Ripple

In the woods, in the river, in the trees.

Most of us grow up gradually, carried along by the river of time, shaped by what touches us and what passes us by. But rivers have sinkers—obstructions that aren’t visible on the surface—that snag us and hold us in place while the flow rushes over and past us, forcing us to grow up in very specific ways in a hurry. Sometimes the sinker catches one soul, sometimes it catches whole communities. Memory is complicated, but this is my story about how the people I grew up with got caught on a sinker in the river of time and nothing was ever the same. 

On Christmas day this year, visiting my mom, I walked out to the woods I played in as a child and found what must surely have been a makeout spot for teenagers who made these woods their playground long after I moved away. 

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It’s 1978 and I’m eleven and my sister is nine, and we live with our parents and infant brother in a raised ranch on a half acre surrounded by farmland and woods on the inland South Shore of Massachusetts. We’re semi-latchkey kids spending the summer as an amoebic horde of a dozen other pre-hormonal neighborhood kids moving from yard to yard playing kickball, street hockey, basketball, hide and seek, and kick the can. 

We climb trees and swim in above-ground pools, running around the inside edge to make a whirlpool that carries us in wide wet circles while a radio blares Donna Summer and The Bee Gees into the humid air. We ride bikes with banana seats and tasseled handlebars, baseball cards clipped to the spokes making that sound our parents hate as we go. Our pogo sticks punctuate the afternoons with terrible clanging, our jump ropes slap asphalt, and we screech at each other for the right to play Steve Austin, Jaime Sommers, or Diana Prince, in our plotless imaginings. 

We play strip poker in the pop-up camper in the driveway across the street, but everyone chickens out before fully naked. We dig up fat chunks of rich gray clay by the river and use a stick to smash pokeberries into the sludge to make purple pinch pots that we let dry in the sun on the basement stairwell. We raid my father’s garden for ground-fall tomatoes and make sun soup with water from the hose in buckets from the sandbox. We bike to Caswell’s market to spend our allowance on bags of Atomic Fireballs and Jolly Ranchers, Charleston Chews, and Marathon Bars, and shake our icy cans of Mountain Dew and Tab when we get home, then try to catch the explosive fountains in our open mouths. 

At the top of Vernon Street, we roam the woods for hours, the sun warming the pine sap and filling the air with that pungent fragrance that smells like home. Maybe our parents don’t know there are older kids, too. Teenagers. Smokers. Beer drinkers. Fire starters. Cussers. French kissers. Second basers. My heart crashes in its cage and my belly sours whenever we encounter them. They tell us girls to hurry up and grow our tits. Tell us mosquito bites aren’t worth a thing. Tell us they like our backyard swing then laugh and ignore us. 

We hold hands to walk out into the alfalfa field to pee
and scare ourselves senseless, certain we can see the ghosts
of the Wampanoag Indians that were exhumed from the land
beneath our feet to make way for our houses in the 1960s. 

We stay out all day trying to avoid them but are somehow collectively drawn close to their outer orbit, playing house in those same woods, building pretend rooms that we outline on the forest floor with pine boughs, rocks, and fern leaves, kissing each other to practice for what we hope someday soon comes next. 

Lunch, if we want it, is usually a sandwich; bologna and American cheese on split-top white bread with mustard and bread and butter pickles; peanut butter and jelly; or peanut butter and fluffernutter. We don’t mind the crust. But the moms aren’t running a diner. So come and eat, clean up your mess, and then back out the door to wade in the Taunton River, skim rocks on Sturtevant’s Pond, or sneak into Mr. Honeywell’s barn down the dirt road way back in the woods to play with his two giant hogs. 

Our pockets jingle with change in case the creepy old ice cream man comes lurking down the street in his old-fashioned truck that plays circus music at the wrong speed and has a freezer door at the back so he has to get out to dig for our treats. Nobody wants to stand close to him or touch his dark, wrinkled hand when we pay him. We split banana and root beer popsicles and dig through melting sherbet in a plastic cone in search of the soggy gumball or lick the dripping vanilla with chocolate swirl ice cream from a cardboard push-up pop tube. 

The rule is to be home before the streetlights come on but then we get to go back out to play tag in the dark or to ruin bed sheets by making them into tents with broomsticks, rope, and clothespins driven into the ground. We sleep out, coated in Off and Skin So Soft, our Mickey Mouse sleeping bags damp from the dew, telling ghost stories by flashlight, watching fireflies dance above the layer of fog, listening to the night bugs and an owl in the woods. We hold hands out into the alfalfa field to pee and scare ourselves senseless, certain we can see the ghosts of the Wampanoag Indians that were exhumed from the land beneath our feet to make way for our houses in the 1960s. 

