Notes on an Execution(31)
*
The girls had disappeared nine years ago. 1990.
Saffy remembered that summer with a sluggish haze that bordered on blackout. Roaring bonfires in empty fields, gritty sleeping bags filled with sand. Needles, beer cans, unwashed hair. She had been eighteen years old when those girls went missing, and she remembered how her dropout friends had talked—like the missing girls were not just one town over, but another world over, like it could never happen to them.
But Saffy knew about catastrophe. It was arbitrary. A thing that descended from nowhere, pointed a bony finger, and smirked. As if to say: I choose you.
Saffy had been transferred, after Miss Gemma’s, to a quiet home three towns north. Twelve years old by then, she had lived with one other foster child, a toddler with a runny nose and needy hands, their shared bedroom always stinking of diapers. Saffy watched the baby most nights while her foster parents drove to the casino across the Canadian border. She spent her middle school years lingering on the basketball courts just to avoid that house, shivering in sweatshirts too small at the wrists. The month Saffy turned sixteen, she was transferred to her last foster family, an elderly couple with an unsupervised basement. Saffy had her own entrance, a door with a key that dangled on a plastic lanyard, a microwave, and a camping stove. She lost herself.
Those teenage years passed in blurs and blips. She remembered the school counselor crying with frustration, the social workers threatening their useless disappointment, moldy beams creaking along the basement ceiling. Ages sixteen through eighteen were a fog, one long chain of mistakes that could have lasted forever. Until that summer, when everything changed.
The girls went missing.
Izzy Sanchez disappeared first. Saffy was eighteen years old, just released from the system and living with her boyfriend Travis, a weed dealer with missing molars and a reliable coke connect. Travis was into all the hard stuff, but Saffy stuck entirely to cocaine, preferring the way it energized her from the inside out. She heard about Izzy in a dim living room, heavy curtains crowding the windows, Salt-N-Pepa blaring from the stereo. One of Travis’s friends had witnessed the scene. He told the story with a lazy glaze, smoke curling around his acne-scarred cheeks. Izzy had been sixteen years old, waiting for a ride outside a party like this one, last seen standing at the end of a long driveway. And then she was gone. Vanished, without a trace.
The second girl went missing a few weeks later. Saffy watched the news from the couch in Travis’s trailer, surrounded by burrito wrappers and overflowing ashtrays. Angela Meyer. Also sixteen years old—she’d worked the closing shift at the diner a few miles away. Saffy hugged her legs to her chest, sweaty on the fraying couch, a humid breeze wheezing from the box fan in the window. Travis was already passed out on the folding bed, the tracks up his arms like veins in the half-light.
Saffy did not have a high school diploma. She did not have friends, not really—the girls from the field hockey team had long abandoned her, and the only person who kept in touch was Kristen. Kristen had been transferred south after Miss Gemma’s. She’d attended a much better high school, emancipated a year early, and now rented her own dingy apartment near a strip mall half an hour away. Kristen was bound for community college, a success story that made those same social workers proud. Kristen made an effort to call every few weeks, just to say hi. Most nights, Saffy sat alone after Travis descended into the ether, dropping ice cubes down her sports bra and trying not to think about the black hole of her future—when she heard about Angela, that hole seemed to expand, a supernova.
Then, the third girl went missing.
The third girl had been attending her boyfriend’s punk show at a dive bar near Port Douglass. She’d stepped outside for a cigarette. Gone. The panic was escalating—number three, officially an epidemic—though that girl had the least public appeal. There was no crying mother on the news, no tragically normal home. The third girl was a high school dropout like Saffy, no family available for interviews. But she was third, so her name blared across the television.
Lila Maroney.
When Saffy heard about Lila, she remembered their old bedroom. Lila on the bottom bunk, the skin on her knees nicked and scabbed from an attempt at shaving with Bailey’s razor. Over the years, she and Kristen spotted Lila occasionally, updating each other over the phone. Lila’s got blue hair now. Lila’s got a nose ring, the kind like a bull. Lila dropped out, heard she’s working at the Goodwill. By the time Lila went missing, she and Saffy traveled in overlapping circles, sometimes appearing at the same parties, rarely speaking about anything substantial. So when Saffy saw the news, she thought of that little girl in an oversized T-shirt, her face lit up in the ghostly glow of a flashlight, breath whistling through a retainer that never seemed to fit her teeth.
“Yo,” Travis said, dumb on the couch, the tip of his joint glowing orange. “What the fuck, Saff?”
Saffy realized she was crying—big, gulping sobs. The trailer pulsed, dizzy. She tugged on a pair of jeans and left, slamming the screen door shut behind her. Travis’s Camry had a dented bumper and a quarter tank of gas, but Saffy wound up toward Plattsburgh, watching as the needle drifted toward empty.
The police station was mayhem, all news cameras and panicked parents, troopers scrawling statements in notepads. The lights in the parking lot blasted, a flood—the early-evening lines of coke still rippled through Saffy’s system, brightening obnoxious. She swiped at her eyes with the heel of her hand.