We just have to record it first.
SADIE HUNTER [RECORDING]:
B-but I w-w-want t-to hear!
WEST McCRAY:
Sadie never outgrew her stutter. Early intervention likely could have helped, but May Beth never managed to convince Claire to take action. School turned out to be a special sort of hell for Sadie. Children aren’t kind about things they don’t understand and, in May Beth’s opinion, Sadie’s teachers also lacked a certain understanding.
MAY BETH FOSTER:
Sadie turned out good in spite of them, not because of them. They thought that stutter meant she was stupid. That’s all I’ll say about that.
WEST McCRAY:
Forty-four-year-old Edward Colburn has never forgotten Sadie. He’d just started his career as a teacher at Parkdale Elementary when she came into his class. Parkdale, as I mentioned, is forty minutes away from Cold Creek, and buses in students from outside towns so they can go to school. This is how Edward remembers his former first grade student:
EDWARD COLBURN:
She was teased by her classmates because of the stutter and that caused her to withdraw.… We did our best to meet her needs, but you have to understand Parkdale has always been two things: underfunded and overcrowded. Add to that a mother who was largely unreceptive to any of our concerns and, well. It’s not a recipe for a child’s personal success. And it happens more often than you’d want to think, not only in economically depressed areas. Sadie was a very adrift, remote child. She didn’t seem to have many, if any, interests of her own. She was reserved, but it was more than that … I’d almost say she was vacant.
MAY BETH FOSTER:
Then Mattie came along.
WEST McCRAY:
In May Beth’s album, Mattie’s arrival is marked with a Polaroid of a tiny, day-old bundle in six-year-old Sadie’s arms. The way Sadie gazes at her newborn sister is almost impossible to describe. It’s unbearably tender.
WEST McCRAY [TO MAY BETH]:
Just look at the way she’s looking at Mattie … wow.
MAY BETH FOSTER:
Isn’t it something? Sadie loved Mattie with her whole heart and that love for Mattie gave her a purpose. Sadie made it her life’s work looking after her sister. Young as she was, she knew Claire wouldn’t do it right.
WEST McCRAY:
Can you describe the girls’ relationship with their mother?
MAY BETH FOSTER:
Claire enjoyed Mattie because they looked alike. She was Claire’s little doll, not her child. She gave Mattie the Southern name. And Mattie thought Claire was the berries …
But that was Sadie’s doing.
WEST McCRAY:
How do you mean?
MAY BETH FOSTER:
Sadie always covered for Claire, lied for her, even. Made sure Mattie understood Claire was sick … I think she thought if she did that, it’d hurt less for Mattie when Claire inevitably let her down. I don’t know if that was the best thing for either of them. It cost Sadie a lot, especially after Claire left. I don’t know if Mattie ever fully appreciated what Sadie did for her, in that respect. If she’d lived long enough, maybe.
WEST McCRAY:
The pictures of Mattie are difficult to look at. She had shiny, stick-straight blond hair, sparkling blue eyes and Claire’s heart-shaped face. It’s nearly impossible to reconcile with that kind of vitality knowing how her story ends.
WEST McCRAY [TO MAY BETH]:
I can’t help but notice Mattie doesn’t look at Sadie with quite the same reverence.
MAY BETH FOSTER:
Mattie loved her big sister. Mattie adored Sadie but Sadie might as well have been Mattie’s mother and that’s a certain kind of dynamic. Throw in a six-year age gap, that’s gonna add to it too. Looking after Mattie brought Sadie out of her shell and forced her to use her voice, no matter the stutter. But the times Sadie didn’t feel like talkin’ or couldn’t get it out, Mattie would know what Sadie needed just by looking at her. So make no mistake, they were devoted to each other in their own ways. I don’t know if all sisters are how the pair of them were. I have three of my own and I love them dearly, but we were never like that.
WEST McCRAY:
With each turn of the album’s pages, May Beth’s voice becomes less and less steady. As we reach the end of it, her eyes fill with tears.
MAY BETH FOSTER:
Oh.
