“We know,” she said. “They shipped it back to us. Of course we know.”
Her grandmother’s lips drew in on the butt of her cigarette, ballooning up her old lungs with the last of the smoke. She was smoking indoors, windows closed, slowly killing anyone who came near her, and as she tapped the ash I could see the similarity between this plastic-entombed room and the rooms in the house where my dream kept taking me. It was the air. The haze of it. A feathery, caustic mist of lavender-blue.
“This is a girl who ran away before,” her grandmother said. “This is a girl who stole money from her own poppop’s wallet when he was taking his afternoon nap in that very chair.” She was pointing at the sunken armchair I was sitting in. I imagined it would be soft to the touch, but I couldn’t tell, because it was encased in a skintight layer of clear plastic.
“No,” I said. That didn’t sound like the Abby I knew.
“Dear,” she said, “the girl you met at that summer camp wasn’t the same girl she was at home, with us, you can be sure.”
I was sensing there were things Abby hadn’t told me. A grave, troublesome part of her story she’d completely left out. When had she run away before? Why hadn’t she mentioned this? What more didn’t I know?
Abby’s grandmother’s eyes flicked to the side table beside the couch, and mine followed. There was a frame standing upright, a two-in-one. The frame met in the center, drawing the two sides together and connecting them symbolically.
Almost as if her gaze had given me permission, I found my hands reaching for the picture frame. I picked it up.
On the left side of the frame was Abby; I recognized her immediately. It was the school portrait, the same one used for her Missing flyer, but this was the first time I was seeing it in color. Her skin had a pink glow she didn’t have anymore, and her teeth were extraordinarily white. Someone must have said, “Cheese!” to her before snapping that photo, someone must have forced her to have a smile that showed teeth, because as I held the picture close I could see how wide her lips were opened, how prominent her teeth were made to be, like an unseen hand was holding a hard, cold object to the back of her neck and telling her to grin or that would be the end of her.
On the right side of the frame was a woman with a pigtailed little girl in her arms. Abby’s mother and young Abby.
Abby hadn’t told me what happened to her mother, and now I wondered. Because she wasn’t in this house, was she? She wasn’t in Abby’s life. She wasn’t here.
Her grandmother sensed the question. “I’m sure Abigail told you about Colleen.”
“A little,” I said.
“Abigail is exactly like her, I should have guessed. Colleen ran off and Abigail gets it in her head to do the same.”
“How old was she, Colleen, her mom, when she . . . ran off?”
“Old enough to know better. Twenty-three.”
So she wasn’t one of them, then. “That’s awful. I mean it must have been, for Abby.”
“Drugs,” she said, and snipped it closed. “Miss Woodman. Lauren, may I call you Lauren? Do you have a mother?”
It took me a moment to nod. Of course I had a mother.
“And your mother, she’s still with you?”
I nodded again.
I expected her to say, Good for you. So I could then say, if I dared, how it didn’t matter: Having a mother couldn’t stop it, and not having a mother wouldn’t make a girl go. Having brown hair wouldn’t make it happen; having black hair or yellow hair or green-dyed hair or a shaved head wouldn’t keep a girl here, in this world, if she was destined to go. Staying home every day or going out every night. Taking drugs or not taking them. Wearing that or wearing this. Talking to strangers or talking to nobody. Hooking up with boys or hooking up with other girls or saving herself for “the one.” There was no way to know. If a girl was meant to go, she just did. I believed that.
Abby’s grandmother stubbed out her cigarette. “Abby always did want to be like Colleen. Let’s hope she has fun.” She breathed out, and the last of her smoke made its way toward my face. I coughed. I could see she’d decided what had happened to Abby a long time ago, and that was why she wasn’t even reported missing for more than a month.
But I was there. I was there for a reason, and maybe it was only to say this:
“Mrs. Sinclair,” I said, “I have to tell you. She didn’t run away. Abby. I know her mother did, but she didn’t. Something happened to her. She went missing. You have to keep looking. Please believe me. Please.”
