Callie #2
Callie closes her eyes. For a second she can almost see it.
Two girls, racing down the grand staircase, too young to notice the rot seeping in, the mold along the walls and the stains on the ceiling, the disorder coming for them.
Two girls, playing games in the woods. One another’s worlds.
She hears their laughter, their shrieks of fear and outrage and delight.
Making dolls out of pine cones. Turning stones into jewels in the palms of their hands.
Shrouded in their girlhoods for a little while longer.
Then, two girls just a few years out of playing games, of imagining things in the woods and winding through the trees.
They learn what it feels like to be touched by someone: sometimes transcendent, sometimes a kind of theft.
Girls trying to decide who they might want to be, aiming themselves toward the futures they want, or think they should want.
All those gaunt-cheeked models on Sabrina Riley’s wall.
Annabelle and her fastidiousness, trying so hard to be good.
When she opens her eyes they go to the edge of the desk, the yellowed blotter, the cup of pens. And then she sees it. A little row of ridges along the top slat of the desk chair. Callie traces her finger just below the marks. But she knows what they are the second she lays eyes on them.
Teeth marks.
Three overlapping rows, wavelike frills where the blue-painted wood gives way to the raw stuff at its center. The yellow pine exposed where someone bit down on it again and again.
In a room this orderly, this controlled, it stands out. Practically gives off a vibration, the way the photo of that broken amber bracelet does. A story there, and with it comes a shiver, the sensation of information passing through her skin.
Back in the car she has to steady herself with a few deep breaths before she can drive away.
The disorder of the house has shaken her, the idea of the girls living there, doing what they had to do to survive their teenage years.
Sabrina, working, then acting out, stirring up trouble, playing boys off of one another to feel something, not love, but connection, need.
Maybe it helped mask the trouble all around her, the kind she had no control over.
Callie had been the Annabelle type. The one who thought that if you can be really good you can make the bad in your life right.
She turns out of the Riley driveway and loops around to the street that backs up to their house so she will pass Jenna’s childhood home on her way back to her cabin.
Someone has written out a Bible verse in black spray paint on a big piece of plywood and propped it up in the front yard.
The person Callie wants to tell most about it is Jenna, who liked to recount the various ways she got kicked out of Sunday school when she was a kid.
Chewing bubble gum, singing “Wild Horses” at the top of her lungs, draping her coat over her head and pretending it was a habit.
Jenna had always had a rebellious streak, a disdain for authority—blamed it on her ancestors, who came to the Pines in the 1700s from the Philadelphia Quaker sect they abandoned when they couldn’t stick to the Friends’ code.
It wasn’t until later though, that it seemed to alchemize into self-destruction.
That the pride in her rebellious nature shifted into something more like shame.
At home Callie starts to make dinner—a grilled cheese and a can of tomato soup heated up on her hot plate—when her phone rings.
Healy.
“Please tell me you have a match for me,” she says, dumping the soup into a pot, splattering some of it on the front of her shirt.
“Where are you right now? Is it a good time to talk?”
“Why do you sound like you’re about to tell me someone died?” She instantly regrets her phrasing. Isn’t that what a part of her has been waiting for, dreading, since Jenna’s bag was turned in? “I’m at home, if that’s what you mean.”
“We do have a match on the Baby Doe case.”
“Hell yes.” Callie feels herself stand straighter, all of her muscles and ligaments going taut with anticipation. Fauver, she thinks. If she can get him on the DNA, then maybe she can get a warrant to search his place.
“Hauser. I don’t know how to tell you this.”
“Just tell me. This is good news, isn’t it? It’s the first real evidence in this case in thirty years.”
“We have a match. A half sibling of Baby Doe. I didn’t believe it at first. Like wondered if you were playing some kind of joke here or something—”
Callie’s excitement shifts into annoyance quickly. “You’re killing me, Healy. Enough with the suspense, please. Who is it?”
He exhales through the line. “You, Hauser. The match we have for Baby Doe? It’s you.”
Callie stands still, at first convinced she heard him wrong. The soup starts to boil but she doesn’t move to turn down the heat, just listens to it bubble angrily.
“Callie?” He says, and that’s how she knows he’s not messing with her, how she knows she heard it right the first time. Her first name, tender and tentative.
Still, she doesn’t answer him right away.
She closes her eyes and counts back the years.
The DNA test she submitted, tipsy and bored on a Friday after her last attempt at Thanksgiving with Jenna.
2017. The tube she spat in and then forgot about until the email came six weeks later heralding her results.
Nothing but a few distant relatives whom she had to pay a higher membership fee to view or message.
Everything else, she already knew. She was predisposed to think cilantro tasted like soap.
She can’t roll her tongue. Nothing about the father Jenna claimed had been a one-night stand before he moved out West to be a roadie for Pearl Jam—a story that always seemed provisional, sure, but Callie figured it was because Jenna was embarrassed about who Callie’s father was, or wasn’t exactly sure.
And that had been that. Or so she thought.
And suddenly, the mysteries of the past few months resolve into meaning.
This must be why Jenna ran. Why she picked up the drugs.
She knew Callie would look into the case.
Knew that she would be exposed as the mother of Baby Doe.
But how? How did Frank bring Jenna into the station for questioning without realizing?
Could he have been so oblivious? Or was it willful?
A form of mercy? Why had Sabrina Riley’s name been in the mix?
Was it just coincidence that her bracelet was found nearby?
She aches in a new way for sixteen-year-old Jenna, who, in her statement, claims she ran back to her house as quickly as she could after finding the child so she could call the police.
Maybe she always knew she would be found out.
Maybe she had wanted to be punished back then.
Maybe she’s spent the rest of her life crushed under the guilt that was never, for whatever reason, discovered. Jenna abandoned Baby Doe.
Callie fumbles to explain all this to Healy. “My mother gave a statement. She said she found the baby. She said—”
He cuts her off. “Listen to me. I don’t know anything about your mother. You’re related on the father’s side.”
“What?”
“You are a genetic relative on the paternal side. There’s no match linking anyone to the child’s mother, or anyone she’s related to.”
Healy gives her a moment to process, and when he speaks again his voice is softer, padded with pity. “You really didn’t have any clue?”
A chill moves through her. Her father. A figure she can’t picture more than the avatar in one of those profiles online. A shadow, a generic outline of a man.
And Baby Doe. A half sibling. Someone else in this world who might have stood alongside her. Might have helped edge away the loneliness and shame of her girlhood. Someone else who, like Jane, could have said, I’m here.
The soup is burning on the hot plate. And still, Callie can’t move to turn the heat down.
She forces herself to ask, “Can you see who the father is? I never knew him. My mother … my mother never even told me his name.”
“You’re the closest genetic match we’ve got. Listen, I know this will be sensitive to bring up with your mom but—”
“My mother is missing. She’s an alcoholic. And an addict, apparently. And she disappeared a few days after the last time I saw her.”
Healy says something on the other side of the line but Callie doesn’t hear, can’t take in anything else. She tells Healy she will have to call him back tomorrow, unplugs the hot plate, and walks outside into the bracing night air.
She needs to move, to work off some of this unruly energy prickling along her nerves. She paces around the outside of her cabin once, twice, then walks down to the shore of the lake, crouches into a squat, drops her head into her hands.
There used to be nothing she couldn’t make sense of in her work. And by cutting ties with her mother she had created an existence that felt tidy, clean. For a few years her place in the world felt clear and solid. She knew who she was and what she was doing.
And now? The whole story of her life feels rewritten. Who would she have been if she could have defined herself in relation to this sister? To have known she wasn’t always alone? And look at what has been taken from her. The hurt is sharp and personal now.