What Comes After

  Mother, Son Accused in Beating

  A Craven County, North Carolina, woman is accused of ordering the beating of her 16-year-old niece as punishment for letting loose a family goat.

  Susan A. Allen, 43, of 9 Cocytus Rd., has been charged with malicious wounding, conspiracy and child cruelty.

  Allen’s son, Book Allen, 18, is charged with the same offenses. Both are being held in the Craven Regional Jail.

  Prosecutor F. Lee Trenis said Susan Allen had custody of the victim, who moved to Craven County from Maine two months ago after the death of her father.

  On October 3, Trenis said, the girl, upset at the Allens’ plans to slaughter two young male goats, let the animals out of a pen behind the Allens’ semirural home. The Allens caught one of the goats, but the other got away.

  The missing goat showed up at Craven County High School later that day — two miles through the woods from the Allens’ home. School officials called Susan Allen to retrieve it.

  When Allen arrived at the school, she told school officials she needed her niece at home to help with the goat.

  Trenis, the prosecutor, said Allen told the girl she would be punished. Allen ordered the girl to do chores until that afternoon, when Book Allen, a senior at Craven High, came home from football practice.

  The Allens took the victim to nearby Craven Lake, where, according to Trenis, Susan Allen ordered Book Allen to drag the girl out of the car and “punish” her.

  The girl suffered numerous contusions as a result of the subsequent beating.

  Trenis said Susan Allen ordered the victim to explain her injuries by saying she had been feeding the goats when one “got spooked” and butted her into a fence.

  According to Trenis, the girl told school officials that story the next day, but they didn’t believe it. She eventually told a school counselor about the assault.

  The girl was hospitalized for two days, then released. She has been placed in a foster home.

  I was never supposed to end up in North Carolina.

  I was supposed to stay in Maine instead. I was supposed to live with my best friend, Beatrice, and her family. Go back to my old high school for junior year. Play on the softball team where Beatrice pitched and I played center field with standing orders from Coach to go after every ball hit to the outfield.

  If I’d stayed in Maine, we would have gone riding on Beatrice’s horse down pine trails to the bluffs overlooking the Atlantic. We would have gone sea kayaking and shared her bedroom and made fun of her little brother, Sean, who had his hair in a rat tail — a style nobody had worn since the 1980s.

  We would have made fun of Coach, too, who told us he used to play for a Red Sox farm team, which we doubted. We looked him up one time on the Internet and couldn’t find him on any farm team rosters.

  If I’d stayed in Maine, I would have done all that, and would have gone by my old house sometimes, and the barn and Dad’s vet clinic, and maybe I would have gotten a job with the new vet who took over from Dad back in the spring when his cough got so bad that he couldn’t work. I would have visited the cemetery where Grandma and Grandpa were buried, and now Dad, too. I would have weeded all their plots and planted flowers.

  But life doesn’t turn out the way you expect. Ever. I didn’t expect Dad to die, not even at his sickest, not even when he didn’t know who I was anymore. Not even in those last hours at the hospital, when the click and hush of the oxygen were the only sounds in that dark, awful room, and Reverend Harding hugged me and prayed with me, and said the Twenty-third Psalm — “Yea though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I will fear no evil.”

  When he finished, he whispered, “Iris, I’m so, so sorry. It’s time we let him go.”

  I hadn’t expected that, either. I’d thought we were praying for God to let Dad live.

  Beatrice had been my best friend since elementary school, and her parents promised Dad that they would take care of me. It was the thing he worried about most in his last weeks.

  But things changed not long after he died. Beatrice’s parents started arguing, usually late at night. And they kept arguing — in their bedroom, with the door shut and the sound muffled. We could hear their voices, even if we couldn’t make out what they were saying. Beatrice put on her iPod and turned up the music. I didn’t have an iPod. Sometimes I left the house and rode my bike down to the batting cages. Sometimes, after Beatrice fell asleep, I sat up in my bed until the arguing stopped, as terrified then by the silence as I had been earlier by her parents’ harsh voices.

