Thinking of this, I may have begged her, please, not to, begged her, please, leave me alive, and she may have lost her bravado and cracked up laughing. She lowered her hand and all that was in it was a small Bic lighter.
She flicked it and brought up a tiny flame that matched the dyed sections of her hair. The color was indistinguishable up close, so for a moment it seemed her whole head had caught fire.
“God! What do you think I am, a monster?” she asked.
I shook my head as far as it would shake with me standing in the crook of the wall.
“Maybe I am,” she said. “Maybe I should burn this whole house to the ground so that’s what they’d find when they get home from the funeral. A pile of stinking ashes and their daughter gone.”
She crooked her head at me, and she blinked, and I truly didn’t know what she was capable of doing. Then she blinked again, and the flames shrunk away from her face, and I saw how scared she was. Petrified. She slipped the lighter into her jeans pocket that already contained the pendant, and she patted it, making sure it was there. Then she looked out the window at the driveway.
“When he gets here, you’re not going to say a thing to him, are you?” she demanded.
“I’m not going to,” I assured her.
“You’ll stay here until your mom gets back. And you won’t call anyone, and you won’t do anything. What’s she doing out so late anyways?”
“She’s out dancing.”
She scoffed. There was something in her tone that made me feel very small, smaller than I even was with her towering over me. “Oh, I know what she’s doing. I think I know where she works. Your mom’s not out dancing.”
“She said . . .”
“You know what your mom’s doing right now? She’s grinding her tits into some perv’s face.”
I remember how strange a picture that made for me, with actions and objects I couldn’t fathom at that age. And I would think back on this later, when my mom would tell me about her job at the club, and then when she quit that job and got an office job and went back to school, and I’d wish I had said something to defend her. But I’d never been able to stand up to Fiona Burke, not for all the time I’d known her, and especially not that night.
Besides, that was when the truck pulled up. First one man came banging into the house, and then there were two. Two men, and Fiona Burke had been expecting only one. The first was tall, and bigger than the width of two Fiona Burkes put together, and the other was quite short. I came up about to his mustache. This second surprise man, the short one, was the one who scared Fiona.
I was surprised, too. What surprised me was how much older they were. I knew Fiona Burke was 17, and I couldn’t estimate the ages of adults—they all just seemed old to me—but these two men weren’t in high school, I was sure of it. They were far older than that.
When she started carrying her bags out to the truck I realized the men were taking Fiona Burke away—she was voluntarily, assuredly going with them—but they were also taking more than just her. The little man was unhooking some paintings from the wall. And the big man was dismantling the stereo system.
With them occupied, Fiona returned to my corner.
“If my mom asks why, tell her I hate her,” she hissed. “Tell her I hate her stupid guts, her and Dad both. Tell her I’m getting a ride to LA and I’ve got a job waiting for me and how’s she like that? Tell her I’m never coming back, not ever.”
I assured her I’d pass all this on to Mrs. Burke.
But Fiona Burke wasn’t done. She’d been holding a lot inside, all those years since the Burkes had made her theirs. She wanted me to tell her adopted parents that they should have left her where she came from, and why’d they ever think she wanted to live in their stuffy old house with boring old strangers? And I think she would have kept on going if I hadn’t stopped her.
“But why?” I asked.
I was the kind of kid who used to ask that a lot, to any small thing and any large thing, unwilling to leave anything unanswered. Maybe not much has changed since then.
Fiona Burke shook her head and rolled her eyes. “You’ll understand when you’re my age,” was all she said. So dismissive, like I’d never get it; I was just a kid.
I didn’t understand then—but I do now.
The little man approached. He’d taken everything he’d wanted from the house and entered the dining room with hands out and empty. Even so, Fiona Burke flinched at the sight of him, as if she knew what he was capable of doing with his bare hands.
He wasn’t saying anything. He was only looking. He was looking at me.
“What?” Fiona Burke said. She didn’t stand in front of me or block me with her body or anything, but she leaned ever so slightly in my direction to let her shadow cover me.
“How old is she?” the little man said to her, as if I didn’t understand the language.
“Nine,” I answered. A slight exaggeration. Fiona Burke probably had no idea how old I was anyway.
“She’s not going to tell on us,” she was saying. “She won’t call anyone or anything. I made her promise.”
“She knows my face,” the little man said. “She’s looking at me right now.”
“No, she’s not,” Fiona Burke said—though I was. I’d turned from the crook in the wall and was peeking up at him. His mustache made his upper lip appear to be rotting and his eyes were smaller than natural in his already small head.
While I was looking at him, he was looking at me.
“Maybe she should come along,” the little man said then in an odd voice, like there were unspoken things below the surface, murky and confusing things he couldn’t wait to let out. His voice was betraying him.
“But what would we do with her?” Fiona Burke joked.
“Don’t worry,” he said in that voice again. “I could think up a few things.”
She caught something in his expression and made a strange squeaking sound in her throat. A sound you’d emit only when alone, behind closed doors, where no one else could hear it. I heard it. So did he.
The little man laughed in response.
