17 & Gone(73)

SHE’S telling me to do it. She’s telling all of us, pulling our strings and giving commands. Soon the girls have sticks gathered from the outskirts of the woods that they raise to light the way, and soon the kerosene can is in my good arm and the spout is open and the liquid is dribbling out on my toes.

I start to wonder: Is it too late for Abby? Fiona is acting like it might be.

And if we destroy this place, this last place

Abby

stayed

before

she

disappeared, will we set her free?

Maybe we will. Maybe doing this will set us all free. Even me.

First go the cabins closest to the hill.

We set fire to the empty beds. Next is the camp office, a small building with a wraparound porch, and we run a line of kerosene all around the porch, from end to end. The canteen is a tiny outhouse of a structure and we leave a fire at one corner, like a bird’s nest. The canoes go up as if they were doused already and were just waiting to be set alight.

Smoke is in the air the way it always is in the dream; it smells just the same.

But then something’s not the same.

Something’s off, and calling to me through the smoke. A voice. And not a voice in my head or a whisper at my ear or the girls with the torches at my back.

This is an actual voice shouting out into the actual night. Someone is on the campground with me.

I’m afraid it’s a delusion, that my mind has shattered and scattered all over the snow. And when he reaches me and he’s been running and the panic colors his face and he says, “Lauren! Are you okay? Lauren?” it takes me a long moment to realize he’s not a ghost or an escaped piece of a dream. He’s Jamie.

Jamie’s been here with me once before, so I should have guessed he’d know where to find me.

He’s shouting. At me. “Did you do this? What did you do?”

He means the fires. When I glance back behind him I expect to see a tidal wave of fire, the coiling, curling lip edged with girls holding torches as tall as their arms will lift, so if they reach high enough they could catch the night on fire. They could destroy the whole world they’ve been stolen from. They could end everything.

But there are only the fires in the places where I set them myself, and there is a trail of kerosene in the snow that no one’s dropped a match to light.

The fires are burning, and letting off black puffs of smoke, but they’re not near as large as I thought they would be.

The girls are nowhere to be seen.

“Why’d you do this?” he says quietly, taking one wide step closer to me.

And I take the next step, to close the gap. “I had to,” I say, the words thick in my throat, forcing me to choke them out.

Also the smoke, coughing from it.

Making it difficult to speak. “She . . .

They . . .”

He holds me, and I have his arms around me again. I know what I should do is shove him into the pines and tell him to start running. Get away from me, Jamie. I’m burning. Get away before I burn you, too.

But there’s the way his body feels pressed to mine. The way his fingers brush away my tears when I didn’t even know I was making any tears and the way his mouth says the things that calm the blazing fury in my head and there’s everything we used to have between us, not dead and trampled in the snow, but here, somehow still among the living.

I have his voice in my ear, and it’s not a phantom, not a demon, not a hallucination. His voice that I lock on to so it’s all I’m hearing.

“It’s okay,” is what he’s saying.

“Look at me. Lauren, look at me.

They’re not real. They’re not real. I’m real. I’m right here.”

— 61 —

WE break apart when we notice a flicker of movement down the hill.

There’s a figure in the distance who I think at first must be Fiona herself, come out to lure me away from Jamie and back together with her and only her, the way it was when this night started. But the figure is in dark colors and appears much larger than Fiona ever was, even in my memories.

It’s a man. And I’m afraid I know who it is.

“You called the cops on me!” I hiss at Jamie, horrified, but he appears just as shocked as I am, pulling me off the pathway and into a thicket of trees.

“I didn’t, I swear,” he says, close up against my ear. “Quiet.”

“But you called my mom.” I whisper it as if I can worm my way into his head for the answer, the way I have with the girls. I watch his face as he stares down the hill.

“Yeah,” he admits, “of course I called her.”

“So she must have called them,” I say, indicating the man at the bottom of the hill. “The cops.”

The dark-clad figure’s movements against the white snow are impossible to miss. The man looks up, toward the fires —he doesn’t seem to see us hiding in the trees. Witnessing the fires blazing appears to make him move even faster.

But not toward them. Toward something else.

He’s headed for the maintenance shed, along the path where I found my fallen scarf. My stomach sinks when I realize: the footprints in the snow, not an animal’s, a man’s. The one who called himself Officer Heaney. Is that what he said, Officer Heaney, or did I mistake him for something he wasn’t? Did I assume?