My face was on fire from letting those words out, my breath gone heavy and hard to catch, but all she did was shake her head. Then she had her hands out for something, and it took me some moments to realize she wanted the picture frame I was holding.
“Give it here,” she said.
Before I did, I looked one last time, not at young Abby and her lost mother but at recent Abby. Abby at sixteen, maybe, in this photo, maybe even just turned 17. Abby forcing a smile that showed all her teeth. She was wearing something around her neck in the photo, but I got only a glimpse of it showing through the open collar of her shirt, before her grandmother was on her feet and rescuing it from my grasp, then snapping it closed.
I wasn’t sure, because I had only a moment to see it, but I thought the pendant she had on was a swirl of smoke inside a stone. Round and gray.
“If she sent you here to get any of her things, let’s stop this right now,” her grandmother said. “I’m not letting you up there, in her room.”
“She . . .” I started, beginning to deny it. But I did want to go up there; I did want to see her room.
“No,” her grandmother said. “Absolutely not. I knew you were after those earrings. She thinks she can send you here to get them and sell them? No. Lauren, it’s time for you to go.”
Abby’s grandmother led me to the door, and only after I stepped through it did she say to me, “When you see her, tell her we assume she’s not coming back. Tell her we won’t wait all those years like we did for her mother.”
“How long did you wait for her mother? Did she ever come back?”
“Oh, she came back. She came back in a box.”
— 38 —
OUT in the driveway, Abby’s grandfather was shoveling snow. He had his back to me, his shoulders hunched into the work, so I wasn’t sure if he saw me coming, if he’d overheard our conversation and the decisive click of the door closed in my face.
Even so, I was aware of him plunging his shovel closer and closer to where I was walking. He was moving down the imaginary line he’d drawn in the white powder, straight for me. If he kept it up, we would soon cross paths.
When we did, the shovel paused in the ground at my feet and I heard him speak. “How’s she doing?” he asked, just loud enough for me to make out, and just quiet enough so his wife wouldn’t hear.
He kept his back to the house and his head down, but though he leaned toward the snow at his feet, his eyes weren’t on the ground. They were lifted up, to my face.
“You’ve seen her,” he said—not a question. “She all right? Doing okay?”
There was no true way to answer this. She was intact, with both her arms and legs, and with hair on her head and no wounds gaping open, none I could see.
But how was she doing beyond that?
Whenever I saw her, the expression on her face was a different one altogether from the school photo in her grandmother’s frame, the face photocopied on the flyer. Not smiling. Not even pretending to. No hint of teeth. Instead she wore a faint question mark of an expression, one waiting to be filled in by the numbers with paint.
I could sense only echoes from her. The echo of sadness. The echo of longing to go home. The echo of craving a peanut butter sandwich.
Sometimes she showed herself to me, so why wouldn’t she do the same now, here, for her grandfather who surely loved her, and had certainly known her longer? She could set a whisper sailing on the wind. She could simply wave from the window of the van i
f she were in there again. Yet she did neither of those things. She wouldn’t set foot near this house at all.
Her grandfather had asked how she was doing, if she was okay. I didn’t want to say something cruel, but a big and blazing part of me did want to alarm him. Her grandmother hadn’t listened; maybe he would. I locked my eyes on his, and I put as much weight into the words as I had in me, and I said, “No. I don’t think she is.”
I expected him to ask more of me, but he didn’t. The shovel went down and he moved along the line with it, putting distance between us. I had the sudden vision of jumping into a snowbank like this one as a little kid. How it felt to throw armfuls of bright white powder up into the air and let it sprinkle down all over, to lie flat as it buried me, and then to stand up and shake it off and set myself free. Whose memory was that, mine or Abby’s? It could have belonged to either of us.
I sensed his wife at the window, watching, but still I called to him, “Are you the one who put the flyers up on the telephone poles?”
“Up north,” he said. “A whole lot of ’em.”
