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THE GIRLS

S1E1

The first half of the photos in May Beth’s album are only of Sadie. She was a small, happy baby, with brown hair, gray eyes and healthy pink skin. She didn’t look anything like her mother.

Sadie was the spitting image of Irene and Claire couldn’t stand it, and if you saw Claire with Sadie, you’d wonder why she’d even have a baby in the first place. She hated holding her, nursing her, soothing her. I’m not being dramatic. She Hated It. I loved on Sadie best I could, but it was never enough to make up for what she wasn’t getting from her mother.

Who was Sadie’s father?

I don’t know. I don’t think even Claire knew. She said his last name was Hunter so that’s what she put on the birth certificate.

According to May Beth, Sadie had a lonely childhood those first six years without Mattie. Claire’s addiction superseded all affection, and left her daughter attention-starved.

Sadie was also painfully shy, due to the stutter she developed when she was two. There was no clear cause. It might have been genetics. Hereditary. No other members in Sadie’s known family stuttered but her paternal side is unaccounted for. May Beth unearthed a recording she made when Sadie was three; we had to hunt down a cassette player to listen to it.

You wanna talk into the recorder, honey? No? I can play it back for you and you can hear what you sound like.

Th-th-that’s m-magic!

Yeah, baby, it’s magic. Okay, talk into right here, just say hi!

B-but I w—I want t-to, I w—I—

We just have to record it first.

B-but I w-w-want t-to hear!

Sadie never outgrew her stutter. Early intervention likely could have helped, but May Beth never managed to convince Claire to take action. School turned out to be a special sort of hell for Sadie. Children aren’t kind about things they don’t understand and, in May Beth’s opinion, Sadie’s teachers also lacked a certain understanding.

Sadie turned out good in spite of them, not because of them. They thought that stutter meant she was stupid. That’s all I’ll say about that.

Forty-four-year-old Edward Colburn has never forgotten Sadie. He’d just started his career as a teacher at Parkdale Elementary when she came into his class. Parkdale, as I mentioned, is forty minutes away from Cold Creek, and buses in students from outside towns so they can go to school. This is how Edward remembers his former first grade student:

She was teased by her classmates because of the stutter and that caused her to withdraw.… We did our best to meet her needs, but you have to understand Parkdale has always been two things: underfunded and overcrowded. Add to that a mother who was largely unreceptive to any of our concerns and, well. It’s not a recipe for a child’s personal success. And it happens more often than you’d want to think, not only in economically depressed areas. Sadie was a very adrift, remote child. She didn’t seem to have many, if any, interests of her own. She was reserved, but it was more than that … I’d almost say she was vacant.

Then Mattie came along.

In May Beth’s album, Mattie’s arrival is marked with a Polaroid of a tiny, day-old bundle in six-year-old Sadie’s arms. The way Sadie gazes at her newborn sister is almost impossible to describe. It’s unbearably tender.

Just look at the way she’s looking at Mattie … wow.

Isn’t it something? Sadie loved Mattie with her whole heart and that love for Mattie gave her a purpose. Sadie made it her life’s work looking after her sister. Young as she was, she knew Claire wouldn’t do it right.

Can you describe the girls’ relationship with their mother?

Claire enjoyed Mattie because they looked alike. She was Claire’s little doll, not her child. She gave Mattie the Southern name. And Mattie thought Claire was the berries … But that was Sadie’s doing.

How do you mean?

Sadie always covered for Claire, lied for her, even. Made sure Mattie understood Claire was sick … I think she thought if she did that, it’d hurt less for Mattie when Claire inevitably let her down. I don’t know if that was the best thing for either of them. It cost Sadie a lot, especially after Claire left. I don’t know if Mattie ever fully appreciated what Sadie did for her, in that respect. If she’d lived long enough, maybe.

The pictures of Mattie are difficult to look at. She had shiny, stick-straight blond hair, sparkling blue eyes and Claire’s heart-shaped face. It’s nearly impossible to reconcile with that kind of vitality knowing how her story ends.

I can’t help but notice Mattie doesn’t look at Sadie with quite the same reverence.

Mattie loved her big sister. Mattie adored Sadie but Sadie might as well have been Mattie’s mother and that’s a certain kind of dynamic. Throw in a six-year age gap, that’s gonna add to it too. Looking after Mattie brought Sadie out of her shell and forced her to use her voice, no matter the stutter. But the times Sadie didn’t feel like talkin’ or couldn’t get it out, Mattie would know what Sadie needed just by looking at her. So make no mistake, they were devoted to each other in their own ways. I don’t know if all sisters are how the pair of them were. I have three of my own and I love them dearly, but we were never like that.

With each turn of the album’s pages, May Beth’s voice becomes less and less steady. As we reach the end of it, her eyes fill with tears.

Oh.

What is it?

She turns the album to me. On one side is a photo of the girls. They’re sprawled on May Beth’s plastic-covered couch, a red-and-orange knitted blanket shared between them. An oversized bowl of popcorn rests on Mattie’s lap. They’re absolutely entranced by whatever’s on the TV in front of them; later May Beth tells me it was probably an old movie. The girls loved the classics. Sadie, in particular, was fond of anything with Bette Davis. But what’s caught May Beth’s attention at this particular moment is the page opposite. It’s empty. There was a picture there, she insists, flipping frantically through the book to see if it somehow got loose and ended up somewhere where it shouldn’t be. She checks the floor around us in case it fell out. It’s nowhere to be found.

But where did it—I don’t know where it could have got to … it was a picture of … the girls were in it … it was … it was—I can’t remember what, exactly, it was … but I know it had the girls in it. They were here. They were right here.