17 & Gone(47)

Or the way the smoke would flow through their guts like a magic trick, a sad one, without scarves.

It was all in the patches of the stories we skipped over, the unspoken ends.

Isabeth. Eden. Shyann, even, maybe. I ached for them.

But wouldn’t I have known if something like that had happened to Abby, out of all the girls?

“What was that movie where they put the girl’s head in a box?” Cass was saying now. “You know what I’m talking about, right? That movie? There was this box, and they look in it and there’s her head?”

I didn’t know the movie and hoped I never would. I left Cass quicker than I meant to, especially after driving all the way there.

Talking to Abby’s camp counselor had given me nothing. Worse than nothing: She’d drawn a detailed enough image that felt more real than the real thing. I didn’t want to think anymore about what she’d said, didn’t want to picture it.

This visit to the coffee shop was what propelled me down to New Jersey, but there was another place I could try in another part of the state. I had the address. I still had questions. And though I didn’t know how to make sense of it, I couldn’t let myself believe she was dead.

— 37 — “SHE ran off,” Abby’s grandmother said when I asked her. “That’s it. That’s the story. You drove yourself all the way here to hear that.”

Her expression didn’t become pained as she said these words, though I expected it would. I found myself watching her upper lip, the darker hints of hair growing in there, the way the hairs moved like little antennae as she spoke. She was the woman who raised Abby, her legal guardian. Within minutes, I could already tell she wasn’t the kind of grandmother who’d open her arms to you, who’d remove the cigarette from her mouth to say sweet things and offer you a cookie. She’d let me inside the house, though. At least she’d let me in.

“And you went to that camp together?” her grandmother asked for the third time.

“Yes,” I said. “I was there. She never said a thing about running away. I know she had her wallet with her, and her purse I think, too, but she left all the rest of her stuff there, you know.”

“We know,” she said. “They shipped it back to us. Of course we know.”

Her grandmother’s lips drew in on the butt of her cigarette, ballooning up her old lungs with the last of the smoke. She was smoking indoors, windows closed, slowly killing anyone who came near her, and as she tapped the ash I could see the similarity between this plastic-entombed room and the rooms in the house where my dream kept taking me. It was the air. The haze of it. A feathery, caustic mist of lavender-blue.

“This is a girl who ran away before,”

her grandmother said. “This is a girl who stole money from her own poppop’s wallet when he was taking his afternoon nap in that very chair.” She was pointing at the sunken armchair I was sitting in. I imagined it would be soft to the touch, but I couldn’t tell, because it was encased in a skintight layer of clear plastic.

“No,” I said. That didn’t sound like the Abby I knew.

“Dear,” she said, “the girl you met at that summer camp wasn’t the same girl she was at home, with us, you can be sure.”

I was sensing there were things Abby hadn’t told me. A grave, troublesome part of her story she’d completely left out. When had she run away before?

Why hadn’t she mentioned this? What more didn’t I know?

Abby’s grandmother’s eyes flicked to the side table beside the couch, and mine followed. There was a frame standing upright, a two-in-one. The frame met in the center, drawing the two sides together

and

connecting

them

symbolically.

Almost as if her gaze had given me permission, I found my hands reaching for the picture frame. I picked it up.

On the left side of the frame was Abby; I recognized her immediately. It was the school portrait, the same one used for her Missing flyer, but this was the first time I was seeing it in color.

Her skin had a pink glow she didn’t have anymore,

and

her

teeth

were

extraordinarily white. Someone must have said, “Cheese!” to her before snapping that photo, someone must have forced her to have a smile that showed teeth, because as I held the picture close I could see how wide her lips were opened, how prominent her teeth were made to be, like an unseen hand was holding a hard, cold object to the back of her neck and telling her to grin or that would be the end of her.

On the right side of the frame was a woman with a pigtailed little girl in her arms. Abby’s mother and young Abby.

Abby hadn’t told me what happened to her mother, and now I wondered.

Because she wasn’t in this house, was she? She wasn’t in Abby’s life. She wasn’t here.

Her grandmother sensed the question.

“I’m sure Abigail told you about Colleen.”

“A little,” I said.

“Abigail is exactly like her, I should have guessed. Colleen ran off and Abigail gets it in her head to do the same.”

“How old was she, Colleen, her mom, when she . . . ran off?”

“Old enough to know better. Twenty-three.”

So she wasn’t one of them, then.

“That’s awful. I mean it must have been, for Abby.”