Maybe that’s why I’m not able to see the shine of it for some time. But when I do—when it catches the light somehow, when it flashes, brighter than the fire outside and brighter than all the snow— my breath goes with it.
It fell, I guess, on the ground, when he was carrying out whatever he had in his arms. It fell facedown, splayed open on the concrete.
I am holding it in my hands when I hear the sirens. When the fire truck comes and the police after that. I am holding it in my hands.
It’s made of plastic; it’s purple, gaudy,
and
shiny,
with
glitter
sandwiched between the translucent decorative sleeves. Its pockets are stuffed full, so the single snap doesn’t work to keep it closed. And inside there are pictures of her and her friends, and a mass of loose change that spills out all over my boots, nickels mostly, and there’s an ID card from a Catholic school in New Jersey, and ticket stubs and clothing tags and little scrawled notes for things she may have wanted to remember and a dollop of chewed gum making some of the contents stick together forever.
It’s Abby Sinclair’s wallet, and I know this before it comes open because of what her former camp counselor told me about the things she took with her the night she went to meet Luke. And I know simply because I know, in my gut. As if she reached out from the ether and told me so herself. I knew it as soon as I had the thing in my hands.
It’s over soon after I find it.
The fires lured them all here, and with them comes all the noise.
The shouting. A dog barking. Sirens.
The door being kicked all the way open.
The men bursting in. Hands up. Knees in snow. The fire truck, the firemen. Lights.
Confusion. The wallet being taken from me. A girl’s name on my lips. Police on the way, and then here. My mom. The feel of my mom’s intact and pounding heart through her coat. Lights. A blanket wrapped around me. The tight ties around my wrists. Questions. Losing sight of Jamie. The backseat of a police car. Lights. The sound of fires being put out. The darkness as the lights go down.
The remembered feel of that wallet, that old chewed piece of gum. The smell of kerosene on my clothes, in my hair. The taste of it on my tongue.
Out the window: the calm, blue sign that
says LADY-OF-THE-PINES SUMMER
CAMP FOR GIRLS fading away and the quiet oasis of my mind that shrinks off with it.
Then pine trees. The pine trees of Dorsett Road as I’m carried away. The same stretch of pine trees Abby must have seen the last night she was here.
— 63 —
THERE are things I don’t understand, things I was a part of without even knowing I was taking part. I guess I was one girl trying to make sense of them.
And trying to fight them, in a way that made sense only to me.
“How did you know to go looking in that shed?”
I’m asked this again and again, the night of the fires and in the days after. By firemen. By police. By my doctor, once I was returned to the hospital. By my own mom. Never by Jamie, though. He doesn’t ask me how I knew to stay and search in there—I guess because he saw the force that propelled me that night, couldn’t help but see the living fire of it in my eyes.
Because that’s the thing: I thought it was over. I thought finding something that belonged to her (and the glittery purple plastic wallet with her school ID
inside did belong to her; police verified that) meant the worst I could imagine, and I did imagine. I thought it was too late. I thought she was dead. I held something of hers in my hands and then I held only my hands in my hands, when they took the wallet for evidence, my arms wound around my back and zip-tied there as I waited inside the squad car to be taken to the station and charged with arson. I told myself awful things.
Convinced myself she was gone. My voices told me, or some voiceless part of me told me, or the synapses in my head broke open and trotted out a song-and-dance made up of kicking legs and flapping lies to tell me. It doesn’t matter how I thought I knew.
I was wrong.