And I guess I’d forgotten about her like everyone else in town had, until she showed up in the dream and tried to give me that stone, the one that looked a lot like the broken piece of jewelry I’d recovered from the gully on the side of Dorsett Road. I was sure it meant something, and it wasn’t until I was alone again later that night, after the frozen pizza with my mom and trying to deflect her questions about Jamie, that I closed myself in my room and dug it out from where, the second I got home, I’d stowed it inside a sock that was wrapped in a sweater and buried in the bottom drawer of my dresser. It wasn’t until then that I really let myself remember.
— 12 — IT was a chilly night in November, the night Fiona Burke disappeared. Her parents were down in Maryland for the weekend, so she had the house to herself, and it was clear she’d wanted— planned—to keep it that way. Until my mom asked her parents if she could watch me, and they said yes without confirming it with Fiona first. I’m guessing that my usual babysitter must have flaked like she did sometimes, and my sudden appearance at my landlords’
house was a last-minute surprise—to both Fiona and me. Because with her parents out of state, this was the night Fiona Burke had planned to run away from home, and all of a sudden I was there, in the way.
My mom wasn’t in school then. She didn’t have the job at the state university or even the certificate to get that job, so this must have been when she worked nights, when she was still dancing at the club across the river.
I want to say I could pinpoint exactly what Fiona Burke looked like on that night she gave my mom the finger behind her back and then said she’d take great care of me. I should have an image of her cleaning out her mother’s jewelry box and her father’s suit jackets, dredging for pawnable brooches and misplaced gold cards.
But she was a fiery blur. Her hair was livid, dyed the red of a sugar drink. Her mouth was a deep, dark streak slathered in gloss that was manufactured to look wet long after it dried.
I remembered this:
Fiona Burke on the landing of her parents’ circular staircase, leaning over and looking down to the floor far below.
Her scraggly flame-red hair with the pitch-black roots hung upside down in the air like living thorns, and through the thorns she was yelling at me to come help her.
I realized she was really doing it and not just saying she would. Leaving. She was actually running away. She’d packed up her things; the few bulging bags up above were the possessions she’d decided to take with her. Before I was ready, she began to fling the bags one by one over the banister.
Dropping her bags down from that height made each one land with the sickening smack of a suicide on the tiled foyer floor. I dragged them off to the side as soon as it was safe to grab them.
When she leaned over to drop the last bag, the odd, murky pendant she always wore got caught on the banister. She pulled herself free and flung the bag, and I guess at that point the black cord that kept the necklace choker-tight against her throat snapped, and the pendant itself slipped off and fell, too.
It sailed through the air over me, and though it must have dropped fast, because it was an actual stone and not made of something lighter, my memory holds a picture of it still falling. I’m standing below, in the middle of the foyer beneath the glittering chandelier, gathering her bags in a pile as instructed, and I look up. I should have moved, but there I am with my face turned upward and the dark object hurtling straight for me.
I must have covered my head and ducked at some point, because the broken pendant did reach bottom, where it hit me in the shoulder, leaving a searing pink whop of impact. From there, it dropped to the floor, glossy face up.
I seem to remember, if I peer back through the years of carefully buried distance, that the stone was as gray as a trail of exhaust smoke, and it had a surface that shone and bounced the light to trick you into thinking it was beautiful.
I also seem to remember that I didn’t get such a good look at it before Fiona Burke descended the stairs and snatched it out of my hands, shoving it in the slim pocket of her jeans to take with her.