Page 95 of Poster Girl

It’s late afternoon when she gets to the Wards’ apartment. The curtains are open, the yellow kitchen glowing even on a cloudy day. She stands on the worn welcome mat for a long time, taking deep, slow breaths. Then she knocks.

Trudie Ward answers. She wears a bright pink sweater, and her hair is in a high ponytail.

“Oh,” she says, when she sees Sonya standing there. “It’s you again.” She frowns. “Your Insight’s gone. Funny, you don’t look like your head’s been cut open recently.”

“Is your mother home?” Sonya says.

“She went to the market,” Trudie says. “She should be back soon.” She waits a beat, and then sighs, and holds the door open. “Come in and wait, I guess.”

Sonya steps into the house. Trudie goes back to the kitchen counter, where a mixing bowl waits with something chocolatey inside it. She picks up the spatula and skims it around the inside of the bowl in one steady motion, turning the batter over.

“Peace officers came here yesterday looking for you,” she says. “They told me you were gone. I figured you ran away for good. To be honest, I was kinda surprised you hadn’t done it earlier.”

Sonya hears “they told me you were gone” the way she used to hear it when Susanna hit the wrong chord on the guitar—each string’s sound crashing into the next. Trudie’s voice, lower thanaverage, a little croaky.They told me you were gone, and I believed them. This is your Alice.

“Youleft the message,” Sonya says. “You pretended to be your sister, and left your mother a message?”

Trudie keeps stirring the batter with the spatula, making three turns around the bowl before setting it down. She sticks her finger in it, tastes the chocolate, and then looks at Sonya.

“It’s not like that. I wouldn’t do something so cruel,” she says, at last. “She asked me to do it.”

“Why?”

“Because we were worried you would take your sweet time,” Trudie says. “Every day you didn’t find Grace was a day you got to spend free. We thought, if you had to hear her voice—if you thought she was in trouble—”

She shrugs. She carries the bowl over to a cake tin waiting on the stove, and spoons the batter into it. She doesn’t spill a drop.

Sonya’s first attempt at baking was in the Aperture. Charlotte taught her how to make quick bread with flour and oats. Sonya forgot to add the baking powder, and the bread came out like a brick. She ate it anyway, in the morning with her coffee, because wasting flour and oats was almost criminal in the Aperture.

Her mother never taught her—she hadn’t known, either. She never had flour on her hands or smudges on her sleeves. She hired help, for dinner parties, and she made a show of domesticity, an apron tied around her waist, a wooden spoon in a stew she hadn’t done any of the work for. For Julia Kantor, a dutiful wife was a capable actress. The same isn’t true for Eugenia, who taught her daughter to be a capable person.

Sonya’s throat tightens. The front door opens, and Eugenia slips her shoes off before even taking her keys out of the lock. She’s carrying a loaf of bread wrapped in paper and a bouquet of daisies tied with brown string. Between the flowers and the cake that Trudie is putting in the oven, Sonya wonders if there’s a celebration coming up. Her throat gets even tighter.

“Oh!” Eugenia says, when she sees Sonya. “Ms. Kantor. Welcome back. I hope Trudie has offered you something to eat.”

“Hello, Ms. Ward,” Sonya says. She says it as normally as she can manage, but something in her tone must be off. Eugenia straightens, clutching the bread and the flowers close to her chest. “I need to talk to you. To both of you, if Mr. Ward is home.”

“Of course,” Eugenia says, and she sets bread and bouquet down on the kitchen counter. She steps into the hallway beyond the kitchen and calls out, “Roger! Come in here a moment.”

Sonya stays near the door. She wishes she were on the other side of the wilderness; she wishes she had chosen to leave this behind her. She felt such clarity standing on Naomi’s porch, but that clarity is gone now, subsumed by the fear that rattles her spine like an earthquake, buzzes in her teeth.

Roger Ward, who Sonya once watched assemble a swing set in the backyard, shuffles into the kitchen in old slippers. He looks almost the same now as he did then. His beard is grayer, his hair thinner. His shoulders are rounded as if weighed down by a heavy load. He looks at her without recognition, at first, and then with it, like the flare around the spark wheel of a lighter before the flame appears.

“Sonya needs to speak with us,” Eugenia says. “Come and sit.”

Roger does sit, at the kitchen island. And so does Trudie. Sonya just closes her eyes, briefly, and shakes her head. It’s not the elegant refusal she practiced. She can’t muster anything more.

The sight of them—Trudie with a chocolate-streaked finger, Roger with his slippers, Eugenia with a key ring still around her finger—is almost more than she can stand.

“I don’t want to leave you in suspense,” Sonya says.No euphemisms,she hears Knox insist, and she says, “Grace is dead.”

She hears a sharp intake of air. Not Eugenia’s—Roger’s. Eugenia’s eyes are soft. She isn’t surprised. Maybe she always knew. Maybe you can feel it when your child dies, like a piece of your body has withered and fallen off.

“You’re sure?” Eugenia says, as Trudie starts to cry. Sonya puts both hands flat against her abdomen and presses down, steadying herself.

“I’m sure,” Sonya says. “But that isn’t where the story starts.” She is aware of her heartbeat, fast and hard in her chest. The pulse in her cheeks. Her next breath catches, but she continues, focusing on Eugenia’s soft eyes.

“The story starts with me,” Sonya says. “When I was sixteen years old, I was riding the HiTrain after school, and it stalled next to your apartment building. I saw Grace standing at one of your windows while Trudie was playing in the backyard.”

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