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The first thing Shauna notices when baby Callie is put into her arms is that she looks like Jackie.
The baby is in her arms, tiny and squirming and red and alive, and Shauna should be crying tears of joy and holding her baby close to her. She should be overcome by an all-encompassing love, one that threatens to tear her in half and rip her apart—a feeling she felt once, long ago, in a dream where she held a baby that in reality didn’t live outside her womb.
Instead, as she looks down at the precious little baby, all she feels is doom; it feels like she’s seeing a ghost.
She rarely let herself picture what the being growing inside of her would look like—she barely paid any attention to it, tried to pretend it wasn’t there at all—but Jeff had babbled excitedly about their baby girl any chance he got. He always said that he hoped she looked like her, brown hair and big brown eyes but with his smile. Shauna didn’t think much of it, the baby would probably look like that, after all, it’s hers and Jeff’s, and theirs alone.
But now as she looks down at the baby, all she sees is Jackie.
She has wispy, caramel-colored hair, the same shade as Jackie’s. The same shape of her mouth. The same slope of her nose. But the most striking part is her eyes.
It feels crazy, because the baby has blue eyes and Jackie’s were a captivating hazel, a mix of greens and browns that you couldn’t peel your eyes away from. At a glance, nobody would think they were remotely similar but Shauna had spent years looking into those eyes, studying every bit of her face and feeling envy thrumming inside her veins, and she had spent years dreaming of them, haunting her and following her every move. So even with a different color, Shauna would know those eyes anywhere.
Callie’s looking up at her with eyes that take over her whole face, wide and innocent. The way she looks at her, like she’s peering into her soul and scrutinizing her, is so reminiscent of Jackie that it makes her want to sob.
This baby—her baby, as foreign of a concept as that is—is Jackie Taylor reincarnated.
She thinks that whatever part of Jackie that’s within her, whatever part has stayed with her in the years since she put a knife to her and put her between her teeth and swallowed her whole, is what’s responsible for Callie.
She thinks it’s wrong to ignore all the resemblance and not pay some sort of homage.
Jeff doesn’t fight her when she says she wants her middle name to be Taylor.
She was wrong before when she’d thought the baby was hers and Jeff’s alone. No, the baby is Jackie’s too.
(And why wouldn’t she be? This was the life she was supposed to have, Shauna may have usurped it, but this was supposed to be her life and Callie was supposed to be hers .)
When Callie’s six, she asks Shauna for a rabbit.
It’s not a wild request, after all, she’s a little girl who likes cutesy, fluffy things and rabbits fit the description perfectly. Besides, their house is filled to the brim with rabbit trinkets, everywhere you look, they’re there; it’s impossible to escape them.
But Shauna still feels her stomach drop all the way down to her feet at her question.
Callie looks much more like her than Jackie now, but Shauna still sees the resemblance there. If anything, Callie looks like a mix of her and Jackie: her brown hair, Jackie’s huge eyes, her cheekbones and chin, Jackie’s mouth and smile, a mix of their noses. It’s as if she’s Jackie and Shauna’s alone and Jeff had nothing to do with her conception; she can’t tell if she hates or loves that thought.
So, it’s not enough that little Callie looks up at her with Jackie’s big eyes that take over her whole face, but she also has to ask her for a goddamned rabbit. It’s just one big haunting.
Jackie had always loved rabbits, mostly because they were cute and fluffy but also because Jackie’s dad had called her his little rabbit growing up because he said she was as cute as a little rabbit.
In the wilderness, after Jackie’s death, whenever they ate rabbit, Shauna would remember how Jackie had felt between her teeth. She would taste her instead.
Sometimes she wonders if Callie came into this world as some sort of karmic payback for everything she did out in the wilderness, as a reminder of everything she’s lost and for a way to haunt her.
Callie is used to getting what she wants most of the time so when she says no, even though she says it calmly and gives her reasoning—and Shauna has been very aggressive her whole life, sure, but she’s never been anything other than calm and steady with her daughter, maybe so much so that it’s left her to be detached from her—Callie bursts into tears anyway.
She hates when Callie cries, mostly because when her big eyes fill with tears and her lip quivers and her face scrunches up, she looks so much like Jackie that she has to turn away.
The years pass as they tend to do, and Shauna starts to live a nightmare: Callie became exactly like Jackie.
She remembers Jackie at that age—how could she not? She didn’t make it past teenagehood, there is nothing past that age, and it was all because of everything Shauna had done to her out of envy and spite, out of wanting to be her and not wanting anyone else to have her; to consume her whole. Jackie had been popular, driven, domineering, and snarky, everything her own daughter is now.
Jackie—despite everything she’d liked to believe when they were younger, despite the tricks her memory wanted to play on her—was much kinder than Callie is, sure, but she carries herself in the same way Jackie did.
She commands a room in the same way Jackie did, something Shauna herself hadn’t been able to do. Callie is with the it crowd and people look up to her, she’s bossy like Jackie was. She also has a flair for the dramatics and an attitude that often meant she rolled her eyes at everything you said and had a little quip for everything.
