“I w-want to k-kill him.”
The spoon freezes an inch from Breckin’s face and his confusion is immediate. He slaps his hands on his high chair tray, calling Marlee’s attention back to him. She dips the spoon into his mouth and then sets it all aside.
“It’s a j-joke,” I say.
“Right,” she says back.
I pick at the tab of the Coke can, letting it catch under my nail before pinging back into place. She says, “I want another cigarette.”
“S-so have one.”
“I don’t smoke around the baby.”
But in the end, she does. She moves herself to the corner of the kitchen and lights up again, carefully turning her face away from Breckin every time she exhales, like it will make a difference. She says, “He hasn’t been around in a couple years. Used to always be around.”
“At R—at Ray’s.”
“Sometimes.” She fidgets, bites her lip. “Where are you from, anyway?”
“D-doesn’t matter.”
She rolls her eyes. “Come on, kid. Give me something.”
“—” I set the Coke down. “I-I’m not a—I’m not a kid.”
She brings the cigarette to her mouth, chewing on her knuckle while smoke drifts lazily around her face. Breckin doesn’t seem put out over the impromptu end of snack time. He’s babbling to himself, enthralled with the sound of his own voice.
“They’re tearing this whole town down,” she says after a minute. “They got this new development coming.” She takes another drag, inhales so deeply, I fleetingly imagine her cancered future. “It’s stupid. I don’t know what they’re trying at. This isn’t like the rest of the state, you know? Fuckin’ … Whole Foods and yoga … and if they pull it off, I can’t afford to live here when it’s a shithole. I don’t know where I’d go.”
“C-Cold Creek.”
“What?”
“W-where I’m from.”
“Never heard of it.” She squints. “You know what he’s about?”
“Y-yeah,” I say. I know it better than you.
I take another sip of the Coke and it’s starting to taste too sweet. I wish the air were moving around in here. Marlee takes another drag of her smoke and Breckin waves his hands around and I feel like this has happened a hundred times before me, that I’ve seen all there is to see of their lives. I look down at myself and the fire-red parts of my chest overwhelm me with the feeling that I want to be somewhere else. Anywhere else.
“You know his name’s not Darren?” she asks. I nod. “I mean, that’s what he went by when he was living here, but I never got used to sayin’ it.”
“W-what’s h-his real name?”
“We’ll just keep it Darren for now,” she says.
“He was K-Keith w-when I knew him.”
“Huh.” She chews her lip. “That’s not his name either.”
“H-how d-d—how do you know?”
“Because my brother used to go to school with him. I was seven years behind them both. Time I finished, they were long gone. I moved out here, got hitched, got divorced and my brother, well. He was making a whole lot more of himself.”
“H-how’d he d-do that?”
People around here hardly ever seem to do that.
“My parents had enough money for one kid and ended up with two.” Marlee shrugs. “He was the boy. He was the one they pinned all their hopes on, so he got more. He got college.”
“W-what was … he like?” I can’t seem to resist asking. “B-back then?”
She looks away. “He was poor as most of the rest of us. But he was quiet. Sort of dirty too, like he didn’t look after himself, like hygiene-wise. He was weird … he did some weird shit, and he got his ass kicked a lot for it. Bullied, I guess. And his parents—they were a mess. His dad would drink and go at him with a belt.”
“Oh,” I say.
She clears her throat. “By high school, my brother—thing you have to understand about my brother is he was a golden boy in every sense of the word—he took Darren under his wing, sort of, just started making a point of being nice to him. When I asked why, he said it was important to set that kind of example because we’re no better or worse than the people we walk amongst.” She pauses. “He was a real asshole, my brother, in case that didn’t make it obvious. Anyway, the other kids, they eased off and Darren and my brother became inseparable … it was sorta like—you’re probably too young for that cartoon about the little dog chasin’ after the big dog? Hell, I am too. But it was like that. Darren was always at my brother’s heels. We’d have him at our house for dinner all the time…” She trails off. “He gave me my first kiss. I was ten and he was seventeen. That’s what Darren was like back then.”
