17 & Gone (10 page)

Fiona Burke was the daughter of the

couple in the big house next door.

They’d adopted her when she was a

baby, from an orphanage in China. I

don’t know what her name had been

before the Burkes rechristened her and

brought her back to the Hudson River

Valley, to where they lived in the small

town of Pinecliff, New York. Even

today, the Asian population in Pinecliff

is only 1.34 percent. Fiona Burke was

likely one of only a handful of Asian

kids in school, and she was the only

person I knew who’d been adopted.

I don’t know what the Burkes were

like all those years before Fiona, when

they were childless and tucked away

behind their lace curtains, shopping for

someone else’s offspring to bring home.

They were an older couple, older than

anyone would expect to be raising a

teenage daughter, and the only reason we

knew them is because we rented our

house from them. It was small and

separated from their much grander house

by a pruned hedge. They called it the

“carriage house” and wouldn’t let my

mom and me paint it a color because

they wanted it white, to match theirs.

Apparently, a long time ago, it used to

be the garage.

This meant the Burkes were our

landlords; my mom used to send me over

to their palatial front porch on the third

or fourth of the month—never the first,

never on time—to ring their bell and

hand-deliver an envelope containing the

rent check.

Only, the Burkes never came to the

door. I’d ring the bell and Fiona would

answer before the chime even stopped

sounding, like she kept herself pressed

up behind it, waiting for any excuse to

let in some air.

She’d open the door, see it was only

me, and her face would fall. She’d hold

out her hand so I could give her the

envelope, and she’d say, “This from

Tamara?”

And I’d say, “Yeah, that’s from my

mom.”

Fiona Burke wasn’t particularly

friendly—she never invited me in; she

never said thank you. But, in the

beginning at least, she wasn’t mean.

She’d

simply

put

the

envelope

containing our rent check on the

sideboard, and the whole time she’d be

looking up over my head, past me at the

road, a visual ache showing in her face.

Then she’d close the door.

She was nine years older than me, so

it seemed she’d always lived there in

that house with the Burkes. She belonged

in Pinecliff, our small town set upon the

steep hill, with the railroad station down

at the bottom and the mountain ridge

hovering above. To my mind, she

belonged there more than I did.

When we spent any amount of time

alone, like when she’d do my mom a

favor and babysit me for a few hours,

she was quiet, perched on the edge of the

couch near the television, making

surreptitious calls on the phone. But

something changed the last year I knew

her, around the time she turned 17. I

know because my mom said, “Don’t take

it personally, honey, she’s 17—that’s

just how girls are at that age.”

But were they?

The shift in Fiona Burke’s personality

came fast, it felt to me. It altered the look

in her eyes, and it chilled the tone in her

voice. It changed everything. She liked

to tease me about something that year,

telling me she could evict me and my

mom anytime. All she had to do was

make up a good, steaming lie about us to

tell her parents, and my mom and I

would be out on the street. We’d have to

live in a cardboard box and beg for

handouts at the train station, she said.

And maybe my mom would decide I was

too much for her to take care of, and

she’d sell me off to some passing

businessman on an Amtrak train bound

for Penn Station, and who knew what

would become of me then.

I cried the first time she said this,

which made her enjoy repeating it. Of

course I know now she didn’t have the

power to evict us, not by her word

alone, but I used to believe she did.

But my sometimes-babysitter and

longtime next-door neighbor Fiona

Burke appeared as innocent as she ever

would in the photograph her parents

selected for her Missing poster. In it, she

had straight teeth and straighter hair, not

yet dyed. Her shirt buttons were done all

the way up to her neck and there were

two pearl earrings fastened in her ears.

She wore a blameless smile and sat

there on a stool with her hands folded.

Her favorite necklace was tight around

her throat, and the flash of the studio

camera happened to catch it at the exact

right angle to make it look lovely and not

like a ghastly, dirty thing hanging over

her shirt.

She was who they wanted her to be, in

that picture. That was before she turned

17. After, a whole other side to her

emerged, one that was out in full the

night I saw her last.

Fiona Burke’s parents saw one thing,

and the world saw another.

When she disappeared, I remember

seeing her picture in the news, being

aware that people were looking for her.

But, as the years went on and she didn’t

come back, as her Missing posters came

down from bulletin boards and other

announcements for yard sales and ride-

shares and rooms for rent went up in

their place, people forgot about her and

stopped asking.

She’d lost herself to that place where

the missing kids go, the kids no one

finds, even when lakes are dredged and

woods combed. The ones computer-aged

into adulthood who never make it home.

She didn’t call. She didn’t write.

She was just gone.

