17 & Gone(14)

“Really,” I said. “Who did you say it was?”

“My manager. At work,” he said again. He waited tables at Casa Lupita, a Mexican restaurant across the river, and it was true he never knew his schedule until the week before. “Next week I’m on Tuesday night, Thursday night, Saturday day.”

“Okay,” I said. “Right.”

Something told me not to believe him.

And that something was irrational, and that something was unexplainable, and that something had never entered my mind before this night, and yet it was there, related to everyone and anyone.

Even the boy I’d lost my virginity to, the one I’d talked about staying with after graduation, into college, which was as far ahead as we’d ever let ourselves think into the future. Even Jamie. Even him.

Jamie’s neck snapped around, and there was a light in his eyes I didn’t recognize, like I’d struck a match and lit him up.

“What is going on here?” he said.

“I really don’t know,” I answered honestly. My voice felt so cold.

“But something is,” he said. “With us.

First bailing on the restaurant. Then this place, this thing with that girl you never even told me about. Now—whatever the f*ck this is.”

He didn’t wait for me to confirm or deny it. He slammed the van door, got back into his own car, and drove off. He made a left down Dorsett Road and let the trees steal his taillights and the wind steal any sound of his engine and the night steal my chance to fix it, not that I knew how to, or was even sure I would.

It happened so fast that I sat there waiting for him to come back, and when he didn’t I was surprised, and then that surprise sunk lower and lower until it turned into a hard, black coal inside me that harbored three leaden words: Told.

You. So.

I didn’t have him when I needed him, which meant I didn’t need him at all. He left me alone so I could be free to find what came next.

Though the truth is, I wasn’t alone.

After he was gone, there was Abby, in the bench seat behind me as if she’d witnessed the whole scene and had been holding her tongue until she was sure she had me to herself.

Our eyes met in the rearview.

In this instant, a thought planted itself in my head in a voice I didn’t recognize.

It’s good you got rid of him, it said.

— 9 — I was standing in the middle of the road where Abby Sinclair went missing.

Jamie had left minutes ago, or an hour ago; all I knew was that he’d left.

I’d pulled out of the Lady-of-the-Pines parking lot and turned right, the direction the police officer said Abby had gone.

I’d driven for a short distance looking for a hill, and since this was a mountain road, it wasn’t long before I found one.

I’d decided it could be the hill, it had to be, the one Abby had coasted down on the bicycle the night she disappeared. I pulled over, wanting to feel my feet on the asphalt she’d traveled that July night.

I made myself walk the center of the road, following the decline, and as I did I imagined the speed of her bike picking up, how she stopped having to pedal, how she began gliding down, faster and faster, down and down . . . but to what?

As I descended to the bottom of the hill, the pines rustled, and it sounded like they were whispering again, spilling secrets I couldn’t understand. They held their breath as one, keeping still, when I got close.

I remembered how, in the rearview mirror the morning Abby showed me her story, it came to a stop at the bottom of the hill. I wanted to see what went on after the end, when there was no one watching.

The narrow road was flat here, a pocket of darkness without streetlights or the glow of any nearby houses. There was nothing here. Just the shallow gully running alongside the stretch of pine trees on the left side, but nothing to separate the pines from the road on the right. Even so, the forest appeared to be brightly lit—glowing from the recent snowfall. All was quiet; all was alight.

What did I expect to find?

There wasn’t the ghost of Abby herself, ready to talk and spread herself open for the reveal. Not her shimmering figure, standing in the shallow dip of snow to my left maybe, a hand lifted and its fingers slowly curling in to beckon me closer. Not her bicycle—leaned up and rusting against the bristly trunk of a towering pine tree, where the police were too blind to spot it. Not the man who grabbed her—if it was a man—or the car that hit her—if it was a car. Not an answer in a box with a bow on it, left there on the asphalt for me to find.

In fact, standing in the middle of the road told me nothing.

Still, I stepped into the gully, my eyes searching. I bent down, to inspect closer.

Snow was in the way, and any evidence left there in summer would be long washed away or buried, but I kept looking. As if, somehow, I’d find a spot and a feeling would come over me and I’d know.

At some point I happened to turn and look back up the hill.

My van was parked on the side of the road where I’d left it, but what startled me were the bright beams of the headlights on high, cutting through the deep gloom.

I’d left the lights on?

I was sure I hadn’t, was sure I’d turned off the lights and the engine and then gotten out and started walking, but I must have forgotten, because who else would have climbed into the van and flicked on the headlights?