“You’re p-pretty,” I say, like that’s a reason. I feel my face turn a deep, deep shade of red and try to redeem myself. “I mean, it’s easy t-to talk to a p-pretty f-face. I don’t know.”
She turns to me. “How long you had that stutter, anyway?”
“All my l-life.”
“It’s kinda cute.”
I look at the car ceiling because there’s something about it that’s vaguely insulting and weirdly flattering at the same time. My stutter is not cute unless I say it is, and I’ll never say it is. Mostly, it’s exhausting. Still, there’s something nice about being worth the effort of Cat’s lie. It’s nice enough it makes me feel everything that’s hurting a little less. Mattie once asked me … she’d just come home flush from a crush on Jonah Sweeten and asked me how you know when you like someone, and if I liked any boys like she did, and I didn’t know what to tell her. That I tried not to think about that kind of stuff, because it was painful, because I thought I could never have it, but when I did end up liking someone, it always made me ache right down to my core. I realized pretty early on that the who didn’t really matter so much.
That anybody who listens to me, I end up loving them just a little.
I turn my head to Cat and she stares at me and I stare back until I can’t take it anymore and look away. I turn the radio on and a song is playing. It’s the one that played at the bar yesterday night. That was only yesterday … my eyes drift closed and I don’t know how long they stay that way when I jerk back awake. Breathe in.
“S-sorry,” I say, embarrassed.
“You look beat,” she says. “Literally and figuratively.”
I look in the mirror, and the side of my nose, underneath my eye, is a little more swollen and bruised than it was before. The tired, dark circles I have are just enhancing the damage.
“Does it hurt?”
I shrug, but yes, it hurts. It hurts worse than it did before I got in the car and it’ll hurt worse than that tomorrow, but more than that I’m just—tired.
She reaches over, her hand skimming my face and I flinch back away from her and she says, “Sorry, I don’t know why I did that.” And I want to say, sorry, I don’t know how to let you. Why don’t I know how to let her? I think of Javi in the backseat of my car, and everything I didn’t let myself do in there with him, and for what? So maybe it’s not a love story, but why can’t I let myself be worth a moment’s tenderness?
Why?
“It’s o-okay,” I say and then, gathering all my courage: “Y-you could … it’s okay if y-you want t-to d-do that.”
She reaches over and cups my face softly in her hands and gives me a sad sort of smile that tells me I’ve given even more of myself away. I’ve put my weak, wanting heart into the universe. I close my eyes and let myself feel it, the heat of her palms against my cheeks. Then she kisses me. Her lips are soft and unexpected and right. I open my eyes.
“Thanks for picking me up,” she says.
“I d-didn’t d-do it for that.”
“I know. I just wanted to thank you.”
I lean my head against the steering wheel and wait for the rain to let up, and my eyes slip closed and I open them again. I’m fucked. I know if I close them one more time, that’ll be it. Every good thing her kiss made me feel is fading, my sad reality kicking back in. I pinch the bridge of my nose and hiss, and the pain doesn’t even sharpen the dullest parts of me.
“If you want to sleep you can.”
I lower my hand.
“I d-don’t,” I say stubbornly.
“Doesn’t seem like you got a choice,” she returns. Then, “It’s okay, Sadie.”
But it isn’t.
I stare out the window and think of my mother’s fingertips pressed lightly against my forehead. I made you. I wonder if she knows about Mattie, wherever she is.
I wonder if she knows I’m all that’s left.
THE GIRLS
S1E4
WEST McCRAY:
The day Mattie disappeared started like any other. May Beth remembers it vividly; she dreams of it every night.
MAY BETH FOSTER:
She came by that morning. I have a rule: it’s not decent to bother a person before nine. So Mattie’s favorite thing, if she was up and around before then, was to come pounding on my door at nine-oh-one, fling it open and shout, “Good morning!” into my trailer. Shout it right in my face, really, because the door opens up to my kitchen. [CHUCKLES]
So that’s what she did. She flung the door wide, I was at the table, having my coffee and she screamed, “Good morning, May Beth!” And I wanted to throttle her because I loved her that much, but I just smiled at her and I asked her, “Where’re you off to today, Mats?” like I always did and she said, “Everywhere,” like she always did.
