17 & Gone (29 page)

screaming.

Aren’t you going to go look for her?

Your mother. She knows.

You haven’t said hello to me yet.

Can’t you see me?

You’re a nasty ho. And you’re not

that cute, either.

You lie. You lie. You lie.

HOW LONG DO I HAVE TO STAY

HERE!

You don’t have much longer.

You said you were going to look for

her. You’re not looking for her.

Hi. I’m saying hi. Hi. Do you see

me? Hi.

You don’t have much longer.

Hi.

My head hammered with the girls’

voices, more than I could have counted,

more than I even recognized, proving

there were lost girls I hadn’t gotten to

meet yet and that I hadn’t been imagining

them in the woods. I screwed my eyes

shut as if that could stop them and it did,

for a moment. Then it made it worse.

One story drowned out the next story and

capsized the story that followed and took

over where the last story left off.

New voices. A new girl named

Jannah wanted to tell me about a boy

named Carlos—how she was supposed

to meet him, and she never made it

before she got taken, and how he had the

most intense brown eyes. And another

new girl named Hailey did some things

she wasn’t proud of, and who am I to

judge? And a girl named Trina hated

every single person who laid eyes on her

—she hated every girl here; she

especially loathed me.

Hailey had run away before. She had

a chipped tooth from the first time, a

pierced belly button from the second

time, a prostitution record for the third

time, but this time, the fourth time she

went missing, she hadn’t run away at all.

Jannah loved Carlos and she ran away to

have a life with him—or she meant to,

before her family caught her and

punished her for what she did. Trina ran

off because no one was even looking.

She ran simply because she could. And

good fucking riddance.

Do you think he waited for me?

They think they know. They don’t

know. No one knows.

Going, going, gone. How you like me

now, huh? How you like me now?

Are you listening? Why aren’t you

listening?

Do you think he waited?

Can’t you hear me? Hi, hi.

She’s out, idiot.

Wake her up, wake her up. Someone

wake her up.

Then—in a gap between the noise—

she spoke. Louder than the others, closer

somehow, more urgent.

Help.

I knew that voice. That was Abby

Sinclair.

—
45
—

WHEN
I opened my eyes, I was

across the room, on the couch, with our

cat, Billie, before me on the coffee table.

The cat stared intently at a spot just

behind my head, and my mom hovered

over me, in crisis mode. She had my two

hands by the wrists and there was a sore

spot on the side of my skull from where

I’d been pounding it, I guess with a fist.

She was making a soothing sound in her

throat, and hearing it calmed something

in me. Calmed the noise and lessened the

panic. The girls responded, too, and

soon we were all still, listening to my

mom’s tuneless humming.

When she saw this, she let go of my

arms and took a seat beside me. “Tell

me,” she said simply. She said it with

the look she used to give me when I was

little, when I was the only person in her

world and she in mine. I focused on one

of her tattoos, the flock of soaring birds

on her neck. I counted them for comfort,

the way I used to when I was younger:

nine. Nine birds. Or was it ten? Ten. I’d

forgotten the tenth bird on the back of her

neck, hidden now behind her ear.

Ten birds, like always. Ten birds, as

I’d remembered.

This was all it took for me to begin

telling her.

“There’s this girl,” I started. “I found

her Missing poster and then I read more

about her online. She’s not from here,

but she went missing from somewhere

close by. They say she ran away, but she

didn’t. Something’s happened, she needs

help, I know she does. But no one’s

looking for her. No one cares.”

My mom kept all expression from her

face, but, twitching beneath her skin,

there was something. The birds fluttered

as the tendons in her neck tightened, and

I kept my eyes on them and kept talking.

I spilled everything about Abby,

except how I’d talked to her myself; I’d

seen her and I’d heard her and I’d been

close enough to her I could’ve reached

out and touched her, but I didn’t say that.

I didn’t say how I hadn’t touched her

because I’d assumed she was a ghost.

But I started to wonder if maybe there

was a way—when you’re in trouble,

when you’re caught somewhere and you

can’t get out—that you can reach out to

someone. Maybe it happens when you’re

sleeping, that you project a vision of

yourself to anyone who can see, and I

can see. I didn’t have the rational,

scientific explanation for seeing the

apparition of a lost but maybe-still-alive

girl in my van and in my bedroom, and

without it I didn’t know how to explain

that piece to my mom. So I skipped that

part.

But I gave her other pieces:

I admitted that I’d talked to the boy

Abby had been hanging out with. That I

went in to talk to the Pinecliff police, not

that they helped. And that I’d even been

to talk to a counselor from the camp and

to Abby’s grandparents, and that was the

real reason I drove down to New Jersey.

I had Abby’s bicycle, the one she left

behind, the one I was storing in the

garage. (I had her pendant, too, but this I

couldn’t say.)

