All the Missing Girls(3)

I was somewhere in Virginia when my phone rang from its spot in the cup holder. I fumbled for the hands-free device in my purse, keeping one hand steady on the wheel, but eventually gave up and hit speaker to answer the call. “Hello?” I called.

“Hey, can you hear me?” Everett’s voice crackled, and I wasn’t sure if it was the speakerphone or the reception.

“Yes, what’s up?”

He said something indecipherable, his words cutting in and out.

“Sorry, you’re breaking up. What?” I was practically shouting.

“Grabbing a quick bite,” he said through the static. “Just checking in. How are the tires holding up this time?” I heard the smile in his voice.

“Better than the cell reception,” I said.

He laughed. “I’ll probably be in meetings the rest of the day, but call me when you get there so I know you made it.”

I thought about stopping for lunch, but there was nothing except pavement and field for miles and miles and miles.



* * *



I’D MET EVERETT A year ago, the night after moving my dad. I’d driven home, tense and uneasy, gotten a flat tire five hours into the drive, and had to change it myself underneath a steady drizzle.

By the time I’d gotten to my apartment, I was hovering on the edge of tears. I had come home with my bag slung over my shoulder, my hand shaking as I tried to jam the key into the door. Eventually, I’d rested my head against the solid wooden door to steady myself. To make matters worse, the guy in 4A had gotten off the elevator at the same time, and I’d felt him staring at me, possibly waiting for the impending meltdown.

Apartment 4A. This was all I’d known of him: He played his music too loud, and he had too many guests, and he kept nontraditional hours. There was a man beside him—polished, where he was not. Smooth, where he was rough. Sober, where he was drunk.

The guy in 4A sometimes smiled at me as we passed in the hall in the evening, and one time he held the elevator for me, but this was a city. People came and went. Faces blurred.

“Hey, 4C,” he’d slurred, unsteady on his feet.

“Nicolette,” I said.

“Nicolette,” he repeated. “Trevor.” The man beside him looked embarrassed on his behalf. “And this is Everett. You look like you need a drink. Come on, be neighborly.”

I thought the neighborly thing would’ve been to learn my name a year ago, when I moved in, but I wanted that drink. I wanted to feel the distance between there and here; I needed space from the nine-hour car ride home.

Trevor pushed open his door as I walked toward them. The man beside him stuck out his hand and said, “Everett,” as if Trevor’s introduction hadn’t counted.

By the time I left, I’d told Everett about moving my dad, and he’d said it was the right thing. Had told him about the flat and the rain and everything I wanted to do over the summer, while I was off. By the time I stopped talking, I felt lighter, more at ease—which could’ve been the vodka, but I liked to think it was Everett—and Trevor was passed out on the sofa beside us.

“Oh. I should go,” I’d said.

“Let me walk you back,” Everett had said.

My head was light as we walked in silence, and then my hand was on the doorknob and he was still nearby, and what were the grown-up rules for this? “Want to come in?”

He didn’t answer, but he followed me in. Froze in the galley kitchen, which looked out into the rest of my studio loft, one room with high windows and sheer curtains hanging from the exposed pipes, segregating my bedroom. But I could see my bed through them—unmade, inviting—and I knew he could, too.

“Wow,” he said. It was the furniture, I was sure. Pieces I’d mined from thrift stores and flea markets and had stripped down and repainted in bold colors to match. “I feel like I’m Alice in Wonderland.”

I slid off my shoes, leaned against the kitchen counter. “Ten bucks says you’ve never read it.”

He smiled and opened my refrigerator, pulling out a bottle of water. “Drink me,” he said, and I laughed.

Then he pulled out a business card, placed it on the counter, leaned forward, and brushed his lips against mine before backing away. “Call me,” he said.

And I did.



* * *



THE DRIVE THROUGH VIRGINIA had turned endless, with its white farmhouses in the hills and the bales of hay dotting the surrounding grass. Then the pass through the mountains—guardrails and signs issuing warnings to turn on the fog lights—and the static as the radio stations cut in and out. The longer I drove, the slower I seemed to go. Relativity, I thought.

The pace was different back home. People didn’t move as fast, didn’t change too much over the course of the decade. Cooley Ridge, holding you to the person you’d always been. When I pulled off the highway, went down the ramp, and hit the main drag, I bet I’d still find Charlie Higgins or someone like him leaning against the beat-up side of the CVS. Bet I’d still find Christy Pote pining for my brother, and my brother pretending not to notice, even though they went ahead and got married to other people.

Maybe it was because of the humidity and the way we had to fight our way through it, like syrup sticking to the bottom of our feet, sweet and viscous. Maybe it was from living so close to the mountains—a thousand years in the making, the slow shift of plates under the earth, the trees that have been here since I was born and would be here when I was gone.