Heather(39)

“Rough day?”

“He’s such a … a … bastard,” you say, deploying the word for the first time but it feels immediately right. Sabrina calls your father a bastard all the time. You try not to think about him, or at least as he is now. You still remember the years when he would lift you on his shoulders, hold your ankles tight and you would raise your head to the clouds, loving the sensation of being closer to the infinite sky.

“Who?”

“The guy you were with.”

The look on the boy’s face changes. “You … you too?”

You let yourself nod, though you wonder how he knows to ask. But his anger feels good, even secondhand. “My sister, too,” you say.

The boy looks up to the ceiling. You think you see tears forming in his eyes.

“Your sister … you have a twin, right? I’ve seen you guys around.”

You nod, wait for him to say something else, but he only drums his fingers against the steering wheel.

You fill the silence, suddenly protective of Sabrina. “She must be special though. He gave her a necklace. It’s pretty. A star inside a circle.”

“He did?” There’s a note of concern in his voice that you can’t parse, and then he sighs. “Let’s just get you home, okay?”

You make it about a mile before you need to be sick. He pulls over and you lean out of the car, retch onto the road.

“I’m sorry,” you say. He hands you a tissue for you to wipe your mouth with.

“You okay to get moving again?”

You don’t know what makes you do this, but you move your hand to your stomach as he watches. You are tired. Tired of not thinking about it or talking about it. Tired of being the only one to know. “I hope I didn’t hurt it,” you whisper.

For a second, he looks as though he’s been slapped, two spots of color on each cheek while the rest of his face goes white. Then, he throws the car into drive and takes the roads too fast, as though you are being chased.

The next morning you wake bleary, still nauseated, retch cranberry wine until you’re empty of anything but bile. The memory of the car ride is hazy. You have the vague feeling of having said something you shouldn’t have, but can’t dredge it up from the swamp of your thoughts, the pressure on your skull too great.

You drink from the tap after getting sick and crawl back to bed. On your bedside table sits the camera out of its bag, the lens taking the mess of you in with its indifferent, one-eyed stare.





CALLIE


She makes a list of halfway houses, but they can be tricky—no one wants to give up residents’ privacy, but sometimes she’s able to drop words like chief and missing person, and they’ll at least tell her Jenna’s never been there. She drives from one halfway house to another, in between shifts babysitting Opal. The next on her list is a place called Ocean’s Haven. She pulls up to a faded Victorian in Asbury Park on a Sunday afternoon expecting nothing, jittery with too much gas station coffee, and underneath that, a deep, abiding exhaustion that makes the bones of her face ache.

“I know you,” a woman says from the porch, between hard draws on a vape pen. She’s cross-legged on a rattan peacock chair, a faded streak of blue hair unspooling from under the pulled-up hood of her sweatshirt.

“Is that right?” Callie wonders if she arrested this woman once upon a time or if the lady is just bullshitting, bored in the late fall chill.

“You’re Jenna’s kid.”

Her breath catches in her chest, the cold ocean air tingling in her lungs. “You know her?”

“Sure. She was here for a while. This summer. She was always showing people your picture.”

Callie takes a big step closer, leans over the porch railing. “Have you heard from her lately?”

“Nah. She left in July. She doing okay? I liked her.”

“She’s missing,” Callie says.

“Damn. Who did it?”

The woman’s question hits like a hammer at the base of her spine. Sure, Callie hasn’t mentioned the drugs, but this is the first person who hasn’t assumed Jenna did this to herself. “What makes you ask that? Who did what?”

“She said she knew this was going to happen. She talked about someone who was going to hunt her down.”

“She wasn’t talking about the devil, right? That’s always been her thing.”

“Nope. Some guy from when she was a teenager. She said she was keeping some secrets for him.”

“Did she say a name? What he looked like?”

“Nah.”

“What secrets was she keeping?”

“Whatever they were, she sure as shit wasn’t telling me. Something that was still hot to the touch, I’ll tell you that much. She played tough but she was scared. You could tell. She’d pick her nails. Get this look on her face. Like she was far away.”

Callie thinks the same thing. She felt the fear in the room that last time they saw one another. Underneath Jenna’s obstinance, her bitterness, pulsed a worry she had been too scared to name, tender and vulnerable as her bare feet on the gravel-strewn road.

Callie leaves the woman from the halfway house—Dawn—her card and tells her to call, day or night, if she hears from Jenna or she remembers anything else that might be relevant.