She’s Abby Sinclair, 17, of Orange Terrace, New Jersey. Abby with the cubic zirconia in her nose. Abby who’s afraid of clowns. Abby who can’t whistle. Abby who chews her nails, just the ones on her thumbs. Abby who can tap-dance. Abby who doesn’t mind when it rains. Or maybe she does mind. Maybe she isn’t like any of those things, since I made that all up.
But she is Abby Sinclair, for sure. She was reported missing September 2 and her case was officially closed on January 29.
She’s 17 still, and she’s alive.
So how did I know? The truth is that I only hoped. That’s what I did. There was no disembodied voice whispering the truth of what happened to Abby Sinclair into my waiting and willing ear.
And if there had been, if ghosts walked and communicated with me, if lost girls really did reach out to me across the smoky abyss—I wonder, wouldn’t I have known the truth so much faster? I could have saved her two months ago.
I could have helped end this before the fires even got set.
Which is what I keep going back to: the fires. It’s all I dream of now, since the house is gone. This time it’s not wishful and imaginary, it’s a memory of something I did with my own two hands.
Besides, I know it now for what it was: a girl’s attempt to call for help. A need to be listened to. To be heard.
I know what she was saying—what I was saying, even if I had trouble articulating it in words then:
Don’t give up.
Don’t give up on her, or any of them.
Keep looking. Always keep looking.
No girl—no missing girl, no runaway —deserves to be given up on, just like I wouldn’t want anyone to give up on me.
The blaze was red and ferocious in the snowed-out night. Before the fire truck came to douse it and darken it, it was brilliant, it was blinding. It was unforgettable. No one could ignore it. I bet it woke people in their beds at night, so they stood at their windows wondering. I bet people could see that fire from miles and miles away.
THREE MONTHS LATER
IT’S my first week back home. The insurance company decided my stay at the hospital was over, even if the doctors hadn’t, and I was signed out and left in my mom’s care as of Monday.
There are things outside our small house that look different now, and I’m spending my time noticing. There are colors that are brighter, and patches of sky that seem lower, and there’s a tree on the lawn that I don’t remember seeing here before.
Since I’ve been gone, spring has come to Pinecliff, and our cat, Billie, has lost some weight and is shedding tufts that drift through the rooms. In the quiet, it seems as if the house has been capsized and I’ve woken underwater, seaweed and minnows slowly circling me. I know it’s only Billie shedding, but I let my imagination idle as I watch a bit of hair float by. There are other things I notice: how my bedroom looks smaller than I remembered, the bed taller. Things like that. But I’ll get used to them.
Another one of my letters got turned in to police, the postmark tracked down and pointed to me, which is how my mom discovered I’d written to more than Abby’s grandparents. I’d been writing other girls’ families, too, when I could find them, telling them what their missing daughters and sisters and nieces would have wanted them to know. The things the girls told me in my dreams, when they let me coast through their memories, a visiting observer who never tampered with their lives but who paid attention, who remembered. I’d write to a girl’s mom, saying she meant to visit her in prison, even one time. I’d write to a girl’s boyfriend, saying she still loved him and she didn’t ditch him at the gas station and she did want to go to Mexico with him, if only she could. My mom wanted to know how many of these letters I’d sent, whose mailing addresses I’d found and what stories I told them, even if I had the addresses and the names wrong, even if my letters never reached who I intended.
When I confessed, I could see from her face how serious she thought this was.
“These are real girls,” she told me carefully. “Those girls you found online, they are real. With real lives. And real people at home wondering what happened to them. But the part about you knowing the girls, talking to them . . .