He balled his hands into tight fists and seemed about to drum them on the table, but shook them in the air a moment instead. “Fine,” he told me. “It’s nothing I haven’t said before. All that fall and all that winter, I kept searching for Abigail. I had ideas about where she might have gone. Back to the ministry in Oregon. Or off to find a friend of my ex-wife’s. Or to a town in the south where we once stayed for a few months, since she seemed to like the other children at the church there more than other places. But she never turned up anywhere. All the while, I kept calling your house, but your parents just let that stupid machine answer. I couldn’t go to the police, because of the way we had been living. Besides, I didn’t know if my ex had some sort of report filed against me. I found out from one of the lawyers after I was in here that she never did stop looking.
“I started coming to your house again. That fall. That winter too. Eventually, your parents didn’t even bother to open the door. By then, I had read that book by Sam Heekin, which meant I knew about the Mustang Bar where he took your father after he apparently popped a few of those pills he liked to take when his back was hurting. The day of the storm, I went through the same routine: hammering away on your front door to no avail until I gave up and found myself sitting at the Mustang Bar too. It had been ages since I’d had so much as a drop of alcohol, never mind the few shots of whiskey I tossed back that night. As I sat at that bar, drowning my sorrows, some girl kept coming in and ordering drinks. Eventually, I realized she was sneaking them outside to the car. When I stood from the stool and made my way outside, who do I see but your sister? She looked different from that night I saw her in the parking lot in Florida, but I remembered her face.”
“And that’s when you made the deal?” I asked.
“Yes. Fifty bucks to call your parents and get them to talk to me. I told her that’s all I wanted to do and she believed it.”
“Then what?”
“She made the call from a pay phone right outside the bar. Meeting at the church was a detail she came up with all on her own. I was expecting to go by your house, but Rose told me that if your parents thought they were going to meet her, that if she was willing to pray with them to get things right in her head, they would venture out into the storm to see her.”
“Only it was you they would be seeing.”
“Exactly.”
“So then you went to the church?”
Lynch glanced behind him at the clock again. I did too. Thirteen minutes. “Uh-uh,” he said. “Your turn.”
I took a breath, thought of those pages in my journal, and began:
Abigail never came back up from that basement—not that I was aware of, anyway. My mother, however—she emerged a few hours later to throw together a quick dinner for Rose and me. While my father took a tray down for Abigail, my mother said she was sorry that we could not eat together as a family, but that any day now, perhaps even the very next, Abigail’s father would return for her at last. A shame, my mother said, that after a perfectly fine summer, this is how he would find the girl. She said she had tried her best, but there were some haunted people she could not help after all.
Once our mother made us two turkey sandwiches then returned to the basement, Rose told me that most nights at Saint Julia’s, she snuck her dinner back up to her room. That’s what she wanted to do then too. It had been so long since I’d seen my sister, I agreed to whatever she wanted. Inside her room, I watched as she shoved the bed back to where it used to be against the far wall, then stripped the sheets Abigail had been sleeping in and piled them, along with all the girl’s clothes, into the cinnamon-colored suitcase we once shared.
“She can have the old thing,” Rose said. “It just brings back bad memories.”
After I hunted down fresh sheets and helped make the room hers again, the two of us lay on her bed and picked at our sandwiches. It was then that I asked Rose more about Saint Julia’s, but she told me she preferred not to talk about it, except to say that she had left on her own and was never going back. The worst experience of her life, that’s what she said, but also the best because it taught her once and for all who she was. There in that bed, lying side by side the way we used to in those makeshift tents in the living room, we fell asleep.
At some point, I was woken by the sound of footsteps padding down the hall, and I looked to see my father, then my mother, slipping into their bedroom and closing the door. For a long moment, I lay there gazing over at Rose who, with her shaved head, looked nothing like herself. In some ways, it was like sleeping next to a stranger. And I couldn’t help but feel that’s what she was becoming to me. I lay there, wondering about her plan to stay in our house without returning to school and how many more feuds that would cause with our parents. Finally, I decided to stop worrying and instead do my part in making things better.