Rust & Stardust Page 28

  His voice always grew softer at the part about Texas with its wide open spaces, the moon and stars above, like he was sharing a secret with Sally. A beautiful little secret.

  “Miss Horner? I asked you a question. Is this man, Frank La Salle, your stepfather?”

  “My stepfather died when I was six. I never saw this man before that day at the Woolworth’s.”

  * * *

  The pilot came onto the loudspeaker and said they were flying over Chicago now, and that it wouldn’t be long until they arrived in Philadelphia, where her mother would be waiting. They’d given her a new outfit to wear: a navy blue suit and a polka-dot blouse, a brand-new pair of black shoes and a bright red coat. It had brought tears to her eyes, as she remembered Sister Mary Katherine trying to give her that beautiful red coat from the lost and found.

  They’d also given her a perky straw cap, which one of the ladies at the detention center affixed to her hair. “What lovely curls you have,” she’d said, and Sally had thought of Ruth. Of her curls collecting on the floor of Ruth and Hank’s trailer.

  Suddenly, the plane bobbed and dipped, and her stomach roiled in waves of nausea.

  “I think I might be sick,” she said, eyes wide and teary as she bent over, light-headed. Mr. Cohen reached into the seat pocket and pulled out a flattened paper bag, and because it was too late to stand up and run to the restroom, she threw up into the paper sack, both mortified and relieved.

  “It’s okay,” he said. “It’s just a bit of turbulence. It should steady out. Try to breathe. You’ll see your mother soon.”

  ELLA

  It was nearing midnight, March 31, 1950, and Ella waited in the backseat of assistant prosecutor William Cahill’s car at the airport, watching the planes land. In only moments, it would be April 1, April Fool’s Day. Part of her still believed this could possibly be just part of an elaborate hoax, a cruel joke.

  “Is that her?” she asked, leaning forward toward the front seat as a small plane taxied toward them.

  “No, ma’am,” Mr. Cahill said without looking back. “Not yet. She’ll be here soon. They said there’s just a small delay.”

  Susan also sat in the backseat. Dee was asleep in Susan’s arms. Al sat up front with Mr. Cahill, smoking.

  “Why doesn’t it come?” Ella asked no one in particular, peering out the glass at the tarmac, the smoke making her eyes tear.

  She turned back to Susan and studied the sleeping child in her arms. Already nearing two years old. Where had this time gone? Every time she looked at Dee she was reminded how very long Sally had been away. She was like a wall marked up with a child’s height, a stunning reminder of time’s insistent and inevitable passage.

  Abruptly, Al stubbed his cigarette out in the ashtray and reached for the door handle. When the door opened, a cold breeze rushed into the car. Ella trembled.

  “What is it, Al? Is it her?” she asked, but he was already striding across the tarmac, and in the distance, she could see the lights of the plane guiding the way for her daughter to come home to her.

  SALLY

  The photo that would be in all the newspapers was the one of Sally descending the steps of the airplane as her mother waited for her, Mr. Cahill gently holding Ella’s arm. In the photo, Sally’s face was anguished, her eyes wet. But what Sally felt as she walked down those steps and saw her mother standing there, waiting for her, was so much more complicated than anything those photographers with their popping, blinding bulbs could capture.

  Her mother looked older. Sally knew, of course, that she herself would appear older to her mother. It had been two years; she was still a little girl when her mother last saw her. But she hadn’t expected that her mother would have changed, too. That the lines that had just started to appear at the corners of her eyes, her mouth, would have deepened. That the sadness she’d seen pass across her mother’s face before would have settled there, in the downward turn of her eyes and lips.

  Ella, like Sally, wore a dark suit, and a dark little cap with a net veil that covered her forehead. It looked familiar, and it took Sally only a moment to realize it was the same cap that she had worn long ago to her stepfather’s funeral. This more than anything made Sally’s heart feel wooden. Too heavy to stay suspended in her chest.

  Ella reached for her, pulling away from that man, and Sally began to cry.

  “I want to go home, Mama.”

  Her mother held her as they made their way past the journalists barking out their questions. The flashbulbs were like fireworks.

