17 & Gone(48)

“Drugs,” she said, and snipped it closed. “Miss Woodman. Lauren, may I call you Lauren? Do you have a mother?”

It took me a moment to nod. Of course I had a mother.

“And your mother, she’s still with you?”

I nodded again.

I expected her to say, Good for you.

So I could then say, if I dared, how it didn’t matter: Having a mother couldn’t stop it, and not having a mother wouldn’t make a girl go. Having brown hair wouldn’t make it happen; having black hair or yellow hair or green-dyed hair or a shaved head wouldn’t keep a girl here, in this world, if she was destined to go.

Staying home every day or going out every night. Taking drugs or not taking them. Wearing that or wearing this.

Talking to strangers or talking to nobody. Hooking up with boys or hooking up with other girls or saving herself for “the one.” There was no way to know. If a girl was meant to go, she just did. I believed that.

Abby’s grandmother stubbed out her cigarette. “Abby always did want to be like Colleen. Let’s hope she has fun.”

She breathed out, and the last of her smoke made its way toward my face. I coughed. I could see she’d decided what had happened to Abby a long time ago, and that was why she wasn’t even reported missing for more than a month.

But I was there. I was there for a reason, and maybe it was only to say this:

“Mrs. Sinclair,” I said, “I have to tell you. She didn’t run away. Abby. I know her mother did, but she didn’t.

Something happened to her. She went missing. You have to keep looking.

Please believe me. Please.”

My face was on fire from letting those words out, my breath gone heavy and hard to catch, but all she did was shake her head. Then she had her hands out for something, and it took me some moments to realize she wanted the picture frame I was holding.

“Give it here,” she said.

Before I did, I looked one last time, not at young Abby and her lost mother but at recent Abby. Abby at sixteen, maybe, in this photo, maybe even just turned 17. Abby forcing a smile that showed all her teeth. She was wearing something around her neck in the photo, but I got only a glimpse of it showing through the open collar of her shirt, before her grandmother was on her feet and rescuing it from my grasp, then snapping it closed.

I wasn’t sure, because I had only a moment to see it, but I thought the pendant she had on was a swirl of smoke inside a stone. Round and gray.

“If she sent you here to get any of her things, let’s stop this right now,” her grandmother said. “I’m not letting you up there, in her room.”

“She . . .” I started, beginning to deny it. But I did want to go up there; I did want to see her room.

“No,”

her

grandmother

said.

“Absolutely not. I knew you were after those earrings. She thinks she can send you here to get them and sell them? No.

Lauren, it’s time for you to go.”

Abby’s grandmother led me to the door, and only after I stepped through it did she say to me, “When you see her, tell her we assume she’s not coming back. Tell her we won’t wait all those years like we did for her mother.”

“How long did you wait for her mother? Did she ever come back?”

“Oh, she came back. She came back in a box.”

— 38 — OUT in the driveway, Abby’s grandfather was shoveling snow. He had his back to me, his shoulders hunched into the work, so I wasn’t sure if he saw me coming, if he’d overheard our conversation and the decisive click of the door closed in my face.

Even so, I was aware of him plunging his shovel closer and closer to where I was walking. He was moving down the imaginary line he’d drawn in the white powder, straight for me. If he kept it up, we would soon cross paths.

When we did, the shovel paused in the ground at my feet and I heard him speak.

“How’s she doing?” he asked, just loud enough for me to make out, and just quiet enough so his wife wouldn’t hear.

He kept his back to the house and his head down, but though he leaned toward the snow at his feet, his eyes weren’t on the ground. They were lifted up, to my face.

“You’ve seen her,” he said—not a question. “She all right? Doing okay?”

There was no true way to answer this.

She was intact, with both her arms and legs, and with hair on her head and no wounds gaping open, none I could see.

But how was she doing beyond that?

Whenever I saw her, the expression on her face was a different one altogether from the school photo in her grandmother’s

frame,

the

face

photocopied on the flyer. Not smiling.

Not even pretending to. No hint of teeth.

Instead she wore a faint question mark of an expression, one waiting to be filled in by the numbers with paint.

I could sense only echoes from her.

The echo of sadness. The echo of longing to go home. The echo of craving a peanut butter sandwich.

Sometimes she showed herself to me, so why wouldn’t she do the same now, here, for her grandfather who surely loved her, and had certainly known her longer? She could set a whisper sailing on the wind. She could simply wave from the window of the van if she were in there again. Yet she did neither of those things. She wouldn’t set foot near this house at all.