Mrs. Burke was wearing slippers, but Mr. Burke’s feet were bare. His pajama pants were too short, and I noticed his hairless, spindly legs and how he favored the left one. We watched them as they watched the east end of their house burn.
We were watching as the fireman went to talk to them.His words washed over Mrs. Burke, and we could see it in her face, how what he said took a very long time to settle, as if she were translating to herself so she could understand, and once she did she let out the cry. We heard it across the hedge that divided their paved driveway from our gravel one. The sound of it made me think of Fiona Burke, wondering if that’s how Mrs. Burke sounded in Baltimore when she got the news that her daughter had gone missing.
We didn’t hear a thing from Mr.
Burke, but we watched him wobble on his bum leg, thin and pale as a sucked-clean toothpick. We were watching as the smoke thinned and no more flames could be made out and as the hoses left the whole side of the house sopping.
And we were watching as Mrs. Burke’s eyes traveled over the hedge to our house,
perhaps
involuntarily,
remembering one disaster that had been connected with us and now connecting us to another.
“Should we go get them?” I said.
“Ask if they want to come inside?”
But my mom had never forgiven them for the way their daughter had treated me that night, locking me in the coat closet.
She hadn’t known how to confront them, seeing as Fiona had disappeared, but she held it in, and didn’t forget it.
“They’ll be fine,” she said. “The fire’s out. You should go back to bed.”
But she didn’t move toward her bedroom, and I didn’t move for mine. It had come true, what Fiona had threatened with her wet mouth shoved up against my ear. The fire she’d joked about setting in her parents’ house? It had been set.
And though I didn’t know how she’d done it from far away, I was convinced, then and all the more now, that she had.
She’d tried to burn down their house, and she’d failed.
Years passed. Eight years. No more fires, and no letters, and no phone calls.
My mom and I stayed put in the carriage house because the Burkes never once raised our rent. They didn’t adopt another kid. I grew too old to need a babysitter. I entered my junior year in the same high school Fiona Burke had once attended, and I dyed my hair black, the color hers would have been if she hadn’t dyed it flame-red. I turned 17.
And that’s when a missing girl named Abby Sinclair would lure the ghost of Fiona Burke back here to Pinecliff.
When the noise would wake the others.
And it’s when I’d feel the first crack inside me, the fracture that started small, with one name, and then broke off into more names, and more names still, and left me gaping.
If I counted all the girls who ran away at the age of 17, starting with girls who lived close to me and then casting my net wider, spreading out along the East Coast in ever-growing circles, then adding girls who may have met more sinister fates, who didn’t go by choice, whose bodies still had not been found, I’d be nowhere. There’d simply be too many.
Which terrified me.
To know a girl was one, I had to sense it. Something would compel me to stop over a certain page online or in the newspaper microfiche in the library.
There’d be a humming in my ears, a chorus strengthened by a new, added voice. Then the warmth, below my heart, gaining heat until I had to take off the pendant or else it would burn me and leave a lopsided almost-circle of a mark. The edges of the room would swim with shadows, and those shadows had arms and legs and mouths that opened. They had shoulder blades and they had elbows and they had knees.
They came out when I discovered another, to crane their shadowy necks around corners, to see who it might be.
This was how I found Natalie Montesano, 17, of Edgehaven, Vermont, missing for the last seven years. Or, I should say, this was how she found me.
ICE STORM
WREAKS
HAVOC ON
MOUNTAIN
ROADS;
LOCAL
GIRL,
17,
MISSING