17 & Gone(29)

My mom enveloped me in her arms, frantic. The colorful pattern of prancing, dancing My Little Ponies had sweated onto my skin, and I’d been desperate enough to have to empty my bladder hours before, so I was sticky all over, smelling of sheep and urine, nearly blinded at the shock of light.

I chugged a glass of water, choking up most of it, and then when I found my voice I told my mom that Fiona Burke was the one who’d done this to me.

“Where is she?” she asked, seething.

Her hands left me for a moment to ball into fists.

“Gone,” I said. That’s the only word I could think to call what had happened to my 17-year-old neighbor: She was gone.

“What do you mean, gone?” my mom said. She sparkled in a flurry of rage. I didn’t realize at first that she still had on her work clothes, the kind of outfit she wore when she danced at the club, and that those sequins weren’t the scaly, iridescent texture of her skin.

“Gone,”

I

repeated,

without

embellishment. I meant gone from the house, gone off somewhere with two creepy men I don’t know, but I think, from the way my mom ran around searching, she suspected that Fiona Burke had been hurt, from falling down a set of steep stairs, maybe—or on purpose, by hanging herself off the end of a rope.

Things must have happened after that involving my mom trying to reach the Burkes at the hotel where they were staying in Baltimore, and the police being called, and Fiona Burke’s school picture—with the pearl earrings and the carefully clasped hands—showing up all over the news.

Mr. and Mrs. Burke may have at first wanted to believe she’d been abducted, that she’d never leave home by choice— but the police saw the truth without needing to do any digging. She’d taken her things from her room. Even without a good-bye note, they could see she’d run away.

The last words Fiona Burke had said to me were Stay quiet, okay? And I think I took that command too literally, as if something would happen if I spoke up or even uttered her name.

Keeping my mouth shut all those years meant swallowing information like little kids swallow LEGO pieces, which can have a way of growing like plastic teeth into your organs and never making their way back out. I would let the Burkes search for their daughter for years, blindly, having no idea what she said about them. Or about the two men and what they looked like. Or how I thought I knew where Fiona was headed—she’d said she was getting a ride to LA.

I choked it all down. When I heard her name on the car radio, I told no one.

When the policewoman asked me, and when Mrs. Burke herself asked me, even when my mom asked me—which happened more than once—my mouth stayed wired shut. I revealed none of it.

— 21 — THERE is one last piece that isn’t technically a part of Fiona Burke’s story, though at the time, in the way one memory can latch itself on to another memory and then forever after trail the first one, it felt that way to me. In my mind, the two events were connected.

This would have been weeks after Fiona Burke had run away, months even, though no more than a year. She hadn’t tried to contact her parents, and we didn’t yet know that she’d never reach out to them. She would never place a collect call from a pay phone and ask them to accept the charges. She would never open a free e-mail account to send an anonymous assurance that she was fine. There would be no blank postcard dropped in a mailbox in a city she was only

passing

through.

No

communication. No word.

Until the fire.

I woke in the middle of the night to the piercing scream of the smoke detector, which somehow had been set off by the smoke coming off the house next door.

My mom and I were afraid at first that the smoke was from inside our own house, and we looked for candles and ran to check the stove, but then we looked out the windows. Out there the smoke was thicker, a visible charge in the night, its source a ferocious spot of light over the dividing hedge between the Burkes’ main house and ours.

The fire truck would arrive within minutes and the flames would be doused, damaging only their laundry room and the hallway between that and their kitchen. An electrical fire due to faulty wiring, it was said, not arson.

I knew different.

We watched for some minutes from the windows, my mom and me. Two firemen had forced themselves into the Burkes’ house and pulled them out the door and off their grand front porch. The firemen wrapped the two hunched figures in wool blankets and made them stand at a distance from the smoking house, on the lawn.

Mrs. Burke was wearing slippers, but Mr. Burke’s feet were bare. His pajama pants were too short, and I noticed his hairless, spindly legs and how he favored the left one. We watched them as they watched the east end of their house burn.

We were watching as the fireman went to talk to them.His words washed over Mrs. Burke, and we could see it in her face, how what he said took a very long time to settle, as if she were translating to herself so she could understand, and once she did she let out the cry. We heard it across the hedge that divided their paved driveway from our gravel one. The sound of it made me think of Fiona Burke, wondering if that’s how Mrs. Burke sounded in Baltimore when she got the news that her daughter had gone missing.

We didn’t hear a thing from Mr.

Burke, but we watched him wobble on his bum leg, thin and pale as a sucked-clean toothpick. We were watching as the smoke thinned and no more flames could be made out and as the hoses left the whole side of the house sopping.