“It wasn’t your fault, you know. Not by any stretch of the imagination was that your fault.”
She was thinking about the night Fiona Burke left, and then I was thinking of it, and then there it was, that almost-nine-year-old memory, itchy and oily like wool.
“I know it’s not my fault,” I said.
Fiona Burke had been babysitting me the night she ran away, that’s fact. Her parents didn’t come home that night, so my mom was the one who found me after, and she never once blamed me for not stopping the girl from getting in that truck, mainly because she didn’t know about the truck.
Besides, I couldn’t have stopped Fiona Burke, I told myself. She’d been watching the road for a good long time. Once on it, I don’t think there was anything that could have turned her back around.
So it was no one’s fault. There was nothing I could have done.
This is when the idea came to me, featherlight and drifting through the room like tufts of Billie’s shedding fur. What if that’s why all this was happening—starting with my van breaking down on the side of the road so I could find that flyer—was it so I could do something for someone else? For Abby?
My mom touched her cheek, absently, as if she knew the exact spot where her beauty mark could be found, the distinct circle so black it was almost blue, on the left side of her cheek, beside her lips. She put her fingernail to it like it itched.
Her beauty mark wasn’t inked on in a tattoo parlor; she was born with it. That’s why it was my favorite piece on her.
It was then that Billie hissed at no one, as if someone had entered the room who only she could see. And then, when my mom turned her attention back to her studies, I saw them, the twinned shimmering outlines in my living room, though it looked like they didn’t know they were in my living room, that they didn’t see me or us or even our furniture, since they stood in the same space already occupied by the couch.
My mom looked up because I was staring. “What?” she said. “Still thinking of Fiona?”
“No,” I said. My eyes weren’t on Fiona; they were on the girl beside her.
I now knew for sure that Fiona was connected to Abby and Abby to her, somehow. They were reaching out from wherever they were now, trying to let me know.
They stood wavering like a two-headed mirage in the space where the couch was. Then, when my mom reached out to turn on the reading lamp, like shadows do when the light hits, they disappeared.
— 14 —
THERE was a witness. The officer said someone saw Abby Sinclair ride the bike off the campus of Lady-of-the-Pines and into the night. He didn’t say who the witness was. Of course he didn’t; why would he tell me? But Abby did.
It was another girl—a kid. She was one of Abby’s campers in Cabin 3, and happened to be the only soul who knew that Abby would sneak off after lights-out, and who she’d go to meet. This girl carried around the secret about Abby and Luke for weeks, first because she got up to pee in the middle of the night and caught Abby tiptoeing into the cabin with a blazing smile on her face that illuminated her teeth even in the darkness. And then because Abby wanted someone to confide in, and she believed that this girl—with her frizzy braids and her thick glasses, her lack of friends and her innocent sense of devotion—would never betray Abby to the counselors.
And so, the girl ended up witnessing more than the last bike ride. Nights previous, she’d seen Abby slip back in beneath the mosquito netting with her eyes full of stars, her lipstick smeared, and the grass stains riding up the back of her shirt. The girl wasn’t there herself when it happened, but she heard it recounted later, how Abby and Luke almost did it. Almost. This girl was young enough to wonder, for hours on end, in vivid-if-anatomically-impossible detail, during games with balls she was supposed to be in the outfield to catch, just what “almost” could even mean.
It wasn’t so much a premonition but simple curiosity that made her follow Abby that night. The faint slap-slap-slap of Abby’s flip-flops were what had woken her, as if Abby were being careless and begging to be caught.
When the cabin’s front door swished closed and the shadow of her favorite counselor-in-training sneaked past the window, she slipped out of her bed and tiptoed outside. She felt the crunch of leaves and pebbled dirt beneath her bare feet and wished she’d thought to bring shoes. Once she saw Abby make a run for it past the mess hall, where the counselors had gathered to be loud and reckless now that the campers in their charge were asleep, she knew she’d have to run, too. And again she longed for shoes.
