All the Missing Girls(8)

But then a hand gripped me—“I said I’m leaving,” and I yanked my arm away.

But it wasn’t security. It was Daniel. He grabbed me, solid and forceful, and hit me. He hit me across the face with a closed fist, and the impact knocked me off my feet onto my side, my arm twisted on the ground between my stomach and the dirt.

Shock and pain, fear and shame, they all felt like the same thing in my memory, all tangled up with the taste of blood and dirt. He’d never hit me before. Not even when we were little kids, really. Ten years later and that moment hangs between us in every interaction, in every passive-aggressive text message and ignored phone call.

And later that night, sometime between the fair closing and six A.M., Corinne disappeared, and everything that had happened that day took on new weight, new meaning. In the weeks that followed, the potential for death became palpable. It was all around us, intangible yet suffocating, existing in every different permutation of events. She could always be dead, in a thousand different ways.

Maybe she left because her father abused her. Maybe that’s why her mother divorced him and left town a year later.

Or maybe it was the boyfriend, Jackson, because it’s usually the boyfriend, and they’d been fighting. Or the guy she was flirting with at the fair whom none of us knew—the one at the hot dog stand. The one who Bailey swore had been watching us.

Or maybe she stuck her thumb out for a ride home, in her too-short skirt and her long-sleeved, gauzy top, and maybe a stranger passing through town took her, used her, left her.

Maybe she just left. That’s what the cops finally decided. She was eighteen—legally, an adult—and she’d had enough of this place.

What happened, the cops asked, in those hours, with all of you? Lay bare your secrets, the Who and the What and the Why, between the hours of ten P.M. and six A.M. The same cops who broke up our parties but then drove us home instead of calling our parents. The same cops who dated our friends and drank beer with our brothers or fathers. And those secrets—the Where were we between ten P.M. and six A.M., the What were we doing, the Why—they wouldn’t keep with those cops. Not at the bar, not in the bed, not in this town.

By the time the people from the state arrived to help out, it was too late. We’d already turned inward, already had our theories set, already believed what we needed to believe.

The official line: Corinne last existed to everyone who knew her just inside the entrance to the fair, and from there, she disappeared.

But she didn’t, really. There was more. A piece for each of us that we kept hidden away.

For Daniel, she disappeared from outside the fair, behind the ticket booth.

For Jackson, from the parking lot of the caverns.

And for me, she faded to nothing from a curve of the winding road on the way back to Cooley Ridge.

We were a town full of fear, searching for answers. But we were also a town full of liars.



* * *



THE CAFETERIA OF GRAND Pines is a great deception—hardwood floors and dark-linen-covered tables better suited for a restaurant instead of a long-term rehab facility. A piano in the corner, though it seems to be more for decoration, and faint classical music playing in the background during dinner. The food, I’ve heard, is the best in any rehab facility in the South—well, that’s what Daniel was told when he picked this place, as if that should make him feel better and make me feel better, by proxy. Don’t worry, Dad, we’ll visit. And the food is to die for.

Today the nurse near reception escorted me into the room, and I caught sight of Dad at a corner table for two. His eyes slid over the nurse and me, then refocused on his fork twirling in the pasta.

“He didn’t tell us you were coming or we would’ve reminded him to wait,” the nurse said, her mouth scrunched up in worry.

Dad looked up as she walked me to the table and opened his mouth like he was about to say something, but the nurse spoke first, her smile practiced and contagious—my own and Dad’s stretching in return.

“Patrick, your daughter’s here. Nicolette,” she said, facing me, “it’s been so nice seeing you again.”

“Nic,” I said to the nurse. My heart squeezed in my chest as I waited, hoping the name caught, contagious as a smile.

“Nic,” Dad repeated. His fingers drummed on the table, slowly, one, two, three, one, two, three—and then something seemed to click. The drumming sped up, onetwothree, onetwothree. “Nic.” He smiled. He was here.

“Hi, Dad.” I sat across from him and reached for his hand. God, it had been a long time. A year since we’d been in the same room. Calls, for a time, when he’d drift in and out of lucidity, until Daniel said they were making him too agitated. And then just letters, my picture enclosed. But here he was now. Like an older version of Daniel but softer, from age and a lifelong appreciation for fast food and liquor.

He closed his hand around mine and squeezed. He was always good at this part. At the physical affection, the outward displays of good-fatherhood. Hugs when he stumbled in late at night, half drunk. Hand squeezes when we needed groceries but he couldn’t pull himself out of bed. Hand squeeze, take my credit card, and that should make up for it.

His eyes drifted to my hand, and he tapped the back of my ring finger. “Where is it?”

Inwardly, I cringed. But I smiled at Dad, glad he’d remembered this detail. It made me happy to know he remembered things I told him in my letters. He wasn’t losing his mind, he was just lost within it. There was a difference. I lived in there. Truth lived in there.