Callie, like Jackie, also had a knack for knowing exactly which buttons to push and what deep-rooted insecurities to pull at.
She’s a distorted image of Jackie, a funhouse mirror reflection.
“I don’t even like my daughter,” she tells Jackie’s parents, anger thrumming inside her veins from Marilyn Taylor’s famous backhanded compliments and passive aggressive remarks.
Jeff saves face by claiming it’s an inside joke between the two of them and Shauna lets him but honestly, she truly meant it.
Her daughter is an asshole and half of the time she can’t stand her. She gets under her skin and it reminds her so much of—
Well, she doesn’t have to say her name. She’s always taking space inside her head, fitting herself between every crevice in her brain. And even if she didn’t, one look at Callie is a glimpse into Jackie.
How could she like Callie if she’s so much like Jackie and she spent her teenagehood resenting Jackie and hating her for being everything she couldn’t be?
She didn’t like Jackie in 1996, she’s not going to start liking her distorted mirror self twenty-five years later, even if it’s her own daughter.
Marilyn says, “She reminds me so much of Jackie at that age.”
Marilyn Taylor had barely known her own daughter but for once, she is right.
No matter where she goes, Jackie will always follow.
She’s at some crazy, artsy party in the city with Adam—she’s definitely outgrown this scene but her youth was stolen from her by blood and gore and guts on a wooden table cut by her sharp knife, so she deserves to experience the wild partying and letting loose her youth was supposed to bring her.
She’s not sure ten minutes have passed before she sees her.
There, at the other side of the room and clouded by shadows, is Jackie.
She can’t see her face but Shauna knows, she’d know her anywhere.
She chases her down—what else would she do? Jackie is like the sun, she’s never been able to escape her pull, radiant and brilliant as she was.
But then she caught up with her, grabbing her arm which should’ve not been possible at all, and when she turns around it’s not Jackie’s face that greets her, but Callie’s.
She’d thought she could never mistake Jackie for anyone else, and maybe she’s still right about that, after all, she’s only ever been able to see Jackie when looking at her daughter.
Here’s Callie, in Jackie’s soccer uniform and dead girl makeup on her face—Shauna thinks she might kill her, that she might actually hate her daughter.
Callie says it all leads back to Jackie, the complications of her life and the reason she’s so clearly not okay and hasn’t been for a single day in Callie’s whole life. All the fucked up parts of her lead all the way back to when Jackie died blue and beneath blankets of snow.
Even high off her damn ass, Callie reads her like nobody else.
Callie may be an asshole, but to her core, she really is a good girl.
She has an unshakable moral code, angry at her parents for whatever happened to Adam Martin and refusing to let them get away with it and just forget about it. She is completely loyal to those she truly loves, doing everything she can to help her mom escape being caught, even if she hates it, because she loves her family more than anything, even when Shauna barely showed her real love growing up.
Callie is a good, good girl, like Jackie was.
Callie is a good, good girl, unlike her.
Shauna knows she wasn’t always a bad person but she thinks she was born defective, with a rotten core that could never let her be satisfied, something that made it so easy for her to hurt others—mostly Jackie herself—even before their plane crash landed outside of society.
Shauna may hate every glimpse of Jackie she catches in Callie, but for once she’s glad for it.
Better for her to be like Jackie than her.
Despite seeing the resemblance between the two since the moment a newborn red-faced Callie was placed into her arms, she never mentioned it to anybody.
She didn’t want anyone to pity her, to remark on how sad it is that she looks for traces of Jackie everywhere, even in her own daughter. Besides, nobody had known Jackie like she had—even if her own teenage self had skewed her perception of her—so they wouldn’t be able to see it even if she pointed it out.
It was only for her to see, her punishment for everything that happened to Jackie and everything she did in the wilderness.
So when she gets home and finds Callie with Jackie’s godforsaken gold heart necklace around her neck, given to her by Lottie, she goes fucking ballistic.
Lottie has no right to give the necklace to her daughter—she’s her daughter, not Lottie’s, for starters, which that in its own is solid enough evidence as to why Lottie has no right—and the necklace signifies all the horrible, despicable things they did back in the wilderness.
But her first thought when she sees that fucking necklace hanging around her daughter’s neck, is Jackie.
With her wide eyes that take over her whole face, her brilliant smile, topped with a striped shirt almost identical to ones Jackie owned and that heart necklace, Shauna can’t even see Callie, she just sees her; she hasn’t seen Jackie so acutely in her features since the day she was born and all she could see was Jackie.
The anger she’d left dormant for years and years reared its ugly head, ricocheting like a bullet astray—unstoppable and deadly.
She knows she looks crazy, with all her yelling and throwing of things, but she doesn’t care, she can’t care.
Here was that stupid necklace, reminding her of everything she’d lost and everything wicked thing she’d done. Here it was, making Jackie inescapable no matter where she was.
And nobody who’d ever had it had met a good ending, why would it be any different with her daughter?
So here was that stupid necklace, dooming her daughter to the same fate as Jackie’s.