17 & Gone(78)

I just have to play along whenever my mom’s around.

Now she’s fluffing my pillows. She’s asking me what I think of couscous for dinner tonight. I’m not sure if that’s what we want to eat, but I say it’s fine.

After my mom watches me swallow today’s dose of meds, she says she’ll go make dinner in the kitchen now. But she lingers, at the doorway, blinking her eyes so they don’t water. She does this more and more, this staring, like she can’t believe I exist. It’s how I used to look at the girls, before I got used to them.

“You can go,” I tell her. “I’ll just be in here, reading.” I hold up a novel I’ve barely started because I can’t pay attention to books right now beyond page one. I use my bad arm to lift it, and she flinches, even though it’s just a few Band-Aids now, only to keep the scars covered.

I’ve been wanting to tell her so many things about how lucky I am to have her, but I can’t seem to get out the words, so I haven’t said any of that yet. I only hope she already knows.

She’s gotten a new tattoo, to commemorate this, which is a strange thing to do, but she says it’s a healthy way to handle trauma. It’s not on her chest. That’s still clean—I keep checking. It’s on her arm. So when I see her walk out of the room, I also catch my own face staring back at me, like a stunted anthropomorphic owl perched on her shoulder. I also always check to make sure the beauty mark is on the correct side of her face, so I’m sure the person wearing my image is really her. It says something to me, that she’s done this, tattooed me on her body. It says she’ll be here for me no matter what, and I know for a fact that some of the girls can’t say that about their mothers. Not all girls can.

If I’d been one of the missing, my mom would have never given up on me.

Never.

Once she’s gone, I don’t touch the book. I watch the window for some time.

She’s closed the window again, when she came up here, but I go over and push it open once more. I have to leave it open. The tree I don’t remember, the one right outside my window, rustles with the lightest touch of wind. It’s an oak, I think. It’s older than I am and will still be here long after me.

There’s a knock on my bedroom door, even though the door is open. I startle, thinking thoughts I shouldn’t. When I look, I see it’s a girl, just a different kind altogether from what I expected.

She steps in the room, the freshman, Rain Patel, who lives nearby and has somehow finagled herself into bringing me packets of homework for next week, even though we barely spoke in school.

“Your mom sent me up,” she says.

She gives me a stack of papers and a new book for AP English, though I’m so far behind I’m probably not in advanced placement anymore, and then she bursts out with some random updates, like how Deena Douglas got mono and the wrestling team won some trophy at state.

Then she weaves awkwardly around my room, not wanting to leave yet, lifting things off my dresser and setting them back down. I don’t stop her. But I do flinch when she finds it and holds it in her hand, playing with its smooth, round surface. “What’s this?” she asks.

“Oh, just something. Something I found.”

“Like on the beach? When my mom and my dad and my brother and I went to the shore, I swear I collected, like, hundreds of stones like this. Okay, maybe not hundreds, but you know. I liked ones in prettier colors, though . . .

white, blue with speckles, pinkish pink.

This one’s just gray.”

In the mirror, for an instant, what she’s holding in the palm of her hand goes bright, like it’s no rock. It dances with a smoky, sultry light. Then it’s dark again.

“Put that down,” I say.

“It’s special,” Rain says, setting it back on the dresser. “I can tell. Where’d you get it?”

It’s so special, I can’t seem to get rid of it. Maybe I’m supposed to keep it, give it a permanent place in my life to commemorate my trauma, like my mom has hers. Or maybe I’m meant to wear it until I know for sure it’s over. Then I can bury it in the yard. Or throw it on the tracks when a freight train goes past, though even the wheels of a train couldn’t crush it. Maybe sometime this weekend I should drive over to the bridge and throw it in the Hudson. No one could get to it then.

“It’s from here,” I say. “From right here in Pinecliff.”

“Oh,” she says, seeming disappointed.

She glances in the mirror because that’s where I’ve been staring, and then she comes closer, sitting on the edge of the bed.

She whispers it: “Are you seeing them right now? Your mom told my mom, so I know about the, you know.” Her dark eyes are very wide, the long lashes creating a dusting of spiderwebs on her cheeks. I can tell by the way she’s edged forward, inching along the end of my bed, that she wants me to say I’m seeing them. The lost girls.

I shake my head.

“Oh,” Rain says. “Okay.”

Her face falls. I think she’s the only person who believes that I’ve seen ghosts. She must think I’m psychic, a medium for the undead or something, like the blue woman on the elevator all those months ago might say we are. For this, I like Rain a tiny bit more. I look at her carefully. She’s so young, so open.

All I can see on her face is that any possible thing in the world could happen to her—her fate is completely unwritten.