The Broken Ones

by Ren Richards

  Nobody knew this except for Nell, who was used to not being believed when it came to her daughter, and so she didn’t bother to explain. Reina was not here. She was already gone.

  It wasn’t Reina who emerged from the crowd an hour into the search. It was Ethan. Nell was still sitting on the bench, but she stood when she saw him and they ran to each other. His arms locked tight around her, and in her dazed confusion, Nell could almost mistake his affection for love.

  ‘Hey, Penny,’ he whispered against her ear. It was a nickname he’d given her before Reina was born, and he was the only one who used it.

  ‘She’s gone,’ Nell croaked. ‘She’s gone. I lost her.’

  ‘She’s not gone,’ he said. ‘We’re going to find her. I promise you we will.’

  It was the only promise he would ever break. Nell responded the way she always did when she had already given up. ‘All right,’ she said. ‘Okay.’

  When they drew apart, he took her hand. He wasn’t crying, but Nell’s face was slick with tears. Strange, she’d thought. He’d always loved Reina, and she’d been certain he would be the one to cry if anything ever happened to her. But there was grief in his stoicism, and Nell would only realise this years later, looking back. He had mourned for their daughter in a way that was profound because of how selfless it had been. How selfless it still was.

  ‘Come on,’ he said. ‘The police are here to escort us to the station.’

  Nell found that idea comforting. Here in the grocery store, she was just floating in space without anything to anchor her to the earth. But at a police station there would be a story to tell and action to take, and all of this would make time move forward again.

  In the interrogation room, she was handed a bottle of Coke. Officer Brady, a woman whose hair was so blond it was almost white, asked questions in the gentlest tone she could manage.

  ‘How old is your daughter?’

  ‘She’s four.’

  ‘And what was she wearing?’

  ‘Light blue jeans. A brown suede coat with pink fur trim.’ Nell tugged at the sleeves of her sweater. ‘She kept opening the door to the freezers and trying to climb inside. She wanted to test how warm she would be in her coat.’

  ‘Is that where she was when you lost sight of her?’

  ‘No. We moved on. It was the next aisle over, with the loaves of bread. At first I thought she was hiding – she does that.’ Nell almost said more, but she stopped herself. If she went on, she would have said that Reina loved to test them. It was a mean little game she played, and she was willing to freeze to death or risk falling into a lake and drowning just for the satisfaction of making Nell come undone. Wherever Reina was now, she would enjoy this. If she had heard the police sirens and known they were for her, she would feel like she’d won her greatest victory yet. Maybe she had.

  The police sent them home after that. Nell couldn’t believe that this was what they did, without any sort of fanfare. Just ‘your job is to go home and wait’.

  Mrs Eddleton was in hysterics. All five thousand square feet of the house was electric with her nervous energy. She was on the phone with the police, demanding a thorough rundown of the search, when Nell and Ethan entered the kitchen.

  ‘The police are incompetent. We’re forming our own search party,’ Mrs Eddleton said, slamming the phone on its cradle. Mr Eddleton was seated at the kitchen table, staring sullenly into his cup of black coffee.

  Nell felt sick with the taste of her own tears and the smell of fear that permeated everything. She had done this to them. To all of them. She had brought Reina into this world, and her reasons for doing so had been selfish. She had wanted something of her own that she could love, and at the time it had not seemed so outrageous to assume a child would love her back.

  Reina had come out screaming. In a pained delirium Nell heard it. She opened her eyes and saw the bloody, squirming silhouette against the searing overhead light. No one prepared her for how powerful babies were.

  The Eddletons loved Reina. Even Ethan, who had never used the word ‘love’ in his life. Even Mr Eddleton, who seldom spoke, preferring to grunt in acknowledgement of his wife’s rants. And Nell loved her, though it drained everything from her. Though it aged her. Though it made her sick and certain that her life was no longer her own.

  But Reina did not love any of them. She could have been born into this suburban mansion or any other house on earth, to rich grandparents who adored her or parents who neglected her, and it all would have been the same to her. Reina was all about utilising her environment, manipulating whoever was naïve enough to cow to what she wanted.

