“So you don’t know her,” Jamie said. “So you lied.”
“She didn’t run away,” I said. “She didn’t. She—”
“How can you possibly know that, Lauren?”
I was staring down into my hands. The light from the dashboard lit them up enough for me to be able to see the lines of my palms, and yet when I gazed at them, there were no lines. My palms were smooth and unmarked as if I had no past, and no future. I had a moment of wondering whose hands were on that steering wheel, whose body walked out of the Lady-of-the-Pines Summer Camp for Girls and climbed into my van.
“I don’t know for sure,” I said. “It’s a feeling I have, that’s all.”
I couldn’t read his face.
But I’m going to find out, I thought but didn’t say. She wouldn’t leave me alone if I didn’t.
He moved toward me then. I felt his hand on my chin, and his mouth on my mouth, and before I knew it I’d pulled away, putting some needed inches between us. A hand was out, shoving into his chest. That was my hand, making it impossible for him to get any closer.
I watched confusion cross his face, then something worse that looked a lot like anger. I’d never shoved him away from me before; I didn’t even know why I had.
“Who was that who called you?” I blurted out randomly. I hadn’t been bothered by it then, in Cabin 3 when he’d answered the phone, but in this moment something told me I should be.
“When?” he asked. He was frozen, leaning over my seat as if suspended in midair. My arm was still out, my unlined hand pressed up hard against his chest as if I were the one keeping him there, dangling. And I was.
I watched him move away from my hand, shrink back and retreat. It felt like witnessing something die between us, a stop-animation visual of a rotting and shriveling thing turning to particles of gray dust, then the wind lifting that dust up and away until there was nothing. I knew I should care. Only a few days ago, I would have fought it, leaped to close the distance, said I was sorry. Yet I did no such thing.
“Who called you? On the phone?” I repeated. “In the cabin before. Someone called.”
“Oh, just my manager at work. Telling me my schedule for next week.” He was in his own seat by this point, not even looking at me.
“Really,” I said. “Who did you say it was?”
“My manager. At work,” he said again. He waited tables at Casa Lupita, a Mexican restaurant across the river, and it was true he never knew his schedule until the week before. “Next week I’m on Tuesday night, Thursday night, Saturday day.”
“Okay,” I said. “Right.”
Something told me not to believe him. And that something was irrational, and that something was unexplainable, and that something had never entered my mind before this night, and yet it was there, related to everyone and anyone. Even the boy I’d lost my virginity to, the one I’d talked about staying with after graduation, into college, which was as far ahead as we’d ever let ourselves think into the future. Even Jamie. Even him.
Jamie’s neck snapped around, and there was a light in his eyes I didn’t recognize, like I’d struck a match and lit him up.
“What is going on here?” he said.
“I really don’t know,” I answered honestly. My voice felt so cold.
“But something is,” he said. “With us. First bailing on the restaurant. Then this place, this thing with that girl you never even told me about. Now—whatever the fuck this is.”
He didn’t wait for me to confirm or deny it. He slammed the van door, got back into his own car, and drove off. He made a left down Dorsett Road and let the trees steal his taillights and the wind steal any sound of his engine and the night steal my chance to fix it, not that I knew how to, or was even sure I would.
It happened so fast that I sat there waiting for him to come back, and when he didn’t I was surprised, and then that surprise sunk lower and lower until it turned into a hard, black coal inside me that harbored three leaden words: Told. You. So.
I didn’t have him when I needed him, which meant I didn’t need him at all. He left me alone so I could be free to find what came next.
Though the truth is, I wasn’t alone. After he was gone, there was Abby, in the bench seat behind me as if she’d witnessed the whole scene and had been holding her tongue until she was sure she had me to herself.
Our eyes met in the rearview.
In this instant, a thought planted itself in my head in a voice I didn’t recognize.
It’s good you got rid of him, it said.
— 9 —
I was standing in the middle of the road where Abby Sinclair went missing. Jamie had left minutes ago, or an hour ago; all I knew was that he’d left.
I’d pulled out of the Lady-of-the-Pines parking lot and turned right, the direction the police officer said Abby had gone. I’d driven for a short distance looking for a hill, and since this was a mountain road, it wasn’t long before I found one. I’d decided it could be the hill, it had to be, the one Abby had coasted down on the bicycle the night she disappeared. I pulled over, wanting to feel my feet on the asphalt she’d traveled that July night. I made myself walk the center of the road, following the decline, and as I did I imagined the speed of her bike picking up, how she stopped having to pedal, how she began gliding down, faster and faster, down and down . . . but to what?
As I descended to the bottom of the hill, the pines rustled, and it sounded like they were whispering again, spilling secrets I couldn’t understand. They held their breath as one, keeping still, when I got close.
I remembered how, in the rearview mirror the morning Abby showed me her story, it came to a stop at the bottom of the hill. I wanted to see what went on after the end, when there was no one watching.
The narrow road was flat here, a pocket of darkness without streetlights or the glow of any nearby houses. There was nothing here. Just the shallow gully running alongside the stretch of pine trees on the left side, but nothing to separate the pines from the road on the right. Even so, the forest appeared to be brightly lit—glowing from the recent snowfall. All was quiet; all was alight.
