17 & Gone(56)

I had Abby’s bicycle, the one she left behind, the one I was storing in the garage. (I had her pendant, too, but this I couldn’t say.)

When I stopped talking at last, my mom had her eyes down, considering all of what I’d told her. Billie didn’t blink.

Her bright gaze bored into me, as if she’d been trying to decide how to respond, too. She sat poised on the coffee table, a slight tremor in her fuzzy tail.

My mom chose her words carefully.

“You say you know? How do you know?”

“I just . . . know.”

“How, Lauren? Explain.”

“I have a feeling.” The expression on her face didn’t change, though the birds on her neck jittered. “I had a dream.”

“You had a dream or you had a feeling? Do you know something you’re not telling me?”

“No.” Yes. “Both. I had a dream and a feeling. She’s not okay. Something happened. I know.”

“Do you want to call the police again?

Do you want me to call for you?” She believed me. My mom believed I was telling the truth.

Relief washed over me, and I wanted to lie back and let that be enough for tonight, and I also wanted to keep talking, now that I’d started, to tell her more about the dreams. About the other girls. About everything I knew that I shouldn’t know, every memory that had been shared with me.

Then I remembered something. She made me think of it when she’d suggested calling the police. “Maybe we could ask for Officer Heaney this time.

That’s who I met when Jamie and I were looking around that camp place. He was there—he found us. He made us leave, you know, for trespassing. But he remembered Abby. He knew she’d gone missing. He knew about the bike. We should call him. I didn’t get to talk to him at the station.”

“All right,” she said. She grabbed a notebook and wrote it down: Heaney.

Heeney? Heeny? We weren’t sure how to spell it.

I still couldn’t read her expression.

“First show me this girl,” she said.

“This Abby Sinclair.”

I found the folded flyer in my coat pocket and smoothed it out to show her.

Abby’s face had faded away to a white space as if she could be anyone, a fill-in-the-blank face surrounded by a block of dark hair. Showing her flyer felt like exposing a page from my middle-school diary; it was that gooey and personal and important and tinged with shame.

“It’s hard to read,” my mom said. “Is this online?”

Now she was acting like she might not believe me, and a little trickle of doubt hooked itself to the lobe of my ear, hovering there, breathing, waiting to hear what she’d say next. Did she think I made this flyer on my computer for fun, invented a missing girl’s name and hometown and decided what clothes she’d be last seen wearing?

“It’s just hard to read,” my mom said, seeming to sense what I was thinking.

“It’s online,” I said. “I’ll show you.”

As we went into the kitchen, the girls’

voices in my ears stayed ominously silent. No shadows skirted the walls.

They must have been angry with me. I might be barred from the house if my dream took me there again in the night— but would they forgive me if I found Abby? Would that be enough? Or was it that I needed to save all of them, retroactively, every last one?

On my mom’s laptop I brought up the missing-persons page: proof Abby was an actual girl and I didn’t make her up.

This was not imaginary; this girl really was missing.

She read it carefully and clicked on the photo to enlarge it and see her face more clearly. Abigail Sinclair, 17, of Orange Terrace, New Jersey. The pendant was a gray shadow in the hollow of her neck, and her eyes were black pools full of secrets, not all of which I knew yet.

I found my voice. “That’s her.”

“You dreamed about this girl,” my mom said, as if she wanted to get the facts straight.

Can a dream be happening when you’re fully conscious of it? I wanted to ask her. Because, if so, then I did dream about this girl. All the time. And I dreamed about the other girls; I dreamed about them all the time, too. And these were dreams when I was sleeping, and these were dreams when I was awake.

This could have been a dream, I realized, sitting there at the kitchen table before my mom’s laptop, the cat having followed us in and still watching me intently, pointing her fuzzed tail. The dream could have been this night, this room, this conversation, and the reality could have been the broken house on the cracked street under the dark smog, with those girls. The reality could have been that I was trapped inside that limbo with the rest of them, and there was no true sky above us, and there were no roads leading to us, and the sidewalk ended, and the house was about to burn down with us in it. I could have already been taken.

“What else?” she said. “Does this girl . . . talk to you? In your . . .

dreams?”

The way she said it—condescending, like she’d added invisible quotation marks around choice words—I could see her reciting it as instructed from one of her textbooks. This was what a doctor might ask a psychotic person. “Let the patient think you believe her. Don’t affirm the delusions, but don’t let her feel attacked.” She was treating me like I’d gone mental.