  Reina did not love them. That was the truth. Nell repeated it over and over in her head, hoping it would make her absence easier.

  By the top of the hour, Mrs Eddleton had summoned no fewer than two hundred people to search for Reina. Mrs Eddleton was nothing if not socially conscious, and now the cul-de-sac was filled with families from church, middle-aged alcoholics from the country club and rubberneckers from the three-block radius. It was dark, so everyone brought their own flashlights and spread out.

  Nell and Ethan walked slowly, stiff with fear like small animals frightened by car headlights. Ethan kept murmuring words to comfort Nell, while Nell mumbled her assent. She only walked. She didn’t look. Reina was not going to be in a ravine or behind a fallen tree. She was gone. Gone. The word was too small to describe such a big and unchangeable thing.

  It was late when she and Ethan returned to the house. Usually the light in the kitchen and the study would still be on – Mr Eddleton pouring his ninth cup of coffee, Mrs Eddleton organising fundraisers and sending busybody emails to the congregation. But the entire house was dark, and neither Nell nor Ethan bothered with the light. They passed by Reina’s nursery and Nell didn’t look inside, but she felt Ethan leaning back as they passed, as though to make sure their daughter hadn’t been asleep in her bed this whole time.

  24

  NOW

  Nell awoke to the sound of Sebastian’s voice, muffled by the bedroom door and the comforter over her head. She couldn’t make out the words, but he sounded furious.

  Rain was coming down sideways, slamming into the bedroom window. The clouds made everything so dark that for a second Nell thought it was night. Thunder boomed, drowning out the city traffic far below.

  It wasn’t night-time, Nell realised. She was waking up to the same awful day. She remembered crawling back into bed at Lindsay’s insistence, after her second glass of wine. Somehow she’d fallen asleep.

  Now, she pushed open the bedroom door. Sebastian had just set his phone angrily on the counter, and now he ran to her, wrapping her in his arms.

  Startled, she circled her arms around him too.

  Lindsay was lying on the couch, staring at the screen of Nell’s laptop, which rested on her stomach.

  ‘I’ve been on the phone with the police trying to find out what they’re doing to catch this guy,’ Bas said. He drew back, gripping Nell’s shoulders and studying her face like he was inspecting her for damage. ‘They’re useless. Completely useless.’

  ‘Lots of drunks out driving in the bunks,’ Lindsay said, not looking up from the screen.

  Sebastian was stroking his thumb over Nell’s temple, and she realised now that her skin ached there. In the shower at Oleg’s motel room, she’d noticed the scrapes and cuts from the glass on her arms, but hours later bruises were beginning to form too.

  Nell was grateful that Lindsay had apparently filled Bas in on the details, because she was too exhausted to relive it again. And all her theories, which had seemed so certain and so clear hours earlier, had turned to mush in her mind. She wondered if she had a concussion.

  Lindsay slammed the laptop shut and got to her feet, tucking it under her arm. ‘I’ve been researching your insurance policy online,’ she said. ‘The accident wasn’t your fault, but that’ll be tough to prove.’ She gently steered Nell back towards the bedroom. ‘Come on, I’ll help you so
rt everything out.’ She whispered something over her shoulder at Bas, but Nell couldn’t make it out.

  As soon as Lindsay had closed the bedroom door, Nell said, ‘I don’t care about the insurance.’

  ‘What?’ Lindsay said. ‘No. We’re not doing that. I just said that so Sebastian would leave us alone.’ She waved her hand dismissively and tossed the laptop onto the bed. Then she sat on the edge of the mattress and patted the space beside her in a gesture for Nell to sit. ‘I’ve spent the past couple of hours going through every possible search result for your old name. And yes, the shit I found was dark, but it was also old.’ She squeezed Nell’s shoulder. ‘Nobody is coming for you. Nobody knows where you live now.’

  Nell doubled forward. ‘I don’t know what to think anymore,’ she said. ‘This morning I was so rattled that I actually thought it was Autumn Hamblin.’