“I saw one,” I said. “Up in Pinecliff.”
He nodded. “Nobody was doing a thing. I talked my wife into putting in the report, but the police say they don’t have time to chase after every runaway, so . . .”
I had to do it again, even though I failed the first time. Now I was the one who stepped closer to him, walking into the pathway he was making in the snow. “She didn’t run away like you think she did.”
He eyed me, his pupils held low under a surface of shining water. “She tell you that?” he said.
“Not exactly,” I admitted. “But you should call the police. Please. Call the police. Ask them to keep looking. Find out what happened to her.”
He stopped for a moment and then said one last thing. I wasn’t sure if it meant he heard me or he hadn’t. He said, “You have to let them know you miss them. That’s why I did the flyers. Even if they don’t ever think about coming back. You gotta make sure they know they can.”
— 39 —
MY mom was waiting in the garage when I came home from New Jersey that night. I hit the garage-door opener to see that she’d found what I’d hidden behind the lawn mower. I’d gotten the tire patched at the bike shop in town and she’d wheeled it out and was playing with the bell on the handlebars. When I pulled in and cut the engine, the first thing I heard was its tinny little ding.
“There you are,” my mom said lightly, though behind those three light words were more words, heavier words. She was going to confront me about not telling her where I was all evening, and I was going to have to come up with an excuse that didn’t involve a drive out of state to ask after a so-called runaway I’d never met, not in real life.
But all my mom said was, “I feel like I never see you anymore.”
Get used to it.
I heard that. That was my head thinking it, or it was a familiar voice warring to be the loudest thing in my head. Fiona Burke had also heard my van pull up, so she’d come out to talk to me. She wanted my mom to leave the garage, but she wouldn’t.
Maybe we should give my mom a warning on what to expect, now that I was 17 like the others. A little head start to begin planning out the design of my Missing posters. Hopefully she’d do something eye-catching, a Missing poster to frame and be proud of, to admire long after I was gone.
That was what Fiona Burke wanted me to say to my own mother.
“Where’d you get this old thing?” my mom said, nudging Abby’s borrowed bicycle. “So retro. It’s darling.” She was straddling the Schwinn now and testing out its wheels.
“You shouldn’t touch it. I’m holding on to it, for a friend.”
She let go and climbed off, and I caught hold of it before it propelled itself into the wall.
“What friend? Deena?”
I shook my head.
“What’s going on, Lauren? What was so much more important than being in school?” Seeing the surprise on my face, she raised an eyebrow. “Your school called. I told them you had a dentist appointment.”
“Thanks for covering for me.”
“Sure thing. Now you tell me where you were.”
“New Jersey,” I said, before I, or anyone else, could stop me.
“Excuse me?”
“I drove down to New Jersey, and then I drove back up.”
“New Jersey?” she said, more to herself than to me. “Who do we know in New Jersey?”
I could have said no one, or I could have said someone, but my mouth didn’t want to keep opening, and my body wanted to move instead. Before I knew it, I was grasping the bike’s handlebars and wheeling it out to the center of the garage.
“You just got home, where’re you going?”
She didn’t say I couldn’t go. She’s never told me I couldn’t do something. She didn’t ground me or give me curfews. She covered for me when the school called and said I’d cut class. She trusted me—or she wanted me to think she did.
If there was any mother in existence who I should be able to let in and know all, it would be this woman. This woman, here.
“I want to try the bike,” I said. “I’ll just ride it along the train tracks to the bridge, then I’ll turn back.”
“It’s too cold.”
I shrugged and pulled down on my wool hat so my ears were covered.
“Besides, when’s the last time you rode a bike? You were maybe ten and you skidded off the embankment outside and skinned both knees.”
“I guess you never forget how to ride. That’s what I heard.”
“They say that.” She was floundering here. She didn’t know how to discipline me because she never had to before.
