by Ren Richards
Lindsay was standing over her now. ‘Nell!’
‘Shut up,’ Nell said. She pressed the receiver back to her ear.
‘You’re not the only one who does research,’ Easter said. ‘There are thousands of newspapers in prison library. And there is all the time in the world to read every word, to find the right person to tell my story. You changed your name, grew out your hair. Maybe I wouldn’t have found you if I wasn’t looking, but you resemble that girl in the newspaper too much to be coincidence.’ She smiled, and her eyes were dead. ‘You’ve been careful. No author photo on your book. No interview. The only recent photograph I could find was in a local article last year.’
Nell remembered that interview perfectly. The young journalist had fawned over her like an excited puppy, and she’d insisted on taking Nell’s picture at her editor’s behest. It was a small interview in a local paper with no online archive, and even then, Nell had been reluctant.
She could deny it, but something about Easter’s gaze had her frozen. Nell still hadn’t answered the question. Did she talk about her daughter like she was alive, or dead?
Daughter.
In truth, she hated the word.
Easter shrugged. ‘I want you to tell my story. You want me to tell you my story so that you can get more money in your piggy bank. The least you can do is be honest—’
‘I don’t talk about her,’ Nell said. ‘Not in the past tense, and not in the present.’ It was the truth. In the ten years since it happened, she thought about her child constantly, counting the days and bundling those days into years, keeping them in neat little piles in her brain. And behind all of that organised mourning was the child’s name: Reina. Reina, rusted like an abandoned hubcap on the side of the road, half covered over with dirt as the world rushed by.
But she didn’t talk about her.
Nell could feel Lindsay’s worry. It was palpable, like the air after someone had just thrown up. Humid and sick. ‘Nell.’
‘Sometimes the papers say you’re innocent and sometimes not,’ Easter said. ‘Maybe you have your own secrets.’
Nell was aware of what the papers said. One morning she was the dim-witted teenage mother being controlled by her wealthy boyfriend and his influential family. The next, she was the girl who had snapped. The next, she had been plotting the child’s demise since her birth, had punched herself in the stomach when she was pregnant. Sometimes she was covering up an accidental drowning, or a backyard accident. Sometimes she had beaten her child with a shovel and hidden the body. The story shifted like hues in a mood ring, never fully coming to form.
When all goes as planned, people pour their cereal and drive to work and daydream about the beach on their desktop wallpaper. Everything is safe. But when a child goes missing, suddenly they remember that any horrible thing is possible. Everyone is a killer or a rapist. There’s a sort of desperation when it’s a child, and the theories get uglier and more brutal as time passes, until there’s nothing left to do but be angry.
Nell had lost her child. That was true. That was all anyone knew. Staring at the photos of that chubby-cheeked little girl would yield no answers; they had all been taken before it happened.
‘Did you kill her?’ Easter asked.
‘No.’ Nell’s voice came out hoarse and hushed. She cleared her throat. ‘No, I didn’t kill her.’
Easter considered this. When she spoke again, it was with a flawless American accent. ‘Maybe you’re telling the truth. Maybe all of those papers are telling lies. Just like they’re telling lies about me. My sister is still alive, and I know I didn’t kill her, just like you know you didn’t kill your little girl.’
It had been nearly a decade since any newspapers found Nell worth writing about. In an industry that thrived on tragedy, there was no shortage of merchandise. Still, Nell swiped through the papers on her iPad every day, looking for Reina amid reports of unidentified bodies.
In the first weeks after Reina disappeared, Nell wondered at what exact moment her child had died. As Nell spoke to reporters, as she and Ethan forced themselves to eat from the covered dishes brought by neighbours and church members, as everyone said nice words, Nell could feel her child decomposing somewhere. She could see it sometimes. She could see the skin going cold, then pale, then shrinking down as though the soil were absorbing it. But what she couldn’t see was where her daughter was. She couldn’t draw a map to that spot. And no search was complete until the lost thing was found.
Easter was still searching her face. ‘All right,’ she said. ‘Take your notes. I’ll tell you my story.’
