Sadie(10)

“Already s-said I’d p-pay. How m-much?”

“Who said anything about money?”

I grab the picture back and he grabs me by the arm and the surprising grip of his spider-leg fingers makes me want to separate from my skin just so I don’t have to feel it. The heat of him. A door slams somewhere beyond us. I turn my head to it.

There’s a truck, a big black dog of a thing idling in the dark. A girl runs toward it. She’s small in a way that reminds me of Mattie, and I stare at her tiny body, made of tiny bones, watching as she comes to a halt at the passenger’s side. She stares at it for a long, painful moment and there’s nothing I can do to stop what happens next. I watch as this girl, who isn’t Mattie, pulls the door open. The cab of the truck lights up briefly as she climbs inside. She closes the door. The truck’s interior lights dim, swallowing her whole.

Caddy digs his fingers into me, his nails sharp.

“L-let m-me go.”

He lets me go, coughing into his elbow.

“It’ll cost you,” he says again.

He tilts his head to the side, his eyes drifting over me and then—a little more tentatively than he did the last time—puts his hand on my arm and walks me farther into the darkness. He brings himself closer to me, fumbling for his belt buckle, whispering the kind of nothings in my ear that can’t even pretend to be sweet. His breath is sour. I look into his eyes and his eyes are red.





THE GIRLS





S1E1


WEST McCRAY:


The first half of the photos in May Beth’s album are only of Sadie. She was a small, happy baby, with brown hair, gray eyes and healthy pink skin. She didn’t look anything like her mother.


MAY BETH FOSTER:

Sadie was the spitting image of Irene and Claire couldn’t stand it, and if you saw Claire with Sadie, you’d wonder why she’d even have a baby in the first place. She hated holding her, nursing her, soothing her. I’m not being dramatic. She. Hated. It. I loved on Sadie best I could, but it was never enough to make up for what she wasn’t getting from her mother.


WEST McCRAY:

Who was Sadie’s father?


MAY BETH FOSTER:

I don’t know. I don’t think even Claire knew. She said his last name was Hunter so that’s what she put on the birth certificate.


WEST McCRAY:

According to May Beth, Sadie had a lonely childhood those first six years without Mattie. Claire’s addiction superseded all affection, and left her daughter attention-starved.

Sadie was also painfully shy, due to the stutter she developed when she was two. There was no clear cause. It might have been genetics. Hereditary. No other members in Sadie’s known family stuttered but her paternal side is unaccounted for. May Beth unearthed a recording she made when Sadie was three; we had to hunt down a cassette player to listen to it.


MAY BETH FOSTER [RECORDING]: You wanna talk into the recorder, honey? [PAUSE] No? I can play it back for you and you can hear what you sound like.


SADIE HUNTER [AGE 3] [RECORDING]: Th-th-that’s m-magic!


MAY BETH FOSTER [RECORDING]: Yeah, baby, it’s magic. Okay, talk into right here, just say hi!


SADIE HUNTER [RECORDING]: B-but I w—I want t-to, I w—I— MAY BETH FOSTER [RECORDING]: We just have to record it first.


SADIE HUNTER [RECORDING]: B-but I w-w-want t-to hear!


WEST McCRAY:

Sadie never outgrew her stutter. Early intervention likely could have helped, but May Beth never managed to convince Claire to take action. School turned out to be a special sort of hell for Sadie. Children aren’t kind about things they don’t understand and, in May Beth’s opinion, Sadie’s teachers also lacked a certain understanding.


MAY BETH FOSTER:

Sadie turned out good in spite of them, not because of them. They thought that stutter meant she was stupid. That’s all I’ll say about that.


WEST McCRAY:

Forty-four-year-old Edward Colburn has never forgotten Sadie. He’d just started his career as a teacher at Parkdale Elementary when she came into his class. Parkdale, as I mentioned, is forty minutes away from Cold Creek, and buses in students from outside towns so they can go to school. This is how Edward remembers his former first grade student: EDWARD COLBURN:

She was teased by her classmates because of the stutter and that caused her to withdraw.… We did our best to meet her needs, but you have to understand Parkdale has always been two things: underfunded and overcrowded. Add to that a mother who was largely unreceptive to any of our concerns and, well. It’s not a recipe for a child’s personal success. And it happens more often than you’d want to think, not only in economically depressed areas. Sadie was a very adrift, remote child. She didn’t seem to have many, if any, interests of her own. She was reserved, but it was more than that … I’d almost say she was vacant.


MAY BETH FOSTER:

Then Mattie came along.


WEST McCRAY:

In May Beth’s album, Mattie’s arrival is marked with a Polaroid of a tiny, day-old bundle in six-year-old Sadie’s arms. The way Sadie gazes at her newborn sister is almost impossible to describe. It’s unbearably tender.


WEST McCRAY [TO MAY BETH]: Just look at the way she’s looking at Mattie … wow.