Heather(105)

“I’m sorry too. I really, really am.”

Jenna rubs her eyes, takes Callie in her arms. Callie can’t remember being held this way since she was a young child bawling over a skinned knee.

“Well, look at this sobfest we have on our hands. We’re a mess, huh?”

Callie laughs between her tears. “I don’t know. I’d say we’re doing all right.”



* * *



Callie stays the night in the cabin, each of them in one of the narrow bunks under the sloped ceiling. Jenna points out the beam where her great-grandfather carved his initials as a boy, shows Callie a guitar in the corner that belonged to Jenna’s mother. The hot plate where she’s been cooking all of her meals. There’s so much more work ahead, but for now they rest. In the morning Jenna makes them breakfast and afterward she plays the guitar, her voice bursting through the quiet, clear and radiant as a new day.



* * *



Callie takes the path back to her car while Jenna stays behind at the cabin, asking for one more day before she goes back to the real world. She promises she’ll call Steve, that she’ll start going to meetings again.

Callie calls her friend, Chelsea, the public defender, when she gets back home. She asks about how Jenna’s allegations might stand up in court if they can get criminal charges pressed against Luke on an old rape case.

Chelsea doesn’t mince words. “Fifty-fifty. She’s got a spotty record. That missed court date on the DUI won’t look good, no matter the circumstances. They’ll try to discredit her, an addict, DUIs, mental health issues, so much time has passed, it was consensual, all that. It depends on the jury. She’ll need luck, too.”

“What about Annabelle?” Callie asks. “What happens in these kinds of cases?”

Chelsea exhales. “That is a tougher call. America doesn’t hate anyone as much as they hate a bad mom.”

“What can I do to bolster the case against Luke Caputo? To make sure he ends up behind bars?”

“She says there are more girls, right? Find them. If they’ll talk, the case grows. There’s momentum. It’s not one woman or two standing in front of the firing squad. It’s easy to discount one woman, say she was asking for it, wanted attention, that her memory is unreliable after all this time, all that shit they always pull. Numbers. Numbers will be the key.”



* * *



There’s Sabrina, who has been silenced. Annabelle, who is being called a murderer. And there’s Jenna.

Think, Callie. Think think think.

The bonfire party. The friends in the woods. She’s in a lot of trouble. He hates when I get high.

Layla.

She calls Collins, asks him for a favor. All the guys have been so solicitous to her after they heard about what happened out at the sinkhole, visiting her, dropping off trays of food their mothers or girlfriends have made. She asks him to get Layla’s address. He texts it to her a moment later and she puts it into her GPS.

The girl might not trust her. And Callie’s not a cop anymore. Just a woman dropping by unannounced asking her to expose the most intimate parts of her story. Layla might still be in Luke’s thrall, smitten and dazzled and made to feel like she’s a part of something bigger than herself, than her own life. But, she knows she hit a nerve with her the last time she saw her, that underneath her bravado is a girl who wants to be understood, wants to be free of the drugs and the men who use her, wants to find her way back to herself again. Callie will do her best to tell her about the case she wants to help build. Because Layla is the strong one, not him. Because they need her. Because she’s got the power to help make things right.





BLAIR


For two weeks she sits in front of a blank piece of paper at the library. Her first attempt, when she can put a pen to the page without her hands shaking, is a little more than a desperate howl. Please don’t take her. We need her. I need her. Please please please. She has a flashback to her first week of preschool, clinging to her mother’s waist, convinced that if she let go, if her mother retreated through the door papered over with cutouts of orange-and-red leaves, she would not see Iris ever again, that she would be left in a world that felt like her classroom, unfamiliar and sterile, without her mother’s presence to help her make sense of it. The world drained of color and meaning, a blur of faces but none of them the one she wanted.

She feels that way, still.



* * *



At the trial Blair does not speak about the stones in the woods or the duffel bag in the corner of the closet. She does not mention the way she dug up the box and the evidence she destroyed in the cover of night.

Instead, she talks about her mother’s volunteer work. About the apple slices drizzled with honey she came home to after school. About the meals they made for the senior citizens in the public housing complex two towns over. About the sense of safety she has always felt in her mother’s presence, the bright sweaters her mother wore so Blair could pick her out easily on the soccer field, so that she could always know she was there. Her mother, a flare shot up through the dark.

The paper rattles in her hands as she finishes. The judge thanks her, but she hardly hears him. Blair’s eyes are on Iris. Her mother has aged, over the months of the trial preparation, and over these past few weeks, and from the distance of the witness stand to the defendant’s chair, Blair can see what she’ll look like as an old woman. The purple-hued bags under her eyes. Her cheekbones hard, startling out from her face, her skin splotched and creased.