That I was—and continue to be—making this all up.
But then I have to answer the questions with more questions: What if that voice calling for help is real?
What if I’ve found Abby Sinclair, who went missing from this place months ago and who’s been kept here, a prisoner, all this time? What if I made everything up except for this?
All I have to do is push open that door to find out.
And if there’s no one inside, if there’s no body attached to the voice that’s screaming and I turn around and I feel my throat and I discover it’s my own voice, my delusion, my dream come to violent life, I’ll admit I’m wrong.
I’ll be what they say I am, and I’ll disown all I’ve seen. I’ll swallow the pills for the rest of my natural-born life.
— 62 —
WHEN the door opens to silence—and darkness; and no girl, alive or not alive; no girl at all—I think I’ve lost everything. Most of all, my mind.
Because I was wrong. Everything about me is wrong.
Maybe that’s why I’m not able to see the shine of it for some time. But when I do—when it catches the light somehow, when it flashes, brighter than the fire outside and brighter than all the snow—my breath goes with it.
It fell, I guess, on the ground, when he was carrying out whatever he had in his arms. It fell facedown, splayed open on the concrete.
I am holding it in my hands when I hear the sirens. When the fire truck comes and the police after that. I am holding it in my hands.
It’s made of plastic; it’s purple, gaudy, and shiny, with glitter sandwiched between the translucent decorative sleeves. Its pockets are stuffed full, so the single snap doesn’t work to keep it closed. And inside there are pictures of her and her friends, and a mass of loose change that spills out all over my boots, nickels mostly, and there’s an ID card from a Catholic school in New Jersey, and ticket stubs and clothing tags and little scrawled notes for things she may have wanted to remember and a dollop of chewed gum making some of the contents stick together forever.
It’s Abby Sinclair’s wallet, and I know this before it comes open because of what her former camp counselor told me about the things she took with her the night she went to meet Luke. And I know simply because I know, in my gut. As if she reached out from the ether and told me so herself. I knew it as soon as I had the thing in my hands.
It’s over soon after I find it.
The fires lured them all here, and with them comes all the noise.
The shouting. A dog barking. Sirens. The door being kicked all the way open. The men bursting in. Hands up. Knees in snow. The fire truck, the firemen. Lights. Confusion. The wallet being taken from me. A girl’s name on my lips. Police on the way, and then here. My mom. The feel of my mom’s intact and pounding heart through her coat. Lights. A blanket wrapped around me. The tight ties around my wrists. Questions. Losing sight of Jamie. The backseat of a police car. Lights. The sound of fires being put out. The darkness as the lights go down. The remembered feel of that wallet, that old chewed piece of gum. The smell of kerosene on my clothes, in my hair. The taste of it on my tongue.
Out the window: the calm, blue sign that says LADY-OF-THE-PINES SUMMER CAMP FOR GIRLS fading away and the quiet oasis of my mind that shrinks off with it.
Then pine trees. The pine trees of Dorsett Road as I’m carried away. The same stretch of pine trees Abby must have seen the last night she was here.
— 63 —
THERE are things I don’t understand, things I was a part of without even knowing I was taking part. I guess I was one girl trying to make sense of them. And trying to fight them, in a way that made sense only to me.
“How did you know to go looking in that shed?”
I’m asked this again and again, the night of the fires and in the days after. By firemen. By police. By my doctor, once I was returned to the hospital. By my own mom. Never by Jamie, though. He doesn’t ask me how I knew to stay and search in there—I guess because he saw the force that propelled me that night, couldn’t help but see the living fire of it in my eyes.
Because that’s the thing: I thought it was over. I thought finding something that belonged to her (and the glittery purple plastic wallet with her school ID inside did belong to her; police verified that) meant the worst I could imagine, and I did imagine. I thought it was too late. I thought she was dead. I held something of hers in my hands and then I held only my hands in my hands, when they took the wallet for evidence, my arms wound around my back and zip-tied there as I waited inside the squad car to be taken to the station and charged with arson. I told myself awful things. Convinced myself she was gone. My voices told me, or some voiceless part of me told me, or the synapses in my head broke open and trotted out a song-and-dance made up of kicking legs and flapping lies to tell me. It doesn’t matter how I thought I knew.
I was wrong.
Turns out Abby Sinclair was still alive.
Officer Heaney was no police officer—he’s a man who worked maintaining the campgrounds, who visited often during the off-season, who lived nearby. He’s a man who was working at Lady-of-the-Pines the summer Abby Sinclair disappeared. What was found in that maintenance shed, what I handed over to police, with my descriptions and Jamie’s of the man we saw, led to uncover who he was, and where he lived, and what—who—he’d stolen.
I was told she knew him. All the Lady-of-the-Pines girls did. So when she was walking back on foot after overhearing Luke on the phone with another girl, after stumbling off her bike and leaving it behind at Luke’s and rushing off into the dark to get away from him, she ran into this man on the road. I don’t know where on the road; no one told me so specifically. But I can imagine it.