“H-how’d he end up here in W-Wagner? How long ago was th-that?”
She shrugs. “It was a couple years. He was just passing through. He knew I lived here because he and my brother keep in touch. Anyway, he stopped by and he seemed different, little more put together, nothing like he was when he was…” She looks at the floor. “He was only supposed to be here for dinner and he ended up staying a lot longer.”
“Mama,” Breckin says plaintively, and Marlee moves to him, resting her hand on his head. She turns to me. “Once he knew he was staying, he told me he was going by Darren Marshall now and if I could play along, that’d be swell.”
“H-he say why?”
Breckin giggles. She shakes her head.
“And you st-still l-let him stay?”
I guess I don’t do so well keeping the disgust out of my voice, because she tenses, raising her hand from her son’s head. She waits a minute, like she expects me to push it, and part of me feels young enough to want to. I used to be an age where I believed I could talk my mother out of her worst decisions, the drinking, drugs, certain men she’d bring home to bed. Keith. Sometimes, I think about that Sadie, begging her mother to save her from … her mother.
I hate that version of myself.
“I don’t gotta answer to you. But yeah, I did.” She shakes her head a little, her brow furrowing. “You know, all the time I was with him, Darren never said he had a kid. My brother never mentioned it either. He would’ve known.”
“I’m n-not lying t-to you,” I lie. She just looks at me and I’m afraid if she does that for too long, she’ll see the truth somehow. “So w-what h-happened?”
“We were together a few months. He’d sit right where you’re sitting, every morning, and he’d have his coffee looking out that window.”
I follow her gaze to the schoolyard. There are a couple of women at the playground now, pushing their kids, or their charges, on the swings. I imagine that place during the school year, the grounds teeming with children, running, playing, laughing, under the watchful eye of the man at the kitchen table.
“I was doing the laundry,” Marlee says. “Cleaning out his jeans pockets before I threw ’em in the wash and I found this picture … this old, worn picture—an old Polaroid. It was…” She closes her eyes briefly and her forehead creases, like she can see it there, behind her eyes, and she wishes she could see anything else. “I don’t want to get into it, but it was the kind of thing you can’t explain or defend.” She takes a shuddering breath out and opens her eyes. “People don’t change. They just get better at hiding who they really are. I turned him out the same day. I wanted nothing to do with it then and I want nothing to do with it now.”
She lifts Breckin from his high chair, pressing her face into his baby neck. I scratch at my chest and immediately regret the abuse of my own gentle touch. My skin is on fire.
“You h-hear of him since? Where he m-might be?”
“No.”
“W-what about your b-brother?”
“I don’t talk to my brother anymore,” she says tightly. “He’s of the opinion that how I treated Darren was wrong and we haven’t spoken since.”
“P-please—”
“Look, I’m sorry for whatever it is brought you here,” Marlee says, “a
nd I feel bad enough for you that I was willing to tell you that much. But I got a kid and I can’t afford to get mixed up in whatever…” She waves her hands. “Whatever this is.”
“—”
She watches me struggle.
“P-please,” is all I finally manage.
She closes her eyes and Breckin sits between us, oblivious.
“Jack Hersh. That’s his real name. Do something with that.”
“H-he d-doesn’t go by it! That’s n-not gonna get me anywhere!”
“Maybe that’s not the worst thing in the world,” she snaps. “You shouldn’t be chasing after someone that fucking sick in the soul, father or not.” She eyes go wide. “Did he hurt you?”
“Yes,” I say, flat and clean. “And m-my sister.”
“Well, I’m sorry.” She pauses. “But I can’t help you.”
It should earn me something but it doesn’t. You can’t buy people with your pain. They’ll just want away from it. I pick up one of her past-due envelopes and turn it slowly in my hands.
“Hey—put that down,” she says. “I told you. I don’t know where he is now.”
I slip the bill out, take a look at the number and she can’t stop me because her arms are too full of baby. Not that one. Too high. I reach for another bill, this one outside of its envelope and take a look at the number. That—that’s a number I can do.