Somehow she made it past the counselors—in there laughing and popping bottles, not one of them glancing out the windows to catch Abby or the girl streaking past—and she caught up to Abby by the bike shed near the edge of the road. What did she expect Abby to do once she saw she had company? Welcome her with open arms? Let her ride the handlebars of the borrowed bicycle and join her on the hill past the fence with Luke, lying between them and making a game of searching out constellations in the sky? Even better, making it so Abby changed her mind and didn’t go see Luke at all?
She didn’t exactly know. But she sure hadn’t expected Abby to get so mad.
Abby snapped at her, called her a nosy brat, and a few worse names besides, and told her to get her butt back to Cabin 3 before she got them both kicked out. The girl happened to mention that the bicycles in the bike shed were for counselors only—she believed in following rules—and since Abby was only in training to be a counselor she wasn’t allowed to ride them, and that made Abby madder still.
The girl backed away, stung, and then watched dejectedly as Abby pedaled off on the old, rusted Schwinn bicycle toward the main road.
That was how I pictured it.
I could put myself in place of either girl: the witness, willing her not to go, or Abby herself, the wind in her hair, the blur of the road, those last moments of gorgeous freedom.
— 15 —
WHEN I pulled up in my van, Luke Castro was in the garage, the sliding door raised open so I could see him from where I’d parked at the bottom of the driveway. He was a pair of legs under the body of a car, so still it seemed at first the car had fallen and crushed him.
I knew it was Luke, the guy Abby liked and maybe could have loved, in the way I knew that Abby had been to this house before. I could sense what patches of lawn she’d walked on, because the ground was still warm months after, snow melted through to grass in spots no larger than a size-eight shoe.
He must have heard my van pull up, because he wheeled himself out and sat up, staring down the driveway at me. He didn’t wave.
From that distance, I wasn’t sure at first if I recognized him from Abby’s memory, but I did recognize him from school. Jamie was right: Luke Castro had graduated a year ago, and apparently he hadn’t gone off to college or he was home on a break, because he was still here at his parents’ house, the same address listed in last year’s school phone book.
Luke glared at my van, his gaze drilling holes through the windshield. I wondered who he saw in the driver’s seat, who he thought I was. I got out and started walking.
I’m not so tall, and I’m not so short. I’ve got long fingers, I’ve been told, and long legs for my height, and, I’ve noticed, a long nose. I was earringless and lipstickless, but the pendant was there around my neck, the round, smoky stone mounted on the long string and hidden under all the layers of my clothes where no one could tell it was hiding unless they pressed a hand up to my chest. Then they’d feel its hot, hard lump.
From where Luke was in the garage, though, I would have only been a hooded face outside an unmarked van. I lowered the hood of the sweatshirt I wore under my coat—one of Jamie’s hoodies, his red one; he’d left it in my room weeks ago and I hadn’t washed it or given it back—and when Luke saw my face, saw I was just a girl, his stillness broke.
He lowered a wrench and moved out of the garage, coming closer. I realized he didn’t exactly look like he had in Abby’s memories. For one, his body was .
. . thicker. He probably had thirty pounds on Jamie. He was also less glowy than I remembered, the shimmer of Abby’s gaze noticeably absent, making him just some guy standing in a driveway in broad daylight. He was good-looking in that obvious, overly symmetrical way I’d never been into, and I found myself wondering about Abby then, about what kind of girl she was if she’d gone all gaga over a guy like him.
Was this the same Luke that Abby had known? I thought back to the declaration of love carved letter by letter into the wooden wall against where she rested her head:
abby sinclair
luke castro
forever
That’s what I’d seen. Luke Castro. This guy. This guy, here.
My legs walked me over to him. “Luke? Do you remember me? I’m Lauren. I’m—”
“Jamie Rossi’s girlfriend,” he said, stopping me, like that’s how I’d introduce myself to someone, my identity in relation to a boy’s. “Yeah, I know who you are. What’s up? What’d I do this time?” This last added with a grin, as if he were happy to be known around town for doing mischievous things.
“I don’t know,” I said, “what did you do?”
