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The Mailer Review/Volume 13, 2019/Silent Night: Difference between revisions
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Though Carol’s parents continued to live in town, and Carol returned to live with them intermittently throughout the years, I rarely saw her. I didn’t know anyone who knew her, so for me her disappearance shouldn’t have made much difference. Still, when the fliers went up in the pharmacy and the Shop Rite and the bike shop, when they flapped on telephone poles on Park Road, I felt, as did all her old high school friends, a terrible loss. The local po- lice station began to receive sightings of Carol in New Britain, in Bridge- port. She was spotted in Vermont, in Lakeland, Florida. | Though Carol’s parents continued to live in town, and Carol returned to live with them intermittently throughout the years, I rarely saw her. I didn’t know anyone who knew her, so for me her disappearance shouldn’t have made much difference. Still, when the fliers went up in the pharmacy and the Shop Rite and the bike shop, when they flapped on telephone poles on Park Road, I felt, as did all her old high school friends, a terrible loss. The local po- lice station began to receive sightings of Carol in New Britain, in Bridge- port. She was spotted in Vermont, in Lakeland, Florida. | ||
But I knew she was none of those places. She’d been last seen leaving her parents’ house, walking down Gun Hill Road. Her mother, suffering from Alzheimer’s, couldn’t say the exact time. Her father had been in the base- ment watching the game on television and had fallen asleep. The night she disappeared, the barn at Folly Farm caught fire. The fire department re- sponse was swift, but the freezing temperatures hampered the fire fighters’ efforts, and twenty horses were lost to smoke inhalation. She had nothing to do with the fire—a spark in the wiring caused it to smolder and then rage— but everyone would associate the barn fire and her disappearance the way that people always associate tragedies. “They come in threes.” | |||
For me, the third loss was the death of my first husband, whom I’d long divorced. He drove his car off the road leaving the old Gun Club and hit a tree. If my sisters and I had stayed married to our local boys we would all three be widows now. Or we would have been in the car with them when the accident happened. Our bodies might have been found in shallow graves in the woods or asphyxiated in our station wagons in our garages. And even if there had been a chance to go back and start over, who’s to say what we would have done differently? Who’s to say how things might have turned out. | |||