Like Isabeth, she got in the car. Even though, like Shyann, she wanted to run off and hide forever in the trees, because her heart was broken. Like Jannah, she went off with someone she thought she could trust. And like Hailey, she was assumed to have run away . . . even though all this time she was really missing.
The car pulled over, and the man leaned out an arm. “Hey, hey, Abby— Your name’s Abby, right? What are you doing out there? You okay?”
And she was nervous at first—anyone hearing a car stop short on a lone road at night would be—and, besides, she didn’t want him to turn her in to the counselors. She’d get kicked out. But his face was friendly enough, and she’d talked to him before, that one time the sink got clogged full of hair and he came to Cabin 3 to fix it. Not to mention, she’d skinned her knee when she fell off the bicycle in Luke’s driveway, before she left the bike there and took off on foot, and she still had another mile to walk back to camp with her knee bleeding.
He said he wouldn’t tell on her. He said he’d help her sneak back in.
I wish Abby didn’t believe him and accept the ride that night, but she did. She did.
Parts of this I tell myself, and parts of this are unalterably true—news articles and police officers have told me.
I don’t know what happened to her all the months she was kept by him, and I can’t make myself ask. The horror of it gouges me open.
How easy it was for the man to get away with taking her and keeping her—because everyone so quickly believed she ran away. It was never questioned, not by anyone who knew her, not by friends or family, not by the girls she spent her summer with, not by the boy she kissed under the stars.
It was questioned by no one—until me.
At some point, and I don’t know if it’s the night of, or a different day, someone approaches to tell me something important. One police officer remembers me from when I visited the station asking about Abby Sinclair and her bike. He comes over when they’re processing me for setting the fires, and he takes one of my hands, even though it’s got ink from the fingerprinting on it, and he tells me some things.
Thanks to me convincing her grandparents, Abby’s file was reopened. He says that my visit to New Jersey, not to mention the letter I sent Abby’s grandparents—creepy as it w
as, upsetting them as much as it did—did have them looking into it, but it was my finding the wallet that broke open the case. My poking around, my insisting no one give up looking, that’s what did this, he says. He was telling me I helped save a missing girl.
I don’t see her myself, but I think of her. I am always thinking of her.
She’s Abby Sinclair, 17, of Orange Terrace, New Jersey. Abby with the cubic zirconia in her nose. Abby who’s afraid of clowns. Abby who can’t whistle. Abby who chews her nails, just the ones on her thumbs. Abby who can tap-dance. Abby who doesn’t mind when it rains. Or maybe she does mind. Maybe she isn’t like any of those things, since I made that all up.
But she is Abby Sinclair, for sure. She was reported missing September 2 and her case was officially closed on January 29.
She’s 17 still, and she’s alive.
So how did I know? The truth is that I only hoped. That’s what I did. There was no disembodied voice whispering the truth of what happened to Abby Sinclair into my waiting and willing ear. And if there had been, if ghosts walked and communicated with me, if lost girls really did reach out to me across the smoky abyss—I wonder, wouldn’t I have known the truth so much faster? I could have saved her two months ago.
I could have helped end this before the fires even got set.
Which is what I keep going back to: the fires. It’s all I dream of now, since the house is gone. This time it’s not wishful and imaginary, it’s a memory of something I did with my own two hands.
Besides, I know it now for what it was: a girl’s attempt to call for help. A need to be listened to. To be heard.
I know what she was saying—what I was saying, even if I had trouble articulating it in words then:
Don’t give up.
Don’t give up on her, or any of them. Keep looking. Always keep looking.
No girl—no missing girl, no runaway—deserves to be given up on, just like I wouldn’t want anyone to give up on me.
The blaze was red and ferocious in the snowed-out night. Before the fire truck came to douse it and darken it, it was brilliant, it was blinding. It was unforgettable. No one could ignore it. I bet it woke people in their beds at night, so they stood at their windows wondering. I bet people could see that fire from miles and miles away.
THREE MONTHS LATER
IT’S my first week back home. The insurance company decided my stay at the hospital was over, even if the doctors hadn’t, and I was signed out and left in my mom’s care as of Monday. There are things outside our small house that look different now, and I’m spending my time noticing. There are colors that are brighter, and patches of sky that seem lower, and there’s a tree on the lawn that I don’t remember seeing here before.
Since I’ve been gone, spring has come to Pinecliff, and our cat, Billie, has lost some weight and is shedding tufts that drift through the rooms. In the quiet, it seems as if the house has been capsized and I’ve woken underwater, seaweed and minnows slowly circling me. I know it’s only Billie shedding, but I let my imagination idle as I watch a bit of hair float by. There are other things I notice: how my bedroom looks smaller than I remembered, the bed taller. Things like that. But I’ll get used to them.
Another one of my letters got turned in to police, the postmark tracked down and pointed to me, which is how my mom discovered I’d written to more than Abby’s grandparents. I’d been writing other girls’ families, too, when I could find them, telling them what their missing daughters and sisters and nieces would have wanted them to know. The things the girls told me in my dreams, when they let me coast through their memories, a visiting observer who never tampered with their lives but who paid attention, who remembered. I’d write to a girl’s mom, saying she meant to visit her in prison, even one time. I’d write to a girl’s boyfriend, saying she still loved him and she didn’t ditch him at the gas station and she did want to go to Mexico with him, if only she could. My mom wanted to know how many of these letters I’d sent, whose mailing addresses I’d found and what stories I told them, even if I had the addresses and the names wrong, even if my letters never reached who I intended.
