Sadie(61)

I crouch back on my heels and wipe my mouth on my sleeve. I dig into my bag and find the IDs, the tags, and sit there with them, spread them out on the side of the road. It feels wrong to have them together. I separate his faces from their names.

I don’t want to take them with me.

They’re too heavy to carry.

When I was eleven, and Mattie was five, I didn’t sleep for a year. Keith and Mom would come home so late from the bar—him sober, her wasted—neither of them trying to be quiet, but her especially. I’d listen to her shuffling steps to the bedroom, to the clatter of Keith tidying up the kitchen, and when all that sound was gone, I knew what would happen next and I knew what would happen if I refused. If it wasn’t me, he’d go to Mattie unless I said, W—wait …

Wait.

Until one night, I couldn’t.

And I’d had the knife that night, had it tucked under my pillow, my fingers clutched around it and instead of doing what I should have, I sent him to her. The next morning, Keith was gone, and the dirty shame of my weakness was all over me and I think Mattie sensed it somehow, that there was some part of me that had given her up, that I couldn’t protect her.

I held on tighter to prove myself wrong.

I felt her breathing, alive.

And I was too.

When Mattie was ten, and I was sixteen, Mom left and took Mattie’s heart with her. Mattie spent every night crying herself awake and was it really so bad, Mattie, just the two of us together?

And then that postcard—

Mattie came back to me with her heart in her hands, there, breathing, alive …

And I was too.

When I was nineteen and Mattie was thirteen, Keith came back.

Guess who I saw, she’d announced, still angry, always angry for the lengths I wouldn’t go for Mom, and never seeing the ones I went to for her. I told him about Mom. He said he’d take me to L.A., to find her. And I asked her who she thought raised her, because in that moment, it couldn’t have been me.

When Mattie was thirteen, and I was nineteen, she crept away into the night, to the truck parked under the streetlight on a corner in Cold Creek, and climbed into the passenger’s side. I don’t know what happened next. If, when the apple orchard appeared on the horizon to mark the growing space between us, she finally felt the distance and changed her mind. If Keith wouldn’t let her change her mind, and dragged her, kicking and screaming out of the truck and between the trees, where he had her, breathing and alive, until she wasn’t.

And I wasn’t.

I am going to kill a man.

“I am,” I whisper into the ground, over and over again.

I am, I am, I am.

I have to.

I’m going to kill the man who killed my sister.

And I’m not leaving the side of the road until I can make myself believe it.

I sit on the ground, feel the gravel press into my jeans. It’s windy, air pushing my hair from my face. I listen to the way it moves the world around me; the trees off the road, leaves rustling their soft song into the night. I stare up at the sky, its stars. Small miracles.

I get to my feet.

Looking at the stars is looking into the past. I read that once. I can’t remember where and I don’t know much about it, but it’s strange to think of the stars above as from a time that is so far removed from Mattie and me, from Mattie being dead.

From the thing I am about to do.





THE GIRLS

EPISODE 6

[THE GIRLS THEME]


ANNOUNCER:

The Girls is brought to you by Macmillan Publishers.


WEST McCRAY:

Keith is Darren. I share the photograph with Ruby and she tells me it’s the exact same one Sadie showed her when she came to Ray’s Diner, asking after the man she said was her dad.


RUBY LOCKWOOD [PHONE]: That’s it. That was the one.


WEST McCRAY [PHONE]: And you still doubted her?


RUBY LOCKWOOD [PHONE]: Was I wrong?


WEST McCRAY [ON PHONE WITH MAY BETH]: There’s no possibility whatsoever that Keith is Sadie’s father?


MAY BETH FOSTER [PHONE]: I can ask Claire when she gets back in, but I doubt it.


DANNY GILCHRIST [PHONE]: Tell me what you got.


WEST McCRAY [PHONE]: Sadie was looking for a man from her childhood—her mom used to date him. She knew him as Keith, but everyone else I’ve talked to has called him Darren, which is why I never made the connection. Sadie was telling people he’s her father, but that’s not likely.


DANNY GILCHRIST [PHONE]: Okay, so who is he?


WEST McCRAY [PHONE]: Can’t find anything on either name. I got my team on it. Get this, though—in Langford, that motel, the Bluebird. Keith’s room was trashed … just hold on, I’m gonna send you the photos …

[KEYBOARD SOUNDS, MOUSE-CLICKS]


DANNY GILCHRIST [PHONE]: [WHISTLES] Wow.


WEST McCRAY [PHONE]: Yeah. The photograph Sadie’s been carrying around was in that room. It was from May Beth’s album of the girls—she took it with her. So I’m going to guess she was in that room too. I don’t know if it was like that before she got there or after she got there or while she was there. According to Joe, Keith wasn’t there when she was, so I don’t believe they met.


DANNY GILCHRIST [PHONE]: She broke into his room.