  Are you worried about La Salle getting out? Did you know he’d raped those other little girls? Did he make you share a bed? Sally, Sally, Sally. He says he was like a father to you. Sally, did you love him?

  She and her mother were ushered to one car. Al and Susan were escorted to another.

  “Can we please just go home?” she asked her mother, whose mouth twitched, eyes narrowed.

  The man driving the car turned around and said, “Real sorry, Miss Horner, but you can’t actually go home just yet. We’ve got to take you to Pennsauken. To the Camden County Children’s Center. They’ll take good care of you there, just until the trial’s over.”

  “I can’t go home?” This felt like one of those nightmares she had sometimes, the ones where she was trying to go somewhere but her legs refused to move.

  “Sorry, sweetheart, it’s the law.”

  Her mother reached for her hand. “It won’t be long,” she promised, but Sally felt like she’d just been fooled. Like everybody was playing tricks on her. Even her own mother.

  “I’ll come see you,” Ella said. “It’s going to be okay.”

  Sally shook her head and then leaned against the cold window, letting the hot tears stream down her face.

  ELLA

  Ella sat so close to Sally in the courtroom, she could feel the heat coming off her. Thankfully, they’d brought that awful man straight back to Camden, shackled to two lawmen on a train, they said, so Ella only had to spend a couple of nights away from Sally, though those two nights somehow seemed longer than any she’d spent over the last two years.

  The pink dress she’d made fit Sally, but somehow it didn’t seem right. Like a grown woman wearing a child’s smock. Sally fidgeted inside it, fussed with the hem, the collar.

  Ella’s body ached; her joints were swollen. It felt like she might just burst. She was a balloon filled with too much breath.

  When that man, Frank La Salle, entered the courtroom, she felt Sally’s body stiffen next to her. Ella squeezed her hand.

  Frank La Salle didn’t look at either one of them as he took the stand. His head bowed low, he sat down, and the judge asked him how he pleaded.

  “Guilty, sir,” he said, and Ella gasped. The lawyers told her that he would likely put up a fight. But here he was, this sad old man, admitting what he’d done to her child.

  Ella could hardly hear what was being said for the buzzing in her ears. It was as if a swarm of bees had taken up residence inside her brain.

  “Mr. La Salle, you, sir, are a moral leper. I sentence you to thirty to thirty-five years in state prison. You’ll serve the sentence for the abduction concurrently.”

  Ella watched his face for any sort of reaction to what the judge had said. But he remained stoic, unflinching.

  The judge looked directly at Ella before returning to Frank. “Mothers throughout the country will give a sigh of relief to know that a man of this type is safely in prison.”

  It was only then that Ella noted a shift in Frank’s expression. He was smiling. Smiling at her.

  SALLY

  The newspaper folks came to the house on Linden Street, wanted another photo for the papers now that Sally was settled back at home. They asked her to sit and pose with the phone to her ear, pretending she was calling home. Her mother’s phone service had been cut off, however, so as she lifted the receiver and pressed it to her ear, it connected to nothing.

  “Perfect!” the reporter had said, winking at he
r. “Welcome home, Sally.”

  Later she offered to help her mother make supper. Sue and Al were coming over with the baby.

  “Mama?” Sally said.

  Her mother was at the counter, assembling a meat loaf. The ground beef was pink, with a bright yellow egg floating on top.

  “Get me the bread crumbs,” Ella said, without looking up from the bowl.

  Sally reached into the cupboard where her mother kept the staples. Everything was where it had always been. Flour, sugar, oats. What did she expect? That everything had changed while she was away?

  Her mother sprinkled the bread crumbs into the bowl, worked the egg and crumbs into the meat.

  “Ruth makes hers with Quaker Oats,” Sally said. “Instead of bread crumbs.”

  “Ruth?”

  “Mrs. Janish, she was our neighbor at the Good Luck. Remember, the one whose telephone I used to call home?”

  Her mother flinched.