  ‘The conjoined twin?’ Lindsay said. ‘Isn’t she the dead one?’

  ‘Yes,’ Nell said. ‘But Easter keeps insisting that Autumn is alive and that she’s evil, and – yes, I know how this all sounds.’

  ‘Well, I don’t know who ran you off the road,’ Lindsay admitted. ‘But I can confirm that it’s not the ghost of an evil conjoined twin, and it isn’t anyone from an internet message board looking to exact revenge on you ten years after you left Missouri.’ She patted Nell’s knee. ‘Sebastian has talked the insurance into sending someone out there to fish your car out of the swamp with a crane. The police will be able to take paint samples from the bumper and hopefully match it to a make and model. That’s something.’

  ‘He did all of that?’ Nell asked.

  ‘Of course,’ Lindsay said. ‘He’s a good one, Nell. Don’t fuck it up.’

  ‘Trying really hard not to,’ Nell said.

  THEN

  After Reina disappeared, entire hours slipped down the drains of the Eddletons’ bathroom sinks. Morning was gone, and then the afternoon.

  The Eddletons’ house was never empty. Mrs Eddleton was especially relentless, inviting every news station and journalist in the country to her house. The living room had become a studio. The couches were pushed back against the walls, leaving only a set of dining chairs in front of the fireplace, which was a shrine of baby photos. A camera was always pointed at those chairs. Someone was always pressing for answers.

  Nell did almost none of the talking but she bore the worst of the backlash. The Eddletons were the loving, warm grandparents. Nell was the reckless teenager who had been given the most precious gift in the world and fucked it up.

  Ethan was never in the papers. Fathers didn’t sell stories. It was always the mothers. There were the Eddletons, printed in black and white, each clutching a corner of a framed photograph. And there was Nell in a tabloid photo that had been taken through the bushes, sneaking out the back door for a moment to breathe, a beer bottle in hand.

  Lindsay was nowhere that day, and later Nell would find out that Lindsay had in fact been there, only to be turned away by the extra security hired by Mrs Eddleton to keep the photographers back.

  No one looked after Nell. No one brought her food or asked how she was faring or told her to get some rest. Not even Ethan seemed to notice her. He had always been a lazy, passive sort, but the child’s absence awoke something in him. Every daylight hour he was with the neighbourhood searches, wading through tall grass and dumpsters. He tore open bulging trash bags, hoping they wouldn’t birth Reina’s corpse like a putrid womb. He came home only to stand over the kitchen sink, forcing down a thirty-second meal and then disappearing again. His muddy footprints and the crumbs on the counter were the only traces of him.

  Nell felt herself slipping out of her body. She had become like the charcoal drawings she saw in art classes before the students painted them. Lines on top of lines, new positions on top of old, until everything blurred and it was impossible to know which version was really there.

  She slept only in fitful naps, and never for long. She dreamed sometimes of maggots crawling from eye sockets or a tiny body sinking in the ink-black water of a well out in an empty field. She dreamed of shadowed figures and car doors closing, and she always woke up wondering if Reina had cried out, wherever she was. If she even cared whether she lived, much less whether she made it home.

  Nell was wondering this when Mrs Eddleton opened her bedroom door and said, ‘We’re going to church in an hour.’ And then she was gone.

  The ride to church was filled with Mrs Eddleton’s nervous prattling and Mr Eddleton’s solemn grunts of affirmation. Ethan and Nell were in the back with the empty baby seat between them. They were staring off in different directions, but then Nell felt his hand eclipse hers. His long, slender fingers wove into her grasp and he squeezed.

  She stared down at their hands, startled. All day she had been invisible. She had been nothing. But Ethan was telling her that not only did he see her, he needed her.

  Maybe he was even trying to comfort her at the same time, but it didn’t work. She felt even worse, if that were possible.

  She slid her hand from his grasp and went on staring out the window. She could see his face reflected in the glass. There was a hurt expression there, boyish and vulnerable; the kind of look he could only give if he believed no one was looking.

