Lock Every Door(22)

She caused and healed so much. Scraped knees, mosquito bites, broken hearts.

Jules and Jane. Always together.

Until, all of a sudden, we weren’t.

“I left Boston two years ago,” Ingrid tells me. “I came here to New York. I forgot to mention that earlier. The New York part. The less said about that, the better. So it was off to Seattle, where I waitressed a bit. So awful. All those overcaffeinated assholes with their special orders. This summer I went to Virginia and got a job bartending at a beach bar. Then it was back here. Silly me thought it would pan out this time. It didn’t. Like, at all. I had literally no idea where to go next when I saw the ad for the Bartholomew. The rest is history.”

Just hearing about it all gives me something akin to jet lag. So many places in such a short amount of time.

“And how did you end up at the Bartholomew?” Ingrid sits up and pats the spot on the bench beside her. “Tell me everything.”

I take a seat and say, “There’s not too much to tell. I mean, other than losing my job and my boyfriend on the same day.”

Ingrid displays the same stricken look she had when asking about stitches. “He died?”

“Just his heart,” I say. “If he ever had one.”

“Why do boys totally suck? I’m starting to think it might be ingrained in them. Like, they’re taught at a young age that they can be assholes because most women will let them get away with it. That’s the reason I left New York the first time. A stupid, stupid boy.”

“He break your heart?”

“Crushed it,” Ingrid says. “But now here I am.”

“What about your family?” I say.

“I don’t have any.” Ingrid examines her fingernails, which are painted the same shade of blue as the tips of her hair. “I mean, yes, I had a family. Obviously. But they’re gone now.”

Hearing that word—gone—jolts my heart for a few swift beats.

“Mine, too,” I say. “Now it’s just me, even though I have a sister. Or had one. I don’t really know anymore.”

I don’t intend to say it. The words simply slip out, unprompted. But I feel better now that they’ve been spoken. It seems right that Ingrid knows the two of us are in the same boat.

“She’s missing?” she says.

“Yes.”

“For how long?”

“Eight years.” It’s hard to believe it’s been that long. The day it happened remains so vivid in my memory that it feels like only hours ago. “I was seventeen.”

“What happened?”

“According to the police, Jane ran away. According to my father, she was abducted. And according to my mother, she was most likely murdered.”

“What’s your theory?” Ingrid says.

“I don’t have one.”

To me, it doesn’t matter what actually happened to Jane. All I care about is the fact that she’s gone.

And that, if her departure was intentional, she never bothered to say goodbye.

And that I’m mad at her and I miss her, and that her disappearance left a hole in my heart no one will be able to fill.

It was February when it happened. A cold, gray month of constant clouds but little snow. Jane had just finished her shift at McIndoe’s, the local pharmacy that sat on the last thriving corner of our town’s dour Main Street. She had worked as a cashier there since graduating from high school a year and a half earlier. Saving money for college, she told us, even though we all knew she wasn’t the college type.

The last known person to have seen her was Mr. McIndoe himself, who watched from the store’s front window as a black Volkswagen Beetle pulled up to the curb. Jane, who had been waiting beneath the pharmacy’s blue-and-white-striped awning, hopped inside.

Willingly, Mr. McIndoe told anyone who would listen. There wasn’t a struggle. Nor was the person behind the wheel a stranger to Jane. She gave the driver a little wave through the window before opening the passenger door.

Mr. McIndoe never got a good look at the person behind the wheel. He only saw the back of Jane’s blue cashier’s smock as she entered the car.

The Beetle drove away.

Jane was gone.

In the days following her disappearance, it became clear that none of Jane’s friends drove a black Beetle. Nor did the friends of those friends. Whoever was behind the wheel was a stranger to everyone but Jane.

But black Beetles aren’t uncommon. Motor vehicle records revealed there were thousands registered in the state of Pennsylvania alone. And Mr. McIndoe didn’t think to make a note of the car’s plates. He had no reason to. When asked by the police, he couldn’t remember a single letter or number. A lot of people in town held that against poor Mr. McIndoe, as if his weak memory was the only thing keeping Jane from being found.

My parents were more forgiving. A few weeks after the disappearance, when it was looking more and more unlikely that Jane would be found, my father stopped by the store to tell Mr. McIndoe there were no hard feelings.

I didn’t know this at the time. It was told to me a few years later, by Mr. McIndoe himself, at my parents’ funeral.

That, incidentally, was the day I realized Jane would never return. Until then, I had kept a sliver of hope that, if she had simply run away, she might find her way back home. But my parents’ deaths didn’t go unnoticed. It made the news. And if Jane had heard about it, then I thought she’d surely come back to see them buried.