17 & Gone (19 page)

moment. It could come crashing down on

her like the ice storm that was her fate.

Coating her eyes and her tongue and

crusting deep beneath her fingernails.

Turning her a color she’d never been

before. Making her do terrible things.

But I didn’t sense that in her—and I’m

sure I would have, traveling through her

wants and thoughts and aches and regrets

and wonderings as I did, once she let me

in. I slid on her consciousness like trying

on a borrowed dress. There was nothing

wrong with that dress, even if it didn’t

fit me exactly.

I didn’t think she’d come to hurt me. I

knew all she wanted was to talk.

To tell me.

She told me everything up until the

moment she disappeared.

The before, I could see and

experience and mull over. And the

during—the accident, the car sliding

circles on the ice and crashing sideways

into the guardrail, that slice of fast-

moving time that came so suddenly—

that, I could play back in slow motion.

Pause and hover over. Investigate. It was

only the after that I couldn’t guess at,

couldn’t pierce a hole through.

Probably because she had a hard time

seeing it, too.

She told me about Lila, who was

hosting the party in her father’s finished

basement. She told me how none of this

would have happened if not for Lila’s

party,

one

Natalie

wasn’t

even

technically invited to, seeing as she and

Lila weren’t what could be called

friends. She’d tagged along to the party

anyway because of some boy. If she

hadn’t met that boy when she’d served

him a burger and fries at Murray’s,

where she waited tables two days a

week, if he hadn’t grabbed ahold of her

wrist when she’d walked by his booth

and slipped the napkin onto her tray, the

one where he’d written, in sloppy boy-

handwriting—
Babe you are hot. when

you get off work want to go to party

later? let me know
—and signed with his

name (Paul), then she wouldn’t be

haunting

me

in

bathrooms

and

whispering her story in my ears. She’d

be back home, alive, and I wouldn’t

know her.

She wanted me to get a sense of how

it was, up where she lived. How little

there was to do up there. How boring it

was, especially in winter, if you

couldn’t afford to ski. So she may have

despised Lila—in the locker room after

phys ed she’d heard the girl call her a

psychopath like her psychopath mother,

and in the hallway out of sight of the

teachers, Lila had let Natalie know how

she

felt

about

psychopaths

with

psychopath mothers. The girl had claws.

But she’d go to her party. Where else

was there to go?

The drive up the mountain was

uneventful. When they’d started the

climb up the mountain pass, it hadn’t

even begun snowing yet. But by the time

they were crawling to the top, searching

out the marker for Lila’s parents’

driveway, the sky ahead was shrouded

in a thick white sheet.

Since the guy who’d invited her was

driving—this was his old ’65 Mustang

coupe, oily and black in the night—she’d

sat in the front and could ignore the

looks from his friends. They were

townies like her, and they’d all heard the

stories of her mother.

But Paul, who was driving, wasn’t

from around there, so he had no idea.

There wasn’t a reason for a party,

except that Lila’s father was letting them

use his finished basement. That’s why

everyone drove up to the highest heights

of Plateau Road when a snowstorm was

expected. Lila’s house was at the tiptop

of the mountain, down a squirrelly dirt

driveway that fractured from the main

road, so that cars had to be parked out

on the road itself, making those who

came in sneakers have to ice-skate their

way to the front door. But her father had

a fully stocked bar and a billiards table

in the carpeted lower level of the house.

And the soundproof door at the top of the

stairs locked from the inside, so her

parents couldn’t check the booze supply

till morning.

It was Tim, the hippie, who brought

the pills. And it was Tim the hippie who

insisted on the orange juice, saying you

could enhance the roll on vitamin C. It

was Jeannette who said there was a

store close by, halfway down the road. It

was Paul who volunteered to drive.

And that’s how Paul and Tim and

Jeannette and Natalie had all gone back

out for the car. And this was also how

Natalie slipped on the ice that was now

falling from the sky and grabbed for the

first solid object, the hood of the car,

and that’s how the zipper of her coat

caused a nick in the paint.

Paul let her in the car, but he made her

sit in back this time.

They were on the road when the drug

kicked in, on a narrow lane skirting the

edge of the mountain, blinded by

shooting snow. The white battering the

hood was the same white flitting into the

sky and the same white slapping the

windshield. All was white.

You can’t know how long it’ll take to

trickle into your system, Tim had told

them, but it’s not instantaneous, and they

probably had a good half hour, so it’ll

be a smooth ride in, so gentle you won’t

know until—

Jeannette smiled and said she felt it

right now. Shit, man—she felt it.

Paul, the one driving, slowed to a

crawl. He spoke over his shoulder to

Natalie, who was in the backseat behind

him, forgetting that she’d nicked the

paint job on his car now, saying, “Whoa,

you feel that?” like they shared the same

body and were feeling the same things.