  Mr. Stone spoke to me first. It was a month after the funeral. “We’re very sorry, Iris,” he said. “Things have gotten difficult for Mrs. Stone and me. I know we promised your father, but that was before —”

  He didn’t finish, but he didn’t have to. I knew what it meant, and it hit me like a line drive to my stomach. He tried to smile. “This doesn’t mean we won’t have you back for a visit,” he added. “Would you like that? Would you like to come back for a visit sometime?”

  He didn’t look at me. He didn’t look at Beatrice. Or at Mrs. Stone. My heart sank.

  Mrs. Stone said she was sorry, too. “I wish we could keep you with us, Iris,” she said. “There are just these things in the way. . . .”

  Her voice trailed off, too. She brushed some hair out of her face and tucked it behind her ears. They were red. Her whole face was red — either from crying or because she was about to. Then she wandered off, the way she often did in the middle of conversations.

  “That’s OK, Mrs. Stone,” I said, knowing Dad would want me to be polite no matter what. But it wasn’t OK. I should have screamed at her instead. I should have screamed at all of them.

  Aunt Sue was the next of kin.

  She was my mom’s older sister. I had only seen her once before, but I didn’t remember because it was when I was a baby. She drove up from North Carolina right after I was born. Dad told me about it. She had a son named Book, who was two then. I never heard about Book having a father. Aunt Sue didn’t want to stay in our house, so the night they arrived, she and Book slept under the camper shell in the back of their truck, even though it was February. They only stayed part of the next day. Aunt Sue looked at me but wouldn’t hold me, got in a fight with my mom about some things that had happened a long time ago, then climbed back in the truck with Book and drove home.

  I didn’t know what to expect from her now, all these years later. When I called her from Beatrice’s, she was smoking the whole time. I heard her light a cigarette, and every time she spoke, I heard her exhale first. She said she was sorry about Dad but didn’t sound as if she meant it. She said Book was looking forward to having me live with them, but that didn’t sound sincere, either. She didn’t say much else.

  I asked if she ever heard from my mom, and there was a long silence.

  Then she said, “No.”

  Then she said, “And I don’t ever expect to, either.”

  I handed the phone off to Beatrice’s dad. I hadn’t really expected my mom to be an option. She left when I was five, and no one knew where she was — not even Aunt Sue, apparently. No one had heard from her in years.

  I went back to the batting cages after getting off the phone, my face burning from anger and frustration, and I swung at high, hard fastballs for an hour until I was too tired to lift the bat.

  Beatrice and I stayed up late the night before I left, packing and repacking my stuff. She kept wanting to add more, trying to make me take clothes that were hers: socks and T-shirts, sweaters and mittens and scarves — as if that would make up for her family abandoning me. I didn’t want any of it.

  “You’re going to come back for Christmas, right?” she asked at one point. It was well after midnight.

&nbs
p; “Yeah,” I said, though I really wasn’t sure of that, or of anything. “If I have the money.”

  “I’ll get you the money,” Beatrice said. “I bet my parents will pay for the whole thing. It’s the least they can do.”

  “Yeah,” I said again, suddenly doubting there would be any Christmas visit. “Maybe.”

  Beatrice’s boyfriend called — his name was Collie — and they spent half an hour whispering, which gave me time to finally finish packing. I had an old hat that Dad used to wear, a green fishing cap. I ran my fingers over the frayed edges and traced the curve of the bill. I pressed it to my face and imagined it smelled like Dad, but probably it didn’t. Probably it had been too long since he’d worn it.

  I put it on, thinking it would be too big, but it fit me just right.

  At three in the morning, Beatrice and I climbed out her window and wandered around town one last time. Nobody was awake but us. We didn’t talk; we didn’t do anything. We just walked down the middle of the street, east toward the harbor. The wind had picked up, blowing in off the Atlantic; it was threatening to storm.

