All the Missing Girls(61)
* * *
I SEE A CORINNE every year. Can pick her out from the other side of my desk. The strong-willed, the cruel, the worshipped. The sad, sad girl sketched in pencil that you see only when you remove the people surrounding her.
Don’t remove them.
Please. Don’t.
She’s mean, but she loves you, I want to tell them. Wait it out, look closer.
I see the long sleeves and I know what’s underneath.
The uneaten lunch tray, ignored as she cuts someone down.
The boys she pushes away over and over, hoping they’ll come back, because they can’t get too close. She can’t let them.
I want to call her into my office for no reason at all—ignore the one struggling with too much school pressure, or parents getting divorced, or the one literally starving for attention. I want this girl, who doesn’t show up in my files. I want to call her in just so she knows, as they grow up, and as everyone abandons her—as they inevitably will—that I am here.
This time I am here.
* * *
TYLER CALLED, JARRING ME awake just as I’d drifted to sleep. His name on the display, and there he was, an image in my mind, safe and nearby. “Hello? Tyler?” I pushed myself out of bed, walked down the hall in case he was in his truck out front, underneath the steady drizzle.
“Hey, Nic.”
“You’re okay? You’re home?” The night was dark, and I didn’t see any sign of Tyler.
“Yeah. Jackson said you were worried.”
“He was worried. I mean, I was, too. Where were you?”
“Taking care of some stuff.”
“Why’d you leave your phone?”
A pause like I should know better. “Forgot it.”
I hated that Tyler was lying to me. We weren’t supposed to lie to each other. We might not say all of what we were thinking, but we never lied—I’d made him promise that. “Tyler,” I said. “Talk to me. Please. I thought you were hurt. I thought . . .”
I shifted uncomfortably in the silence that followed.
“I went to Mississippi,” he said, his voice quick and hushed. Without his phone, the unspoken understanding.
“To her father’s place?”
“I just wanted to check for myself. No sign of Annaleise,” he said. “No sign of anything.”
I stayed on the phone, listening to him breathe.
Eventually, he broke the silence. “You were right,” he said. “We need some space.”
I felt him drifting even further as we spoke. “Tyler—”
“Do you need anything, Nic?” Like a professional courtesy.
What did I really need? From him? For him. “Just to know you’re okay.”
“I’m okay,” he said. “See you ’round, Nic.”
* * *
THERE WAS SOMETHING BOTH familiar and discomforting about the rain here. In the city, it hit the windows and streets and flooded the gutters, like it was encroaching on us. It caused traffic jams and made apartment lobbies too slippery. But here, the rain was just another part of the landscape. Like it was the thing that lived here and we were merely visitors.
It made me feel small and temporary. Made me imagine my mother in this very house, hearing this very rain. The same water molecules, recycled and replaying, like the circular diagram in science class. And before that, my grandparents buying this land, building this house from the ground up, standing in front of this window, listening to the same thing. Some religions believe time is cyclical, my father had said. That there are repeating ages. But to others, time is God. A gift for us to stretch out and exist in.
It was a comfort to me, the sound of my father’s voice, trying to make sense of things.
Because the thing about standing here in the middle of the mountains with the rain coming down, in a house your grandfather built, is that it’s too easy to notice how insignificant you are.
How quickly you might go from something to nothing.
How one moment you can be a girl laughing in a field of sunflowers, and the next, a haunting face on a poster in a storefront window.
How terrifying, empty and hollow, and then: how absolving.
I brought Tyler outside in the rain once. Asked him, “Do you feel it?” Laced my fingers with his and waited for his whispered “Yes.” He could’ve been talking about anything—the cold on his face, the rainwater in his shoes, the sky whispering to him about love and loneliness and me. But I liked to believe he felt the same. That he was the person who always understood.
I tried to get back to sleep. I lay in bed and closed my eyes, concentrating on the sound of the rain on the roof—hoping it might keep my mind empty, lull me into a gentle oblivion.
But Cooley Ridge was talking to me with each drop, nudging me awake.
Keep your eyes open. Look.
Time can weave around and show you things if you let it. Maybe this was how. Maybe Cooley Ridge was trying to show me. Time was trying to explain things.
Tick-tock.
The Day Before
DAY 7
The house looked brighter, more alive, with the fresh coat of paint that Laura had picked out—pale almond, she’d called it. But the furniture had been pulled away from the walls and sat at unnatural angles, haphazardly covered with sheets of plastic, giving the whole downstairs a fun-house feel. I must’ve grown immune to the smell of paint sometime during the night. It wasn’t until I stepped out to toss the plastic in the trash and went back inside that it hit me—the wall of fumes, sticky and suffocating—that no open windows could alleviate. We needed to run the air, to circulate everything through the filters. We needed the damn air-conditioning.