  Sally hadn’t talked to her mother at all about her time away with Mr. Warner. But she wanted her to know about the good things. That it wasn’t all terrible. That in a way she’d been taken care of by so many people. Sister Mary Katherine. Lena. Ruth. She thought of Ruth, asking her to grab the container of oats and shake some into the bowl when her hands were covered with the hamburger and eggs. Tap a couple of drops of Tabasco in there too, would ya? she’d say. Gives it a bit of a kick. And then Ruth would kick back her bare foot behind her.

  “I cooked in Baltimore, mostly hamburgers and eggs. But Ruth taught me how to make chili and meat loaf and we made pork chops once, but I burnt them so we had to feed ’em to Tex. Oh, Mama, you woulda loved Tex. He was the sweetest dog ever. He slept on my pillow every night, liked to put his nose in my hair…”

  Her mother’s hands flew to her ears, like a child trying to block out the sound. It didn’t matter that there was hamburger and egg on her hands; she pressed her ears against her head, and the raw meat stuck to her skin.

  “Mama,” Sally asked, scared. “What’s the matter?”

  Her mother lowered her hands from her face then, and looked like she was just waking up from a dream. She shook her head and quickly cleaned the mess from her cheeks with a dish towel.

  “It’s nothing, Sally. I’m sorry.”

  ELLA

  “I’m going out to get the mail,” Sally said.

  Ella was at her sewing machine. Al had finally convinced her to see that specialist in Philadelphia, who prescribed some medicine to help with the pain in her hands. While the pain was still there, of course, it was dulled. Deadened a bit. Enough so that she’d been able to get back to work, send that sweet girl Vivi back home to her own mama. She knew she needed to start making money again on her own if she and Sally were to stay in the house on Linden Street.

  Ella wasn’t sure what she had expected if Sally were ever to come home. On those rare occasions when she allowed herself to entertain that weak flicker of hope, she hadn’t thought past the reunion. She’d imagined the moment that she took her daughter in her arms. She’d dreamed the scent of her hair, the way it would feel to hold on to her. The sound of her voice. What it would feel like to hear her say “Mama” again. But beyond that she hadn’t dared (or even known how) to imagine.

  What she hadn’t known, couldn’t have known, was that Sally would be so different. Of course, she was recognizable. Her pale blue eyes. Her curls and her soft smile. Her voice was the same. But she was also changed. Physically, of course, she was more woman than child now. But it was so much more than that. Where she had once been such a bright, shimmering light, there was a certain dullness, a darkness now. All that light that used to dance in her eyes was dimmed a bit. Where she had once been interminably curious, she was now somehow shrewder. As though she already knew everything there was to know about the world, and the burden of this knowledge exhausted her. Her endless enthusiasm and eagerness had been replaced by wariness, weariness.

  Ella felt like Rip Van Winkle, like she’d closed her eyes and woken up with two years stolen out from under her. She might have gotten her daughter back, but those two years were gone. Ella could barely consider what had happened in her child’s life in the last two years. She was a girl trespassed upon, violated in unthinkable ways. Ella tried so hard to put those thoughts out of her mind, but it sometimes seemed as if Sally’s skin still bore the imprints of that man’s hands. She was jumpy now: she flinched and winced, stiffened. Her left eye had taken to twitching nervously. Even when she seemed to be enjoying herself, that trembling lid betrayed her.

  When Sally tried to talk about her life on the road with Frank La Salle, Ella felt her ears begin to buzz. She saw stars. That woman, Ruth, who had helped her escape. She spoke about her with a fondness that felt, oddly, like a betrayal to Ella.

  “Ruth sent another letter,” Sally said, coming in from outside.

  “That right?” she said, and pressed the treadle.

  That woman had written letters nearly every other week since Sally came home. Sally had offered to let Ella read them, but it had been too difficult.

  Sally pored over the paper in her hands, her eye scanning the words.

  “Oh, Mama!” she said, looking up, her eyes oddly bright though filling with tears.

  “What is it?” Ella asked.

  “She’s gonna have a baby. She just found out! Oh, how I’d love to go see her. Do you think? I mean, is there any way…” Sally’s words trailed off, like unraveled stitches.