  Our reflections, distorted in the darkened storefront windows as we walked past a row of shops, magnified what a funny-looking pair we were — Beatrice tall, with her black hair and high cheekbones and perfect smile and model’s legs; me short and skinny, with a sharp face and freckles and chopped hair and middle-school boobs; both of us in practice Ts, gym shorts, floppy socks, dirty New Balances. It was about all either of us wore in the summer.

  Beatrice started crying.

  “I’m so sorry about my mom and dad,” she said. “I wish I knew what was going on.”

  I waited for her to say more, to at least try to explain what had happened. Something. But she just cried. I started to comfort her, to act polite and tell her it was OK, like I had with her mom. But then it hit me again how messed up the whole thing was. Maybe her parents were splitting up, but so what? My dad had died, and my best friend’s parents had broken their one promise to him. And all Beatrice could do was cry about it. What about fighting for me? What about insisting that I stay with them no matter what?

  But as much as I wanted to shout all that at Beatrice, I just couldn’t. She and her family were still all I had, even if it was for just this one last night in Maine. So I took off running instead.

  Beatrice yelled “Wait!” but I wouldn’t, so she raced after me down the street, past shops, through people’s yards, down alleys, down to the bay. I let her catch up with me where the land sloped down to the black water — usually calm in the harbor, but churning tonight as the wind kept blowing harder and the rough ocean waves skirted the seawall.

  The storm broke over us as we stood there — a summer squall, as sudden and fierce as a nor’easter.

  “Come on!” I yelled over the roar of the wind and the rain. “Let’s go out on the seawall.”

  Beyond the dark harbor we could see whitecaps rising, smashing hard onto the rocks. The seawall jutted out a quarter of a mile, no longer so high above the tide line. A blue beacon light shone faintly above a small stone cabin at the point.

  “You’re crazy,” Beatrice yelled back. “It’s too dangerous!”

  I ignored her and slid down the muddy embankment to the water’s edge. The rain kept pouring as I climbed over wet rocks and finally onto the wall.

  “Iris!” Beatrice yelled after me, but when I didn’t stop, she followed me.

  Soon we were running, stumbling, leaning into the wind and the hard, slanting rain that pelted us, sharp as needles on our arms and legs and faces — anywhere we were exposed. We struggled on, with the wind howling, the waves rising higher, crashing harder, the spray blinding us.

  It took ten minutes to make it to the end, battling through the wind and that spray, until we fell inside the shack, exhausted. There was no door. Everything was slick and wet. Wood shutters strained but held in the one window on the ocean side. We huddled together at first, crouching low on the floor.

  Beatrice wanted us to stay like that until the storm passed, but I had a different idea. I got up to open the shutters — they slammed against the outside wall — and then I stood there for the next half hour, facing the Atlantic. I gripped the frame tight until I couldn’t feel my hands, just the blasting wind and the needles of rain and the incessant spray. The waves rose dangerously high, threatening to break over the seawall.

  My face burned. I was sure I would have welts from the slicing rain. For a minute it even seemed to be raining backward, the water falling up and into my face from the ocean.

  Then the wind shifted, and slowly, gradually, died. The waves receded. The storm passed.

  There were stars out. I shivered violently from the cold, then turned and helped Beatrice off the floor. We stood there for a couple of minutes more, leaning on each other, then staggered together back home — back to her home. We didn’t speak. I used to always know what Beatrice was thinking, but now, and for most of the past month, I didn’t have a clue. Maybe she kept quiet because she was mad at me for dragging her out onto the seawall, or maybe she just didn’t know what to say anymore.

  I didn’t know what was left to say, either, and didn’t have the words to explain to Beatrice — or to anyone else — how good it had felt to be out there on the seawall in the middle of the storm. How it was so much better than lying awake at night, worrying about moving to North Carolina, thinking about my dad, thinking about all the things I forgot to tell him, all the ways I hadn’t been a good enough daughter, how much I missed him and how awful and deep this black hole of grief was that threatened to pull me all the way in and turn me into something the opposite of myself.

