There was a vintage white dress, an embroidered white sheath with a low neck and fitted drape, wrapped carefully in tissue paper and encased in a plastic bag. It was the kind of thing that Carey would have worn. It looked to be about my size, and I tried it on, wiggling out of my shorts in the middle of the hayloft. It fit almost perfectly, though it was a little tight under the arms and long at the knee. Folded beneath it was a rolled cloth coat, printed with a leopard pattern and lined in peach silk. It slid over the dress like they were made for each other, the hemlines matching exactly.

The other boxes held more of Maria’s cartoonish, juvenile drawings—some signed Maria Clarke, some signed Maria Frances Clarke—and when I found an unlabeled portrait of Carey, drawn from life, recognizable but still repulsively terrible, it occurred to me that Maria Frances Clarke was probably the MFC who had once carved her initials over the shelf in my closet.

There were scenes of small-town life, with WAPPINGERS FALLS, Carey’s hometown, written on the back, and a house with CLARKE written on the mailbox. The house was a one-story rathole with vinyl siding and a rusted-out Toyota Camry parked in the driveway. My mother’s house often looked the same way. It made me shiver, the similarity of it all, the repetitive nature of small-town alcoholic poverty. I pawed through them, and after a while had to put them down. The drawings grew worse, revolting, even, with each page, and I boxed them back up. They reminded me of Portfolio Day, the alumni duty where we gathered in a high school gym and examined the work of would-be Academy hopefuls, which I thought of as the saddest day of the year.

I tried to situate Maria in Carey’s life. Same town, so…Maria was probably a friend of Carey’s from high school, someone to whom Carey wouldn’t have been able to say no.

I pictured the toddler from the family in the photographs, all grown up, twentyish, maybe, beautiful, arriving at Pine City, maybe nervous, maybe jealous, maybe thrilled. Then I saw her getting dumped, like I did, in the worst house, and working quietly on these awful drawings while Carey realistically reproduced a human corpse like a magician. I pictured Carey helping her pick out this dress for the summer party.