17 & Gone(20)
“Me either,” I said.
“I could have helped her,” my mom kept on. “Fiona. I could’ve done something. If I’d known.”
I could see how she took it in, what happened to the girl who’d once lived next door, knotting it up into her own little ball of knots she carried around inside, lifting it out every once in a while to dwell. She was studying to be a psychologist at the university where she worked; it would take her years to get the degree, as she could only take a couple night classes a semester with her tuition reimbursement while she worked days in an office on campus, but I believed she’d make it. I believed she’d get to help people.
Still, I don’t think she could have helped Fiona Burke.
“You two were close,” my mom said.
“We weren’t close. I hardly knew her.”
“It wasn’t your fault, you know. Not by any stretch of the imagination was that your fault.”
She was thinking about the night Fiona Burke left, and then I was thinking of it, and then there it was, that almost-nine-year-old memory, itchy and oily like wool.
“I know it’s not my fault,” I said.
Fiona Burke had been babysitting me the night she ran away, that’s fact. Her parents didn’t come home that night, so my mom was the one who found me after, and she never once blamed me for not stopping the girl from getting in that truck, mainly because she didn’t know about the truck.
Besides, I couldn’t have stopped Fiona Burke, I told myself. She’d been watching the road for a good long time.
Once on it, I don’t think there was anything that could have turned her back around.
So it was no one’s fault. There was nothing I could have done.
This is when the idea came to me, featherlight and drifting through the room like tufts of Billie’s shedding fur. What if that’s why all this was happening—
starting with my van breaking down on the side of the road so I could find that flyer—was it so I could do something for someone else? For Abby?
My mom touched her cheek, absently, as if she knew the exact spot where her beauty mark could be found, the distinct circle so black it was almost blue, on the left side of her cheek, beside her lips.
She put her fingernail to it like it itched.
Her beauty mark wasn’t inked on in a tattoo parlor; she was born with it.
That’s why it was my favorite piece on her.
It was then that Billie hissed at no one, as if someone had entered the room who only she could see. And then, when my mom turned her attention back to her studies, I saw them, the twinned shimmering outlines in my living room, though it looked like they didn’t know they were in my living room, that they didn’t see me or us or even our furniture, since they stood in the same space already occupied by the couch.
My mom looked up because I was staring. “What?” she said. “Still thinking of Fiona?”
“No,” I said. My eyes weren’t on Fiona; they were on the girl beside her.
I now knew for sure that Fiona was connected to Abby and Abby to her, somehow. They were reaching out from wherever they were now, trying to let me know.
They stood wavering like a two-headed mirage in the space where the couch was. Then, when my mom reached out to turn on the reading lamp, like shadows do when the light hits, they disappeared.
— 14 — THERE was a witness. The officer said someone saw Abby Sinclair ride the bike off the campus of Lady-of-the-Pines and into the night. He didn’t say who the witness was. Of course he didn’t; why would he tell me? But Abby did.
It was another girl—a kid. She was one of Abby’s campers in Cabin 3, and happened to be the only soul who knew that Abby would sneak off after lights-out, and who she’d go to meet. This girl carried around the secret about Abby and Luke for weeks, first because she got up to pee in the middle of the night and caught Abby tiptoeing into the cabin with a blazing smile on her face that illuminated her teeth even in the darkness. And then because Abby wanted someone to confide in, and she believed that this girl—with her frizzy braids and her thick glasses, her lack of friends and her innocent sense of devotion—would never betray Abby to the counselors.
And so, the girl ended up witnessing more than the last bike ride. Nights previous, she’d seen Abby slip back in beneath the mosquito netting with her eyes full of stars, her lipstick smeared, and the grass stains riding up the back of her shirt. The girl wasn’t there herself when it happened, but she heard it recounted later, how Abby and Luke almost did it. Almost. This girl was young enough to wonder, for hours on end, in vivid-if-anatomically-impossible detail, during games with balls she was supposed to be in the outfield to catch, just what “almost” could even mean.
It wasn’t so much a premonition but simple curiosity that made her follow Abby that night. The faint slap-slap-slap of Abby’s flip-flops were what had woken her, as if Abby were being careless and begging to be caught.
When the cabin’s front door swished closed and the shadow of her favorite counselor-in-training sneaked past the window, she slipped out of her bed and tiptoed outside. She felt the crunch of leaves and pebbled dirt beneath her bare feet and wished she’d thought to bring shoes. Once she saw Abby make a run for it past the mess hall, where the counselors had gathered to be loud and reckless now that the campers in their charge were asleep, she knew she’d have to run, too. And again she longed for shoes.