Heather(108)

Callie had watched as the divers went down, and down again, and down another time, until they could bring Sabrina up from the depths, release her from a tangle of machinery. You were glad there had been someone there to bear witness. Someone to watch over Sabrina, so she would not be alone.

She told you about the case against Luke Caputo, about the other girls and women who had come forward. Nine of them in all.

It was strange, after all these years, learning the Coyote’s name. Son of the former police chief, sure, but in the end, with a name, he was just another man. You saw it before that, in the photos Blair had developed. He was younger than you are now. And you could finally see something small about him. An ugly need, a weakness, that warped him and diminished him.

You had been the strong one. You know that now. You and Sabrina both.

Callie had been pregnant—early enough that there was just a slight swell under her shirt, easy enough to miss if you didn’t catch the way she would let her hand rest on her belly for a moment, protecting it. Just married, in law school. Would finish that year, take the Bar. She had apologized to you for how things had gone, and you hadn’t known how to say it. That the truth coming out had been the beginning of something.

Your life. Your two lives. Stitched together at that ugly seam, at last.



* * *



You stare out the passenger seat window as Ben drives, the smell of cedar and pitch pine seeping into the car. Feel the shadows of the trees fall over you as you drive deeper into the woods.

The house is yours now, no one else to claim it. Ben has asked what you want to do with it. Raze it to the ground, restore it to its former splendor. Neither feels honest. In the fall, you will sell the house but keep the land abutting it. The woods, the factory ruins. The places you and Sabrina used to hide.

The trail behind the house is overgrown, but your feet lead you. Ben and Blair and the boys follow—Blair home from college for the week on spring break, your sons with their newly broad shoulders and deep baritone voices of men. Margot is with you too, bearing a bouquet of pale pink roses shrouded in cellophane that crackles in the silence.

The rubble of the factory looks so much smaller than it had been in your mind. It was bigger, you want to tell them. Towering. But that must not be true. It must have been this small all that time.

How impossible, to tell the story of how it had been to anyone else, who wasn’t there at your side. Still, you have been trying. Your promise to all of them. As much truth, the best you can.

There’s the clearing just behind it. Callie did it, Ben tells you. Made sure the weeds were pulled, any debris removed before you came.

Two headstones stand side by side.

Margot unwraps the roses.

Your fingers meet Margot’s as you take two of the flowers from her, and with the easy intimacy of that touch you think of something she told you when the rest of the world was calling you a monster. Margot—someone who had more right to hate you than anyone else—wrapped her hands firm around yours.

There is nothing that happens to a child that a mother does not feel. Even when the thing that happens to them is you.

Margot told you something else, too, something that helped her after the stillbirth. She said that scientists had found that a child’s cells remain in the mother’s body, even after a miscarriage, even decades after pregnancy, after the mother dies. The cells rove around the first few years after pregnancy. Sometimes they collect in places that need healing. Repairing tissues, fixing wounds.

But, you read later, sometimes, the cells find darker places to collect. If the mother has a tumor, the fetal cells can encourage the cancer to fester. A case-by-case scenario, whether these cells rush in to heal or destroy. Both of you marking another, shaping another, at one another’s mercy, for all time.



* * *



You put the first rose on Sabrina’s plot. Can’t help but think of the bones below your feet, the same length and shape as the ones under your skin. The scar on your arm prickles as the breeze shifts between the trees.

You turn to the second grave. When they asked what name to carve into the stone it came to you in an instant, unlocked from the black box of your mind. As if it had always been there, waiting to be known.

Heather.

Like the Pine Barrens heather your own mother revered. Rare in so many other places but thick and dense in the understory in these woods.

Resilient in the acidic, inhospitable soil, with yellow flowers that burst forth in the spring. You—I—kneel in front of the stones, bury the amber bead I’ve held onto for so long in the earth between them.





ACKNOWLEDGMENTS


Thank you to Sarah Bedingfield, who encouraged me to write this book when it was just a wisp of an idea. I am so lucky to have such a dedicated, fearless, and whip-smart agent in my corner. Thanks to Rebecca Rodd at Levine Greenberg Rostan, who provided an early read and crucial feedback and helped keep everything on track with grace and aplomb while we navigated two maternity leaves.

Thank you to my editor, Ryan Doherty, who both trusted me and challenged me at every step of the editorial process. We took this book on quite the ride but your patience, wisdom, and encouragement made it a pleasure.

Thank you to Faith Tomlin for your astute edits and your enthusiasm for Heather and the women who populate the world of this book.

Jennifer Jackson went above and beyond and read this novel in so many forms and offered essential feedback. I’m so lucky to have had another brilliant reader on my team.