3
NOW
Lindsay was all dressed to impress Bonnie. She’d even gone to the salon for acrylic tips, the French manicure accented by painted red fleurs-de-lis. But by the time Bonnie was brought to the visiting room, Lindsay was too subdued to bother with her.
Bonnie noticed it right away. She sat on her side of the round table, looked Lindsay up and down, then turned to Nell and said, ‘What crawled up her ass?’
Lindsay’s face was downturned, but she raised her eyes to give her mother a sour glare.
‘Hi, Momma,’ Nell said. Her attempt at recovering civility.
‘Hi, baby girl.’ Bonnie spoke with a surge of affection; she patted Nell’s hand. She could switch it on and off, her warmth in one moment as believable as her coldness in the next.
Across the room, a CO said, ‘You know the rules, Baker.’
‘All right, all right.’ Bonnie waved without turning to look at him. Baker was the maiden name she’d reclaimed after her conviction. No sense keeping the name of a husband she hated so much she’d tried to murder him. ‘Motherfucker,’ she mumbled.
Lindsay moved her finger to her lip, about to chew on her nail before she remembered the acrylic tips. Nell worried. Lindsay prided herself on her appearance; not just the cosmetic aspects, but the overall presence of a woman who had her shit together. A woman who awoke each morning smelling like a lilac sprig. Very rarely did the nervous foster child surface in these little gestures. Nail biting. Fidgeting. Repeating words like a dementia patient.
‘I finished my book,’ Nell said. ‘Just emailed it off this morning.’ Nell was sparse in the details she shared with her mother. The money never came up. She craved Bonnie’s approval, and simultaneously she knew that no good would come from telling her about any of her achievements. She’d made that mistake with the first book, and Bonnie had managed to talk Nell into adding money to her commissary. Bonnie had even faked a heart attack for the guilt factor; the trip to a brightly lit hospital with a private TV in her room was just an added bonus.
‘Email,’ Bonnie echoed. She had been in prison for twenty-nine years. She had never even owned a computer.
Ten years ago, when Reina went missing, Nell considered it a blessing that Bonnie couldn’t access the internet. While the newspaper articles and television segments were brutal, at least they ended. The internet never forgot a thing. You could search for the story of a missing four-year-old and her eighteen-year-old mother and find all sorts of theories. Crudely drawn amateur depictions of theories, videos whose comments discussed all the ways that mother deserved to die, get raped, be sent to Gitmo Bay. Give me five minutes with that bitch, I’ll do what the state’s afraid to do.
‘I’ll mail you an early copy when I get them,’ Nell said.
‘You know I love your writing, baby,’ Bonnie said. ‘You write ugly things but they sound pretty when you tell it.’ Her gaze shifted to Lindsay. ‘Who’s the new man in your life?’
‘There is no new man,’ Lindsay said. She’d straightened her posture now, but her eyes were still mean.
‘No?’ Bonnie said. ‘I just assumed there was. It’s been a couple years since you burned through the last husband. You’re about due for a third.’
‘Okay.’ Lindsay’s chair scraped against the linoleum as she pushed away from the table. ‘I don’t have to take this. I’ll be outside.’
That word was its own reve
nge. Outside. Lindsay could step through a pair of glass double doors and Bonnie would never be able to follow.
‘Linds—’ Nell began, but she was already gone. Nell blew out a hard breath, pushing the hair away from her face. ‘Why’d you have to put her in a mood? I’m the one who has to ride home with her for two hours.’
In truth, Nell wasn’t dreading the ride home. But she liked to make out that she and Lindsay weren’t as close as they were. Bonnie was jealous enough that her girls had freedom; knowing they had each other would make her spiteful.
‘She was in a mood when she walked in.’ Bonnie held her hands up, as though that somehow implied they were clean.
4
NOW
In Missouri, there’s a little town called Greendale Park. Population 200,000. It has an elementary school with a library wing donated by the First Lady in 2004. There’s a video rental store that continues to survive despite streaming media. There’s a lake where it’s illegal to fish, and a bike path, and several blocks of little split levels that went up in the sixties. And on the corner of East and Sutland, there’s a telephone pole in front of a church.
