MAY BETH FOSTER:
Then Mattie came along.
WEST McCRAY:
In May Beth’s album, Mattie’s arrival is marked with a Polaroid of a tiny, day-old bundle in six-year-old Sadie’s arms. The way Sadie gazes at her newborn sister is almost impossible to describe. It’s unbearably tender.
WEST McCRAY [TO MAY BETH]: Just look at the way she’s looking at Mattie … wow.
MAY BETH FOSTER:
Isn’t it something? Sadie loved Mattie with her whole heart and that love for Mattie gave her a purpose. Sadie made it her life’s work looking after her sister. Young as she was, she knew Claire wouldn’t do it right.
WEST McCRAY:
Can you describe the girls’ relationship with their mother?
MAY BETH FOSTER:
Claire enjoyed Mattie because they looked alike. She was Claire’s little doll, not her child. She gave Mattie the Southern name. And Mattie thought Claire was the berries …
But that was Sadie’s doing.
WEST McCRAY:
How do you mean?
MAY BETH FOSTER:
Sadie always covered for Claire, lied for her, even. Made sure Mattie understood Claire was sick … I think she thought if she did that, it’d hurt less for Mattie when Claire inevitably let her down. I don’t know if that was the best thing for either of them. It cost Sadie a lot, especially after Claire left. I don’t know if Mattie ever fully appreciated what Sadie did for her, in that respect. If she’d lived long enough, maybe.
WEST McCRAY:
The pictures of Mattie are difficult to look at. She had shiny, stick-straight blond hair, sparkling blue eyes and Claire’s heart-shaped face. It’s nearly impossible to reconcile with that kind of vitality knowing how her story ends.
WEST McCRAY [TO MAY BETH]: I can’t help but notice Mattie doesn’t look at Sadie with quite the same reverence.
MAY BETH FOSTER:
Mattie loved her big sister. Mattie adored Sadie but Sadie might as well have been Mattie’s mother and that’s a certain kind of dynamic. Throw in a six-year age gap, that’s gonna add to it too. Looking after Mattie brought Sadie out of her shell and forced her to use her voice, no matter the stutter. But the times Sadie didn’t feel like talkin’ or couldn’t get it out, Mattie would know what Sadie needed just by looking at her. So make no mistake, they were devoted to each other in their own ways. I don’t know if all sisters are how the pair of them were. I have three of my own and I love them dearly, but we were never like that.
WEST McCRAY:
With each turn of the album’s pages, May Beth’s voice becomes less and less steady. As we reach the end of it, her eyes fill with tears.
MAY BETH FOSTER:
Oh.
WEST McCRAY:
What is it?
WEST McCRAY [STUDIO]: She turns the album to me. On one side is a photo of the girls. They’re sprawled on May Beth’s plastic-covered couch, a red-and-orange knitted blanket shared between them. An oversized bowl of popcorn rests on Mattie’s lap. They’re absolutely entranced by whatever’s on the TV in front of them; later May Beth tells me it was probably an old movie. The girls loved the classics. Sadie, in particular, was fond of anything with Bette Davis. But what’s caught May Beth’s attention at this particular moment is the page opposite. It’s empty. There was a picture there, she insists, flipping frantically through the book to see if it somehow got loose and ended up somewhere where it shouldn’t be. She checks the floor around us in case it fell out. It’s nowhere to be found.
MAY BETH FOSTER:
But where did it—I don’t know where it could have got to … it was a picture of … the girls were in it … it was … it was—I can’t remember what, exactly, it was … but I know it had the girls in it. They were here. They were right here.
sadie
I’m going to kill a man.
I’m going to steal the light from his eyes. I want to watch it go out. You aren’t supposed to answer violence with more violence but sometimes I think violence is the only answer. It’s no less than he did to Mattie, so it’s no less than he deserves.
I don’t expect it to bring her back. It won’t bring her back.
It’s not about finding peace. There will never be peace.
I’m not under any illusion about how little of me will be left after I do this one thing. But imagine having to live every day knowing the person who killed your sister is breathing the air she can’t, filling his lungs with it, tasting its sweetness. Imagine him knowing the feeling of the ground beneath his feet while her body is buried below it.
This is the furthest I’ve been from anything that I know.
I’m in the front seat, turning a switchblade over and over in my hand. There’s a dirty water smell in the air. I close my eyes and open them and I’m still in the front seat, still turning the knife, air still heavy with the pond scum scent of it all. I close my eyes and open them again and it’s like one of those running dreams where every impossible push forward is rewarded with the knowledge that you have to do it over and over again and there is no finish line and you don’t know how to make yourself stop.
“Mattie.”
The M of her name is an easy press. The double ts don’t overstay their welcome.
When she was five and I was eleven, Mattie would crawl into my bed, terrified of the dark, desperate for me to say something that would make her feel safe. My fractured reassurances were never enough; all I could offer was my presence and she took what she could get, pressing her head against my shoulder and falling asleep like that. By morning, all my covers were tangled around her tiny body and my pillow always somehow ended up under her head. When I was eleven and Mattie was five, she wanted to talk like me, would storm around shattering her words until Keith smacked her on the butt for it and said, Nobody talks like that who’s got a choice, and even though I hated him for it, I told Mattie he was right. When Mattie was five and I was eleven, I could no longer pretend each new sentence had a chance of coming out of me clean. I stopped talking for two weeks from the sheer grief of it until Mattie looked at me with her eyes impossibly wide and said, “Tell me what you want to say.”
Keith is not my father, but he sometimes pretended he was, would let people make the mistake and silently dared me to correct them. He would buy me candy at the gas station whether or not I was begging for it, then make a production of putting it in my palms just because he wanted to hear me force out a thank you. He would sit me at the table at night and have me memorize prayers to the utter delight of May Beth and Mattie was right to be afraid of the dark then because at night, he would come into my room and make me say them.
When I was nineteen and Mattie was thirteen, Keith came back.
I turn the switchblade one more time in my sweaty palm, feeling the weight of its neat black handle and the unforgiving blade tucked inside.
It was his, a long time ago.
It’s mine now.
I’m going to carve my name into his soul.
THE GIRLS
EPISODE 2
WEST McCRAY:
In our last episode, I introduced you to the two girls at the center of this podcast, Mattie Southern and Sadie Hunter. Mattie was murdered, her body left just outside her hometown of Cold Creek, Colorado. Sadie is missing, her car found, abandoned, thousands of miles away, with all her personal belongings still inside it. The girls’ surrogate grandmother, May Beth Foster, has enlisted my help in finding Sadie and bringing her home.
For those of you just tuning in, this is a serialized podcast, so if you haven’t listened to our first episode, you should do that now. We have more story than time to tell it—but I suppose that’s true for all of us.
[THE GIRLS THEME]
ANNOUNCER:
The Girls is brought to you by Macmillan Publishers.