And I guess I’d forgotten about her

like everyone else in town had, until she

showed up in the dream and tried to give

me that stone, the one that looked a lot

like the broken piece of jewelry I’d

recovered from the gully on the side of

Dorsett Road. I was sure it meant

something, and it wasn’t until I was

alone again later that night, after the

frozen pizza with my mom and trying to

deflect her questions about Jamie, that I

closed myself in my room and dug it out

from where, the second I got home, I’d

stowed it inside a sock that was

wrapped in a sweater and buried in the

bottom drawer of my dresser. It wasn’t

until then that I really let myself

remember.

—
12
—

IT
was a chilly night in November, the

night Fiona Burke disappeared. Her

parents were down in Maryland for the

weekend, so she had the house to

herself, and it was clear she’d wanted—

planned—to keep it that way. Until my

mom asked her parents if she could

watch me, and they said yes without

confirming it with Fiona first. I’m

guessing that my usual babysitter must

have flaked like she did sometimes, and

my sudden appearance at my landlords’

house was a last-minute surprise—to

both Fiona and me. Because with her

parents out of state, this was the night

Fiona Burke had planned to run away

from home, and all of a sudden I was

there, in the way.

My mom wasn’t in school then. She

didn’t have the job at the state university

or even the certificate to get that job, so

this must have been when she worked

nights, when she was still dancing at the

club across the river.

I want to say I could pinpoint exactly

what Fiona Burke looked like on that

night she gave my mom the finger behind

her back and then said she’d take great

care of me. I should have an image of

her cleaning out her mother’s jewelry

box and her father’s suit jackets,

dredging for pawnable brooches and

misplaced gold cards.

But she was a fiery blur. Her hair was

livid, dyed the red of a sugar drink. Her

mouth was a deep, dark streak slathered

in gloss that was manufactured to look

wet long after it dried.

I remembered this:

Fiona Burke on the landing of her

parents’ circular staircase, leaning over

and looking down to the floor far below.

Her scraggly flame-red hair with the

pitch-black roots hung upside down in

the air like living thorns, and through the

thorns she was yelling at me to come

help her.

I realized she was really doing it and

not just saying she would. Leaving. She

was actually running away. She’d

packed up her things; the few bulging

bags up above were the possessions

she’d decided to take with her. Before I

was ready, she began to fling the bags

one by one over the banister.

Dropping her bags down from that

height made each one land with the

sickening smack of a suicide on the tiled

foyer floor. I dragged them off to the

side as soon as it was safe to grab them.

When she leaned over to drop the last

bag, the odd, murky pendant she always

wore got caught on the banister. She

pulled herself free and flung the bag, and

I guess at that point the black cord that

kept the necklace choker-tight against

her throat snapped, and the pendant itself

slipped off and fell, too.

It sailed through the air over me, and

though it must have dropped fast,

because it was an actual stone and not

made of something lighter, my memory

holds a picture of it still falling. I’m

standing below, in the middle of the

foyer beneath the glittering chandelier,

gathering her bags in a pile as instructed,

and I look up. I should have moved, but

there I am with my face turned upward

and the dark object hurtling straight for

me.

I must have covered my head and

ducked at some point, because the

broken pendant did reach bottom, where

it hit me in the shoulder, leaving a

searing pink whop of impact. From

there, it dropped to the floor, glossy face

up.

I seem to remember, if I peer back

through the years of carefully buried

distance, that the stone was as gray as a

trail of exhaust smoke, and it had a

surface that shone and bounced the light

to trick you into thinking it was beautiful.

I also seem to remember that I didn’t get

such a good look at it before Fiona

Burke descended the stairs and snatched

it out of my hands, shoving it in the slim

pocket of her jeans to take with her.

That’s how I know she had the

pendant with her when she went. And yet

somehow, impossibly, there I was, more

than eight years after she’d gone, holding

her signature piece in the palm of my

now much larger hand.

—
13
—

AFTER
seeing Fiona Burke so

distinctly in my dream, I cornered my

mom. I wanted to ask about Fiona in a

way that didn’t seem rehearsed, to know

if my mom had ever heard anything about

the girl, after all these years. For all I

knew, Fiona Burke had safely made it

into her twenties and was living in a

perfectly nice house somewhere far from

here, like North Dakota, studying to be

something admirable, like a veterinarian.

My mom looked up from her psych

textbook. “Did you say Fiona Burke?”

she asked absently, yawning and marking

her place with her highlighter. “I haven’t

heard her name in years.” She pulled her

hair off her neck and stretched, and as

she did the flock of birds tattooed near

her ear lifted their wings for the ceiling.

The green vines encircling her arms

came alive with her movement, and I

admired their twists and turns and

flowering details until she lowered her

arms and her sleeves dropped closed