I flash back to the side of Dorsett Road, the gully filled with snow where I found the pendant that night. I see my hand reaching out to pluck it from the ground and I see my fingers wrapping around a dirty rock from the side of the road and lifting this putrid thing into the palm of my hand like it’s something beautiful. I see it clear, and my throat chokes up, and my eyes burn, and I’m not so sure anymore about anything.
“What did you do?” I shriek.
I have it now, in my hand, and it’s still a rock. No matter how many times I turn it over, rubbing it in my fingers, it doesn’t change back. It’s as gone as the girls are, as gone as I should be soon, if the shadows gathering by my feet under the table are any indication. Gone, and this dirty, lumpy rock is all that’s left.
“I didn’t do anything to it,” she says in a quiet voice. “You know that.”
I put my head down, which is why I don’t see the next thing she’s trying to show me. There’s the sound of shuffling papers and some movement on the table before me, and then she says, as if this is a portfolio showing at the end of art class and she wants to know my artistic influences regarding my still life of grapes: “Now tell me about these, Lauren.”
I won’t look.
“Your mother found them in your room, in your dresser, she told me, and under your bed. Your mother said there were a lot more than what we have here, but she brought in a few to show me. Can you tell me about these posters, Lauren? These ‘Missing’ notices? It looks like you’ve printed yourself up quite a collection.”
On the top is Shyann Johnston, gone missing from Newark, New Jersey, at age 17. Beside her is Yoon-mi Hyun, gone missing from Milford, Pennsylvania, at age 17, but I don’t see Maura Morris’s flyer, which bothers me, because I always like to keep them together. And then poking out from beneath Shyann is a girl I haven’t found in the dream yet, and edging out from beneath Yoon-mi is a girl I looked for and didn’t ever see and there are so many, all age 17, and these aren’t even all of them.
I wonder what Fiona will have to say about this—or, more, what she’ll tell me to say in my own defense. She stands far across the room, beside the potted plant the doctor accused her of being, and the look on her face is something terrible.
I’ve seen that look only once before, years ago, when she wanted to get me away from that little man and did the only thing she could think when his back was turned, which was hide me, fast. In the moment before she shoved me in the coat closet, I remember how she looked this sickened, this afraid.
I turn back to the doctor. Fiona has given me no words, so I have nothing to say.
It doesn’t matter. The doctor has glanced at the clock. She gathers my girls off the table and holds them in her arms. This is enough, she says, for today. We’ll talk some more next time. We’ll have time to go through all of this—we’ll have lots and lots of time to talk in the coming weeks.
“Weeks?” I say. “I thought I was getting out on Monday.”
She won’t confirm if I am or not, only that we’ll talk more soon. Then she tells me I can go now. I can go out with the others and line up now, because it’s time for lunch.
— 56 —
THE girl who I witnessed yodeling when she first arrived has the other bed in my room now, but she sleeps with her face to the wall, so all I have is a view of the back of her head and the lump of her body. She sleeps day and night, night and day, and there’s nothing that can wake her, not even when I bolt upright in the dark, shaken to consciousness by a bad feeling I can’t name.
This isn’t a dream—those have been taken from me. This is something else. I let my eyes adjust in the darkness and stare directly overhead, at the ceiling speckled with midnight static. It takes some moments before I start to be able to decipher them. The shadows.
The ceiling and walls are clean and unmarked where my roommate is sleeping—no shadows there. That’s because they’ve all gathered on my side of the room, staining the wall beside my bed and clawing upward to bloom in the darkest spot directly over my pillow, where my head is now resting.
“You have to get out of here,” a voice says.
It wasn’t one of the girls’ voices sidling through the slurred spaces of my mind. It wasn’t Fiona’s voice, her body appearing suddenly beside me in the bed, her mouth tilted to face my ear. It wasn’t even my neighbor, spouting out a random lucid sentence in her sleep. It was my own voice. I’d spoken those words aloud. To myself.
