“Breech?”
“Feet first. I can’t tell like this, come lay down.”
She guides you onto your back on her bed, lifts your shirt, and presses into you. You watch her face as she tenses her fingertips along your stomach, pressing, pressing.
“I think it’s normal. I think this is the head.”
“That’s good,” you say. Normal. But the phrasethe headsends a wave of sickness through you.
She turns away and counts off the days on her calendar, running backward through the pages, backward through time.
“I think it will be any week now. But first babies tend to come late.”
Maybe it will never come, you think. It will stay locked between your pelvis, your body won’t do what the books say it is made to do. Instead, it will bend to your will. It will make sure that nothing everchanges, not before you are ready. Not until Sabrina finishes looking up all those words she’s circled and written down.
Your eyes catch on a basket in the corner. Stacks of clean sheets. Tiny clothes that you have to look away from, the pink tags from the thrift store still attached.
One day she tapes the end of a paper towel tube closed, fills it with dried black beans, and tapes the other end shut, gives it a shake, adds more tape, shakes it again, smiles to herself.
A rattle. Her sleeve slips as she hands it to you to try and you see the black-blue of a fresh bruise around her wrist.
“What are you doing with him still?” you ask.
“I’ll fix it, Annabelle. He’s going to pay for this. He’s going to help.”
“I don’t want his help.”
“Money, Annabelle. We’re going to need money.”
“Why would he give us money?”
“He has some secrets worth protecting. A job worth protecting. And we aren’t the only ones.”
“The only ones what?”
“The only girls. He likes to brag about it. To get me to do what he wants. The others do this. The others like that.”
For a second her voice breaks and she looks away from you. You put a hand on her arm and her skin feels fever-hot. You realize you still have no idea, really, what Sabrina has gone through. That the Coyote has remade you both in different ways, and it makes you so sorrowful that you want to lie down and cry, the way the two of you did together when your mother first left.
But it still gives you a bad feeling. Bringing him into this. The idea of revenge. Yes, of course, since the night at the Cranberry Festival a part of you has been simmering with rage. That he moves through the world so unencumbered, while you have been sick, exhausted, colonized, exiled from your own life. But that doesn’t mean you want anything from him. Sabrina, on the other hand, wants to draw blood. You feel her thirst for it. All that energy you felt coming off her as she curled her hair or put on another coat of mascara orfiled her nails, now it is in service of something else. Of you, of some plan. And that scares you. Drop it, you tell her. Let it go.
“It will be fine,” Sabrina says, but she keeps her eyes on the rattle, turns it in her hands.
CALLIE
She has to drive all the way home before she gets good enough cell service to google Iris Owens and the address on the paper. Even without Google she recognizes the number as a New York City area code. Callie wonders if that means she made it, after all. Maybe not to NYU but to the city. To something like the life she imagined for herself there.
She practically sprints inside her house, pounds the nameIRIS OWENS CORTLANDTinto her computer. She’ll look at property records, at LinkedIn profiles, at social media, in time. But for now the first thing she does is click on the Images tab. She has to see for herself, who Annabelle has made herself into. What she has become.
Annabelle has highlighted her hair to a sunny blond, similar to the color in Sabrina’s mug shot photo. She’s thinner, and underneath the rounded face of her yearbook photos are some of the canny, sharp angles of Sabrina’s features. It is like she’s looking at both of them at once, layered together in the form of a middle-aged woman. She looks for the scar Trent Brentwood told her about but the woman in the photo is wearing long sleeves.
She clicks on the article affiliated with the photo.IRIS OWENS RECOGNIZED FOR VOLUNTEER COMMITMENTS
Iris Owens, mother of three, spends her afternoons volunteering at a soup kitchen—
Annabelle, the good one. But then… Why had she felt the need to reinvent herself? Why would she have run away and taken on a new name?
There’s another photo of Annabelle with her husband, taken at aschool fundraiser that ran in a local paper. Ben Owens is not much taller than his wife, has a big, easy smile, a slightly receding hairline, and a crinkle to his eyes that to Callie indicates a jovial air. She googles him in another tab and finds that he works as a CPA in a two-man firm in town. His bio on the company’s page is folksy, sweet. Mentions his love of cooking, fishing, and camping, his beautiful wife, his three children. Property records indicate that Ben and Iris Owens purchased their home twelve years ago. On Google Maps she zooms in to see a well-kept Colonial with a basketball net fixed above the garage door.
