17 & Gone

  I place the open notebook on her knees. She doesn’t flinch. The lock of hair in front of her nose doesn’t shift, so I’m not positive she’s even breathing.

  But she blinked. I did see that.

  I take the pencil in my hand and place it into hers. The nurses wouldn’t let me have a pen, but they let me use one of their own dull-sharpened pencils. It barely writes, but I tighten her fingers around it so it doesn’t fall. I position the hand holding the pencil on the paper. Then I step away and wait to see what she’ll do with it.

  Which is nothing. The pencil drops and rolls across the floor.

  The screams that come next aren’t from her mouth, or mine. A wailing can be made out down the hall, and it’s getting closer. When the new patient—some girl I don’t recognize—is walked through, struggling with two male nurses as she’s led past the common room, I cover my ears and watch her go. She flails and lets her hair fly. I uncover one ear for a second to see if she’s stopped and quickly plug it closed again; it sounds like she’s yodeling. That’s someone with problems.

  When I look back to Fiona, I see she’s moved. She isn’t catatonic, as she wants everyone to believe; she’s lightning-quick and on alert. She’s the girl I remember from the house next door, who pitched her bags down the stairs and locked me in the closet. She’s the girl who always thought of running, one eye on the road. Even now, escape plans hatch in her mind, but I’m not sure they’re for her to follow—I think this time they’re meant for me.

  Somehow she’s gotten herself to the wall behind the nurses’ station. She’s pulled the fire alarm. And she’s returned to her statue pose on the vinyl seat, her mouth slightly open now so a nice, telltale line of drool can emerge. Her eyes focus on nothing but the dust motes floating around her face in beautiful snowflake patterns, mimicking what’s coming down outside. All within an instant, before the nurses react to the alarm and come to line us up and check with the fire marshal to see if we need to evacuate. That’s how fast Fiona Burke moved.

  — 53 —

  I don’t run.

  I can picture what Fiona wants from me: a daring escape while the hospital staff is distracted. She longs for the sight of me leaping over the half door that divides the patients from the so-called healthy people on the other side, making it out to the elevator, and riding it down to freedom. But she’s forgotten how slow I am.

  There is the moment in which I could make my escape.

  And then that moment passes.

  I do make it downstairs, and outside, but only with the nurses and the orderlies and the other patients. A group of us takes the back stairs, the emergency exit I didn’t even know was so close to the common room, and we are made to do so without getting our coats, though it’s still only January.

  It had been snowing before, I think, but now the bleached-out sky spits up only a few damp flurries. So we stand there shivering in our cotton shirts, with a lucky few in sweatshirts. We watch the parking lot in a daze.

  Fiona is at the end of the row we’ve formed against the hospital’s back brick wall, near the shadows and out of reach of the sun. No one’s guarding her, and someone should be. Her spine is slumped and her red-dyed hair hangs in her eyes. She wears the clothes she always wears, the last outfit I remember seeing her in and the outfit she wore through the ashy rooms of the dream: the too-short shirt and the too-tight jeans. Her bare stomach is exposed to the biting cold. She makes no movement, doesn’t even shiver.

  They’re saying it’s only a fire drill, but I know better. We wait outside longer than any drill should last, wait until someone inside gives the all clear. Then we can go back in. We pile up, one behind the other, pushing into the oversize elevator, enough of us inside you’d think we’d make it sink instead of rise.

  Fiona is between me and the paneled wall, and as the elevator doors fold closed I feel how hot her skin is up close, how it roasts against mine. I don’t move away, because I want the mark on me after. I want the proof we’ve both been here.

  The adult ward has also been evacuated—in a time of emergency, no one would be left behind—and some of their patients are on the elevator with ours. One of the women has suddenly taken a liking to me. She’s sandwiched beside Fiona, but she ignores Fiona entirely and focuses her attention on me. Her blue hair is cotton-candy soft, and hollow punctures in her earlobes show where thick piercings used to be.

