“Stay still,” she says. She spills something over your wound, a chemical ammoniac stink to it, and it sizzles against your skin. You hear someone cry out, realize only when you see Sabrina wince that it is you.
She squints as she stitches, taking her time. Inhaling a little each time the needle pierces your skin.
“He told me he met you. Didn’t say anything else. But he didn’t have to.”
“Oh,” you manage to say. And you wonder how well you really know her. Wonder if she knew the glass was there, in wait, and she knew she just needed to get the angle right. Knew that if she was successful you’d be marked forever. And that there would be no risk of you thinking you could slip sideways into her life ever again.
“And I found those brochures under your bed.”
The college brochures. Big cities and faraway places near the ocean. Schools Sabrina could never get into. Her voice cracks a little, but then she clears her throat. “Almost done,” she says, soft, consoling.
You’ll never know the truth. Whether she wanted to hurt you or heal you. Or maybe the truth is, she wanted to do both. Maybe that’s what you both have wanted since you grew together in your mother’s body, the two of you alone in the warmth and dark, competing for nourishment.
CALLIE
She and Devereaux walk along the edges of the trail in the waning light, Callie calling Jenna’s name until she goes hoarse. She circles the place where the bag was left behind, but there are no signs of her mother anywhere. No footprints in the sandy soil. No trace of clothing. Not a strand of red hair tangled in the understory.
They get as far as the Buttonwood camp, where she shows a few hikers her mother’s photo, but they only shake their heads over their tin-can dinners.
Callie stalks away from them, grinding her teeth. “Chief,” Devereaux says tentatively, raising his eyes to the darkening sky.
He doesn’t have to finish the rest of the sentence. They won’t find her tonight if they haven’t already. Worse, they’ll end up lost in the woods themselves. The forest is dense and fickle and all these trails can go tricky. One step off them and you can walk for an hour thinking you’re in a straight line when really you’ve been making a big circle, covering the same ground over and over again.
Back at thestation she asks the troopers to send in K-9 units but they say they can’t get out until the next day. If Jenna had been drunk or high, she couldn’t have gotten far. It stands to reason that they would be able to track her down. Callie had been bracing for the worst out there. Jenna still and quiet among the trees. Lips blue, skin pale. The same way she found Layla. Except for Jenna it would be too late.
Next she calls hospitals and shelters on the off chance Jenna got dropped off somewhere by a civilian. She gets someone on the line inVoorhees who reports a single Jane Doe heroin OD, but this woman is described as having tattoos on her arms. Not Jenna, then. Some other sorry soul.
Callie drives to Jenna’s house again, this time not hesitating as she lets herself in. She searches through the drawers of Jenna’s nightstand, in her dresser, rifles through the medicine cabinet in her bathroom—nothing stronger than Tylenol. She drops to the floor, crawling through the living room on her hands and knees to check underneath the furniture. No vial caps. No glassine baggies in any of the garbage cans. Not even booze in its usual hiding places—in the back of the linen closet, behind the extra sheets. In the cabinet above the refrigerator.
She drops onto Jenna’s couch and plugs in the dead phone that had been found in the purse, taps her foot while she waits for the screen to chime to life. Almost all of the notifications that flood in are her own messages and calls. Most of Jenna’s recent outgoing texts are to coworkers hoping to trade off shifts or bitching about the new back of house staff at the diner. But there’s one person she seems to be in touch with daily: someone named Steve Wilkins. Their messages are sparse—Can we talk in an hour? How are you doing today? See you tomorrow?—but the call log tells another story. Sometimes they spoke for an entire hour. Jenna has saved his picture—an older man smiling through a bush of white beard, a red bandanna tied over his head. A boyfriend? Looks too nice to be Jenna’s type, but Callie dials him and he picks up on the third ring.
“Jen? I’m glad to hear from you.”
“I’m sorry, this isn’t Jenna. It’s her daughter.”
“Callie?” A pause, and even over the phone she can hear this man choosing his words carefully, the way Deveraux had. “Is she—”
“She’s missing. I hadn’t heard from her in a few days and then her belongings were found abandoned off of a walking trail.”
“Oh,” Steve says, and in just that syllable the sorrow is unmistakable.
“It looks like she was in touch with you quite frequently. Can I ask what your relationship is to her?”
“We’re friends.”
“You talk an awful lot. It’s not romantic?”
“No, no. I’m married.”
“Does your wife know you spend hours on the phone speaking with my mother? Texting her?”
“That’s not really—”
Callie cuts him off. “Mr. Wilkins, I have a sense you aren’t telling me something. Let me impress upon you the seriousness of this call. This is a missing persons case. It’s not looking so great that she spent hours on the phone with a married man every week and now is nowhere to be found.”
Steve Wilkins clears his throat. “I’m her sponsor. AA.”
Callie shuts her eyes. A sponsor. She was really doing it. Really trying.