WEST McCRAY:
What is it?
WEST McCRAY [STUDIO]:
She turns the album to me. On one side is a photo of the girls. They’re sprawled on May Beth’s plastic-covered couch, a red-and-orange knitted blanket shared between them. An oversized bowl of popcorn rests on Mattie’s lap. They’re absolutely entranced by whatever’s on the TV in front of them; later May Beth tells me it was probably an old movie. The girls loved the classics. Sadie, in particular, was fond of anything with Bette Davis. But what’s caught May Beth’s attention at this particular moment is the page opposite. It’s empty. There was a picture there, she insists, flipping frantically through the book to see if it somehow got loose and ended up somewhere where it shouldn’t be. She checks the floor around us in case it fell out. It’s nowhere to be found.
MAY BETH FOSTER:
But where did it—I don’t know where it could have got to … it was a picture of … the girls were in it … it was … it was—I can’t remember what, exactly, it was … but I know it had the girls in it. They were here. They were right here.
sadie
I’m going to kill a man.
I’m going to steal the light from his eyes. I want to watch it go out. You aren’t supposed to answer violence with more violence but sometimes I think violence is the only answer. It’s no less than he did to Mattie, so it’s no less than he deserves.
I don’t expect it to bring her back. It won’t bring her back.
It’s not about finding peace. There will never be peace.
I’m not under any illusion about how little of me will be left after I do this one thing. But imagine having to live every day knowing the person who killed your sister is breathing the air she can’t, filling his lungs with it, tasting its sweetness. Imagine him knowing the feeling of the ground beneath his feet while her body is buried below it.
This is the furthest I’ve been from anything that I know.
I’m in the front seat, turning a switchblade over and over in my hand. There’s a dirty water smell in the air. I close my eyes and open them and I’m still in the front seat, still turning the knife, air still heavy with the pond scum scent of it all. I close my eyes and open them again and it’s like one of those running dreams where every impossible push forward is rewarded with the knowledge that you have to do it over and over again and there is no finish line and you don’t know how to make yourself stop.
“Mattie.”
The M of her name is an easy press. The double ts don’t overstay their welcome.
When she was five and I was eleven, Mattie would crawl into my bed, terrified of the dark, desperate for me to say something that would make her feel safe. My fractured reassurances were never enough; all I could offer was my presence and she took what she could get, pressing her head against my shoulder and falling asleep like that. By morning, all my covers were tangled around her tiny body and my pillow always somehow ended up under her head. When I was eleven and Mattie was five, she wanted to talk like me, would storm around shattering her words until Keith smacked her on the butt for it and said, Nobody talks like that who’s got a choice, and even though I hated him for it, I told Mattie he was right. When Mattie was five and I was eleven, I could no longer pretend each new sentence had a chance of coming out of me clean. I stopped talking for two weeks from the sheer grief of it until Mattie looked at me with her eyes impossibly wide and said, “Tell me what you want to say.”
Keith is not my father, but he sometimes pretended he was, would let people make the mistake and silently dared me to correct them. He would buy me cand
y at the gas station whether or not I was begging for it, then make a production of putting it in my palms just because he wanted to hear me force out a thank you. He would sit me at the table at night and have me memorize prayers to the utter delight of May Beth and Mattie was right to be afraid of the dark then because at night, he would come into my room and make me say them.
When I was nineteen and Mattie was thirteen, Keith came back.
I turn the switchblade one more time in my sweaty palm, feeling the weight of its neat black handle and the unforgiving blade tucked inside.
It was his, a long time ago.
It’s mine now.
I’m going to carve my name into his soul.
THE GIRLS
EPISODE 2
WEST McCRAY:
In our last episode, I introduced you to the two girls at the center of this podcast, Mattie Southern and Sadie Hunter. Mattie was murdered, her body left just outside her hometown of Cold Creek, Colorado. Sadie is missing, her car found, abandoned, thousands of miles away, with all her personal belongings still inside it. The girls’ surrogate grandmother, May Beth Foster, has enlisted my help in finding Sadie and bringing her home.