  When she speaks, her voice is fainter than I expect. Gentle.

  “They’re wrong about us,” she whispers, her heated words in my face. The elevator, so fully loaded, takes its time lifting us between floors.

  “Who is?” I say back.

  “In another place, in another time, we’d be shamans,” the woman whispers with shining, truth-telling eyes as blue as her head. “We’d be gods.”

  I turn to Fiona to see what she thinks of this nonsense. There is a muscle in her cheek that jitters—if she lets it go, it would allow her mouth to smile.

  A nurse takes the blue woman by the arm and says to me, “Don’t you listen to Kathy. She knows that’s all in her head. And she knows she’s not to talk about such things with the other patients.”

  The blue woman knows no such thing—her blue eyes tell me so—and then when the elevator doors open and she leaves, she takes everything she knows with her.

  I can tell Fiona thinks she’s insane.

  We’ve returned to our side of the floor, to our vinyl chairs and to the hour before it’s time for dinner, which we look forward to and dread all the same. My gray notebook is where I left it, open to the page I’d given Fiona to write me a message, though the pencil has vanished from the room.

  She’s left me a drawing that’s been scratched into the paper, like with a fingernail. I can see it if I turn the page this way and that, let it catch the light. It’s a hard, jagged line that rises high to attack the edge of the paper, like a burst of flames.

  This is when the understanding leaks into me, faster and so much more welcome than a sedative. Fiona is trying to communicate. She drew me this symbol, and she pulled that alarm. In doing so, she showed me the way out.

  Because there it is in the paper carving she did for me:

  Fire.

  She wants one.

  But she hasn’t said why yet.

  — 54 —

  MY mom’s wardrobe choices for me make me question her mental state. Once the nurses let me have everything she’s brought for me, I discover that she’s packed me more socks and also the ugliest sweaters and sweatshirts I own, ones she would have had to go digging through my drawers to find, and more than I’d need for staying only through the weekend. For my therapy appointment, I’m encased in a bright orange sweatshirt, the cautionary color of traffic cones, and if there’s anything that says I’m not myself, it’s this. Only a very sick person would wear this shirt.

  The one thing my mom didn’t send was the necklace. It wasn’t anywhere in the bags she packed for me, not even in the pockets. It’s all I can think about now, how I’ve lost it, how without it I’ve broken my connection to the other girls. Fiona is here with me, but the others—I can’t hear them, and I haven’t dreamed them, and it’s Abby I keep wondering about, Abby I miss most of all.

  “How are you feeling today, Lauren?” the doctor is asking me. Or she may have asked this minutes ago, and I still haven’t formed my answer.

  Some days I see one doctor in a group with the other patients, and other days this doctor, alone. The last time I was in here alone with this doctor I was asked all about wanting to harm myself, which I denied, and I’ll say the same today.

  This time, though, when I say I’m feeling better, the doctor asks about the voices. “The girls,” she calls them, as if she was pleasantly introduced to each of them before I came in the room and they’ve stepped out for a moment, perhaps for tea.

  How long have they been talking to me? she wants to know. Do they ever ask me to do things, things that scare me or upset me? Things I’d rather not do?
br />   “Like what kinds of things?” I ask.

  “Violent things,” she says carefully. Her hair is layered and cropped short, and her pantsuit is wrinkled in only one spot as if she ironed everywhere else but the left knee. This mistake in her pants seems violent to me.

  “No,” I say.

  “Such as trying to hurt your mother?” she says, and waits.

  “That’s not what happened,” I start, getting upset. “I’d never hurt my mom. Who do you guys think I am?”

  “Of course you wouldn’t,” she says, then switches gears. “Tell me about this party where you lost your keys. That was a bad night, wasn’t it? What happened?”

  “I lost my keys.” She stays silent, so I keep talking. “I guess I dropped them. I don’t remember. I kind of blacked out.”

