Callie #2
“That unless they had proof, or Annabelle told them something, there was nothing they could do. Not like they could take her to the doctor or make her lift up one of those big sweatshirts she had started wearing.”
“But how did you know she had been with Luke?”
“He told me about it. He and I met first. He picked me up that same afternoon. He was always doing that, playing one girl off another. I was fifteen, the first time.”
She winces. Fifteen years old. Callie, in all the ways she was strict with herself, had never so much kissed a boy then.
“Jesus, Mom. But then why … if you knew about Annabelle, did you get back together with him?”
“Get back with him,” Jenna says, her mouth puckered like she’s bitten into something sour.
A chill works its way up Callie’s spine. She’s keenly aware of the quietness around them, no sound but the occasional crackle of the logs in the fireplace. “Mom?”
“Like I said. Never a good thing when anyone in that family says they want to talk.” Jenna tries to manage a smile that reminds her of the way Annabelle tried to make the mood light in her living room.
“But. I thought, I don’t know. That I would be good at it.
Being a mother. I thought it might make me become good enough. We know how that worked out.”
“You went through a lot. It must have been really, really hard.”
Jenna shrugs, uncomfortable. “That’s life, right?” Jenna reaches out and traces the air just over Callie’s stitches. “What happened here?”
“Damien happened.” She isn’t sure she can get into it now, the whole thing. The water. How close it had come. “He’s been arrested. Confessed to the murder of Sabrina Riley.”
Jenna nods. “I figured it was one of them.”
“And Annabelle Riley has been arrested in connection with the Baby Doe case. It’s causing something of a sensation online.”
“They found Annabelle Riley? What was she doing? Circus performer? No, she was so smart. Professor? Astronaut?”
“She’s a mother. Married. Runs the PTA, volunteers. It’s part of the reason the media is so into her case. It makes for good headlines. Perfect Mom Hiding Ugly Secret. All that bullshit.”
Jenna presses her lips together. “So she’s normal. Well. That’s good too. Good for her.”
“A grand jury decided she’s going to be charged with murder. She’s out on bail but they’ve set a trial date for a few months from now.”
Jenna’s lip quivers. “Damn it,” she says, and wipes her eyes.
“We were all just kids. And those boys had all this protection. They were untouchable. I tried to tell Frank at the station, about Luke. The morning I went down there after I found the baby. I told him the truth. And he made it seem like I could get in trouble. He said it would be easy enough to tell everyone I was the suspect. That the baby had been mine. It sounds ridiculous now. But how was I supposed to know?”
“I’m so sorry, Mom.”
“It’s not like now. Now there’s Twitter and YouTube and blogs and TikTok and all these ways you can tell the world that something happened to you, that someone is bad. Me? I was just a girl in a police station in the woods. Who cared what I knew? Who cared what happened to me?”
Callie has been so caught in the cesspools of the internet, reading all of the comments about Annabelle, that she forgot that it could be used this way too. A form of power, a megaphone. “No one could blame you.”
“She has kids? Annabelle does?”
“A daughter and two sons. Teenagers.”
“And he’s out there with his business planting trees and growing his little pet pot plants in a greenhouse for kicks.
Fuck that.” Jenna sits up, squares her shoulders, and Callie sees something new in her, something she hadn’t been able to see all this time.
Her mother as a survivor. Callie doesn’t want to tell her the next detail: that she talked to a friend of hers the day before, a public defender she knew from up north.
In New Jersey there’s no longer a statute of limitations on sexual assault, but that law wasn’t put into effect until 1996.
Cases five years or less before 1996 might still result in criminal charges, but it’s hard to get a conviction without DNA evidence.
Annabelle could go to jail for murder. Luke might walk free.
They’re quiet again for a while. Jenna is the one who breaks the silence.
“I know I messed up. I know I did a lot wrong, Calliope. I wasn’t a good mother to you.
And that I have to face that. It’s been a big part of my stuff at AA.
But you don’t just come from me, or them; you come from this too.
Okay? You come from people who didn’t like one way of living and were brave enough to start over somewhere else.
You come from people who can make up their own minds.
That’s why I named you Hauser. But I should have told you all that. ”
“I’m sorry too. I really, really am.”
Jenna rubs her eyes, takes Callie in her arms. Callie can’t remember being held this way since she was a young child bawling over a skinned knee.
“Well, look at this sobfest we have on our hands. We’re a mess, huh?”
Callie laughs between her tears. “I don’t know. I’d say we’re doing all right.”
Callie stays the night in the cabin, each of them in one of the narrow bunks under the sloped ceiling.
Jenna points out the beam where her great-grandfather carved his initials as a boy, shows Callie a guitar in the corner that belonged to Jenna’s mother.
The hot plate where she’s been cooking all of her meals.
There’s so much more work ahead, but for now they rest. In the morning Jenna makes them breakfast and afterward she plays the guitar, her voice bursting through the quiet, clear and radiant as a new day.
Callie takes the path back to her car while Jenna stays behind at the cabin, asking for one more day before she goes back to the real world. She promises she’ll call Steve, that she’ll start going to meetings again.
Callie calls her friend, Chelsea, the public defender, when she gets back home. She asks about how Jenna’s allegations might stand up in court if they can get criminal charges pressed against Luke on an old rape case.
Chelsea doesn’t mince words. “Fifty-fifty. She’s got a spotty record.
That missed court date on the DUI won’t look good, no matter the circumstances.
They’ll try to discredit her, an addict, DUIs, mental health issues, so much time has passed, it was consensual, all that.
It depends on the jury. She’ll need luck, too. ”
“What about Annabelle?” Callie asks. “What happens in these kinds of cases?”
Chelsea exhales. “That is a tougher call. America doesn’t hate anyone as much as they hate a bad mom.”
“What can I do to bolster the case against Luke Caputo? To make sure he ends up behind bars?”
“She says there are more girls, right? Find them. If they’ll talk, the case grows.
There’s momentum. It’s not one woman or two standing in front of the firing squad.
It’s easy to discount one woman, say she was asking for it, wanted attention, that her memory is unreliable after all this time, all that shit they always pull. Numbers. Numbers will be the key.”
There’s Sabrina, who has been silenced. Annabelle, who is being called a murderer. And there’s Jenna.
Think, Callie. Think think think.
The bonfire party. The friends in the woods. She’s in a lot of trouble. He hates when I get high.
Layla.
She calls Collins, asks him for a favor.
All the guys have been so solicitous to her after they heard about what happened out at the sinkhole, visiting her, dropping off trays of food their mothers or girlfriends have made.
She asks him to get Layla’s address. He texts it to her a moment later and she puts it into her GPS.
The girl might not trust her. And Callie’s not a cop anymore.
Just a woman dropping by unannounced asking her to expose the most intimate parts of her story.
Layla might still be in Luke’s thrall, smitten and dazzled and made to feel like she’s a part of something bigger than herself, than her own life.
But, she knows she hit a nerve with her the last time she saw her, that underneath her bravado is a girl who wants to be understood, wants to be free of the drugs and the men who use her, wants to find her way back to herself again.
Callie will do her best to tell her about the case she wants to help build.
Because Layla is the strong one, not him.
Because they need her. Because she’s got the power to help make things right.