For those of you just tuning in, this is a serialized podcast, so if you haven’t listened to our first episode, you should do that now. We have more story than time to tell it—but I suppose that’s true for all of us.
[THE GIRLS THEME]
ANNOUNCER:
The Girls is brought to you by Macmillan Publishers.
WEST McCRAY:
Claire left when Sadie was sixteen, which meant Mattie was ten. Their mother had wholly succumbed to her drug addiction by that point, and her exit was its most logical conclusion. May Beth’s last conversation with Claire was two days before she abandoned her life and children in Cold Creek.
MAY BETH FOSTER:
She wanted money from me and I knew what she wanted it for. Said it was for the girls, for food, and I said well, you tell me what you need and I’ll pick it up at Stackett’s for ya, and she said no, I need the money. And we got into it worse than we ever had. I tried not to push her too much, because whenever I did, she’d keep the girls from me …
Anyway, I told her to get her shit together, that she was still young enough to turn it all around and God would reward her trouble, but she had to do her part too. She hung up the phone so hard, my ears were ringing all night.
WEST McCRAY:
The next day, May Beth went on a two-week vacation to visit her daughter in Florida. The day after that, Claire left.
Mattie had just entered fifth grade and was enjoying herself. Sadie had been dividing her time between high school—which, per May Beth, she didn’t like at all—and working at the McKinnon Gas Station.
Her boss, Marty McKinnon, has lived in Cold Creek all forty-five years of his life and expects he’ll live what years are left of it here too. He’s an imposingly well-built, ruddy-faced guy but he’s known around town as a gentle giant. He’d give you the shirt off your back, if you’re not too afraid to ask for it.
MARTY MCKINNON:
Sadie was a good kid, hard worker. I didn’t need the help so much as she did, you catch my meaning. She’d uh, she tried all over town for a job before she ended up with me. They’d been talking about it at the bar, Joel’s, you know. Makin’ fun of her, like—
WEST McCRAY:
What did they say?
MARTY MCKINNON:
They just thought it was funny she might be able to do anything worth paying for. She was a buck and change and she can’t hardly talk, so how can you put her to work? That sorta thing … well, I thought that was damn unfair, so when she finally came my way, I offered her something. She was so grateful, that was the first and only time she ever hugged me. If you knew Sadie, you’d know she wasn’t a … she didn’t open up a lot. It was like pulling teeth just to get her to tell you how she was. I think that’s because she was always terrified people would call CPS and she’d get separated from Mattie. But that was unlikely.
WEST McCRAY:
Why do you say that? It seems pretty obvious the girls needed help.
MARTY MCKINNON:
Yeah, but everyone here does, you get me? We’re not in the habit of borrowing trouble. Still, it worried Sadie and she thought Claire leaving would be the end of ’em—as if May Beth would’ve ever let that happen—so she didn’t say a word about it to anyone and made Mattie swear to do the same. Then, a week later, around four in the morning, I get a call. It’s Mattie, frantic. She thought Sadie was dying. I drove over and Sadie was sick as a dog. It was bad enough I took her to the hospital. They hooked her up to some IVs and she was fine … just one of those freak things.
MAY BETH FOSTER:
I think it was the stress of Claire going, that’s what caused it.
MARTY MCKINNON:
Anyway, we were in the waiting room and Mattie just lost it, just started bawling her eyes out and Mattie’s always been kind of dramatic, like Claire was, but this wasn’t that. She was scared out of her mind. So I got her candy from the vending machine, tried to settle her down some, and she told me Claire had left and if anyone found out, she and Sadie would never see each other again. My God, the kid was so upset, she threw up all over me. It was a mess. First thing I did was call May Beth in Florida and she flew back that day. She really loves those girls. Sadie was so mad at Mattie tellin’ me and at me tellin’ May Beth, and at May Beth just for knowin’, I don’t think she talked to any of us for a week.
