Her grandfather had asked how she was doing, if she was okay. I didn’t want to say something cruel, but a big and blazing part of me did want to alarm him. Her grandmother hadn’t listened; maybe he would. I locked my eyes on his, and I put as much weight into the words as I had in me, and I said, “No. I don’t think she is.”
I expected him to ask more of me, but he didn’t. The shovel went down and he moved along the line with it, putting distance between us. I had the sudden vision of jumping into a snowbank like this one as a little kid. How it felt to throw armfuls of bright white powder up into the air and let it sprinkle down all over, to lie flat as it buried me, and then to stand up and shake it off and set myself free. Whose memory was that, mine or Abby’s? It could have belonged to either of us.
I sensed his wife at the window, watching, but still I called to him, “Are you the one who put the flyers up on the telephone poles?”
“Up north,” he said. “A whole lot of ’em.”
“I saw one,” I said. “Up in Pinecliff.”
He nodded. “Nobody was doing a thing. I talked my wife into putting in the report, but the police say they don’t have time to chase after every runaway, so . . .”
I had to do it again, even though I failed the first time. Now I was the one who stepped closer to him, walking into the pathway he was making in the snow.
“She didn’t run away like you think she did.”
He eyed me, his pupils held low under a surface of shining water. “She tell you that?” he said.
“Not exactly,” I admitted. “But you should call the police. Please. Call the police. Ask them to keep looking. Find out what happened to her.”
He stopped for a moment and then said one last thing. I wasn’t sure if it meant he heard me or he hadn’t. He said, “You have to let them know you miss them. That’s why I did the flyers. Even if they don’t ever think about coming back.
You gotta make sure they know they can.”
— 39 — MY mom was waiting in the garage when I came home from New Jersey that night. I hit the garage-door opener to see that she’d found what I’d hidden behind the lawn mower. I’d gotten the tire patched at the bike shop in town and she’d wheeled it out and was playing with the bell on the handlebars. When I pulled in and cut the engine, the first thing I heard was its tinny little ding.
“There you are,” my mom said lightly, though behind those three light words were more words, heavier words. She was going to confront me about not telling her where I was all evening, and I was going to have to come up with an excuse that didn’t involve a drive out of state to ask after a so-called runaway I’d never met, not in real life.
But all my mom said was, “I feel like I never see you anymore.”
Get used to it.
I heard that. That was my head thinking it, or it was a familiar voice warring to be the loudest thing in my head. Fiona Burke had also heard my van pull up, so she’d come out to talk to me. She wanted my mom to leave the garage, but she wouldn’t.
Maybe we should give my mom a warning on what to expect, now that I was 17 like the others. A little head start to begin planning out the design of my Missing posters. Hopefully she’d do something eye-catching, a Missing poster to frame and be proud of, to admire long after I was gone.
That was what Fiona Burke wanted me to say to my own mother.
“Where’d you get this old thing?” my mom said, nudging Abby’s borrowed bicycle. “So retro. It’s darling.” She was straddling the Schwinn now and testing out its wheels.
“You shouldn’t touch it. I’m holding on to it, for a friend.”
She let go and climbed off, and I caught hold of it before it propelled itself into the wall.
“What friend? Deena?”
I shook my head.
“What’s going on, Lauren? What was so much more important than being in school?” Seeing the surprise on my face, she raised an eyebrow. “Your school called. I told them you had a dentist appointment.”
“Thanks for covering for me.”
“Sure thing. Now you tell me where you were.”
“New Jersey,” I said, before I, or anyone else, could stop me.
“Excuse me?”