When Nell last saw that telephone pole, her child’s face was stapled to it in a glossy high-resolution photograph that Mrs Eddleton had printed. Below the photo in big bold letters: JUSTICE FOR REINA.
Teddy bears and mason jars of tea light candles surrounded this pole. The sky was filled with little trinkets for the world’s missing children, and when nobody was looking, those pieces rained down on that spot one at a time. A blue stuffed lion. A grey elephant. A bear holding a white heart that said ‘I love you’ in purple taffeta.
Sorry, these gifts said. Sorry that you hadn’t been someone – anyone – else’s child.
Maybe those offerings were all still there. Maybe the pile had grown and swallowed up the entire town in an avalanche of cotton batting and prayers.
Lindsay was already in the car when Nell returned to the parking lot. She was shivering in the November chill, her breath misting before her.
‘Jesus,’ Nell said as she climbed into the driver’s seat. ‘You could have waited in the lobby.’
Lindsay shook her head. She was staring at the prison yard beyond the barbed fence. ‘I didn’t want to be in that hellhole a minute longer.’ She turned to face Nell, who was glancing at her mirror as she backed out of their spot. ‘You can’t work with Easter Hamblin. She’s fucking insane.’
‘People want to read about the insane,’ Nell said.
‘No, I mean like actually insane,’ Lindsay emphasised. ‘Straitjacket grade.’
‘She murdered her twin and then pretended to be her, Linds. Were you expecting a Victorian debutante?’
‘How did she find those articles about you? How did she even know it was you? You changed your name. You changed everything.’
‘I didn’t change my face,’ Nell said. ‘And my picture was plastered all over the newspapers when it happened.’
‘I’m disturbed by your level of calm,’ Lindsay said. ‘You should be freaking out.’
‘I plan to,’ Nell said, craning her neck to see past a Camaro parked across two spaces. ‘But is it okay with you if I get us out of here first?’
Once they were on the interstate again, Nell stretched her fingers and then renewed her grip on the steering wheel. ‘Okay,’ she said. ‘I’m terrified that Sebastian will find out.’
Early on in their relationship, Bas had revealed himself to be of the open-book persuasion. On their second date, he told Nell about his mother’s two rounds of chemotherapy and his sister’s douchebag boyfriend. A month later, Nell knew about all his ex-girlfriends and how he liked his coffee, and that his preferred genre of movie was ‘so bad it’s actually good.’
In exchange, she began offering small bits of herself like anniversary presents tied up with dollar-store ribbon. She told him that her father had lost custody when Nell was two, after he was pulled over driving drunk with his daughters in the back seat. Nell hadn’t been in a car seat because they didn’t own one, but they had been wearing seat-belts. This was Lindsay’s vigilance. It would have been all the same to their father if they jumped around or strangled each other. And her first kiss was with a boy at her group home when she was eleven. It was on a dare, and she had to use her tongue because that was part of the deal. He tasted like pickles.
Slowly, they both unfolded for each other. Awkward confessions over dinner turned to hushed revelations in the bedroom. At first she kept him at a distance. But while she wasn’t paying attention, somehow he came to fill her hair, the tight crags between her teeth, the darkness at the back of her throat. He could not be separated from her so easily. If he left her now, pieces of herself would tear away with him. Her fingers. Her cheek. The bone in her hip where he rested his hand as he slept.
She lied to him sometimes. Little things, like that her new laptop had cost less than she’d really spent, or that she had eaten something other than coffee and Cheetos for breakfast. But the only big lie she’d ever told had been about the dull scar that ran from her pelvis to her breastbone. She’d told him that she had gotten pregnant at fourteen, and that they’d had to cut her open because the baby had tangled herself on the way out and nearly killed them both. All true. But the next part of her story was only what she wished had come next: a nice couple came with one of those car seats that converts into a stroller. They whisked their new adoptee away, to a life of private school and piano lessons, and there she remained to this day. Nell didn’t worry about her, she said, and the adoption had been closed. She didn’t want them to find each other.
