“It runs in the family.” Emily marveled at the almost tangible state of knowing that had transformed her grandmother’s gaze. She was there again, as if a broom had swept the cobwebs from her cluttered brain.
Emily touched her crinkly cheek. “Hello, Gram.”
“Hello, my sweet child.” Her hands stopped knitting, but only to cup Emily’s face between them. “When is your birthday?”
Emily knew to offer as much information as possible. “I’ll be eighteen in two weeks, Grandmother.”
“Two weeks.” Gram’s smile grew wider. “So wonderful to be young. So much promise. Your whole life a book that has yet to be written.”
Emily steeled herself, creating an invisible fortress against a wave of emotion. She was not going to spoil this moment by crying. “Tell me a story from your book, Gram.”
Gram looked delighted. She loved telling stories. “Have I told you about when I carried your father?”
“No,” Emily said, though she’d heard the story dozens of times. “What was it like?”
“Miserable.” She laughed to lighten the word. “I was sick morning and night. I could barely get out of bed to cook. The house was a mess. It was a scorcher outside, I can tell you that. I wanted desperately to cut my hair. It was so long, down to my waist, and when I washed it, the heat would spoil it before it could dry.”
Emily wondered if Gram was confusing her life with “Bernice Bobs Her Hair”. Fitzgerald and Hemingway often crossed into her memories. “How short did you cut your hair?”
“Oh, no, I did no such thing,” Gram said. “Your grandfather wouldn’t allow me.”
Emily felt her lips part in surprise. That sounded more real life than short story.
“There was quite a rigmarole. My father got involved. He and my mother came over to advocate on my behalf, but your grandfather refused to let them enter the house.”
Emily held tight to her grandmother’s trembling hands.
“I remember them arguing on the front porch. They were about to come to blows before my mother begged them to stop. She wanted to take me home and look after me until the baby came, but your grandfather refused.” She looked startled, as if something had just occurred to her. “Imagine how different my life would have been if they had taken me home that day.”
Emily didn’t have the capacity to imagine. She could only think about the realities of her own life. She had become just as trapped as her grandmother.
“Little lamb.” Gram’s gnarled finger caught Emily’s tears before they could fall. “Don’t be sad. You’ll get away. You’ll go to college. You’ll meet a boy who loves you. You’ll have children who adore you. You’ll live in a beautiful house.”
Emily felt tightness in her chest. She had lost the dream of that life.
“My treasure,” Gram said. “You must trust me on this. I am caught between the veil of life and death, which affords me a view of both the past and the future. I see nothing but happiness for you in the coming days.”
Emily felt her fortress cracking against the weight of impending grief. No matter what happened—good, bad or indifferent—her grandmother would not bear witness. “I love you so much.”
There was no response. The cobwebs had fractured Gram’s gaze into the familiar look of confusion. She was holding a stranger’s hands. Embarrassed, she took up the knitting needles, and continued the sweater.
Emily wiped away the last of her tears as she stood up. There was nothing worse than watching a stranger cry. The mirror beckoned, but she felt bad enough without staring at her reflection for a second longer. Besides, nothing was going to change.
Gram didn’t glance up as Emily grabbed her things and left her room.
She went to the top of the stairs and listened. Her mother’s strident tone was muffled by her closed office doors. Emily strained for her father’s deep baritone, but he was probably still at his faculty meeting. Still, Emily slid off her shoes before carefully picking her way down the stairs. The old house’s creaks were as well-known to her as her parents’ warring shouts.
Her hand was reaching for the front door when she remembered the cookies. The stately old grandfather clock was ticking up on five. Gram wouldn’t remember the request, but nor would she be fed until well after six.
Emily placed her shoes by the door, then propped her small purse against the heels. She tiptoed past her mother’s office to the kitchen.
“Where the hell do you think you’re going dressed like that?” Her father’s stink of cigars and stale beer filled the kitchen. His black suit jacket was thrown over one of the chairs. The sleeves of his white dress shirt were rolled up. An unopened can of Natty Boh was beside two crushed empties on the counter.
Emily watched a bead of condensation roll down the side of the can.
Her father snapped his fingers as if hastening one of his grad students to get on with it. “Answer me.”
“I was just—”
“I know what you were just,” he cut her off. “You’re not content with the damage you’ve already caused this family? You’re going to completely blow up our lives two days before the most important week of your mother’s entire career?”