I told her to figure things out with her sister and stay out of trouble in the meantime.
WEST McCRAY:
Mattie and Sadie had been fighting that week.
MAY BETH FOSTER:
It was about Claire, of course.
Mattie wanted to go to L.A. but she knew they didn’t have the money, so whenever she’d pick a fight about it, deep down she understood—or at least, I think she understood—that it was impossible. Mattie would have her moment, let it die a while, then have another.
But somehow, she’d found out Sadie had been squirrelling away cash in case of an emergency. If they didn’t end up needing it, Sadie told me Mattie would take it to college. Now that Mattie knew about this money, she decided that meant they could hop a plane to L.A. and look for Claire. Of course Sadie told her that wasn’t happening.
I had them over for an early dinner that afternoon and they weren’t talking. It was awful. Usually, Sadie would try to smooth things over, but not this time. When I asked her about it afterward, she said, and I’ll never forget it—she said, “I don’t think I’ll ever be enough for Mattie.”
Mattie was never content with just having her sister.
WEST McCRAY:
Sadie worked the gas station that night.
MARTY MCKINNON:
Sadie might not have been the most forthcoming girl, but it was clear she was upset about something. Find out later, it was that fight.
WEST McCRAY:
The fight was brought to the Abernathy Police Department’s attention by Sadie herself, but played no significant part in their investigation into Mattie’s murder. It’s just another layer of tragedy in a story that’s already seen more than its fair share.
MARTY MCKINNON:
It was a long shift, I remember. Sadie said she really needed the money, so I gave her a few more hours. She clocked off pretty late and—
MAY BETH FOSTER:
She came back to my place. She didn’t do that all the time, only when she was real worn out and maybe … maybe looking for a bit of mothering. I was glad to do it, because the opportunity didn’t come along too often with Sadie. Anyway, she fell asleep on my couch and she looked so peaceful, I didn’t want to wake her. I should have. I can’t help but wonder what might’ve happened if I had. Maybe she and Mattie would’ve crossed paths before Mattie ever got in that truck … because that’s the thing—no matter what happened between them, Sadie always checked in on Mattie for whatever she might need. She always had a meal on the table or in the fridge, ready to heat up. No matter how frustrated Sadie got with her sister, she never stopped looking after her.
But that night, I wouldn’t let her. I didn’t wake her up. I thought it would be good for Mattie—for Mattie to stand back and notice that absence, to realize how much Sadie did for her even if Mattie thought Sadie didn’t get it right enough of the time. So I texted Mattie and I let her know Sadie was with me and she wasn’t going to be home.
WEST McCRAY:
Mattie never got it. She’d left her phone in the trailer. Sadie discovered this when, the next day, she sent a string of frantic texts to her little sister, demanding to know where she was. They read as follows:
S
ORRY, MATTIE. FELL ASLEEP.
WHERE ARE YOU?
I DIDN’T DO IT TO BE A BITCH, I PROMISE.
I’M FREAKING OUT—JUST TELL ME WHERE YOU ARE.
DON’T DO THIS TO ME.
MAY BETH FOSTER:
I’ll never forget it. Sadie came back to my place and told me Mattie was gone. I said, “I’m sure she’s somewhere around town, just being a little bitch about it.” That’s exactly what I said. I’ve never forgiven myself. And Sadie just looked at me and said, “This feels different.” She was right.
WEST McCRAY:
I don’t need to paint you a picture of what this retelling does to May Beth because you can hear the utter agony in her voice. Still, I want you to know she sits across from me at her table the entire time, her gaze fixed on something I can’t see, her hands twisting the tablecloth. She’s not shying from her hurt, and it’s a true privilege that she’d share it with me, but her desperate attempt to control it tells me the pain I’m witness to is barely scratching the surface. I don’t know how she survives it, frankly. She doesn’t seem to either.
