So upstairs.
Everything was easy until the moment my right foot meets the first step. The stairs are old, and they let me know it, groaning loudly under the weight of my body. Each time it sounds, I feel like I did when I was driving and the car would take the curve of a hill, that strange anxious rising and falling sensation in the pit of my stomach.
When I reach the landing, I exhale. I don’t realize how hard I’m shaking until the moment before I grip the banister, and I catch sight of my trembling fingers.
There are three doors, the closest one open, revealing a bathroom, leaving two left. I push the first door open and find myself in Nell’s room.
I thought I might.
I hoped I wouldn’t.
Her room is neat, in the way I kept my room neat, like everything was put into place by small, uncertain hands. There’s faded pink wallpaper on the wall with yellowing seams that I think has been here longer than she has. A small bed with a mint green comforter, a little too deflated, secondhand. I cross the threshold and move to the tiny desk across from her bed. This is where she makes her masterpieces. A sketchbook and colored pencils with dollar-store stickers on them. I move to her closet, next to the bed, and open the door where I’m met with the scent of baby-soft detergent and all of Nell’s impossibly small clothes.
I was this small once.
A lifetime ago.
I sift through them almost unconsciously. This wasn’t something I set out to do, but now that I’m doing it, I can’t stop because I know. I know I’ll find exactly what I don’t want to find, and it’s there, in the back. A shirt with the tag cut out of it. I take it off the hanger and press it against my face and a fierce, near unbearable wave of grief follows. I’m going to save you, Nell. I’m going to save you, but everything after that, I think, is beyond saving. I can stop Keith but I can’t undo everything that’s already been done. How do you forgive the people who are supposed to protect you? Sometimes I don’t know what I miss more; everything I’ve lost or everything I never had.
“Always wondered if you’d show up on my doorstep one day.”
I take a faltering step forward and then steady myself, his quiet, edgeless voice turning me small, like that, turning me into a small girl, sick with the knowledge that she’s done this wrong. I’ve done this wrong because when I turn Keith is standing right in front of me.
I wish his darkness lived outside of him, because you have to know it’s there to see it. Like all real monsters, he hides in plain sight. He is tall, has always been tall. He’s wearing jeans, scruffed and ratty at the bottoms, threads hanging against his bare feet. His legs stretch up to his torso, his arms taut and muscular in a way I don’t remember them being when I was young. His face is as sharp as it ever was, shadowed and in need of a shave. The lines beside his eyes are so much deeper now than they were when I was eleven, and they were harsh even then. Eight years. It’s been eight years since I saw him in the flesh, but I feel that time between us disappear. I cannot keep looking at him if I want to keep myself in this moment, but I can’t look away and he’s making me small. I’m not. I’m not small, I’m not small, I’m not small … The floor creaks under him. He positions himself against the door frame, leaning against it and blocking my way out. I keep Nell’s shirt pressed to my face. The skin of my hands is stretched so tight over my knuckles from my grip. I close my eyes. I listen to the sound of him breathing, remember the sound of him breathing late at night, I remember … I’m not small …
The floor creaks, shifting under his weight …
I open my eyes and raise my head.
He’s gone.
I would think he was never here, if I couldn’t hear him rushing through the house, running from me and I feel frayed at my own edges, trying to understand what just happened, what I let happen. I drop Nell’s shirt and leave her room, hurrying down the stairs, not quietly, because if he’s here and he knows I am here, there’s no point in being quiet anymore. I reach the bottom of the stairs. The back door is open, leading to the backyard, the woods beyond it.
I move to it. I can taste the air, dry and stale, and I can hear the quick, sure sound it entering my lungs. I step through the door, take that first step outside and the world explodes into a beautiful black night sky with more stars than I’ve ever seen in my life. I watch them flash and sparkle before my eyes, brilliant bright and white and then red, before they begin to slowly disappear, until all that’s left is black. My skull feels like it’s coming apart, throbbing from the impact of some unknown force. He hit me, I realize vaguely …
And then: a pinprick of light, a single star reappears on the horizon to keep time with my heartbeat, pulsing faintly, alive. I want to reach for it, but I can’t move my arms. I fall through it instead, feel my body hit the ground. I’m on the ground, my head firing thought after thought that can’t seem to complete themselves and they all begin with Mattie …
And they never seem to end.
THE GIRLS
S1E6
WEST McCRAY:
When I finally get back to Cold Creek, Claire still hasn’t returned.
It’s been a few days.
MAY BETH FOSTER:
I called all the bars within twenty-five miles. Nobody’s seen her, I don’t know how much that’s worth. She’s got money here … maybe she’s on a bender in some dive I don’t know about and got somebody else to pick up the tab.
WEST McCRAY:
It’s easy to believe Claire would jeopardize her sobriety by returning to Cold Creek, but when she came back, she was motivated by her grief, not self-destruction. That grief should remind us Claire Southern is more than the sum of her failures. She’s not a perfect person—but she is a person. A mother.
I find her in the orchard where they recovered Mattie’s body.
[FOOTSTEPS, CARS IN DISTANCE]
WEST McCRAY:
Claire?
[LONG PAUSE]
CLAIRE SOUTHERN:
You recording this?
WEST McCRAY:
If that’s okay with you.
CLAIRE SOUTHERN:
I was driving around … just driving the same roads, over and over. I wasn’t sure what I was doing. Wound up here a few hours ago and now it’s taking me forever to leave.
I just can’t seem to make myself do it.
WEST McCRAY:
I’m sorry for your loss.
CLAIRE SOUTHERN:
That’s the first time anyone ever said that to me.
WEST McCRAY:
I’m sorry about that too.
CLAIRE SOUTHERN:
It’s different when you think someone’s always going to be around. You think you got all the time in the world to make it right.
WEST McCRAY:
You thought you could make it right with Sadie?
CLAIRE SOUTHERN:
I doubt I could have. It’s just a comfort, having the option.
You got kids?
WEST McCRAY:
Yeah.
CLAIRE SOUTHERN:
How many?
WEST McCRAY:
Just one.
A daughter.
CLAIRE SOUTHERN:
How old?
WEST McCRAY:
She’s five.
CLAIRE SOUTHERN:
That’s a good age.
WEST McCRAY:
Is it?
CLAIRE SOUTHERN:
Yeah. They’re really starting to be people at that age but they’re still clingy, like a baby. Sadie was—Sadie went through something like that.
WEST McCRAY:
That right?
CLAIRE SOUTHERN:
She never remembered it. It’s probably amazing I do. But she went through this phase where she wanted me to tuck her in at night real bad, begged me to do it, so I’d go in her room and I’d run my hands through her hair ’til she fell asleep and this one time … she looks up at me and she says, you made me. And I—I said yeah. Yeah, baby I did.
WEST McCRAY:
You love your daughter.
CLAIRE SOUTHERN:
My daughter hates me.