Jane Doe #2 is newer—she’s only been in the marsh for two days. If you got close enough you might still be able to smell the traces of her perfume on her skin or the scent of the last cigarette she smoked lingering in her hair. She is still that close to life, like a door she could almost walk back through. Jane Doe #1 has been here for two weeks now. She is breaking down; her skin no longer holds her in. The mud beneath her is dense and cold, like pudding. When the tide pulls the water back, there is a thick, scatological stink as the sulfur at the bottom is exposed. As the casino junket buses pass by, the passengers will frown, scowl in the direction of the restroom, look around at one another to detect a glimmer of guilt on someone’s face. The old women press their handkerchiefs over their noses, trying to stifle the gag that rises in their throats. But the smell is everywhere, impossible to escape.

Jane #1 had loved school, even though classes bored her. A straight C kind of girl who doodled on the backs of her hands during class. Her teachers sensed some intelligence, ambition, coiled deep in her and were always prodding her to try harder, but she figured there would always be time for seriousness, for duty, later on in her life. And she thrived in other ways. Homecoming court, winner of the Best Wardrobe award her senior year, Prom Queen. She had a smile that even the strictest teachers couldn’t resist, a quick, crackling wit that made her a good flirt. She spent those four years feeling like the bright shining thing that other people orbited around.

The summer after she graduated was when the malaise crept in, when everything became blunted, gray. When the beers didn’t seem to be as cold, the parties as fun, the songs as moving, the sun as hot. It was as though there were some kind of screen between her and the rest of the world, dimming the thing that made every moment pulse with energy, sparkle with promise and light. And then the kids she dismissed as losers, nerds, moved away for college. One of them even went to Yale, and the idea that something so monumental could happen to someone whom she had thought so little of occupied her mind for days. She felt as though she had made a fatal mistake—all this time she thought she had mastered the order of the world, and it made her sick to wonder if perhaps, maybe, she had not.