Fiona Burke hadn’t aged a day.
Her hair was red with the black roots, gone pinkish in some spots. Her eyes were liquid-lined. Her bare stomach was visible, but it wasn’t that she’d grown out of her shirt in the years since I’d known her; that’s how she liked to wear her shirts, one size too small and no shame for what was showing.
With the drapes open, Fiona Burke stepped out into the room because there was nowhere to hide. There was glass all over the floor from a window that must have been shattered—and as she walked closer to me she stepped right on the shards. Pain didn’t reach her face, if she felt any at all. I realized, now that I’d grown up and she’d stopped growing, we were about the same height.
She spoke then. She recognized me.
Happy now? You little brat.
I could have asked her how she knew it was me, after all these years, because I dyed my hair black now, blue-black from a bottle, and didn’t I look any different from when I was a kid?
Before I could utter a word, she grabbed my hand and shoved something into it that was hotter even than her skin, sizzling like a coal burning from a fire, and hard, like a knob of bone. My sole reaction was to get it away from me as quickly as possible. My hand opened and let go.
What dropped to the ground was a pendant made from a smoke-gray stone.
That’s when I remembered I’d seen something very much like it before. Fiona Burke used to wear a choker with a similar stone around her long, thin neck.
My dream-self didn’t have the wherewithal to make the connection, but my waking self, the self bursting out of sleep on the couch before the flickering TV at the sound of Mom saying the pizza was ready—my waking self needed only an instant to connect the dots and connect the girl.
There was me. There was Abby Sinclair. And now there was a girl I last saw when I was eight years old. Fiona Burke used to be my next-door neighbor, but she ran away from home when she was 17 years old.
MISSING
FIONA BURKE
CASE TYPE: Endangered Runaway
DOB: June 17, 1987
MISSING: November 13, 2004
AGE NOW: 25
SEX: Female
RACE: Asian
HAIR: Black
EYES: Brown
HEIGHT: 5’3” (160 cm)
WEIGHT: 125 lbs (57 kg)
MISSING FROM: Pinecliff, NY, United States
CIRCUMSTANCES: The photo on the right is a composite image to show how Fiona may look at twenty-five years old. She was last seen on November 13, 2004. When she was last seen her hair was dyed red. Her hair is naturally black.
ANYONE HAVING INFORMATION SHOULD CONTACT
Pinecliff Police Department (New York) 1-845-555-1100
— 11 —
WHEN I look back, I can see the hints. The hints that were there all along—like the time I was eight years old and my mom left me in the care of the girl who lived next door. The girl who told me to stand very still with my face squashed up against the yellow wallpaper and to not turn around and to not dare look. To stand against the wall in my My Little Pony pajamas while she made plans to ditch town for good.
That was the first time I came in contact with someone who went missing.
Fiona Burke was the daughter of the couple in the big house next door. They’d adopted her when she was a baby, from an orphanage in China. I don’t know what her name had been before the Burkes rechristened her and brought her back to the Hudson River Valley, to where they lived in the small town of Pinecliff, New York. Even today, the Asian population in Pinecliff is only 1.34 percent. Fiona Burke was likely one of only a handful of Asian kids in school, and she was the only person I knew who’d been adopted.
I don’t know what the Burkes were like all those years before Fiona, when they were childless and tucked away behind their lace curtains, shopping for someone else’s offspring to bring home. They were an older couple, older than anyone would expect to be raising a teenage daughter, and the only reason we knew them is because we rented our house from them. It was small and separated from their much grander house by a pruned hedge. They called it the “carriage house” and wouldn’t let my mom and me paint it a color because they wanted it white, to match theirs. Apparently, a long time ago, it used to be the garage.
This meant the Burkes were our landlords; my mom used to send me over to their palatial front porch on the third or fourth of the month—never the first, never on time—to ring their bell and hand-deliver an envelope containing the rent check.
Only, the Burkes never came to the door. I’d ring the bell and Fiona would answer before the chime even stopped sounding, like she kept herself pressed up behind it, waiting for any excuse to let in some air.
She’d open the door, see it was only me, and her face would fall. She’d hold out her hand so I could give her the envelope, and she’d say, “This from Tamara?”
And I’d say, “Yeah, that’s from my mom.”
Fiona Burke wasn’t particularly friendly—she never invited me in; she never said thank you. But, in the beginning at least, she wasn’t mean. She’d simply put the envelope containing our rent check on the sideboard, and the whole time she’d be looking up over my head, past me at the road, a visual ache showing in her face. Then she’d close the door.
She was nine years older than me, so it seemed she’d always lived there in that house with the Burkes. She belonged in Pinecliff, our small town set upon the steep hill, with the railroad station down at the bottom and the mountain ridge hovering above. To my mind, she belonged there more than I did.
When we spent any amount of time alone, like when she’d do my mom a favor and babysit me for a few hours, she was quiet, perched on the edge of the couch near the television, making surreptitious calls on the phone. But something changed the last year I knew her, around the time she turned 17. I know because my mom said, “Don’t take it personally, honey, she’s 17—that’s just how girls are at that age.”