  Nell tried to concentrate on what Mrs Eddleton was saying. She wanted to prepare herself for whatever was about to come next.

  ‘We’ll each light a candle for Reina—’ Mrs Eddleton’s voice hitched as she said the name, but she went on. ‘And a prayer for her will be said after the sermon. After that, I’ve arranged for caterers to set up a luncheon back at the house. I’ve invited the Tribune, the Missouri Post…’ Nell began to lose focus again. What did any of these things matter? Candles? A candle was not a magnet, and Reina was not an earring that had gotten lost somewhere in the couch cushions. And a luncheon. Nell pictured platters of cheese cubes and crackers shaped like butterflies. More strangers to flash photos of her and type stories of what a wretched mother she was.

  None of those reporters knew the truth, which was much worse than anything they were going to write. They didn’t know what sort of child Reina Eddleton was. They hadn’t seen the things Nell had seen, or thought the things Nell had thought.

  They made it halfway up the church steps before Nell started to shake. It began as a low tremble, like musical vibrations, until it spread out to her fingers and her feet. Her mind went hazy, and with the next step she collapsed to her hands and knees.

  Someone was screaming. A crowd began to form. Cameras flashed, and Nell realised the screams were coming from her.

  Arms wrapped around her. Ethan had taken off his jacket and he draped it over her head, shielding her from the reporters.

  It was a small gesture of such profound kindness on his part. But Nell didn’t want him. She wanted Lindsay. Her sister, who was nowhere. Maybe the police ought to be looking for her too, Nell thought through sobs. Maybe she had slipped under the water in her new massive marble bathtub and gotten sucked into the Bermuda Triangle.

  ‘It’s all right,’ Ethan said in her ear. He had never been one for platitudes. Surely he didn’t mean that this was all right. Maybe he only meant it was all right that she couldn’t make it to the church. ‘Come on. Can you stand?’ He didn’t wait for her to answer before he wrapped his arm around her waist and pulled her up. She gripped his coat and kept it tented over her face as he guided her to the car. She heard him tell a reporter to fuck off.

  He pushed her into the car and followed after, locking the doors. The windows were tinted, mercifully, but that didn’t stop the photographers from trying to get their perfect shot. Cameras flashed through the glass.

  ‘I really need her,’ Nell sobbed. ‘Where the fuck is she?’

  ‘I know,’ Ethan said, gathering her into his arms. ‘I know, Penny. I need her too.’

  Looking back on that day, Nell would never be certain whether she had been talking about Reina or Lindsay.

  25

>   NOW

  Three days after Nell drove her car into the swamp, a crane came to fish it out. Nell, Lindsay and Sebastian stood on the shoulder of the road, watching the massive metal arm dip below the surface of the water.

  It was a murky swamp, surrounded by fronds and tall grass, and the late morning sun revealed shades of green and yellow.

  The crane began to lift, groaning mechanically. Up came Nell’s 2010 Buick LaCrosse in metallic midnight blue. A waterfall was pouring through the broken driver’s side window.

  ‘Holy shit,’ Lindsay whispered.

  Sebastian wrapped his arm around Nell’s shoulders, reeling her close.

  Nell numbed herself to what she was seeing, forcing away the knowledge that it could have been her grave. Since that night, her sleep patterns had become more erratic than usual. She’d been shaky one minute, hyperactively cleaning the entire apartment the next. And she’d been thinking about Reina, not as the four-year-old Nell remembered, but as the little girl being memorialised by strangers and well-wishers on the internet, who called her a precious angel and said things like ‘rest peacefully, sweet girl’.

  In her constant thinking about Reina, Nell wondered who her daughter had really been. Had she been the monster Nell remembered, or was Nell the monster? She thought about how backwards it seemed that she could find the humanity in a woman who had drowned all of her children, but no matter how many memories she replayed, she couldn’t find the humanity in her own child.

  After the ruined car was deposited onto the tow truck, Sebastian sprinted over to the driver to give directions to their preferred mechanic, then got in his car to follow, raising a hand in farewell to the sisters.