Last Girl Ghosted(61)

Jones tilts back in his chair, stares up at the ceiling as if it is all playing out for him there.

“I made a lot of mistakes,” he says. “We should have done things differently. I’m sorry.”

“This is not about blame, all these years later.”

He draws in and releases a deep breath. Then he gets up and walks over to a freestanding cabinet and withdraws a thick file, brings it back to his desk. It has one word scrawled on it: Greenwood.

I’m shaking. And there’s a volcanic brew in my center.

That night. It was buried so deep. A blessed amnesia can set in after trauma. You move away from the event and it takes on dreamlike qualities. It recedes from the day-to-day. But it’s not gone, just submerged. When it surfaces, it brings up powerful emotions. Rage. Terror. Sadness like a well with no bottom.

“I’m trying to piece things together. That’s why I’m back here,” I say. “Can we talk about it? About what happened?”

He opens the file, flips through the papers there. From where I’m sitting, I see some official records, some copies of newspaper articles, some photographs. But I don’t move in for a closer look.

“What we did—it wasn’t protocol. It wasn’t legal,” he says, voice low. “We should have called Child Protective Services, but I just couldn’t see my way to that. You were so young, seemed so fragile, catatonic with grief. You’d lost everything.”

I’m back there, but the memories are disjointed, in pieces. Jones Cooper held me up, a strong arm around my shoulders, ushering me away from the sounds of people shouting. Shock had me disoriented, unable to piece together the things I’d seen, done, lost. My ears were ringing, breath tight in my chest. He wrapped me in a blanket, put me in the back seat of a big SUV, made a call. His voice was muffled; I couldn’t hear his words.

My brother, I said when he came back to me. My mom.

He rested a heavy hand on my shoulder, his face grim but kind. Hang in there, kid. We’re going to take care of you.

I don’t remember anything until Maggie came for me, sat beside me in the back seat, then ushered me to another vehicle.

This is the worst night of your life, she said. But you’re going to get through it.

There was a drive away from my family, my home. I wept and wept and wept. Please, I remember begging. Let me go home. I thought it was a nightmare, that I would wake up. I didn’t.

“Our plan was to call CPS in the morning, after you’d had some rest, some time in a safe place,” Jones went on. “But later that night when I saw the list of the dead, your name was on it. A mistake.”

I don’t say anything, just listen to the sound of my memories: gunfire. The screaming. My father roaring my name. The sharp scent of smoke and cordite.

“I had an idea. I wondered if we could do better for you than to have you go into a cold, unfeeling system. Both Maggie and I have seen too many kids get lost that way.”

He shrugs, as if he’s not sure now that it was the right thing, knowing that it’s far too late to change it.

I remember the next morning, sitting at their sun-drenched kitchen table, a bowl of oatmeal uneaten before me. The day outside was cruelly blue and beautiful, and my life was in ruins. I was stunned, stoic, out of tears, sadness hardened into a shell.

Jones Cooper sat at the table and gave me a choice. Keep my name and be taken away into the foster care system. Or change my name and the Coopers would find me a safe home, and help me heal and create a new life. I chose to stay.

I know now that it was only possible to do this because of how isolated my family had been. I wasn’t known in The Hollows, nor were the other people up on the property. In town they called us hill people, strange, mysterious, to be avoided.

“Maggie disagreed but she went along with it,” Jones says now. “We can never hide from the truth, or some such. You know Maggie.”

Outside the wind has picked up, rattles the window frame.

“The girl whose body they mistook for yours, she was the same age, her whole family gone. No one in town knew her or her parents. So I called in a favor with a guy in Records.”

He says it like it’s nothing. Truly, it was fraud. Maybe it couldn’t have happened anywhere else.

But this is The Hollows and the usual rules don’t apply. This town takes care of its own. Sometimes the wrong thing is the right thing here. The Hollows will keep your secrets.

“We gave you her birth certificate, her Social Security number,” says Jones. “We let you choose your own name, and we legally changed it. We never filed a death certificate for her. But we filed one for Robin Carson. So Robin Carson died that day.”

“Doesn’t a minor need a guardian to change her name?”

He gives me a look. I take his point. I don’t ask for any more details about how he did what he did.

It strikes me as terribly sad. A girl, just like me, gone without a trace. We illegally erased her name and it’s as though she never existed. Funny how our whole identity comes down to a few sheets of paper, how a sleight of hand, a forged document, can erase an existence, create a new one.

“I chose Wren Greenwood.” A bird name, like my mother would have wanted. The name my imaginary friend gave me. And the image that gave me the most peace, green trees moving in the wind.

He offers a thoughtful nod. “It suits you.”