17 & Gone(70)

Fiona and I agree that the hospital was not the place for me. We agree I should be allowed to stop on the road for a burger and fries, because she might not be able to eat solid foods, but I still can, and we agree it was a good thing I only pretended to swallow my last round of pills. Fiona says her head feels clearer already.

We do agree on so much. But there are other things I sense Fiona wants to keep to herself until the time comes, possibly so she won’t scare me off.

Details, mostly. Like not mentioning exactly where we’re headed. She directs me on a circular route through snowy back roads, avoiding fallen trees and numbered highways.

They’ll be waiting for us, she says.

All the girls will be; we just have to get ourselves to them. It’s those pills.

Whatever’s in them kept me from visiting the dream. But it was also the hospital itself, the walls there that kept my dream-self from stepping in where it belonged. That, too, she says.

This has to be done, she says. This is the only way, she assures me when I ask if maybe I should look for a pay phone somewhere and call my mom. We can’t call Mom yet. I won’t be able to see the girls otherwise. But I have her, Fiona says, so it’s okay. I have her, and she’ll take me to them.

She stretches out in the front passenger seat of my van beside me, her legs up on the high dashboard and her feet pressed against the slope of the windshield like she might kick it out at any moment and cover us in glass, knowing it wouldn’t hurt her, but it would hurt me. That’s the old Fiona, I tell myself. She wouldn’t do that to me now. She might tease, but she wouldn’t actually kick.

She becomes more animated the farther we get from the hospital. Her voice is clear, her eyes bright. And there’s a cunning curve to her lips sometimes as she points me down this road and that road, leading the way.

I keep an eye on her as I drive. It’s late afternoon and already the light is falling fast, bringing with it a dark night.

In that low light what I see is my former babysitter, the neighbor girl who ran off and left me suffocating in a coat closet for my own protection, a flash-point decision that proved to be the right one.

Her flame-dyed hair reveals her natural dark roots as it did then. The FU

scrawled on her thigh is now facing me, right side up.

Everything Fiona has said makes logical sense to me, until I see the road she has us driving. Dorsett Road is more narrow and twisting, coming from this end, which was closer to the side of the river where the hospital could be found, and the hills are all leading downward instead of up. The entrance to the Lady-of-the-Pines Summer Camp for Girls has been piled with snow, as if a snowplow gathered all the weather from every corner of Pinecliff and deposited it in this spot to keep me out.

I’ve slowed, but I haven’t stopped.

“Not here?” I ask.

Yes, here, she says. Don’t play dumb.

There’s nowhere to park near the gate, so I have to leave the van at the edge of the road, only half hidden in the trees, and I don’t know how I’ll get back out, with the way my tires are jammed in.

I shut off the engine. Still, I hesitate.

What? she says. You were thinking we’d find that brick building with the gate? That we’d drive to some street and there it’d be? Popped up like a mushroom from your little dream?

I don’t nod. Then again I don’t not nod.

She sighs, showing she’s on her last nerve, then gazes out at the gate separating us from the campground.

It’s where this all started, she says, waving her arm at it. This sick, disgusting

place

where

whatever

happened to her happened. Do you want to help Abby or not?

I nod. I do.

And the others?

I nod. All of them, I do.

Then we have to do it here. Where else?

— 59 —

SO much snow since I last visited. But not enough to keep us out.

We trudge through it to reach the gate.

There, we discover that the broken chain on the fence has been replaced with a much thicker one, along with a more sturdy lock, a gold one, shiny new and too solid to get through without a big hammer. The top of the gate is still woven with coils of barbed wire, but Fiona is undeterred. I expect her to hoist herself up on the chain link and climb over—because how would the barbed wire cut through smoke, if that’s what she’s made of? How would it cut through a ghost, a memory, an idea? But she won’t do it. She says we’ll have to find another way in.

After maneuvering over a snowbank and circling widely past the first set of trees, we do find another entrance.

Really, the whole pine forest is an entrance. We come in through the back way, past the offices and a maintenance shed made of gray concrete blocks.

There are prints in the snow leading up to its door, there are prints to the compost pile, and there are prints heading into the darkened woods, but Fiona waves at me from far up the path.

I’m slow.

Fiona isn’t cold, but I am, and then, like it’s been left out for me to find, I discover my own scarf lying in a knot in the snowy path—I must have dropped it weeks ago, though I don’t remember walking this particular path at the edges of the campground. So how would I have dropped it here? It doesn’t matter, because I pick it up and shake off the snow and wrap it twice around my neck.

And it helps, a little.

It won’t be so cold soon, Fiona tells me, making me shiver. I can’t help but wonder if she means it won’t be so cold after you die. If it’s warm and snug when it’s over, and the star-shine glowing down over you warms your skin. If that’s what she’s telling me. If that’s really what’s about to happen tonight.