Emily’s face burned with shame. “It’s not about—”
“I don’t give a glorious goddamn what you think it is and is not about.” He pulled the ring off the can and threw it into the sink. “You can turn back around and get out of that hideous dress and stay in your room until I tell you otherwise.”
“Yes, sir.” She opened the cabinet to retrieve the cookies for her grandmother. Emily’s fingers had barely brushed the orange and white packaging on the Bergers when her father’s hand clamped around her wrist. Her brain focused not on the pain, but on the memory of the handcuff-shaped bruise around her grandmother’s frail wrist.
You’ll get away. You’ll go to college. You’ll meet a boy who loves you . . .
“Dad, I—”
He squeezed harder, and the pain took her breath away. Emily was on her knees, eyes tightly shut, when the stench of his breath curled into her nostrils. “What did I tell you?”
“You—” She gasped as the bones inside her wrist started to quiver. “I’m sorry, I—”
“What did I tell you?”
“T-to go to my room.”
The vise of his hand released. The relief brought another gasp from deep inside Emily’s belly. She stood up. She closed the cabinet door. She walked out of the kitchen. She went back up the hallway. She placed her foot on the bottom stair, directly above the loudest creak, before putting her foot back on the floor.
Emily turned.
Her shoes were still beside the front door alongside her purse. They were all dyed a perfect shade of turquoise to match her satin dress. But the dress was too tight and she couldn’t get her pantyhose past her knees and her feet were pa
infully swollen so she bypassed the heels and grabbed her clutch on the way out the door.
A gentle spring breeze caressed her bare shoulders as she walked across the lawn. The grass tickled her feet. In the distance, she could smell the pungent salt of the ocean. The Atlantic was far too cold for the tourists who would flock to the boardwalk in the summer. For now, Longbill Beach belonged to the townies, who would never stand in a snaking line outside of Thrasher’s for a bucket of French fries or stare in wonder at the machines stretching colorful strings of taffy in the candy shop window.
Summer.
Only a few months away.
Clay and Nardo and Ricky and Blake were all preparing for graduation, about to start their adult lives, about to leave this stifling, pathetic beach town. Would they ever think of Emily again? Did they even think of her now? Maybe with pity. Probably with relief that they had finally excised the rot from their incestuous little circle.
Her outsiderness didn’t hurt now as much as it had in the beginning. Emily had finally accepted that she wasn’t a part of their lives anymore. Contrary to what Gram had said, Emily was not going away. Not going to college. Not meeting a boy who loved her. She would end up shrieking her lifeguard whistle at obnoxious brats on the beach or passing out endless free samples from behind the counter at Salty Pete’s Soft Serve.
The soles of her feet slapped against the warm asphalt as she turned the corner. She wanted to look back at the house, but she refrained from the dramatic gesture. Instead, she conjured the image of her mother pacing back and forth across her office, phone to her ear as she strategized. Her father would be draining the can of beer, possibly weighing the distance between the rest of the beer in the fridge and the Scotch in the library. Her grandmother would be finishing the tiny sweater, wondering what child she could’ve possibly started it for.
An approaching car made Emily move from the center of the road. She watched a two-tone Chevy Chevette glide by, then saw the bright red glow of the brake lights as the car squealed to a stop. Loud music pounded from the open windows. Bay City Rollers.
S-A-T-U-R-D-A-Y night!
Mr. Wexler’s head swiveled from the rearview mirror to the side mirror. The lights blinked as he moved his foot from the brake to the gas, then back again. He was trying to decide whether or not to keep going.
Emily stepped back as the car reversed. She could smell the joint smoldering in his ashtray. She assumed that Dean was supposed to chaperone tonight, but his black suit was more appropriate for a funeral than a prom.
“Em,” he said, shouting over the song. “What are you doing?”
She spread out her arms, indicating her billowing turquoise prom dress. “What does it look like I’m doing?”
His eyes flickered over her, then did another, slower take, which was the same way he had looked at Emily the first day she had walked into his classroom. In addition to teaching social studies, he was the track coach, so he’d been wearing burgundy polyester shorts and a white, short-sleeved polo—the same as the other coaches.
That was where the similarities had ended.