Summer ends and school starts and soon after, a girl named Mary Lou disappears from the next town over. Her bike is found a mile or so from her house with paint on the fender from the car that it’s believed— and is later confirmed—to have hit her when she was on her way back from a friend’s house. She’s fifteen and older siblings in the regional high school system know who she is, talk about how pretty, how nice, how popular. 

Helicopters roar through the sky like all the angry dads we know—back and forth over the woods to the east and to the west of our house, tracing the sky above the river that snakes through and away from our neighborhood. The sky is hard and loud. Heavy. Endless. Filled with invisible smoke. I can smell the world burning even though I can’t see the flames. The moms are pale and shrinking into themselves, disappearing, their faces wan and tired, huddled at the ends of driveways, even the ones that don’t like each other leaning closer to speculate and worry together, their grimacing heads on swivel. 

Nobody knows what to do. Stay indoors. Stay in the yard.
Don’t talk to strangers. Don’t talk to older kids. But the older kids don’t miss a beat. They keep the game going. You’re cute. But too skinny. Too bad you’re so flat.
Not like Mary Lou, I think, she’s beautiful. I bet you don’t even know how to kiss, kid. I want to tell them they’re wrong, I’m getting good at it. 

If I’m outdoors, I soon hear, where are you, Kelly Jean? We don’t dare wander far. We’re all on auto-pilot, kids trudging up to the corner to get the school bus, parents backing their sedans out of driveways to head to work, fear swirling under our skin like the unearthly green grass fronds waving in the river’s current. Everything is sideways. The tuna casserole burns, the grass doesn’t get its final cut, and the pool water turns green before the cover gets put on. We watch the nightly news for updates, and there are leads about a man who did something like this once before, but there’s no sign of Mary Lou. 

We gather in backyards where grownups can see us, lighting the ends of small sticks on fire with a stolen lighter, tracing the glowing tips in wide arcs, picking fat ticks off the dogs, and lighting those on fire, too, watching their bodies burst and sizzle in an ashtray stolen along with the lighter. The maple leaves turn bloody pink and red across the neighborhood then fall and collect in rain-matted piles. Halloween is coming and we won’t be trick-or-treating alone this year. Nobody knows what to do. Stay indoors. Stay in the yard. Don’t talk to strangers. Don’t talk to older kids. But the older kids don’t miss a beat. They keep the game going. You’re cute. But too skinny. Too bad you’re so flat. Not like Mary Lou, I think, she’s beautiful. They laugh, I bet you don’t even know how to kiss, kid. I want to tell them they’re wrong, I’m getting good at it. 

Months pass. It’s just weeks after Halloween. The news says two runners find her in the state forest. Not my forest. Not my little woods carpeted with the Princess Pine we make into an Advent wreath at Christmas. My woods with tender pink Lady Slippers and ghostly white Indian Pipes emerging from the soil like delicate boners. Not near my stream where I dip my freckled face under the surface to sip on the hottest days, my eyes open, watching the light dance shadows on the sand, my curls dangling, wicking the cold wet against my sweating neck, only afraid of the teenagers and this thing I’ll know later as desire. 

He tied her to a tree with baling wire. They thought she was a scarecrow. The wire decapitated her. 

I ask, what does decapitated mean? Mom looks away from the TV, and won’t meet my eyes. Dad says that means the wire cut her head off. Mom is angry. You didn’t have to tell them. Dad rolls his eyes, they’re going to find out. Everyone will. Better to hear it from us. Mom glares at all of us, you aren’t allowed in the woods. Never again. I wonder, what kind of tree? 

I want to go to my woods. To climb to the top of the oak that lifts me above the canopy so I can see all of our houses and driveways and cars. See us all swimming and swinging and digging in the sand. Clothes on lines flapping in the summer breeze. Fathers pushing mowers, pulling weeds, listening to the Red Sox on transistor radios, sipping frosty cans of Schlitz as they stare into the middle distance waiting for a homer. I want to see our houses all neat and real and laid out in a row just the way they were planned, our parents waiting for us to come home for supper, the hot dogs and hamburgers sizzling on the hibachi, paper plates, ketchup, mustard, and relish ready for us on the picnic table next to a big bowl of Ruffle’s potato chips and a two-liter bottle of root beer. The air filled with the neon crack of mosquitos frying in the bug zapper. 

I want each mother and father and sister and brother to come out on their front lawn and hold their hand across their brow to block the sun, searching the treetops for my face, then let their hand float up to wave when they see me. Let me name them and hold them in place forever.