17 & Gone(28)

“No, she’s not,” Fiona Burke said— though I was. I’d turned from the crook in the wall and was peeking up at him.

His mustache made his upper lip appear to be rotting and his eyes were smaller than natural in his already small head.

While I was looking at him, he was looking at me.

“Maybe she should come along,” the little man said then in an odd voice, like there were unspoken things below the surface, murky and confusing things he couldn’t wait to let out. His voice was betraying him.

“But what would we do with her?”

Fiona Burke joked.

“Don’t worry,” he said in that voice again. “I could think up a few things.”

She

caught

something

in

his

expression and made a strange squeaking sound in her throat. A sound you’d emit only when alone, behind closed doors, where no one else could hear it. I heard it. So did he.

The little man laughed in response.

“She stays here,” Fiona Burke said.

I didn’t know then that she was speaking up for me. Protecting me. I didn’t know a lot of things I know now.

The big man had returned, and there was a new sense of urgency, someone who’d called, somewhere they had to be. The little man became distracted by all of this and it was when his back was turned that Fiona Burke did what she did. She had me by the elbow, and then when I was too slow, she had both my arms and was dragging me out of the dining room and down the hall. She hissed into my ear to stay quiet and then she shoved me into a hall closet.

It was dark and thick with the heady scent of what I’d later discover was wool. The wool was from her parents’

coats, decades’ worth of coats, and there were pointy objects that were the bony prongs of her parents’ umbrellas.

She’d jammed the lock from the outside, or she’d known that the knob would stick. I don’t know. Either way, she’d locked me in.

I couldn’t hear much of what happened outside the wall of coats that confined me in that dark, small space.

When they were near the front door, mere steps from the coat closet, I could hear the little man’s voice—it boomed bigger than you’d expect from his body —slithering under the door and through the layers of wool, causing a cool line of sweat to trickle anxiously beneath my pajama shirt and down my spine.

I would not scream to be let out of the closet, and I was afraid to try the knob again to see if it would turn. I wouldn’t make a sound with him so close. Fiona Burke would come back for me when he wasn’t looking and undo the lock to set me free. She’d do that before she went away in that truck with them. She would.

The little man was asking for me.

“Where’d she go?” he was saying. “I didn’t scare her away, did I? Call for her. Tell her I won’t hurt her. Tell her to come back.”

Fiona Burke refused. She must have been standing very close to the closet, but she didn’t open it. We were there together, one thin slab of wood between us, like our hands were touching, palm to palm. I didn’t understand then what he could have wanted from me. All I knew is she was determined not to let him find me.

“She ran,” I heard her say through the door. “Out into the backyard, stupid kid.

She’ll come back when she gets cold— she’s only got those pajamas on. Let’s just go?”

“Oh, yeah? She’s back there?” the little man said, and he must have made a move in the direction of the backyard because his voice got lower with distance. But then the big man spoke—he said very few words, but when he spoke everyone listened—and he was saying they had to leave.

I kept quiet. My mind was flashing on Fiona Burke’s eyes, how wild they’d looked beneath the wings of shellacked black mascara as she hurried me out of the dining room. She’d been frightened of what could happen to me, and that’s what frightened me.

At some point they left, drove away.

At some point Fiona Burke said good-bye to the house where she was raised, turned her back on all of us, and took off.

She didn’t leave a note. In a way, I guess I was the note.

Only, she’d stuffed me in the coat closet, and I was too short to reach the string that would turn the light on—and it was too dark for me to even see if there was a string.

I don’t know if I could have saved her if I’d opened my mouth and told someone—her parents, the police, my mom, anyone—about the men she went with.

But—looking back on it now—I am sure of one thing. She’d saved me.

— 19 — SPENDING the entirety of a night in a small, dark space ruins all understanding of time. A minute expands into an hour’s worth of seconds. Air rebreathed is made of less and less air until you feel like you’re choking on your own spit. The panic sets in and you think you’ll never get out, that no one can hear because no one is there, that the hot, scratchy, heavy walls all around you will keep you forever, and when you hear someone yelling your name you don’t know who it is at first. You don’t recognize your own mother’s voice; you can’t imagine that you’re safe now, that you’ll be let out now, that there aren’t two strange men and a cruel flame-haired girl crouching on the other side of that door waiting to take you away.

— 20 — I don’t know how many hours it was before the shock of light hit me and I could breathe air. I must have made a noise inside the coat closet because, soon, someone was pounding and I was pounding back and she was pulling and I was pushing and the door got unstuck and the light was in my face and she was there.