I straddled the bike and tried out the brakes, testing the bounce of the tire. It seemed as good as new. The snow had been cleared off the road and I could coast down it without sliding on ice. Not two miles away, down the hill, the train tracks ran north and south, following the river. I could follow those tracks for days. The line headed straight up to Montreal.
What could my mom do if I told her the truth? Tie me by the wrists to my bedposts each night, lock me in our basement and lower food through the vents so I didn’t starve? Could she save me and could she save Abby? Could she save Fiona Burke years after the fact?
Once you were tagged to disappear and join the others, I don’t think you could be saved at all.
My mom said my name, softly. She reached out, as if to touch my hair, and when I flinched, she lowered her arm.
“We’re going to talk when you get back,” she said, as if prophesizing our future. “You’re going to tell me what’s been going on and why you went down to New Jersey.”
Very quietly, maybe to keep Fiona Burke from hearing, I said, “Okay.”
“I just want you to know you can talk to me if you want to talk to me,” she said, keeping it going and coming close to ruining it. “I’m always here, if you want to talk. I can see there’s something, Lauren. I just don’t know what it is yet.”
For a moment I wondered if mothers can see. Maybe once you’ve made a person, you can see through the skin you shaped to what’s in there hurting without anyone having to tell you, Look here.
I stood up straight with the bike in my hands. I stood in my mom’s direct line of sight. There I was: Girl, 17. Girl, hair not so long anymore, but long legs, my mom’s same long nose. Girl wearing black boots and black jeans. Wearing the pendant I found on the side of the road, a pendant like the one I thought I saw on Abby in that photograph, like the one Fiona Burke had on the night she ran away. I actually never took it off.
Wearing also a flashing sign that said I was in trouble. Wearing it on high for heavy traffic so it could be seen far out in the lanes in the distance. Letting it blink and beep. Letting it shout out what I wanted it to say because maybe someone would know how to make it stop.
Girl, not yet missing.
Easy target of a girl, standing out in the open right here.
&
nbsp; But all my mom said was, “When you get back? We’ll talk.” All those psych classes weren’t teaching her when to keep pushing and when to let go. She’d come so close, and too fast she’d let go.
“Don’t you have homework?” I said. “We can talk tomorrow—it’s not urgent.”
Liar, said Fiona Burke.
My mom looked relieved. “I do have a paper to write, but Lauren? We’ll talk tomorrow about all of this.”
I got the bicycle gliding and hopped on. It balanced perfectly and didn’t topple over. I hadn’t forgotten anything I’d seen so far. Not even how to ride a bike.
I pumped the pedals until I was out of sight of my house and the Burkes’ house and could let go and have the spinning tires do it all without me having a say. I thought of Abby on this bicycle, on the way to meet Luke. Then there was Abby leaving Luke’s house on foot in the warm summer’s night, there was the road, there were the pine trees, and beyond that I guess there was something I wouldn’t get to know. There was a dark night sky starred with questions, and she was one of them. I kept thinking if I looked hard enough maybe I’d be able to pick out her point in the constellation.
Or more likely I’d keep getting it all mixed up, like how I could never seem to find the Big Dipper, even when it was right there, screaming out its existence in the sky right over my head.
Then I changed the story. I imagined Abby on the way to meet Luke, but never stopping, never bothering going to his house and instead riding a wide circle and making it back safe to the grounds of the summer camp that night.
I imagined her still alive.
I kept pedaling and soared around each coming turn. I sped past mailboxes. I flew over humps in the road. I somehow managed to avoid slicks of ice. I pedaled so fast, I didn’t know how I’d ever get the bike to stop.
When I reached the railroad tracks, I saw the light in the distance and heard the rumble: a train was coming. It sped closer, rattling the air, a freight train that didn’t look to be stopping at the commuter Amtrak stop at Pinecliff. I pumped the pedals and steered the bike down the narrow road that ran alongside the tracks. I was ahead of the train, but I felt it gaining on me, a hulking monster I was too small and insignificant to think of ever beating.