by Sasha Dawn
I wonder if Chatham agreed to come here because Caroline guilted her, or because she really wanted to come. But she’s here now.
Bringing her back with us is a big gamble, especially because I’ve yet to figure out how I’m going to leave to take her home, but—obviously—I’m willing to take the risk.
She’s sitting across the coffee table from me, her back to the blazing electric fireplace, on the cheap area rug I now wish I’d vacuumed when Rosie told me to. She’s setting up the Scrabble board—it’s the game she chose from the few on the shelf—and doling out tiles.
“So when do you start at the Tiny E?” It’s not exactly my conversation of choice, but it’s a place to begin.
“Actually, I don’t know if I can take the job. I can’t find my license. I’m sure it’s just in a box somewhere, but I need an ID to start, and frankly . . . I’m running out of places to look.”
She lays out a few tiles on the board: cape. Then she rearranges them: pace. “I’m not sure I’ll ever find it, and getting a birth certificate from Georgia might prove difficult at this point. We’d have to go back, and—”
“Aiden can help.” Here’s the thing about Aiden: he’s brilliant. If he used his mind for good, he could be running the country someday. But he doesn’t agree with an overarching force of power, so he’s made it his mission to work against the system. This includes utilizing his graphic-art skills to ensure the underage population of this town can purchase a six-pack. Or, in my case, get a tattoo.
“Tell Aiden I’ll take any help I can get,” she says.
I pause a moment, and then blurt out, “Okay, how the hell do you end up here? Of all places?”
“Well . . .” She takes a deep breath and looks at me, as if she’s weighing how much she trusts me—which could be not at all, for all I know. “We’re sort of here looking for Savannah.” Her look holds me in, unblinking. “My sister.”
“Oh.”
When she doesn’t elaborate, I probe a little: “You think she’s here?”
“She might be. I don’t really know. She ran away.” And after a pause: “She’s always running away. But this time, she told me she was going. She wanted me to go with. I just thought . . . it’s a crazy idea, right? Taking off for a small town you’ve never been to?”
“She wanted to come here?”
“Yeah.”
It’s quiet for a few beats. So quiet, in fact, that I hear the rainforest soundtrack wafting down the steps. I play it to help Caroline and Margaret fall asleep, and it’s soothing, but now it’s just background noise.
I play off her c: cot.
“Do you ever just know something?” she finally says. “And you don’t know how you know it, but you know it?”
I know what she means. I knew I was connected to Chatham Claiborne the second I saw her, but I know I can’t say that; it would sound too creepy.
She’s working the zipper on her backpack. “Savannah wrote about this place. The lighthouse, the boardwalk . . .” She pulls a book out of the bag and places it on the table, next to our pool of facedown tiles.
It’s one of those blank-page journal types, about half an inch thick. Its black vinyl cover with worn edges is bound with a dirty rubber band.
“She wrote about Sugar Creek?” I ask. How would anyone from Georgia know about this place? To the extent she could write about it?
“I think so. It’s mostly vague references, but she mentions the name of the town.” She opens the book and shows me a rudimentary sketch of what looks like the lighthouse at Northgate Beach.
I see the name amidst scrawlings: Sugar Creek.
“I told her I wasn’t going to run away with her. She was always running away, like I said, but she’d never left Georgia before, and I wasn’t about to follow her out to the middle of nowhere—no offense.”
“None taken.”
“But she took off again anyway. She left her journal. And not only did she leave it, she left it underneath the pillow on my bed. Like she wanted me to find it. Like she wanted me to read it.”
I’m nodding like a bobblehead on a dashboard. What else can I do? I don’t want to interrupt her, this first time she’s really opened up to me.
“We’re not biological sisters. I told you that.”
“Right.”
“She’s adopted; I’m not.”
“Okay.”
