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THE GIRLS

EPISODE 4

[THE GIRLS THEME]

ANNOUNCER:

The Girls is brought to you by Macmillan Publishers.

WEST McCRAY:

Arthur, Keith and Paul.

These are the names May Beth Foster gave me. Men who were with Claire long enough they might know something about Darren M., the man Sadie claims is her father.

Arthur is dead, like May Beth told me he would be. He lived with Claire and the girls for six months, when Sadie was thirteen and Mattie was seven, and overdosed two years later. May Beth doesn’t have much to say about him. He was a dealer. Keith, there’s no record of anywhere. I put a team on finding him. By May Beth’s accounts, Keith lasted longest. He came into the girls’ lives when Mattie was five and Sadie was eleven.

MAY BETH FOSTER:

He was the one who really tried. He looked after those girls as best as Claire would let him. Keith was my favorite.

WEST McCRAY:

Why is that?

MAY BETH FOSTER:

Well, whenever Claire brought a man home, it was like … my heart would just sink because it always ended worse than it started. And it always started bad. Keith didn’t start bad. He picked Claire up at the bar, Joel’s, found her there—she was often there … and he brought her home. And he was stone-cold sober. That stood out to me. Not as a bad thing, mind, but Claire usually had men as wrecked as she was. That first night, he put her to bed, and then he introduced himself to me.

Right away, I liked him. He treated me like … he treated me with respect. He treated me like I was the girls’ flesh-and-blood grandmother. That meant something to me. Then I come to find out he was a God-fearing man, and I believe in the power of prayer myself. He taught the girls a little religion. So that was—I liked that a lot. He was only supposed to stay the weekend. He stayed a year instead, and if I’d had it my way, it would’ve been forever.

WEST McCRAY:

Describe his relationship with the girls.

MAY BETH FOSTER:

He told me he’d always wanted kids and this was the closest he’d ever got, would probably ever get to having them. Mattie thought he was wonderful … he had a sort of juvenile sense of humor, and she was young enough to enjoy it. Sadie—well, she never liked Keith.

WEST McCRAY:

Why’s that?

MAY BETH FOSTER:

He was sober, like I said. I know how that sounds but … he didn’t use. He didn’t get in the way of Claire using, but he was clean himself. He just accepted Claire for what she was, and wanted to be part of their lives. Maybe that’s a sickness in itself, enabling … but he tried to create structure for the girls and up until that point, Sadie felt that was her job. He was an interloper, in her eyes.

WEST McCRAY:

You’d think she’d want a little of that stability for herself—that an actual adult in her life would let her be a kid again.

MAY BETH FOSTER:

She didn’t know how to be a kid. Mattie was so wound up in Sadie’s purpose, Sadie was terrified of losing that.

WEST McCRAY:

How did it end between Claire and Keith?

MAY BETH FOSTER:

Terribly. That much followed the pattern. She kicked him out in the middle of the night. I could hear her screaming at him from across the lot. Damn miracle nobody called the police. I looked out the window and she had all his things on the lawn and he was shouting back at her.

Claire just got tired of them, you know. Once she felt she got all she could from them, they had to go. This was no different. He grabbed all his things and left. He walked past and saw me watching from my window. He waved good-bye. I never saw him again.

Tell you the truth, I cried over that one.

WEST McCRAY:

Paul Good works for a logging company in the Northwest. He looks it too; he’s a tall, muscular guy, with red hair, a beard, and a tanned, sun-worn face. He’s not a particularly hard man to get ahold of, but it does take him the better part of a week to decide whether or not he wants to speak on the record. He was with Claire Southern for eight months, sure, but it was a difficult time in his life. He was using. He was depressed. Four years clean, he wasn’t sure he wanted to revisit it.

PAUL GOOD [PHONE]:

I don’t know I got a lot to say … or what exactly it is you want me to say.

I look back at that time and I think … I was a kid. I was a mess. I mean, I got a family now. I got a wife, I got a little girl of my own. I don’t know what I thought I was doing then. No … that’s a lie. [LAUGHS] I thought I loved Claire.

WEST McCRAY [PHONE]:

How did you two meet?

PAUL GOOD [PHONE]:

Oh, Jesus. I was driving home—Abernathy was home, then—from the bar. I was drunk too. I shouldn’t be saying that. It was stupid, but that’s not my life anymore. Anyway, she was walking. She was walking in the dark, on the wrong side of the road. [LAUGHS] It’s amazing I didn’t kill her. I pulled over and asked her if she needed a lift and she said yes, and soon as she got in that car, she starts crying. She’d been having a rough night, drinking for some of it—but she was more sober than I was. Talked my ear off on the way to her place. When I got her there, she told me I was a good listener and maybe I could, you know, do that for her again. She didn’t invite me in that night, but man … she got me.

The first part of our relationship was on the phone. And I fell in love with the life she sold me, which was a lot different than what it actually was … the way Claire told it, her mom was sick and she cared for her. Then she got pregnant. Then her mom died and then she got pregnant again and she was looking after two girls alone. She sounded so devoted to ‘em and I’d always wanted kids myself.

