Last Girl Ghosted(68)

Abandoned apartments, cars, cell phones. All of them stepped away from her life, or were taken, not leaving a trace behind, or even a digital trace to follow. They all dropped off the grid.

I am the only one left.

I was probably days away from knowing what happened to the others.

What were you going to ask me?

Adam, if you had asked me to fold up my life and walk away leaving everyone and everything behind. Would I have done it? Would I have followed you, like my mother followed my father? If you had said to me, like he did to her, the world is broken, let’s leave it behind and create another kind of life, would I have gone with you?

I don’t know.

There’s Jax and her family. There’s Dear Birdie and all the people who need her.

My conversation with Jax rings back. Anyone could be Dear Birdie. There’s a certain amount of relief in that idea. Is it true? Maybe anyone can be anyone. Robin Carson can be Emily Stone. Emily Stone can become Wren Greenwood. Wren Greenwood can become Dear Birdie. I have not so much dug a shallow grave for myself, as woven a tangled web of lies and false identities. Am I the spider or the fly?

“Find what you’re looking for?”

His voice moves through me like an electric shock. I turn to see a dark form filling the doorway. For just a second, I think it’s you. And a tsunami of anger, sadness, fear rushes through me. But when he steps closer, I see that it’s Bailey Kirk—bigger and broader than he seemed to me the first time I met him. I hold my ground, won’t give him the satisfaction of a flustered apology.

“No,” I say. “Not at all.”

He moves into the room and shuts the door behind him. He seems unruffled, a slight smile on his face. I don’t suppose, as a PI, you can muster much anger for someone invading your space and rifling through your stuff.

“Yeah,” he says. “Welcome to my world.”

I close the file in my lap, shutting out your face, and look at Bailey. He seats himself on the edge of the bed and rests his hands on his thighs. There’s something solid about him, something comforting and good.

“You know everything there is to know about me,” I say.

“Not everything,” he says gently. “We never know everything about each other, do we?”

Based on what I read in those files, he knows more about my past than anyone. I am seen. Revealed. There’s a kind of relief to that, a tension sheds.

For the first time, the feeling I thought might be love, the weight of my sadness and loss, the sharp edge of my disappointment have all shifted to anger.

“I’ll help you,” I say. “I’ll help you find him.”



thirty-two


The sun is setting outside, the room growing darker. But neither of us gets up to turn on the light. He stays on the bed, and I sit uncomfortably on the stiff desk chair my arms wrapped around my middle.

In the dim of this cheap motel room, I tell Bailey how my father came home from war, moved us from our happy “city” life and out to his family property. How Jay, my mother, and I left everything and everyone we knew behind, because my father wanted us to live off the grid, away from the world of men.

“So, he was a doomsday prepper,” Bailey says.

It has a load, that phrase, a kind of joke inherent in its syllables, evoking crazy people who erroneously predict the apocalypse, who have gone mad because they shed all the things we hold to. But there are all kind of madness. And my father could be forgiven for thinking that the modern world was failing.

“He called himself a ‘collapsist.’”

“A collapsist?”

“He wasn’t preparing for some distant event. He believed the world was already in decline. He said that he joined the army as an idealist and returned as a realist. War, famine, disaster, pestilence—the four horsemen of the apocalypse. According to my father, they’d already arrived.”

Bailey nods, rubs at his chin. “That must have been frightening for a kid, to be waiting for the end of the world.”

“Lots of things are frightening when you’re a kid. My dad—he was a scary guy when he drank. I think I was more afraid of him than I was of the end of the world.”

“So how did you cope?”

I tell him about “Robin,” the girl who came to me in the woods and taught me everything I needed to survive, to become the daughter my father wanted me to be. What was she? An imaginary friend, I suppose. Dr. Cooper says that in the case of childhood trauma, it’s not uncommon for a young person to create a presence, something or someone who comforts and soothes, who eases loneliness, who protects. As we grow older, stronger, we need that presence less and it fades.

“But really it was just the books in the study,” I admit. “And him, my father. He taught me a lot about survival. And I was a decent student. I learned the things he wanted me to know, how to be in on that land. I even wanted to learn it.”

“And what about your mother?”

I close my eyes and conjure her. Her golden hair and kind smile, her indulgence of my imaginary friend who she knew was real to me and an important feature of my adjustment to our new life, her laughter, her warmth.

“She loved him. She thought that the house, nature, the retreat from the madness of modern life would heal him. That he would become again the man she used to love.”