“Well . . .” She sighs. “All I can say is that all my life, she’s been running away, but she always comes back. And one day, a couple weeks ago, she took off, and I haven’t seen her since. She told me to go with her. She told me she wasn’t coming back. And life without her . . .” Her eyes redden, and they start to well with tears, but none grow big enough to roll down her cheeks. “I don’t know what to do.”
“I can’t imagine.” I wonder what any of this has to do with Sugar Creek, why Savannah would come here, of all places.
“I worry about her—”
“Of course you do.”
“—which is crazy, because I know she can take of herself. But still.”
“Yeah.”
“So I came because this is where she said she wanted to come. This is the place she wrote about—the boardwalk, the lighthouse on the beach.”
“Lots of towns have lighthouses. Lots of towns have boardwalks and beaches.”
“Yeah, I know.”
“If she wanted to see a beach, she probably could’ve stayed in Georgia.” Shut up, Josh.
A few beats of silence ensue.
“I have this dream.” She rubs an eye with a knuckle. “I’ve had it dozens of times. Maybe hundreds, I don’t know.”
Already, I’m intrigued.
“I’m running. I can’t miss the train. I have to get to the station, and Savannah’s always there—her voice, anyway—over my shoulder, telling me to run. Telling me we have to get back to Sugar Creek before it’s too late.”
An eerie chill pricks my skin.
“And then I’m just . . . gone,” she says. “I’m in blackness. With nothing.”
I don’t know what to say. I have to say something.
She’s fiddling with the Scrabble tiles on her tray, rearranging them. But when she finally looks up at me, the pressure to break the silence is suddenly like flames on the back of my neck. Intense.
I clear my throat. “Well, Sugar Creek’s to hell and gone from Moon River, that’s for sure, so if blackness is what you’re looking for . . .”
She takes a tile from the pool of extras, sets it on her tray.
“We’re to hell and gone from everywhere,” I add.
“So’s Moon River.”
It’s my turn to take a tile. I’ve got nothing.
“We grew up in fear of upsetting our dad. He was angry all the time, you know?”
Unfortunately, I do.
“And Savannah used to say he’d put another little girl—a bad little girl—under the floorboards in the stables.”
Who says something like that?
“It scared me when I was little. I’d listen in the middle of the night to see if I could hear her crying, and of course I never did. But eventually I figured out Savannah said it because it would scare me. Because she didn’t want me to step out of line and get in trouble. Because she was always getting in trouble and she wanted to save me from that.”
Savannah had wanted to protect her from something bad. I understand that, too. I’d do the same for my sisters. I’m about to ask what she means by getting in trouble in her family, but she’s speaking again.
“But the strange coincidence?” She presses her lips together. “There was this story on the news. About a girl from here.”
“Rachel Bachton.”
“Yeah.”
“They think they found her.” Again I think of her little bones, huddled in a cold and lonely grave. “Buried in—hey—Chatham County, actually.”
“Right. At the confluence. Where the two rivers meet.” Chatham takes another deep breath. “That girl. Rachel
. She’s been gone a long time, and I started thinking. Rachel was talking to another little girl at a farmers’ market, right? When she disappeared?”
“Mmmhmm.”
“I think . . . I don’t know for sure. I mean, I can’t know, but . . .” She shakes her head, and the look on her face lands somewhere between despair and confusion. “I don’t remember this, because I was barely four. But Savannah—she’s slightly older—and the girl Rachel was talking to? It could’ve been anyone, right?”
She doesn’t say it, but she doesn’t have to say it. She or Savannah could’ve been that girl. As far as I know, they never interviewed the girl supposedly seen talking to Rachel, because they never determined who the girl was.
“I don’t know if we were there that day,” she says. “Here, I mean. Why would we be here when we lived in Moon River? But I have vague memories of a farmers’ market somewhere. And if you look through Savannah’s journal, the things she wrote about, the things she drew . . .” She flips another page in the journal and shows me the image of a homemade swing hanging from a tree branch. Again, the words Sugar Creek are scribbled in the margin. “I don’t know how she knows things about this place if she was never here.”