She told him she did. She told

everyone in the car that she felt it. In

fact, she felt other sensations instead.

Like how cold it was, so cold since Paul

hadn’t let the car warm up before

shifting it into drive, and colder still

because Paul had the window cracked.

Also she felt a climbing ache in her

head, probably from the overpowering

scent of gasoline. Was the car’s gas tank

leaking?

None of this was an effect of the drug.

She was completely sober.

What no one knew was that Natalie

had pocketed the pill Tim had given her.

She didn’t know, and never would get

to, what it felt like to “roll,” as Tim

called it, on a white winter’s night while

driving.

They didn’t know she was faking. The

snow seemed funny to Jeannette, so

Natalie pretended it was funny to her,

too. Tim was mesmerized by the seat

vinyl, how soft it was, how beautiful, so

Natalie

spent

a

long

moment

contemplating its perfectly smooth skin.

Paul kept watching her instead of the

road, and she wanted to tell him to keep

a lookout for other cars and for patches

of ice and swift turns that would veer

them off the side of the mountain.

Also, she wanted to ask, haven’t they

driven far enough? Wasn’t the store

supposed to be just down the road?

But if she did that, she’d reveal she’d

only pretended to swallow the pill. That

she’d lied.

It was only that she didn’t want to

lose control. She didn’t want to have no

sense of what was real or unreal, to

think everything was wonderful when it

actually wasn’t wonderful, which was

what Tim had told everyone who hadn’t

done it before to expect after the

chemical seeped into their bloodstreams.

Everything Tim had described was the

last thing Natalie would have ever

wanted, especially knowing she wasn’t

among friends.

To lose control?

To not know what was real?

That would be too much like looking

down at her hands and seeing they’d

become her mother’s hands. Like

looking into the mirror, as Natalie did

every single day since the two

consecutive life sentences were decided,

and gazing into the eyes of a woman who

could plunge a knife into a man’s

stomach forty-seven times and then bag

him up with his gym socks and his tennis

racket and leave him at his wife’s door

to be discovered when she went out to

get the newspaper Sunday morning.

Natalie didn’t, couldn’t be sure, what

she was capable of, having this woman

for a mother, and so she could never let

go the way the others could. She’d never

get so inebriated she’d climb atop the

bar in a basement rec room and pitch

herself face-first into the arms of

whoever would catch her, like Lila had

before the orange-juice run.

And yet somehow, sober, Natalie had

gotten herself talked into going for a ride

in Paul’s Mustang. And she was sober

when Jeannette turned to her in the

backseat of the moving car and said, as

if she’d only just noticed her, “Natalie

Montesano? Natalie, is that you?”

Jeannette’s pupils had grown to two

black nickels, gargantuan against the

shrinking sea of her irises. She wasn’t

slurring; she was talking as if she didn’t

know how to make full use of her mouth.

“Wait.” She seemed confused. “Wait.

Why
don’t we like you?”

And that was all it took. The fine

feeling, the open mind, the sense of

adventure in agreeing to go on the drive

in the snowy night, it all left Natalie.

And good riddance. In its place came

disdain. Pulsed through with rage.

Woven with hate.

Maybe there was a piece of her

mother inside her after all. It wouldn’t

cause her to grab a sharpened object and

plunge it into the closest chest—three

hearts to choose from in this car. It had

always been subtler, inside Natalie. It

made her not care. Not about herself,

and not about anyone else.

She didn’t care if they all died on this

road tonight.

When she did it, it was without

thinking, and it was also as if she’d been

premeditating it for years: She reached

her arm forward into the front seat and

she said, “Watch out for that car!”

There was no other car. There was

only the car they were in, which

shuddered when the brakes were

jammed, and then slid. Soon the old

Mustang was careening across the ice,

not going straight and not going

sideways, and there was the railing at

the road’s edge, and there was the space

ahead of it, filled only with air and

emptied of trees.

There was this moment before the car

made impact, so of course she

remembered

it,

where

she

saw

everything that was happening and was

about to happen and understood it in a

way she didn’t know life could be

understood.

Then she saw the guardrail come for

them—and beyond that, the gaping edge

of the mountain—and this was when she

screamed. She screamed the way the

man’s wife did when she found the bag

with the body, the way a madwoman

would scream when she tore open the

guts of a lying, two-timing man. She

screamed, and then the car jolted to a

stop.

She showed me how she screamed,

and my ears rang for days.

—
25
—

NATALIE’S
story doesn’t end

there, with the accident. There was what

came after.

If anyone could have been on that

mountain to see the smashed black

Mustang, if they’d been peering in

through the cracked windshield to where

Natalie lay in the backseat, they would

have wondered what might happen to

her. Would any of the kids who’d been

in the car come back for her, and why

hadn’t anyone tried to wake her first