Dean Wexler was only six years older than his students, but he was worldly and wise in a way that none of them would ever be. Before college, he’d taken a gap year to backpack across Europe. He’d dug wells for villagers in Latin America. He drank herbal tea and grew his own weed. He had a thick, luxurious Magnum P.I. mustache. He was supposed to teach them about civics and government, but one class he was showing them an article about how DDT was still poisoning the groundwater and the next he was explaining how Reagan cut a secret deal with the Iranians on the hostages to swing the election.
Basically, they had all thought that Dean Wexler was the coolest teacher any of them had ever known.
“Em.” He repeated the name like a sigh. The car gear went into neutral. The emergency brake raked up. He turned off the engine, cutting the song at ni-i-i-ight.
Dean got out of the car. He towered over her but, for once, his eyes were not unkind. “You can’t go to the prom. What would people think? What are your parents going to say?”
“I don’t care,” she said, her voice going up at the end because she cared quite a lot.
“You need to anticipate the consequences of your actions.” He reached out for her arms, then seemed to think better of it. “Your mother’s being scrutinized at the highest levels right now.”
“Really?” Emily asked, as if her mother hadn’t been on the phone for so many hours that her ear had taken on the shape of the receiver. “Is she in trouble or something?”
His audible sigh was clearly meant to indicate he was being patient. “I think you’re not considering how your actions could derail everything she’s worked for.”
Emily watched a seagull floating above a cluster of clouds. Your actions. Your actions. Your actions. She had heard Dean being condescending before, but never toward her.
He asked, “What if someone takes a photo of you? Or there’s a journalist at the school? Think about how this will reflect on her.”
A dawning realization put a smile on her lips. He was joking. Of course he was joking.
“Emily.” Dean clearly wasn’t joking. “You can’t—”
He turned into a mime, using his hands to create an aura around her body. Bare shoulders, too full breasts, too wide hips, the stretching seams at her waist as the satin turquoise failed to conceal the round swell of her belly.
This was why Gram was knitting the tiny sweater. This was why her father hadn’t let her leave the house for the last four months. This was why the principal had kicked her out of school. This was why she had been cleaved away from Clay and Nardo and Ricky and Blake.
She was pregnant.
Finally, Dean found words again. “What would your mother say?”
Emily hesitated, trying to wade through the torrent of shame being thrown at her, the same shame she had endured since word had gotten out that she was no longer the good girl with the promising life ahead of her but the bad girl who was going to pay a heavy price for her sins.
She asked, “Since when do you care so much about my mother? I thought she was a cog in a corrupt system?”
Her tone was sharper than she’d intended, but her anger was real. He sounded exactly like her parents. The principal. The other teachers. Her pastor. Her former friends. They were all right and Emily was always wrong, wrong, wrong.
She said the words that would hurt him most. “I believed in you.”
He snorted. “You’re too young to have a credible system of beliefs.”
Emily bit her bottom lip, struggling to rein in her anger. How had she not seen before that he was completely full of shit?
“Emily.” He gave another sad shake of his head, still trying to humiliate her into compliance. He didn’t care about her—not really. He didn’t want to have to deal with her. He certainly didn’t want to see her making a scene at the prom. “You look enormous. You’ll only make a fool of yourself. Go home.”
She wasn’t going to go home. “You said we should burn the world down. That’s what you said. Burn it all down. Start again. Build something—”
“You’re not building anything. You’re clearly planning some stunt in order to get your mother’s attention.” His arms were crossed. He looked at his watch. “Grow up, Emily. The time for selfishness has passed. You’ve got to think about—”
“What do I have to think about, Dean? What do you want me to think about?”
“Jesus, lower your voice.”
“Don’t tell me what to do!” She felt her heart beating inside her throat. Her fists were clenched. “You said it yourself. I’m not a child. I’m nearly eighteen years old. And I’m sick and tired of people—men—telling me what to do.”
“So now I’m the patriarchy?”
“Are you, Dean? Are you part of the patriarchy? We’ll see how fast they circle the wagons when I tell my father what you did.”
Fire razed up into her arm, shot into her fingertips. Her feet left the ground as she was spun around and slammed into the side of the car. The metal was hot against her bare shoulder blades. She could hear the tick of the cooling engine. Dean’s hand was clamped around her wrist. His other hand covered her mouth. His face was so close to hers that she could see sweat seeping between the fine hairs of his mustache.
Emily struggled. He was hurting her. He was really hurting her.