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 eighteen 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.
Cooper’s is a two-story getup with a sleazy wooden exterior, the top half of it made up of rooms for rent. I’ve parked as close as I can to the front door. I leave my car and pass a line of motorcycles, following a gritty guitar riff inside. The walls are dark cherry awash in red light. There’s a band at the opposite side of the room and stretched in front of them, the dance floor, where people are grinding against nothing or each other.
It’s a hardscrabble crowd consisting of the middle-aged and the old as dirt and one anomalous group of perfect teenagers who Definitely Don’t Belong But Didn’t Get the Memo. They’re clustered together in a booth in the corner, hands wrapped around PBRs. It’s strange, seeing them live and in the flesh, and I realize stalking their social media has given them the vague sheen of celebrity. Kendall and Noah Baker are as blond as their aunt Marlee, but they don’t possess the same sallow complexion that speaks to hunger, sleeplessness and stress. They’ve been turned golden by the sun. Kendall’s hair is in two loose pigtails and her lips are pouty and pink. She has an air of practiced boredom but I can tell there’s nothing else she’d rather be doing. Noah has a tidy buzz cut and broad shoulders. Of the two of them, he looks more like their father. Javi has shaggy brown hair, light brown skin, a sharp nose and a lean body. A girl I recognize from their feeds but whose name I never caught sits next to him, her head tilted back, laughing at something Noah’s said. She has beautiful brown curls that almost waterfall over her shoulders, her skin a warm brown with golden undertones. There’s a diamond stud in her nose and it glints every time it catches the light. She’s prettier than Kendall, but something about her makes me think she doesn’t know it. That’s a real tragedy and I mean it. It’s sad when people don’t realize their worth.
I make my way to the bar and ask for a shot of whiskey. The bartender is this built, white guy with long, greasy black hair that definitely needs a cut. He wipes his hands on the towel hooked into his belt loop and eyes me skeptically. Says, “Look a little young to me.”
He sounds as gritty as the band.
I nod to the teens across the room.
“So d-do they.”