  I stepped outside the next morning to a world lashed clean by the storm. The sun was blinding, the sky blue and cloudless. Beatrice and I struggled to fit my suitcases into the trunk of her dad’s car but kept getting in each other’s way. Everything seemed off — the house, the yard, the street, us — as if it had all been erased, then redrawn: close to the original, but not quite the same. Angles a little different, sight lines no longer clear. I put on sunglasses, but it was still too bright out. I couldn’t see the ocean.

  Once we were done, Beatrice and I both climbed into the backseat. Mr. Stone got in behind the steering wheel and looked blankly at the empty passenger seat for a minute.

  Finally he shrugged. “Off we go, then.” Mrs. Stone waved from the front door, sagging against the frame as if she needed the support to help her stand.

  We’d only gotten a few hours of sleep, but I was still surprised that Beatrice passed out ten minutes later, not long after we pulled onto the Portland highway. Mr. Stone and I didn’t talk. He fiddled with the radio until he found the oldies station that my dad and I always used to listen to, but the ones playing today seemed to have been selected just to make me feel awful: “So Far Away,” “Operator,” “Wish You Were Here.”

  I pulled my hoodie up over my ears to try to block out the sound, and spent the rest of the trip looking out the window at the blur of pine stands and strip malls and little towns and glimpses of the coast, trying to memorize everything as if seeing it for the last time, which maybe I was.

  Once we got on the interstate, the real Maine vanished, though, and it seemed as if we could have been almost anywhere in America — not that I’d been very many places before: Portland a dozen times, Boston twice for softball tournaments, Nova Scotia once on the ferry. I’d never been on an airplane, but I couldn’t get excited about it, knowing what I was leaving and where I was going.

  There was a lobster-roll stand where we got off the interstate, and I asked Mr. Stone if he would stop.

  “You’re hungry?” he asked, looking at the clock on the dashboard. It was ten in the morning.

  I shook my head. “I just wanted to get some Whoopie Pies for my aunt and my cousin. I don’t think they have them in North Carolina. I thought I should probably bring them something.”

  Beatrice stayed asleep when I got out of the car and didn
’t wake up two minutes later when I climbed back in. I had to elbow her awake when we finally reached the airport. She was slumped against my shoulder and left a string of drool when she sat up.

  “Sorry,” she croaked.

  “For what?” I asked. “Falling asleep or getting drool on my hoodie?”

  She blinked and wiped her chin. “What?”

  I shook my head. “Never mind.”

  Mr. Stone looked over the backseat. “Almost there,” he said. “All ready for your big adventure, Iris?”

  Beatrice sniffed. “God, Dad. She’s not going to Disneyland.”

  “I’m aware of that, Beatrice,” Mr. Stone said, his voice sharp. He reached back without looking and gestured at me with an envelope. “This is some spending money for your trip, Iris, and any expenses that might come up when you get to your aunt’s.”

  Beatrice grabbed the envelope and counted the money: two hundred dollars in a stack of crisp twenties. Her face was red when she handed it back over, and I shoved the money into my jeans pocket and mumbled thanks.

  Beatrice’s cell phone rang as we pulled up to the terminal, and I knew from the ringtone that it was Collie. They barely had time to launch into one of their whispery conversations, though, when Mr. Stone stopped at the Departures curb.

  “Gotta go,” Beatrice said into her phone. “Love you, too.”

  Mr. Stone said he would wait in the cell-phone lot for Beatrice to go in with me, and she started chattering the minute he drove off, I guess trying to make up for all the things she hadn’t been awake long enough to say in the car. “Call me when you get there, OK? And e-mail me as soon as you get to a computer. Tell me everything. See if you can take pictures and send them to me. And find out when you can come back to visit.”

  Her phone rang again. “It’s Collie,” she said. “He must have forgotten to tell me something.”

  She scooted off to talk while I got my ticket and checked my bags.

  I wanted to reach over and snap her cell phone closed, but instead I just stood there seething. Beatrice had changed in the past month. The worse things were between her parents, and the closer I got to leaving, the more obsessed she’d become with boys.