I.

On the other side of the road, on a bench facing the ocean, she looked up from the book she was reading just in time to see them lift the body from the marsh where it had been stashed like dirty laundry, wrapped in a red-checkered cloth that looked like a picnic blanket, the color faded to a dull maroon. 

She stuck her finger in her book and joined the small crowd that had gathered outside the general store where, like today, she always purchased a sandwich on her lunch break. A couple from Boston squinted in the noonday sun; so did a housewife clutching groceries in paper bags, and the cashier and soda jerk from the store.

It took two policemen to lift the body out and put it in the back of an ambulance under the direction of a medical examiner in pleated black pants and a white starched shirt. She remembered how white and spotless that shirt looked in comparison to the waterlogged blanket. He was smoking a cigarette and two years later she would go out on a date with him.

There was also a policeman in the middle of the street directing traffic. Every now and then he would look at her from the corner of his eye. She really didn’t like the way he was looking at her. Why did he pick her of all people to look at? The woman from Boston wore nicer clothes, and had a trim figure. Even back then she hadn’t turned many men’s heads. Did he think she was involved somehow, might know the body? He probably just recognized her from her job at the courthouse.

She had finally settled on this explanation when she noticed the pale wet foot sticking out of one end of the blanket. On the pale wet foot was a lime green high-heeled shoe, the kind her mother might get on sale for her at Filene’s Basement.

The fact she could only see one high heel on one foot and not the other troubled her.

The medical examiner closed the back doors of the ambulance and the policeman in the street blocked the traffic so he could drive out. Then, he got into his patrol car and left the opposite way, leaving the noontime traffic to fend for itself.

The lights were not lit on the top of the ambulance so it simply joined the rest of the traffic, mostly mainlanders rushing down the Cape for the weekend. She stood and watched the ambulance slowly and quietly recede into the distance. The other two policemen stood mulling around the marsh. The couple from Boston and the housewife left. The soda jerk and cashier lingered a little longer, reluctant to return to work.

It took some time before she realized her index finger still kept her place in the book. 

+

That was thirty-four years ago. Thirty-four years! She still worked at the same place, still had lunch most days at the same spot. Worst things had happened in her life: the assassination of Bobby Kennedy after King, the death of her father at a young age, her mother’s death just last year, the final person who would ever love her. Worst of all the electrical fire that had left her permanently disfigured, her hair loose clumps, her nose two pin pricks and her mouth a swollen wound, her voice box an itch that could never be scratched. But she still pointed to the time she’d lost her innocence as that moment when everyone’s attention had turned from the surf to the marsh.

Only it wasn’t on the day they found the body, it was all the weeks and months and years that followed. The days when details were sparse but gruesome rumors ran rampant, and the town, fearing a killer on the loose, suffered under a voluntary curfew that all but crippled the economy at the height of tourist season. After the first month, a description of the body was released: woman, five feet, seven inches, one-hundred-and-forty pounds, expensive dental work. Nearly decapitated: one side of head crushed, possibly with shovel. Possibly deceased one week. Both hands and one leg missing, possibly in an attempt to hide identity. Wearing a plaid green wool skirt and yellow angora sweater and a green high-heeled shoe on one remaining foot. between twenty-five and thirty-five years old. Wrapped in a forty-by-sixty inch red-checkered picnic blanket. No sign of struggle. Curly orange hair.

The next month the newspaper offered a reward for information leading to the identity of the body.

The month after that they confessed all the tips had led nowhere, but the reward would remain until the identity was found.

On the first year anniversary, the newspaper featured a two-page spread on the case of the unidentified body they had named the Picnic Girl. Every anniversary after that they ran an article (“Whatever Happened to the Picnic Girl?”) with the same boilerplate text and only the date switched out. They did this for ten years, then every couple of years, then never.

When she dated the medical examiner—being an islander year-round left her dating pool sparse, and working at the courthouse left it even sparser—she’d asked him why the police didn’t do more to find out who the body was.

He took her to his office and flicked the lights on in the closet. It was filled with shelf upon shelf of boxes. He told her inside the boxes were bones, fragments of skeletons to scores of unknown victims. It was like having the pieces to a million jigsaw puzzles, but not enough to get the picture right, or to even know sometimes if you had them in the right puzzle. Then, he’d tried to make love to her in there and she’d said no and didn’t return his phone calls.

She’d never really dated much after that, and after the fire she’d put being in a relationship on the back burner, so to speak. It wasn’t that she didn’t think she could find someone to love or love her; it’s just that those sort of things seemed, well, unimportant.

Because a person could just disappear and become a body, and nobody would care, and nothing would be left of them but one cheap green shoe.

She tried not to blame anyone. She’d been a picnicker herself once, too.

