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“Look—” Frankie began, talking to the other two men in the room, but Rory was shaking his head and Frankie never finished whatever it was he was going to say.
And it dawned on Betsy that her boyfriend, who once she had thought was a master of the universe—and maybe he had been when he’d been a banker—wasn’t just scared of people like Tony Lombardo. He was frightened of Damon and Rory.
“Betsy,” Frankie said, his voice even weaker than when things had been at their absolute worst with his son and he was scared for the boy, so very, very scared, “you can’t be done. As Rory said: not yet. I’m…I’m sorry. See, tomorrow night? Monday? That’s kind of important.”
“No. I want to be an assistant at Futurium and do my job managing all your calendars and meetings and leave it at that.”
“It’s just that you’re…”
“I’m what?”
“You’re not done yet,” Rory said, finishing Frankie’s sentence for him in a way her boyfriend hadn’t planned when he’d been searching for the right words. He was angry, and he put down his tumbler so hard on the coffee table that she was surprised the glass top didn’t break or the tumbler itself didn’t shatter.
Which was when she told herself that Rory was wrong and her fear was not going to cripple her. She was done. She had to be; she had to be for Marisa and she had to be for Crissy. She was in deep, yes, but she was not underwater. So, she was going to fold her cards, she was going to cash in her chips. They or she could choose any casino metaphor they wanted. The point was, she hadn’t killed anyone. She hadn’t broken any laws. At least not on purpose. Sure, she’d let that photographer, Tim Whatever, take some pictures of her at Red Rocks. But that was it. No one, she told herself, could argue that she was part of “a conspiracy,” because she didn’t know what the others were doing.
And so she stood up and stormed past the three men, and only when she reached the front door did she turn back to them. “This is over,” she said. “At least my part.”
And then she was outside and the sun was setting, and to the east she saw the phantasmagoric halo that was Las Vegas.
* * *
In Vermont, the mushrooms in the woods that day had been as big as human skulls. The two girls thought they had found a mass grave. The sisters were ten and eleven at the time, and it had rained most of September. In addition to their sheer size, the mushrooms had quarter-sized dots the color of pitch that looked like the holes for eye sockets or nostrils. If these were skulls, then this part of the forest had been the site of (worst case) some sort of criminal slaughter or (best case) a centuries-old graveyard that had floated up from beneath layers of dirt and decaying pine boxes.
Crissy took Betsy’s arm and let out a small shriek. The sun was setting by six thirty then and it was five thirty in the afternoon, and so the woods already were growing shadowy and dark. They knew the way home. They knew those woods well. But they hadn’t been there since the height of the spring, and the forest always was changing. The sisters had ventured there because their mother’s backyard trail cam at the edge of the woods had picked up a bobcat, and they were just bored enough after school that day—for whatever the reason, they had no after-school activities—and they were just old enough now that their parents weren’t afraid they’d accidentally burn down the house if left alone until their mom returned from the high school. The idea that a bobcat would come so close to the village astonished them, even then. Usually the camera caught only raccoons and squirrels and the occasional deer. And so they had set off, looking for scat or claw marks on trees, not really believing they’d see the animal, but viewing the excursion as something more interesting than homework. The two of them were not long removed from being Brownies, so they still had that Brownie badge work ethic: the relentless drive to cover a sash with pyramidic cloth icons commemorating the ability to splint a finger or think like a scientist or sit with a senior citizen who reeked of urine and feces while she shared a story from her own childhood. Betsy had left the Brownies when her big sister had left, and Crissy had only moved on because she had gotten a part in a community theater production of Annie and felt she was too busy or too important to take the next step and become a Girl Scout.
They were off the path when Crissy cried out.
“What? What?” Betsy asked, and Crissy pointed, and there they were. The younger girl started toward them, the older one attached to her as if Betsy’s arm were an umbilical cord, and she knew within seconds that they were only mushrooms. But Crissy was behind her, and Betsy found the urge to torment her big sister irresistible. “Oh, my God,” she said. “Skulls. People were murdered here. Maybe witchcraft!”
