17 & Gone(67)

At some point I realize the doctor has gone silent.

“Who are you listening to?” she asks.

I’m confused. “I’m listening to you.

You were talking.”

“You turned and looked over there”— she points at the potted plant in the corner—“is someone there, talking to you? One of the ‘girls’?”

The plant is a plant, a fern in a pot of dirt. If I insist that the plant is only a plant, will she wipe my slate clean and send me home? If I say the plant speaks in the voice of a girl, will I stay locked away here forever? Or maybe I have it in reverse. Will she think I’m lying if I deny the plant can talk? Will she think I can’t ever be “cured”?

I turn back to her and there she is. Not the doctor—she hasn’t moved from her plush chair, where she sits with her leg folded up, daring me to notice the wrinkled knee—but Fiona, no longer faking catatonic and instead faking a trigger with her finger and pointing her imaginary gun to the back of the doctor’s actual head.

— 55 —

FIONA’S here with me now. She pretend-shoots the doctor dead and then she’s motioning for the window, like I should make a leap for it, or push the doctor through the glass to see if her enormous earrings will break her fall.

I’m not sure what Fiona’s getting at, but I’m not about to do anything stupid, and I need to keep all reactions off my face so the doctor doesn’t know.

With Fiona’s arrival, the doctor’s office has darkened at the edges, bleeding shadows in the corners and on the ceiling tiles. I see our time is running out. Not just on this session. On the girls.

Then I catch what Fiona wanted to show me: She’s not motioning at the window; she’s motioning at the desk beside the window. The pendant is on the doctor’s desk. It’s been here this whole time.

I point to it. “That’s mine. Can I have that back?”

The doctor gazes over at her desktop, but she doesn’t move closer.

“I’m glad you brought that up,” she says. “What is this little collection?”

I don’t understand what she means by “collection.” There’s one thing: the necklace. There’s the necklace I wore around my neck, and that’s all.

I can see it there, out of reach but in the same room with me now. Close enough that I could stand up, and take a few steps, and have it in my hands. I study it as if for the first time: The stone is gray but not completely gray; really, it doesn’t look like a stone at all but a breath of smoke that’s been caught inside a bubble of glass. I think of breaking it open, to see if that’s what’s in there.

Because it can’t be. Because it’s heavy, heavier than something made of smoke should be, and when you hold it in your fist it grows hot, or your fist does, and if I had it now I’d practically be burning.

“It’s just a necklace,” I tell her.

“Is it?” she says oddly.

I watch as she raises herself from her plush chair and moves for the desk, gathering up some papers in her arms and my pendant on top. She walks it all over to me and places the pile neatly on the small table before the chair where she has me sitting. I’m about to grab for the necklace first, but she blocks my hand.

“Is that what you meant? This ‘necklace’?” She points, and again I notice how she’s careful not to touch it.

Her tone is confusing me. Also confusing is when she asks me to describe it for her, as if she can’t see it on the table before us, right here. I tell her about the smoky gray stone, which gleams in the light and swirls with movement, coming alive at the sound of my voice. It’s like a mood ring, the kind they sell at gas-station registers for five bucks. But it never changes color, and you wear it around your neck instead of on your finger.

“Where did you get it?” she asks.

“Did someone give it to you?”

I avoid her eyes. “Not exactly.”

I’m worried she’ll make me tell the whole story before I’m allowed to have it back. And if I told, I’m not sure I’d get to keep it.

“I . . . found it,” I say weakly. What I should say is that it belongs to a missing girl. I should be confessing that it might be a clue, and should be turned over to police, if my wearing it against my skin all these weeks hasn’t contaminated it.

But if I could only get it back, I’d have my link to her again. To Abby. Because she hasn’t finished telling me her story.

None of the girls have.

“Lauren,” the doctor says, waiting until I meet her eyes. “What I see there isn’t a necklace like you’re describing.

What I see there is a rock.”

A rock?

“A rock,” she repeats. “A rock from the ground, which looks to be tied with a string.”

I lower my eyes to the pendant, and there’s the swirl and the gleam and the shimmer, and then a flatness and a stillness that wasn’t there before, and a darkening that wasn’t there before, and a rock. There’s a rock. The pendant has turned into a rock.

I flash back to the side of Dorsett Road, the gully filled with snow where I found the pendant that night. I see my hand reaching out to pluck it from the ground and I see my fingers wrapping around a dirty rock from the side of the road and lifting this putrid thing into the palm of my hand like it’s something beautiful. I see it clear, and my throat chokes up, and my eyes burn, and I’m not so sure anymore about anything.