  “Of course not,” Ella snapped, snipping them off like the blades of her shears. “What’s the matter with you, wantin’ to go back there?”

  “Oh, Mama,” she said. “I didn’t mean…”

  “You’d think you missed it there. Living in squalor with that monster. What’s the matter with you?”

  The second she said it, she felt the same way she had when she snapped at Russell that night. Her bitterness something she couldn’t control, and the bile of her words burning her tongue afterward.

  AL

  “She loves you,” Al said to Sally.

  “Sue?” Sally asked, distracted.

  He’d given her a watering can and asked her to water the annuals that he’d arranged earlier in tidy rows along the long tables in the greenhouse. She seemed to marvel at the delicate spray of water, the simple task of watering the thirsty soil.

  “Your mama,” he said. “She’s just struggling.”

  “Her rheumatism’s better since she saw the specialist.”

  “Not that, Sally,” Al said.

  He watched her as she moved down the aisle, shuffling her feet like an old woman instead of a teenaged girl.

  When he thought about all the things she must be carrying around inside that head of hers, that heart, it took everything he had not to punch something. Someone. If he’d made it to California before the police got to him, he’s pretty sure he could indeed have killed Frank La Salle. Even with him safely in prison now, justice supposedly being served did little to quell his rage.

  And Ella, Ella who’d been offered this gift, was acting like a damn fool. Here was her daughter. Alive. Saved. But he’d seen her barely able to look Sally in the eye.

  “Can I stay with you and Sue?” Sally said, carefully dribbling water into some geraniums. “Maybe go to school here in Florence this fall? I’m behind at school now. None of my friends from Camden will be in my grade.”

  Al rubbed his hand across his face. As much as he wanted to tell her that she could stay with them, live with them, he knew it wasn’t right. The girl had lost two fathers already; he wasn’t about to let her lose her mother, too. Ella owed her this.

  “You can stay with us this summer,” he offered. “But you need your mama. And she needs you.”

  Camden, New Jersey

  1951–1952

  SALLY

  Sally was a year behind in school. In the fall of 1951, those girls she once knew—Vivi and Bess and the others with their shiny hair and untroubled eyes—moved on to high school
, but she was left behind in the eighth grade, her life somehow stunted. Towering over the other children, more woman than girl, she stuck out. An aching, throbbing thumb.

  Everyone knew who she was. Everyone knew what Frank La Salle had done to her. Yet no one said a word. It was as if they all shared the same awful secret. But she could feel it in the way their gazes held too long: the girls assessing, and the boys? God only knows what they were thinking.

  At school, she sat in the back, never raised her hand. It didn’t matter, because the teacher never called on her anyway. She listened, of course, her mind thrilling still at the amazing world and all that there was still to learn. At how much she had missed while she was away.

  “Who can tell me the phases of the moon?” the teacher asked, her eyes expectant.

  Silence. Sally’s arm itched with the desire to lift.

  “Anyone?”

  New moon, waxing crescent, first quarter … Her mind hummed. Waxing gibbous.

  “It’s right there in your textbook. Didn’t anyone study the lesson?”

  Full moon! That bright full moon that hung overhead, casting its brilliant light through the window in the rooming house in Atlantic City. She’d stared at her pale skin in wonder as it bathed her in its cool light. Marveled at its tidal pull, the sound of the waves crashing against the sand through the open window.

  “Waning…?” the teacher prompted.

  In Baltimore, it waned, dimming the dark corners of that attic room. The world, the world of that locked room had been made of shadows, and she’d felt betrayed by the heavens.

  The girl in front of her raised her hand.

  “Yes, Abigail?”

  “Crescent?”

  “Not yet. Waning gibbous, third quarter, then…?” The teacher sighed, disappointed in all of them.

  Waning crescent, Sally thought. That sliver of moon that sliced the sky the morning she realized that Lena and the circus had left. She’d walked through the empty lots where Lena and the others’ trailers had been. The dirt littered with sparkling sequins, like scattered stars in an upside-down sky, the only evidence they had ever been there.