His smile cracked wide open, my tone lost on him. Besides, he wasn’t even looking me in the face. “Hey, I like the van,” he said. “No windows. Good and private. Nice.” He wasn’t looking at the van, either. His eyes were running up and down my legs. His eyes took their sweet time finding their way back up to my face, and when they did the arrogant look there showed me he didn’t care if I had a boyfriend. Or who I was. I could have been any female in skinny jeans standing in his driveway and he’d assume he had a shot at tugging them off. I pulled the coat down and lifted the hood of the sweatshirt.
That was what my body did and what my brain thought, but then what Abby wanted took over. It was having Luke Castro so close that had brought her out again. Her breath fogged up my mind.
For a second, as if Abby’s nails were digging into my skin to keep me from squealing, I didn’t want to say why I was there. I wanted to do what she would’ve done. To be her. To take over from where she would have landed, had she made it all the way here on her bike that July night. To lean in and kiss him and let him tug off my skinny jeans and see what his body looked like under those clothes. It was cold outside, but with these thoughts in my head, it was warm. I’d never been with anyone but Jamie, and there was only the thinnest thread holding me to him. How easy it would be to break it.
But I shook my head and wrestled back control of my mind. “I’m here because of Abby. I heard you knew her.”
The sound of her name turned his face an unnatural shade of blank. The kind of expression someone would have when trying to hide something.
“Abby Sinclair,” I said, watching his face carefully. “I heard you guys hung out this summer.”
Still blank. So blank I thought he’d deny it. And then I’d have to remind him.
Abby’s memories of Luke, of the nights she snuck off the campground to see him before the night in question, are full of lips pressed in darkness, and the way his neck smelled, which was musky from his cologne, and the way the planes of his face caught the barest patches of light in the darkness. How he looked under a streetlight. How he looked in the beam of the tiniest flashlight, so small it hung from the ring of his keys. How he looked under the light of the moon.
“Abby?” I repeated. “Pretty girl? From New Jersey? Long brown hair?”
He straightened, and a shadow could be made out, slinking across his eyes and cheek, cascading down his chin. “That girl from that camp down the road?”
“Yeah. Abby. I know you know her. She told me.”
“You a friend of hers or something?”
I nodded. I was way more than a friend. He had no idea.
“Well,” he said, shrugging. “Took you long enough.” He turned his back on me then and walked up into the garage. I had no choice but to follow.
Abby was deathly silent as I trudged up the driveway behind Luke Castro. I couldn’t see her anywhere in the snow and I couldn’t feel her behind me.
Was she in the house? Had Abby Sinclair been hiding here in Pinecliff all along?
Once in the garage, where it was warmer because of the space heater, and darker because the sun didn’t reach, I tensed, expecting him to open the door leading into the house and then there, all cozied up in a winter sweater knitted by his grandma, would be Abby herself, alive and well and rolling her eyes at my intrusion. She would have known my thoughts all this time, have been listening in as if over a radio, playing with me, teasing me, pushing me to see how far I’d go.
I felt like a fool. I questioned her face in my rearview, her shadow skirting the edges of rooms. I questioned all of it, everything about her, for the first time since all this started. And then as quick as the doubt had come, anger replaced it. My insides flipped and seethed. Oh, it had been Abby, haunting me ever since I found her picture on the side of the road. But not so I could help her. Not so I could find out what happened. Not because we were connected, somehow, through Fiona Burke, who knew me, who somehow knew her. She wasn’t communicating with me because I was meant to help her, because out of everyone in the town of Pinecliff, in all of Dutchess County, in this state, in this country, in this world, it had to be me. No. She was fucking with me.
All of this rushed over me, and I lost sight of if she was a ghost or not a ghost, a villain or a victim or a messed-up teenage girl.
“What’s your problem? Don’t you want this or what?” Luke was asking me.
And him. He’d been a part of it. I wanted to punch him in his chiseled nose, break it clean across the middle so he never recovered and he lost some of his luster and people called him ugly sometimes. How would he like that? But before I could make a fist, I realized what he meant. There was no door open into the house. There was no Abby in his grandma’s hand-knitted sweater leaning out, laughing at me for trying to save her when she didn’t need saving.
