Heather(76)

When she looks down again she sees it, another boulder in line with the one that tripped her, framing the path—or what used to be a path—like a gateway.

She aims her phone past the boulder and finds a line where the understory is less thick, not as tangled. She can only make out the ground a few feet ahead at a time but she starts to walk, high, plodding steps. The ground is level, at least—everything in the Pines is flat—but it doesn’t mean she doesn’t have to stop and backtrack, find her line through the trees to the place where she thinks she senses a gap.

A cloud passes over the moon and shifts away, and there it is: the line of the stone foundation, a gap where a door once hung. She steps through the doorway and there’s more of a drop to the ground on the other side than she realizes, lands hard on her right ankle, which starts to throb right away.

She limps to the center of the structure, not knowing what she’s looking for. The stone seems to hold the chill of the night close. She shivers, thinks of two girls climbing the walls and whooping as they jump, two girls pointing broken branches at one another like swords. Two girls laughing together and speaking in code as teenagers, hands quick in one another’s hair, tight French braids that look perfect and make their scalps ache, shins beaded with blood from trudging through the understory, though by then they hardly feel the sting. Their own world out here, the abandoned factory a place they could invent and explore, unlike their own home, with its bare cupboards and filthy windows.

“What happened?” she whispers, shrugging up at the place where the factory roof should be. What made everything go so wrong?

She paces the perimeter of the factory walls once, twice, a third time, learning now where she can place her feet, where the ground is uneven, ignoring the throb in her ankle. By the fourth lap her body knows how to keep her steady and she runs one hand along the cool stone of the wall, her phone in the other.

She thinks she is imagining it, her eyes playing tricks on her, when she catches the flash of white on the short northern wall of the ruins. A spot of it, just below the window. She steps closer, tripping once on the way, too eager to be careful.

In between one of the stones, a ziplock bag, damp and blooming with mold, with a piece of paper inside.

Iris Owens

57 Cleveland Lane

Cortlandt, New York 10567



There’s a phone number below the address, too. Callie’s breath catches in her chest. It’s the handwriting from the SAT workbooks. Careful, deliberate, exacting.

Annabelle.

And the name. The same as a doll under Sabrina’s bed. The name a girl would pick for herself if she had to invent herself anew. A name she had practice pretending with. A proxy self she was used to creating stories for.

“You were a fucking kid,” she whispers.

Annabelle has been here. Annabelle has been trying to tell Sabrina where she’s gone.

She knows more now, but she’s also back at her original questions. Who was the mother of Baby Doe? Where did Sabrina go?

Except this time, she has someone to ask. She’ll go to Annabelle.





ANNABELLE


Sabrina brings books from the library. Guide to Home Birth. Birthing Better. What to Expect for Baby’s First Year.

You flip open the guide to home birth and even the illustrations make you queasy. The organs crammed around the fetus, floating in its watery sack.

“I can’t,” you say, shutting the book.

Sabrina rolls her eyes. “Fine, I’ll read them first and tell you what you have to know.” She pulls a book from the top of the stack and studies it with the concentration she had reserved for the notebook she was always scribbling in back when she was still in school. With the concentration you recognize when she stitched your arm back together. You remember something she said last year. Too bad I’m not like you, good at school. Or else I’d study to be a nurse.

She bites her lip, takes a pencil from her backpack and circles one word, another. The old habit from when you were in elementary school. Circling words to look up in the dictionary when you went back to the library. You look at the ceiling but you can still hear it, the drag of her pencil around one word, then another, then another. There is so much the two of you do not know.

You cannot imagine life beyond this thing that is waiting for you, the thing you have heard stories of but cannot picture. Mother Leeds in the circle of chanting women, cursing and writhing with pain. Blood. The dark coil of a cord. It is like how you have known, a fact crouching in the back of your mind, that you will die one day. It is coming for you, but impossible to imagine your way into the moment, to prepare.

“It’s going to be okay, Annabelle.”

“Tell me again, about the plan,” you say to Sabrina, as she stands over the stove stirring a seasoning packet into a pot of ramen. You’ve lost track of how many days you’ve been out of school, though you still refer to it that way in your head. As though you’ve only been sick. As though you’ll return.

“We’ll get our own place. An apartment somewhere. Maybe by the ocean. We can take her for walks on the boardwalk.” You close your eyes and for a second you savor it. Your mother used to take you to see the ocean. Not in summer when it was hot and crowded, but in the shoulder season, when the sand was cold on your bare feet and you had the beaches to yourselves, save for a few dog walkers and old men with their metal detectors. You picture you and Sabrina, together, the salt in the air making your hair go wavy. Taking turns pushing a carriage along the shoreline.