But were they?
The shift in Fiona Burke’s personality came fast, it felt to me. It altered the look in her eyes, and it chilled the tone in her voice. It changed everything. She liked to tease me about something that year, telling me she could evict me and my mom anytime. All she had to do was make up a good, steaming lie about us to tell her parents, and my mom and I would be out on the street. We’d have to live in a cardboard box and beg for handouts at the train station, she said. And maybe my mom would decide I was too much for her to take care of, and she’d sell me off to some passing businessman on an Amtrak train bound for Penn Station, and who knew what would become of me then.
I cried the first time she said this, which made her enjoy repeating it. Of course I know now she didn’t have the power to evict us, not by her word alone, but I used to believe she did.
But my sometimes-babysitter and longtime next-door neighbor Fiona Burke appeared as innocent as she ever would in the photograph her parents selected for her Missing poster. In it, she had straight teeth and straighter hair, not yet dyed. Her shirt buttons were done all the way up to her neck and there were two pearl earrings fastened in her ears. She wore a blameless smile and sat there on a stool with her hands folded. Her favorite necklace was tight around her throat, and the flash of the studio camera happened to catch it at the exact right angle to make it look lovely and not like a ghastly, dirty thing hanging over her shirt.
She was who they wanted her to be, in that picture. That was before she turned 17. After, a whole other side to her emerged, one that was out in full the night I saw her last.
Fiona Burke’s parents saw one thing, and the world saw another.
When she disappeared, I remember seeing her picture in the news, being aware that people were looking for her. But, as the years went on and she didn’t come back, as her Missing posters came down from bulletin boards and other announcements for yard sales and ride-shares and rooms for rent went up in their place, people forgot about her and stopped asking.
She’d
lost herself to that place where the missing kids go, the kids no one finds, even when lakes are dredged and woods combed. The ones computer-aged into adulthood who never make it home.
She didn’t call. She didn’t write.
She was just gone.
And I guess I’d forgotten about her like everyone else in town had, until she showed up in the dream and tried to give me that stone, the one that looked a lot like the broken piece of jewelry I’d recovered from the gully on the side of Dorsett Road. I was sure it meant something, and it wasn’t until I was alone again later that night, after the frozen pizza with my mom and trying to deflect her questions about Jamie, that I closed myself in my room and dug it out from where, the second I got home, I’d stowed it inside a sock that was wrapped in a sweater and buried in the bottom drawer of my dresser. It wasn’t until then that I really let myself remember.
— 12 —
IT was a chilly night in November, the night Fiona Burke disappeared. Her parents were down in Maryland for the weekend, so she had the house to herself, and it was clear she’d wanted—planned—to keep it that way. Until my mom asked her parents if she could watch me, and they said yes without confirming it with Fiona first. I’m guessing that my usual babysitter must have flaked like she did sometimes, and my sudden appearance at my landlords’ house was a last-minute surprise—to both Fiona and me. Because with her parents out of state, this was the night Fiona Burke had planned to run away from home, and all of a sudden I was there, in the way.
My mom wasn’t in school then. She didn’t have the job at the state university or even the certificate to get that job, so this must have been when she worked nights, when she was still dancing at the club across the river.
I want to say I could pinpoint exactly what Fiona Burke looked like on that night she gave my mom the finger behind her back and then said she’d take great care of me. I should have an image of her cleaning out her mother’s jewelry box and her father’s suit jackets, dredging for pawnable brooches and misplaced gold cards.
But she was a fiery blur. Her hair was livid, dyed the red of a sugar drink. Her mouth was a deep, dark streak slathered in gloss that was manufactured to look wet long after it dried.
I remembered this:
Fiona Burke on the landing of her parents’ circular staircase, leaning over and looking down to the floor far below. Her scraggly flame-red hair with the pitch-black roots hung upside down in the air like living thorns, and through the thorns she was yelling at me to come help her.
I realized she was really doing it and not just saying she would. Leaving. She was actually running away. She’d packed up her things; the few bulging bags up above were the possessions she’d decided to take with her. Before I was ready, she began to fling the bags one by one over the banister.
Dropping her bags down from that height made each one land with the sickening smack of a suicide on the tiled foyer floor. I dragged them off to the side as soon as it was safe to grab them.
When she leaned over to drop the last bag, the odd, murky pendant she always wore got caught on the banister. She pulled herself free and flung the bag, and I guess at that point the black cord that kept the necklace choker-tight against her throat snapped, and the pendant itself slipped off and fell, too.
It sailed through the air over me, and though it must have dropped fast, because it was an actual stone and not made of something lighter, my memory holds a picture of it still falling. I’m standing below, in the middle of the foyer beneath the glittering chandelier, gathering her bags in a pile as instructed, and I look up. I should have moved, but there I am with my face turned upward and the dark object hurtling straight for me.
I must have covered my head and ducked at some point, because the broken pendant did reach bottom, where it hit me in the shoulder, leaving a searing pink whop of impact. From there, it dropped to the floor, glossy face up.
