Sadie(73)
The Girls is brought to you by Macmillan Publishers.
WEST McCRAY:
It’s been a year since I turned up on Amanda’s doorstep and she told me Keith was dead. The next words out of my mouth were, “I think we should call the police.” In the time since, I’ve been collecting the pieces of everything that’s left, trying to put them together in a way I can understand. Amanda agrees to meet me to go over what happened that day. She’s a white, thirty-year-old mother of one. She has asked me not to use her last name.
AMANDA:
I don’t know where to start.
WEST McCRAY:
How did you meet him?
AMANDA:
He came to the place I worked at the time.
WEST McCRAY [STUDIO]: Amanda no longer lives in Farfield. She lives in a new town, a different state. She’s trying to put her relationship with Christopher—the name Keith was going by at the time—behind her. It hasn’t been easy. She is haunted by everything that happened then. She’s finding it hard to cope.
WEST McCRAY:
You worked at a bar.
AMANDA:
Yes. He showed up one night, and then another. He was nice, attentive. He didn’t drink, he just ate there. He kept coming back. There was something about him—I felt like I could talk to him, and I felt whatever I said, he understood. I’m a single mom and it’s difficult to find people—I found it difficult to find people willing to listen.
WEST McCRAY:
You have a daughter.
AMANDA:
[PAUSE] Yes.
WEST McCRAY:
How old was she at that time?
AMANDA:
She’d just turned ten.
WEST McCRAY:
How long did you know him, before he moved in?
AMANDA:
About a month and a half. He was there for every one of my shifts, and every one of my breaks. My days off. I was—I thought I was in love with him. I remember thinking that was ridiculous, to feel that way, but at the same time, why couldn’t one good thing happen to me?
If I had known that bringing him home … if I had known what I was bringing home … my daughter never said a word to me. She never told me something was wrong. You’d think, as her mother, I would’ve known. You think that I— WEST McCRAY:
He targeted single mothers of young girls, women who were alone and had to look after more than their fair share. He preyed on them as much as their children. You can’t blame yourself.
AMANDA:
I know that, but knowing it and …
Knowing it and believing it, those are two different things. [PAUSE] He didn’t have a job. Any other time, that’d be a red flag for me. But he was so nice and so good with my girl that I thought having someone around more often, someone who, at the time, she seemed to like—I thought that would be good for her.
WEST McCRAY [STUDIO]: Amanda’s daughter is in therapy now. Twice a week.
AMANDA:
So I’d be working and he’d be home. With her.
WEST McCRAY:
Tell me how he died.
AMANDA:
One of the girls at the bar asked to switch shifts with me, so I went in a little earlier than I usually do, and came home a little earlier than I usually did. When I got home, my daughter was there and he wasn’t. She told me she’d been at the bookstore and when she got back, he was gone. I was absolutely furious because I didn’t want her home alone because I didn’t think that was … [LAUGHS] I didn’t think it was sa— I’m sorry.
WEST McCRAY:
Take as long as you need.
AMANDA:
Anyway, he came in around nine o’clock that night. He looked awful. He was … dirty. Just filthy. He was pale, he was trembling, favoring his left side. I was horrified. Couldn’t believe my eyes.
WEST McCRAY:
What did he say happened?
AMANDA:
He told me he got mugged. He said, how did he put it … “I got jumped, they took all my money, they took me for a ride.” But he never said who they were and when I asked, he got real vague about it. He was in pain, though, and something had happened to him—that much was true.
WEST McCRAY:
You didn’t go to the police.
AMANDA:
I wanted to. I begged him to. He refused. I told him we should at least go to the hospital and get him checked out, because he was clearly hurting, but he was adamant that he was fine, he was just a little sore, he just needed to sleep it off. And, as if he was trying to prove his point, he sat down and he had a late dinner with me. Then he took a shower. He went to bed. He was alive. The next morning, I checked on him, he said he was fine, he just wanted to sleep. So I let him sleep. I sent my daughter to a friend’s house, to stay the day and night, so he wouldn’t be disturbed. I went to work. When I came back home, around midnight, he was unresponsive, still in bed. I called 911.
WEST McCRAY:
He had tried, unsuccessfully, to treat a stab wound in his left side. It became infected. He died in the hospital of sepsis a few days later.
AMANDA:
When he died, I was devastated and completely out of my depth. I had no idea who to contact. I couldn’t afford a funeral. He didn’t really mention a family … so I went through his things. I found … in his wallet—he had money in it. That tripped me up because he told me “they” had taken it. His muggers. In his truck, I found an ID. It had a different name on it. It wasn’t Christopher.