MAY BETH FOSTER:
It’s killing me a little more every day. And if that’s what it’s doing to me, you can’t imagine what it did to Sadie. She … became a shell of who she used to be. I lost her a little more each day.
WEST McCRAY:
It’s understandable then, that May Beth wants to protect Sadie from further hurt. She’s so afraid of the information she’s been keeping from me she makes me fly back to Cold Creek just to get it. It’s not that she doesn’t trust me, she says, but she’d feel better saying it to my face.
When I get there, I turn the microphone off and she tells me what she knows. Five days later, I have a new lead, and once she’s been reassured that what she’s told me won’t cause any kind of problems for Sadie should we find her, May Beth agrees to tell me again for podcast.
MAY BETH FOSTER:
Once I say it, everyone’s going to understand why I don’t think much of the Farfield Police Department because if they were as thorough as they claim they were, if they did everything in their power to figure out what happened to Sadie, they would’ve found this and they would’ve followed through on it. It was under the passenger’s seat of her car.
WEST McCRAY:
It’s a credit card. Sadie didn’t have any credit cards when she lived in Cold Creek. And this one doesn’t belong to her. It belongs to a woman named Cat Mather.
She’s an easy enough person to track down.
sadie
I dream of small, broken bodies.
Prone and hurt, catalogued and kept sacred in a small, dark spaces. The look in their eyes is one of utter incomprehension giving way to pain, to emptiness. Sometimes they stare right at me. Other times, the middle distance. There’s nothing I can do. It’s too late.
I dream of Mattie’s face.
I jerk awake, the side of my head knocking against the windshield. The throbbing in my nose is near unbearable—but survivable.
It’s survivable, I tell myself.
I turn the car on and glance at the clock only to discover I wasn’t out for more than an hour. I feel more tired than I did before I gave in to sleep and my bones are aching in a way that makes me miss my bed, makes me miss the idea of a home. The trailer’s not even that, anymore, though. It wasn’t when I left it. It’s not home if I’m the only person in it.
I yawn. It was the shuffling and shifting beside me that woke me up. Cat rummaging around, I think, but by the time my eyes were open, she was sitting very still beside me, staring out at the road. I follow her gaze. The rain has stopped. Must have just stopped. The midafternoon sun is out, making the pavement gleam.
Cat doesn’t look right. Everything she laid out on the dashboard is gone, back in her bag, I guess. An hour doesn’t seem like it would be enough time for them to dry.
“What’s w-wrong w-with you?” I ask.
“What? Nothing. I was just waiting for you to wake up.”
“I-I’m awake.” I clear my throat. “You wanna g-get outta here?”
“Sounds like a plan.”
I pull back onto the road while Cat sits rigid beside me. We drive the next hour in silence. She’s different now. I can’t put my finger on why—all I did was sleep. I roll the window down and take a deep breath. I can see the air, thick with post-rain haze.
“Hey, hey.” Cat taps me on the arm with one hand and points left with the other. The road reveals a small gas station and we must be between nowhere and somewhere, because it’s surprisingly busy. It’s got two pumps out front and probably the world’s grimiest bathrooms out back. I pull in. The sign next to the pumps says SELF SERVE (CASH ONLY, PAY INSIDE).
It’s the best of the worst available options, just slightly less talking involved than if an attendant shows, expecting you to tell them what you need. But I’m not feeling up to it. If Mattie were here, I’d let her do the talking. She liked doing her best impression of a person in charge to save me from The Look, or worse. Because there are worse people than Becki with an i—Becki, imagine her, the tip of an iceberg—and I swear I’ve met them all. There’s a lot of folks out there willing to pay for their comfort with someone else’s voice.
Cat unbuckles her seat belt and shoves some crumpled money into my hands.