We were alone in the garage as before, and he was balancing a blue Schwinn bicycle, holding it upright by the handlebars. The frame was doused in rust, and one of the tires was punctured.
“What’s that?” I said slowly, putting it together. “That’s not . . .” I eyed the rest of the garage. My panic soothed when I heard her breathing. She must have trailed me so closely, I hadn’t even seen her shadow.
“Abby’s bicycle,” he said. “Isn’t that why you’re here?”
“No,” I said. You see, the bicycle in his hands was blue. Sure, it was a Schwinn, but I could have sworn, when I saw it in her memories, that it had been green. Bright green. Green like the trees surrounding the road she’d been riding. Green. “That’s not it.”
“Uh, yeah, it is,” he said, rolling it as best he could with the flat back tire over to me so I had to take it. Its metal frame was very cold, and its seat was gashed open, spilling yellowed fluff and a protruding wire spring.
“If it’s her bike, why didn’t you give it to the police?”
“What do you mean? Why would I?”
“Because she’s missing,” I said.
“She ran away,” he said, and shrugged. “That’s what I heard. Some girl at that camp told me.”
I couldn’t speak. Why could no one who knew her see that she hadn’t run away? How was it that I hadn’t met her in real life and yet I, of all people, knew?
“She rode this over that night,” he said. “Then she had a conniption when she heard me on the phone—she was late, I didn’t think she was coming, so I called some other chick. So what?”
“She . . . She did see you that night?” I wasn’t expecting that. “She rode all the way here, on her bike? That night? Are you sure?”
“Yeah, but like I was saying, she didn’t stay long. She started bawling, the whole freak show. Then she gets on the bike to go and runs over something in the driveway and this happens.” He kicked at the flat back tire. “And—get this—she dropped the bike and she took off. I went after
her, but I couldn’t find her anywhere on the road. Maybe she took the shortcut through the woods, dude, I don’t know.” He shrugged. “We weren’t exclusive. What did she expect?”
I was still trying to understand. I’d seen her reach the bottom of the hill, but nothing beyond that, nothing outside that patch of darkness, and I’d assumed that’s where it had ended.
Instinctively I touched the pendant, resting beneath my clothes. How did it get in the gully then? Was it when she was walking back? Did I misunderstand, get the whole trip reversed, shuffle the events out of order, confuse the whole night?
Luke seemed happy to get rid of the bike. I was the one holding it upright now, and he used his free hands to fix his hair.
“You’re . . . giving this to me?” I said.
“I figured she’d come back and get it, but yeah. Then I heard she was gone, so. It’s a piece-of-shit bike anyway, but take it. It’s what you came here for, right?”
“But, Luke, that was the night she disappeared. You were the last person to see her.”
“Wasn’t me, Officer.” He put up his hands in surrender, laughing, but when I didn’t laugh back he lowered his hands. “Seriously, though. Everyone says she ran away or whatever. You don’t think I—”
I wasn’t sure what to think. It depended on what Abby thought. And I needed her to tell me what that was.
“Why’d I keep her bike all this time then, huh? That should prove I didn’t do shit to her. I’d have thrown it off a cliff by now if I had.”
I didn’t say anything, so he kept talking.
“Lauren, you know me. C’mon now. Be serious.”
I closed my eyes. I wished I could will the dream to life. That I could climb the steps of the house, no matter the time of day, awake or asleep or in the middle of conversation. If only I could control it, the smoky space that controlled me. I could be in the dairy aisle during my shift at the Shop & Save, stacking the 1 percent and the 2 percent milk cartons beside the whole and then the smoke would start sifting in, up from the floor like that time the little kid broke open the bag of flour, and the pale cloud would be a curtain through which I could visit the dream. Or here, now, in Luke Castro’s garage. I’d step through and ask Abby my questions. I’d find out what I needed to know. I’d come back, I’d know all.