So I tried to correct it. “I lost my keys. It’s just that I lost my keys.” I started looking again but came up with nothing.
“Fuck it,” Jamie said—to the sky, or to someone, something I couldn’t see. He said it while looking upward, as far away from me as he could. His body went rigid and I thought he was going to kick something. Then he let out a long breath and said, “It’s too cold out for this shit. C’mon, I’ll take you home. You’re too drunk to drive yourself anyway.”
He took my arm. It was the first time he’d touched me in days and days.
— 43 —
WE were silent on the drive home. I was cursing myself for losing my keys, and Jamie was next to me probably cursing himself for caving and being nice to me.
When we got to my place, Jamie turned to me in my driveway and said, “You’re freaking me out a little, Lauren. It’s like you’re this whole other person all of a sudden. Or else you’re just trashed. Is that it? Is it that you’re just really drunk?”
If only that’s all it was. If only I could sober up and take an aspirin to erase this tomorrow.
I leaned forward, and this wasn’t Abby’s memory or any of the other girls’ memories cascading over me—it wasn’t their wants but mine. I wanted to feel my lips against his neck, or his neck against my lips. I wanted to remember for one small second what there was before the shadows blotted it all out. I wanted to know if his mouth still tasted like cinnamon.
But he pushed me away. “We broke up,” he said. “Remember?”
For an increment of time in the darkness of his car, I didn’t. But it passed and then I did.
“I have to ask you something,” he said. “It’s about this.”
From his pocket the folded Missing flyer emerged, and he didn’t have to open it all the way for me to know Abby’s face would be on it.
“You left it,” he said. “In my hoodie.”
I nodded. It was still in his hand, and I absolutely needed to take it back.
“What’s up with this girl Abigail? For real. Is that why you were with Luke Castro?”
“Abby,” I corrected him. “But I wasn’t with him. I told you, I dropped my keys.”
“You don’t really know that girl . . . Do you?”
I took the folded flyer from his hands and protected it in mine. “Jamie . . . what if I told you something and I couldn’t explain it and you couldn’t ask me why or how I know or anything? What if I told you that Abby is here in the car with us, right now? What if I could see her sitting in the seat behind you and she’s waving at me to stop talking now, but I’m not going to, I’m going to tell you. What if, Jamie? What if I told you all that?”
He shut his eyes and held them closed. At his back, in the seat directly behind his, Abby Sinclair glared at me. I could see the dirty reflection of her face in the rearview mirror even if I didn’t turn around to be sure.
Finally Jamie spoke. “I’d say you were really trashed and you should go in and have a glass of water and go to bed.”
“Okay,” I said. “I’m glad I didn’t tell you then.”
There was a stunned look on his face when I slammed the car door and headed up the walk to go inside.
— 44 —
MY mom knew I’d been drinking before I’d even taken off my coat. She wasn’t going to punish me over it, but she did remark on it, and she did ask how I got home and how I was going to get a spare key for my van if I couldn’t find the one I lost, and she did comment that I deserved a hangover if I got one. She said that last thing with a vindictive little sparkle in her eye.
It was when she was asking me about the party, when she was saying something that required an answer from my mouth, that the room cracked open and the voices came out. They weren’t slivers of whispers like usual. They didn’t take turns, and they didn’t play nice. I couldn’t see them, but I could hear them, closing in on all sides, voices gone raspy and hoarse from breathing fire and hoarser still from all the screaming.
Aren’t you going to go look for her?
Your mother. She knows.
You haven’t said hello to me yet. Can’t you see me?
You’re a nasty ho. And you’re not that cute, either.
You lie. You lie. You lie.
HOW LONG DO I HAVE TO STAY HERE!
You don’t have much longer.
You said you were going to look for her. You’re not looking for her.
Hi. I’m saying hi. Hi. Do you see me? Hi.
You don’t have much longer.
Hi.
My head hammered with the girls’ voices, more than I could have counted, more than I even recognized, proving there were lost girls I hadn’t gotten to meet yet and that I hadn’t been imagining them in the woods. I screwed my eyes shut as if that could stop them and it did, for a moment. Then it made it worse. One story drowned out the next story and capsized the story that followed and took over where the last story left off.
New voices. A new girl named Jannah wanted to tell me about a boy named Carlos—how she was supposed to meet him, and she never made it before she got taken, and how he had the most intense brown eyes. And another new girl named Hailey did some things she wasn’t proud of, and who am I to judge? And a girl named Trina hated every single person who laid eyes on her—she hated every girl here; she especially loathed me.
Hailey had run away before. She had a chipped tooth from the first time, a pierced belly button from the second time, a prostitution record for the third time, but this time, the fourth time she went missing, she hadn’t run away at all. Jannah loved Carlos and she ran away to have a life with him—or she meant to, before her family caught her and punished her for what she did. Trina ran off because no one was even looking. She ran simply because she could. And good fucking riddance.
Do you think he waited for me?
They think they know. They don’t know. No one knows.
Going, going, gone. How you like me now, huh? How you like me now?
Are you listening? Why aren’t you listening?
Do you think he waited?
Can’t you hear me? Hi, hi.
