Last Girl Ghosted(42)

Her feed is simple, mostly black-and-white images of city views, strange objects—an armless doll in a trashcan, an abandoned shoe in the street, a stray dog curled around a litter of puppies in a cardboard box—or isolated trails, vistas. No words, other than her bio. You create yourself in ever-changing shapes/unsung, unmourned, undescribed/like a forest we never knew.

Unmourned. Rilke again.

Her final posts are the ones that have hooked me. They are portraits of places I know well. A graveyard. A wooded trailhead. An old house abandoned and fallen into disrepair. A simple chapel.

Her last images are of The Hollows, the place where I grew up, where my father grew up. I guess in some ways, it’s home.

I shower and dress—jeans, black cashmere sweater, boots, my leather jacket. I throw some clothes, toiletries in a knapsack, pack up my laptop.

Down in the kitchen, I brew a triple espresso. I drink my coffee by the window, looking for my blackbird friend. But the seed on the sill is untouched and he doesn’t come.

Are we going home? Robin wants to know. Today she wears Jay’s sweatshirt, torn jeans, and scuffed sneakers. She’s not there, this ghost of my childhood. But she is. I don’t answer her. She lingers by the door for a moment, then fades away.

I think about waking Jax, telling her the whole ugly story. But she’ll want to go with me and I need to be alone. Or it seems as if I should take on this journey alone. So I leave her a note instead:

I’ll be back. Take care of Dear Birdie.
She’ll know what to do.

I slip out the door, set the alarm, and head toward the garage where I keep my car.

The truth is that since Bailey Kirk said it yesterday, maybe before that, when I found the article among your things, I knew I would have to go back there. That I would have to go home.

My breath comes out in white clouds as I move quickly up the street, huddling against the chill, passing the other pretty stoops, then turning onto the busy commercial street. It’s already hopping at this early hour, people clutching coffees and cell phones, heading for the subway, joggers, moms with strollers, yogis with mats in slings across their bodies.

A guy with dreadlocks and a blue jumpsuit has his earphones in and doesn’t say a word as I hand him my ticket. He disappears to retrieve my car from the mysterious depths of urban automobile storage, then returns with it to hand me my keys.

“Hey,” he says, watching me with a look I can’t read. “Be careful.”

I shake my head. “Sorry?”

But he turns away, goes back to his tiny office. Was he talking to me? Or was he on the phone talking to someone else? I keep looking in his direction for a moment, the words echoing. When did even the simplest exchanges become so confounding?

Maybe it’s me.

It’s definitely me.

I get in my car, close the door, feel the quiet leather interior ensconce me. It’s a cocoon. My shoulders ease, breath comes easier. I pull out into traffic and start to drive.

A car, you said. How does that work with your whole Miss-Frugal-I-take-public-transportation thing?

It doesn’t, I guess. We’re all full of little inconsistences, aren’t we, Adam?

But when it all becomes too much, sometimes I need to get out of the city—not on foot, on bike, or on the train. When my many secrets, the noise inside and outside my head, all the desperate people out there who need Dear Birdie’s advice are a wave threatening to wash me away, my vehicle becomes a life raft, a little ship I get in to float away.

Dear Birdie,
I found my birth mother through one of those genetic testing services, but she doesn’t want to meet me. She’s kept me a secret all her life, has a new family, other children. I feel so alone, knowing that I have a family who might never know me. What should I do?
Dear Birdie,
I can’t forgive my father for driving drunk and being responsible for the accident that killed my mother and my brother. He’s in jail and I can’t bring myself to visit him even though we’re all we have left.
Dear Birdie,
I can’t shake this feeling that my life isn’t my life. That I’m a fraud and all the things I post on Instagram are just a shallow version of who I should have been. And my relationships are all weirdly competitive and I hate my job. Do other people feel this way? How do I find my true self?
Some of them I can help. Some I can’t. Accepting the difference is the hard part.

I know there are happy, well-adjusted people out there. People living authentic lives that have meaning and purpose. People who have deep and healthy relationships, weathering life’s many blows with strength and faith, coming out the other side of pain and tragedy stronger and wiser, with more compassion for themselves and others.

But Dear Birdie doesn’t hear from those people. Ever. People come to her for help. And having walked a dark terrain, she is uniquely qualified to guide people back toward the light.

Isn’t she?

Sometimes. But she’s not feeling it on this gray misty morning, where winter is settling into the air, and you’ve disappeared, and the past is digging itself out of its grave.

Today, I’m as lost as everyone else. Maybe I should write a letter to Dear Birdie.

Dear Birdie,
I have run away from the darkness of my past and created a successful life. But there are so many layers to me. The person I was then. The one I am now to do my job. There’s the person my few friends know. And then, there was a man I thought I could love, who is also buried deep, not who I thought he was at all. In fact, he might be a monster. Just like my father.