Sadie(13)
MAY BETH FOSTER:
It’s funny, I always thought Claire would leave us one way or the other—but I still wasn’t ready for it. Sadie never had her mother to begin with, so she didn’t even know how to start losing her on this level. The only thing Sadie was afraid of was losing the family she had left and that was Mattie. And Mattie … Mattie was absolutely leveled by it.
WEST McCRAY:
Tell me more about that.
MAY BETH FOSTER:
I thought it was going to kill her. I well and truly did. Mattie got so depressed about it, she didn’t want to eat. She lost weight she couldn’t afford to lose. She barely slept … she’d have these waking nightmares about Claire leaving and open her eyes and realize that it wasn’t just a dream. Sadie couldn’t even calm her down. She was hysterical half the time, almost catatonic the rest of it. I told Sadie we needed to get Mattie to a doctor, but … Sadie wouldn’t have it, and I didn’t see it ending well if we did, to be honest. Sadie dropped out of high school instead. She thought maybe being at home would help.
WEST McCRAY:
And did it?
MAY BETH FOSTER:
No. Only one thing got through to Mattie.
WEST McCRAY:
About three months after Claire left, and for the first and only time, the girls received word from their mother. It arrived in the form of a postcard, which was later recovered with Sadie’s belongings. On its front, a line of palm trees against a stark, beautiful blue sky. Greetings from Sunny L.A.! the cards says. Wish you were here! It’s addressed only to Mattie, and in Claire’s messy scrawl it says, Be my good girl, Mats.
MAY BETH FOSTER:
Mattie came alive after that. From that point on, she was absolutely fixated on L.A.—they had to go there and find Claire, they just had to, their mother wanted them to find her and start over …
I hate that it happened, as grateful as I was for it at the time. It put the color in Mattie’s cheeks, it gave us our girl back, but my God, she and Sadie were never the same after that.
WEST McCRAY:
Sadie refused to look for Claire?
MAY BETH FOSTER:
It wasn’t possible, for a lot of reasons. The money. They couldn’t afford it. They didn’t know where in the city she was, I mean come on. Claire probably wrote it when she was high. She didn’t ask them to find her. That postcard was a good-bye. Mattie just didn’t understand or accept it. And I guess … Sadie could’ve acted a little torn up about it for her sister’s benefit, but she didn’t …
WEST McCRAY:
Did Mattie blame Sadie for Claire leaving?
MAY BETH FOSTER:
No, but she blamed Sadie for not looking for her.
WEST McCRAY:
What did Claire mean when she told Mattie to be “‘my good girl”?
MAY BETH FOSTER:
When Mattie was being Claire’s good girl, she was usually giving Sadie hell. I feel like I’m making Mattie sound terrible and that’s not the case. She was just … young. Mattie loved Sadie but she worshipped Claire.
WEST McCRAY:
After the postcard, things slowly deteriorated between the girls.
MAY BETH FOSTER:
It was heartbreaking to see, the way Mattie would get with Sadie. Just vicious. Sadie forgave Mattie everything. She knew where that anger was coming from and bore it. That doesn’t mean she was a saint—she wasn’t. She’d get impatient, tell Mattie she was being stupid, that it was hopeless … it was the first real crack between them and it kept growing. It’s amazing, really, when I think about how long and how hard Mattie held onto Claire while Sadie was just trying to hold onto Mattie.
The month before Mattie died, things were as bad between them as I’d ever seen. Mattie was becoming a woman and that’s a dangerous time in any girl’s life. She was her own person and that person had different ideas of how things should be than Sadie did. And she never said it, but I know Sadie was damn hurt about it.
I can’t—if Claire hadn’t sent that—if she coulda just made a clean break, I think eventually Mattie would’ve come to terms with it. But she had to screw things up all the way from L.A. and that’s what Sadie and Mattie were fighting about, the night Mattie disappeared.
WEST McCRAY:
That’s the one thing everyone seems to agree was the catalyst for Mattie’s disappearance: she attempted to leave Cold Creek in search of her mother. She got into a killer’s truck for what she hoped would be the first leg on her long journey to L.A.
MAY BETH FOSTER:
Mattie never would’ve done something like that if she’d never got that postcard. I know it haunted Sadie and I know … I know if Sadie’s out there right now, it’s still haunting her.
sadie
Something collides with my window.
Thud.
My eyes fly open and my head jerks up, my neck protesting the unholy angle it’s been stuck in with a quick succession of alarming cracks. My body is halfway across the backseat before I’ve got a grasp of the situation. Two kids, boys—around ten or eleven years-old—standing about five feet from the car. They’re both so underfed May Beth would’ve declared them ragamuffins. One has a basketball in his hands. He’s glaring at me. I glare back. He throws the basketball at my window. Thud. It bounces back in his hands. He takes aim again and anger surges through me. I reach across the front seat, my palm flying to the horn of the car. I press down and keep my hand there.