Heather(107)
* * *
Callie had asked Della again what she knew the day she put the Post-it with Sabrina Riley’s name on it on the bathroom mirror.
“I didn’t know anything, other than something bad had happened to those girls. I had no idea Annabelle … no idea what would happen to her, of course.”
Della, it turns out, was the one who sent the file on the Baby Doe case up to Healy’s team, hoping they might take it upon themselves to find out where the Riley girls had gone. She hadn’t wanted to do it while Frank was still chief. She knew there was something off about the way the case was handled, but it was a hard time for her family. She had just found out she was pregnant again, and her husband had been laid off. They needed her job, she couldn’t rock the boat. But she admitted to talking to her girls about the case a little. About the itch it left behind. And in the end Callie is grateful for Wren, for the publicity she’s stirred up. There’s a huge movement online of people who are rallying behind Annabelle, a fervor to see Luke punished. Callie declined to be interviewed by Wren but she was relieved to find out that the DA was working on charging him. That the tides were finally turning against him.
* * *
Callie braces herself to find Annabelle with more injuries the next time she visits, but she appeared unscathed. She had started working in the prison kitchen. Through a letter she wrote and circulated through her husband, she had quadrupled the prison library’s stock of paperback books via donations from their town.
“What’s with you and libraries?” Callie asks, aiming for lightness, though of course everything turned so quickly after their first meeting among the knitters.
Annabelle offers her a thin smile but soon the look on her face turns thoughtful. “I thought for so long I was trying to be good, to atone, but it’s different. Maybe there’s a part of me that’s doing that. But I think what I want most is to feel like I belong somewhere. It feels … dangerous, not to belong. You know people are helping Ben with the kids? Driving them to sports practices and school? There’s a few former friends who cross the street when they see Ben, but mostly people are trying to be kind. Maybe that’s what I was doing all this time. Creating spaces where I belonged, where I would never feel like I wouldn’t have help.”
Callie recognizes the impulse. After all, that was part of becoming a cop. A uniform that meant she was claimed, sanctioned, by the rest of the group. Even Damien acted the way he did because he was trying to belong. In a moment of desperation, Annabelle had no one to keep her from the worst, most base, version of herself. No one to claim her as theirs. The girl whom so many people failed or harmed in order for her to do what she did. And the same with Jenna. Her mother’s treatment, her father tending to her day and night, and then working double shifts to pay off the medical bills. It left Jenna on her own without anyone to keep her safe. Left her to fend for herself against Luke, the Caputos. A battle she was always going to lose.
“What will you do now?” Annabelle asks her.
“I have absolutely no idea,” Callie says, the admission making her edgy. She’s been in touch with Chelsea about the Luke Caputo case. Luke had been arrested the week before. She thinks of what Jenna said to her that day in the cabin. Callie has, for so long, defined herself against the messiness and pain of her upbringing. Her legacy was darker than even she could have guessed. But Jenna had also given her the gift of a lineage. Of people who were willing to start over, their own way. And that’s what she’ll do, too. Over and over until she gets it right.
ANNABELLE
For a long time you thought that the truth coming out would be the hardest part. You thought it would hurt to be called a monster. For the world to know how you had failed the baby. Your baby.
But what you could not have known until after the news trucks left your street, after your husband came to you in tears at the edge of the bed, after your daughter returned from school quiet, ashamed, after the trial and the sentencing, was that when the fear was gone, there was only grief left.
Grief that bent you in half on the thin mattress of your prison cell cot. Grief that made your stomach empty itself. Grief that you gagged on when there was nothing left for your body to rid itself of. You had kept it at the edge of your mind for so long that you did not understand how total it was. How the fear of being revealed was only the smallest part of it. A single raindrop in a storm.
As a part of your probation you speak to a counselor every week. Her name is Laura, and she is your age, with bright blond hair and a beaded glasses chain that she runs between her fingers when she’s listening.
“I don’t have the words,” you told Laura, after spending the first four sessions staring out the window. “I’ve never been good at it. Telling the truth about how I feel. I never had to. Sabrina always knew. And that was enough. One person, who understood me perfectly.”
Laura had smiled at you, and you detected real, true kindness in it. “Well, now. That’s where we start.”
* * *
They found Sabrina’s body in the water. Divers brought her up from a grave of wreckage. You had never learned to swim as girls. Later, you took lessons after you married Ben, in the brisk chlorinated rectangle of the local YMCA, while Blair was in preschool on the other side of the building. You learned to float and to kick and get from one end of the pool to another with a decent freestyle. You learned that you liked the backstroke best. You had the opportunity to learn that about yourself, and even that felt like a kind of betrayal at the time, even more so now that you know what happened to her in the end.