She felt Crissy’s fingers grasping her biceps harder, and she thought her brash, confident big sister—the aspiring actor, even then—was going to cry, and so she went on, “I see bones. Lots of them.”
Crissy started to pull away, and Betsy let her. The girl turned and ran. She’d gone easily twenty-five yards, racing beneath branches and hopping over mossy rocks when she stopped and yelled back, “Betsy, come on! Let’s get out of here!”
Instead, Betsy knelt, as if in supplication, before one of the mushrooms and used two hands to gently lift it from the soft black soil like a chalice in some movie she must have seen that was set in the middle ages. She was careful because it was fragile, but she knew Crissy would perceive her delicacy as respect for the dead. “I think it’s from a grown-up,” she called back. “But these other ones might be little kids.”
“Put it down, put it down!” Crissy screamed. “Let’s go!”
And then Betsy stood up with the mushroom and smashed it between her hands, crumbling it into pieces. Crissy screamed with all the drama of a starlet in a slasher pic. The birds in the trees flew away, and if there was a bobcat anywhere near them, it would have fled without hesitation. Betsy smiled demonically, but Crissy never saw the grin. She had turned, sprinting away in full-on drama queen mode. (Later, she’d insist that she also never saw Betsy cave in the mushroom and sprinkle the pieces on the ground.) And because even then the small stupid things Betsy did took on lives of their own and became big stupid things, Crissy got lost in the woods. It’s easy, especially when dusk is falling or a person is scared. The disorientation and the confusion spike like a fever, and soon it takes a compass to distinguish north from south. (Once, when Betsy was thirty, she had been housesitting for friends with a dog, and the first time she walked the animal in the woods, she lost all sense of direction and needed the compass on her phone to navigate her way west and back to their property, fighting her way through vines and brambles and decaying birches that had tumbled to the ground, and climbing up and over fallen maples, pine trees, and oaks.)
Crissy got home just as their mother was calling the State Police. She was covered in scrapes, including two on her face that had her more terrified they wouldn’t heal in time for the publicity photos they were going to shoot for her next show than the idea that she had seen a pile of human skulls an hour earlier. When Betsy told her they’d only been mushrooms, Crissy shook her head and, for the first time in her life, gave her sister the finger.
The irony to this story, in Betsy’s mind?
No, the ironies?
First, a decade later, when the two of them were in college, one of their classmates from elementary school would kill himself not far from where they had seen the elephantine mushrooms. It was during hunting season, and he had wrapped his lips around the muzzle of his Remington 7600 and used his thumb to press down on the trigger. Arguably, the real killer had been opioids. He hadn’t told anyone he was going into the woods, and it would be two days before his body was found. Moreover, Betsy knew intuitively that the skull beneath his hair and the cap he was wearing would have had a hole that looked very much like the black spots on those mushrooms the two girls had found in the woods.
Second, it would be late that night, when their stepfather came home from the newspaper, that under the subterfuge of comforting Crissy, he would do his worst, and she—Betsy—would walk in and catch them.
Catch him.
How much skin had she seen? Her sister’s pale, bare legs. Her stepfather’s, too, less pale because of the black hair. The room was dark, but the hallway light brightened the room enough. Too much. He was off the bed, she was on it, and then there was the frantic attempt to cover up and reframe the narrative, but you can’t cover that up.
Betsy knew intellectually that what happened there wasn’t her fault. Years later, when Crissy was in rehab, she’d learn it had been going on periodically since Crissy had been in the fourth grade. But would the man have gone into Crissy’s bedroom a little before midnight that night if her sister hadn’t been lost in the woods and so terribly frightened? If their mother hadn’t called the State Police? Would her sister have allowed him to pull her nightgown over head on that particular occasion? Betsy would never know. But she always believed that if she hadn’t told Crissy the mushrooms were skulls and demolished one with her hands, that night would not have unfolded the way that it had: their stepfather wouldn’t have taken advantage of Crissy’s devastation and once more unleashed his own perversions upon her and then, after he was finally caught, taken his own life.
He’d gone to the small carriage barn where they parked the two family cars and hanged himself in the rafters on the second floor. It was why Betsy never, ever confused hanged with hung.
* * *