She’s out, idiot.
Wake her up, wake her up. Someone wake her up.
Then—in a gap between the noise—she spoke. Louder than the others, closer somehow, more urgent.
Help.
I knew that voice. That was Abby Sinclair.
— 45 —
WHEN I opened my eyes, I was across the room, on the couch, with our cat, Billie, before me on the coffee table. The cat stared intently at a spot just behind my head, and my mom hovered over me, in crisis mode. She had my two hands by the wrists and there was a sore spot on the side of my skull from where I’d been pounding it, I guess with a fist. She was making a soothing sound in her throat, and hearing it calmed something in me. Calmed the noise and lessened the panic. The girls responded, too, and soon we were all still, listening to my mom’s tuneless humming.
When she saw this, she let go of my arms and took a seat beside me. “Tell me,” she said simply. She said it with the look she used to give me when I was little, when I was the only person in her world and she in mine. I focused on one of her tattoos, the flock of soaring birds on her neck. I counted them for comfort, the way I used to when I was younger: nine. Nine birds. Or was it ten? Ten. I’d forgotten the tenth bird on the back of her neck, hidden now behind her ear.
Ten birds, like always. Ten birds, as I’d remembered.
This was all it took for me to begin telling her.
“There’s this girl,” I started. “I found her Missing poster and then I read more about her online. She’s not from here, but she went missing from somewhere close by. They say she ran away, but she didn’t. Something’s happened, she needs help, I know she does. But no one’s looking for her. No one cares.”
My mom kept all expression from her face, but, twitching beneath her skin, there was something. The birds fluttered as the tendons in her neck tightened, and I kept my eyes on
them and kept talking.
I spilled everything about Abby, except how I’d talked to her myself; I’d seen her and I’d heard her and I’d been close enough to her I could’ve reached out and touched her, but I didn’t say that. I didn’t say how I hadn’t touched her because I’d assumed she was a ghost. But I started to wonder if maybe there was a way—when you’re in trouble, when you’re caught somewhere and you can’t get out—that you can reach out to someone. Maybe it happens when you’re sleeping, that you project a vision of yourself to anyone who can see, and I can see. I didn’t have the rational, scientific explanation for seeing the apparition of a lost but maybe-still-alive girl in my van and in my bedroom, and without it I didn’t know how to explain that piece to my mom. So I skipped that part.
But I gave her other pieces:
I admitted that I’d talked to the boy Abby had been hanging out with. That I went in to talk to the Pinecliff police, not that they helped. And that I’d even been to talk to a counselor from the camp and to Abby’s grandparents, and that was the real reason I drove down to New Jersey. I had Abby’s bicycle, the one she left behind, the one I was storing in the garage. (I had her pendant, too, but this I couldn’t say.)
When I stopped talking at last, my mom had her eyes down, considering all of what I’d told her. Billie didn’t blink. Her bright gaze bored into me, as if she’d been trying to decide how to respond, too. She sat poised on the coffee table, a slight tremor in her fuzzy tail.
My mom chose her words carefully. “You say you know? How do you know?”
“I just . . . know.”
“How, Lauren? Explain.”
“I have a feeling.” The expression on her face didn’t change, though the birds on her neck jittered. “I had a dream.”
“You had a dream or you had a feeling? Do you know something you’re not telling me?”
“No.” Yes. “Both. I had a dream and a feeling. She’s not okay. Something happened. I know.”
“Do you want to call the police again? Do you want me to call for you?” She believed me. My mom believed I was telling the truth.
Relief washed over me, and I wanted to lie back and let that be enough for tonight, and I also wanted to keep talking, now that I’d started, to tell her more about the dreams. About the other girls. About everything I knew that I shouldn’t know, every memory that had been shared with me.
Then I remembered something. She made me think of it when she’d suggested calling the police. “Maybe we could ask for Officer Heaney this time. That’s who I met when Jamie and I were looking around that camp place. He was there—he found us. He made us leave, you know, for trespassing. But he remembered Abby. He knew she’d gone missing. He knew about the bike. We should call him. I didn’t get to talk to him at the station.”
“All right,” she said. She grabbed a notebook and wrote it down: Heaney. Heeney? Heeny? We weren’t sure how to spell it.
I still couldn’t read her expression. “First show me this girl,” she said. “This Abby Sinclair.”
I found the folded flyer in my coat pocket and smoothed it out to show her. Abby’s face had faded away to a white space as if she could be anyone, a fill-in-the-blank face surrounded by a block of dark hair. Showing her flyer felt like exposing a page from my middle-school diary; it was that gooey and personal and important and tinged with shame.
“It’s hard to read,” my mom said. “Is this online?”
Now she was acting like she might not believe me, and a little trickle of doubt hooked itself to the lobe of my ear, hovering there, breathing, waiting to hear what she’d say next. Did she think I made this flyer on my computer for fun, invented a missing girl’s name and hometown and decided what clothes she’d be last seen wearing?
“It’s just hard to read,” my mom said, seeming to sense what I was thinking.
“It’s online,” I said. “I’ll show you.”
