Callie is both shocked and not. It doesn’t feel like a lie. It could make sense of everything. The sloppy investigation. Why Sabrina would feel like she had nowhere else to go, no other choices. But she hates how everywhere she turns she feels flatfooted. How Trent, now Lynne, have caught her off guard.
“And… another question. I know, your practice, your girls are out there. But did you hear about the child they found? The baby? That winter, 1991. The same one the girls disappeared.”
“That was a very sad thing,” Miss Hamilton says, rising from her chair, sliding a backpack on her shoulders. “But I don’t know anything about that. Now excuse me, I need to be running drills right now.”
“Did you know Jenna Barry?” The question slips out and Callie hears the desperation in her voice. She can’t stop looking at the yearbook photo of Jenna. The girl she was before she became the joke down at the station, the woman with the crazed hair and glassy, dead-to-the-world eyes.
“I did.”
“She’s my mother. She’s the one who found the child.”
For the first time this afternoon Hamilton doesn’t have a polished answer at the ready. She studies Callie’s face, and Callie guesses shecan see the resemblance now that she knows to look. “I’m very sorry. She was a sweet girl.”
Callie nods. She’s never heard that descriptor for Jenna. Hundreds of other words come up for Jenna before she’d think to call her sweet. Troubled. Lonely. Messy. Lost. But Jenna had been a girl once, just like Annabelle and Sabrina. A girl brimming with her own desires and hopes. Who had been something else other than the names everyone slung at her, all the labels everyone stuck to her back.
ANNABELLE
You walk to the supermarket, the day mild enough that the snow from earlier in the week drips from the trees, and underneath everything you hear water rushing groundward. You can smell the sunlight and mineral melt of ice, like a superpower, but the sounds of liquid everywhere call attention to your bladder, the way you have to piss every thirty minutes. The urge undeniable and the store still twenty minutes away.
Your feet punch through the wet snow as you make your way through the underbrush, squat against a tree. The relief turns to panic when you see a flash of color at the edge of the road, a red coat and orange hat, bright, the kind favored by hunters.
“What are you doing?”
Jenna. Your neighbor, who used to circle the perimeter of the factory when you and Sabrina were girls, asking if the two of you would play. Sometimes you would let her, but the triangle always felt lopsided. It was such a burden to have to explain the long-established rules of your games, your code words and shorthand. At the bus stop for school she was always nudging, peering, desperate to be let in.
She cuts a look to your middle, the coat your father left behind that you’ve taken to wearing because it zips over your sweater. Because it helps you feel hidden, even as you recoil at the smell of him on it. Skoal and spilled liquor.
You haven’t seen Jenna in a few weeks and it is like seeing her anew. You notice the way the cold puts patches of pink on her cheeks, the bright whites of her eyes, that she has become pretty, even, under her cap.
“Nothing. What are you doing?”
She turns to show you a sack on her shoulder, the canvas strap. “Delivering papers. This road is on my route.”
It should bind you together, both of you out there in your fathers’ clothes, but it only fills you with repulsion. You have been so busy in the storm of your mind that you forgot that other people want and need, and something about seeing Jenna in that hat hurts. Makes you feel it more keenly. How much both of you lack.
“You know, I’ve been wanting to ask you about something…” You remember now about Jenna’s dead mother, and instead of pity you feel rage. How much easier it would be, to have a mother who left you involuntarily. To have a diagnosis and a reason. To have a father who chopped wood for the woodstove in the kitchen, where you could at least warm your hands.
“I’ve got to go,” you say, brushing past her.
“Annabelle!” she shouts. “It’s about him!” she says, her voice coming apart in a desperate split that makes you stand still. When she speaks again her voice is somber. “I know what happened. I guess I want… I want to make sure you’re okay.”
“You don’t know anything,” you say, surprised by the low growl of your voice. An animal with its haunches up. “You have no idea.”
It comes back to you as you walk away, that it was Jenna who first told you the story of Mother Leeds and the Jersey Devil. How you and Sabrina swore you didn’t believe her, but the next time you found yourself alone in the trees and heard a noise—a pine cone skittering to the ground, a squirrel scrabbling through the branches—you screamed and ran for the safety of the factory, pressed yourself against one of the stone walls, your breath heaving in and out of your chest.
You stomp therest of the way to the store, indignant, jealous of Jenna’s future, unblemished like the clear, snowmelt-scoured road ahead of her as she finishes her paper route and returns home. You grab a basket at the front of the shop and it bangs empty against your kneeas you walk the aisles, find the runtiest, cheapest bunch of bananas you can, a box of cereal, the smallest container of milk. You stand in front of the meat refrigerator and eye bloody cubes of beef like the kind your mother would add to stew, simmering it to tenderness, with bay leaf and barley, sweetened with carrots and onion. You step away, your veins practically humming with desire, to feel the warm stuff of that stew, to feel the ways it would fortify you, fill you.
You head to the checkout, the shelves next to you bright with shampoos and conditioners. Before you can reach the end, where the registers are, you are accosted by a wall of baby formula to your right, a blue-eyed child with a feathery tuft of brown hair staring out at you from a canister promisingOnly the Best. The prices underneath the formula canisters are staggering, so much more than the milk you have in your basket. You let your eyes drift to the packages of diapers, add the cost of one box to one canister of formula and find that its more than you budget for a week’s worth of food. A display of teething rings and pacifiers catches your eye, all of that pastel plastic. Before you can think about it, you grab one and shove it underneath your coat.
“Annabelle?”
You startle, drop the pacifier on the ground, look up to see Della, a friend of your mother’s from when you were a girl. Della and her husband, Keith, would come over for bonfires in the yard, your father building the flames higher and higher, roasting marshmallows to a golden brown for you and Sabrina, two at a time so that neither of you had to wait. Your mother cooked and you all ate outside under the stars, paper plates in your laps. Della and her husband could both play the fiddle, but she was better. You could see it even then in the way she let herself get lost in the music, the way her eyes closed like she was savoring it, while Keith often looked around to see who was admiring him play.
Della looks to the pacifier, then to your face. Behind her, there’s a little girl in the cart, maybe two or three years old. Your mother told you once that Della and her husband were having trouble conceiving a child, and she would drop pouches of crushed herbs on their porchthat were meant to help.Looks like she didn’t need you, you think, with a treasonous thrill.
“How… how are you?”
“Fine,” you say, the response so automatic by now it is like a punchline. You think of Della and your mother, their mouths wine-stained, leaning together, laughing, reaching out for one another’s wrists. You and Sabrina desperate to be let in on the jokes, while the men rolled their eyes and flicked beer tabs into the fire.
