17 & Gone(35)

She didn’t touch me, because I don’t think a ghost can touch a person. But she stood very, very close to me so her whisper teased at the lobe of my ear: You don’t need him, she said, and I knew just what she’d say next. You have us.

— 24 — NATALIE wondered what else she’d inherited from her mother, beyond the physical characteristics most kids inherit through the curse of DNA: eye color, hair texture, bumps on the nose, extra weight around the hips. Did she carry something else of her mom’s, that raging flare buried and faintly glowing somewhere in her, the one that made her mother sneak the blade from the kitchen and plunge it, without warning, into the snoring chest of that man in her bed?

Maybe this kind of calculated rage was genetic. It could be that Natalie had this trait just as she had anything else.

You have your mother’s eyes.

You have your mother’s skill with a carving knife.

Natalie feared it could snap on at any moment. It could come crashing down on her like the ice storm that was her fate.

Coating her eyes and her tongue and crusting deep beneath her fingernails.

Turning her a color she’d never been before. Making her do terrible things.

But I didn’t sense that in her—and I’m sure I would have, traveling through her wants and thoughts and aches and regrets and wonderings as I did, once she let me in. I slid on her consciousness like trying on a borrowed dress. There was nothing wrong with that dress, even if it didn’t fit me exactly.

I didn’t think she’d come to hurt me. I knew all she wanted was to talk.

To tell me.

She told me everything up until the moment she disappeared.

The before, I could see and experience and mull over. And the during—the accident, the car sliding circles on the ice and crashing sideways into the guardrail, that slice of fast-moving time that came so suddenly— that, I could play back in slow motion.

Pause and hover over. Investigate. It was only the after that I couldn’t guess at, couldn’t pierce a hole through.

Probably because she had a hard time seeing it, too.

She told me about Lila, who was hosting the party in her father’s finished basement. She told me how none of this would have happened if not for Lila’s party,

one

Natalie

wasn’t

even

technically invited to, seeing as she and Lila weren’t what could be called friends. She’d tagged along to the party anyway because of some boy. If she hadn’t met that boy when she’d served him a burger and fries at Murray’s, where she waited tables two days a week, if he hadn’t grabbed ahold of her wrist when she’d walked by his booth and slipped the napkin onto her tray, the one where he’d written, in sloppy boy-handwriting— Babe you are hot. when you get off work want to go to party later? let me know—and signed with his name (Paul), then she wouldn’t be haunting

me

in

bathrooms

and

whispering her story in my ears. She’d be back home, alive, and I wouldn’t know her.

She wanted me to get a sense of how it was, up where she lived. How little there was to do up there. How boring it was, especially in winter, if you couldn’t afford to ski. So she may have despised Lila—in the locker room after phys ed she’d heard the girl call her a psychopath like her psychopath mother, and in the hallway out of sight of the teachers, Lila had let Natalie know how she

felt

about

psychopaths

with

psychopath mothers. The girl had claws.

But she’d go to her party. Where else was there to go?

The drive up the mountain was uneventful. When they’d started the climb up the mountain pass, it hadn’t even begun snowing yet. But by the time they were crawling to the top, searching out the marker for Lila’s parents’

driveway, the sky ahead was shrouded in a thick white sheet.

Since the guy who’d invited her was driving—this was his old ’65 Mustang coupe, oily and black in the night—she’d sat in the front and could ignore the looks from his friends. They were townies like her, and they’d all heard the stories of her mother.

But Paul, who was driving, wasn’t from around there, so he had no idea.

There wasn’t a reason for a party, except that Lila’s father was letting them use his finished basement. That’s why everyone drove up to the highest heights of Plateau Road when a snowstorm was expected. Lila’s house was at the tiptop of the mountain, down a squirrelly dirt driveway that fractured from the main road, so that cars had to be parked out on the road itself, making those who came in sneakers have to ice-skate their way to the front door. But her father had a fully stocked bar and a billiards table in the carpeted lower level of the house.

And the soundproof door at the top of the stairs locked from the inside, so her parents couldn’t check the booze supply till morning.

It was Tim, the hippie, who brought the pills. And it was Tim the hippie who insisted on the orange juice, saying you could enhance the roll on vitamin C. It was Jeannette who said there was a store close by, halfway down the road. It was Paul who volunteered to drive.

And that’s how Paul and Tim and Jeannette and Natalie had all gone back out for the car. And this was also how Natalie slipped on the ice that was now falling from the sky and grabbed for the first solid object, the hood of the car, and that’s how the zipper of her coat caused a nick in the paint.