But they never did. June passed, then it was July, and still, they had not found her.
Late at night, you drove to the diner. Nestled in a dark corner off the highway, the diner closed at midnight, and you liked to spend those sleepy hours drinking coffee in a back booth, avoiding the gloom of your trailer. Your favorite waitress had a perky blond ponytail and freckles scattered across her cheeks—she chattered as she refilled your coffee. She was young, maybe sixteen, and easy to blush. Angela, read the tag on her apron. You repeated her name in the shower, on the road, in the walk-in freezer as you organized tubs of vanilla.
In truth: the screaming had started again.
There were a few days, after that first Girl, when you were certain you had banished it for good. Everything had been lighter. Prettier. You wondered if this was the feeling people talked about, if this was happy. You still had your summer job at the Dairy Queen. You handed smiling children their ice cream cones, complimented your coworker on her haircut. She cocked her head, mumbled a confused thanks. Her words were tinged with suspicion, a quiet fear that made you angry—it was dripping slowly back into you, the sound of the baby’s screaming. Like a leak in the ceiling.
That night was humid. Middle of July. You remember the sweat, how it soaked straight through your T-shirt. Through the glowing diner window, Angela stacked the chairs, mopped the floor, shut the lights. Finally, she came out of the restaurant, her purse clutched in her armpit—she fiddled with the keys, locked the door, and squinted across the pavement toward her car. She didn’t see you at first, standing dead still in the center of the empty parking lot. A jolt, at the sound of your breathing. Right away, she recognized danger. Angela screamed, piercing, but you clapped a hand over her mouth.
After, it was different.
The relief was muted. A dilution. A weak, flaccid high. This Girl did not feel anything like the first. By the time you dragged her limp into your car, by the time you used the wheelbarrow behind your trailer to cut a path through the dense woods, by the time she’d joined the other Girl in the ground at the wild center of the abandoned forest, it was gone. The relief. Like it had never been there at all. Your body was streaked with dirt, and the sun threatened light above the canopy of trees. Your hands were stinging, blistered from where the belt had ripped your skin, the pearl bracelet from the Girl’s wrist twisted between your fingers.
A memory surfaced, buried until now. Your mother, clasping a chain around your neck—this will always keep you safe. You pressed your face into your filthy palms. You wept.
*
They will be here any second. Shawna, and the transfer team.
You stand to pull Blue’s letter down from the shelf. The letter is only one page: you fold it as small as you can, tuck it into the elastic waistband of your pants. This single sheet of paper will come with you, a corner poking into your thigh as you run into the wild.
But the photo. You do not know what to do with the photo.
The photograph feels dire—when you hold the Blue House up to your face, the image blurs. This close, you can almost see the salt and pepper shakers, the crusty ketchup bottles. You can almost hear the whining hum of the soda machine, Blue’s cackling laugh from behind the kitchen door. But breathing in, you smell only glossy paper.
When you stick out your tongue, the surface of the photograph is bitter. Metallic. You taste ink, chemicals.
Wincing, you rip off a single corner: the edge of the lawn, Blue’s parked car. You pop it into your mouth like a potato chip. The ink numbs in your throat, a sweet poisonous burn, as you realize what you need to do. You rip the precious photograph into strips your molars will understand. The ink is sickening between your teeth. You crunch down anyway, until the photo has evaporated sharp in your throat, until the Blue House is forever a part of you.
*
You do believe in the multiverse. The eternal possibility of it. There is a version of you out there—a child, unabandoned. A boy who came home from school to a mother who read you stories and kissed your forehead goodnight. There is a version of you who never put that fox in Saffy Singh’s bed, who learned how to banish Baby Packer’s screaming any other way. A man who never married Jenny. There is a version of yourself who lost only the things that everyone loses. You like to believe that every alternate self would have found the Blue House, too.
But the most bemusing version of you—the one you cannot reckon with—is the Ansel Packer who did everything the same and simply never got caught.
Saffy
1999
The day they found the missing girls, Saffy thought of the long, sloping yard behind Miss Gemma’s house. The overgrown grass, the looming cattails—how she used to explore, hunting for secrets.