MAY BETH FOSTER:
It’s funny, I always thought Claire would leave us one way or the other—but I still wasn’t ready for it. Sadie never had her mother to begin with, so she didn’t even know how to start losing her on this level. The only thing Sadie was afraid of was losing the family she had left and that was Mattie. And Mattie … Mattie was absolutely leveled by it.
WEST McCRAY:
Tell me more about that.
MAY BETH FOSTER:
I thought it was going to kill her. I well and truly did. Mattie got so depressed about it, she didn’t want to eat. She lost weight she couldn’t afford to lose. She barely slept … she’d have these waking nightmares about Claire leaving and open her eyes and realize that it wasn’t just a dream. Sadie couldn’t even calm her down. She was hysterical half the time, almost catatonic the rest of it. I told Sadie we needed to get Mattie to a doctor, but … Sadie wouldn’t have it, and I didn’t see it ending well if we did, to be honest. Sadie dropped out of high school instead. She thought maybe being at home would help.
WEST McCRAY:
And did it?
MAY BETH FOSTER:
No. Only one thing got through to Mattie.
WEST McCRAY:
About three months after Claire left, and for the first and only time, the girls received word from their mother. It arrived in the form of a postcard, which was later recovered with Sadie’s belongings. On its front, a line of palm trees against a stark, beautiful blue sky. Greetings from Sunny L.A.! the cards says. Wish you were here! It’s addressed only to Mattie, and in Claire’s messy scrawl it says, Be my good girl, Mats.
MAY BETH FOSTER:
Mattie came alive after that. From that point on, she was absolutely fixated on L.A.—they had to go there and find Claire, they just had to, their mother wanted them to find her and start over …
I hate that it happened, as grateful as I was for it at the time. It put the color in Mattie’s cheeks, it gave us our girl back, but my God, she and Sadie were never the same after that.
WEST McCRAY:
Sadie refused to look for Claire?
MAY BETH FOSTER:
It wasn’t possible, for a lot of reasons. The money. They couldn’t afford it. They didn’t know where in the city she was, I mean come on. Claire probably wrote it when she was high. She didn’t ask them to find her. That postcard was a good-bye. Mattie just didn’t understand or accept it. And I guess … Sadie could’ve acted a little torn up about it for
her sister’s benefit, but she didn’t …
WEST McCRAY:
Did Mattie blame Sadie for Claire leaving?
MAY BETH FOSTER:
No, but she blamed Sadie for not looking for her.
WEST McCRAY:
What did Claire mean when she told Mattie to be “‘my good girl”?
MAY BETH FOSTER:
When Mattie was being Claire’s good girl, she was usually giving Sadie hell. I feel like I’m making Mattie sound terrible and that’s not the case. She was just … young. Mattie loved Sadie but she worshipped Claire.
WEST McCRAY:
After the postcard, things slowly deteriorated between the girls.
MAY BETH FOSTER:
It was heartbreaking to see, the way Mattie would get with Sadie. Just vicious. Sadie forgave Mattie everything. She knew where that anger was coming from and bore it. That doesn’t mean she was a saint—she wasn’t. She’d get impatient, tell Mattie she was being stupid, that it was hopeless … it was the first real crack between them and it kept growing. It’s amazing, really, when I think about how long and how hard Mattie held onto Claire while Sadie was just trying to hold onto Mattie.
The month before Mattie died, things were as bad between them as I’d ever seen. Mattie was becoming a woman and that’s a dangerous time in any girl’s life. She was her own person and that person had different ideas of how things should be than Sadie did. And she never said it, but I know Sadie was damn hurt about it.
I can’t—if Claire hadn’t sent that—if she coulda just made a clean break, I think eventually Mattie would’ve come to terms with it. But she had to screw things up all the way from L.A. and that’s what Sadie and Mattie were fighting about, the night Mattie disappeared.
WEST McCRAY:
That’s the one thing everyone seems to agree was the catalyst for Mattie’s disappearance: she attempted to leave Cold Creek in search of her mother. She got into a killer’s truck for what she hoped would be the first leg on her long journey to L.A.