What did I expect to find?
There wasn’t the ghost of Abby herself, ready to talk and spread herself open for the reveal. Not her shimmering figure, standing in the shallow dip of snow to my left maybe, a hand lifted and its fingers slowly curling in to beckon me closer. Not her bicycle—leaned up and rusting against the bristly trunk of a towering pine tree, where the police were too blind to spot it. Not the man who grabbed her—if it was a man—or the car that hit her—if it was a car. Not an answer in a box with a bow on it, left there on the asphalt for me to find.
In fact, standing in the middle of the road told me nothing.
Still, I stepped into the gully, my eyes searching. I bent down, to inspect closer. Snow was in the way, and any evidence left there in summer would be long washed away or buried, but I kept looking. As if, somehow, I’d find a spot and a feeling would come over me and I’d know.
At some point I happened to turn and look back up the hill.
My van was parked on the side of the road where I’d left it, but what startled me were the bright beams of the headlights on high, cutting through the deep gloom.
I’d left the lights on?
I was sure I hadn’t, was sure I’d turned off the lights and the engine and then gotten out and started walking, but I must have forgotten, because who else would have climbed into the van and flicked on the headlights?
I felt myself shiver. My van was black, with windows only in the very front and the very back. The main cavern was windowless, which made it seem like the kind of vehicle a serial killer would aspire to drive, to make it easier for transporting a body. I’d never noticed how ominous the van looked from the outside, how threatening.
It stared at me from up on top of the hill, eyes blazing.
And I think this was the first time it came over me—the reality. I was being followed. Haunted, by anoth
er girl the same age as me. She needed me to do something for her, and she wouldn’t leave me alone until I gave her what she wanted. Would she?
She knew every little thing I did, could see me here on the dark road right now. She could hear my thoughts. She could feel my heart and how furiously it was beating. She could feel the panicked sweat dripping down my spine.
I never felt so alone, or so crowded.
I had to keep looking.
When I turned my attention back to the bottom of the hill, I saw things in a new light. It was golden and it was warm, thick with the heat of summer. Everything was tinged this color, even the night sky.
I noticed how the snow had vanished, so the road and the gully running alongside it was brown with mud, and green with protruding weeds. Then I realized I was on the ground, on the asphalt, because I’d fallen off the bicycle, and my hands were pocked with gravel and my knees were bleeding.
My hair was longer than usual, and I swept it out of my face so I could see. I noticed the front fender of the car—rusted, one headlight gashed in—and I used it to help myself to stand up. I heard a door open, and I heard a voice, and I heard a response come out of my own body, in a voice that wasn’t mine, saying I’m okay. That was not me talking, that was someone else.
I was someone else.
It was over as soon as it had begun, the light around me turning colder and more blue. I was wavering on my two feet, in the middle of the icy back road, completely alone. There was no car here, no bicycle, no glimmering specter of a girl. My raw knees through my jeans burned, as if I’d really fallen to the ground as she had, and the palms of my hands were pricked with bits of snow and grimy pebbles of tire salt. But these were my knees again, and my hands, and my own breath billowing out in visible wisps from my own lungs into the cold.
That’s when I saw it. There, close by, was a glow that seemed to hum from the edge of the road. A light that, once it caught my attention, turned smaller, shrinking in on itself until the tiny thing I was meant to find focused and came clear. It looked like an oddly colored rock at first, and then I blinked. And realized what it was. Someone had dropped . . . a piece of jewelry on the side of the road.
I crept closer and lifted it from the blanket of snow. Impossibly, it had been perched there, half buried and glistening in the darkness. This stone pendant on a broken strand of silver chain.
Once I climbed the hill back up to my van, I let the pendant drop into my palm so I could study it under the dome light. I’d thought it was a rock, but it wasn’t, at least not the kind of rock or stone that would be found just lying in the dirt in the Hudson Valley. Maybe it was a moonstone, but it wasn’t so much a silky-smooth, gray gemstone as a round bubble of glass translucent enough to show its gray insides.
Gray like swirling smoke.
If I moved the circular pendant—which wasn’t a real circle but a lopsided, handmade attempt at a circle—I could see the insides shifting, like I’d woken a dormant volcano. Other than this otherworldly aspect to the pendant, the smoke that moved as the stone moved, it was a plain piece of jewelry mounted crookedly on a backing of thick silver. The broken chain was crusted with dirt and green with rot, and wasn’t even that nice of a chain to begin with. The pendant wasn’t expensive. It wasn’t beautiful. But it meant something.
It belonged to Abby.
— 10 —
MY mom caught me with one of Abby’s flyers. It was the one I’d found in the Shop & Save where I worked after school. In the days leading up to visiting the camp, I’d discovered more of them, more and more, everywhere I checked in town.
This particular copy had been within my reach for months. It had been pinned up in the break room on the board between the two vending machines, the machine with the petrified ice-cream sandwich stuck in its craw and the machine that dispensed the same kind of soda, over and over, out of every hole. I’d seen only the top of the flyer on the bulletin board, only part of the headline that read: ISSING. But the rest quickly filled itself in for me, even though corners of other pages were blocking most of her face. I went to dig it out from beneath the layers of announcements for unwanted kittens and needed roommates, staff notices saying who can park in what section of the parking lot, and the store’s holiday hours. There, beneath all that and pierced with hundreds of old pushpin holes so the page seemed to flicker with starlight, was a Missing notice for Abby Sinclair.
