Heather(80)

Then one of the women mewls for help. She has to go to the bathroom.

Callie uses this as an opportunity to leave. She’s flustered, hot under her coat. An alarm blares on her way out, makes her jump, and she realizes she still has the book under her arm, the one whose jacket she was reading as a prop.

“Shit,” she swears, lunges to the nearest shelf, shoves it between two doorstop fantasy novels.

She sits in her car for a moment after she starts it. That wasn’t how it was supposed to go. She didn’t have a precise plan for this day when she came here to watch Iris, but she’s fumbled it. She can’t help but feel dirty, dirtier than she used to after going undercover to buy drugs, or pretend to solicit a man for sex. What is she doing, trailing this woman through her life? There are ways to go about interviewing Iris about Sabrina, but this isn’t it. Her head feels cloudy, her body wrung out.

The body remembers, Iris had said. Her body is feeling all of it: Jane, Damien, Jenna, Wren, the mess of this case.

A tap at the window makes her jump.

Iris again.

She rolls it down, waits for Iris to speak first. She looks different than she had in the library, among the knitters.

She looks afraid.

It takes her a minute to speak, and the silence is charged. Something has been laid bare between them.

“Did she send you?” Iris asks finally, her words slow and measured. Nothing of the amiable tone she took with Callie among the stacks of books.

“Who?” Callie says, finding she means it two ways. Who are you talking about, and who are you?

She takes a breath, as though it pains her, like someone whose ribs are bruised. “Sabrina. Please tell me Sabrina sent you.” Callie feels her mouth gape open a little bit. Iris continues. “You’re a PI, right? She’s hired you?”

Iris has been holding out. Hoping. All this time. Callie can see it in her face, in the tight clench of her fists. What she’s suspected, what she’s worried about and the stories she’s been telling herself, over the many long years she must have been waiting. That Sabrina would find a way back to her. That they’d be together again.

“Let’s go somewhere we can talk more openly,” Callie says.

Iris nods. “My house. No one is home. You can follow me. Or do you … you might already know the address?”

Callie nods, flushing hot with shame.





ANNABELLE


“It’s perfect,” Sabrina says, holding up the note the Coyote pinned to the front door, a time and a place scrawled in blocky print. “I’ll meet him, like I always do. But then I’ll tell him he’s got to pay up.”

“It seems … weird,” you say. Sabrina had started leaving him voicemails from the payphone in front of the convenience store, cryptic and bitter. Your phone lines had been cut off, finally, after months of the phone company sending increasingly strident warnings. Envelopes marked URGENT in red ink.

“Stop worrying,” she says, putting her coat on, zipping it to her chin. She’s wearing the gold star charm after keeping it on her dresser all these weeks. You wonder what it means.

At the window you watch her pale hair recede into the dark. To your surprise, she turns once at the end of the driveway, gives you a smile and a wave, turns back again. Sets her shoulders and disappears from view.



* * *



Night falls, no Sabrina. You consider walking to the payphone, but who would you call? It wouldn’t help you find her, and you’d freeze. After a short thaw, winter came back, swift and hard and bitter.

You don’t know what to do with yourself. You pace the hallways, open the same cabinets over and over again, jump at every creak in the old house, thinking it’s her.

You lie down to sleep but can’t rest. You have no way of calling her. You have no one who can help. You think for a moment of calling the cops, but then you remember the Cranberry Festival, how the Coyote had stood in the circle of men with the police chief. His friends.

You try to calm yourself, tell yourself she will come back with a reason it took so long. She’ll return and tell you a convoluted story about where she’d gone and what she had to do and why, her face flushed with victory. She’ll show you her purse, a wallet fat with cash, and then the two of you will turn toward the future, toward the rest of your lives. But that only works for so long. You check the clock every few minutes. You search out some coins from between the couch cushions, resolve to walk to the payphone at the market. You will call the police after all. You get as far as putting on your coat, but a moment later you are taking it off again. What if she’s hurt and comes back while you are gone? Every step you’d take down the road could be a step in the wrong direction. You feel her close by, you know she wouldn’t leave you, not now, if she could help it.

In the end, you walk in circles in the yard calling her name. Calling and calling and calling. Once, you think you hear her calling to you from far off, but realize it is only your own voice thrown back to you. You don’t know whether it is the cold or the fear that makes you start to tremble, but you stay out until your teeth clack against one another, until your knees begin to falter and buckle underneath you like the untested legs of a fawn.

“Come back, help, help, help,” you plead, to the sky, the cold, indifferent stars, one last time. “Sabrina!” you shout, your heart pounding, your limbs weak. “Sabrina!”