Sadie(67)

The floor creaks, shifting under his weight …

I open my eyes and raise my head.

He’s gone.

I would think he was never here, if I couldn’t hear him rushing through the house, running from me and I feel frayed at my own edges, trying to understand what just happened, what I let happen. I drop Nell’s shirt and leave her room, hurrying down the stairs, not quietly, because if he’s here and he knows I am here, there’s no point in being quiet anymore. I reach the bottom of the stairs. The back door is open, leading to the backyard, the woods beyond it.

I move to it. I can taste the air, dry and stale, and I can hear the quick, sure sound it entering my lungs. I step through the door, take that first step outside and the world explodes into a beautiful black night sky with more stars than I’ve ever seen in my life. I watch them flash and sparkle before my eyes, brilliant bright and white and then red, before they begin to slowly disappear, until all that’s left is black. My skull feels like it’s coming apart, throbbing from the impact of some unknown force. He hit me, I realize vaguely …

And then: a pinprick of light, a single star reappears on the horizon to keep time with my heartbeat, pulsing faintly, alive. I want to reach for it, but I can’t move my arms. I fall through it instead, feel my body hit the ground. I’m on the ground, my head firing thought after thought that can’t seem to complete themselves and they all begin with Mattie …

And they never seem to end.





THE GIRLS





S1E6


WEST McCRAY:


When I finally get back to Cold Creek, Claire still hasn’t returned.

It’s been a few days.


MAY BETH FOSTER:

I called all the bars within twenty-five miles. Nobody’s seen her, I don’t know how much that’s worth. She’s got money here … maybe she’s on a bender in some dive I don’t know about and got somebody else to pick up the tab.


WEST McCRAY:

It’s easy to believe Claire would jeopardize her sobriety by returning to Cold Creek, but when she came back, she was motivated by her grief, not self-destruction. That grief should remind us Claire Southern is more than the sum of her failures. She’s not a perfect person—but she is a person. A mother.

I find her in the orchard where they recovered Mattie’s body.

[FOOTSTEPS, CARS IN DISTANCE]


WEST McCRAY:

Claire?

[LONG PAUSE]


CLAIRE SOUTHERN:

You recording this?


WEST McCRAY:

If that’s okay with you.


CLAIRE SOUTHERN:

I was driving around … just driving the same roads, over and over. I wasn’t sure what I was doing. Wound up here a few hours ago and now it’s taking me forever to leave.

I just can’t seem to make myself do it.


WEST McCRAY:

I’m sorry for your loss.


CLAIRE SOUTHERN:

That’s the first time anyone ever said that to me.


WEST McCRAY:

I’m sorry about that too.


CLAIRE SOUTHERN:

It’s different when you think someone’s always going to be around. You think you got all the time in the world to make it right.


WEST McCRAY:

You thought you could make it right with Sadie?


CLAIRE SOUTHERN:

I doubt I could have. It’s just a comfort, having the option.

You got kids?


WEST McCRAY:

Yeah.


CLAIRE SOUTHERN:

How many?


WEST McCRAY:

Just one.

A daughter.


CLAIRE SOUTHERN:

How old?


WEST McCRAY:

She’s five.


CLAIRE SOUTHERN:

That’s a good age.


WEST McCRAY:

Is it?


CLAIRE SOUTHERN:

Yeah. They’re really starting to be people at that age but they’re still clingy, like a baby. Sadie was—Sadie went through something like that.


WEST McCRAY:

That right?


CLAIRE SOUTHERN:

She never remembered it. It’s probably amazing I do. But she went through this phase where she wanted me to tuck her in at night real bad, begged me to do it, so I’d go in her room and I’d run my hands through her hair ’til she fell asleep and this one time … she looks up at me and she says, you made me. And I—I said yeah. Yeah, baby I did.


WEST McCRAY:

You love your daughter.


CLAIRE SOUTHERN:

My daughter hates me.

And let me tell you something else about Sadie. She was clever. When she was seven, she was signing her own permission slips and, as she got older, Mattie’s too. May Beth would buy the gifts for Christmas, for birthdays, and Sadie would sign my name to the cards and Mattie, she never knew the difference.

You know something else? I was—I was in Harding’s Grove since I left. For the last three years. Harding’s Grove is about three hours away from Cold Creek.


WEST McCRAY [STUDIO]: Of all the things I’ve learned since I started peeling back the layers of Sadie’s story, this seemed the most certain: Claire, tearing off into the night, heading for the City of Angels, abandoning Mattie and Sadie and sending one palm tree postcard back with a plaintive, “Be my good girl,” scrawled across its back for Mattie, and nothing, as usual, for her eldest daughter.