Justin’s mother killed him, so townspeople believed, convinced by the papers and the testimony of beautiful, tearful Mae Worthington. Mae, from a respected family, reliable babysitter, model student, precocious poet, could never, ever have harmed a child in her care.
Determining the four-month-old died from suffocation, the county coroner submitted his report. The mother denied it, accused the babysitter of neglect, even outright murder. The town turned against the baby’s mother. The idea of accusing Mae Worthington of the murder of a child! She was only 13! Justin’s mother had a drug history. No one liked her or her husband. They kept to themselves, didn’t mingle with the neighbors. Drove the wrong color car.
The woman and her husband moved away. Later, they heard, she died in a car accident. The townspeople nodded to each other, muttered sagely: Ah, she was guilty after all. She turned her car into oncoming traffic. She killed herself.
Mae Worthington grew older, won scholarships, traveled with the debating team, became homecoming queen. The only sign of how the trauma of Justin’s death affected her was her poetry. Grim, baffling, disconsolate. People who knew such things said she was the next Plath or Sexton. Her father paid for expensive psychotherapy; the therapists said: write more poetry.
Until the baby’s death the popular Mae was always seen in the company of Dominique Cantini, an odd girl with few friends. People praised Mae’s willingness to befriend the underdog. What self-possession, what integrity! But after Justin’s death, the friendship soured. Mae courted new friends, other friends, Sawyer, Hollis and Annie Novak.
Mae was a girl who could do nothing but succeed, a girl everyone loved to see and talk about. She swept through high school on invincible wings, blessed, touched, they said.
Just before graduation, on a spring day when sun warmed the tawny folds of the California valley hills, when the blue sky tasted of summer heat, Mae Worthington drove her car—a graduation present from her father—onto the Santa Fe Pacific railroad tracks and waited for a train. When it came, nothing was left but crushed steel, blood, and bits of bone.