As I mentioned earlier, it’s managed by May Beth Foster, the girls’ surrogate grandmother. She shows me the girls’ trailer, a double-wide, exactly as Sadie left it. May Beth has found herself in a suspended state of grief where she can’t bring herself to clean it out, even though she also can’t afford not to rent it.
I don’t know what I’m expecting when I step inside, but the place is spare and clean. For the last four years of their lives, Sadie raised Mattie here on her own, but still—she was a teenager and when I think of teenagers, I think of some sort of natural disaster; a tornado moving from room to room, leaving carnage in its wake.
It was nothing like that in the place they called home. There are still cups in the kitchen sink and on the coffee table in front of the old television in the living room. A calendar on the fridge that hasn’t been flipped since June, when Sadie disappeared.
Things get downright eerie in their bedrooms. Mattie’s room looks like it’s waiting for her to come back. There are clothes on the floor, the bed is unmade. There’s an empty glass with water stains coating its inside on the nightstand.
MAY BETH FOSTER:
Sadie wouldn’t let anyone touch it.
WEST McCRAY:
It’s a direct contrast to Sadie’s room, which looks like it knows she’s never coming back. In her room, the bed has been neatly made, but aside from that, every available surface is bare. It appears to have been stripped clean.
WEST McCRAY [TO MAY BETH]: There’s nothing here.
MAY BETH FOSTER:
I found all her things in the Dumpster back of the lot, the day I realized she was gone.
WEST McCRAY:
What kinds of things?
MAY BETH FOSTER:
She got rid of her books, movies, clothes … just everything.
It makes me sick to think about her throwing her life in the garbage like that because that’s what it amounts to. Every little bit that made her, everything, was all in the trash and when I found it, I just started to cry because she’d … it wasn’t worth anything to her anymore.
WEST McCRAY:
Did you see this coming at all? Did she give you any kind of indication she was planning on leaving?
MAY BETH FOSTER:
That week before she left, Sadie got really quiet, like she was thinking about doing something stupid and I told her whatever she was thinking … don’t. I said to her, “Don’t you do it.” But by that point, I couldn’t reach her about much of anything.
Still, I never imagined this …
I have to tell you, it’s killing me to be in here. I just, I’d really like not to be.
WEST McCRAY:
We continue talking in her trailer, a cozy double-wide at the front of the lot. She has me sit on her plastic-covered couch which squeaks very loudly every time I move. When I tell her that’s not so great for an interview, we end up in her small kitchen, at the kitchen table, where she serves me a glass of iced tea and shows me the photo album she’s kept of the girls over the years.
WEST McCRAY:
You did this?
MAY BETH FOSTER:
I did.
WEST McCRAY:
Seems like something a mother would do.
MAY BETH FOSTER:
Yeah, well. A mother should.
WEST McCRAY:
Claire Southern, Mattie and Sadie’s mother, is not a welcome topic of conversation, but she’s an unavoidable one because without Claire, there would be no girls.
MAY BETH FOSTER:
Less said about her, the better.
WEST McCRAY:
I’d still really like to hear it, May Beth. It could help. At the very least, it’ll give me a better understanding of Sadie and Mattie.
MAY BETH FOSTER:
Well, Claire was trouble and there was no reason for it. Some kids are just born … bad. She started drinking when she was twelve. At fifteen, she was into pot, cocaine. By eighteen, heroin. She’d been arrested for petty theft a few times, misdemeanors. Just a mess. I was best friends with her mama, Irene, since Irene started renting from me. That’s how I come into their lives. You never knew a soul as gentle as Irene. She could’ve had a firmer hand with Claire, but there’s no use in dwelling on that now.
WEST McCRAY:
Irene died of breast cancer when Claire was nineteen.
MAY BETH FOSTER:
Before Irene died, Claire got pregnant. Irene was trying so hard to hold on for her grandchild but it wasn’t … it wasn’t meant to be. Three months after we put Irene in the ground, Sadie was born. I’d promised Irene on her deathbed I’d look out for that little girl, and that’s what I did. That’s what I’ve always done because, well—you have any kids of your own?
WEST McCRAY:
Yeah, I do. A daughter.
MAY BETH FOSTER:
Then you know.
sadie
Three days later, I dye my hair.
I do it in some public bathroom along the way. The ammonia mingles with the stench inside the dirty stalls and makes me gag. I’ve never colored my hair before and the end result is a muddy blond. On the girl on the box, it was golden but that doesn’t matter because all it’s meant to look is different.
Mattie would’ve hated it. She would’ve told me so. You never let me dye my hair, she’d whine in her thin voice and by thin, I don’t mean papery or weak. It just never came completely into itself. When she laughed, it would go so shrill and hurt my ears but I’m not complaining because when Mattie laughed, it was like being on a plane at night, looking down on some city you’ve never been to and it’s all lit up. Or at least how I imagine that would be. I’ve never been on a plane before.
And it’s true too. I never let her dye her hair. When she was burning through every rule in my book (call if you go to a friend’s house, don’t text boys without telling me, put your phone away and do your goddamn homework already) that was the only one she chose to honor: no dying your hair until you’re fourteen. Just missed it.
I think the real reason Mattie never touched her hair was because she got the blond from Mom and couldn’t stand the thought of losing what little pieces of her she had left. It always made me crazy how much the two of them looked alike, with their matching hair, blue eyes and heart-shaped faces. Mattie and I didn’t share a father and we didn’t look like we were sisters, not unless you caught us mirroring each other’s expressions in those rare instances we felt the exact same way about something. Between her and Mom, I was the odd one out; my unruly brown curls and murky gray eyes set upon what May Beth always called a sparrow’s face. Mattie was scrawny in a way that was underdeveloped and awkward, but there’s a special kind of softness that goes along with that, something less visually cynical compared to my makings. I’m the result of baby bottles filled with Mountain Dew. I have a system that doesn’t quite know how to process the finer things in life. My body is sharp enough to cut glass and in desperate need of rounding out, but sometimes I don’t mind. A body might not always be beautiful, but a body can be a beautiful deception. I’m stronger than I look.
It’s dark when the sign comes up for Whittler’s Truck Stop.
A truck stop. Closest thing to a pause button for people living on fast-forward, only they don’t pause so much as dial themselves down to twice the speed the rest of us operate on. I used to work at a gas station just outside of Cold Creek and my boss, Marty, never let me work nights alone was how little he trusted truckers passing through. I don’t know if that was entirely fair of him, but it’s how he felt. Whittler’s is bigger than what I come from, but doesn’t seem as clean. Or maybe you get so used to the mess of home you convince yourself over time everything’s exactly where it belongs. Nothing here is really trying for its best. The neon lights of the gas station sign seem duller than they should be, like they’re choosing to slowly go out rather than ending themselves with that sudden pop into darkness.