My mom had gotten to her feet by this point and stood there worrying the tattoos at her wrists, winding her fingers around and around them, as if she could rub off the vines and start over with fresh skin. This was a nervous habit she had, when she was finding words for something difficult.
She drifted to the window, the one facing the hedge that separated our house from the Burkes’ next door. The night was glistening white and as silent as an unsprung trap. Billie wove herself through my mom’s legs and tried to look up and out the window herself, though she was far too short to reach and a little too fat lately to go leaping.
Obviously I assumed my mom was going to tell me that Fiona Burke was dead. But she only confirmed what I already knew: Fiona Burke had run away, and no one had ever heard from her again.
The Burkes’ house was dark, as if they were away—and maybe they were, like the night their daughter took off— but my mom studied its windows as if expecting a light in one of them.
“It’s so sad,” she said, turning back to me. “I still don’t know what to say to Mr. and Mrs. Burke, now, after all these years.”
“Me either,” I said.
“I could have helped her,” my mom kept on. “Fiona. I could’ve done something. If I’d known.”
I could see how she took it in, what happened to the girl who’d once lived next door, knotting it up into her own little ball of knots she carried around inside, lifting it out every once in a while to dwell. She was studying to be a psychologist at the university where she worked; it would take her years to get the degree, as she could only take a couple night classes a semester with her tuition reimbursement while she worked days in an office on campus, but I believed she’d make it. I believed she’d get to help people.
Still, I don’t think she could have helped Fiona Burke.
“You two were close,” my mom said.
“We weren’t close. I hardly knew her.”
“It wasn’t your fault, you know. Not by any stretch of the imagination was that your fault.”
She was thinking about the night Fiona Burke left, and then I was thinking of it, and then there it was, that almost-nine-year-old memory, itchy and oily like wool.
“I know it’s not my fault,” I said.
Fiona Burke had been babysitting me the night she ran away, that’s fact. Her parents didn’t come home that night, so my mom was the one who found me after, and she never once blamed me for not stopping the girl from getting in that truck, mainly because she didn’t know about the truck.
Besides, I couldn’t have stopped Fiona Burke, I told myself. She’d been watching the road for a good long time.
Once on it, I don’t think there was anything that could have turned her back around.
So it was no one’s fault. There was nothing I could have done.
This is when the idea came to me, featherlight and drifting through the room like tufts of Billie’s shedding fur. What if that’s why all this was happening—
starting with my van breaking down on the side of the road so I could find that flyer—was it so I could do something for someone else? For Abby?
My mom touched her cheek, absently, as if she knew the exact spot where her beauty mark could be found, the distinct circle so black it was almost blue, on the left side of her cheek, beside her lips.
She put her fingernail to it like it itched.
Her beauty mark wasn’t inked on in a tattoo parlor; she was born with it.
That’s why it was my favorite piece on her.
It was then that Billie hissed at no one, as if someone had entered the room who only she could see. And then, when my mom turned her attention back to her studies, I saw them, the twinned shimmering outlines in my living room, though it looked like they didn’t know they were in my living room, that they didn’t see me or us or even our furniture, since they stood in the same space already occupied by the couch.
My mom looked up because I was staring. “What?” she said. “Still thinking of Fiona?”
“No,” I said. My eyes weren’t on Fiona; they were on the girl beside her.