— 57 —
JAMIE has come to visit, and he’s driven my van. He tells me he’ll go drop it off at my house after. A friend will come pick him up, and he’ll leave the keys for me in my room.
I don’t know why he’s come all the way over here to tell me about his transportation arrangements, or why it’s so important to him that I know he got my van off Karl’s back lawn. He goes to the window of the common room to point out the van in the parking lot, and there it is, at the curb beside a low-hanging tree, black and menacing and mine, and if only I could be in it now, going anywhere, just driving.
Jamie’s back is to me, and I can study the set of his shoulders under that old peacoat he’s still got on. His thin legs in those big black boots. The curls of his hair sticking out under that knit cap. If this were the last time I ever got to see him, I’d be okay with it. This memory of him here at the window would be a decent one to hold on to.
Then he turns, and the memory I’m making of him shifts. The pain in his eyes is more emotion than I’ve felt myself in days. It’s like they carved all feeling out of me and handed the gore over to him, as my guest, to carry through the halls on my behalf until his visiting time is up and the dinner hour begins and they make him leave empty-handed.
He takes a seat in a vinyl chair beside me and turns it so we face each other. “I’ve been thinking about what you said,” he starts. “That night. When I drove you home.”
It’s kind of him, only I can’t remember exactly what I said that night. Bits and pieces like that have been smudged away.
“So that really was what you were seeing?” he goes on. “That girl?” And that’s how I remember I told him about Abby Sinclair.
I have the very strong feeling that he shouldn’t say her name here, so I put my hand on his arm to stop him, the first touch we’ve had between us since he arrived. Unfortunately I’ve used my left arm, and some of the bandage peeks out from the edge of my sleeve. He sees it and freezes. I pull my arm away and put it back where it was.
Jamie and I aren’t together anymore, and I’m not sure if we’re friends, but we’re something. He wouldn’t be here if we were nothing. He starts talking about some random thing and while talking he fidgets—I think the other patients in the common room are making him uncomfortable—and it’s while his mouth moves that time slows around him and he doesn’t seem to notice. I’m slow enough to see through it, and what I can see is Fiona standing up from the chair she’s been parked in all afternoon and walking with purpose over to us. She’s behind Jamie’s chair now. Now she’s reaching out her arm and slugging a hand into Jamie’s open coat pocket.
So slow, and also fast. Too fast. In no time, Fiona has picked Jamie’s pocket and rescued my van keys.
I don’t want her to bother me with this now. She’s easier to deal with when she stays catatonic in the vinyl chair in the corner, barely blinking. Yet now she’s dancing behind Jamie’s back, making a game of it, and when he whips around to see what’s got my attention she rises to her toes and throws them.
She doesn’t know me so well. If she did, she’d know I can’t catch any objects pitched straight at me, which is why I always do so dismally in the forced ball games during gym. But what she’s done has surprised me, and in the shock of realizing she’s tossed my keys over Jamie’s head, I have this vision of my good arm shooting out on instinct and my good hand opening. I can see it like it’s already been done and happened: the keys landing there, perfectly timed and well-aimed. It makes as much sense as if I’d simply reached o
ut myself and plucked the keys from Jamie’s gaping pocket when he wasn’t looking.
I can’t fault her. When Fiona sees an opportunity, she takes it. Maybe that’s why she ran off with those two guys all those years ago. It wasn’t either of them she wanted to be with—it was that they had a truck, they had the means to get her out of there, and so she gambled on it, in case she never had another chance again.
I don’t mean to get Jamie in trouble, or leave him stranded, but if this is my only time to go free, shouldn’t I take it? Shouldn’t I catch the keys in my open hand and wait for a moment when no one’s looking and find my way to the back stairs I remember taking in the fire drill? Shouldn’t I follow her lead and go?
— 58 —
I’M 17 now, I have been since last month, and I think it must have changed me like it changed Fiona all those years ago. It’s made me shrink away from the people in this world who care about me, and obsess over people I’ve never met in real life.