I moved in with the three of them and then the truth really come out. I mean, there were signs that she had some problems … she drank too much—on the phone, I could tell when she’d been drinking. She’d nod off. That was the heroin. By the time I realized the extent of it, she was my heart. I didn’t mind the kids but I loved Claire. So I started using too. I made myself sick for her.

WEST McCRAY [PHONE]:

Paul entered the girls’ lives when Sadie was fifteen and Mattie was nine.

PAUL GOOD [PHONE]:

They didn’t hate me or nothing, they just didn’t want me. So I stayed out of their way and they stayed out of mine. They probably deserved better from me, though. There wasn’t a whole lot of consistency in their lives and I could see Sadie was trying to give that to Mattie. I left her to it.

WEST McCRAY [PHONE]:

What was Sadie like?

PAUL GOOD [PHONE]:

Stubborn as hell. Hated her mother. Sadie thought she knew better’n Claire so far as Mattie was concerned and she probably did, if you want the truth. But her and Claire were always at each other’s throats … and Claire favored Mattie, so it got ugly sometimes. I don’t know. Like I said, we stayed out of each other’s way and if I sensed a screaming match coming on, I ducked. Only thing I cared about was Claire and crack.

WEST McCRAY [PHONE]:

Tell me how it ended.

PAUL GOOD [PHONE]:

She got tired of me and I was running out of money. One day, I come home and found her with another guy. That was it. She didn’t respect me. Dumb thing is, I still loved her, but I couldn’t stay with her after that. Damnedest thing, though … WEST McCRAY [PHONE]:

What?

PAUL GOOD [PHONE]:

After I left, it was like a fog cleared in my mind. I realized I wasn’t living the life I was supposed to, that I didn’t actually want to be an addict. So I packed it up and I just left town … ended up here, got clean. It sounds simple when I put it like that. There wasn’t anything simple about it. But getting out of Claire’s orbit was the first step. That place—those girls … it just had this feeling … I don’t know if I should say it.

WEST McCRAY [PHONE]:

I’d like to hear it.

PAUL GOOD [PHONE]:

Like the three of them were doomed. I guess I always knew there wasn’t going to be a happy ending for ‘em. When you called me, caught me up on what happened to all of them … I don’t know. I want to say I was surprised but I’m not. But it’s sad. It’s damn sad.

WEST McCRAY [PHONE]:

Paul, in all the time you were with Claire, she ever mention a Darren?

PAUL GOOD [PHONE]:

Can’t say she did.

WEST McCRAY [PHONE]:

So you’ve never heard that name before?

PAUL GOOD [PHONE]:

That’s right.

WEST McCRAY:

When I’m done talking to Paul, I give May Beth a call.

WEST McCRAY [PHONE]:

We’re kind of at a standstill in terms of what more I can do right now.

MAY BETH FOSTER [PHONE]:

What does that mean? You’re giving up?

WEST McCRAY [PHONE]:

No, it just means I’ve got to dig in and try to find a new lead. If I don’t find one, we’ve got to hope some new developments occur in the meantime.

MAY BETH FOSTER [PHONE]:

Well, that sounds like giving up to me. We don’t have that kind of time. Sadie’s out there, and anything could be—anything could be happening to her— WEST McCRAY [PHONE]:

It can take a long time to work a story like this, May Beth. I know that’s not what you want to hear but you’ve got to be patient, okay? You’ve got to be patient.

[LONG PAUSE]

MAY BETH FOSTER [PHONE]:

I might have something.

WEST McCRAY [PHONE]:

What?

MAY BETH FOSTER [PHONE]:

I might … I might have something that you can use. I don’t know. [PAUSE] I just don’t want to get her in trouble but … but then, if she’s—if she’s already in trouble, and this helps you find her … WEST McCRAY [PHONE]:

What is it? What do you know?

MAY BETH FOSTER [PHONE]:

I don’t know. I don’t know what to do. I don’t want her to get into trouble over this, I just—I want her to be safe. I want her to be here. [PAUSE] But I don’t want her to get in trouble. She’s had it hard enough.

WEST McCRAY [PHONE]:

Okay … okay, May Beth, do you remember what you said, the very first time you called me?

MAY BETH FOSTER [PHONE]:

I wanted you to help me.

WEST McCRAY [PHONE]:

Yeah, that’s right, but do you remember how you put it? You told me you didn’t want … [LONG PAUSE]

MAY BETH FOSTER [PHONE]:

I don’t want another dead girl.

WEST McCRAY [PHONE]:

So whatever information you’ve been holding on to … you don’t want that to be the difference, between finding her alive and not, do you? If Sadie’s alive, and you think what you know could get her into some kind of trouble, you have to look at it like she’s alive to fix it, you understand? As long as she’s alive, she can fix it. We can fix it.

MAY BETH FOSTER [PHONE]:

I know, but …

WEST McCRAY [PHONE]:

I can’t find Sadie, let alone help her, if I don’t have all the information. And I have to be able to trust you as I move forward with this. We can take it off the record, if that helps. Do you want to do that?

MAY BETH FOSTER [PHONE]:

Yes. Please.

WEST McCRAY [PHONE]:

Okay, then that’s what we’ll do.