Chapter Callie #2
Callie helps Jane to the bedroom, Jane’s grip firm on her arm.
Her friend, the former cross-country athlete, cowed by a walk down the hall.
It makes her skin sizzle with rage and Jane must feel it, feel something, because she drums her fingertips lightly along Callie’s forearm as she eases herself down on the end of the bed, telegraphing to Callie to stay calm.
Callie gets Jane’s makeup bag from the bathroom counter, among the clusters of bright-orange pharmacy bottles.
One has Damien’s name on it. Lexapro. She wonders if Frank knows, if that’s what his question was about down at the station.
How’s Damien seem to you? Fuck Damien, Callie had thought, but realizes how ungenerous that is. How he’s going through something too.
“Did you see that video I sent you?” Jane asks, as Callie steps back into the bedroom and hands the makeup bag to Jane, who swipes mascara over her eyelashes and frowns into a compact. “The cops didn’t even investigate the half brother even though he was super shady.”
“I did watch it. My money was he was involved but he didn’t actually do it. Hired someone, probably. Hold on, you’ve got a smudge.”
She licks the end of her finger and rubs the delicate skin under Jane’s eye, wiping away a feather of mascara.
“Thanks. You should bring me to therapy one day. One of the trainers is a total babe.”
“No setups, please, Janie.”
“Not a setup. Just a chance for you to talk to a hot guy and see where it goes. I’m not asking you to wait for him at a café with a red rose on the table. Just come and hang around.”
“I’m not really in a dating frame of mind right now.
” She doesn’t tell Jane that she downloaded Tinder the other night, a little tipsy after her shift, swiped until she came across Collins’s profile, then deleted the app.
Or about the guy she met on the bank of the creek.
Adrian, to whom she has written and deleted five texts already.
“If you’re going to transplant your life to the sticks to help take care of us, you might as well get something out of it.”
“I am getting something out of it. I get to hang with you guys all the time. So long as I’m not wearing out my welcome. If you ever need a little space, I hope you’ll let me know.”
Jane shifts her hands, winces, picks up a plastic pony that had been buried in the comforter.
“You are the space, Callie.” She holds the horse out like evidence.
“I was drowning before. But this … well, shit. Being here all the time. Everything a mess, not being able to do anything. This is something else.”
Callie doesn’t know what to say. She can’t crutch along the same old platitudes about Jane needing to focus on herself, needing to recover. This feeling Jane is talking about is raw, deep. Despair.
Callie makes her voice low. “Can we please talk about it, Jane? The voicemail? Even if you don’t remember it, I think you meant it. Come on, it’s me, Janie. Tell me.”
Jane raises her gaze to Callie’s face. Her eyes brim with tears. She tries to speak and makes a sound that’s not quite a word. Like someone choking. Callie takes her hand but before she can speak comes the patter of feet, fast on the hardwood.
“Mama!” Opal thrusts herself between Jane’s legs, pulls back and looks up at Jane’s kohl-rimmed eyes, penciled brows. “You look … weird.”
Callie can’t look at Jane again so she puts her hand on Opal’s shoulder. “Your mama looks like a fox.”
Jane clears her throat. “Opes, will you go find the necklace you made for Aunt Callie?”
Opal nods solemnly, runs out of the room again. Jane zips her makeup bag, her movements brisk and sure.
“Jane, come on…”
“How are you doing, by the way? What’s the news? On your mom?”
“No real changes. The troopers brought dogs out but after all that rain they couldn’t find any kind of trail. I keep calling hospitals and rehabs and shelters, keep driving by her house to see if she’s come back.”
“Why would she have started using now?”
“Beats me. Unless … I don’t know. The whole thing at the station just sent her over the edge somehow.
The Baby Doe case coming up again. The two of us at each other.
” The admission makes her breath feel shallow.
She keeps thinking about what Steve said, that people make all kinds of choices when they are hurting.
And Callie had caused the hurt. She embarrassed her at the station, hadn’t believed Jenna about being sober.
She had been cruel and impatient. She hadn’t listened at all.
“It’s not your fault, Callie.”
Callie sighs. “I just know there’s something else going on here.
Call it intuition, or whatever. But Sabrina’s bracelet, the fact that no one has seen her, Fauver’s record of being violent.
It feels like it adds up to something bigger.