  “Do you have blackouts like this often? When you wake up and don’t remember what you’ve done? Or maybe when people tell you that you’ve done things and you have no memory of doing them?”

  I’m not sure what someone told her I did beyond losing the keys; my mom wasn’t even there that night. Has she been talking to Jamie? Did Jamie say something?

  “That’s like something I saw on TV once,” I say. “Multiple personalities, I think. Is that what you mean? Like I black out and someone other than me takes over and makes people call me by a different name?”

  “I’m not saying that at all. Is that what you’re saying?”

  She leans forward and the large button earrings she has fastened into her lobes droop low, skimming her shoulders. The earrings themselves are bigger than her ears and must weigh a ton. It’s like she’s decorated herself with two plates from her kitchen.

  I think of the blue woman from the elevator, how the giant empty holes in her ears might have once held earrings as large as this.

  “No,” I say. “I’m not saying I have multiple personalities. Of course not.”

  If she knew more about the girls, she wouldn’t have even asked that. The girls may tell me things, and let me walk through their memories, but I don’t become them. They’re them, and I’m always only me.

  I fold my arms over my chest and play with the caution-orange cuffs on my floppy sleeves. The sweatshirt smells musty, like my mom wanted to dress me as a whole other person and had to search for the costume in the back of my closet. Or like she’s some other woman, come to impersonate my mother, wanting to dress a girl who’s impersonating me.

  “Do you ever see things you think might not be real?” the doctor asks.

  “What do you mean by ‘not real’?”

  “Hallucinations. Things or people no one else can see.”

  I’m silent for a long time.

  She’s not asking any more questions, so after a while I speak up. “Can you be a psychiatrist and believe in stuff?”

  “How so?”

  “If you had a patient,” I start, “and if she said she saw a ghost, if she said she could talk to the ghost and the ghost talked back, would you automatically give her medication and call her crazy? Or would you consider that maybe some kind of supernatural explanation is possible? What I mean is, do you believe in things like that? Are you even allowed to?”

  She skirts the question. “We never use the word crazy here.”

  “But would you? Would you say that seeing something like that is only a chemical imbalance in her brain?”

  “Seeing hallucinations can be a symptom of mental illness, yes. Seeing a ‘ghost.’ Talking to the ‘ghost.’ Having the ‘ghost’ talk back . . . Yes.”

  “Like what?” I say. “Like which illness? Tell me one.”

  “We don’t insert labels so soon in the process, we never—”

  “Schizophrenia,” I insert for her. “Like my dad.”

  She pauses and absently touches her wrinkled knee. “So you did hear what your mother and I were talking about. That was not about you. You understand that, right?”

  I shrug.

  “Schizophrenia isn’t something that can be diagnosed after just one episode. A diagnosis can take years. And I want you to know that one person’s experience isn’t necessarily like another’s. Experiences can vary, and nothing in psychology fits neatly into a box and gives us such easy answers.”

  She’s being vague. I don’t respond, so she keeps on.

  “There are many things what you’re going through could be. You say you’re not depressed, but that’s something we need to explore. There has to be time for therapy, time to adjust to different medications, to—”

  More things, she says more things. She keeps talking. She could be talking about shamans and gods, for all I know—I suspect she talks simply to hear herself talk. What I’m waiting for is another voice, an answer in my head. A voice of a lost girl to tell me all of this is what’s crazy. My being here. My having to listen to this. While outside they’re being taken and I’m the only one who knows. The meds aren’t making me as slow and sleepy as they were in the beginning, but they do something far worse than that. They make it so I haven’t heard a voice in days.

  At some point I realize the doctor has gone silent.

  “Who are you listening to?” she asks.

  I’m confused. “I’m listening to you. You were talking.”

  “You turned and looked over there”—she points at the potted plant in the corner—“is someone there, talking to you? One of the ‘girls’?”