“Should be enough,” she says quickly. A yellow truck pulls up behind us. “Uh, I’m just gonna stretch my legs … go to the bathroom.”
“Okay.”
She gets out of the car.
I watch her round the station and sit there for another minute, or maybe much more than a minute, because the next thing I know an older man raps his knuckles against my window, startling me so bad I near hit the roof. I roll the window down and stare. He’s all silver hair and bushy eyebrows, the skin of his deeply tanned face sun-leathered enough to make it hard to guess how long he’s actually been on this earth. Forty. Sixty. I don’t know.
“Whoa! Didn’t mean ta scare ya.” His voice has a faint withering of age about it. “But it’s self-serve and you’ve been sittin’ out here so long, I thought you didn’t see the sign. We got a line happening behind you, so…”
“—” I block, of course. I can feel the word in my mouth, trying desperately to free itself. When it finally does, it comes out, “Sssssssorry.”
I sound drunk.
“You been drinking?” the man asks.
I’m never sure if being asked if I’m drunk is a step up from the suggestion I’m stupid, but it all points to the same thing, I guess—that there’s something fundamentally not right about me and once you feel that on you, you want to get away from it.
“If you been drinking, you know I can’t just let you drive outta here.”
“C-couldn’t st-stop me. I got a”—I flash a smile—“got a g-good head st-start.”
I keep that smile plastered on even as I feel heat creep past my neck, to my ears, and bloom across my cheeks until my whole face is tomato red. The hard lines around the man’s brown eyes soften. He either feels sorry for me or he’s embarrassed for himself. I won’t know which until he opens his mouth.
He clears his throat and makes it a peace offering: “How about I fill it up for ya.”
“I’ll pay i-i-i—”
I give up and nod toward the building.
I’ll pay inside.
The air-conditioning gives the station a bite, raises the hairs on my arms and legs. I need to restock a little—food and water—but doing it at a place like this, where anything remotely healthy is too expensive to look at and the shit food is at a premium too, isn’t very smart of me. I grab a bottle of water from the fridge and a dusty jar of peanut butter from a shelf near the back. I pick up a plastic spoon at the coffee counter where I contemplate a seventy-five-cent coffee from an old metal percolator and decide that money’s better spent on food. So no coffee, but my metal-warped reflection is how I want people to picture me: the skin of my face stretched upward and downward at impossibl
e lengths, my eyes dozing somewhere near the middle, my nose a long sliver with two pinprick nostrils, all of me blurring oddly together like watercolors poured down a canvas that can’t keep hold of its art.
The bells over the door spastically announce the old man’s entrance and I expect Cat to be behind him, maybe, but she’s not. I follow him to the counter with my peanut butter and water and that, combined with the gas—even with Cat’s contribution—lightens my wallet too much.
Money burns fast. Knowing that doesn’t get easier with age and it’s worse when you learn it young. The beauty of childhood is not entirely grasping the cost of living; food just appears in the fridge, you have a roof over your head because everyone does and electricity must be some kind of sorcery, like right out of Harry Potter or something, because who could ever put a price on light? Maybe it’s not even that you believe in magic. It’s that you never really had to think about any of it before. Then one day you find out you’ve been walking the razor’s edge all along.
“Th-thanks,” I tell him.
When I get back outside, Cat is nowhere to be found but the line that’s formed behind my car is looking more than a little pissed off. I get inside it and pull forward into a parking spot and that’s when I notice all her stuff is gone from the front seat.
“What the fuck,” I murmur. I get back out of the car. The place seems busier than it did a second go, people moving in and out of the store.
I cup my hands around my mouth. “C-Cat?”
A few heads turn my way, but none of them are her. I jog around the building to the bathrooms and a sign on the door says to ask for the key inside—but Cat didn’t do that. She got out of the car, walked behind the building and now she’s … she’s gone.
The back of the station faces a steep incline toward a field of wildflowers. It stretches about a mile before it meets highway. There’s no one I can see. My chest gets tight. Did something happen? Did someone …
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