She’d been here waiting for me to find her all along.
My mom got home from class late that night, after I’d visited Lady-of-the-Pines. I was in our living room, curled up in front of the TV, waiting for her to come in so I could heat up a frozen pizza. Jamie hadn’t called or e-mailed or left me a message, and my mom found me in an immobile ball.
“Hey,” she said, pausing in the doorway. She dropped her schoolbooks on the side table and shrugged off her coat, then asked how my night out with Jamie went.
I shrugged. It went fine, I told her, and by the expression on her face I could tell she knew it didn’t and she also knew I had no desire to talk about it. She digested all of this and restrained herself from asking more.
“How was class?” I asked.
“Good,” she said.
In the moving light from the television screen, I watched the dance of her tattoos—for all my life, she’s been covered with them. There are the vines that wrap around her arms and grasp her shoulders; there’s the pinup girl on her back, the tendrils of the painted girl’s yellow hair peeking out from beneath my mom’s real hair, which she kept a brilliant bottle burgundy; and the flock of birds soaring up her neck and into the sky beyond her ear. All of these tattoos were as much a part of my mom as her two blue eyes.
But as I was looking at her, she was also looking at me, noticing the furious motion of my hands. “What’s that you’re holding?” she asked.
I realized I was still fingering the flyer, running over every rip and prick of a pin and gouge in the paper, acting like I was trying to memorize Abby’s story in Braille.
“Oh this?” I said. When I heard myself, it sounded so artificial. “It’s nothing.”
I knew it wasn’t nothing, but I also didn’t yet know how, in a way, it was everything. Abby might have been the first, but she wouldn’t be the last. All the girls are 17, the same age I’d turned that month. Soon I’d have flyers like this for so many of them. I’d be able to recite their names, their identifying details (birthmarks and hairstyles, fluctuations in weight and height), their hometowns and possible destinations, and sometimes the outfits they were last seen wearing (sneaker brands and jacket colors, specifics like the silver heart necklace, the turquoise hat with the pom-pom, the zebra-print belt). I’d know and understand their vanishings, but I wouldn’t have the end to their stories, I wouldn’t have the why.
“Can’t I see?” my mom said, reaching out as if I’d actually let go. And that’s when I crushed it—Abby’s Missing flyer—crushed it fast into a hot, damp knot in the palm of my hand.
She pulled back her hand as if I’d bitten her. “Never mind,” she said. “You don’t have to show me. So I was thinking of heating up a frozen pizza. You want?”
I nodded, and watched her drift off to the kitchen. I want to say I offered to help, but I stayed put where I was. I kept the balled-up flyer safe, wedged in under my body, and I didn’t fight it when my eyes began to close.
It was almost like I wanted to have the dream, like I was calling it closer. Before I knew it, I was on the sidewalk outside the brick building, and I was climbing the cracked and crumbling stairs, and I was at the door trying to decide if I should ring the bell or just let myself in.
Oh wait, I was in already. I was coughing and coughing and batting at the smoke to get it away from my face. When the air settled—when my eyes and lungs got used to it, or when I realized I was lucid enough to communicate to myself that I was dreaming and this wasn’t actual smoke—a sense of calm came over me. I let myself see where I was.
The house had
shifted its arrangement of rooms, with some doorways I didn’t remember, and some rooms in places there hadn’t previously been rooms. Up above, the ceiling creaked with the weight of movement. A rotting chandelier, covered in moss and spiderwebs, misted with smoke, shook as if a person were stomping heavily right over it.
“Is someone up there?” I called. “Abby?”
That’s when I caught the drapes moving at the far end of the giant room. Someone was hiding near the windows, like last time. The same figure, the same girl.
I could see her more clearly now.
The long curtains were in tatters, so it wasn’t entirely possible for her to fully conceal herself behind them. Holes in the mealy fabric showed pieces of her body—she was still wearing the too-tight jeans she’d been wearing on the night I last saw her; the jeans that said FU on the thigh (upside down, because she’d scrawled it without thinking of how other people would read it, or because she meant it for herself more than anyone else)—and the gutted hem of the drapes showed me the bottoms of her legs in those jeans and two bare, dirt-blackened feet.
All this time I’d been looking for Abby, and here I’d found someone else.
In the dream, I found myself doing things I’m not sure I could have done in real life. My dream-self picked her way through the room to get closer to those drapes. My dream-self had no fear. She ignored the growing sense that there were others behind her, others she hadn’t been introduced to yet. She found the edge of the drapes and moved slowly along the length, searching for a cord. When she found it, hidden in the tatters and held together by a few tangled threads, she took it in both hands and she pulled. The drapes slid open, and the girl, Fiona Burke, was revealed.
There she was—not an animated and gruesome corpse, dead the way she surely should have been if the stories were to be believed. And not years older, either, the way she would be now if she’d survived.