Just because you can’t buy people with your pain—well. It doesn’t mean you can’t still buy them.
I hold it up and try again:
“W-what about y-your b-brother?”
THE GIRLS
S1E2
WEST McCRAY:
The ID tag on Sadie’s green backpack lists May Beth Foster as her emergency contact. She collected it, and Sadie’s belongings, from the Farfield Police Department in July.
MAY BETH FOSTER:
And let me tell you something about Farfield police: they don’t give a good God damn.
WEST McCRAY:
Detective Sheila Gutierrez is a petite fifty-year-old mother of three who has worked at the Farfield Police Department for the last fifteen years. She is sympathetic to May Beth, but she’d argue her claim.
DETECTIVE SHEILA GUTIERREZ:
We’ve done everything within our power to find Ms. Hunter. We did a search, we talked to locals, we put out bulletins and alerted the press, as well as law enforcement in surrounding areas. There was no evidence of foul play at the scene, and given the fact that Ms. Hunter left Cold Creek of her own volition as a response to a personal tragedy, we believe this could be an extension of that. The car sustained no damage. It’s a very real possibility she left it there by choice. Regardless, there’s no trace of her. That doesn’t mean we’ll be any less vigilant moving forward and if anyone has any information we encourage them to please call us at 555-3592.
WEST McCRAY:
May Beth keeps the car parked next to her place. The Chevy is old, but it still runs. She found a bill of sale in its trunk—not between Sadie and the Chevy’s former owner, but the Chevy’s former owner and the person who owned it before them. I got hold of the one who sold the car to Sadie, and she agreed to meet with me at a coffee shop in Milhaven, thirty miles outside of Cold Creek, to tell me about its buyer.
BECKI LANGDON:
She was real strange, you know. [BABY CRIES] Oh hush, now. You hush … come on now, your mama’s talking.
WEST McCRAY:
Becki Langdon—that’s “‘Becki with an i,” as she makes sure to point out in our email exchanges, despite the fact that it’s written out for me to see—is a bubbly brunette and proud mother to a baby boy. Becki’s time with Sadie was brief but she remembers her well.
BECKI LANGDON:
We—my ex-husband and I, that is—we were wanting to sell the car. It was mine, I’d had it for … God, since I was a teenager? But he had his own and we figured we could use the money for the baby, so that’s why we had it for sale. I really wish I’d kept it now because his sorry ass walked out right after Jamie was born and now my mom’s driving me everywhere.
WEST McCRAY:
Can you tell me what Sadie was like? Or did she say or give any indication what she wanted the car for?
BECKI LANGDON:
I mean, it was a pretty standard exchange. No reason for it to get personal. Except she called herself Lera. I thought she was older too. She sounded older in her emails.
WEST McCRAY:
Do you have those emails? I’d love to see them.
BECKI LANGDON:
No, sorry. Cops asked me the same but I deleted ’em. Anyway, I met her and she was awfully twitchy, had a problem talking. I was worried because I didn’t know if something wasn’t right in her head. I must not’ve been very good at hiding it because she got bitchy with me.
WEST McCRAY:
What do you mean “‘bitchy”?
BECKI LANGDON:
Like she was gonna back out. I showed her the car, she gave me cash and we went our separate ways. You think I was the last person to ever see her?
WEST McCRAY:
I hope not.
BECKI LANGDON:
[LAUGH] Oh, God! I didn’t mean it that way. My mouth, I swear. Sorry. [PAUSE] Hey, is that car—I mean, is anyone using it now? Like … do you think they’d be willing to sell it back?
DANNY GILCHRIST [PHONE]:
What do you got for me?
WEST McCRAY [PHONE]:
A lot of backstory and a girl that looks like she ran away after her sister was murdered. Honestly, I really don’t think she wants to be found. And now I have to figure out a way to tell that to her surrogate grandmother.
DANNY GILCHRIST [PHONE]:
And then what?
