17 & Gone(30)

And we were watching as Mrs. Burke’s eyes traveled over the hedge to our house,

perhaps

involuntarily,

remembering one disaster that had been connected with us and now connecting us to another.

“Should we go get them?” I said.

“Ask if they want to come inside?”

But my mom had never forgiven them for the way their daughter had treated me that night, locking me in the coat closet.

She hadn’t known how to confront them, seeing as Fiona had disappeared, but she held it in, and didn’t forget it.

“They’ll be fine,” she said. “The fire’s out. You should go back to bed.”

But she didn’t move toward her bedroom, and I didn’t move for mine. It had come true, what Fiona had threatened with her wet mouth shoved up against my ear. The fire she’d joked about setting in her parents’ house? It had been set.

And though I didn’t know how she’d done it from far away, I was convinced, then and all the more now, that she had.

She’d tried to burn down their house, and she’d failed.

Years passed. Eight years. No more fires, and no letters, and no phone calls.

My mom and I stayed put in the carriage house because the Burkes never once raised our rent. They didn’t adopt another kid. I grew too old to need a babysitter. I entered my junior year in the same high school Fiona Burke had once attended, and I dyed my hair black, the color hers would have been if she hadn’t dyed it flame-red. I turned 17.

And that’s when a missing girl named Abby Sinclair would lure the ghost of Fiona Burke back here to Pinecliff.

When the noise would wake the others.

And it’s when I’d feel the first crack inside me, the fracture that started small, with one name, and then broke off into more names, and more names still, and left me gaping.

If I counted all the girls who ran away at the age of 17, starting with girls who lived close to me and then casting my net wider, spreading out along the East Coast in ever-growing circles, then adding girls who may have met more sinister fates, who didn’t go by choice, whose bodies still had not been found, I’d be nowhere. There’d simply be too many.

Which terrified me.

To know a girl was one, I had to sense it. Something would compel me to stop over a certain page online or in the newspaper microfiche in the library.

There’d be a humming in my ears, a chorus strengthened by a new, added voice. Then the warmth, below my heart, gaining heat until I had to take off the pendant or else it would burn me and leave a lopsided almost-circle of a mark. The edges of the room would swim with shadows, and those shadows had arms and legs and mouths that opened. They had shoulder blades and they had elbows and they had knees.

They came out when I discovered another, to crane their shadowy necks around corners, to see who it might be.

This was how I found Natalie Montesano, 17, of Edgehaven, Vermont, missing for the last seven years. Or, I should say, this was how she found me.

ICE STORM

WREAKS

HAVOC ON





MOUNTAIN


ROADS;





LOCAL


GIRL,

17,





MISSING


Jan. 3, 2006—EDGEHAVEN—

Friday’s heavy snow turned to ice on Saturday and left treacherous driving conditions throughout the high-elevation mountain roads.

There were reports of power outages across the county. In addition, in connection to a car accident on Plateau Road late Saturday, a female Edgehaven Central High School senior, 17, was reported missing.

Witnesses say the girl had been a passenger in a car that collided with the guardrail, but she could not be located in the wreckage. “We can’t help but hope someone came along and pulled her from the car. But she hasn’t been checked into any local hospital and her family hasn’t heard a word,” Sheriff Arnold F.

Wymes said in a statement to the public on Monday. “If she wandered out on her own . . . it’s not likely she’d have survived the elements.” A search is still under way.

The public is asked to report any information to the Edgehaven Police Department. The northern pass of Plateau Road is closed to nonemergency traffic until further notice.

— 22 — THE new girl, Natalie, had inherited the eyes. The ones on her mother’s side, paler than a pair of eyes should be. They looked to be coated in a thick layer of ice, and only if you chipped through would you find the person they belonged to, the girl shivering beneath.

These eyes were exactly like her mother’s,

who

was

serving

two

consecutive life sentences at a women’s correctional facility four hours away, and would never get out, not in her lifetime.

Natalie had not once gone to visit the prison to look into the frigid eyes of the woman responsible for bringing her into the world. Even if those eyes would be held back behind a wall of clouded glass lathered on both sides by the links of the metal cage that encased it. Natalie was afraid it would be like looking off into the far distance, into a future she didn’t want to see. Like mother like daughter, people always said. They assumed, but they should have asked, because looks are deceiving sometimes. Eyes can be.

I first saw Natalie’s eyes for myself on a cold January morning while I was combing out the rat’s nest of my hair.