“No!” Silas bellows and she stops in her tracks. He points to me. “You—get the hell out, get the hell off my property—get out of here!”
I take halting, dazed steps to the car. Silas moves away from me and Kendall rushes forward and grabs at his arm, pulling him to her. I sniff and immediately regret it, the taste of blood thick and metallic at the back of my throat. I ease into my car slowly and pull out of the driveway. By the time I’m at the end of the street, I’m shaking so hard, I don’t know how I’m driving and in my head, three, no four words: 451 Twining Street, Langford … 451 Twining Street … Langford.
When Silas Baker’s house feels far enough away, I pull over.
A long, long time ago, when Mom had just left, I ran a fever of 105. May Beth was too many states away, visiting family and I was so sick, I didn’t know my own name, no matter how many times Mattie called me by it.
Sadie, I think you’re sick.
Sadie, you gotta tell me what to do …
Sadie, I think you’re dying.
She ended up phoning my boss, Marty, who bundled me into his pickup and took me to the hospital an hour away, where they stuck an IV in my arm and waited for the numbers on the thermometer to go down. May Beth cut her family vacation short just to look after me and I was so mad at everyone I didn’t speak to any of them for a week.
Whole thing ended up costing us too much.
I stare down at myself. My shirt is soaked in my own blood, my nose still bleeding. I’m glad Mattie isn’t alive to see this because I can just imagine her hands fluttering uselessly beside me because she never knew what to do when I needed something, when I needed help. Never. You can’t blame her for it, though. She shouldn’t have had to.
She was just a kid.
Kids shouldn’t have to worry about that kind of stuff.
It’s not right any other way.
THE GIRLS
EPISODE 4
[THE GIRLS THEME]
ANNOUNCER:
The Girls is brought to you by Macmillan Publishers.
WEST McCRAY:
Arthur, Keith and Paul.
These are the names May Beth Foster gave me. Men who were with Claire long enough they might know something about Darren M., the man Sadie claims is her father.
Arthur is dead, like May Beth told me he would be. He lived with Claire and the girls for six months, when Sadie was thirteen and Mattie was seven, and overdosed two years later. May Beth doesn’t have much to say about him. He was a dealer. Keith, there’s no record of anywhere. I put a team on finding him. By May Beth’s accounts, Keith lasted longest. He came into the girls’ lives when Mattie was five and Sadie was eleven.
MAY BETH FOSTER:
He was the one who really tried. He looked after those girls as best as Claire would let him. Keith was my favorite.
WEST McCRAY:
Why is that?
MAY BETH FOSTER:
Well, whenever Claire brought a man home, it was like … my heart would just sink because it always ended worse than it started. And it always started bad. Keith didn’t start bad. He picked Claire up at the bar, Joel’s, found her there—she was often there … and he brought her home. And he was stone-cold sober. That stood out to me. Not as a bad thing, mind, but Claire usually had men as wrecked as she was. That first night, he put her to bed, and then he introduced himself to me.
Right away, I liked him. He treated me like … he treated me with respect. He treated me like I was the girls’ flesh-and-blood grandmother. That meant something to me. Then I come to find out he was a God-fearing man, and I believe in the power of prayer myself. He taught the girls a little religion. So that was—I liked that a lot. He was only supposed to stay the weekend. He stayed a year instead, and if I’d had it my way, it would’ve been forever.
WEST McCRAY:
Describe his relationship with the girls.
MAY BETH FOSTER:
He told me he’d always wanted kids and this was the closest he’d ever got, would probably ever get to having them. Mattie thought he was wonderful … he had a sort of juvenile sense of humor, and she was young enough to enjoy it. Sadie—well, she never liked Keith.
WEST McCRAY:
Why’s that?
MAY BETH FOSTER:
He was sober, like I said. I know how that sounds but … he didn’t use. He didn’t get in the way of Claire using, but he was clean himself. He just accepted Claire for what she was, and wanted to be part of their lives. Maybe that’s a sickness in itself, enabling … but he tried to create structure for the girls and up until that point, Sadie felt that was her job. He was an interloper, in her eyes.
WEST McCRAY:
You’d think she’d want a little of that stability for herself—that an actual adult in her life would let her be a kid again.
MAY BETH FOSTER:
She didn’t know how to be a kid. Mattie was so wound up in Sadie’s purpose, Sadie was terrified of losing that.
WEST McCRAY:
How did it end between Claire and Keith?
MAY BETH FOSTER:
Terribly. That much followed the pattern. She kicked him out in the middle of the night. I could hear her screaming at him from across the lot. Damn miracle nobody called the police. I looked out the window and she had all his things on the lawn and he was shouting back at her.
Claire just got tired of them, you know. Once she felt she got all she could from them, they had to go. This was no different. He grabbed all his things and left. He walked past and saw me watching from my window. He waved good-bye. I never saw him again.
Tell you the truth, I cried over that one.
WEST McCRAY:
Paul Good works for a logging company in the Northwest. He looks it too; he’s a tall, muscular guy, with red hair, a beard, and a tanned, sun-worn face. He’s not a particularly hard man to get ahold of, but it does take him the better part of a week to decide whether or not he wants to speak on the record. He was with Claire Southern for eight months, sure, but it was a difficult time in his life. He was using. He was depressed. Four years clean, he wasn’t sure he wanted to revisit it.
PAUL GOOD [PHONE]:
I don’t know I got a lot to say … or what exactly it is you want me to say.
I look back at that time and I think … I was a kid. I was a mess. I mean, I got a family now. I got a wife, I got a little girl of my own. I don’t know what I thought I was doing then. No … that’s a lie. [LAUGHS] I thought I loved Claire.
WEST McCRAY [PHONE]:
How did you two meet?
PAUL GOOD [PHONE]:
Oh, Jesus. I was driving home—Abernathy was home, then—from the bar. I was drunk too. I shouldn’t be saying that. It was stupid, but that’s not my life anymore. Anyway, she was walking. She was walking in the dark, on the wrong side of the road. [LAUGHS] It’s amazing I didn’t kill her. I pulled over and asked her if she needed a lift and she said yes, and soon as she got in that car, she starts crying. She’d been having a rough night, drinking for some of it—but she was more sober than I was. Talked my ear off on the way to her place. When I got her there, she told me I was a good listener and maybe I could, you know, do that for her again. She didn’t invite me in that night, but man … she got me.
The first part of our relationship was on the phone. And I fell in love with the life she sold me, which was a lot different than what it actually was … the way Claire told it, her mom was sick and she cared for her. Then she got pregnant. Then her mom died and then she got pregnant again and she was looking after two girls alone. She sounded so devoted to ’em and I’d always wanted kids myself.
I moved in with the three of them and then the truth really come out. I mean, there were signs that she had some problems … she drank too much—on the phone, I could tell when she’d been drinking. She’d nod off. That was the heroin. By the time I realized the extent of it, she was my heart. I didn’t mind the kids but I loved Claire. So I started using too. I made myself sick for her.
WEST McCRAY [PHONE]:
Paul entered the girls’ lives when Sadie was fifteen and Mattie was nine.