I seem to remember, if I peer back through the years of carefully buried distance, that the stone was as gray as a trail of exhaust smoke, and it had a surface that shone and bounced the light to trick you into thinking it was beautiful. I also seem to remember that I didn’t get such a good look at it before Fiona Burke descended the stairs and snatched it out of my hands, shoving it in the slim pocket of her jeans to take with her.
That’s how I know she had the pendant with her when she went. And yet somehow, impossibly, there I was, more than eight years after she’d gone, holding her signature piece in the palm of my now much larger hand.
— 13 —
AFTER seeing Fiona Burke so distinctly in my dream, I cornered my mom. I wanted to ask about Fiona in a way that didn’t seem rehearsed, to know if my mom had ever heard anything about the girl, after all these years. For all I knew, Fiona Burke had safely made it into her twenties and was living in a perfectly nice house somewhere far from here, like North Dakota, studying to be something admirable, like a veterinarian.
My mom looked up from her psych textbook. “Did you say Fiona Burke?” she asked absently, yawning and marking her place with her highlighter. “I haven’t heard her name in years.” She pulled her hair off her neck and stretched, and as she did the flock of birds tattooed near her ear lifted their wings for the ceiling. The green vines encircling her arms came alive with her movement, and I admired their twists and turns and flowering details until she lowered her arms and her sleeves dropped closed and hid the pictures from me.
Our cat, Billie—for Billie Holiday—leaped up on the back of the couch. Her long gray hair made her appear even larger than she actually was, and her green eyes held on me warily. We’d had her almost as long as Fiona Burke had been missing.
“Yeah,” I told my mom. “I hadn’t thought of her in a long time, either.”
She asked a simple question next. She asked why.
This is how it’s been between me and my mom since I was a kid: I’d tell her anything. I’d tell her things before she asked. I told her the first time I tried a cigarette, at thirteen, and never again. And as soon as Jamie and I were getting close to taking it to the next level, I confided in my mom and she made me an appointment at Planned Parenthood.
That’s what happens when it’s only you and your mom and no one else. There’s a trust you share that no one can get close to. My mom had a tattoo on her left arm of two blackbirds in a knotted tree; that was the piece she got for her and me, after I was born. We were in this tree, together, she liked to say.
Something breathed in the living room with us, and I was the only one aware. Was it Abby, whispering through the hollow spaces in the walls? Was it the rising voices of the other girls, who I didn’t know were coming yet, so I didn’t know to listen for them? Was it Fiona Burke herself, haunting this property and reminding me she could still have us evicted from this house?
All I knew was something—someone?—didn’t want me to tell my mom why right now. I felt sure of that, almost as if I could hear a voice breathing these commands into my open ear:
Don’t tell her. Don’t tell her about the dream.
I knew I shouldn’t tell her about Abby’s Missing poster rescued from the telephone pole, or about the summer camp where she’d gone missing. Not about Luke Castro, either, who I’d now tracked down and would go visit. And not about Abby’s grandparents’ address in Orange Terrace, New Jersey, and how I’d mapped my path there from our front door. Not about the pendant I was now wearing on a long string that hung under two layers of shirts and felt warm, oddly warm, against my bare skin.
I was not supposed to tell my mom any of these things.
I spoke carefully, as if there were someone keeping tabs on me from the shadows, making sure.
“I don’t know why,” I said. “I . . . I just thought of her. Like randomly. For no reason. And I wondered if Mr. and Mrs. Burke ever got any word about what happened. Did they?”
My mom had gotten to her feet by this point and stood there worrying the tattoos at her wrists, winding her fingers around and around the
m, as if she could rub off the vines and start over with fresh skin. This was a nervous habit she had, when she was finding words for something difficult.
She drifted to the window, the one facing the hedge that separated our house from the Burkes’ next door. The night was glistening white and as silent as an unsprung trap. Billie wove herself through my mom’s legs and tried to look up and out the window herself, though she was far too short to reach and a little too fat lately to go leaping.
Obviously I assumed my mom was going to tell me that Fiona Burke was dead. But she only confirmed what I already knew: Fiona Burke had run away, and no one had ever heard from her again.
The Burkes’ house was dark, as if they were away—and maybe they were, like the night their daughter took off—but my mom studied its windows as if expecting a light in one of them.
“It’s so sad,” she said, turning back to me. “I still don’t know what to say to Mr. and Mrs. Burke, now, after all these years.”
“Me either,” I said.
“I could have helped her,” my mom kept on. “Fiona. I could’ve done something. If I’d known.”
I could see how she took it in, what happened to the girl who’d once lived next door, knotting it up into her own little ball of knots she carried around inside, lifting it out every once in a while to dwell. She was studying to be a psychologist at the university where she worked; it would take her years to get the degree, as she could only take a couple night classes a semester with her tuition reimbursement while she worked days in an office on campus, but I believed she’d make it. I believed she’d get to help people.
Still, I don’t think she could have helped Fiona Burke.
“You two were close,” my mom said.
“We weren’t close. I hardly knew her.”