17 & Gone(50)

“Besides, when’s the last time you rode a bike? You were maybe ten and you skidded off the embankment outside and skinned both knees.”

“I guess you never forget how to ride.

That’s what I heard.”

“They say that.” She was floundering here. She didn’t know how to discipline me because she never had to before.

I straddled the bike and tried out the brakes, testing the bounce of the tire. It seemed as good as new. The snow had been cleared off the road and I could coast down it without sliding on ice. Not two miles away, down the hill, the train tracks ran north and south, following the river. I could follow those tracks for days. The line headed straight up to Montreal.

What could my mom do if I told her the truth? Tie me by the wrists to my bedposts each night, lock me in our basement and lower food through the vents so I didn’t starve? Could she save me and could she save Abby? Could she save Fiona Burke years after the fact?

Once you were tagged to disappear and join the others, I don’t think you could be saved at all.

My mom said my name, softly. She reached out, as if to touch my hair, and when I flinched, she lowered her arm.

“We’re going to talk when you get back,” she said, as if prophesizing our future. “You’re going to tell me what’s been going on and why you went down to New Jersey.”

Very quietly, maybe to keep Fiona Burke from hearing, I said, “Okay.”

“I just want you to know you can talk to me if you want to talk to me,” she said, keeping it going and coming close to ruining it. “I’m always here, if you want to talk. I can see there’s something, Lauren. I just don’t know what it is yet.”

For a moment I wondered if mothers can see. Maybe once you’ve made a person, you can see through the skin you shaped to what’s in there hurting without anyone having to tell you, Look here.

I stood up straight with the bike in my hands. I stood in my mom’s direct line of sight. There I was: Girl, 17. Girl, hair not so long anymore, but long legs, my mom’s same long nose. Girl wearing black boots and black jeans. Wearing the pendant I found on the side of the road, a pendant like the one I thought I saw on Abby in that photograph, like the one Fiona Burke had on the night she ran away. I actually never took it off.

Wearing also a flashing sign that said I was in trouble. Wearing it on high for heavy traffic so it could be seen far out in the lanes in the distance. Letting it blink and beep. Letting it shout out what I wanted it to say because maybe someone would know how to make it stop.

Girl, not yet missing.

Easy target of a girl, standing out in the open right here.

But all my mom said was, “When you get back? We’ll talk.” All those psych classes weren’t teaching her when to keep pushing and when to let go. She’d come so close, and too fast she’d let go.

“Don’t you have homework?” I said.

“We can talk tomorrow—it’s not urgent.”

Liar, said Fiona Burke.

My mom looked relieved. “I do have a paper to write, but Lauren? We’ll talk tomorrow about all of this.”


I got the bicycle gliding and hopped on. It balanced perfectly and didn’t topple over. I hadn’t forgotten anything I’d seen so far. Not even how to ride a bike.

I pumped the pedals until I was out of sight of my house and the Burkes’ house and could let go and have the spinning tires do it all without me having a say. I thought of Abby on this bicycle, on the way to meet Luke. Then there was Abby leaving Luke’s house on foot in the warm summer’s night, there was the road, there were the pine trees, and beyond that I guess there was something I wouldn’t get to know. There was a dark night sky starred with questions, and she was one of them. I kept thinking if I looked hard enough maybe I’d be able to pick out her point in the constellation.

Or more likely I’d keep getting it all mixed up, like how I could never seem to find the Big Dipper, even when it was right there, screaming out its existence in the sky right over my head.

Then I changed the story. I imagined Abby on the way to meet Luke, but never stopping, never bothering going to his house and instead riding a wide circle and making it back safe to the grounds of the summer camp that night.

I imagined her still alive.

I kept pedaling and soared around each coming turn. I sped past mailboxes.

I flew over humps in the road. I somehow managed to avoid slicks of ice. I pedaled so fast, I didn’t know how I’d ever get the bike to stop.

When I reached the railroad tracks, I saw the light in the distance and heard the rumble: a train was coming. It sped closer, rattling the air, a freight train that didn’t look to be stopping at the commuter Amtrak stop at Pinecliff. I pumped the pedals and steered the bike down the narrow road that ran alongside the tracks. I was ahead of the train, but I felt it gaining on me, a hulking monster I was too small and insignificant to think of ever beating.

The train was just behind me and then it was beside me, and for a single, perfect moment the freight train and I were matched, its nose even with the bike’s front tire.

Then, fast, it overtook me and thundered past me and I was left behind.

— 40 — SHE was waiting for me in my bedroom, watching in silence as I shook out my legs, my muscles burning after riding her bike so hard and for so long.

Her eyes held on me, and the weight of that gaze felt like she was pressing her entire body down on top of me, caked in mud and littered with burrs and twigs, scraped raw in places, as heavy as a sack of bricks.