WEST McCRAY [PHONE]:
And then … what?
DANNY GILCHRIST [PHONE]:
What’s your deal with this?
WEST McCRAY [PHONE]:
I think Sadie ran away and I don’t think that makes for much of a story.
DANNY GILCHRIST [PHONE]:
You know there’s a real human element here, connecting a girl with the person who loves her and wants her home. After working with me on AOT, you should know that. So what’s the real deal here, why don’t you want to look for her?
WEST McCRAY [PHONE]:
I didn’t say I didn’t want to look for her.
DANNY GILCHRIST [PHONE]:
Okay, good.
So she ran away. What was she running from?
WEST McCRAY [PHONE]:
Trauma. Memories of her sister. Seems pretty obvious.
DANNY GILCHRIST [PHONE]:
What was she running to?
WEST McCRAY [PHONE]:
I’m all ears.
DANNY GILCHRIST [PHONE]:
You know where the trail goes cold. Farfield. All you’ve got is where she’s been. So retrace those steps, that’s all there is to it. [PAUSE] Maybe you find something, maybe you don’t, and this isn’t the show.
WEST McCRAY [PHONE]:
Yeah.
DANNY GILCHRIST [PHONE]:
Do your best. That’s all we can ask.
WEST McCRAY [STUDIO]:
The name Sadie gave Becki is what sticks with me the most. When I ask May Beth about it, she tells me Lera is Sadie’s middle name.
WEST McCRAY [PHONE]:
So she buys a car and assumes a different name … May Beth, it sounds like she doesn’t want to be found.
MAY BETH FOSTER [PHONE]:
Even if that started out being the case, something has changed, you hear me? Something’s not right. I feel it.
WEST McCRAY [PHONE]:
Well, I need more than a feeling to go on.
sadie
I want to live my life on the internet. Everything is perfect there.
I found Kendall Baker on a computer in a library in some forgettable town along the way. She’s beautiful. A girl with glow. Eighteen years old, but the kind of eighteen they write about in books. The kind of eightee
n that lives faster than the speed of hurt.
A girl who has no reason at all to believe she isn’t permanent.
As I scrolled through her Instagram feed, it struck me that every curated, perfectly captured moment in her life would still look wonderful without all the filters she slaps on them. Kendall Baker has a hectic social life. Weekdays are spent being a perfect daughter and friend, but weekends are dedicated to blowing off the steam required to maintain that kind of facade. Through her feed and the comments on her pictures, I find out that most weekends, she and her brother, Noah, and their special chosen few leave the city where they live, Montgomery, and drive an hour away to slum it in a bar called Cooper’s.
Cooper’s is where I find myself now, Wagner hundreds of miles behind me. I arrive on a Thursday, park across the road and wait.
They don’t show until Saturday.
Kendall Baker is my line to Silas Baker, Marlee’s brother, and Marlee wasn’t kidding when she said he got everything. He got college. He got college. He made a lot of good investments and reinvested his money back into his community. A lot of his money is tied to a lot of the businesses in the city. He got the Montgomery Good Citizenship award six years ago for his Outstanding contributions toward making Montgomery, CO, a city we’re proud to call home! In the accompanying photo, Silas, radiant, white and blond, was surrounded by his wife and his children, and even though he’s the one I want—the one who will lead me to Keith—his kids were the ones I lingered on.
And now Kendall Baker’s life has a sick little hold on me.
Her feed led me to other feeds and soon, I could imagine her whole world. One of Kendall’s friends, Javier Cruz—Javi, they call him, the J silent—the way he takes pictures of her makes me think he feels something for her. The way she is about him makes me think she doesn’t feel it back. There was this one video—they were here, I think, Cooper’s—and he had his phone’s camera filming her and she was dancing like something out of a movie, her arms outstretched, her hands floating in front of her. I watched it over and over, entranced by his enchantment. I have never been kissed the way I want to be kissed and I have never been touched the way I want to be touched. I don’t often let myself think of it, but ever since I saw that video, I can’t seem to stop.