“Okay,” I told the officer. “Thank you for your time. I understand.” I grabbed Abby’s flyer from off the desk and returned it to the hoodie’s front pocket, where the touch of the pendant would keep it warm. I didn’t look back. I was almost at the door.
“But maybe when I get a chance I’ll look into it,” he called through the window into the waiting room. My hand was on the knob and the door was coming open, and I knew he didn’t mean it and that as soon as I walked out of the station he’d let himself forget. I glanced back at the window to be sure and noticed him looking up at the clock on the wall. “How old are you, miss?
Shouldn’t you be in school?”
“Winter break,” I said, though technically it didn’t start for another day.
“You sure about that? My daughter goes to Pinecliff Central, and she had school today, she—”
The door swung closed before he could finish. I was still here. I was still searching. I was the only one who seemed to care.
— 17 — I didn’t get far.
My eyes swam and then came into focus: the parking lot of the Friendly’s.
The square of blacktop divided by yellow lines. The gray concrete curb.
The bumper of my van wedged against the curb. The sign on the plate-glass window advertising a three-course Christmas dinner special next week (was Christmas next week already?) for only $7.99. The cracks in the sidewalk.
The faces in the cracks. Smiling faces at first and then mouths in the shape of screams.
I’d been on the sidewalk outside the Friendly’s for I-couldn’t-say-how-long.
Something had come over me when I was leaving the police station and I’d had to pull over. It was the growing sense that I was being watched—and then it was the growing sense that whoever was watching, they were inside the van. They were in the bowels of the back, behind the bench seat. I’d opened the door when I put the bicycle in and I’d left it open too long when I was checking my phone and reading Jamie’s text messages (six since that morning).
I’d let them in. They knew I was looking for Abby—they’d heard everything I’d said.
This chain restaurant, this parking lot, was the nearest turnoff I’d seen. I’d barreled through the lot and I’d come to a stop and I’d opened the driver’s side door and I’d leaped out, and it took much deep breathing and many minutes before I could open the two back doors at the tail end of the van. When I did I could hardly look, but I had to look, because I had to know— All I’d found was Abby’s borrowed bicycle inside.
I’d gotten myself all worked up over nothing.
Now I was sitting on the sidewalk, out under the cold, winter-white sky. I couldn’t get back in the van just yet.
I was looking down at my knees, caked with ice and snow and with the salt kernels thrown out in winter so people wouldn’t slip and fall in the ice and snow, and that was how I realized I must have fallen. I lifted my hands and saw that my palms, too, were caked with the mixture, pockmarked and dented from impact, discolored, almost grayed.
“Hey, you,” I heard.
This voice was coming from behind me, to my left. I ignored it, of course, like I’d been ignoring Fiona Burke since we’d left the police station.
“Hey.” The voice again. This was a girl’s voice, I realized, the voice of a very young girl. “Hey. I’m talking to you.” A clean, white toe nudged the scuffed steel toe of my combat boot.
“Are you sick? Do you need me to get my mom?”
From the size of her tiny feet in those puffy white boots I knew she was far too young to even be a part of this. When I craned my neck to look up into her face, I saw I was right: This girl was nine or ten maybe, eleven at most. She was dry and clean and safe. She had years to go.
Years and years.
The girl had many barrettes all over her head and just looking at them made my own head feel heavy. The weight of all those barrettes, if they were plated in steel like the kicking toes of my boots, that’s what knowing all the things I knew felt like.
“I’m fine,” I managed to answer her, finally.
“You threw up all over the sidewalk,”
the girl said, holding her nose.