It’s put me in danger, the way it did her. But it’s also opened my mind, and my ears, and I don’t think there’s a way to close either now, after this. I’ve been changed down through to my bones.
Fiona likes me better this way, I can tell. We’re the same age now, but, still, she wants to protect me. She won’t say so aloud; she doesn’t have to. It’s clear from how she refuses to leave my side. I know she doesn’t want the shadow-fingers in my hair, playing with the jagged wisps at the back of my neck, tugging a little, trying to get a good grip. She doesn’t want the shadow-hands tightening in a stranglehold around my throat. She’s broken me out of the psych ward to help me, she says, to keep me from getting stuck in that house and ending up lost the way the rest of them did, the way she did, she reminds me.
And I did want out. It’s the only way I can help the others. And Abby. Abby especially. Fiona keeps assuring me it’s not too late.
The plan forms as we drive. Its pieces click together almost too easily, as if in her quiet stupor in the corner of the common room she was devising this outing all along. There’s something we need to do; and tonight is the night we must do it.
There are certain things we agree on, philosophically: To save myself, we have to save the others. You can’t have one and not both.
To save Abby, we must pinpoint her location first. Fiona assures me we’re gaining on her; we’re close.
We agree that the lost girls can’t be left in that house. Whatever kind of limbo it may be—made of charred wood and tattered curtains, burned things and ash—it’s still a place that’s not here and not there. It’s the in-between, and whoever’s shown her face there is stuck in the smoke where no one can find her. Where no one can know her end.
Isn’t it better for people to know? Fiona says. And I think of her, wrapped in mystery, how her parents still don’t have a clue what became of her. And I think of Abby Sinclair, her fate unspoken, and I think of the others, their gaping stories without any definable finish. It’s better to know, I decide, than to never.
Fiona and I agree that the hospital was not the place for me. We agree I should be allowed to stop on the road for a burger and fries, because she might not be able to eat solid foods, but I still can, and we agree it was a good thing I only pretended to swallow my last round of pills. Fiona says her head feels clearer already.
We do agree on so much. But there are other things I sense Fiona wants to keep to herself until the time comes, possibly so she won’t scare me off. Details, mostly. Like not mentioning exactly where we’re headed. She directs me on a circular route through snowy back roads, avoiding fallen trees and numbered highways.
They’ll be waiting for us, she says. All the girls will be; we just have to get ourselves to them. It’s those pills. Whatever’s in them kept me from visiting the dream. But it was also the hospital itself, the walls there that kept my dream-self from stepping in where it belonged. That, too, she says.
This has to be done, she says. This is the only way, she assures me when I ask if maybe I should look for a pay phone somewhere and call my mom. We can’t call Mom yet. I won’t be able to see the girls otherwise. But I have her, Fiona says, so it’s okay. I have her, and she’ll take me to them.
She stretches out in the front passenger seat of my van beside me, her legs up on the high dashboard and her feet pressed against the slope of the windshield like she might kick it out at any moment and cover us in glass, knowing it wouldn’t hurt her, but it would hurt me. That’s the old Fiona, I tell myself. She wouldn’t do that to me now. She might tease, but she wouldn’t actually kick.
She becomes more animated the farther we get from the hospital. Her voice is clear, her eyes bright. And there’s a cunning curve to her lips sometimes as she points me down this road and that road, leading the way.
I keep an eye on her as I drive. It’s late afternoon and already the light is falling fast, bringing with it a dark night. In that low light what I see is my former babysitter, the neighbor girl who ran off and left me suffocating in a coat closet for my own protection, a flash-point decision that proved to be the right one. Her flame-dyed hair reveals her natural dark roots as it did then. The FU scrawled on her thigh is now facing me, right side up.