+

II.

She was now a stenographer at the courthouse.

After her job that day—transcribing the deposition statement of a witness to insurance fraud—she checked the clock above her desk. Yes, she had just enough time to log in before going home to get ready.

She had a hobby—everyone who worked at the courthouse knew about it—involving a computer bulletin board database of thousands of missing persons and unknown remains that she and other people with modems combed for potential connections.

Most of the remains had faces to go with them, modeled in clay or latex, that were based on the bone structure of the skulls and intended to represent a likeness of the deceased.

She found these faces repulsive. Their carved smiles, she supposed, were to make them look sympathetic. But as the photos slowly loaded on the web page from top to bottom, nothing could hide the vacuous nothing that first met you in their eyes. They looked like museum cavemen, the death masks of black holes.

Her own eyes had been undamaged from the fire. Even so, she wore sunglasses, wraparound mirrored things she’d picked up at a tourist trap downtown long ago. Before the fire, when she wore her sunglasses, people didn’t know if she was looking at them but assumed she was, seeing themselves reflected through her eyes. The policeman directing traffic that day had really only been staring at himself.

Things changed after the fire. While her body was visible she had become invisible. People stared openly, avoiding themselves in her eyes, as if not seeing themselves somehow meant she couldn’t see them.

This gave her a sort of power, not truly being seen.

Two bailiffs snickered behind her, saying most people used the net to jerk off, heck, maybe that’s what she was doing. 

They were wrong, of course. It was never about the sex. It was always about the masks. 

She opened a page on an unidentified body, one nobody had even bothered modeling a face for. Female, age fifty-eight to sixty. Otherwise unrecognizable due to putrefaction. Cause of death: unknown. Personal items: two keys. Body: Found in residence. How can someone have a residence and still be unknown?

Six years ago to the day she had removed the Picnic Girl’s mask, discovered her true identity and closed her page. Tonight she would celebrate with the only other person this mattered to. 

She went home to change into a new wig, a frizzy orange one. She painted the rubbery strips that were now her lips a bright red. She thought about downing a fistful of pills to numb the stinging pain she was constantly experiencing but she knew it would be better if she was sober, so she just threw on an old raincoat. She left her sunglasses on, even though it would be dark by the time she arrived at her destination.

It was easier getting around in the off-season, though the town became a desolate and lonely place. She still had to stop at the florist before driving off island.

There was only an hour left of visiting time when she finally arrived at the nursing home. She noticed he’d gotten a new roommate since last year. That was the problem with nursing homes, your new friends kept dying. This new one was sleeping in front of a television blaring a rerun of Kojak. She wondered how many bodies here went unclaimed. 

She kicked him in the foot, not hard.

He looked like one of the masks—until the glimmer of recognition wet his eyes.

“Remember me?” she said. She placed the flowers, a funerary bouquet, on his nightstand. She took the raincoat off, revealing the dry yellow sweater and green skirt she’d worn to work that day. Her pale wet skin and orange hair glistened in the stark fluorescent light, as did the drool dribbling down his chin. A breathing tube inserted into his nose reminded her of the one she had been forced to breathe from for months after the fire. 

“Summer, 1964. You were an encyclopedia salesman and a serial adulterer and on vacation with your wife when you got into a fight and caved her head in with a shovel. You used the shovel to sever her arms and a leg but couldn’t stomach more. You left her wrapped in a blanket in a marsh and went home and told everyone she’d run off with a sailor. And for some reason everyone believed you.”

Her voice was low and scratchy and her red lips didn’t move so the words she spoke seemed to come from the center of the earth. 

“Her name—our name—was Janet Lineman before we met you. You have three sons that grew up without their mother.”

He was staring into her sunglasses. She knew he was seeing himself, the years, reflected back.

“Six years ago I found out Janet was the Picnic Girl. Six years we’ve celebrated that day the Picnic Girl died and Janet lived again. And I’m going to celebrate that day here with you every year until one of us is dead.”

His eyes were white. These were no black holes.

“Maybe next year we’ll celebrate with the police,” she said. “Maybe your sons too, and all your grandchildren.”

His breathing grew heavy. His nostrils were a clogged fountain. 

She sat and watched him struggle for air for a few quiet minutes, then left him alone, her green high-heels clacking down the hallway.

On the way home, she stopped at the picnic table where she almost always ate her lunch. The area had been built up— the general store was long gone—but the marshes were still there, protected by a conservancy.

She and Janet sat and watched the tide come in and the ocean roar.

Seagulls pecked at shells on the beach, and below the surface horseshoe crabs hid their true faces.

+++ 

Patrick May is a writer living in Pawtucket, Rhode Island, near where the baseball field used to be and not far from where the soccer stadium is now.