When I stopped talking at last, my

mom had her eyes down, considering all

of what I’d told her. Billie didn’t blink.

Her bright gaze bored into me, as if

she’d been trying to decide how to

respond, too. She sat poised on the

coffee table, a slight tremor in her fuzzy

tail.

My mom chose her words carefully.

“You say you know?
How
do you

know?”

“I just . . . know.”

“How, Lauren? Explain.”

“I have a feeling.” The expression on

her face didn’t change, though the birds

on her neck jittered. “I had a dream.”

“You had a dream or you had a

feeling? Do you know something you’re

not telling me?”

“No.” Yes. “Both. I had a dream
and

a feeling. She’s not okay. Something

happened. I know.”

“Do you want to call the police again?

Do you want me to call for you?” She

believed me. My mom believed I was

telling the truth.

Relief washed over me, and I wanted

to lie back and let that be enough for

tonight, and I also wanted to keep

talking, now that I’d started, to tell her

more about the dreams. About the other

girls. About everything I knew that I

shouldn’t know, every memory that had

been shared with me.

Then I remembered something. She

made me think of it when she’d

suggested calling the police. “Maybe we

could ask for Officer Heaney this time.

That’s who I met when Jamie and I were

looking around that camp place. He was

there—he found us. He made us leave,

you know, for trespassing. But he

remembered Abby. He knew she’d gone

missing. He knew about the bike. We

should call him. I didn’t get to talk to

him at the station.”

“All right,” she said. She grabbed a

notebook and wrote it down:
Heaney.

Heeney? Heeny?
We weren’t sure how

to spell it.

I still couldn’t read her expression.

“First show me this girl,” she said.

“This Abby Sinclair.”

I found the folded flyer in my coat

pocket and smoothed it out to show her.

Abby’s face had faded away to a white

space as if she could be anyone, a fill-

in-the-blank face surrounded by a block

of dark hair. Showing her flyer felt like

exposing a page from my middle-school

diary; it was that gooey and personal and

important and tinged with shame.

“It’s hard to read,” my mom said. “Is

this online?”

Now she was acting like she might not

believe me, and a little trickle of doubt

hooked itself to the lobe of my ear,

hovering there, breathing, waiting to

hear what she’d say next. Did she think I

made this flyer on my computer for fun,

invented a missing girl’s name and

hometown and decided what clothes

she’d be last seen wearing?

“It’s just hard to read,” my mom said,

seeming to sense what I was thinking.

“It’s online,” I said. “I’ll show you.”

As we went into the kitchen, the girls’

voices in my ears stayed ominously

silent. No shadows skirted the walls.

They must have been angry with me. I

might be barred from the house if my

dream took me there again in the night—

but would they forgive me if I found

Abby? Would that be enough? Or was it

that I needed to save all of them,

retroactively, every last one?

On my mom’s laptop I brought up the

missing-persons page: proof Abby was

an actual girl and I didn’t make her up.

This was not imaginary; this girl really

was missing.

She read it carefully and clicked on

the photo to enlarge it and see her face

more clearly. Abigail Sinclair, 17, of

Orange Terrace, New Jersey. The

pendant was a gray shadow in the

hollow of her neck, and her eyes were

black pools full of secrets, not all of

which I knew yet.

I found my voice. “That’s her.”

“You dreamed about this girl,” my

mom said, as if she wanted to get the

facts straight.

Can a dream be happening when

you’re fully conscious of it? I wanted to

ask her. Because, if so, then I did dream

about this girl. All the time. And I

dreamed about the other girls; I dreamed

about them all the time, too. And these

were dreams when I was sleeping, and

these were dreams when I was awake.

This
could have been a dream, I

realized, sitting there at the kitchen table

before my mom’s laptop, the cat having

followed us in and still watching me

intently, pointing her fuzzed tail. The

dream could have been this night, this

room, this conversation, and the reality

could have been the broken house on the

cracked street under the dark smog, with

those girls. The reality could have been

that I was trapped inside that limbo with

the rest of them, and there was no true

sky above us, and there were no roads

leading to us, and the sidewalk ended,

and the house was about to burn down

with us in it. I could have already been

taken.

“What else?” she said. “Does this

girl . . . talk to you? In your . . .

dreams?”

The way she said it—condescending,

like she’d added invisible quotation

marks around choice words—I could

see her reciting it as instructed from one

of her textbooks. This was what a doctor

might ask a psychotic person.
“Let the

patient think you believe her. Don’t

affirm the delusions, but don’t let her

feel attacked.”
She was treating me like

I’d gone mental.

I met her eyes. “Yes,” I said.

At this, my gaze was pulled away

from her to the window over the kitchen

sink, the small one that looked in the

direction of the grand old Burke house

next door. The view was of the side of

the house near the laundry room, where

the fire had burned all those years ago. I

knew there was snow outside, and the

temperature hovered near freezing, but