This particular copy had been within my reach for months. It had been pinned up in the break room on the board between the two vending machines, the machine with the petrified ice-cream sandwich stuck in its craw and the machine that dispensed the same kind of soda, over and over, out of every hole.
I’d seen only the top of the flyer on the bulletin board, only part of the headline that read: ISSING. But the rest quickly filled itself in for me, even though corners of other pages were blocking most of her face. I went to dig it out from beneath the layers of announcements for unwanted kittens and needed roommates, staff notices saying who can park in what section of the parking lot, and the store’s holiday hours. There, beneath all that and pierced with hundreds of old pushpin holes so the page seemed to flicker with starlight, was a Missing notice for Abby Sinclair.
She’d been here waiting for me to find her all along.
My mom got home from class late that night, after I’d visited Lady-of-the-Pines.
I was in our living room, curled up in front of the TV, waiting for her to come in so I could heat up a frozen pizza.
Jamie hadn’t called or e-mailed or left me a message, and my mom found me in an immobile ball.
“Hey,” she said, pausing in the doorway. She dropped her schoolbooks on the side table and shrugged off her coat, then asked how my night out with Jamie went.
I shrugged. It went fine, I told her, and by the expression on her face I could tell she knew it didn’t and she also knew I had no desire to talk about it. She digested all of this and restrained herself from asking more.
“How was class?” I asked.
“Good,” she said.
In the moving light from the television screen, I watched the dance of her tattoos—for all my life, she’s been covered with them. There are the vines that wrap around her arms and grasp her shoulders; there’s the pinup girl on her back, the tendrils of the painted girl’s yellow hair peeking out from beneath my mom’s real hair, which she kept a brilliant bottle burgundy; and the flock of birds soaring up her neck and into the sky beyond her ear. All of these tattoos were as much a part of my mom as her two blue eyes.
But as I was looking at her, she was also looking at me, noticing the furious motion of my hands. “What’s that you’re holding?” she asked.
I realized I was still fingering the flyer, running over every rip and prick of a pin and gouge in the paper, acting like I was trying to memorize Abby’s story in Braille.
“Oh this?” I said. When I heard myself, it sounded so artificial. “It’s nothing.”
I knew it wasn’t nothing, but I also didn’t yet know how, in a way, it was everything. Abby might have been the first, but she wouldn’t be the last. All the girls are 17, the same age I’d turned that month. Soon I’d have flyers like this for so many of them. I’d be able to recite their names, their identifying details (birthmarks and hairstyles, fluctuations in weight and height), their hometowns and
possible
destinations,
and
sometimes the outfits they were last seen wearing (sneaker brands and jacket colors, specifics like the silver heart necklace, the turquoise hat with the pom-pom, the zebra-print belt). I’d know and understand their vanishings, but I wouldn’t have the end to their stories, I wouldn’t have the why.
“Can’t I see?” my mom said, reaching out as if I’d actually let go. And that’s when I crushed it—Abby’s Missing flyer —crushed it fast into a hot, damp knot in the palm of my hand.
She pulled back her hand as if I’d bitten her. “Never mind,” she said. “You don’t have to show me. So I was thinking of heating up a frozen pizza.
You want?”
I nodded, and watched her drift off to the kitchen. I want to say I offered to help, but I stayed put where I was. I kept the balled-up flyer safe, wedged in under my body, and I didn’t fight it when my eyes began to close.
It was almost like I wanted to have the dream, like I was calling it closer.