Like maybe she didn’t choose to leave the baby.
What if someone made her? And maybe my mom knew that. ”
Jane opens her mouth to say something, closes it, looks down at her hands.
Callie had been careful not to say the other thing, but maybe she edged too close to it anyway, the air in the room suddenly too warm.
What kind of person chooses to abandon a child?
Because who knows what Jane had intended, when she talked about leaving in that morphine-addled voicemail.
Whether leaving would have included Opal or not.
Jane puts on a smile, raises her eyebrows. “Want me to see what the TikTok crime girlies have to say about it?”
“Please don’t put any of this on the internet,” Callie says, her voice harder than she intends.
“Joking! Joking, Chief Hauser. But maybe I can help you. I’m entering my Rear Window era. Invalid. Lots of spare time.”
Damien raps on the doorframe. “Sorry to break up the girl talk but we’ve got to go now if we want to be on time.”
Jane rolls her eyes. “He’s right. Gotta run. Last week I calculated what these sessions costs by the minute. Not good.”
Damien grimaces. She can’t tell if it is the cost itself or if he doesn’t like Jane talking about money in front of Callie. Jane leans her head to Callie’s shoulder for a moment before taking Damien’s hand and letting him help her up.
She meets the scientist—Adrian—on the bank of Rancocas Creek. He’s got two kayaks in the water and raises a paddle in greeting as she pulls up.
She texts Jane before she gets out of the car. This Adrian seems normal, gentle—it had been Callie’s aggression that characterized their first meeting—but she can’t be too careful. Meeting a guy on a first date. Watersports. Call the cops if you don’t hear from me in two hours.
Don’t get too wet HAHAHA
You’re gross
Sorry, invalid’s gotta live a little But I’m glad you’re letting yourself have some fun.
“What’s that smirk about?” Adrian asks.
“I just can’t believe I’m doing this.”
He holds out a life jacket for her. She can’t help but wonder who wore it before her. Whether it will hold the smell of some other woman the way a shirt or coat might. But when she shrugs it on all she can smell is lake water, clean, faintly metallic.
“Well, I’m excited. How are you feeling about your maiden voyage?”
“A ship has a maiden voyage, not a person, right?”
He laughs. “That’s true. You’ll have no problem. Not much that can set you off course when the water is as flat as this. Just nice, easy paddling. I thought we might go out and back for an hour or so, just get you used to things?”
“Sounds good,” she says. How hard can it be? But the second she wades into the water she slips on slick rocks, ends up on her hands and knees in the shallows.
“Whoa there.” He steadies her boat with one hand, holds out another to help her up.
“I think I hate kayaking,” she says. She means it but he laughs, and she likes the sound of it, an easy, big laugh that sounds surprised at itself. It rings out across the water. She wants to hear it again.
She follows Adrian down the creek, through the bends, as he points out places turtles nest. She learns that he studied marine biology at a college by the sea.
“All that farmland back home was pretty but after a certain point it just made me feel locked in. I always knew I wanted to be near water.” He talks to his parents a few times a week—they still live in the house where he grew up.
She feels a stab of envy, that Adrian and his family seem like the Caputos.
All rallying around one another, main characters in one another’s lives.
He asks her about her family, about where she grew up. She says what she always says about Jenna. Her beautiful voice, her love of music, her red hair.
“She’s … missing.” Callie says. She hadn’t planned on mentioning it. Didn’t want to saddle this man with her baggage, but the words end up tumbling out.
“Missing how?”
Callie sighs. “I brought her in for driving drunk. She slept it off in the station overnight but no one has seen her or heard from her since the morning she was released. And then they found her bag off the Batona Trail. Drugs inside.”
“Wait. Those posters. That’s her?”
“Yeah. Not that they’re going to do any good. I’ve got a couple other departments looking out for her, as far as Philly, Atlantic City, but … nothing.”
“I’m so sorry.”
They’re quiet for a while, that the only noises are the birds overhead and the sounds of their paddles sliding in and out of the water.
The trees and the red of the understory are reflected in the lake’s surface, the colors rich and sumptuous together, almost too vivid to be real, more like something assembled and composed, an oil painting.
For a moment she gets it. The pull of the water.
The austere, untouched beauty you find in pockets of the pines. Why someone might choose this place.
“Is it just you? Dealing with all this? Or do you have siblings?”