Then she’d close the door.
She was nine years older than me, so it seemed she’d always lived there in that house with the Burkes. She belonged in Pinecliff, our small town set upon the steep hill, with the railroad station down at the bottom and the mountain ridge hovering above. To my mind, she belonged there more than I did.
When we spent any amount of time alone, like when she’d do my mom a favor and babysit me for a few hours, she was quiet, perched on the edge of the couch near the television, making surreptitious calls on the phone. But something changed the last year I knew her, around the time she turned 17. I know because my mom said, “Don’t take it personally, honey, she’s 17—that’s just how girls are at that age.”
But were they?
The shift in Fiona Burke’s personality came fast, it felt to me. It altered the look in her eyes, and it chilled the tone in her voice. It changed everything. She liked to tease me about something that year, telling me she could evict me and my mom anytime. All she had to do was make up a good, steaming lie about us to tell her parents, and my mom and I would be out on the street. We’d have to live in a cardboard box and beg for handouts at the train station, she said.
And maybe my mom would decide I was too much for her to take care of, and she’d sell me off to some passing businessman on an Amtrak train bound for Penn Station, and who knew what would become of me then.
I cried the first time she said this, which made her enjoy repeating it. Of course I know now she didn’t have the power to evict us, not by her word alone, but I used to believe she did.
But my sometimes-babysitter and longtime next-door neighbor Fiona Burke appeared as innocent as she ever would in the photograph her parents selected for her Missing poster. In it, she had straight teeth and straighter hair, not yet dyed. Her shirt buttons were done all the way up to her neck and there were two pearl earrings fastened in her ears.
She wore a blameless smile and sat there on a stool with her hands folded.
Her favorite necklace was tight around her throat, and the flash of the studio camera happened to catch it at the exact right angle to make it look lovely and not like a ghastly, dirty thing hanging over her shirt.
She was who they wanted her to be, in that picture. That was before she turned 17. After, a whole other side to her emerged, one that was out in full the night I saw her last.
Fiona Burke’s parents saw one thing, and the world saw another.
When she disappeared, I remember seeing her picture in the news, being aware that people were looking for her.
But, as the years went on and she didn’t come back, as her Missing posters came down from bulletin boards and other announcements for yard sales and ride-shares and rooms for rent went up in their place, people forgot about her and stopped asking.
She’d lost herself to that place where the missing kids go, the kids no one finds, even when lakes are dredged and woods combed. The ones computer-aged into adulthood who never make it home.
She didn’t call. She didn’t write.
She was just gone.