17 & Gone(77)

When I confessed, I could see from her face how serious she thought this was.

“These are real girls,” she told me carefully. “Those girls you found online, they are real. With real lives. And real people at home wondering what happened to them. But the part about you knowing the girls, talking to them . . .

Lauren, sweetie, you know that’s not . . .”

“Real,” I said for her, so she wouldn’t have to use such a dangerous word. “Mom, I’m sorry. I know that now.”

It hurts to know. It mortifies me. But all of what my mom says is true; the doctors have made me face it and say it out loud and admit to everything.

Since that night, I have a court date coming up because of the fires, and Jamie does, too, which isn’t fair, but my lawyer says I can explain everything when I plead guilty. He expects community service, since he’ll be arguing that I was mentally impaired.

And Abby has gone back home to New Jersey. I’ve watched what I could about her on the news, as much as they’d let me, and I recall being hung up on the fact that she didn’t look the way she did in my mind. Her face was mostly the same as the one on the Missing poster, but her body was different. She was shorter than I thought, from those visions of her gliding away on the Schwinn, and her hands didn’t look the way I remember her hands looking, and her hair was curlier and, from the side, there was an unrecognizable slope to her nose.

Also, when she spoke for the cameras in an interview my mom saved for me to watch, I was struck by how her voice wasn’t the voice I heard in my head. It was the voice of a stranger.

But she was found, and she was alive.

And the man—whose name wasn’t even Heaney—was arrested, charged with a list of crimes my mom wouldn’t read aloud to me from the newspaper. His trial is coming up soon.

This is not a part of the story I invented. Not pieces of my mind come loose. Not flashes from dreams. People keep assuring me that Abby was found, and they have the same response every time I ask, so I’m choosing to believe them. It’s not like the rock that still hasn’t turned back into the pendant, even when I look at it from all angles, upside down, sideways, with lights on and lights off. It’s still a rock I found on the side of the road.

Also, I have the letter now. It was waiting for me when I was released. I think my mom held on to it for a long time, not sure if she should show me. I’m glad she did, even though it shoves me right back into everything whenever I read it.

Her handwriting slants forward, and her round letters bubble, making me think she was a cheerful person, or is trying to be. She used green pen and a piece of ruled paper from a notebook instead of stationery. I’ve let my fingers run over the ridges on the back of the paper, feeling where her pen pressed down, feeling for the words that were heaviest to write, the worst ones. I like that she wrote it all down. She could have e-mailed, and this is so much better.

Dear Lauren, she starts. I keep trying to write you this, but it’s hard because I don’t know what to say. The police told me what you did. My grandma told me you visited. I know we never met or anything and this feels really weird, but I need to say thank you.

She goes on, telling me how hard life has been since she’s come home, fitting back in with friends who don’t understand, who look at her differently now, and how she tries to forget things, but she can’t and wonders if she ever can. I’m not sure how much she knows about me—she doesn’t say explicitly— but she seems to be aware that I’ve been sick and that I was sent away. There’s a line in her letter about hoping I get to come home soon and that I feel better.

She signs the letter Abby, not Abigail, like we’re friends.

I’m not sure if I’ll ever be able to write her back.

I fold up the letter again and slip it into the drawer of my nightstand. I’m looking out the window and I’m thinking how happy I am she’s alive and then I’m thinking how I’m still alive myself. Still intact and in this body and breathing through these lungs. Still here. Two twists I wasn’t expecting.

It’s a Thursday now maybe, or it could be a Friday. I don’t have to go back to school until next week. My mom has taken a semester leave, saying she can’t juggle classes on top of her job and wanting to be home to take care of me right now. I joke with her about how she could have asked for extra credit, since she can do a home-study of a mental disorder under her own roof and hopefully I’m enough to fill a thesis paper, but she barely cracks a smile.

I shouldn’t be joking about it. She doesn’t even want me to say the word in front of her (schizophrenia), though doesn’t she know how an unsaid word (schizophrenia) holds more power the longer it’s kept from touching your tongue? The fact that it’s unsaid, and that it could be years before I get an official diagnosis, makes me wonder about it all the more. In the night, I tiptoed downstairs to pore through her college psychology textbooks, seeing what the “positive” and “negative” symptoms are and ticking off how many I’ve had. I also read about how it doesn’t go away, how there’s no cure. People who have this spend their whole lives on antipsychotic medications to keep the delusions and the voices away. And even then, the meds don’t always work. The cocktail can change often—it’s never the same mix for everyone. There’s no way to know.

It’s realizing all this that scares me more than anything supernatural ever could. The concept of a ghost, I can understand; the misfiring synapses of my brain, I can’t. One is outside and apart from me and something I could run from, but the other is me. The other is what I am. So I’ve been thinking on it for all these months, and I’ve decided.