“She stays here,” Fiona Burke said.
I didn’t know then that she was speaking up for me. Protecting me. I didn’t know a lot of things I know now.
The big man had returned, and there was a new sense of urgency, someone who’d called, somewhere they had to be. The little man became distracted by all of this and it was when his back was turned that Fiona Burke did what she did. She had me by the elbow, and then when I was too slow, she had both my arms and was dragging me out of the dining room and down the hall. She hissed into my ear to stay quiet and then she shoved me into a hall closet.
It was dark and thick with the heady scent of what I’d later discover was wool. The wool was from her parents’ coats, decades’ worth of coats, and there were pointy objects that were the bony prongs of her parents’ umbrellas.
She’d jammed the lock from the outside, or she’d known that the knob would stick. I don’t know. Either way, she’d locked me in.
I couldn’t hear much of what happened outside the wall of coats that confined me in that dark, small space. When they were near the front door, mere steps from the coat closet, I could hear the little man’s voice—it boomed bigger than you’d expect from his body—slithering under the door and through the layers of wool, causing a cool line of sweat to trickle anxiously beneath my pajama shirt and down my spine.
I would not scream to be let out of the closet, and I was afraid to try the knob again to see if it would turn. I wouldn’t make a sound with him so close. Fiona Burke would come back for me when he wasn’t looking and undo the lock to set me free. She’d do that before she went away in that truck with them. She would.
The little man was asking for me. “Where’d she go?” he was saying. “I didn’t scare her away, did I? Call for her. Tell her I won’t hurt her. Tell her to come back.”
Fiona Burke refused. She must have been standing very close to the c
loset, but she didn’t open it. We were there together, one thin slab of wood between us, like our hands were touching, palm to palm. I didn’t understand then what he could have wanted from me. All I knew is she was determined not to let him find me.
“She ran,” I heard her say through the door. “Out into the backyard, stupid kid. She’ll come back when she gets cold—she’s only got those pajamas on. Let’s just go?”
“Oh, yeah? She’s back there?” the little man said, and he must have made a move in the direction of the backyard because his voice got lower with distance. But then the big man spoke—he said very few words, but when he spoke everyone listened—and he was saying they had to leave.
I kept quiet. My mind was flashing on Fiona Burke’s eyes, how wild they’d looked beneath the wings of shellacked black mascara as she hurried me out of the dining room. She’d been frightened of what could happen to me, and that’s what frightened me.
At some point they left, drove away. At some point Fiona Burke said good-bye to the house where she was raised, turned her back on all of us, and took off.
She didn’t leave a note. In a way, I guess I was the note.
Only, she’d stuffed me in the coat closet, and I was too short to reach the string that would turn the light on—and it was too dark for me to even see if there was a string.
I don’t know if I could have saved her if I’d opened my mouth and told someone—her parents, the police, my mom, anyone—about the men she went with.
But—looking back on it now—I am sure of one thing. She’d saved me.
— 19 —
SPENDING the entirety of a night in a small, dark space ruins all understanding of time. A minute expands into an hour’s worth of seconds. Air rebreathed is made of less and less air until you feel like you’re choking on your own spit. The panic sets in and you think you’ll never get out, that no one can hear because no one is there, that the hot, scratchy, heavy walls all around you will keep you forever, and when you hear someone yelling your name you don’t know who it is at first. You don’t recognize your own mother’s voice; you can’t imagine that you’re safe now, that you’ll be let out now, that there aren’t two strange men and a cruel flame-haired girl crouching on the other side of that door waiting to take you away.
— 20 —
I don’t know how many hours it was before the shock of light hit me and I could breathe air. I must have made a noise inside the coat closet because, soon, someone was pounding and I was pounding back and she was pulling and I was pushing and the door got unstuck and the light was in my face and she was there.
My mom enveloped me in her arms, frantic. The colorful pattern of prancing, dancing My Little Ponies had sweated onto my skin, and I’d been desperate enough to have to empty my bladder hours before, so I was sticky all over, smelling of sheep and urine, nearly blinded at the shock of light.
I chugged a glass of water, choking up most of it, and then when I found my voice I told my mom that Fiona Burke was the one who’d done this to me.
“Where is she?” she asked, seething. Her hands left me for a moment to ball into fists.
“Gone,” I said. That’s the only word I could think to call what had happened to my 17-year-old neighbor: She was gone.
“What do you mean, gone?” my mom said. She sparkled in a flurry of rage. I didn’t realize at first that she still had on her work clothes, the kind of outfit she wore when she danced at the club, and that those sequins weren’t the scaly, iridescent texture of her skin.
“Gone,” I repeated, without embellishment. I meant gone from the house, gone off somewhere with two creepy men I don’t know, but I think, from the way my mom ran around searching, she suspected that Fiona Burke had been hurt, from falling down a set of steep stairs, maybe—or on purpose, by hanging herself off the end of a rope.
Things must have happened after that involving my mom trying to reach the Burkes at the hotel where they were staying in Baltimore, and the police being called, and Fiona Burke’s school picture—with the pearl earrings and the carefully clasped hands—showing up all over the news.
