Heather(104)

It breaks Callie’s heart. Because it was so true. Somewhere along the line that was what girls learned. Experience meant men. They had the keys to the rest of your life.

“When did you know about Annabelle?”

“That she was pregnant? I heard Miss Hamilton, the history teacher, talking to the guidance counselor. I was there, waiting around in the hall outside the office, I was in trouble for cutting class. Anyway, she was saying something like, maybe she had it all wrong, but that she wondered…”

So Hamilton had her suspicions. No wonder she didn’t want to mention it to Callie when she visited her that day at the school. Not when she knew how the story turned out. Hamilton was trying to protect Annabelle after the fact, because she failed her when it counted.

“What did the guidance counselor say?”

“That unless they had proof, or Annabelle told them something, there was nothing they could do. Not like they could take her to the doctor or make her lift up one of those big sweatshirts she had started wearing.”

“But how did you know she had been with Luke?”

“He told me about it. He and I met first. He picked me up that same afternoon. He was always doing that, playing one girl off another. I was fifteen, the first time.”

She winces. Fifteen years old. Callie, in all the ways she was strict with herself, had never so much kissed a boy then.

“Jesus, Mom. But then why … if you knew about Annabelle, did you get back together with him?”

“Get back with him,” Jenna says, her mouth puckered like she’s bitten into something sour.

A chill works its way up Callie’s spine. She’s keenly aware of the quietness around them, no sound but the occasional crackle of the logs in the fireplace. “Mom?”

“Like I said. Never a good thing when anyone in that family says they want to talk.” Jenna tries to manage a smile that reminds her of the way Annabelle tried to make the mood light in her living room. “But. I thought, I don’t know. That I would be good at it. Being a mother. I thought it might make me become good enough. We know how that worked out.”

“You went through a lot. It must have been really, really hard.”

Jenna shrugs, uncomfortable. “That’s life, right?” Jenna reaches out and traces the air just over Callie’s stitches. “What happened here?”

“Damien happened.” She isn’t sure she can get into it now, the whole thing. The water. How close it had come. “He’s been arrested. Confessed to the murder of Sabrina Riley.”

Jenna nods. “I figured it was one of them.”

“And Annabelle Riley has been arrested in connection with the Baby Doe case. It’s causing something of a sensation online.”

“They found Annabelle Riley? What was she doing? Circus performer? No, she was so smart. Professor? Astronaut?”

“She’s a mother. Married. Runs the PTA, volunteers. It’s part of the reason the media is so into her case. It makes for good headlines. Perfect Mom Hiding Ugly Secret. All that bullshit.”

Jenna presses her lips together. “So she’s normal. Well. That’s good too. Good for her.”

“A grand jury decided she’s going to be charged with murder. She’s out on bail but they’ve set a trial date for a few months from now.”

Jenna’s lip quivers. “Damn it,” she says, and wipes her eyes. “We were all just kids. And those boys had all this protection. They were untouchable. I tried to tell Frank at the station, about Luke. The morning I went down there after I found the baby. I told him the truth. And he made it seem like I could get in trouble. He said it would be easy enough to tell everyone I was the suspect. That the baby had been mine. It sounds ridiculous now. But how was I supposed to know?”

“I’m so sorry, Mom.”

“It’s not like now. Now there’s Twitter and YouTube and blogs and TikTok and all these ways you can tell the world that something happened to you, that someone is bad. Me? I was just a girl in a police station in the woods. Who cared what I knew? Who cared what happened to me?”

Callie has been so caught in the cesspools of the internet, reading all of the comments about Annabelle, that she forgot that it could be used this way too. A form of power, a megaphone. “No one could blame you.”

“She has kids? Annabelle does?”

“A daughter and two sons. Teenagers.”

“And he’s out there with his business planting trees and growing his little pet pot plants in a greenhouse for kicks. Fuck that.” Jenna sits up, squares her shoulders, and Callie sees something new in her, something she hadn’t been able to see all this time. Her mother as a survivor. Callie doesn’t want to tell her the next detail: that she talked to a friend of hers the day before, a public defender she knew from up north. In New Jersey there’s no longer a statute of limitations on sexual assault, but that law wasn’t put into effect until 1996. Cases five years or less before 1996 might still result in criminal charges, but it’s hard to get a conviction without DNA evidence. Annabelle could go to jail for murder. Luke might walk free.

They’re quiet again for a while. Jenna is the one who breaks the silence. “I know I messed up. I know I did a lot wrong, Calliope. I wasn’t a good mother to you. And that I have to face that. It’s been a big part of my stuff at AA. But you don’t just come from me, or them; you come from this too. Okay? You come from people who didn’t like one way of living and were brave enough to start over somewhere else. You come from people who can make up their own minds. That’s why I named you Hauser. But I should have told you all that.”