“Mmmhmm.” My brow furrows in concentration as I try to grasp what Chatham’s saying. She thinks she knows something about Rachel Bachton? About the girl whose fate I can’t stop thinking about? No wonder I’m drawn to her.
“And she’d wanted me to come with her when she came. I thought she was crazy. I mean, go to Chicago? I can kind of understand that. But go to Sugar Creek? Specifically?”
“Yeah.”
“Either Savannah knows something, remembers something she can’t prove, or she wants me to think she does.” Quietly, she busies herself with her Scrabble tiles, and adds: “I just don’t know. It’s probably all in my mind. Or hers.”
But I can’t let it go. “What do your parents say?”
“Loretta”—her eyes roll a little—“My mama . . . she doesn’t say anything. She never says anything out of turn.” She says it in a tone I recognize all too well.
And maybe, if I were some other guy, with some other experiences, I wouldn’t have caught on to the subtle hint she just let slip, but my past is riddled with tones like the one she just aimed at me.
A window to the past opens in my mind. Rosie’s holding Margaret up in front of her, like a shield; Margaret’s screaming in fear, and I’m yelling to Rosie: You think he won’t hurt a little girl?
As soon as the memory slips in, I shove it back out into the blackness and slam the window down on it.
I clear my throat, and hope Chatham didn’t notice I went a little gray and lifeless for a minute there.
“I have a theory,” Chatham says. “See, Savannah started talking about this place right around the time the police connected the bones they found at the river to the little girl who went missing here. She started saying we were at that farmers’ market, that we’d been there.”
“Savannah thinks she witnessed the kidnapping of Rachel Bachton? Or that she was the little girl who talked to her?”
“Maybe. Or maybe she just said it to accuse Wayne, to get Wayne in trouble.”
“Wayne?”
“My dad. Savannah went to the police once, told them she thought she might have been the little girl Rachel was talking to, that maybe our father was involved.” She clears her throat. “She ended up getting arrested. It was a mess.”
“Arrested? For what?”
“Various things. Consumption of illegal substances, mainly. Public drunkenness. They called her unreliable.”
The sounds of the rainforest filtering out of the speakers upstairs do nothing to calm the rapid clamor of my heart in my chest. “Did they ever check up on what she said? Look into Wayne as a suspect?”
“He doesn’t match the description of the kidnapper. He’s been nearly bald all my life, for one thing, and he’s large. Overweight. He also had an airtight alibi—he was in Moon River the morning of the kidnapping.”
I’m nodding. “Still, Savannah must have had a good reason for accusing him.”
“Does wanting him to be guilty qualify? He’s done some pretty terrible things.”
“Like what?”
She bites at her thumbnail. It takes her a while to reply. “Let’s just say,” she finally says, “when he’s angry, you don’t want to be in his way.”
Oh.
“I researched the case,” she says. “There were sightings of Rachel in the weeks after. On a . . .” She bites her lip, as if forcing herself to stop talking. Her brow knits, and she shakes her head. “I mean, power of suggestion . . .”
On a train. Rachel was seen on a train.
“At a train station,” I finish the thought for her. “Rachel was seen at a train station on the East Coast. Supposedly.”
“And I have a dream about running to catch the train, presumably to Sugar Creek.”
Chatham has a recurring dream about a train station, running to catch a train, and Rachel was seen on a train.
Savannah apparently drew and wrote about our beach, our boardwalk, and Rachel used to live near here.
Rachel was seen talking to a little girl in the moments before she disappeared, and no one ever determined who that girl was.
Is it possible Chatham and Savannah, or Chatham or Savannah, witnessed Rachel Bachton’s kidnapping?
“But my sister . . . sometimes I hate her for putting these things in my head.” Chatham wets her lips. “She’s not exactly reliable all the time, and some of the things she used to say . . . they’re so outrageous, you know? Like the girl under the floorboards. It’s just possible enough that Savannah hates Wayne so much that she’d make this stuff up. I mean, I hate him, too, but I hate him for the stuff he’s actually done. There’s plenty of it. Why invent more?”