Surely Sebastian had seen Reina on the news when she first went missing and in the months that followed, but he had no reason to remember the teenage mother who hurried past the news crews, trying to cover her face with her coat. She had changed over the years, taken pains to adjust her hair, her clothes, even her posture. And like most people, he was inoculated to the tragedy of missing children. He had likely muttered his disgust, poured himself a cup of coffee, and gone back to whatever had mattered to him all those years ago. Turned on the radio and gotten snared by the lyrics of a song and forgotten all about it, most likely.
‘Fuck,’ Lindsay murmured. She looked like she was going to throw up. ‘Okay. Okay, you know what? Don’t panic.’
‘You’re being inconsistent, Linds.’
‘Easter tells stories. She murdered her sister and then told us that her sister is alive. She’s a loon. Nobody is going to believe her even if she does blab about you.’
Easter wouldn’t have to convince anyone that she was telling the truth about Nell. The evidence was right there in the papers. Dozens of photos of Nell falling apart, or faking calm, or walking to her car with a bag of groceries. She had changed her name and she had moved to a new state, but there was no such thing as anonymity in 2020. Easter was right. Buried things always unearthed themselves.
Now Nell was the one to whisper, ‘Fuck.’ The word came out squeaky and cracked. She had the sense that she might cry, but she refused.
She took a deep breath. The calming effects of deep breaths were overrated. Deep breaths when Ethan Eddleton first tilted her chin and kissed her. Deep breaths as she ambled into the hospital with an arm wrapped around her stomach and water trailing down her legs. Deep breaths when Reina’s constant tantrums rattled around in her skull until she felt sick with them. Deep breaths when she sat in the courtroom, her hair pulled back to show the judge her baby features in the hope of a merciful verdict. Deep breaths when she sped over the Missouri/Illinois state line.
Deep breaths now, as she drove this road that felt like an executioner’s walk.
‘I wonder what medications Easter is taking,’ Nell said. ‘The state provides such shitty alternatives to anti-psychotics to cut costs.’
‘What?’ Lindsay said. ‘Who gives a fuck, Nell? Why are we talking about Easter?’
‘I don’t know, Lindsay. I’m trying to pretend I still have a li
fe left to salvage, is that okay with you?’
The mania of Nell’s tone made Lindsay realise that they were both hysterical. That wouldn’t do. One hysterical sister was manageable, but that meant the other had to be that much more reasoned. Lindsay slipped into her old familiar role like a well-worn dress. On a normal day, Lindsay and Nell were sisters. But when the rare need arose, Lindsay became the mother she had learned to be when she was four.
‘Let’s imagine the worst-case scenario one piece at a time, and we’ll figure out how to deal with it,’ Lindsay said, her voice calm. ‘Let’s say Easter contacts Jasper and tells him who you are.’
‘Jasper won’t care.’ Nell realised this was true as soon as she’d said it. Her agent had been in the publishing industry for nearly as long as Nell had been alive. He was slim with a salt-and-pepper halo around his balding crown, and he had the vocabulary of a burly sailor. He took nothing personally, saw setbacks as personal challenges and hung up on clients if they started crying. ‘If I took a machine gun to an orphanage tomorrow, he’d be contacting a lawyer to make sure I could write the story from my cell.’
Lindsay nodded. This sounded like an accurate depiction. ‘The press,’ she said.
‘The press would be a nightmare.’ Nell raked a hand through her hair. ‘I’d have to move.’
‘Fine,’ Lindsay said. ‘Fuck that apartment.’
Nell loved her apartment, but it wasn’t worth the hell of being locked inside with the curtains drawn while reporters waited for her to take out the garbage so they could paw through it. Nothing was worth that. There were plenty of other places to live. Nell had learned that the world could be endless. If it had been possible for her child to slip through a tear in the atmosphere and be gone forever, it was also possible for Nell to elude the press. It would take time, but she could do it.
‘Bas,’ Lindsay said.
Nell’s vision blurred. Sebastian. If he found out what happened all those years ago, she would lose him forever.