“Where’d she go?” he was saying. “I didn’t scare her away, did I? Call for her. Tell her I won’t hurt her. Tell her to come back.”
Fiona Burke refused. She must have been standing very close to the closet, but she didn’t open it. We were there together, one thin slab of wood between us, like our hands were touching, palm to palm. I didn’t understand then what he could have wanted from me. All I knew is she was determined not to let him find me.
“She ran,” I heard her say through the door. “Out into the backyard, stupid kid.
She’ll come back when she gets cold— she’s only got those pajamas on. Let’s just go?”
“Oh, yeah? She’s back there?” the little man said, and he must have made a move in the direction of the backyard because his voice got lower with distance. But then the big man spoke—he said very few words, but when he spoke everyone listened—and he was saying they had to leave.
I kept quiet. My mind was flashing on Fiona Burke’s eyes, how wild they’d looked beneath the wings of shellacked black mascara as she hurried me out of the dining room. She’d been frightened of what could happen to me, and that’s what frightened me.
At some point they left, drove away.
At some point Fiona Burke said good-bye to the house where she was raised, turned her back on all of us, and took off.
She didn’t leave a note. In a way, I guess I was the note.
Only, she’d stuffed me in the coat closet, and I was too short to reach the string that would turn the light on—and it was too dark for me to even see if there was a string.
I don’t know if I could have saved her if I’d opened my mouth and told someone—her parents, the police, my mom, anyone—about the men she went with.
But—looking back on it now—I am sure of one thing. She’d saved me.
— 19 — SPENDING the entirety of a night in a small, dark space ruins all understanding of time. A minute expands into an hour’s worth of seconds. Air rebreathed is made of less and less air until you feel like you’re choking on your own spit. The panic sets in and you think you’ll never get out, that no one can hear because no one is there, that the hot, scratchy, heavy walls all around you will keep you forever, and when you hear someone yelling your name you don’t know who it is at first. You don’t recognize your own mother’s voice; you can’t imagine that you’re safe now, that you’ll be let out now, that there aren’t two strange men and a cruel flame-haired girl crouching on the other side of that door waiting to take you away.
— 20 — I don’t know how many hours it was before the shock of light hit me and I could breathe air. I must have made a noise inside the coat closet because, soon, someone was pounding and I was pounding back and she was pulling and I was pushing and the door got unstuck and the light was in my face and she was there.
My mom enveloped me in her arms, frantic. The colorful pattern of prancing, dancing My Little Ponies had sweated onto my skin, and I’d been desperate enough to have to empty my bladder hours before, so I was sticky all over, smelling of sheep and urine, nearly blinded at the shock of light.
I chugged a glass of water, choking up most of it, and then when I found my voice I told my mom that Fiona Burke was the one who’d done this to me.
“Where is she?” she asked, seething.
Her hands left me for a moment to ball into fists.
“Gone,” I said. That’s the only word I could think to call what had happened to my 17-year-old neighbor: She was gone.
“What do you mean, gone?” my mom said. She sparkled in a flurry of rage. I didn’t realize at first that she still had on her work clothes, the kind of outfit she wore when she danced at the club, and that those sequins weren’t the scaly, iridescent texture of her skin.
“Gone,”
I
repeated,