When I confessed, I could see from her face how serious she thought this was.
“These are real girls,” she told me carefully. “Those girls you found online, they are real. With real lives. And real people at home wondering what happened to them. But the part about you knowing the girls, talking to them . . . Lauren, sweetie, you know that’s not . . .”
“Real,” I said for her, so she wouldn’t have to use such a dangerous word. “Mom, I’m sorry. I know that now.”
It hurts to know. It mortifies me. But all of what my mom says is true; the doctors have made me face it and say it out loud and admit to everything.
Since that night, I have a court date coming up because of the fires, and Jamie does, too, which isn’t fair, but my lawyer says I can explain everything when I plead guilty. He expects community service, since he’ll be arguing that I was mentally impaired.
And Abby has gone back home to New Jersey. I’ve watched what I could about her on the news, as much as they’d let me, and I recall being hung up on the fact that she didn’t look the way she did in my mind. Her face was mostly the same as the one on the Missing poster, but her body was different. She was shorter than I thought, from those visions of her gliding away on the Schwinn, and her hands didn’t look the way I remember her hands looking, and her hair was curlier and, from the side, there was an unrecognizable slope to her nose. Also, when she spoke for the cameras in an interview my mom saved for me to watch, I was struck by how her voice wasn’t the voice I heard in my head. It was the voice of a stranger.
But she was found, and she was alive. And the man—whose name wasn’t even Heaney—was arrested, charged with a list of crimes my mom wouldn’t read aloud to me from the newspaper. His trial is coming up soon.
This is not a part of the story I invented. Not pieces of my mind come loose. Not flashes from dreams. People keep assuring me that Abby was found, and they have the same response every time I ask, so I’m choosing to believe them. It’s not like the rock that still hasn’t turned back into the pendant, even when I look at it from all angles, upside down, sideways, with lights on and lights off. It’s still a rock I found on the side of the road.
Also, I have the letter now. It was waiting for me when I was released. I think my mom held on to it for a long time, not sure if she should show me. I’m glad she did, even though it shoves me right back into everything whenever I read it.
Her handwriting slants forward, and her round letters bubble, making me think she was a cheerful person, or is trying to be. She used green pen and a piece of ruled paper from a notebook instead of stationery. I’ve let my fingers run over the ridges on the back of the paper, feeling where her pen pressed down, feeling for the words that were heaviest to write, the worst ones. I like that she wrote it all down. She could have e-mailed, and this is so much better.
Dear Lauren, she starts. I keep trying to write you this, but it’s hard because I don’t know what to say. The police told me what you did. My grandma told me you visited. I know we never met or anything and this feels really weird, but I need to say thank you.
She goes on, telling me how hard life has been since she’s come home, fitting back in with friends who don’t understand, who look at her differently now, and how she tries to forget things, but she can’t and wonders if she ever can. I’m not sure how much she knows about me—she doesn’t say explicitly—but she seems to be aware that I’ve been sick and that I was sent away. There’s a line in her letter about hoping I get to come home soon and that I feel better.
She signs the letter Abby, not Abigail, like we’re friends.
I’m not sure if I’ll ever be able to write her back.
I fold up the letter again and slip it into the drawer of my nightstand. I’m looking out the window and I’m thinking how happy I am she’s alive and then I’m thinking how I’m still alive myself.
Still intact and in this body and breathing through these lungs. Still here. Two twists I wasn’t expecting.
It’s a Thursday now maybe, or it could be a Friday. I don’t have to go back to school until next week. My mom has taken a semester leave, saying she can’t juggle classes on top of her job and wanting to be home to take care of me right now. I joke with her about how she could have asked for extra credit, since she can do a home-study of a mental disorder under her own roof and hopefully I’m enough to fill a thesis paper, but she barely cracks a smile.
I shouldn’t be joking about it. She doesn’t even want me to say the word in front of her (schizophrenia), though doesn’t she know how an unsaid word (schizophrenia) holds more power the longer it’s kept from touching your tongue? The fact that it’s unsaid, and that it could be years before I get an official diagnosis, makes me wonder about it all the more. In the night, I tiptoed downstairs to pore through her college psychology textbooks, seeing what the “positive” and “negative” symptoms are and ticking off how many I’ve had. I also read about how it doesn’t go away, how there’s no cure. People who have this spend their whole lives on antipsychotic medications to keep the delusions and the voices away. And even then, the meds don’t always work. The cocktail can change often—it’s never the same mix for everyone. There’s no way to know.
It’s realizing all this that scares me more than anything supernatural ever could. The concept of a ghost, I can understand; the misfiring synapses of my brain, I can’t. One is outside and apart from me and something I could run from, but the other is me. The other is what I am. So I’ve been thinking on it for all these months, and I’ve decided.