Everything Fiona has said makes logical sense to me, until I see the road she has us driving. Dorsett Road is more narrow and twisting, coming from this end, which was closer to the side of the river where the hospital could be found, and the hills are all leading downward instead of up. The entrance to the Lady-of-the-Pines Summer Camp for Girls has been piled with snow, as if a snowplow gathered all the weather from every corner of Pinecliff and deposited it in this spot to keep me out.
I’ve slowed, but I haven’t stopped. “Not here?” I ask.
Yes, here, she says. Don’t play dumb.
There’s nowhere to park near the gate, so I have to leave the van at the edge of the road, only half hidden in the trees, and I don’t know how I’ll get back out, with the way my tires are jammed in.
I shut off the engine. Still, I hesitate.
What? she says. You were thinking we’d find that brick building with the gate? That we’d drive to some street and there it’d be? Popped up like a mushroom from your little dream?
I don’t nod. Then again I don’t not nod.
She sighs, showing she’s on her last nerve, then gazes out at the gate separating us from the campground.
It’s where this all started, she says, waving her arm at it. This sick, disgusting place where whatever happened to her happened. Do you want to help Abby or not?
I nod. I do.
And the others?
I nod. All of them, I do.
Then we have to do it here. Where else?
— 59 —
SO much snow since I last visited. But not enough to keep us out.
We trudge through it to reach the gate. There, we discover that the broken chain on the fence has been replaced with a much thicker one, along with a more sturdy lock, a gold one, shiny new and too solid to get through without a big hammer. The top of the gate is still woven with coils of barbed wire, but Fiona is undeterred. I expect her to hoist herself up on the chain link and climb over—because how would the barbed wire cut through smoke, if that’s what she’s made of? How would it cut through a ghost, a memory, an idea? But she won’t do it. She says we’ll have to find another way in.
After maneuvering over a snowbank and circling widely past the first set of trees, we do find another entrance. Really, the whole pine forest is an entrance. We come in through the back way, past the offices and a maintenance shed made of gray concrete blocks. There are prints in the snow leading up to its door, there are prints to the compost pile, and there are prints heading into the darkened woods, but Fiona waves at me from far up the path. I’m slow.
Fiona isn’t cold, but I am, and then, like it’s been left out for me to find, I discover my own scarf lying in a knot in the snowy path—I must have dropped it weeks ago, though I don’t remember walking this
particular path at the edges of the campground. So how would I have dropped it here? It doesn’t matter, because I pick it up and shake off the snow and wrap it twice around my neck. And it helps, a little.
It won’t be so cold soon, Fiona tells me, making me shiver. I can’t help but wonder if she means it won’t be so cold after you die. If it’s warm and snug when it’s over, and the star-shine glowing down over you warms your skin. If that’s what she’s telling me. If that’s really what’s about to happen tonight.
I follow her along a path and up a hill, made more difficult by the container of kerosene we discover and liberate from under a tarp near the firewood. She makes me carry the kerosene to the circle of stones, so we can build ourselves a fire. It’s what will bring them out the quickest, she says. A fire, she says, to smoke out Abby and the rest of the girls.
A fire, like she was pointing to in the hospital. Fiona Burke has always wanted a fire.
I’m following her and doing what she tells me to do—just like that night when I was a kid. But also, I know she’s right. I’ve seen the girls in reflective surfaces: mirrors and windows, and once in the exceptionally clean surface of a fork from the dishwasher. And I’ve seen the girls in small spaces, where they emerge only if no one’s looking, and in the trees, where the shadows make good places to hide. But I don’t know how being out in the open, with the pine forest all around and no roof above, will let them know it’s safe to emerge. The only other way is the flicker of flame, the mask and smell of smoke. That’s why we have to do it, Fiona says.
Once we do, they’ll be lured out, and so will their stories. I think of them like apples bobbing to the surface of water, though these are real girls, and real girls’ heads. Soon, families and friends will have closure. Mysteries will be untied and left out in the sun for the finding. I’ll mourn every last one of them, hoping against hope I’m wrong.