MAY BETH FOSTER:
Depends on the hour. [PAUSE] I’m angry. I’m angry at a lot of people, for a lot of reasons—most of all myself and what I failed to see—and sometimes that’s the only thing that gets me out of bed.
WEST McCRAY:
I’m sorry.
MAY BETH FOSTER:
And you’re winding everything up? I guess that’s it, huh?
WEST McCRAY:
Not entirely. But I think if not much new is happening, the next step is getting Sadie’s story told. I’d like to privilege the world with knowing her, the way you did for me.
WEST McCRAY [STUDIO]: May Beth tries, and ultimately fails, to hold back tears.
MAY BETH FOSTER:
Claire’s inside. She’ll talk to you.
WEST McCRAY [STUDIO]: May Beth insists on having me for dinner and heads to Stackett’s for groceries, leaving Claire and me alone to talk.
The inside of May Beth’s place looks exactly like it did, when I was first here, all those many, many months ago. It’s like stepping back through time, to our first meeting, poring over the photo album of Sadie and Mattie before reaching the page with the missing picture.
Claire stands at the kitchen sink with her arms crossed, looking more and less sure of herself since we last talked. We’re silent for a while, as though we’re both holding out hope Sadie will miraculously show up, will appear, walking up the drive, disrupting the narrative one final time.
WEST McCRAY: Where do you think she is?
CLAIRE SOUTHERN:
L.A.
That’s a joke.
WEST McCRAY:
I’m surprised you’ve stuck around.
CLAIRE SOUTHERN:
Me too.
But you know what I keep thinking about?
WEST McCRAY:
What’s that?
CLAIRE SOUTHERN:
She dyed her hair blond.
Sadie had naturally brown hair. She looked just like my mother, and I had a hard time with that. It was too much for me.
Sometimes I think I’d like nothing better than to get out of this place, and that I’m the last person in the world that’d deserve to see her if she came back. But then I think, she dyed her hair blond and that’s Mattie’s color, but it’s mine too. And if any part of her doing that had even a little bit to do with me, I feel like I should stay here, just in case.
Just in case she wants to come home to me.
Just in case she’s able to.
WEST McCRAY:
I hope …
WEST McCRAY [STUDIO]: I hope.
CLAIRE SOUTHERN:
Have you thought about what you’re gonna call the show?
WEST MCCRAY:
I was thinking maybe Sadie & Mattie. Did you have a different idea?
CLAIRE SOUTHERN:
I think you should call it The Girls. I think you should call it that for every girl I figure Sadie must have saved.
You call it The Girls and you make sure the people who hear it, you make sure they know Sadie loved Mattie with everything she had. You let them know that she loved Mattie so much, that’s what she turned her love into. You let them know.
WEST McCRAY [STUDIO]: I often think about what Claire said to me in the apple orchard in Cold Creek. How when she asked me why I was looking for Sadie, I told her I had a daughter of my own because it felt like the most noble thing I could offer her at the time. Claire got mad at me, rightfully, for using my daughter as a reason to see the pain and suffering in her world, and as an excuse for my fumbling attempt to fix it.
But I was lying at the time.
I told Danny I didn’t want this story because I didn’t think it was one, and that was a lie too. I don’t know that the truth is much better. Girls go missing all the time. And ignorance is bliss. I didn’t want this story because I was afraid. I was afraid of what I wouldn’t find and I was afraid of what I would.
I still am.
I never got to meet Sadie Hunter, but I feel in some small though significant way, I’ve gotten to know her. Twenty years ago, she was born and placed in her mother’s arms, and six years after that her sister Mattie was placed in hers, and her whole world came alive.
In Mattie, Sadie found a sense of purpose, a place to put her love. But love is complicated, it’s messy. It can inspire selflessness, selfishness, our greatest accomplishments and our hardest mistakes. It brings us together and it can just as easily drive us apart.
It can drive us.
When Sadie lost Mattie, it drove her to leave her home in Cold Creek, to take on the loneliness and pain of thousands of miles, just to find her little sister’s murderer and make the world right again, even, possibly, at the expense of herself.
We may never know what, exactly, happened between Sadie and Jack, but I know what I want to believe. And in this aftermath, it’s Sadie’s love for Mattie that remains, to fill in those gaps until—if, when—Sadie returns to tells us in her own words.
And Sadie, if you’re out there, please let me know.
Because I can’t take another dead girl.