Heather(64)

“And … another question. I know, your practice, your girls are out there. But did you hear about the child they found? The baby? That winter, 1991. The same one the girls disappeared.”

“That was a very sad thing,” Miss Hamilton says, rising from her chair, sliding a backpack on her shoulders. “But I don’t know anything about that. Now excuse me, I need to be running drills right now.”

“Did you know Jenna Barry?” The question slips out and Callie hears the desperation in her voice. She can’t stop looking at the yearbook photo of Jenna. The girl she was before she became the joke down at the station, the woman with the crazed hair and glassy, dead-to-the-world eyes.

“I did.”

“She’s my mother. She’s the one who found the child.”

For the first time this afternoon Hamilton doesn’t have a polished answer at the ready. She studies Callie’s face, and Callie guesses she can see the resemblance now that she knows to look. “I’m very sorry. She was a sweet girl.”

Callie nods. She’s never heard that descriptor for Jenna. Hundreds of other words come up for Jenna before she’d think to call her sweet. Troubled. Lonely. Messy. Lost. But Jenna had been a girl once, just like Annabelle and Sabrina. A girl brimming with her own desires and hopes. Who had been something else other than the names everyone slung at her, all the labels everyone stuck to her back.





ANNABELLE


You walk to the supermarket, the day mild enough that the snow from earlier in the week drips from the trees, and underneath everything you hear water rushing groundward. You can smell the sunlight and mineral melt of ice, like a superpower, but the sounds of liquid everywhere call attention to your bladder, the way you have to piss every thirty minutes. The urge undeniable and the store still twenty minutes away.

Your feet punch through the wet snow as you make your way through the underbrush, squat against a tree. The relief turns to panic when you see a flash of color at the edge of the road, a red coat and orange hat, bright, the kind favored by hunters.

“What are you doing?”

Jenna. Your neighbor, who used to circle the perimeter of the factory when you and Sabrina were girls, asking if the two of you would play. Sometimes you would let her, but the triangle always felt lopsided. It was such a burden to have to explain the long-established rules of your games, your code words and shorthand. At the bus stop for school she was always nudging, peering, desperate to be let in.

She cuts a look to your middle, the coat your father left behind that you’ve taken to wearing because it zips over your sweater. Because it helps you feel hidden, even as you recoil at the smell of him on it. Skoal and spilled liquor.

You haven’t seen Jenna in a few weeks and it is like seeing her anew. You notice the way the cold puts patches of pink on her cheeks, the bright whites of her eyes, that she has become pretty, even, under her cap.

“Nothing. What are you doing?”

She turns to show you a sack on her shoulder, the canvas strap. “Delivering papers. This road is on my route.”

It should bind you together, both of you out there in your fathers’ clothes, but it only fills you with repulsion. You have been so busy in the storm of your mind that you forgot that other people want and need, and something about seeing Jenna in that hat hurts. Makes you feel it more keenly. How much both of you lack.

“You know, I’ve been wanting to ask you about something…” You remember now about Jenna’s dead mother, and instead of pity you feel rage. How much easier it would be, to have a mother who left you involuntarily. To have a diagnosis and a reason. To have a father who chopped wood for the woodstove in the kitchen, where you could at least warm your hands.

“I’ve got to go,” you say, brushing past her.

“Annabelle!” she shouts. “It’s about him!” she says, her voice coming apart in a desperate split that makes you stand still. When she speaks again her voice is somber. “I know what happened. I guess I want … I want to make sure you’re okay.”

“You don’t know anything,” you say, surprised by the low growl of your voice. An animal with its haunches up. “You have no idea.”

It comes back to you as you walk away, that it was Jenna who first told you the story of Mother Leeds and the Jersey Devil. How you and Sabrina swore you didn’t believe her, but the next time you found yourself alone in the trees and heard a noise—a pine cone skittering to the ground, a squirrel scrabbling through the branches—you screamed and ran for the safety of the factory, pressed yourself against one of the stone walls, your breath heaving in and out of your chest.



* * *



You stomp the rest of the way to the store, indignant, jealous of Jenna’s future, unblemished like the clear, snowmelt-scoured road ahead of her as she finishes her paper route and returns home. You grab a basket at the front of the shop and it bangs empty against your knee as you walk the aisles, find the runtiest, cheapest bunch of bananas you can, a box of cereal, the smallest container of milk. You stand in front of the meat refrigerator and eye bloody cubes of beef like the kind your mother would add to stew, simmering it to tenderness, with bay leaf and barley, sweetened with carrots and onion. You step away, your veins practically humming with desire, to feel the warm stuff of that stew, to feel the ways it would fortify you, fill you.