It was here that her eyes began to glow with something sick and warm coming up to the surface. She’d kept it down all this time and now I guess my questions about Abby worked to put it into words in a way she wasn’t able to before.
“Do you think he killed her?” she said suddenly, and it was so much worse than I thought.
She was nineteen or twenty by now; she’d stick around. Right then I hated her for that, and more still for what she said.
For not caring. For not noticing. For not doing a thing.
No wonder Abby had reached out to me.
“He, who?” I said from between my teeth.
“He, whoever. Whatever freak of nature found her in the woods and murdered her.”
“Wait, what do you mean? Did you see anyone in the woods?”
“No. Of course not. I’m just assuming.”
It wasn’t something I was going to assume. Some of the girls I’d seen lately in the house had met terrible fates before they walked up to the front door—it could be told through their eyes and in the way, sometimes, parts of their bodies would go all pins and needles like they hadn’t gotten used to having legs again.
Or the way the smoke would flow through their guts like a magic trick, a sad one, without scarves.
It was all in the patches of the stories we skipped over, the unspoken ends.
Isabeth. Eden. Shyann, even, maybe. I ached for them.
But wouldn’t I have known if something like that had happened to Abby, out of all the girls?
“What was that movie where they put the girl’s head in a box?” Cass was saying now. “You know what I’m talking about, right? That movie? There was this box, and they look in it and there’s her head?”
I didn’t know the movie and hoped I never would. I left Cass quicker than I meant to, especially after driving all the way there.
Talking to Abby’s camp counselor had given me nothing. Worse than nothing: She’d drawn a detailed enough image that felt more real than the real thing. I didn’t want to think anymore about what she’d said, didn’t want to picture it.
This visit to the coffee shop was what propelled me down to New Jersey, but there was another place I could try in another part of the state. I had the address. I still had questions. And though I didn’t know how to make sense of it, I couldn’t let myself believe she was dead.
— 37 — “SHE ran off,” Abby’s grandmother said when I asked her. “That’s it. That’s the story. You drove yourself all the way here to hear that.”
Her expression didn’t become pained as she said these words, though I expected it would. I found myself watching her upper lip, the darker hints of hair growing in there, the way the hairs moved like little antennae as she spoke. She was the woman who raised Abby, her legal guardian. Within minutes, I could already tell she wasn’t the kind of grandmother who’d open her arms to you, who’d remove the cigarette from her mouth to say sweet things and offer you a cookie. She’d let me inside the house, though. At least she’d let me in.
“And you went to that camp together?” her grandmother asked for the third time.
“Yes,” I said. “I was there. She never said a thing about running away. I know she had her wallet with her, and her purse I think, too, but she left all the rest of her stuff there, you know.”
“We know,” she said. “They shipped it back to us. Of course we know.”
Her grandmother’s lips drew in on the butt of her cigarette, ballooning up her old lungs with the last of the smoke. She was smoking indoors, windows closed, slowly killing anyone who came near her, and as she tapped the ash I could see the similarity between this plastic-entombed room and the rooms in the house where my dream kept taking me. It was the air. The haze of it. A feathery, caustic mist of lavender-blue.
“This is a girl who ran away before,”
her grandmother said. “This is a girl who stole money from her own poppop’s wallet when he was taking his afternoon nap in that very chair.” She was pointing at the sunken armchair I was sitting in. I imagined it would be soft to the touch, but I couldn’t tell, because it was encased in a skintight layer of clear plastic.