Eileen’s disappearance from X-ville and new life as Lena

Eileen’s disappearance from X-ville and new life as Lena is both a literal escape and a change in how Eileen lives with herself. Before leaving, she had trained herself to conceal distress behind a carefully composed face; years later, she describes a life in which she can feel and show emotion without apology. The departure does not erase her past, but it lets her begin again beyond the family home and the identity attached to it.

The Mask Before Escape

Eileen’s practiced composure began as a deliberate performance. A book she found at the public library showed plaster casts made from the faces of Lincoln, Beethoven, and Sir Isaac Newton after their deaths. She studied the casts and practiced in a mirror, trying to hold an expression of calm resilience. She later called this her death mask: a face worn at Moorehead to hide how sensitive she felt. Misery and shame surrounded her there, but she recalls that she did not retreat to the bathroom to cry.

The mask also served her outside the prison’s immediate routines. Eileen kept sweet vermouth and mint chocolates in her locker, stealing the chocolates from a drugstore in X-ville. Before visiting hours, she drank vermouth and ate the sweets to steady herself for receiving the imprisoned boys’ mothers. Her duties included recording visitors in a ledger and directing them to orange plastic chairs in the hallway. The apparently small ritual of greeting and waiting thus became another setting in which she had to manage the feelings her composed face concealed.

Her work also placed her in brief, unwanted intimacy with visitors. Because Moorehead had no female guards or officers, she was assigned to conduct security checks of women, including patting down mothers before visits. Randy was often nearby, guarding the visitation-room door. Eileen imagined that she was touching him instead, while recognizing that he seemed scarcely to notice her. In her own account, she reduced herself to a pair of hands moving nervously through the air. The mothers, she observed, were passive and remorseful, and her checks never uncovered a concealed weapon or poison.

The visiting room made the strain of this role visible. Younger boys tried to face the wall and appear unreachable, but seeing their mothers’ pain could make them cry. When a young arsonist’s mother offered him a handkerchief, Randy intervened because such contact was not permitted. Eileen tried to ignore the mothers’ grief in order to maintain her own flat composure. When she became too upset to do so, she sought an empty room and used an embarrassing physical routine to bring herself back under control. These repeated acts of concealment make the later change in her life more than a change of location: the person who had worked to hide every sign of feeling eventually allows herself to cry.

Leaving X-ville

On a cold Christmas morning, Eileen drove the Dodge into her driveway and left Rita Polk slumped in the passenger seat. She ran through the snow and entered the house, knowing she was there for the last time but not stopping to pack a suitcase. Her father woke as she came down from the attic, putting the gun and all the cash she had into her purse. She did not empty her father’s bank account or cash her final paycheck.

The house remained behind as a place she would not reclaim. Eileen later wondered whether she might inherit it after her father died, but after a decade or two she chose to forget the possibility. She says there was nothing in the house she wanted enough to return for. In her understanding, she was dead in X-ville: a ghost, a lost soul, and a lost cause. The language describes not a literal death but the severing of her former place in the town and family.

After leaving, Eileen reached New York City late on Christmas Day. She was tired, hungry, physically uncomfortable, and swollen-faced, and spent the evening walking around Times Square. The contrast is stark: she had fled without properly packing, and her first hours elsewhere offered no instant comfort. Her own later judgment is that disappearance was not a solution to all her problems; it did, however, make it possible to start over.

Becoming Lena

Eileen closes the family home behind her and turns toward the yard. An icicle breaks and cuts her cheek, leaving a scar. She recalls that men later assigned the mark different meanings, but for her it signifies that she had once been someone else: the girl Eileen, the one who got away. The scar therefore remains a visible trace of the past even as she refuses to make it a reason to return.

No one, she says, came looking for her—or, if someone did, she hid well enough not to be found. She told people to call her Lena and changed her last name when she married that spring. Marriage gives her another name and a socially legible way to become someone new. Her account does not present this change as a simple erasure: the old identity persists as something she remembers, but no longer has to inhabit in X-ville.

Life After Disappearance

Looking back, Eileen describes a life sharply unlike the narrow freedom she wanted at twenty-four: a cramped afternoon among strangers, an unhurried walk without her father waiting, safety somewhere far away, and a place to call home. She now lives in a beautiful place, sleeps in a beautiful bed, eats well, walks in beautiful surroundings, and cares deeply for others. At night she is content to be alone in her bed; in the morning she is thankful for another day. Most decisively, she cries readily from both pain and pleasure and no longer apologizes for it.

The state of being Lena is thus not simply disappearance continued under another name. It is the eventual consequence of distance from X-ville, joined to a changed relationship with vulnerability. The death mask that once kept Eileen’s fear and sensitivity hidden gives way to a life in which feeling can be acknowledged. Her account preserves the cost and limits of escape while showing what it made possible: not a repaired past, but a home and identity she could choose.