I feel an invisible tether wrap around my hand, another way this girl and I are somehow connected. She has Wayne to my Damien. She may not even know it yet, but she’s pulling me in. I’m coho salmon hooked on her line, and with every word, she’s reeling me in closer.
I think I hear my mother pull up, but we’re too engrossed in conversation for me to do anything about it.
“You think your sister’s lying?”
Chatham shrugs. “You ever go to a rave? You know the sort of mood-altering things you can encounter at a rave?”
I’ve never been to a rave, but because I can imagine—pot, Ecstasy, whatever else people can find—I give her a nod. “Sure.”
“Let’s just say Savannah’s seen her fair share. Plenty of reasons to want to alter her mood.”
There it is again: a hint about what went on behind the doors at Chatham’s home.
Her sister is unreliable. Always running away. Pops some G every now and then, from the sounds of it. And she thinks she saw Rachel’s kidnapping. She’s got Chatham thinking it too, despite the fact that their dad, who’s apparently an asshole, couldn’t have been in Sugar Creek the day it happened.
“I don’t know,” Chatham says. “It’s probably not true. I guess I’m here to prove she’s not crazy, or maybe to acknowledge that she is. But more than that, I just want to find her.”
“Where can we look?”
“I’ve been asking at school. Around town. I went to the mall, and that tattoo shop on Hauser. No one’s seen her.”
“You say she goes to raves? Maybe we should hit one.”
The door upstairs opens, and I hear the jingle of Rosie’s keys.
I put a finger to my lips.
Rosie’s shoes—standard issue, thick-soled Skechers, manufactured for and marketed to those who spend hours on their feet every day—squeak as she walks up the stairs from the foyer to the kitchen.
Chatham freezes.
Five, four, three, two . . .
“God damn it, Josh.”
Of course she’s pissed. The kitchen remains in the same state of disarray in which she left it; I didn’t do the dishes. I figured, w
hy bother? I’m not the one dirtying them, seeing as though I haven’t been afforded the privilege to eat with the family all week.
But any second she’s going to come downstairs. Can’t have my mother making a scene in front of my guest—especially because I’m not supposed to have guests when Rosie’s not home, let alone when I’m grounded.
Quietly, I stand and wave for Chatham to follow me. A second later, we’re standing at two open doors: my bedroom, and my bathroom. The first implies things I wouldn’t insult her to try at this point, and the second would put her in a black hole of filth I really should’ve cleaned when Rosie told me to.
I leave the choice to her.
She chooses option one.
“Be right back,” I whisper.
I go up the stairs, pausing for a second on the landing by the front door to compose myself. Then, I turn to climb the remaining half-flight to face the music.
I see Rosie, frantically scrubbing the countertop next to the sink. The water is running, but I think I hear . . .
I tune in more closely. It’s hard to determine between the water and the rainforest soundtrack. But I think I hear her sniffling.
At this moment, she turns toward me. Even in the dim light, I can make out streams of mascara curbing over her cheeks. A split second later, she hurls the wet sponge at my head and charges.
I catch the sponge, and manage to dodge the open palm flying at my face.
“Stop,” I say.
“You’re no better than your asshole father!”
“Don’t wake the girls.”
She manages to catch me on my bicep. Her fingernails dig into my skin. “You’re no better!”
The effect of her words is minimal—I’ve heard them so many times—but all this because I didn’t wash the dishes?
“Let go of me,” I say.
For a few seconds, we’re locked there.
But eventually, she loosens her grip and backs off, sniffling and violently hiccupping over her tears.
“I loved you.” Her back meets the pantry door; her face is in her hands. She slides to the floor. “Before you were even born, I loved you.”
Here it comes: phase three.
I shake my head.
“I always do my best. You got that? You think you’ve got it bad?” Her knuckles are white, and her hair is knotted between her fingers. “Try being me.”