I wasn’t sure what to think. It depended on what Abby thought. And I needed her to tell me what that was.
“Why’d I keep her bike all this time then, huh? That should prove I didn’t do shit to her. I’d have thrown it off a cliff by now if I had.”
I didn’t say anything, so he kept talking.
“Lauren, you know me. C’mon now.
Be serious.”
I closed my eyes. I wished I could will the dream to life. That I could climb the steps of the house, no matter the time of day, awake or asleep or in the middle of conversation. If only I could control it, the smoky space that controlled me. I could be in the dairy aisle during my shift at the Shop & Save, stacking the 1
percent and the 2 percent milk cartons beside the whole and then the smoke would start sifting in, up from the floor like that time the little kid broke open the bag of flour, and the pale cloud would be a curtain through which I could visit the dream. Or here, now, in Luke Castro’s garage. I’d step through and ask Abby my questions. I’d find out what I needed to know. I’d come back, I’d know all.
This time it worked, in a way.
Because the place in the dream was near. I could smell its smoke. Or someone who reeked of it.
“Who are you looking for?” Luke asked. “My parents are out. It’s just you and me.”
It’s just you and me, a voice mocked, in my head.
She was meaner than I expected.
Don’t go inside the house if he asks you. He just wants to do you in his parents’ water bed.
I was looking around wildly then, to see where the voice was coming from. I thought she was behind me, but the voice had come from across the garage, on the other side of the car. So was she under it or crouching down against the door?
Just wait, she said. You’ll ruin everything.
“No,” I said. “I have a boyfriend.”
“Whoa,” Luke said at this, though I wasn’t even talking to him.
I waited for the voice to return so I could find where she was hiding, and then when she kept silent I realized. That wasn’t Abby. That voice was cruel the way Fiona Burke was cruel, and snide the way Fiona Burke used to be snide.
That was Fiona’s low whisper in my ear.
“Listen,” Luke was saying, “if you do hear from her, no hard feelings, right?
It’s not like we were serious. She knew that.”
My face must have said otherwise.
“She didn’t?”
“She thought . . .” I started, wishing she’d speak up and tell me. “She thought maybe,” I finished.
Luke shook his head. “Why doesn’t she just call me herself? Why’d she send you?”
“Because I told her I’d help her,” I said, and by saying it out loud, it was like I was declaring it. To him and everyone. To myself. To her and to Fiona Burke—I felt their held lungfuls of breath as they listened.
Then I wheeled the bike out of the garage and down the driveway toward my van without another word. Maybe I’d been wrong, I told myself. Maybe the bike had been blue.
— 16 — I didn’t end up wheeling Abby’s blue Schwinn bicycle into the police station. I left it in my van parked outside and then I went in, to tell the police I had it.
The station was small, with a waiting room holding three chairs and an interior window in the wall, through which a receptionist sat reading.
I didn’t see Officer Heaney or anyone else
official-looking
through
the
window, but I was told to sit tight and an officer would be with me very soon. I waited forty-two minutes. Then the receptionist went on break, apologizing for keeping me waiting, and an officer came up front to help me, leaving me sitting another eleven minutes while he ducked back in to take a phone call.