Mr. and Mrs. Burke may have at first wanted to believe she’d been abducted, that she’d never leave home by choice—but the police saw the truth without needing to do any digging. She’d taken her things from her room. Even without a good-bye note, they could see she’d run away.
The last words Fiona Burke had said to me were Stay quiet, okay? And I think I took that command too literally, as if something would happen if I spoke up or even uttered her name.
Keeping my mouth shut all those years meant swallowing information like little kids swallow LEGO pieces, which can have a way of growing like plastic teeth into your organs and never making their way back out. I would let the Burkes search for their daughter for years, blindly, having no idea what she said about them. Or about the two men and what they looked like. Or how I thought I knew where Fiona was headed—she’d said she was getting a ride to LA.
I choked it all down. When I heard her name on the car radio, I told no one. When the policewoman asked me, and when Mrs. Burke herself asked me, even when my mom asked me—which happened more than once—my mouth stayed wired shut. I revealed none of it.
— 21 —
THERE is one last piece that isn’t technically a part of Fiona Burke’s story, though at the time, in the way one memory can latch itself on to another memory and then forever after trail the first one, it felt that way to me. In my mind, the two events were connected.
This would have been weeks after Fiona Burke had run away, months even, though no more than a year. She hadn’t tried to contact her parents, and we didn’t yet know that she’d never reach out to them. She would never place a collect call from a pay phone and ask them to accept the charges. She would never open a free e-mail account to send an anonymous assurance that she was fine. There would be no blank postcard dropped in a mailbox in a city she was only passing through. No communication. No word.
Until the fire.
I woke in the middle of the night to the piercing scream of the smoke detector, which somehow had been set off by the smoke coming off the house next door. My mom and I were afraid at first that the smoke was from inside our own house, and we looked for candles and ran to check the stove, but then we looked out the windows. Out there the smoke was thicker, a visible charge in the night, its source a ferocious spot of light over the dividing hedge between the Burkes’ main house and ours.
The fire truck would arrive within minutes and the flames would be doused, damaging only their laundry room and the hallway between that and their kitchen. An electrical fire due to faulty wiring, it was said, not arson.
I knew different.
We watched for some minutes from the windows, my mom and me. Two firemen had forced themselves into the Burkes’ house and pulled them out the door and off their grand front porch. The firemen wrapped the two hunched figures in wool blankets and made them stand at a distance from the smoking house, on the lawn.
Mrs. Burke was wearing slippers, but Mr. Burke’s feet were bare. His pajama pants were too short, and I noticed his hairless, spindly legs and how he favored the left one. We watched them as they watched the east end of their house burn.
We were watching as the fireman went to talk to them.His words washed over Mrs. Burke, and we could see it in her face, how what he said took a very long time to settle, as if she were translating to herself so she could understand, and once she did she let out the cry. We heard it across the hedge that divided their paved driveway from our gravel one. The sound of it made me think of Fiona Burke, wondering if that’s how Mrs. Burke sounded in Baltimore when she got the news that her daughter had gone missing.
We didn’t hear a thing from Mr. Burke, but we watched him wobble on his bum leg, thin and pale as a sucked-clean toothpick. We were watching as the smoke thinned and no more flames could be made out and as the hoses left the whole side of the house sopping. And we were watching as Mrs. Burke?
??s eyes traveled over the hedge to our house, perhaps involuntarily, remembering one disaster that had been connected with us and now connecting us to another.
“Should we go get them?” I said. “Ask if they want to come inside?”
But my mom had never forgiven them for the way their daughter had treated me that night, locking me in the coat closet. She hadn’t known how to confront them, seeing as Fiona had disappeared, but she held it in, and didn’t forget it.
“They’ll be fine,” she said. “The fire’s out. You should go back to bed.”
But she didn’t move toward her bedroom, and I didn’t move for mine. It had come true, what Fiona had threatened with her wet mouth shoved up against my ear. The fire she’d joked about setting in her parents’ house? It had been set.
And though I didn’t know how she’d done it from far away, I was convinced, then and all the more now, that she had. She’d tried to burn down their house, and she’d failed.
Years passed. Eight years. No more fires, and no letters, and no phone calls. My mom and I stayed put in the carriage house because the Burkes never once raised our rent. They didn’t adopt another kid. I grew too old to need a babysitter. I entered my junior year in the same high school Fiona Burke had once attended, and I dyed my hair black, the color hers would have been if she hadn’t dyed it flame-red. I turned 17. And that’s when a missing girl named Abby Sinclair would lure the ghost of Fiona Burke back here to Pinecliff. When the noise would wake the others.
And it’s when I’d feel the first crack inside me, the fracture that started small, with one name, and then broke off into more names, and more names still, and left me gaping.
If I counted all the girls who ran away at the age of 17, starting with girls who lived close to me and then casting my net wider, spreading out along the East Coast in ever-growing circles, then adding girls who may have met more sinister fates, who didn’t go by choice, whose bodies still had not been found, I’d be nowhere. There’d simply be too many.