  The plant is a plant, a fern in a pot of dirt. If I insist that the plant is only a plant, will she wipe my slate clean and send me home? If I say the plant speaks in the voice of a girl, will I stay locked away here forever? Or maybe I have it in reverse. Will she think I’m lying if I deny the plant can talk? Will she think I can’t ever be “cured”?

  I turn back to her and there she is. Not the doctor—she hasn’t moved from her plush chair, where she sits with her leg folded up, daring me to notice the wrinkled knee—but Fiona, no longer faking catatonic and instead faking a trigger with her finger and pointing her imaginary gun to the back of the doctor’s actual head.

  — 55 —

  FIONA’S here with me now. She pretend-shoots the doctor dead and then she’s motioning for the window, like I should make a leap for it, or push the doctor through the glass to see if her enormous earrings will break her fall. I’m not sure what Fiona’s getting at, but I’m not about to do anything stupid, and I need to keep all reactions off my face so the doctor doesn’t know.

  With Fiona’s arrival, the doctor’s office has darkened at the edges, bleeding shadows in the corners and on the ceiling tiles. I see our time is running out. Not just on this session. On the girls.

  Then I catch what Fiona wanted to show me: She’s not motioning at the window; she’s motioning at the desk beside the window. The pendant is on the doctor’s desk. It’s been here this whole time.

  I point to it. “That’s mine. Can I have that back?”

  The doctor gazes over at her desktop, but she doesn’t move closer.

  “I’m glad you brought that up,” she says. “What is this little collection?”

  I don’t understand what she means by “collection.” There’s one thing: the necklace. There’s the necklace I wore around my neck, and that’s all.

  I can see it there, out of reach but in the same room with me now. Close enough that I could stand up, and take a few steps, and have it in my hands. I study it as if for the first time: The stone is gray but not completely gray; really, it doesn’t look like a stone at all but a breath of smoke that’s been caught inside a bubble of glass. I think of breaking it open, to see if that’s what’s in there. Because it can’t be. Because it’s heavy, heavier than something made of smoke should be, and when you hold it in your fist it grows hot, or your fist does, and if I had it now I’d practically be burning.

  “It’s just a necklace,” I tell her.

  “Is it?” she says oddly.

  I watch as she raises herself from her plush chair and moves for the desk, gathering up some papers in her arms
and my pendant on top. She walks it all over to me and places the pile neatly on the small table before the chair where she has me sitting. I’m about to grab for the necklace first, but she blocks my hand.

  “Is that what you meant? This ‘necklace’?” She points, and again I notice how she’s careful not to touch it.

  Her tone is confusing me. Also confusing is when she asks me to describe it for her, as if she can’t see it on the table before us, right here. I tell her about the smoky gray stone, which gleams in the light and swirls with movement, coming alive at the sound of my voice. It’s like a mood ring, the kind they sell at gas-station registers for five bucks. But it never changes color, and you wear it around your neck instead of on your finger.

  “Where did you get it?” she asks. “Did someone give it to you?”

  I avoid her eyes. “Not exactly.”

  I’m worried she’ll make me tell the whole story before I’m allowed to have it back. And if I told, I’m not sure I’d get to keep it.

  “I . . . found it,” I say weakly. What I should say is that it belongs to a missing girl. I should be confessing that it might be a clue, and should be turned over to police, if my wearing it against my skin all these weeks hasn’t contaminated it. But if I could only get it back, I’d have my link to her again. To Abby. Because she hasn’t finished telling me her story. None of the girls have.

  “Lauren,” the doctor says, waiting until I meet her eyes. “What I see there isn’t a necklace like you’re describing. What I see there is a rock.”

  A rock?

  “A rock,” she repeats. “A rock from the ground, which looks to be tied with a string.”

  I lower my eyes to the pendant, and there’s the swirl and the gleam and the shimmer, and then a flatness and a stillness that wasn’t there before, and a darkening that wasn’t there before, and a rock. There’s a rock. The pendant has turned into a rock.