As we went into the kitchen, the girls’ voices in my ears stayed ominously silent. No shadows skirted the walls. They must have been angry with me. I might be barred from the house if my dream took me there again in the night—but would they forgive me if I found Abby? Would that be enough? Or was it that I needed to save all of them, retroactively, every last one?
On my mom’s laptop I brought up the missing-persons page: proof Abby was an actual girl and I didn’t make her up. This was not imaginary; this girl really was missing.
She read it carefully and clicked on the photo to enlarge it and see her face more clearly. Abigail Sinclair, 17, of Orange Terrace, New Jersey. The pendant was a gray shadow in the hollow of her neck, and her eyes were black pools full of secrets, not all of which I knew yet.
I found my voice. “That’s her.”
“You dreamed about this girl,” my mom said, as if she wanted to get the facts straight.
Can a dream be happening when you’re fully conscious of it? I wanted to ask her. Because, if so, then I did dream about this girl. All the time. And I dreamed about the other girls; I dreamed about them all the time, too. And these were dreams when I was sleeping, and these were dreams when I was awake. This could have been a dream, I realized, sitting there at the kitchen table before my mom’s laptop, the cat having followed us in and still watching me intently, pointing her fuzzed tail. The dream could have been this night, this room, this conversation, and the reality could have been the broken house on the cracked street under the dark smog, with those girls. The reality could have been that I was trapped inside that limbo with the rest of them, and there was no true sky above us, and there were no roads leading to us, and the sidewalk ended, and the house was about to burn down with us in it. I could have already been taken.
“What else?” she said. “Does this girl . . . talk to you? In your . . . dreams?”
The way she said it—condescending, like she’d added invisible quotation marks around choice words—I could see her reciting it as instructed from one of her textbooks. This was what a doctor might ask a psychotic person. “Let the patient think you believe her. Don’t affirm the delusions, but don’t let her feel attacked.” She was treating me like I’d gone mental.
I met her eyes. “Yes,” I said.
At this, my gaze was pulled away from her to the window over the kitchen sink, the small one that looked in the direction of the grand old Burke house next door. The view was of the side of the house near the laundry room, where the fire had burned all those years ago. I knew there was snow outside, and the temperature hovered near freezing, but the window didn’t have a pattern of frost on it like the others in the kitchen.
The window was fogged in the center into a round, warm shape, almost like a pair of lips. Like someone had pressed her glossed mouth to the window glass. And breathed.
My mom was taking out her cell phone and dialing the number for the Pinecliff Police Department, the one that was listed on Abby’s Missing notice. She was making the call for me, like she said she would. She believed me enough to make this call.
When someone answered, she said she wanted to find out more about a missing-persons case in the area. It involved an underage girl named Abigail Sinclair. She wanted to know if there was an active investigation, because she had information that led her to believe the girl didn’t run away, as suspected. After a few questions, and discovering she should call back in the morning when the day shift was on, she asked if she could leave a message for a specific officer, one who had more knowledge of the case. Officer Heaney, she said.
A pause.
“Yes,” she said. “Heaney. H-E-A-N-E-Y, I think, or maybe H-E-E-N-Y? You don’t have a large department; surely you know who I mean.”
Then she got quiet. She was completely silent as someone on the other end of the line spoke, and I wasn’t close enough to make out what they were saying.
“What’s going on?” I said. She waved at me to give her a second. “Did he come to the phone? Is he there?”
“No,” she said into the phone. “No, I’m afraid
not, no.”
“Can’t you leave him a message?” I asked. She didn’t respond.
“I understand,” she said at last. “All right. Okay. Yes, thank you.” She left her name and her number. She was in this now, too.
When she ended the call, she took a long moment before meeting my eyes.
She’d spoken to the police on the phone as if she absolutely believed me, had not a single doubt, and would go to bat for me if she had to. But now she was full of doubts. They flew and flapped all over her, making grim shadows darker than the tattooed birds that lined her neck.
“How tipsy are you right now?” she asked.
“Only a little,” I said. “I know where I am. I know what’s happening. I know who I’m talking to. What’d they say? Tell me.”
“Besides tonight,” she said. “Besides whatever you had to drink tonight. How have you been feeling lately, Lauren?”
“Fine,” I said, in growing confusion.
“Are you sure?”
“Why wouldn’t I be?”
The question hung in the air, unanswered.
“All right,” my mom said. “Just making sure. I’ll tell you what they said. They’re opening an investigation.”
I breathed a sigh of relief.
“Not because I called,” she was quick to add. “Not because of us. Turns out the case was just reopened, actually. Just this morning. Because her legal guardian called. Her grandfather, they said. From what I understand, he called out of the blue and said the family had reason to believe she didn’t run away and they wanted her case recategorized.”
There was a warmth inside me, and it wasn’t the pendant heating up; it was knowing Abby’s grandfather had heard me. He did what I’d asked him to do. And, because of that, someone would be searching for her now. They hadn’t given up.
“But,” my mom said, and lingered there like she didn’t know how to finish.
“But?”
“But there’s no Officer Heaney at the Pinecliff Police Department, Lauren. I don’t know who you met that night, but no one by that name or any name like it works at the station. Are you sure he was from the Pinecliff station?”